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Familiar Unto Me: Witches Sorcerers and Their Spirit Companions
The familiar has been a staple element of the image of the witch for centuries. Despite its ubiquity in folklore, art, books, movies, and television depicting witches and magicians, familiar spirits are an under explored element of modern magical literature. Familiar Unto Me changes that by presenting a comprehensive look at familiar spirits.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces and discusses the concept of the familiar spirit. The basics of acquiring, maintaining, and working with a familiar are presented. Considerations for planning your own rituals for obtaining a familiar spirit are discussed, and example rituals are presented. The focus in part one is familiars for witches and sorcerers; the defining elements of each approach to magic and how it impacts acquiring a familiar are discussed.
Part two explores the concept of familiar spirits in Pagan and NeoPagan contexts with a focus on mythology, faerylore, and the history of the familiar in trial evidence and folklore. Copious descriptions of myths, folktales, and faery stories are presented along with detailed exploration of historical figures, literature, and folk beliefs to paint a picture of the worldview and history of ideas surrounding the familiar spirit. Contemporary approaches to working familiars, fetches, and fylgjur are discussed and analyzed along with traditional lore to explore new and innovative magical concepts adjacent to the familiar spirit. Methods for acquiring a faery familiar are discussed along with the presentation of an early modern ritual for encountering a faery queen.
Part three explores the adventure of a group of magicians acquiring a familiar spirit for their lodge. It presents the rituals, details of planning and execution, and a discussion of the experience. This exploration becomes the basis of exploring the role of familiars, and positive spirit possession in contemporary revivals of magic as a path towards creating living spirit traditions rooted in historical European magical practice, informed by the wisdom and experience of living spirit traditions in the Americas. Part three also explores often overlooked role of spirit magic in the Victorian magical revival and the evidence of sex magical practices related to familiar spirits. Rituals for an elemental lover round out the collection of rituals.
The text provides nine rituals. Two of the rituals are presented with variants for the elements so that the magician can work directly and conveniently from the book. An additional traditional ritual is described and analyzed in detail along with comparison to a description of the ritual in a folktale. Each ritual has either some analysis of the ritual, explanations of why it is designed the way it is, or discussion of experience executing the ritual.
The book discusses spirit assistants from antiquity through today. Modes of working for grimoire magic, traditional witchcraft, NeoPagan witchcraft, Paganism and modern ceremonial magic are all presented or discussed.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces and discusses the concept of the familiar spirit. The basics of acquiring, maintaining, and working with a familiar are presented. Considerations for planning your own rituals for obtaining a familiar spirit are discussed, and example rituals are presented. The focus in part one is familiars for witches and sorcerers; the defining elements of each approach to magic and how it impacts acquiring a familiar are discussed.
Part two explores the concept of familiar spirits in Pagan and NeoPagan contexts with a focus on mythology, faerylore, and the history of the familiar in trial evidence and folklore. Copious descriptions of myths, folktales, and faery stories are presented along with detailed exploration of historical figures, literature, and folk beliefs to paint a picture of the worldview and history of ideas surrounding the familiar spirit. Contemporary approaches to working familiars, fetches, and fylgjur are discussed and analyzed along with traditional lore to explore new and innovative magical concepts adjacent to the familiar spirit. Methods for acquiring a faery familiar are discussed along with the presentation of an early modern ritual for encountering a faery queen.
Part three explores the adventure of a group of magicians acquiring a familiar spirit for their lodge. It presents the rituals, details of planning and execution, and a discussion of the experience. This exploration becomes the basis of exploring the role of familiars, and positive spirit possession in contemporary revivals of magic as a path towards creating living spirit traditions rooted in historical European magical practice, informed by the wisdom and experience of living spirit traditions in the Americas. Part three also explores often overlooked role of spirit magic in the Victorian magical revival and the evidence of sex magical practices related to familiar spirits. Rituals for an elemental lover round out the collection of rituals.
The text provides nine rituals. Two of the rituals are presented with variants for the elements so that the magician can work directly and conveniently from the book. An additional traditional ritual is described and analyzed in detail along with comparison to a description of the ritual in a folktale. Each ritual has either some analysis of the ritual, explanations of why it is designed the way it is, or discussion of experience executing the ritual.
The book discusses spirit assistants from antiquity through today. Modes of working for grimoire magic, traditional witchcraft, NeoPagan witchcraft, Paganism and modern ceremonial magic are all presented or discussed.
