The Witch of Eye

by Kathryn Nuernberger

  Why do those that are grieving and those who are enjoying themselves alike have the flute played to them?

  Why is it that of all things which are perceived by the senses that which is heard alone possesses moral character?

  Things could be so different from how they are. We cannot say that they would be better. But the possibility of some other way makes this one feel faint and fading and transparent when it could be milky or milky when it could be transparent.

  Why do waves sometimes begin to move before the wind reaches them?

  Why is it that the waves do not ripple in the deep open sea?

  Why is it that if anything is thrown into the sea when it is rough, a calm ensues?

  Why is the sea more transparent than fresh water, although it is thicker?

  Why is the sea combustible?

  Why does the air not become moist when it comes in contact with the water?

  Why is it that air is denser than light, but it can pass through solids?

  Why is it that air cannot saturate anything?

  When I am being melodramatic about my choices, I don’t know why we have sensations of choosing in the first place. Why should every minute of our lives be a choice? Is it the case that to choose is to feel yourself pseudoing into some other air or some other sea? When I’m being melodramatic, I feel like I’m multiplying. Aristotle lived for sixty-two years. The child he raised lived for less. The years went by and by. So many people loved so many people in the meantime that the air grew thick with the Pseudo-Aristotles of them all. They became the air we breathe, an atmosphere that could or could not pass through certain metallic solids and certain gelatinous moistures, all of which, like us, are living out lives in suspension.

  Agnes Sampson, the Wise Wife of Keith

  The definition of a comedy, historically and theoretically, is “any play that ends with a wedding.” This is because a wedding is a restoration of the social order, a promise that all the hijinks and shenanigans, the well-bred daughters running away, the well-bred sons putting on women’s clothes and falling in love with each other in an act that made it seem like these characters at last were finding a way to be who they are, all that chaos, don’t worry, was nothing but a joke.

  When I got married in that ridiculous dress while people I hardly knew were crying all around me, it felt like a comedy. But then I always prefer tragedies, which are typically defined by how a new king steps over all of the old king’s bodies to assume the throne. Tragedies have their place, because there are times a person needs to cry their guts out and believe this crying has nothing to do with their own selves.

  Everyone in that garden said our wedding was like a fairy tale. I agreed, thinking how much a fairy tale can be like a handbook for how to get by within a given social order, with only a minimal undercurrent of grumbling.

  Witches, as we know them, were first so characterized in Macbeth, a play about a tragic marriage and a fairy tale about the invention of a good king. It has many plot points in common with the life of King James, who assumed the throne of England the year this play was produced. James’s father was murdered, his mother was blamed, he believed in the occult, and fretted, as all kings do, that the air was teeming with the wishes of the people around him to see him dead.

  For some reason it’s not enough for a king to own us, he also has to marry and produce heirs in a fashion that restores our faith in true love and happy endings. No doubt this has to do with some bullshit about the divine rights of kings and perfection of God’s plan. In what was described as “the only romantic gesture of his life,” young James set sail through a season of devastating storms to collect in person his bride, Princess Anne of Denmark, who had been shipwrecked on the coast of Norway. How people must have swooned to hear of the courage of their king. How the king must have swooned to imagine his own courage while he was doing it.

  At this point James was still a skeptic, but he nodded along politely when the in-laws tried to explain away those storms. “These were not signs from God against the marriage!” everyone insisted, as if someone had suggested they might be. “It was devil’s work.” The Minister of Finance, who, it was whispered in some corners, had inadequately equipped the ships, suggested they hold an inquisition, like a kind of wedding present. He suggested they start by questioning Karen the Weaver, who was known to hold a grudge and was conveniently situated several rungs beneath him on the social ladder.

  The proclamations and executions came quickly: Karen the Weaver had sent demons and witches floating across the waters in empty barrels. When they reached the princess’s fleet, they climbed up the keel of her ship and summoned the bad weather. But their attempt to thwart the will of God would fail thanks to the vigilant fires of the faithful.

  Meanwhile I wonder about Princess Anne and how eager she really was to join James in Scotland. An English spy reported to his majesties that prior to the wedding Anne was “so far in love with the King’s Majesty as it were death to her to have it broken off and hath made good proof of divers ways of her affection which his Majestie is apt in no way to requite.” The insinuation here is that the Scottish king preferred men. This is the kind of rumor that was sometimes true and sometimes used in a homophobic society to undermine an enemy. Anne was devotedly embroidering shirts for her fiancé while three hundred tailors worked on her wedding dress. This was the kind of gesture that was sometimes true and sometimes used to seal a political alliance. It is hard to say which was the case in this instance, since the way you interpret love letters and rumors five hundred years after the fact says more about you than it could ever say about history.

  Some things I could say about the letters and rumors: trying on the dresses is so boring, so too the flowers and the speeches and the long walk down the aisle and interminably being stared at by people who want to believe in what you represent. There was hail clattering the glass roof of the greenhouse chapel so loudly you could hardly hear the string quartet. I liked that part. And I liked that when it was over my mother was happy, my father was happy, and so far as I could tell no one would ever have a reason to demand an explanation for my choices again.

