Early reference to Witches turning themselves into Hares.
The prevalence of the belief that witches could transform themselves into hares is seen from a remark made by Giraldus Cambrensis in his topography of Ireland. He writes:—
“It has also been a frequent complaint, from old times, as well as in the present, that certain hags in Wales, as well as in Ireland and Scotland, changed themselves into the shape of hares, that, sucking teats under this counterfeit, they might stealthily rob other people’s milk.”
Giraldus Cambrensis, Bohn’s Edition, p. 83.
This remark of the Archdeacon’s gives a respectable antiquity to the metamorphosis of witches, for it was in 1185 that he visited Ireland, and he tells us that what he records had descended from “old times.”
The transformation fables that have descended to us would seem to be fossils of a pagan faith once common to the Celtic and other cognate races. It was not thought that certain harmless animals only could become the temporary abode of human beings. Even a wolf could be human under an animal form. Thus Giraldus Cambrensis records that a priest was addressed in Ireland by a wolf, and induced to administer the consolations of his priestly office to his wife, who, also, under the shape of a she-wolf was apparently at the point of death, and to convince the priest that she was really a human being the he-wolf, her husband, tore off the skin of the she-wolf from the head down to the navel, folding it back, and she immediately presented the form of an old woman to the astonished priest. These people were changed into wolves through the curse of one Natalis, Saint and Abbot, who compelled them every seven years to put off the human form and depart from the dwellings of men as a punishment for their sins. (See Giraldus Cambrensis, Bohn’s Edition, pp. 79-81.)