Bats in Witchcraft: Sorting the Folklore From the Inventions
Type bat into any witchcraft search and you will be handed a confident list: bat's wing means holly, bat's blood means something else, bats were the classic witch's familiar, and so on.
Much of that list has no source anybody can point to.
Which is not the same as saying bats have nothing to do with witchcraft. They have a real place in the record. It is just a different place from the one the internet describes, and the difference is worth knowing before you build practice on it.
The ingredient code-name lists
The most repeated claim is that grimoire ingredients like eye of newt and bat's wing were coded plant names, kept secret from outsiders.
What is true
Folk plant names are genuinely vivid and genuinely confusing. Plants have been called crow's foot, lamb's ear, adder's tongue and dozens of similar things for centuries, entirely openly. A herbalist reading an old recipe really might need to know that a name refers to a leaf rather than an animal.
What is not established
The specific decoder lists circulating online, the ones that assign an exact plant to each poetic name, are modern compilations. They rarely cite a manuscript, and where they do, the citation usually does not say what the list claims. Treat any list that gives you a tidy one-to-one mapping with suspicion, particularly if it appears without a single source.
Shakespeare is often cited as evidence, since the witches in Macbeth call for wool of bat. But that scene is theatre written for effect, not a working recipe, and it is roughly the weakest possible source for what practitioners actually did.
Bats in the trial records
Pieces that carry this
The English and Scottish witch trials do mention animals extensively, and it is worth knowing which ones.
Cats, dogs, toads, mice, rats, ferrets and insects dominate. Bats appear far less often than popular culture suggests. The reason is mundane: familiars in those confessions are usually described as animals kept, fed and handled in a household, and a bat is not an animal anybody kept.
It is also worth remembering what those documents are. They are confessions extracted under interrogation, often under torture or its threat, from people with every reason to say whatever ended the questioning. They tell us what interrogators expected to hear. Our guide to familiars in modern witchcraft covers that distinction properly.
Where the bat does belong
Set aside the invented material and a real association remains, built on things people could actually observe.
Night work
Bats are one of the few creatures you reliably encounter while working outdoors after dark. Anyone who practises at night in summer has watched them. That is not symbolism imposed from outside; it is the animal that is actually there.
Thresholds
Bats roost in the parts of a building nobody uses: attics, belfries, ruins, the gap between the roof and the room. In folk terms those are threshold places, neither inside nor outside. A creature that lives in the gap is useful for anything to do with boundaries, which our hedge witchcraft guide gets into.
Disappearance and return
Hibernating species vanish for months and come back. That is a cycle you can watch rather than one you have to take on faith, and it makes the bat a reasonable image for anything to do with retreat and return.
The flying ointment question
Bats come up in the flying ointment discussion, usually as an ingredient in a recipe somebody found online, so it is worth addressing directly.
What the sources describe
Early modern accounts of ointments do exist, and the plants named in the more credible ones are the nightshade family: henbane, belladonna, mandrake, datura. These are genuinely psychoactive and genuinely capable of killing you, which is the main thing to know about them.
Where the bat comes in
Animal fat as a base is described in several accounts, and later retellings sometimes specify exotic animals for effect. That specificity is almost always the retelling rather than the source. A recipe demanding bat's blood is a good sign that you are reading somebody's dramatic reconstruction rather than a document.
The honest summary: night flight is a real and recurring theme in the confessions, the plants named are real and dangerous, and the animal ingredients are the least reliable part of the whole picture. Our herbal witchcraft guide covers the plant side safely.
A practical note on materials
This one matters more than the folklore. Bats are protected in the United Kingdom, across the European Union, and under various state and federal rules in the United States. Buying bat parts, disturbing a roost, or handling a bat can carry real legal consequences, and many species are in genuine decline.
Anyone selling you a bat wing for ritual use is either selling you something illegal or selling you something else with a label on it. Imagery, jewelry and art carry the symbol perfectly well without any of that.
Why the bat kept its reputation
One question worth answering: why did the association stick so hard in Europe when cats and toads eventually softened?
Largely because nobody lives with a bat. A cat becomes ordinary because it sits on your lap. A toad becomes ordinary because you find one in the garden and it does nothing frightening. The bat stayed at a distance, glimpsed at dusk and never handled, so there was nothing to wear the strangeness down. Familiarity is what defuses this kind of symbol, and the bat never got any.
Working with the bat as an image
Start with the season
Bat associations sit naturally in late summer and autumn, which is when the animal is most visible and when the Samhain end of the year approaches.
Keep the record honest
If you take on the bat as a working image, write down what you actually did and what actually happened. That habit is the only reliable defence against gradually adopting somebody's invented correspondence list without noticing.
Pick your reading
Western gothic or Chinese fortune, decide which one you mean. Our bat symbolism guide covers the split, and the bat collection carries both.
One piece to start with
Frequently Asked Questions
Is bat's wing really a code name for a plant?
Possibly, in the general sense that folk plant names have always been vivid and animal-flavoured. But the specific decoder lists circulating online are modern compilations with no manuscript behind them. Use them as a curiosity rather than as a source.
Were bats common witch familiars?
Not in the trial records. Cats, dogs, toads, mice and insects appear far more often, because familiars in those confessions are described as household animals that were kept and fed. The bat familiar is mostly a later cultural addition.
Can I use real bat parts in my practice?
No, and this is a legal question rather than an ethical preference. Bats are protected across the UK, the EU and much of the United States, and handling or trading in them carries real penalties. Use imagery instead.
Carry the Symbol, Not the Specimen
The bat works as an image without any of the complications. Our bat collection covers jewelry and home pieces, and sits alongside the wider familiars range.
Related Reads
Bat Symbolism: Fortune in the East, Fear in the West
Hedge Witchcraft: The Path Between Worlds
Herbal Witchcraft: Plants and Potions
Witch Familiars: Animal Magic in Modern Practice