  One way of thinking about a wife is that she is more or less invisible and so more or less free, provided she can remember to keep her head down long enough to stay that way.

  On the voyage back to Scotland there were more storms. Perhaps the king had really come to believe demonology was a branch of theology. Or perhaps diplomacy required him to take the weather as seriously as Anne’s family had and launch a parallel inquisition of his own.

  The Newes from Scotland is the pamphlet commissioned by the king to tell the proceedings of the North Berwick witch trials. Here, as in all other trials, name leads unto tortured name until you can hardly remember who accused who. Euphemia Maclean was accused of accepting pain relief from her midwife, Agnes Sampson, who gave her an unspecified powdered substance, a bored stone to keep under her pillow, and some “inchantit mwildis,” which are the finger, toe, and knee joints of a disinterred corpse. She was also instructed to put her husband’s shirt under the bed during her labor. The part about the shirt seems sweet to me, a kind of tender comfort from a man in this era of rigid gender divisions, but that is probably just one of my happy memories talking. The judges were not touched by it at all—for these things Euphemia Maclean was burned.

  In a fairy tale a dangerous woman with power turns a man into the most beastly version of himself. A beautiful, silent, and perfectly stupid girl waits patiently to be taken by him. And then we all live once more happily ever after. In a witch trial you hear a version of this story over and over again. More than three hundred times in James’s North Berwick trials.

  In comedies women dress and then behave as men, men dress as asses, everyone falls asleep drugged by fairies in the forest. And when they wake to be married, each according to their station, that is meant to feel to the audience, after so much madness, like a choice made freely. All reports indicate Queen Anne and
King James got along for the first few years. Then James sent their newborn son away to be raised by his former nurse under the supervision of various trusted lords in a distant castle. It was understood his mother would not see him again until he was a man. This was Scottish royal tradition, but the queen from Denmark was furious and fought to get her son back like a mother who truly loved her child. She attempted both kidnappings and coups. She had many miscarriages that were attributed to her grief and fury.

  I like to think Anne was pragmatic from the beginning. I like to think she arrived in Scotland with a packet of seeds a midwife gave her for birth control and this was how she made sure she never lost another child. I like to think no one ever even thought to utter the name of the queen’s cunning woman. But what I like to think is not about history or about truth, it is about my love affair with uncovering a well-kept secret that the world might be more just than it seems on its face.

  The king and queen began as young as a fairy tale. They grew old and weathered as a scaffold. This was something they did both together and separately.

  Agnes Sampson, known by all of her patients and clients as the Wise Wife of Keith, was famous for the help she could offer women who wanted children, women who didn’t, women in love, and women in pain. When the king decided he wanted to interrogate this “wise wife” personally, she had been shaved bald, tortured with a rope around her neck for an hour after being pinned to a wall for days by the witch’s bridle, which is an iron muzzle with a bit to hold down a woman’s tongue. Sampson began at last to speak after her naked body was inspected and a suspicious mark that was said to be the place where the devil put his tongue was found on her privates.

  This is almost always the way in witch trials—once the witch knows her mark has been seen, she gives up hope she’ll ever slip away from this. She may as well help her inquisitors plan that long walk to the altar. Agnes Sampson confessed so rapidly and so much—a dead cat was thrown in the sea, there was some kind of spell involving the “chiefest parte” of a dead man, a black toad hung up by his heels, this peasant woman, that peasant woman—the king said he could hardly believe her.

  With one eye on the instruments hanging from the wall of her cell, she took the king aside and “declared unto him the very words which had passed between the King’s majesty and his Queen the first night of their marriage.” After that James “wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed all of the devils in Hell could not have discovered the same.”

  To this day none of the rest of us knows what these words were. They might have been sweetly romantic or frankly political. You could try to remember the words that passed on the first night of your marriage or the words you would say if you were to do it all over again. But you would have to conclude there is no way to know what love and marriage are to a person who is, as much as any of us can be, living a life that is also an emblem for others.

  From the Wise Wife of Keith the king learned two hundred more names in the coven, including that of James Fian, a schoolmaster and the rare male sorcerer, who would soon enough become another subject tortured into confession. He told his crimes like an old tale: Once upon a time he had tried to use a spell to make a woman love him back. He sent a pupil to get the young woman’s hair, but her mother intervened and sent the little boy back with hairs from the udder of a cow, which is how he came to be followed everywhere by a lovesick bovine.

  Surely the children he taught would have laughed at this punch line the first time he told the story. It seems unlikely that the inquisitor laughed, since Fian’s legs were crushed in a contraption called The Bootes the next time he told it.

  The character of a king is a way of believing things happen for a reason. The queen is a way of being angry at someone besides God. A witch is a woman who thought her story ended with that wedding a dozen pages back and now she’d be allowed to do as she pleased.

  I wonder which of these I would have been and I wonder which I am now. I might have fallen in love, I might have been burned, I might have given up the name of my own dear friend, I might have set the hour of execution, might have pulled the fingernails, might have set the pins, might have been pregnant, might have lost my child, I might have looked around at all I owned and wondered how I could ever hold on to it all. I might walk past those bodies hanging in the town square and know they are intended to mean something to me, but, head down, I have this cart to drag miles yet through the rock and mud before I can warm my hands by a fire, the one my husband is feeding with small sticks even now and thinking how soon I’ll be home. I might be the one who tells this story when I get there, but if I have any sense at all, you can be sure the tale will end on a note of how happily, how wise, how just everything turned out in the end.

