dancing in the palm of his hand
A novel of the witchcraft persecutions in 17th century Germany
annamarie beckel
dancing in the palm of his hand
A novel of the witchcraft persecutions in 17th century Germany
annamarie beckel
Breakwater Books Ltd.
100 Water Street P.O. Box 2188
St. John’s NL A1C 6E6
www.breakwaterbooks.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Beckel, Annamarie L.
Dancing in the palm of his hand / Annamarie Beckel.
ISBN 1-55081-217-3 ISBN-13 978-1-55081-217-6
1. Trials (Witchcraft)--Germany--Fiction. I. Title.
PS8553.E29552D35 2005 813’.54 C2005-902612-X
Copyright © 2005 Annamarie Beckel
Design: Rhonda Molloy
Editor: Tamara Reynish
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical— without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or storing in an information retrieval system of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6. This applies to classroom usage as well.
We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
Printed in Canada.
Historians estimate that between 80,000 and 200,000 people, 75 percent of them women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe between 1500 and 1750.
This novel
is dedicated to the memory of the innocents who suffered.
“A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of the Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy.”
–Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, 1486, Malleus Maleficarum, known in the Holy Roman Empire as Der Hexenhammer, The Hammer of Witches.
foreword
Dancing in the Palm of His Hand is a work of fiction. Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg and his chancellor, Johann Brandt, lived and ruled in early 17th century Würzburg, and historians estimate that von Ehrenberg burned 900 witches between 1623 and 1631. Throughout the novel, characters quote from theologians’ and jurists’ treatises on witches. These treatises are real historical documents: Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum (Peter Binsfeld, 1589), De la Demonomanie des sorciers (Jean Bodin, 1580), Discours des sorciers (Henri Boquet, 1602), Disquisitionum Magicarum (Martin Delrio, 1599), Malleus Maleficarum (Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, 1486), Demonolatreiae (Nicolas Remy, 1595), and De Praestigiis Daemonum (Johann Weyer, 1563). With the exception of De Praestigiis Daemonum, which was written by Johann Weyer, an opponent of the witch persecutions, these documents were the guides for the witch hunters. Moreover, the universities in the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and France regularly issued “opinions” on legal procedures in witch trials, which in the Holy Roman Empire were guided by the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, popularly known as the “Carolina Code,” the basic criminal law code formalized under Emperor Charles V in 1532.
Witch trials existed during one of the most creative and dynamic periods in the history of Europe. The theological and legal aspects of “demonology” were considered serious intellectual pursuits, and these horrific and misogynistic treatises on witchcraft existed side by side with brilliant Renaissance art and literature, with the works of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Galileo, Montaigne, and Descartes.
1
They conjured me into being. Floods of pious words were my birth waters. The Dominicans served as midwives, the Jesuits wet-nurses. The black ink flowing from their quills was the bitter milk I suckled. The dark stream sustains me even now, giving me life and strength.
They call me Lucifer, Prince of Devils. The Antichrist. I am as real to them as the Virgin’s Son. And nearly as powerful. I bring fire and hail, death and pestilence, impotence and barrenness. I take the shape of a handsome man, an alluring woman. I seduce the unrighteous. So they say.
I am awed by the number of souls they claim I have won. Yet, I care not for a single one of them. So they say.
The end-time is near, and I am at war with God. In the dark of night, deep in the forest, my army gathers around me. We desecrate the host, trample with cloven hoof all that is sacred. We make an ointment from the flesh of unbaptized babies, use it to fly through the air, to kill and to maim. So they say.
They have granted me extraordinary powers, almost unlimited. I am nearly an equal to God, they say. Yet, because no Dominican or Jesuit can find a pathway around his belief that God is omnipotent, they say I can act only with God’s permission.
I should think such a notion offensive to God.
