Shipwrecks notwithstanding, the main business of a Brazilian witch was love spells, which formed an important industry in colonial Brazil’s underground economy. No records of Maria Gonçalves Cajada’s methods are extant, but we have Portuguese accounts of other witches reported to be very good and reliable with their work. One used the native herb supora-mirim and the native bird bemtevi, which is of the tyrant flycatcher family, whose males are known for being constant and protective parents. Their call translates as “I see you well.” To attract faithfully married men to her desperate clients, a witch would recite:
Bemtevi, Bemtevi, as thou art a Bemtevi
and thou knowest not how to take leave ….
O Bemtevi, even if far he be,
soon he shall return to me.
Though this is not the version of love I long for, there have been times when I had to remind myself how much I don’t want it and how much I hate it when people try to make difficult things seem simple.
Like any woman who makes demands, Maria Gonçalves Cajada was almost entirely alone in her insistence that the world be fair and also that she be granted a just place in it. I appreciate deeply, almost as a kind of profession of faith, that there is an historical record, cited by Laura de Mello e Souza in The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross, among others, of how a woman looked a priest in the eyes, then turned the other way to set three pieces of cheese fermented in her own vaginal fluid on a windowsill to feed the demons. It is a gesture with many layers of meanings which the centuries have distilled to a very lovely note ringing “I am.”
When Maria wandered the countryside begging with her dear but inexperienced friend Domingas Fernandos, Maria told everybody Domingas was a saint and that touching or being touched by the nervous woman was a virtue. And she added, clever and practical, that it would cost you a certain number of cruzados to give such magic a try.
Another love spell from another of the accused that was recorded in the affidavits of the Visitation went like this:
Souls, souls of the sea, of the land,
three hanged, three dragged, three shot to death for love,
all mine shall gather and into the heart
and so shall enter and such tremor shall cause for love
that none could rest nor be still
save say yes to this wish.
I like this one better because this woman also told her clients that if the wish were granted doors would open and close, guitars would sound, stars would shoot. If not, asses would bray and dogs would bark. I like it that she leaves room for heartbreak and refusal. In the space between the poem and its answer, both lovers still have the freedom to make a choice. I like remembering that if I ever decide to change my life, it will still be my life to change.
It was an old friend who testified before the inquisitors and, trying to save herself, accused Maria of being a sorceress who nourished the devil. Two days earlier this friend had been denounced by a former lover who, to save his reputation, claimed to have been bewitched. The judges found his accusations as persuasive and compelling as hers, so they sentenced both women, plus many others.
It’s a bad ending and I don’t like it. I don’t like that the moral becomes one about the treachery of women. I don’t like that the only way to learn anything about Maria Gonçalves Cajada is to first learn that everyone called her by the nickname Arde-lhe-o-rabo, which translates as Butt-that-burns. That every index and parenthetical aside acknowledges the name by which the inquisitors, the torturers, and the cruelest of customers knew her, the one that came to her most likely as a side effect of sex work. I don’t like that it was the name she was given because she was a woman who would tell nothing but the truth. I don’t like that this is the way every story of radical friendship seems to end. But it only seems that way because of who has been allowed to write the stories. My dear friend read the first drafts and the last ones. She read the letters I sent and the ones I didn’t. She read the ones I received too. I have confessed a lot here, but she is the one who showed me the whales and she has secrets of mine she will take to her grave.
So let’s think instead for a moment about Domingas, who vanishes from the archives immediately after her journey with Maria is over. As far as we know anything could have happened to her. Though we cannot know what it was, we can surmise she was given something by her friend upon their parting. It might have been a rung of ladder or a plank of boat, a powder gathered from the back of some toad in the forest or an egg soaked in the magic of her pudenda. Maybe it made her invisible or invincible or rich enough to call herself free. Maybe it made it so she could find a way to go back home or to some new home or further along that mud-splattered road. Maybe it made it so she could become the person she always thought she had the right to be. If any part of what people said about her were true, I want it to be that Maria Gonçalves Cajada had this power to share and she did, that it touches the shores of our lives even now.
Medusa
You begin a spell with an invocation like Hear me or I beseech you or Oh friend or Listen.
One of the things that can make a spell work is a description of a previous time the spell worked. The Anglo-Saxon Æcerbot to heal barren land, for example, begins by gathering parts of every kind of tree growing there except the hardwoods and parts of every known herb except the burrs, packing them with milk and honey into four blessed clods, and burying those clods at the corners of your acreage. A spell is most effective when you want something and can remember a time it already existed.
