The World of All Souls

by Deborah Harkness

  Stories of vampirelike creatures have existed far back into human history, including Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures, and folklore all over the world shows parallels with the revenant figure of the undead. But it is Eastern Europe that is the heartland of the vampire myth in modern popular culture. Linguists and historians have looked for the root of the word “vampire” to try to understand its origins. There are several theories: that the Slavic variations upir, upyr, and upior link back to the Turkish word uber, meaning “witch.” Or that it has roots back to the Greek word pi, “to drink.” Today there is general agreement that its root is Slavic, derived from a medieval Serbian word that, when anglicized, becomes vampir. Its meaning may have connections to a time when Christianity was young, clashing with the old pagan gods and their rituals of blood sacrifice.* Diana encountered numerous variations for “vampire”: from the old Occitan word manjasang that Ysabeau uses to the Anglo-Saxon term wearh (monster, criminal, or evil spirit). In Prague nachzehrer, from old German folklore, was used, literally meaning “devourer of the dead,” while the Jews used the word alukah (leech).

  Throughout this vampire history, the images, beliefs, and fears are constantly tangled with tales of witches and other creatures, any beings that did not fit into human society. Whatever the origins behind these mythic figures, it is what people believed in a certain age that shaped the acknowledged history. As Matthew said to Diana, “Somewhere in each of these stories, there’s a nugget of truth.”

  See also:

  CHARACTERS: Gerbert d’Aurillac, Jack Blackfriars, the members of the de Clermont family, Juliette Durand, Benjamin Fox, Andrew Hubbard, Domenico Michele

  ORGANIZATIONS: The Congregation, the Conventicle, the Order of the Defeated Dragon

  LITERATURE: Peter Stubbe pamphlet

  Witches

  Aunt Sarah had always told me that magic was a gift. If it was, it had strings attached that bound me to all the Bishop witches who had come before me.

  Characteristics

  Of the four types of creatures, witches are the only ones that have inherited supernatural powers. Most witches can perform magic using spells and herbs, and some can even harness the powers of nature. Because the practice of witchcraft depends heavily on knowledge and spells that have been recorded over generations, witches are strongly bound to tradition and family.

  Witches tend to be highly practical and organized. They are drawn to professions that require a good sense of tradition and the categorization of knowledge, and they often pursue careers as teachers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, midwives, anthropologists, librarians, and botanists. Vivian, the head of the Madison coven, is an accountant, although Diana’s Aunt Sarah was astonished to find out that Vivian also had a master’s degree in medieval literature. Vivian responded, “Do you have any idea how many English majors are accountants?”

  Like other creatures, witches are neither uniformly good nor uniformly evil. Just as some scientists use their knowledge for the advancement of the creature condition and others for destructive purposes, witches can practice magic either for benign or malignant ends. Satu Järvinen employed witchcraft to torture Diana to discover the extent of her powers while Sarah Bishop used it to heal her injuries.

  Contrary to human lore, witches are not necessarily warty and hunchbacked (though they can be). They often pass as humans who have outsize personalities and eccentric taste in fashion and decor. Most witches dress for comfort and leave style to the daemons. Diana Bishop, for example, is most comfortable in old yoga pants and a stretchy sweater. Her mother favored loose clothes à la Annie Hall. Other witches prefer dark colors and richly textured fabrics such as velvet. The effect can be either frumpy or stylish, depending on the witch. Because power will out in the end, witches often have long fingernails and unruly hair.

  Diana’s hair grows, curls, straightens, and changes color as her powers develop and evolve. She definitely experiences more good-hair days once she begins to release her pent-up magical energy.

  Witches can be either female or male. Strictly speaking, the term “witch” applies to women and “wizard” to men, but “witch” is used collectively to refer to both. This is a departure from the old human custom of using the male form of the word to describe a group, probably because witch culture is strongly matriarchal. Many witches recognize the power of the goddess, a threefold deity who represents the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Most witches use their mother’s maiden name as the family name. In the Bishop family, the custom is for Bishop witches (male and female) to keep the Bishop name regardless of marriage.

  In the past, university-trained male wizards were more heavy-handed than the witches in their practice of the craft. When Johannes Pistorius probed Diana’s thoughts, she was indignant at his intrusiveness, “which was strikingly similar to Champier’s method for ferreting out my secrets. I was beginning to dislike university-educated witches.” They tended to rely more on book learning than on instinct. Goody Alsop bemoaned the fact that in Elizabethan London all the young wizards had gone off to university to study natural philosophy, a precursor to the natural sciences, thinking books would teach them better than experience.

  Diana herself is a historian of science; her thesis at Oxford demonstrated how the new chemistry of the seventeenth century triumphed over the old science of alchemy in the race for intellectual acceptance. She learned, however, that it is a mistake to put scholarship in conflict with magic. Intellectually, magic and science are compatible rather than conflicting ways to master the natural world. One is not superior to the other—they are different roads to the same end.