2
14 April 1626
People began gathering at dawn, just as the cathedral bells rang out. Eva watched from the window as men and women streamed past the bakery on their way to the town hall. Everyone came: craftsmen and journeymen, merchants, priests and monks, peddlers and beggars, town councilmen, peasants from outside the Würzburg city walls. Some brought children: little boys astride their fathers’ shoulders, babies squirming in their mothers’ arms, younger sisters and brothers clinging to the hands of older siblings.
Eva did not join them. She tried not to hear the trial, but the town hall was only a few buildings away from the bakery on Domstrasse, and the voice that read out the shrift was loud and resonant. The reading of the women’s crimes lasted nearly two hours: they had turned away from God and signed a pact with the Devil, attended the sabbath where they fornicated with the Devil and his demons, caused illness and death among their neighbours, curdled milk and caused grain to spoil, raised up fierce storms with lightning and hail to ruin the crops, caused men’s members to go limp and women’s wombs to close or their babies to die within, dug up the graves of unbaptized infants to make a flying ointment from their flesh.
The voice and the crimes chilled Eva and made her heart quicken. She tied and retied the lacing of her bodice, trying to relieve the tightness she felt within. She kept herself busy and distracted by standing behind the counter, taking people’s kreuzers and pfennigs in exchange for the heavy dark loaves the journeymen had baked before first light. She tried to distract her daughter as well, to keep her from hearing and from seeing. Katharina was too young, only eleven. She would have nightmares, and the child was already plagued with disturbing dreams and visions.
No matter what she did, however, Eva’s thoughts returned again and again to the three accused women. She had no need to hear the voice. Leaflets listing the women and their crimes, shown in etchings for those who could not read, had appeared in the marketplace the day before. She’d not been surprised to see an old woman, a beggar, among the accused, but she’d been shocked to see Frau Basser’s name – and her crimes. She was the wife of a prosperous tavern-keeper just down the street, a plump jovial woman who’d known everyone in Würzburg. She’d come to the Rosen Bakery for her family’s bread, and Eva had thought her a good woman, a pious woman, a woman she’d never have suspected of witchcraft. Never. But Eva had read the litany of crimes Frau Basser had confessed to. She’d even admitted to poisoning one of the tavern’s patrons.
And there was a girl, too, just sixteen, only five years older than Katharina.
The bakery was vacant now; everyone was ou
tside, watching. Eva heard loud cheers and knew that old Judge Steinbach, in his tremulous voice, had rendered a verdict. The accused had been condemned. Eva leaned against the counter and tried to breathe, but there was not enough air. The roar of the crowd grew louder, and Eva found herself drawn yet again to the window. The enraged mob, waving fists and shouting curses, followed the slow-moving cart as it lurched through the street. The monks, in sombre black robes, chanted, warning that all that had been predicted was coming to pass; the end of the world was near.
The crowd surrounding the tumbrel parted slightly, and Eva saw the three wretched women behind the wooden bars: the girl, barely old enough to be considered a woman, Frau Basser, and the old beggar. A priest sat with them, a small black book clutched in his hands. Frau Basser leaned close to him and shouted, but her words were lost in the boisterous din. Eva’s throat closed, and she had to look away. The women had been stripped to the waist, their heads shaved, their arms bound behind their backs. Their pale skin was mottled blue with cold. Blood streaked their bare mutilated breasts.
Katharina had crept up beside Eva and now stood on tiptoe trying to gain a better view, her white-gold braid swinging as she bobbed her head. Then, she stood still. Eva put an arm around her and tried to pull her close, to turn her away from the window, but the slight girl stood as solid and resistant as a pillar of stone. Eva placed her hand over her daughter’s eyes. “Don’t watch,” she said.
Katharina pulled the hand away. “But Mama, I saw an angel come out of the flames. She had big white wings.” The girl held out her thin arms as if she were cradling an infant. “She carried a white dog.”
Eva grabbed the girl’s shoulders. “You must not say such things!” There were no flames. Not yet. And certainly there were no angels. “You saw nothing of the kind.” She released her daughter, giving her a small shove. “Go back by the ovens.”
“But Mama, can’t we go, too?”
