Are you my Familiar?

Well, I seem to be on a roll, three posts in two days! Mind you it is the weekend. I have a full time job in the city where I am on the computer for 8 hours a day, so I suspect weekdays will be rather slow for posts and the weekend I will yammer your ears off. Anyways, onto my next brilliant flash of inspiration (I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek). I have discovered that the idea of a familiar is a rather popular topic of conversation in the Pagan realm, and so this morning while making breakfast and drinking the magical elixir that allows me to function like a normal human being (aka Coffee) I mulled it over.

I currently live with four animals, yes my house is a zoo and no I am not counting my husband amongst them. I have three dogs and a cat. The two older dogs are small breeds, one is 13 the other is 12. The other dog is still a puppy, she is 10 months old and is a larger breed dog. She still has a ton of the rambunctious puppy energy that causes her to get into everything and drive me completely crazy at least once a day. The other two are much more sedate, preferring the comfort of the couch or the foot of the bed to madcap laps around the house. They are still rather active, but are considerable less so than the puppy. I got the two small ones as a teenager when they were puppies and we just got the puppy this year (I know, if she`s only 10 months old DUH!). The cat is the newest addition to our family and proof that my husband loves me, he is not a cat person whatsoever and has already had to rescue her from trees and cupboards when she gets stuck. Did I mention my husband is a saint, I really should. Anyway, she is a rescue, we think she is about two years old.

Now I have four animals and as a witch one must be my familiar, right? I mean it is the pinnacle of witchyness to have a familiar? Every witch I have read about has one. Well let us examine these pets one by one, starting with the puppy. She loves to be wherever I am, curled up at my side, she loves coming outside with me while I garden and she eats grass until she makes herself sick (a habit I wish she would stop). So does that make her my familiar? Probably not, that makes her a puppy! Her breed is a very family oriented one (Border Collie, Golden Retriever and Irish Setter), they like to stick close to their pack and after we brought her home I took over the "mom role" for her.

So onto the second one, lets look at the 13 year old. I got her when I was sixteen, she was just a ball of white fluff when I got her and I slept beside her box in a sleeping bag for the first few days, and always woke up to find the box tipped over and the puppy in my sleeping bag. So I brought the puppy downstairs to my bedroom and left her box beside my bed. And yet in the am, there she was, curled up on my pillow next to me. Even after 13 years she is still always curled up next to me. She too likes to know where I am at all times, although she does not always have to be right next to me. She has also taken a shine to my husband, she will follow him everywhere, behave beautifully for him and will sit at the door every time he leaves and wait for him to come back. Hmmm, again seems like a loyal and good dog to me, but not a familiar, she will be around me when I cast spells, create an altar etc, but that is more because she has always done so.

Ok third dog then, my little suck. He is the smallest of the three dogs and is actually the son of my 12 year old dog. When she had a litter of puppies he was the runt of the litter, kept getting pushed out of the basket by the bigger and stronger puppies. I was so scared he was going to die that I bought a bottle of puppy formula and fed him three times a day myself, just to make sure he would grow. I played with him and cuddled him non stop and when the time came to sell the puppies we ended up keeping him because I was so attached (actually I can thank my brother because he got to choose which two puppies we kept and my boy was one of the ones chosen). He is still a total Mommy's boy, he has to sleep curled up next to me, follows me wherever I go (more than the puppy does) and I can flip him onto his back and rub his belly with no warning. Actually the stuff that dog lets me get away with is astounding. Again is he a familiar? I don't think so. He is very intuitive, knows my moods exceptionally well and when I am upset he won't leave my side (or when I am sick). He is a very faithful companion, but I don't think that makes him a familiar. So none of the dogs are familiars, and yet they are still and integral part of my life. I would be poorer for not having their companionship and love.

So the last one, the Cat. Well she is a good choice for familiar, the connection between Witches and Cats go back through the centuries. And she is a beautiful long haired black cat! Well that is a promising start isn't it! This cat has to know where everybody is in the house at all times, if she cannot find you she meows non stop until you identify where you are. In our house we have quite a few rooms, one of which has been set aside as my pagan room. This is one of the cat's favorite places to go. Whenever the door is open she is in there like a dirty shirt, sniffing everything, she jumps onto the altar, paws at the books, and has to be there whenever I am doing a working.

Aha! You say, she is totally your familiar, the interest n the the altar and magical workings proves it! Well maybe it does, or maybe it does not. First of all the room I speak of is normally a closed door room, pets are not allowed to wander through it. Anybody who owns a cat can tell you that a closed door is a severe annoyance to any cat. The second that any closed door is opened my cat, who normally has the speed of molasses poured from the carton, suddenly develops the magical abilities of "The Flash" and will actually materialize in the room before you have stepped in the door. So its not just the pagan room, the same thing happens irregardless of what closed door it is. Second, she is a rescue cat. She was found in a house with 70 other cats, with her litter of kittens. She was only 4 pounds when they found her and were unable to save her litter. She was adopted and then abandoned two weeks afterwards in -40 weather. She then spent another month in the shelter, waiting for a home. When we got her she was very clingy, and especially after two weeks, which to be honest I cannot blame her.

So what conclusions can we come to about this:
1) It would appear that I do not have a familiar, there are some indicators that I might have one, but equally enough indicators that I do not.
2) It can be incredibly easy to jump to conclusions that would lead you to the answer you want. Had I desperately wanted a familiar, any of the examples above could lead me to delude myself into believing that one of my pets is a familiar.

It is easy to convince oneself of anything when you want it badly enough, even if that is not necessarily the truth. To be brutally honest, I don't know if any of my pets are my familiars, perhaps one is, perhaps not, at the end of the day does it really matter? I honour my pets and their contribution to my life daily. I feed and water them, give them shelter from the elements. I give them love and attention, and spoil them rotten with toys. I make sure their medical needs are taken care of. In return I get tons of slobbery kisses, lots of purrs and mountains of cuddles! So what if they are not my familiars, it does not make me any less of a witch, nor does it diminish the impact they have in my life.

Yours humbly

The Redneck Pagan