The Hare

The hare is the animal most consistently and specifically linked to the figure of the witch in British and Irish tradition. Not as a familiar kept indoors — that role belongs to the cat and the toad — but as a body the witch becomes: a shape slipped into at night to cross ground quickly, to go among cattle unseen, to run from dogs and return before dawn.

That is a precise folkloric claim, not a vague symbolic resonance. It deserves to be examined as precisely as it was recorded.

Isobel Gowdie and the trial record

The fullest primary evidence comes from Scotland in 1662. Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn in Nairnshire made four confessions to witchcraft over six weeks — apparently voluntarily, which has puzzled historians ever since. Her statements are among the most detailed witch-trial documents in the Scottish record. They introduced, among other things, the word coven into English usage.

On shapeshifting, Gowdie was specific. To transform into a hare, she said, the witch recited:

I sall gae intill ane haire, With sorrow and sych and meikle care; And I sall gae in the Devillis nam, Ay qubill I com hom againe.

To return to human form:

Haire, haire, God send thee caire: I am in an hairis liknes just now; But I salbe in a womanis liknes ewin now.

She described being sent by the Devil as a hare to carry a message to neighbours, and being set upon by a man and his hounds along the way. The dogs could not kill her in hare form, she said, but they could bite — and those bite marks would still show on her skin once she was human again. The wound transferred with the body.

This detail — wound on the hare, wound on the woman — became the narrative pivot of dozens of later folk stories across Scotland and Ireland. It is how the witch-hare gets unmasked.

Wilby’s Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits situates Gowdie’s confessions within a broader pattern of early modern British shapeshifting belief, noting that the hare was among the most commonly named transformation animals in trial testimony, alongside the cat and, less frequently, other small mammals.

The milk-theft tradition and May Day

Across Ireland, Scotland, and northern England, the modal witch-hare story runs as follows: a farmer’s cows stop giving milk. A hare is seen moving among the herd, usually at night or at dawn. The farmer — or more often a group of men — goes out to shoot the animal, but ordinary lead passes through it without effect. Someone produces a silver coin, a crooked sixpence, or in some Irish accounts a piece of a religious medal, beaten or melted into a rough ball. The silver wounds the hare. The animal bolts. The next morning, a local woman — always named, always already suspected — is found bearing an identical wound.

The Irish version of this tradition is particularly well documented, and it has a specific seasonal anchor. William Camden’s Britannia (1586) records the Irish belief that if a hare is seen among cattle on May Day, it should be killed at once, because it is presumed to be an old woman stealing butter. The same belief is attested in the Irish Folklore Commission’s twentieth-century collections, which gathered accounts from Kerry, Clare, and other western counties where the May Day hare was still treated as a real danger within living memory.

May Day mattered because it was a threshold: the beginning of the summer grazing season, when cattle’s milk was at peak economic importance and therefore most vulnerable to supernatural interference. The hare as milk-thief belongs to the same anxiety cluster as butter-churning charms and the theft of the fíor (the force or virtue) of a neighbour’s dairy.

In County Kerry, the tradition carried a further layer. Eating a hare was said to be like eating your grandmother, because the souls of old women — particularly those with a reputation for cunning — were thought to inhabit hares. The shapeshifter and the soul-vessel collapse into each other.

Silver, and why it works

The requirement of silver to wound or kill the witch-hare is consistent across the British Isles and appears in essentially every recorded version of the story. The Irish material is specific: a crooked threepenny or sixpenny piece was the preferred form, the crookedness apparently intensifying the silver’s power. Melted religious medals appear in some accounts, which is a characteristic piece of folk logic — the sacred metal of a Christian object turned to practical counter-magic.

The silver-and-shapeshifter equation runs parallel to werewolf belief on the Continent, and both probably draw on silver’s long-standing association with the moon, purity, and the supernatural. That silver features in both traditions does not mean they share a single root; it means silver carried consistent symbolic weight across a wide range of European apotropaic practice.

What makes the British witch-hare distinctive is not the silver but the identification: the wounded hare and the wounded woman are the same person. The shapeshifter is not a supernatural creature from outside the community. She is a neighbour.

The three hares motif

Distinct from the witch tradition — and usually conflated with it carelessly in modern pagan writing — is the medieval decorative motif known as the three hares, or in Devon as the Tinners’ Rabbits. The image shows three hares running in a circle, each appearing to have two ears, but with only three ears present in the design: the ears form a shared triangle at the centre, an optical illusion that rewards close attention.

