Weyland’s Whey – That Old Familiar Feeling

That Old Familiar Feeling

 

They’re a basic ingredient.  When you’re a witch you gotta have the robe.  An altar.  And a familiar or two.

Now, full disclosure time here: I’m no scholar or expert.  I haven’t seriously researched this topic, nor do I intend to.  But I deal with familiars on a daily basis (or at least I believe I do) and I’m happy to share my own experiences.

I suppose familiars come in all genders and species or whatever, but I only deal with my boys Jinx and Spirit.  They’re a couple of stray cats my girlfriend Sparkle took in long before she and I met.  We hit it off as soon as I stumbled through the door.  (Spirit and I, that is.  Jinx took a little longer.  Sparkle is still making up her mind.)  I considered the boys to be my fams right away, just as a matter of course.  (Wytch plus cats equal familiars, right?  Right?)  Foresight not exactly being my forte, I originally had no plans to do anything magickal with them at all.  But when I noticed those two furry little freeloaders weren’t paying any rent money, I decided to put them to work.

The question was how.  Communication would be a major hurdle.  Cats don’t talk.  (Try “meow”.)  I don’t know if they think in words or symbols at all, although they seem to respond to their own names.  (And some occasional profanity on my part.)  So messages would have to be empathic, not psychic.

What else can they do?  Well, their divination prowess is limited.  Did they warn us that our neighbor’s house was going to burn down?  Apparently water damage doesn’t show up on their radar.  Can they help find missing keys?  Nope.  How about stock market tips?  Only on Sabrina.  Size and the absence of opposable thumbs hobble their usefulness as servants or gofers.  As if a cat would follow instructions anyway.  They’d have to be mute advisers.

Fortunately they’re both natural born snugglers.  Scooping them up and holding them is no problem.  Maybe proximity would be a key here.

Hey presto.  Spirit likes to hop on  the bed and stare at Sparkle while she sleeps. He usually has to walk over me to do so.  Intercepting him with a hug was business as usual.  I soon found I had thought of an answer to a problem at work I had been  fretting over.  Quality time spent with Jinx yielded similar results.

Oh yeah, I know what you’re thinking.  Instead of having two empathic felines who feed me solutions to my troubles, it’s far more likely the cats are just stress busters.  I pick one up, my blood pressure goes down and voila! I suddenly know what to do tomorrow.  Not because the cats did anything.  Because I’m calmer and can figure out my own solutions.

In my heart of hearts I figure that’s probably how it works.  But what fun is that?  Yours truly has been a Romantic since birth.  (How can you be a wytch and not be a Romantic, eh?)  So I choose to believe my furry little fams are purring answers into my ear.  It fits my worldview better.

And who’s to say the process isn’t magical after all?  Reducing stress and tension sans meds is a neat little trick in and of itself.  If magick is the art of causing changes with our willpower, this is pretty darn close.

Hey, it works for me.

 

(Photo by Anusha Barwa on Unsplash )

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About the Author:

Weyland Smith is an eclectic solitaire wytch.  He lives in New Jersey with his girlfriend Sparkle, their two feline familiars and a dog named Delinquent.  Weyland’s interests include writing, crystals and web weaving.  Wey is also a firm believer in reincarnation—in a previous life he was a village idiot.