In early modern Britain, disbelief in the existence of spirits was tantamount to atheism. The overwhelming majority of people,…

“In early modern Britain, disbelief in the existence of spirits was tantamount to atheism. The overwhelming majority of people, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, believed in the existence of a countless number and variety of invisible supernatural beings. Different types of people were concerned with different types of spirits: for the devout Christian, angels and demons stood centre stage; for the elite magician, spirits originating from classical cosmologies could be equally significant while the uneducated country people placed a greater emphasis on the ‘fairy folk’. Trying to make any hard and fast distinction between categories of spirits in early modern Britain is impossible because supernatural beings were labelled differently, depending on geography, education and religious perspective and definitions overlapped considerably. The term ‘fairy’, for example, is a misleadingly broad generic term which, in the period, covered a wide range of supernatural entities. On a popular level there was often little difference between a fairy and an angel, saint, ghost, or devil. We find the popular link between fairies and angels, for example, expressed in the confession of a cunning man on trial for witchcraft in Aberdeen, in 1598. The magical practitioner, who was identified in the trial records as ‘Andro Man’, claimed that his familiar (described by the interrogators as the Devil) was an angel who, like Tom Reid, served the queen of the fairies. The records state ‘Thow confessis that the Devill, thy maister, quhom thow termes Christsonday, and supponis to be ane engell, and Goddis godsone, albeit he hes a thraw by God, and swyis to the Quene of Elphen, is rasit be the speking of the word Benedicte.’”

– Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits - shamanistic visionary traditions in Early Modern British witchcraft and magic (viaophidiansabbat)