In Devon alone there are around seventeen surviving examples carved into the oak roof bosses of medieval parish churches. The motif also appears on floor tiles at Chester Cathedral, in stained glass at Long Melford in Suffolk, and on a ceiling in Scarborough, Yorkshire. But it is not only British: closely related versions have been identified in Islamic architecture in the Middle East and Central Asia, in Buddhist cave temples in China (the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang), and in a scattering of Himalayan and South Asian sites. The current scholarly hypothesis, developed by the Three Hares Project (Greeves, Andrew, and Chapman), is that the motif travelled along Silk Road routes under the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, reaching Devon either through trade networks or through returning Crusaders.

What the three hares meant in each context is contested and probably varied. In the Devon churches, the Tinners’ Rabbits name points to tin-mining patronage: the mines funded church construction across the southwest, and the motif may have functioned as a mark of guild or fraternity identity. It does not appear to carry a specifically witchcraft meaning in any of the documented contexts. It is a symbolically resonant image — the endless rotation, the shared ears, the illusion of individual wholeness within collective form — but attempts to read it as a pre-Christian fertility or moon symbol projecting through medieval Christianity should be treated with caution, as the earliest dateable instances are medieval rather than ancient.

The moon association

The link between hares and the moon is genuine, ancient, and cross-cultural: it appears in Chinese, Indian, and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican traditions, as well as across various strands of European thought. In Britain and Ireland, the hare’s nocturnal habits, its associations with wildness and liminal space, and its long folkloric connection with women made the moon correspondence feel natural.

What the moon-hare connection does not have is a clean pre-modern British pagan lineage. The claim that the goddess Eostre transformed into a hare at the full moon — widely repeated in modern witchcraft writing — rests on a thin evidentiary base. Hutton’s Stations of the Sun demonstrates that the evidence for Eostre as a goddess (let alone an Eostre-hare connection) is essentially limited to a single passage in Bede; the hare element appears to be a late accretion with no documentary anchor in the early medieval period. This does not mean the moon-hare correspondence is without value as a working symbol. It means it is better understood as an intuitive modern synthesis than as a recovered pre-Christian doctrine.

Hare in modern correspondence practice

In contemporary Wiccan and eclectic pagan correspondence books, the hare appears under:

• Element: earth or water (sources vary)
• Planet / luminary: moon (the dominant assignment, consistent across most modern sources)
• Season / sabbat: Ostara / spring equinox; sometimes Samhain (the transition, the between)
• Powers: transformation, speed, intuition, fertility, prophetic dreaming

The moon and transformation assignments are the most defensible in terms of historical continuity. The fertility assignment is genuine, though it flows through a different channel than the witchcraft tradition: the hare’s fecundity and its March “madness” (actually courtship and competition behaviour) gave it a spring-fertility valence in agricultural communities that has nothing to do with shapeshifting witches.

The witchcraft association — the one with actual primary-source grounding in Gowdie’s confession, in Camden, in the Irish Folklore Commission’s records — is curiously underemphasised in modern correspondence shorthand, perhaps because it is threatening rather than numinous. The witch-hare is not a symbol of gentle lunar wisdom. She is a thief, a suspect, a woman the community shot at with silver.

Relationship to cat and toad

The hare fits into a cluster of witch-animals in the British tradition, but it occupies a different position than the cat or the toad. The cat and the toad were primarily familiars — spirits or creatures kept and fed by the witch, acting as her agents. The hare was primarily a disguise — the witch herself, transformed. That distinction is not absolute (Gowdie mentions both familiar-keeping and shapeshifting), but it maps onto a genuine difference in how the two kinds of story were structured. In familiar-spirit accounts, the witch directs an external being. In witch-hare accounts, she is the hare. The body is the locus of the crime, which is why the silver-wound identification works as narrative logic: you hurt the animal’s body and find the injury on the woman’s body because they are the same body.

Both traditions reflect early modern anxieties about women’s bodies, mobility, and the ability to operate outside sanctioned domestic space. That context does not exhaust the symbolism, but it should stay visible.

Cross-references: cat (familiar/shapeshifter cluster, forthcoming); toad (familiar traditions, forthcoming); May Day rites and cattle protection (forthcoming).