The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  Government officials tortured her, of course, to wring out this weird confession, but they wouldn’t necessarily have had to. There is ample research to suggest that a little menace, a little kindness, the promise of approval from someone in authority—this is enough, even today, to make people very confused about what they know to be true.

  Her daughter Joan, for instance, was induced to confess she had seen her mother turn that cat into a toad. Why turn your demon cat into a demon toad? You might as well ask why a police officer would kill a man for selling cigarettes or taking out his wallet or carrying a cell phone, living in his apartment, or opening his own front door. The child went on to admit she sold her own soul to that selfsame toad so she could get a bit of bread and cheese from the neighbor girl, Agnes Brown.

  Of course the tribunal believed this testimony. People knew the devil to be real, and his magic, his witches, his familiars, his blood spells and poison. Their whole lives they knew the devil was coming for them. This century is not so different. Consider the mug shot and some blurry footage from a gas station calling into being that archetype of white America’s inquisitions. The officer will say in the deposition that he was “like some sort of superhuman beast bulking up to run through the shots.” That’s the only way such tribunals can imagine a now-dead Black teenager. “Like a demon.” The mostly white jurors will nod like people who know, and then they will acquit.

  In a witch hunt, a great many of the witches confess. Why would they do that if they weren’t guilty? Well, here’s part of a reason why: The Supreme Court ruled in Frazier v. Cupp that the police may willingly and knowingly use deception in the course of interviewing a suspect, even though misinformation renders people vulnerable to manipulation. Michel Foucault, the great philosopher of discipline and punishment, reminds us the confessional process is always guided by rules that “are necessarily of the master’s side, rules that once again do not focus on the truth of discourse, but on the way in which this discourse of truth is formulated.” Among individuals exonerated after wrongful conviction, researchers found that 85 percent of juvenile false confessions were given by Black children. Contrary to certain popular narratives about power and control, the earliest forms of law enforcement were not well-regulated militias, but slave patrols hunting down people running for freedom. A 2006 FBI bulletin detailed the threat and warned the consequences of white supremacists infiltrating local and state law enforcement would be more excessive uses of force, more extrajudicial killings, less successful prosecution of hate crimes.

  So the neighbor girl wasn’t surprised when little Joan Waterhouse brought over her mother’s demon familiar to scare her in some new horrific form. She was frightened, of course, by the contorted face and horns she thought she saw, the violence of the voice when he demanded she give him butter. But also she’d been expecting this would happen ever since everyone started telling her it would.

  It seems to be easier for some people to understand the role of stereotype threat and implicit bias in the judicial system when I say the wrongful imprisonment and execution happened to a little old white lady, gullible and confused, possibly suffering from dementia, named Agnes. As she stood at the gallows awaiting the rope, Agnes Waterhouse pleaded with the authorities, Reverend Thomas Cole, Sir John Fortescue, Sir Gilbert Gerard, the Queen’s attorney, and John Southcote, Justice of the Queen’s Bench. She begged their forgiveness and the forgiveness of God. She swore she’d never stopped praying, but only used Latin because that wretched cat forbade her to pray in English. She swore before the mob of people that even when she’d been stripped by the devil of her right to speak, as the devil might do to any of them, still she’d kept trying, she’d never stopped trying, to find a way to live honorably within this system of God’s laws and men’s.

  The Invention of Fire

  Less monotonous and less abstract than flowing water, even more quick to grow and to change than the young bird we watch every day in its nest in the bushes, fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all of life to its conclusions.

  —GASTON BACHELARD, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

  In “Burning of Three Witches in Baden, Switzerland,” dated to 1585, three women lie on a large pyre watched by a circle of men. The smoke forms a silhouette of inquisitors with their hoods up, lurking at the periphery of the crowd. The flames are unexpectedly hard-edged and geometrical, each lick stabbing the next in acute angles.

  You can find many images of what was done to witches in the scrapbook of the Protestant minister Johann Jakob Wick. He called it his Wickiana and in it compiled news documents from 1505 to 1588, presumably as evidence of a coming apocalypse. Among depictions of grasshoppers, comets, and children attacked by pigs were many images of the executions of witches. These in addition to the oil paintings in museums and miniatures lining the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Each one I see reminds me how deeply I agree with Susan Sontag’s objections to the propagation of images of war, outlined in Regarding the Pain of Others. Maybe the images’ effect will be to trigger apathetics’ empathy and stop the violence, but more likely they will galvanize the rage of the faithful and teach the ambitious more of what a human being is capable.

  I am neither lying nor exaggerating—in “The Torture Used against Witches” (1577) the cherubic boy-man with curly locks has a boner so big it almost interferes with his capacity to turn the wheel that pulls the woman’s arms unaccountably backwards, rendering the deep green of her dress very striking against the crimson of her apron. The parchment is centuries old and tattered, but the pigments have not lost a shade. Or maybe someone came back later to add this color so they could imagine the moment more vividly.