“Nein! Go fetch yeast and flour for the men.”
Her face in a pout, Katharina walked toward the back of the bakery, her left foot dragging like the whisper of brittle leaves across the wooden floor.
Eva turned from the window. She never went to the burnings, and she would not allow her daughter to go. There’d been no burnings when she was a child, and when they started, about sixteen or seventeen years ago, she’d gone only once, when she was twenty and still working as a maidservant. Even now Eva sometimes woke in the middle of the night hearing echoes of the old woman’s screams and smelling the nauseating stench of scorched flesh. Ten or twelve years ago there’d been so many burnings, hundreds, that the stink had hung over Würzburg for three solid years. Then the burnings stopped, and Eva hoped it was finished, that all the witches were dead, but now there seemed to be more of them than ever.
The door creaked open. Eva stepped behind the counter as three women came in, each wearing the small embroidered cap of a matron. Eva’s fingers went to her own black cap, a widow’s cap, and smoothed her brown hair beneath it.
One of the matrons held fast to a little boy’s hand. She brushed her fingertips over the youngest woman’s belly. “Perhaps there will be more babies now,” she said, “and the harvests will improve. There’ll be more grain, cheaper bread.” She glanced sharply at Eva, then pointed to a dark loaf. She opened her hand and held out eight pfennigs.
Eva shook her head.
“It’s all I have,” the woman pleaded.
Eva thought of the tattered ledger in the bedchamber upstairs. She kept the accounts, adding and subtracting the numbers each night. The bakery would fail if she didn’t keep raising her prices to match the rising costs of wheat, barley, and rye.
The boy gripped the edge of the counter and stared at the loaf. His fingers were grimy, his cheekbones sharp under sallow skin. His huge eyes glinted like a stray dog’s. He swallowed.
Eva wiped her hands on her apron. Were he still alive, Jacob would beat her for what she was about to do. She took the loaf from the shelf and handed it to the woman, taking only four pfennigs from the callused palm.
The woman clutched the bread to her chest. “Danke,” she whispered.
The three women left quickly, and two younger women came in, one tall and angular, the other small and too thin, but comely nonetheless. Both wore plain dark gowns, much like Eva’s own, laced over muslin chemises, and each carried a woven basket. Their long hair was tied back, but neither wore a cap. Unmarried maidservants. The smaller one leaned toward the other. “The harvests will be better now,” she said, her face bright. “And Karl will be able to save money.”
“Enough to think of marrying?” said the other girl.
The first young woman blushed prettily, then reached into her basket and held out three kreuzers. “Bitte, two loaves of rye.”
Eva placed the loaves on the counter and picked up the kreuzers.
“But there are undoubtedly more of them,” warned the tall girl. “Because the end-time is near. That’s what the priest says. Ruining crops and killing babies.” She shuddered. “I hate them all.”
Eva counted out six pfennigs in change.
“I wish them all dead,” said the other girl, “then the emperor’s generals would win the war, and everyone would return to the true faith.” She gave Eva a sidelong glance, as if seeking her agreement.
Eva gave it, nodding, sure that the girl was only repeating what she’d heard from her employer, or priest. Eva could feel the unspoken fear hovering just below the young maidservants’ fierce words. They might hate witches, but, like her, they’d chosen not to attend the burnings.
The girl placed the loaves in her basket, then she and her companion left.
Eva went to stand before a small painting of the Virgin and Son she’d hung in the alcove under the stairway. Her fingers trembled as she made the sign of the cross. “Mary, Mother of God, have mercy upon me for I have sinned,” she prayed. When she’d seen Frau Basser, she had not felt what she was supposed to feel: fury at the witch and satisfaction at the rightful punishment meted out by the court. She had felt only pity. And pounding fear.
She considered Mary’s calm and kindly face, the golden light surrounding her and the child, and felt reassured. The Holy Mother would feel pity, even for a witch. And perhaps those three women were the last in the city. The harvests would improve now. Würzburg would be spared from plague. There would be more babies. And there would be no more burnings. The tall girl’s words entwined themselves around her hopes. There are undoubtedly more of them. Because the end-time is near. Eva knew the words to be true. And now even women she knew and thought to be good and righteous were being revealed as witches.
