Hares, Cats and Witches

The hare among the cows

Across Britain and Ireland, and in much of northern Europe, country people once believed that certain women could take the shape of a hare. The purpose was nearly always the same: to steal milk. A hare seen among the cattle in the early morning was suspected of sucking the cows dry, and if a farm's butter would not come in the churn, or its cows gave less than usual, the hare was blamed, and through the hare, a woman.

The belief is old. The twelfth-century churchman whose account of Ireland tells of a speaking wolf also recorded a long-standing complaint that certain old women in Wales, Ireland and Scotland changed themselves into hares in order to suck other people's cows. In Ireland the danger was greatest on May morning, the start of summer, when the "profit" of a farm, its luck in milk and butter, was thought to be most easily stolen. People watched their cattle and their wells at dawn on that day, and a hare in the field was an ill sign.

In Scandinavia and Finland the milk hare took a different form. There it was not the woman herself but a creature she was said to make and send out, a hare-like thing that sucked the neighbors' cows and carried the milk home to her churn. Medieval wall paintings in some Swedish churches show it at work, a warning painted where the whole parish would see it.

The hare that was wounded

One story about the witch hare was told so often, in so many places, that it can stand for all the rest. A farmer, tired of losing his milk, lies in wait, or a hunter takes his dogs out at dawn. They start a hare among the cattle and chase it. It runs faster than any natural hare, and ordinary shot does not stop it, but at last a dog snaps at its hind leg, or a silver coin or button fired from a gun strikes it. The hare escapes, limping, through a gap in a wall or a hole at the foot of a cottage door. The men follow, and inside they find an old woman by the fire, out of breath, with blood on her leg.

This is the shared wound: an injury given to the animal appears on the human body. It is the same proof that ran through European werewolf lore from the Roman soldier with the wounded neck onward, discussed on the page of werewolf signs and cures. The motif had a terrible convenience. It turned any bruise, limp or scar into evidence.

A Scottish witchcraft confession of the 1660s, set down by the woman's interrogators, includes a rhyme she was said to use to go into a hare's shape and come out again. What lay behind her words, and what became of her, is not known. The record tells us what her questioners wanted to hear and what her neighbors feared. It tells us nothing about hares.

The witch as cat

The cat had a similar reputation. In the witchcraft beliefs of early modern Europe, a cat might be a witch's familiar, a spirit in animal form that served her, or it might be the witch herself. A much repeated tale tells of a man who, set upon at night by cats in a lonely mill or empty house, cuts off a paw. He puts it in his pocket, and when he takes it out it has become a woman's hand, with a ring he recognizes. Next day a woman of the neighborhood is found with her arm bound up and her hand missing. In sixteenth-century France the same story was told of a wolf.

Gentler cat stories survive as well. In an English folktale a man tells his wife that he has seen a procession of cats carrying a tiny coffin with a crown on it, and has been given a message for a cat he has never heard of. Their own old cat, dozing by the fire, leaps up crying that he must be the new king of the cats, and vanishes up the chimney. Here the cat is not a witch but a creature with a secret life of its own, which is what anyone who has lived with a cat has always suspected.

The harm the stories did

It is easy to tell these tales as curiosities. They were not curiosities to the women they were told about. The people suspected of being witch hares and witch cats were most often old, poor and alone: widows who begged at doors, women who had quarreled with a neighbor, healers whose remedies had once failed, anyone a little odd in manner or appearance. When a cow went dry or a child fell ill, a story already existed to explain it, and it pointed at them.

In the age of the witch trials, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, many thousands of people in Europe were put to death on charges of witchcraft, most of them women, and tales of shape-changing were among the accusations made against some of them. After the trials ended, suspicion and violence went on in some country places for a long time. Accusations of witchcraft still put vulnerable people in danger in parts of the world today.

The library tells these stories because they belong to the record of shapeshifter belief, and the record should be complete. The trials are treated more fully on the page of trials, physicians and skeptics. They are best read with the accused in mind.

The real hare

Part of the reason the hare was suspected lies in the animal itself, which really is unlike its neighbors. The brown hare does not dig a burrow, as the rabbit does. It lives above ground all its life, crouched by day in a shallow hollow in the grass called a form, so still that a person may almost step on it before it bursts away. Its young are born furred and open-eyed and spend the day hidden and alone, and the mother visits them only briefly, around dusk. A creature that seems to have no home, that comes and goes at twilight, and that is never seen with its young is easily taken for something more than it is.

The hare is also very fast, able to outrun most dogs, and it twists and doubles back so suddenly in a chase that it can seem to vanish. In early spring hares gather in open fields and rear up to box with their forepaws. It was long assumed that these were rival males; it is now known that most often a female is fending off an overeager male. A hare caught or wounded can scream in a voice that sounds startlingly human. And in the Scottish hills the mountain hare turns white in winter and brown again in spring. To people who watched all this from the edge of a field, the hare was already halfway to being something else.

The ancient Britons, according to Julius Caesar, kept hares but would not eat them, and fishermen in parts of Scotland would not even say the animal's name at sea. Claims that the hare was sacred to an old English goddess of spring, however, are modern guesses, not recorded belief.

Kinder hares

Elsewhere the hare's reputation is gentler. Across East Asia, people see in the markings of the full moon not a man but a hare or rabbit. In China the jade rabbit of the moon pounds the herbs of immortality with a mortar and pestle, keeping company with the goddess Chang'e; in Japan and Korea the moon rabbit pounds rice into rice cakes, a picture that delights children at the autumn moon festivals. A Buddhist story from India, told across Asia, explains how the hare came to be there. A hare who had nothing else to give a hungry traveler leaped into the fire to offer his own body, and the traveler, a god in disguise, kept the flames from burning him and drew the hare's likeness on the moon so that his kindness would never be forgotten.

In much of Africa the hare is the clever small animal who outwits the lion and the elephant, and those stories crossed the Atlantic to become the rabbit trickster of African American storytelling. He has a place among the tricksters. And a carving found in churches in England, and as far away as the cave temples of northwestern China, shows three hares running in a circle and sharing three ears between them, so that each seems to have two. What it meant to those who made it is not known, which may be the most hare-like thing about it.