Bat

The bat is the only animal to appear in both the witch-trial record and on Qing dynasty imperial robes. In Europe, it spent roughly five centuries as a devil’s familiar and a shorthand for everything sinister that flies at night. In China during the same period, it was embroidered onto silk as a token of good fortune. The same creature, the same natural history, two readings as far apart as readings can get. Understanding why requires staying close to the actual sources — and resisting the modern horror stereotype, which is largely nineteenth-century Gothic fiction draped over a much older and stranger set of associations.

The classification problem

Medieval natural philosophy did not know what to do with the bat, and that uncertainty is where the symbolic weight begins.

Isidore of Seville, writing his Etymologiae in the seventh century, placed the bat under the volucres — the birds — but noted immediately that it was anomalous: “it is an animal similar to a mouse… in appearance it is a quadruped at the same time as being equipped to fly; this is not usually found among other birds.” Bartholomaeus Anglicus, whose thirteenth-century encyclopaedia De proprietatibus rerum was one of the most widely copied reference works of the Middle Ages, repeated Isidore nearly verbatim: the bat is “lyke to a Birde, and also to a foure footed beast: and that is but seld found among Birdes.”

The name itself encodes the problem. Isidore derives vespertilio from vespertinus, “of the evening.” The bat is named not for what it is but for when it appears — at the hinge between day and night, the exact moment medieval thought identified as the hour when ordinary categories became unstable.

A creature that is mammal and bird at once, that belongs to neither clean class, that appears precisely at dusk and vanishes before full darkness — this is a liminal creature by structural logic, not by poetic licence. Folklore across Europe did not invent the bat’s ambiguity; it read it off the animal itself.

Wool of bat: the literary record

The most famous appearance of the bat in the English witch-lore is also the most precise in its date: Act IV, Scene I of Macbeth (1606), where the three witches catalogue the contents of their cauldron:

Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog…

Shakespeare’s ingredient list is a studied piece of dramatic design. Each creature in the opening tier — toad, snake, newt, frog, bat, dog — is nocturnal, venomous, or marginal: the categories of things that right-thinking Tudor Englishmen kept out of the house. “Wool of bat” is arresting because bats do not have wool; the phrase forces the audience to register the bat as something between a furred animal and a winged one, which is exactly the right cognitive note for a scene built around inversion and category-breaking.

One reading offered by herbalists and folklorists is that “wool of bat” was a herbal code name — bog moss, or a similar material — rather than a literal bat pelt. This reading is plausible for some items in the list, less so for others, and the play works theatrically whether or not Shakespeare’s audience parsed it that way. What matters for the symbolic record is that by 1606 the bat was so firmly lodged in the repertory of witch-associated creatures that it needed no explanation.

Macbeth was written six years before the Lancashire Witch Trials of 1612. It is a useful marker: by the early seventeenth century, the bat’s association with witchcraft was established enough to be a theatrical shorthand, not a novel claim.

The medieval witchcraft association

The bat’s route into the witch-trial imaginary runs through its natural habits as much as through its literary appearances.

Bats roost in the same places that trial-era folklore associated with witchcraft: old churches, abandoned buildings, caves, the ruins of pre-Reformation religious houses. They emerge at the hour — dusk — that popular belief across northern Europe marked as the witches’ hour, the pivot when protections weakened and the dead might walk. Their silent, erratic flight in half-light, combined with the fact that they navigate without visible reference to light, fed a long-running popular belief that bats were in some sense seeing what ordinary creatures could not — a perception that mapped neatly onto the witch’s supposed access to hidden knowledge.

J.C. Cooper’s survey of traditional symbolism records that in the Christian register the bat was classified as “the bird of the devil” — a formulation that recapitulates Isidore’s classification problem while adding a moral valence. Dante placed Satan in the Inferno with bat’s wings rather than an angel’s feathered ones, a choice that was not eccentric but conventional: bat wings signal perverted flight, inversion of the divine order.