  Even the university-educated witches and wizards agree that a witch’s most prized asset is instinct. Almost all witches, for example, can tell when another witch is lying, because of an instinctive feeling of anger and contempt that arises. Even before Diana fully possessed her powers, she used her instincts. In the beginning she didn’t realize how much she relied on them. Couldn’t everyone walk through the woods with her eyes closed and arrange ideas on an invisible whiteboard?

  Since history has demonstrated that humans often resent their witch neighbors, witches do their best to hide magical abilities from the rest of the population—despite insatiable human interest in the subject. Of course, witches living in more accepting populations can feel freer to express themselves; witness Sarah Bishop’s MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM bumper sticker. Witches have also found it beneficial to cultivate relationships with human communities by sharing their spells for fixing appliances, opening stuck locks, and curing insomnia.

  Most witches develop magical powers around puberty, though there are often signs of talent years earlier. Such outbursts of magic are difficult to predict and control, rendering the early school years a challenging time for witch parents. As they develop, witches can exhibit two kinds of inherited talent: the use of spells or witchcraft, known as the craft, and/or elemental magic, which involves the control and manipulation of fire, air, earth, and water without use of spells. Elemental magic is power that a witch simply has and can wield as he or she likes. Stephen Proctor described elemental magic as the warp of the magical world, and spells the weft.

  Witches who practice the craft avidly collect and perfect spells handed down through the ages, adapting them to modern situations. This is challenging in an age of rapidly changing technology. When her computer froze, the witch Abby Pratt tried in vain to fix it using old spells for stuck wheels and broken locks. New spells were needed, and only a rare kind of witch called a weaver can create them.

  According to Goody Alsop, “To be a weaver is to be tied to the world around you and see it in strands and hues. While some ties fetter your magic, others yoke the power in your blood to the four elements and the great mysteries that lie beyond them. Weavers learn how to release the ties that bind and use the rest.” A beginning weaver learns to create spells by tying colored cords into knots. Later, as she master
s the art, the cords and knots become invisible. A weaver can perform only spells that she herself has created.

  Weavers often have a third eye that provides perception beyond ordinary sight, and Diana’s is located in the center of her forehead. With it Diana was able to see young Jack Blackfriars’s empty stomach, the nimbus of light that surrounded the firewitch Catherine Streeter, and the faces of people she hasn’t yet met. The eminently pragmatic Sarah views Diana’s third eye as a radio, one that (with practice) could be tuned in to the proper frequencies to make it most useful.

  Genetics and Reproduction

  Like vampires, witches are distinct from the human and daemon populations in that they possess twenty-four chromosomal pairs in every cell nucleus. Until Diana Bishop’s DNA was analyzed, geneticists studying the witch population believed that all witches descended from one of four female witch ancestors. A witch’s female line of descent can be traced through her mitochondrial DNA, and the four genetic witch lineages are classified under clans, with clan mothers. The first witch, from whom they all claim matrilineal descent, was dubbed mtLilith (Miriam Shephard and Marcus Whitmore chose her fitting name). mtLilith is the equivalent of mitochondrial Eve—mtEve for short. mtEve’s seven known daughters, also clan mothers, are considered the most recent common matrilineal ancestors of every human of Western European descent. Diana’s genetic lineage is different from that of other witches, however. She is from a fifth, previously unknown, clan which Matthew names Clan Heh. Clan Heh could be another line of descent from mtLilith, or it could descend from a sister of mtLilith. Whichever it is, without Diana’s children Clan Heh could die out entirely.

  Witches descend from other witches, but not all children of witches are so fortunate as to have power. When Peter Knox examined Diana as a child and found her devoid of magical abilities, he was surprised but it was within the realm of possibility. The common wisdom is that witches give birth only to other witches, but there are exceptions. Sophie Norman is a daemon who was descended from witches, for example. Sophie married another daemon, but she gave birth to a witch. Because of the covenant that forbade the intermingling of creature types, not much is known about the reproductive abilities of creatures. Matthew is a pioneer in this field of research.

  Modern witches are not as powerful as their ancestors and do not produce as many children. Matthew’s initial theory was that as time went by and witches relied less and less on witchcraft and magic to survive, their changing needs forced DNA mutations that rendered the magic less powerful. Later he and Diana learned that weavers in the past had been actively sought out and murdered by other witches. And Rabbi Loew said that fewer weavers were born after the Congregation established the covenant against creature intermingling.

  Creature intermingling turns out to be the key to the continued existence not only of witches but of all the creatures. The Book of Life’s revelation of the existence of the Bright Born, whose supernatural power and long life derive from their cross-creature parentage, explains the birth of Diana’s children, who are representatives of the new Bright Born generation.

  Customs and Lore

  Witches are strongly bound to the customs and lore that have been passed down through generations. These form the foundation of rituals, celebrations, talismans, and other expressions of witch culture.