- GenresWitchcraft
536 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 10, 2023
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August 29, 2026
The familiar may be one of the most recognizable figures in the popular imagination of witchcraft and simultaneously one of the least adequately understood in contemporary magical literature. Familiar Unto Me is valuable because BJ Swain takes the subject seriously enough to let it remain complicated.
This is a substantial book, and Swain earns much of that length by refusing to pretend that “familiar spirit” has possessed one stable definition across history. The familiar of an English witch trial, the spirit assistant of a grimoire magician, the faery lover of folklore, the fetch of modern witchcraft, the tutelary spirit of a sorcerer, and the companion encountered through contemporary Pagan practice may resemble one another without being interchangeable. Swain works through these similarities and differences instead of flattening them into the modern image of a magical helper.
That historical breadth is one of the book’s strongest qualities. Witch-trial material appears alongside faery lore, household spirits, Pagan mythology, grimoire traditions, Victorian ceremonial magic, and contemporary practice. Figures such as the familiars associated with the Pendle accused and Isobel Gowdie are considered within the larger imaginative world of devils, ghosts, faeries, animal-formed spirits, and the dead. The resulting picture is considerably stranger than the sanitized “animal familiar” of modern popular witchcraft.
Swain is particularly good at recognizing that historical testimony rarely gives us clean ontological categories. A spirit might be described as a devil in one context, appear as an animal in another, behave much like a faery elsewhere, and possess qualities associated with the dead. The temptation for the modern reader is to decide which category the spirit “really” belonged to. Swain is more interested in what these overlapping descriptions tell us about the magical worldview that produced them.
That approach becomes especially productive in the material on faery familiars. The Queen of Elphame, Thomas the Rhymer, faery lovers, black dogs, elf-shot, and related traditions are not treated as decorative folklore appended to witchcraft. Swain is examining a continuum of relationships in which supernatural beings bestow knowledge, power, protection, inspiration, or companionship upon human partners. In that wider context, the familiar begins to look less like an eccentric feature of witch-trial demonology and more like one manifestation of a much older and broader concept of spirit alliance.
The distinction Swain draws between witches and sorcerers is also worth considering. He does not insist upon a single universal taxonomy, but he takes seriously the possibility that different magical identities produce different relationships with spirits. A familiar may be inherited, encountered, bestowed, ritually acquired, negotiated with, or introduced through initiation. The means of acquisition tells us something about the magical culture surrounding the relationship.
This matters because contemporary occult literature often treats spirits as though they were interchangeable resources. One finds a spirit in a correspondence list, performs the appropriate ritual, asks for assistance, and moves on. Familiarity implies something much more enduring. A familiar is defined by relationship.
That relationship may involve instruction, magical assistance, protection, divination, empowerment, mediation with other spirits, or participation in ritual. It also develops through time. Swain repeatedly returns to the practical realities of acquiring, maintaining, and working with familiar spirits rather than romanticizing the initial encounter as the entire achievement.
The practical sections are consequently more useful than a simple collection of spirit-conjuring recipes. Swain discusses how rituals are constructed and why particular ritual choices are made. Several operations are accompanied by analysis or accounts of their execution, allowing the reader to see ritual as something designed around a particular spirit relationship rather than as immutable liturgy.
I especially appreciated the account of a group of magicians acquiring a familiar for their lodge. The very idea disrupts our contemporary tendency to imagine the familiar as exclusively personal. A spirit can potentially become attached to a collective magical body, participating in the continuity, identity, and power of a group. This brings the familiar surprisingly close to older ideas concerning tutelary spirits of households, places, temples, initiatory groups, and communities.
From there Swain moves into one of the more provocative questions in the book: whether spirit possession might have a constructive role within revived European magical traditions. This is particularly interesting because Western ceremonial magic has often emphasized command, invocation, identification, or visionary communication while maintaining considerable anxiety about possession. Swain looks toward living spirit traditions in the Americas as evidence that controlled and culturally structured possession can function as a sophisticated religious technology rather than simply a pathological loss of agency.
There are obvious dangers whenever one magical culture borrows explanatory models from another, and this is an area that deserves considerable care. Yet the underlying question is legitimate. If one is genuinely attempting to reconstruct a spirit-centered magical culture rather than merely reproducing nineteenth-century occult forms, then the range of possible human-spirit relationships deserves broader consideration than invocation and evocation alone.