When you hear someone say Medusa was hideous with hair full of snakes, that is some xenophobic assholery by people who lived on the other shore of the Mediterranean Sea. When you hear she was a dangerous and vengeful witch, that means she was as measured in the congressional hearings on the subject of known-rapist Poseidon as any woman so subpoenaed always is. When you hear the corals of the Red Sea formed after Perseus set Medusa’s head down for a moment on a bed of seaweed that had washed ashore, there were years I thought all the world was a Gorgon cave and I was already made of stone.
In a way that felt like corals being born into the sea, a person who loved me reached across to touch my wrist.
Though anthropological linguists caution against calling everything you don’t understand magic, what doesn’t feel possible when reading the Babylonian spells carved out from one of the oldest written languages? Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath no couch … or a ghost unburied, or a hag-demon, or a ghoul … or a weeping woman that hath died with a babe at the breast … There is so little of what the people who invented writing wrote that every fragmented word of a busted stone tablet seems to be a spell. Whatever thou be until thou art removed, until thou departest from the body of the man, thou shalt have no water to drink. Thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand.
I was trying to understand the space between what seems possible and what can happen when the phenomenological linguist Maurice Merleau-Ponty said language itself is the spell. “There is no inner life,” he wrote, “that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest.”
Another word for the space between us is chiasm; neurobiologists use it to describe the anatomical region in the brain between the left and right hemispheres where neural fibers from the eyes interweave to form a single vision.
Medusa was brought into being by two chthonic monsters of the archaic world. Phorcys was the first merman and father of crabs. Ceto is the mother of whales.
I thought I was falling in love, but really I was so full of fury I didn’t even know the half of it. My friend who believes in love and wants me to keep believing too read me H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision over the phone: “It is a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone. Into that over-mind thoughts pass and are like fish swimming under clear water … There is, then, a set of
super-feelings. These feelings extend out and about us; as the long floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him.” Her voice crossed a thousand miles to reach me in the cave at the bottom of my ear.
Maybe jellyfish were the spell I was looking for, she said, and that seemed possible too, because of how my mind and my body felt like tentacles longing to really be tentacles. Loricae, like caims, runes, and incantations, are litanies that make a circle. The word lorica, like the word caim, can be translated as shield or armor. I was such a lorica of busted coral reef.
Eventually the goddess Athena took possession of Medusa’s head, which could still turn you to stone with nothing more than a glance across the chiasm, and she placed it on her shield.
“Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self. Our conversation resembles a struggle between two athletes in a tug-of-war. The speaking ‘I’ abides in its body. Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the ‘I’ into the other person’s perspective,” writes Merleau-Ponty.
In runes the letters are words but also the letters control the tenor of the spell, as in you must sing them, perhaps in a falsetto. Such a spell is about speaking out loud what was written in silence. The German root for rune means whisper. Derivatives appear in other languages as secret, mystery, speech, to speak, to cut with a knife, poem.
I speak to the gulls every morning when I pass them on my circle over the cliffs because I know I’m not going to leave my mind to live like a jellyfish in some starry pelagic zone where you can’t find the beginning or end of your body. Except when I have and except when I do.
Merleau-Ponty urges us to keep trying to listen and trying to say what we mean. Stay with it long enough, he reassures, and you will come to understand “human languages are informed not only by the structure of the human body and the human community, but by the evocative shapes and patterns of the more-than-human terrain.”
When Perseus beheaded Medusa, the Pegasus she had been carrying flew forth from her body and passed through the whole sky in orbiting astonishment at how far this blue world goes. Her offspring, winged and airy and free, gazed upon weary and trembling Atlas, then, in Pegasus’s only recorded act of magic, turned the giant to stone. Which is one way to explain how it is I am still here, trying to understand the meanings and the possibilities inherent in every word that passes between us.
Angéle de la Barthe
Thomas Aquinas wondered if our atmosphere was a punishment for demons. He concluded no, but also wondered if demons could experience sorrow. He concluded no, but wondered if the will of the demon was obstinate in evil. He concluded not really, but wondered if they, being coagulated creatures of air, could produce spawn by copulating with witches. He concluded no, but what if they disguised themselves as women to steal the seed of men?
This must be how Angéle de la Barthe, a well-known woman of property and means in Aquinas’s Toulouse came to be a mother at age fifty-two. (Or was it sixty-four? Accounts vary … Wolf-headed, serpent-tailed, her child, it was said, fed on the fresh corpses of infants for two years, before he ran away in the night.
Or so she said after the inquisitor Hugo de Beniols tortured her and threatened to burn her alive if she did not confess.