  It is harder than we think to imagine someone else’s pain. Elaine Scarry explains this in her treatise on suffering, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. It is even a struggle to clearly remember our own agony after it is over, much less someone else’s. Psychologists theorize that those who torture suffer from an isolating sickness of not being able to derive a sense of others’ emotions from cues of facial expression, body language, and tone of voice. This is not to say their suffering is equivalent to that of those they tortured. Only to help us consider the extremes a person might go to for the relief of seeing some other person’s humanity. We suffer from each other and we suffer without each other.

  In the British Library’s MS Royal 20 C VII, f. 4v there is pity in the woodcut eyes of the people watching; the bridled horses they sit astride have only the most merciless gaze. I am reminded of this tip for interpreting dreams: every character is a different version of yourself.

  Turn the page if you can stand to look into the face of the man amidst those first tentative licks the pitchfork peasant tends and you’ll see he is weeping, but softly, as any of us knows how to weep.

  Walpurga Hausmännin suffered one of the very worst executions I know of. For a long time I didn’t write it—my memory of the Museum of Torture is still fresh. The instruments were as real as that stag party of drunk bachelors ahead of me, laughing as they passed scold’s bridles, lead shoes, collections of variously sized wheels. They hung on each other’s shoulders while singing a loud and slurring bar song about the wanton maid who roasted six pears but only gave her betrothed two.

  This executioner in a Wickiana entry from 1587 is like a dancer with his massive thighs and slender knees, a delicate right foot en pointe as he reaches for a stick of wood with a flourish of the right arm. The waifs at the stake are wailing, but their faces are charcoal-smudged so it is easier to keep looking.

  Pain is private and there is no easy way to put it on display that does not have a titillating quality. Though it is the case that making someone look is sometimes used as a form of torture and is sometimes used in the making and training of torturers, nevertheless, there is something to be said for recounting the truth of what was done and also for opening yourself up to the pain of knowing it.

  Walpurga Hausm�
�nnin was stopped five times before she reached the town square. First they tore her left breast and right arm with irons. Then they tore her right breast. At the third stop they tore her left arm. At the fourth her left hand was cut off. They paused at the stake to cut off her right hand before lighting the fire.

  The medieval Europeans were such an allegorical people. Nothing meant what it was. Walpurga’s torture is unbearable in all of its meanings. The left hand was cut because “if mine eye offend me.” The right hand because it was the one she used to take her oath as a midwife. Her breasts and arms were torn because it was believed the devil took away almost all of a witch’s capacity to feel. And the fire because “none shall suffer a witch to live” and “their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire.” In general, the faces of the women in the flames will be unlikely in the allegorical extreme—peaceful or penitent or snarling as a demon would. Hans-Jurgen Gunther showed a red-winged dragon with sagging breasts and the face of a pig pulling something ephemeral (a soul? a demon? her raspy and cracking voice?) out of a woman burning alive with her hands tied behind her back. To convey her face of pain would be beside the point—an execution is not about the pain of the dying, it is about the symbols those who are compelled to watch can’t help but interpret.

  In the Spiezer Chronik (1485) Jan Hus sits with a flame of yellow hair inside a blossom of fire, smiling. He looks like the illustration in my daughter’s picture book of Thumbelina just born from a peony. The man poking him with a pitchfork wears the expression of dismay.

  If you must look, interpret instead the quizzical faces of those who are trying to figure out what this sign is telling them. Or how they wear the open-mouthed astonishment of someone who just figured out what it all means.

  Medieval European art marches through the centuries on a trajectory from profoundly and awkwardly two-dimensional toward an ever-more-realistic illusion of depth and perception that would be perfected in the Age of Enlightenment, when witch trials became an embarrassing old superstition while the torments of slavery emerged as the backbone of modern economies. But in some cases the depiction of flames skipped over all that slow evolution, with a viewfinder straight into the minds of the postwar abstract expressionists melting the paint of their feelings like the center of an atom bomb.

  The abstraction of fire is a constant through the centuries, including in the work of J. M. W. Turner, who painted sea battles and Parliament on fire because a burning sky is permission to brush on the chaos of what you see beyond seeing as your hand trembles its work beyond reason. Whistler was another of these apostles of flames, painting a series of nocturnes, in which the night is so many layers of abstracted shades of darkness and the fireworks fall in a formless but beautiful drizzle of gold leafing.

  On occasion one of these anonymous painters working on this or that chronicle in the solitude of the monastery looks away from the face they cannot show to the fire itself. If you set a person on fire, the horror of such abstractions show, eventually their face stops being a face and becomes part of the fire. In the movies they can only make this look campy and implausible. But on the canvas it is painful and teaches you how to feel. Hard to look and hard to look away, they are images that make you want to undo time. The power in such radical allegories is that they simplify what is and what it means to the same breath: Everyone is as fragile as you are.