The book’s discussion of erotic spirit relationships pushes this even further. Faery lovers and elemental lovers occupy territory that modern occult literature frequently either sensationalizes or avoids. Swain instead situates them within historical and folkloric patterns of intimacy between humans and spirits. Whether one interprets such relationships literally, visionary, psychically, or through some combination of these categories, they reveal how inadequate the language of “spirit helper” can become. Spirits in traditional accounts may teach, seduce, demand, protect, initiate, punish, marry, inspire, and transform.
This is perhaps the larger achievement of Familiar Unto Me. It restores agency to the familiar.
The familiar is not merely an astral employee assigned to the magician. Nor is it simply a projection of the practitioner’s higher self given a convenient animal shape. Swain’s entire survey repeatedly returns us to the possibility of relationship with an Other possessing its own character, desires, affinities, and capacity to participate in magical work.
That makes the book especially relevant to the revival of spirit-centered traditional witchcraft. Historical European magic was filled with spirits: saints, angels, devils, ghosts, faeries, household beings, tutelary powers, planetary intelligences, and the dead. Yet much twentieth-century occultism translated these beings into psychological components, symbolic forces, or abstract energies. Those interpretations can be useful, but something significant disappears when every spirit becomes a disguised portion of the magician.
Swain moves decisively in the opposite direction.
There are places where I would have welcomed tighter historical distinctions, particularly because witch-trial testimony must always be handled carefully. Depositions survive through hostile legal systems, clerical assumptions, interrogation practices, folklore, personal testimony, and the interpretive frameworks of those recording them. One cannot simply read a trial record as a neutral ethnography of witchcraft. Swain is generally aware of the ambiguities, but the sheer breadth of material inevitably creates moments where historical evidence and contemporary magical reconstruction stand very close together.
Still, I would much rather have a book willing to enter that difficult territory than another contemporary work reducing the familiar to a pet with whom one shares a psychic bond.
Familiar Unto Me understands that the history of the familiar is really a history of relationships between magicians and other-than-human persons. Those relationships have been interpreted as demonic, faery, ancestral, angelic, tutelary, erotic, initiatory, and magical depending upon time and place. Swain gathers these strands together without requiring them all to have originated from a single hidden tradition.
The result is less a definition of the familiar than an anatomy of spirit companionship.
That distinction is important. Definitions tell us where a phenomenon ends. Swain is far more interested in discovering how far it can extend.
This is a substantial book, and Swain earns much of that length by refusing to pretend that “familiar spirit” has possessed one stable definition across history. The familiar of an English witch trial, the spirit assistant of a grimoire magician, the faery lover of folklore, the fetch of modern witchcraft, the tutelary spirit of a sorcerer, and the companion encountered through contemporary Pagan practice may resemble one another without being interchangeable. Swain works through these similarities and differences instead of flattening them into the modern image of a magical helper.
That historical breadth is one of the book’s strongest qualities. Witch-trial material appears alongside faery lore, household spirits, Pagan mythology, grimoire traditions, Victorian ceremonial magic, and contemporary practice. Figures such as the familiars associated with the Pendle accused and Isobel Gowdie are considered within the larger imaginative world of devils, ghosts, faeries, animal-formed spirits, and the dead. The resulting picture is considerably stranger than the sanitized “animal familiar” of modern popular witchcraft.
Swain is particularly good at recognizing that historical testimony rarely gives us clean ontological categories. A spirit might be described as a devil in one context, appear as an animal in another, behave much like a faery elsewhere, and possess qualities associated with the dead. The temptation for the modern reader is to decide which category the spirit “really” belonged to. Swain is more interested in what these overlapping descriptions tell us about the magical worldview that produced them.
That approach becomes especially productive in the material on faery familiars. The Queen of Elphame, Thomas the Rhymer, faery lovers, black dogs, elf-shot, and related traditions are not treated as decorative folklore appended to witchcraft. Swain is examining a continuum of relationships in which supernatural beings bestow knowledge, power, protection, inspiration, or companionship upon human partners. In that wider context, the familiar begins to look less like an eccentric feature of witch-trial demonology and more like one manifestation of a much older and broader concept of spirit alliance.
The distinction Swain draws between witches and sorcerers is also worth considering. He does not insist upon a single universal taxonomy, but he takes seriously the possibility that different magical identities produce different relationships with spirits. A familiar may be inherited, encountered, bestowed, ritually acquired, negotiated with, or introduced through initiation. The means of acquisition tells us something about the magical culture surrounding the relationship.
This matters because contemporary occult literature often treats spirits as though they were interchangeable resources. One finds a spirit in a correspondence list, performs the appropriate ritual, asks for assistance, and moves on. Familiarity implies something much more enduring. A familiar is defined by relationship.