Or perhaps she said. In 1275, congress with demons was not yet listed as a crime. And there are no transcripts of her trial, though there is no shortage of them from other trials in that same year. So serious historians consider the fifteenth-century chronicle of her so-called life to be specious and apocryphal, imperfect to the point of meaninglessness.
Angéle de la Barthe was of the gnostic sect of Cathars, so like Aquinas, the devoted Catholic, she would have believed the air was on invisible fire with an aether of demons snatching at souls as they glimmered past. Unlike Catholics, as a Cathar she would have believed in a dualist philosophy of a good god and an evil god who were equally powerful and held each other in balance.
Also, she was wealthy. She owned her own property and thus wielded some degree of influence in the city of Toulouse, which was a stronghold of those who would resist the authority of the Church. They abandoned baptisms there, for example, because Cathars thought it absurd that you had to buy the holy water from a traveling priest when water is material and the spirit is immaterial.
Whenever a Cathar mother and father made a new baby, a body that would cage another soul for a lifetime, they felt they had been very weak and were very sorry. This strikes me as easily miserable as anything the Catholics believed, but the part where gender was of no consequence to them because bodies were of no consequence to them is appealing.
But to the inquisitors a woman in authority was confusing and created a sense of disorder—you might call it a feeling of bedevilment—among those friars loyal to the papacy who witnessed it. Or perhaps I am being specious and apocryphal.
I keep remembering that boyfriend I once had who was so excited when we stumbled on Aquinas’s grave in Toulouse. Who knew, we said to each other, that Toulouse had once been at the center of so much philosophical inquiry and intrigue? Not me, whose Catholic education was designed to inculcate a spirit of obedience and discipline. And not him, who had been raised to inherit the earth. He went on and on about how Aquinas was his favorite philosopher, the one who proved the existence of God. It seemed to me Aquinas must have been the only philosopher that boyfriend of mine had ever read and that what had been proved was nothing.
Having read the Summa Theologica the summer before, just to prove I was smart, it was tempting to spit on the grave of yet another man pretending to know so much. But it was important to me then to be nice, so I waited until we got home to break up. He called me a bitch, naturally, and said I didn’t know how to love and I was going to die alone. It took a certain amount of willpower not to laugh right into his teary face. Perhaps he deserved it, but he was so sad to be this mean. He was under the impression he loved me and also that he knew anything about me.
Thomas Aquinas wondered what knowledge was and who might have what portion of it. He proposed, “The proper knowledge of the angels is twofold; namely morning and evening. But the demons have no morning knowledge.”
Goodness as a form of morning knowledge is a beautiful idea, but let’s not forget Aquinas also said children resulting from demonic congress, children like the one Angéle de la Barthe was tortured into admitting she had, were “icy creatures that rode the winds and assailed the bodies and minds of their human prey.”
What I was thinking, but didn’t say, to that ex of mine was that I didn’t particularly care if I ever loved again. That I was looking for something more than this knotted cord of the erotic, something that would really be worth the shortness of my time and the limitations of my attention.
I have tried to be Catholic and tried to be Cathar. I have tried to be worthy of the air I breathe. I made myself miserable many times over trying to embody the ascetic opposite of whatever it was I thought I wanted.
Aquinas said perfection is when a thing is perfect in itself or when it perfectly serves its purpose. Good luck figuring out when or if that might ever be you.
There has been much disagreement about what constitutes even a perfect number. Passionate advocates can be found throughout the Middle Ages for 3, 7, and 10. Lately the mathematicians are partial to numbers that equal the sum of their divisors that are smaller than themselves. 6, for example, = 1 + 2 + 3. Euclid identified four of these: 6, 28, 496, and 8128. But doesn’t it seem like there should be a perfect number of perfect numbers? After two thousand years of recorded investigations, it is still unknown whether the number of perfect numbers is infinite or even whether a perfect number can be odd.
In physics there is the “perfectly plastic,” “perfectly rigid,” “perfectly fluid,” “perfectly black,” and the “crystal.” None of these can be found in nature; they are merely extreme ideals nature might be understood to approach. Perfection is a concept desig
ned to make it possible to think beyond what we already know.
On the list of known paradoxes you can find this one: the greatest perfection is imperfection, because it so perfectly attains the limits of its own ideal.
Before Thomas Aquinas there was Saint Gregory, who said that perfection will only be realized after the fulfillment of history.
That guy, the old story goes, once heard the deathbed confession of a monk in his order who had stolen three gold pieces. Gregory cast every friend the sick man had out of the room so the thief would die alone. Then threw the failed body on a manure pile and the three coins after him, saying he should take the gold with him to perdition. There is no reason, the saint thought, that God’s punishments should not begin on earth.
The Witch of Eye Page 7