  Bell, book, and candle: The degree of supernatural ability varies widely from one witch to another. Traditionally witches were examined around puberty by local coven leaders, and those who showed promise were brought to the attention of Congregation officials. These officials organized tests and competitions to ensure that the most gifted young witches were appropriately trained and cultivated. Both Rebecca Bishop and Peter Knox participated in these events. In modern times the Congregation expanded their examinations to include children who showed no signs of talent as well.

  Diana Bishop was examined by Congregation officials at an early age, and her lack of magical talent was confirmed at age thirteen when she failed to complete the witch’s traditional coming-of-age ceremony, known as bell, book, and candle. According to Widow Beaton, when a witch was discovered in times past, her neighbors cast her out of the church by ringing a bell to show that she was dead, closing the Bible to show that she was denied access to God, and snuffing out a candle to indicate that she had no soul. This ceremony continued into modern times in a somewhat changed form: Altar bells rang to welcome the young witch into the community; representatives of the witch’s family closed their cherished family spellbook and then extinguished a candle. A true witch was supposed to be able to stop the bells, open the book, and relight the candle. As a weaver who cannot follow the spells made by other witches, Diana failed miserably.

  Blood singing: A witch’s blood sings, but so softly that only vampires can hear it. Each bloodsong has a unique signature, like a fingerprint. Vampires can identify bloodsongs and can hear a witch’s blood sing before the witch is visible. Philippe’s blood vow on Diana sings as well—but that’s a vampire’s tale to tell.

  Brooms: Witches don’t use brooms to fly; flying comes naturally to windwitches and those who have inherited a power over air, like Diana Bishop or Emily Mather. In modern times brooms appear in human popular culture, and witches have adopted them as tongue-in-cheek references to a witch’s power. In sixteenth-century London, however, witches used their brooms to perform spells, for example, during the ritual when Diana became a weaver.

  Covens: A coven is an association of witches formed for the sake of safety, protection, and community. The support of friends is vital to a group that has been feared and persecuted for millennia. Gillian Chamberlain reminded Diana of this when she invited her to the Mabon celebration of the Oxford coven, but at that point Diana was in denial of her powers and (rightly) suspicious of Gillian’s motives. Only later, in sixteenth-century London, did she come to appreciate the support of a sympathetic coven.

  Throughout history covens were organized geographically. In England, for example, witches based coven membership on Christian parish boundaries. In the London of the 1500s, covens (then called gatherings) were organized into larger districts known as wards, each of which sent one elder to a larger organization called the Rede. Though the number of witches today is rarely large enough to support the elaborate coven structure of the medieval and early modern period, and fear of human reprisals makes formal organization undesirable, some areas (Salem, Massachusetts; Madison, New York; London, England; parts of Central Europe; the Guangdong region of China) do still have covens.

  Devil worship: Contrary to countless human accusations, witches do not worship the devil. The devil is part of the Christian belief system. Witches honor many deities, chief among them the goddess, who is associated with the eternal cycle of birth, growth, and death.

  Familiars: Especially in early modern England, witches were assumed to have a familiar—an animal-shaped spirit that served as both companion and magical helpmate. The most common was a black cat or a black dog, although during times of witch hysteria the possession of any unusual pet could lead to accusations of witchcraft. In reality, weavers are the only witches that possess familiars. These animals help them master their abilities and serve as an extension of their talents. Diana’s familiar is a firedrake named Corra. Stephen Proctor’s was a bird named Bennu. And Goody Alsop’s familiar was a fetch—an airy image of herself.

  Grimoires: Grimoires are the official record of a witch family’s spells and history. They contain everything from annotated spells to treasured family recipes, such as Em’s Famous Vanilla Vampire Walnuts. The Bishop grimoire dates back to Rebecca Davies, Bridget Bishop’s grandmother, whom Diana met in 1591 London. Diana’s mother, Rebecca, kept a separate, secret grimoire she called her Book of Shadows. Rebecca recorded her darker magics in her Book of Shadows, such as spells “to summon a spirit recently dead and question it.” Family grimoires are proudly displayed on formal occasions such as the bell, book, and candl
e ceremony.

  Marking the passing of the year: Witches rely on the power of nature to work their elemental powers or spells. The changing of the seasons and the waxing and waning of the moon represent moments of particular importance in their year. The lunar calendar, for example, marks the passing of months, and there is a detailed plant lore that dictates when witches should traditionally plant their herbs, harvest them, and make them into magically potent preparations. Some of the more popular witch festivals include Lughnasadh, the first of three Wiccan harvest festivals, and Mabon. Mabon is a pagan ritual of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth and a recognition of the need to share them to secure the blessings of the goddess during the coming winter months. It is an important celebration for witches and has special significance to Diana and Matthew, because that is the day they first met.

  Myth and History

  Witches have existed for millennia. According to Hebrew folklore, the first woman, Lilith, was also the first witch; she left Adam because he demanded sexual subservience. “Why must I lie beneath you?” she asked. “I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.”* In ancient times Lilith was known as a creature of the night, goddess of the wind and moon, and the mate of Samael, the angel of death. In modern times she is sometimes called the first feminist.