Domestic spirit helps or harms based on treatment
A motif, one of the traits figures share. All traits.
Behaviour TMI F480
13 figures
They can be helpful or harmful, reflecting the dual nature of household spirits and the unseen forces believed to inhabit domestic spaces.
It must be fed and kept properly, often with specific food set aside for it, and the household that neglects it loses both the spirit and the prosperity.
The relationship runs ambivalent rather than simply hostile: physical roughhousing, minor harassment, and frightening encounters on lonely roads at night sit alongside episodes of real help — chores done, protection extended — once the spirit has been stood up to or otherwise accepted.
The farm relationship ran on tribute, possibly wages for his services as a cowherd: at one farm near Abergwyddon the milkmaid carried a bowl of milk and a piece of white bread to a lonely place on the pastures every day.
The pairing of blessing and affliction suggests something touchy rather than malicious: the same neighbours who give increase send sickness when slighted.
Some tales speak of Cat Sidhes blessing households or rewarding those who show them respect, while others warn of their vindictive nature when slighted.
In exchange, it demands to be fed, and in some tellings it insists on a specific dish, such as an unsalted omelette or scrambled eggs, left out for it; a keeper who refuses or neglects this due risks the spirit's anger or departure.
Nats are considered volatile and morally ambivalent: they can grant protection, fertility, and good fortune to households and villages that honor them, but are also believed to bring illness, misfortune, or possession upon those who neglect or offend them, particularly by violating taboos associated with a given spirit's shrine or domain.
forgetting the offering, or serving it without butter, was said to provoke him into mischief or open sabotage, from tangling cattle's tails to souring milk to abandoning the farm outright, taking its prosperity with him.
Accounts describe the Bannik as capable of both generosity and real danger.
Outside the immediate family a Brownie was regarded with some caution, since one that felt slighted, underpaid, or otherwise offended could turn genuinely mischievous, undoing its own tidying or playing pranks on the household it had previously served faithfully.
On the helpful side, he is described as completing unfinished household tasks overnight, for which servants would leave him a bowl of milk, and accounts describe him skimming milk, grinding at the quern, and otherwise assisting with kitchen labor much as a Brownie would in northern English and Scottish tradition, to which he is explicitly connected as a comparable southern English household spirit.
Accounts vary on how the Tylwyth Teg regard human generosity, but a recurring motif across Welsh fairy lore holds that they resent stinginess and reward households that leave offerings out in good faith.