The familiar tradition is the most operationally specific of the bat’s witchcraft associations. Familiars — animal spirits believed to serve witches in exchange for blood or affection — were predominantly cats, toads, and dogs in the English record, but bats appear regularly in Continental accusations and in popular iconography. The witch-flight imagery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, documented in broadsheets and trial pamphlets, frequently shows nocturnal creatures in attendance: owls, cats, toads, and bats cluster at the margins of the frame while a figure rides a staff or a goat through dark air.

It is worth noting what the trial record and the imagery are not saying: bats were not consistently accused of being witches in shapeshifted form (that role falls more often to hares and cats), nor were they reliably the primary familiar. Their role is more ambient — part of the nocturnal atmosphere that surrounded the witch figure — than specific. The bat is furniture in the witch’s world as much as it is an actor in it.

The natural history underneath

Strip away the symbolism and the natural history of bats is genuinely unusual.

They are the only mammals capable of true powered flight. They navigate by echolocation — a faculty that was not scientifically described until the eighteenth century, meaning that for most of European history, bats simply appeared to move through complete darkness without error, a capability that had no natural explanation available to observers. They roost communally in caves, which in European and Near Eastern tradition are consistently associated with the underworld and with liminal passage between the living and the dead.

These are not invented correspondences. They are observations of real animal behaviour that a pre-scientific worldview reasonably read as evidence of unusual power. The bat’s symbolic weight is, in this sense, well-grounded — not in the supernatural, but in the genuinely extraordinary facts of bat biology.

The East Asian reversal

The contrast with Chinese tradition is sharp enough to be instructive.

In Mandarin, the word for bat — fú (蝠) — is a homophone of the word for good fortune — fú (福). This linguistic coincidence produced one of the most durable good-luck emblems in Chinese decorative art. A grouping of five bats, wu fu (五福), represents the Five Blessings: long life, wealth, health, love of virtue, and a peaceful death in old age. The motif appears on Qing dynasty porcelain, carved into furniture, woven into silk robes, and stamped onto wedding gifts. A bat painted upside down signals fortune arriving, because “upside down” (dào) puns on “to arrive.”

This tradition is documented from at least the fourteenth century and was not marginal: wu fu bats appear on imperial robes and in Buddhist devotional contexts alike. The Bat Conservation International archive notes that red bats doubled the auspicious reading, red being the colour of joy in Chinese ritual life.

The same animal, the same echolocation, the same cave-roosting nocturnal biology — and the symbolic reading is diametrically opposite. This is the clearest demonstration that the European witch-bat association is cultural construction rather than universal legible meaning. The bat is not inherently sinister. It became sinister through a specific convergence of Christian demonology, taxonomic anxiety, and Gothic literary tradition.

Correspondences in modern practice

For reference — not as folklore evidence — the bat appears in contemporary witchcraft correspondence systems with the following assignments:

• Element: air (flight) and earth (cave-dwelling)
• Sabbat: Samhain, the threshold feast when the boundary between living and dead is said to thin
• Associations: transition, liminal passage, psychic perception, communication with the dead, familiar work
• Cross-references: the cat (nocturnal familiar), the toad (cauldron ingredient and familiar companion), and the broader question of flying ointments and witch-flight imagery, which the bat’s presence in nocturnal iconography consistently accompanies

The Samhain association is the most defensible of these, because the bat’s actual behaviour supports it: in temperate Europe, bats enter hibernation in October, disappearing from sight at the precise moment in the calendar that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the dark half of the year. Their vanishing and their later return in spring fit the death-and-return logic of the wheel without requiring symbolic overlay.

Modern practitioners who work with bat imagery are, whether they know it or not, working with a symbol whose European valence is largely medieval Christian demonology reworked through early-modern witch-trial iconography, then filtered again through Victorian Gothic literature. That does not make it unavailable as practice. It means the genealogy is worth knowing.

Cross-references on this site: (forthcoming — cat, toad, flying ointments, Samhain)