  Two Elizabeths

  From each witch they interrogated the inquisitors needed something old—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. But they also needed something new, so they could feel with each trial and execution as if they were making progress.

  Elizabeth Styles’s addition to the canon: She let her demon suck her blood. He came to her often. Even when she was tied to a pole in a dungeon, still he came to her in the form of a butterfly to suck from her as he always did.

  Though it may seem strange to us now, that the devil came as an apparition of a butterfly was not something new then. Even the great botanist and first ecologist, Maria Sibylla Merian, who discovered and documented insect metamorphosis in the 1600s, had to be careful about her reputation, because there were many who still believed in witches and their power to take the form of butterflies and spoil the milk. She kept her laboratory of silkworms and caterpillars very secret.

  The Greeks, who had a rich tradition of witchcraft, called butterflies psyches, the same word they used for souls. I wonder about that, about what in each of us is a little bit witch. In his book Psyche, Jacques Derrida writes about how each moment of speech, each endeavor to charm or interest a listener, is an invention. An invention, he says, is by its nature an attempt to unsettle the status quo. It requires a moment of destruction. He writes, “An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract.” And adds, “A strange proposition. We have said that every invention tends to unsettle the statutes that one would like to assign it at the moment it takes place.” The butterfly of us then, the witch of us, is our striving to be something to each other.

  Elizabeth Styles was accused by a thirteen-year-old girl also named Elizabeth. This other Elizabeth had been having strange fits lasting three hours or more and when the episode had passed she’d have holes in her hands, wrists, face, and neck. There would be thorns in her flesh. For this she blamed Elizabeth.

  In addition to the butterfly business, Styles confessed that the devil had appeared to her about ten years since in the form of a handsome man or sometimes a black dog who promised her money, she said, and that she should live gallantly and have “The Pleasure of the World” for twelve years if she would blood-sign his paper, handing over her soul to him.

  In his chapter on witchcraft theory, the historian Walter Stephens suggests inquisitors were conducting a form of theological research in their trials. They were anticipating the invention of empirical data and a scientific method, after a fashion, and so were inventing the proof they were desperate to receive.

  “The attitude of witchcraft theorists toward their theories was not belief,” Stephens writes, “but rather resistance to skepticism, a desperate attempt to maintain belief, and it betrays an uncommonly desperate need to believe.” We could say, then, that Elizabeth Styles’s inquisitor was one of the great innovators in his time.

  What a comfort it would be if we could believe criminal justice as literary genre was a phenomenon of the past. If it was only once upon a time that interrogations were a form of coauthorship between the accuser and the accused.

  Psyche is the part of you that can be separated from your body. This capacity to become yourself and your other self creates opportunities for feelings like romance and ecstasy. And if you are someone who can’t seem to get yourself free of yourself? Well, perhaps you will be consoled by watching others escape the self of their bodies. Torture gets the soul out almost every time.

  To have a soul then is to flutter about spoiling the milk and destabilizing the script of how we talk to each other.

  I often feel like a witch in the way I do a poor job performing the part of a friend or friendly or casual acquaintance. This is because I want to charm, to show kindness, to understand, to console, to be someone to the people I meet, and the script only allows us to pass each other briefly and superficially without creating an event. I always love an event. Therefore, if need be, I will be the event that happened to you. Like a kindness.

  Say for example you’re a soldier walking home from the war. Or the maiden working in your stepmother’s garden. Or the miller with a cart and a broken axle. A wild-haired woman will stop and, in her kindness, give you a gift of great power and significance. A jewelry box, for example, that can summon three dogs of great, greater, and greatest size. Or a letter from that old love you try never to think of. Maybe a bag that can hold everything up to and including death itself. And now your ordinary life of meandering pleasures is jacked up with purpose and an unwieldy power that may be a help to
you but may also rear its head back and bite you a curse on your nose.

  I used to take vows of silence every morning because of how my love and fear of invention could make me so sick to my stomach. In this way conversational invention is like any other endeavor at which you might fail.

  When I hiked up a mountain with an old dear friend, I was so excited because I have a good, amusing script for mountains I invented back when I lived near one and went up it every Saturday. It involves cursing and hating the mountain all the way up because when the path is just sharp stones pointing ever higher you can tell the mountain is trying to push you down. But then you finally reach the lake and you and the crags can admit to each other that you were actually in love this whole time.

  What I’ve always loved about this friend of mine is how easy he is to charm and how he is full of unexpected questions that inspire you to inventions. His admiration for an unexpected comment lights up the room. But there have been a few intervening years between us and I didn’t know he’d been busy all this time turning into a man who conquers peaks at such a breakneck pace you can’t keep up to talk to him. On the mountain, charm is not what’s on his mind.