Creepy Familiars: Jarmara May 18, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
One of the joys of reading about early modern witch trials is the description (particularly in British cases) of the crazy and creepy familiars kept by old women for their various delectations and debaucheries. Beach recently publicized a spirit mole and he now wishes to introduce Jamara, described in three different passages relating to some seventeenth-century East Anglian witch trials.
He was ‘another white imp with red spots as big as a small dog’; this absurdly reminds Beach of the Pimpa, an Italian cartoon hero for very young children.
Rather less dramatically he was ‘a white dog, with red spots’.
Then finally we get to the horrible essence. Jamara, whose fellow imp was known as Vinegar Tom, was ‘like a red or sandy spotted dog, with legs not so long as a finger, to our perceivance, but his back as broad as two dogs, or broader of that bigness and vanish’d [?].’
Not sure about that final vanish’d? Varnish’d???
The contemporary picture at the top reduces the horrid majesty of Jamara to a saloon poodle with molting issues. Can anyone do better: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Or come up with creepier familiars?