Eva crossed herself again. When there were so many witches, and they appeared in such guises, how could anyone know who was a witch and who was not?
3
14 April 1626
Herr Doktor Franz Lutz tugged his fingers through his tangled white beard and stared into the distance where row after row of grapevines striped the sunlit hillside. In a small patch of untrammelled meadow, yellow and white flowers bloomed amidst the tall grasses. A few bony cows grazed, apparently unalarmed by the noisy crowd that had gathered so near to them.
Father Herzeim stepped down from the tumbrel. One witch, Frau Basser, tried to follow the priest, and the executioner had to shove her back into the cart. Lutz kept his gaze locked on the priest. He felt a vague sense of shame when his eyes strayed to the witches and their nakedness, particularly the young one. She must have been a great beauty, he thought, a young woman of generous and comely proportions.
Father Herzeim’s face was haggard, and Lutz wondered for the hundredth time how his friend managed it, visiting witches in their stinking cells, hearing their final confessions, going with them to their deaths. It was a dangerous ministry, coming face to face with witches and the Devil. The priest, a professor of civil and ecclesiastical law at the university, was entirely unsuited for such crude work, and Lutz wished the Prince-Bishop had never appoi
nted him. Father Herzeim, a Jesuit, rarely spoke of it, except to say “it is our way of proceeding,” but Lutz could see the terrible toll this onerous duty was taking. His friend had been the final confessor for witches for less than a year, and in that brief span, premature streaks of silver had crept into his dark hair and beard, the lines on his handsome face had deepened, though he was not yet forty.
Lutz raised an arm, and Father Herzeim made his way toward him, his broad-brimmed hat bobbing above the crowd. People warily stepped away from the final confessor for witches, and the priest took his place beside Lutz. Drops of blood, witches’ blood, spotted the pale yellow cincture around the waist of his black cassock. He made the sign of the cross, his long fingers sweeping from his forehead to his chest, left shoulder to right. “In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti.” He clasped his hands over his breviary and bowed his head.
The executioner, masked and gloved, led the witches from the tumbrel, one by one. Frau Basser was first. Shrieking, she tried to pull away from his grasp. He cuffed her across the face, then untied her wrists only long enough to bind her to one of the three tall stakes
Lutz resisted the urge to plug his forefingers into his ears, to shut out Frau Basser’s screams, the mob’s curses and jeers, and, especially, the monks’ chanting, which unnerved him even more than the screams. He feared that the monks might be right. The end of the world was near; everything predicted in The Apocalypse was coming to pass. He tallied the evidence, keeping count by tapping his fingers against his wool breeches. One: hunger. Last autumn’s grain harvests had been the worst in years and people were starving. Beggars were thick on the streets, not just in Würzburg, but throughout the southwest. Two: plague. It was breaking out everywhere around them, Ansbach, Rothenburg, Nuremberg. At yesterday’s Lower City Council meeting, the councilmen had voted to direct the city gatekeepers to allow no strangers to enter Würzburg nor any citizen to re-enter who was returning from a city with plague. Three: war. The Holy Roman Empire now had a new and powerful enemy. The Netherlands had just joined England and Denmark on the side of the Protestant Union. Four: witches. The Devil was actively recruiting more witches. Scores had been executed, not only in Würzburg, but in Bamberg, Eichstatt, and Ellwangen as well, and still there were more of them. Only two days earlier, at Easter mass, the priest had read from The Apocalypse: Woe to the earth, and to the sea, because the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time. The priest had followed that verse with words from the Dominicans’ Der Hexenhammer, The Hammer of Witches. No matter how hard he tried, Lutz could not erase the words from his mind: And so in this twilight and evening of the world...the evil of witches and their iniquities superabound.
Dancing in the Palm of His Hand Page 1