  The Invention of Familiars

  Some things we don’t care to talk about by name. It’s an old problem and one of its consequences has been fiction. Another popular solution is to fill in the gap with an animal.

  The monks of the Middle Ages, denying themselves everything a body wants, or lying about it, were the great theologians of allegory. From Animals with Human Faces, an encyclopedic investigation of what meant what: “The brute creation, like the world itself, existed solely for the spiritual edification of man. While animals shared in the Fall, they had no part in the great plan of Redemption.”

  The breath of the panther is so sweet that it attracts all animals except the dragon.

  The stag is the enemy of the snake.

  The hyena feeds on corpses until its stomach is blown up like a drum.

  In my neck of the woods, where the panther is long extinct and no one’s ever even seen a monastery, the saying goes that you’ll never see a blue jay on a Friday because that is the day he flies down to hell to give a grain of sand to the devil.

  The lion’s cubs are born dead and brought to life by the gentle licking of their parents.

  The lynx’s urine turns into carbuncles in seven days.

  No one knows what the devil wants with the blue jay’s sand, but in all the stories that bird is good at inventing trouble and good at charming his way around it. Like as not, it is the devil doing Friday penance to the jay and not the other way around.

  Certainly the blue jay’s tricks and charms would have worked on me. I’ve always had a thing for a sad-eyed sonofabitch. I’d follow a blue jay to the deserts of hell if he’d let me even try to keep up.

  Up here, on the living side of earth, I watch the people falling in love catch and release doves to prove how full their livers are with the humors of passionate devotion. Suckers. Falling for a love that has no grit and songs with no bark.

  The beaver, pursued by the hunter, bites off its own testicles and casts them before his predator. The beaver, pursued by a second hunter, rears upright and reveals the empty place of its old genitals.

  Once the mole was a magic animal, able to predict the future. “If a man eats the heart of a Mole newly taken out of her belly and panting,” the monks said, “he shall be able to devine and foretell infallible events.”

  As with humans, there was a time when the mole’s heart lived not in her chest but in her stomach. It did not beat down there, but panted.

  The ram is an icon of brutal, fecund love.

  The human race is descended from a wolf.

  A blue jay does nothing all day but make deals and exercise his wit. A blue jay will run even the harmless chickadee back to her brush.

  A widow of a copyhold tenant could keep her lands, provided she was chaste. Should it be otherwise, she could regain her rights by riding into the court of the manor backwards on a ram, holding its tail between her hands as she recited: “Here I am riding upon a black ram, like a whore as I am.”

  In the beginning mermaids were saviors and sirens were temptresses. One was a fish and one was a bird. Later their features became confused—they might all be women, part fish, part fowl, or even part horse. Any one of them might do anything.

  The weasel can kill t
he basilisk. She has knowledge of the herb of life. She can become a beautiful girl to marry and then, at the wedding feast, revert to her animal nature and pursue a mouse.

  This time when the blue jay came back, the poison oak was in bloom and bees were gathering all of the nectar. The lovers were dead and their birds all flown, honey was bitter, and his favorite berries would soon be ripe. A blue jay will make you remember you are just a person and your heart is never going to be anywhere except behind your ribs. I had had my fill. So he sat in his tree alone and barked to anyone who might bother to listen that with himself he was most extremely pleased.

  Maria Gonçalves Cajada & the Invention of Love Spells

  Maria Gonçalves Cajada, the accused sorceress from colonial Brazil, once said, “If the bishop has a mitre, I have a mitre, and if the bishop preaches from the pulpit, I preach from the cadeira.” Also, she was widely rumored to feed the devil flesh from a persistent wound on her foot, which is gross, but the sore was the source of her power.

  Her life was on the southern coast, but I read about her to the north, driving a narrow peninsula of mountains into that same sea. A whale we saw surface in the far distance of those cold waters would have floated and spumed her coast months before. In the car with a friend who also shocks with the directness of her questions and her demands, I heard myself say what I hadn’t know I’d been thinking. “I’m going to leave him.”

  Back in the seventeenth century, which these currents and the secret creatures of their infinite depths also touched, demonologists and inquisitors were concluding, “Women witches, because of the pact they have made with the Devil, can give news of what is happening at sea or at the ends of the earth.” It was not uncommon then to hear that shipwrecked men had fallen into the arms of witches flying over the waters. It was thought that one could find in the sea “the demonological learnings of an entire people: the hazardous labor of ships, dependence on the stars, hereditary secrets, estrangement from women—the very image of the great, turbulent plain itself makes men lose faith in God and all his attachment to his home; he is then in the hands of the Devil, in the sea of Satan’s ruses.” Among the powers listed in these records kept by the Portuguese inquisitors during their Visitation to the Brazilian colonies was that Maria Gonçalves Cajada could summon storms forcing a ship to port on the pirate islands, using her beloved devil and for the price of two cruzados.