informed the Court that they had seen her feeding imps, two white ferrets, with white bread and milk, but this she steadfastly denied. In Goethe’s Faust, Part I, Scene 2, Mephistopheles first appears to Faust outside the city gates as a black poodle and accompanies him back to his study, snarling and yelping when In Principio is read. This is part of the old legend. Manlius (1590), in the report of his conversation with Melanchthon, quotes the latter as having said: “He [Faust] had a dog with him, which was the devil.” Paolo Jovio relates[1] that the famous Cornelius Agrippa always kept a demon attendant upon him in the shape of a black dog. But John Weye, in his well-known work De Præstigiis Dæmonum,[2] informs us that he had lived for years in daily attendance upon Agrippa and that the black dog, Monsieur, respecting which, such strange stories were spread was a perfectly innocent animal which he had often led about himself in its leash. Agrippa was much attached to his dog, which used to eat off the table with him and of nights lie in his bed. Since he was a profound scholar and a great recluse he never troubled to contradict the idle gossip his neighbours clacked at window and door. It is hardly surprising when one considers the hermetic works which go under Agrippa’s name that even in his life-time this great man should have acquired the reputation of a mighty magician.
Grotesque names were generally given to the familiar: Lizabet; Verd-Joli; Maître Persil (parsley); Verdelet; Martinet; Abrahel (a succubus); and to animal familiars in England, Tissy; Grissell; Greedigut; Blackman; Jezebel (a succubus); Ilemanzar; Jarmara; Pyewackett.
The familiar in human shape often companied with the witch and was visible to clairvoyants. Thus in 1324 one of the accusations brought against Lady Alice Kyteler was that a demon came to her “quandoque in specie cuiusdam æthiopis cum duobus sociis.” The society met with at Sabbats is not so easily shaken off as might be wished.
NOTES TO CHAPTER III.
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1 Two local Milanese Orders, the Apostolini of S. Barnabas and the Congregation of S. Ambrose ad Nemus, were united by a Brief of Sixtus V, 15 August 589. 11 January, 1606, Paul V approved the new Constitutions. The Congregation retaining very few members was dissolved by Innocent X in 1650. The habit was a tunic, broad scapular, and capuche capuche of chestnut brown.