That relationship may involve instruction, magical assistance, protection, divination, empowerment, mediation with other spirits, or participation in ritual. It also develops through time. Swain repeatedly returns to the practical realities of acquiring, maintaining, and working with familiar spirits rather than romanticizing the initial encounter as the entire achievement.
The practical sections are consequently more useful than a simple collection of spirit-conjuring recipes. Swain discusses how rituals are constructed and why particular ritual choices are made. Several operations are accompanied by analysis or accounts of their execution, allowing the reader to see ritual as something designed around a particular spirit relationship rather than as immutable liturgy.
I especially appreciated the account of a group of magicians acquiring a familiar for their lodge. The very idea disrupts our contemporary tendency to imagine the familiar as exclusively personal. A spirit can potentially become attached to a collective magical body, participating in the continuity, identity, and power of a group. This brings the familiar surprisingly close to older ideas concerning tutelary spirits of households, places, temples, initiatory groups, and communities.
From there Swain moves into one of the more provocative questions in the book: whether spirit possession might have a constructive role within revived European magical traditions. This is particularly interesting because Western ceremonial magic has often emphasized command, invocation, identification, or visionary communication while maintaining considerable anxiety about possession. Swain looks toward living spirit traditions in the Americas as evidence that controlled and culturally structured possession can function as a sophisticated religious technology rather than simply a pathological loss of agency.
There are obvious dangers whenever one magical culture borrows explanatory models from another, and this is an area that deserves considerable care. Yet the underlying question is legitimate. If one is genuinely attempting to reconstruct a spirit-centered magical culture rather than merely reproducing nineteenth-century occult forms, then the range of possible human-spirit relationships deserves broader consideration than invocation and evocation alone.
The book’s discussion of erotic spirit relationships pushes this even further. Faery lovers and elemental lovers occupy territory that modern occult literature frequently either sensationalizes or avoids. Swain instead situates them within historical and folkloric patterns of intimacy between humans and spirits. Whether one interprets such relationships literally, visionary, psychically, or through some combination of these categories, they reveal how inadequate the language of “spirit helper” can become. Spirits in traditional accounts may teach, seduce, demand, protect, initiate, punish, marry, inspire, and transform.
This is perhaps the larger achievement of Familiar Unto Me. It restores agency to the familiar.
The familiar is not merely an astral employee assigned to the magician. Nor is it simply a projection of the practitioner’s higher self given a convenient animal shape. Swain’s entire survey repeatedly returns us to the possibility of relationship with an Other possessing its own character, desires, affinities, and capacity to participate in magical work.
That makes the book especially relevant to the revival of spirit-centered traditional witchcraft. Historical European magic was filled with spirits: saints, angels, devils, ghosts, faeries, household beings, tutelary powers, planetary intelligences, and the dead. Yet much twentieth-century occultism translated these beings into psychological components, symbolic forces, or abstract energies. Those interpretations can be useful, but something significant disappears when every spirit becomes a disguised portion of the magician.
Swain moves decisively in the opposite direction.
There are places where I would have welcomed tighter historical distinctions, particularly because witch-trial testimony must always be handled carefully. Depositions survive through hostile legal systems, clerical assumptions, interrogation practices, folklore, personal testimony, and the interpretive frameworks of those recording them. One cannot simply read a trial record as a neutral ethnography of witchcraft. Swain is generally aware of the ambiguities, but the sheer breadth of material inevitably creates moments where historical evidence and contemporary magical reconstruction stand very close together.
Still, I would much rather have a book willing to enter that difficult territory than another contemporary work reducing the familiar to a pet with whom one shares a psychic bond.
Familiar Unto Me understands that the history of the familiar is really a history of relationships between magicians and other-than-human persons. Those relationships have been interpreted as demonic, faery, ancestral, angelic, tutelary, erotic, initiatory, and magical depending upon time and place. Swain gathers these strands together without requiring them all to have originated from a single hidden tradition.
The result is less a definition of the familiar than an anatomy of spirit companionship.
That distinction is important. Definitions tell us where a phenomenon ends. Swain is far more interested in discovering how far it can extend.
June 17, 2023
Great
Ain't nothing like being well prepared for anything that might come my way on the mystical plane.... having a familiar for backup is definitely helpful in the struggle.... because Evil Will never give up so you better be prepared....
Ain't nothing like being well prepared for anything that might come my way on the mystical plane.... having a familiar for backup is definitely helpful in the struggle.... because Evil Will never give up so you better be prepared....
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