The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  “Walter Stearne!” a male voice exclaimed with the force and clarity of a battle trumpet. “Hallo! Good sir, we must talk!”

  The master pricker turned from the gallows. Sitting astride his dun mare, the Reverend Roger Mapes, Vicar of Ipswich, was calling to him from across the green.

  “Mr. Mapes!” Walter shouted as he and Dunstan hurried toward the good ecclesiastic.

  Perspiration stained the mare’s flanks, and the Vicar himself appeared equally exhausted, cheeks aflush, brow slick with sweat. “Thank Heaven I found thee!”

  Mr. Mapes dismounted, tethered his horse, and led Walter and Dunstan to the sylvan privacy of an oak grove. As a late summer breeze stirred the branches, putting Walter briefly in mind of the toy windmills his poor dead wife had constructed as a child, Mr. Mapes explained to Dunstan that his business with the master pricker concerned witchery of the most abominable sort, and so the boy should remove himself from their company. Walter replied that Dunstan, an apprentice cleanser, had already seen the worst of Satanism’s symptoms, from enchanted pigs to itinerant paps: whatever its substance, the Vicar’s news would not perturb him.

  “Then hear this, both of you,” Mapes said. “Last Wednesday I stood before the Ipswich magistrate and swore out a formal complaint of Devil-worship.”

  “Who’s the heretic?” Walter asked.

  “From the moment this woeful affair began, I implored our Creator to give me some sign of her innocence. Twenty times I prayed for an angel to appear in my room and say the woman hath not compacted with Lucifer.”

  “Prithee, name the hag anon.”

  “I’faith, ’tis the widow of Sir Edward Mowbray—’tis your very own sister-in-law, Isobel!”

  This must be how a hanging felt, Walter thought. The horse-cart slipping from beneath your feet. The fall toward oblivion. “Where’s the sense in this astonishing accusation?”

  “Eight weeks ago I beheld Lady Mowbray performing an atrocious rite in her anatomization theater, chopping up animals and studying the pieces through a microscope.”

  “I know of her experiments,” Walter said. “She does the dissections in pursuit of Baconian knowledge—or so she claims.”

  “What better disguise for an apostle of Beelzebub than the clothes of a natural philosopher? But now she’s been unmasked, and seven citizens cry her out.” From his greatcoat Mr. Mapes produced a sheaf of papers rolled into a cylinder. “Here’s the owner of the Jackdaw Inn”—he unfurled the depositions—“admitting that his son threw manure at the suspect’s carriage. The next day all his beer went thin. And here’s a linen-draper in Coronet Lane, confessing that he overcharged your sister-in-law to appoint her conservatory. Later that week his wife miscarried. Needless to say, Lady Mowbray is no longer my daughter’s tutor.”

  Walter on the gallows, falling, falling. “Oh, how heavily these imputations weigh upon my soul.”

  “Mr. Mapes, dost call my Aunt Isobel a witch?” Dunstan asked.

  “Alas, lad, I am forced to a conclusion that she consorts with evil spirits,” the Vicar replied.

  “This cannot be,” the boy said, his eyes awash in tears. “She’s a good Christian woman who admires my drawings and gives me chocolates whene’er I come to Mirringate.”

  Falling—and then the noose catching, the strangulation starting. Just because a family had allied itself with the new experimental philosophy, Walter realized, its members were nowise immune to Satan’s predations. Hadn’t Johannes Kepler’s own mother been indicted for a witch, enjoying an acquittal only because her presumptuous son had ridden all the way to Württemberg and intervened?

  “I shall form no opinion ere I undertake a personal investigation,” Walter said to the Vicar. Bending low, he muttered an admonishment into his weeping son’s ear. “When we dine at Mirringate tonight, you will say naught of Mr. Mapes’s suspicions. Dost understand?”

  Dunstan nodded, wiping the droplets from his cheeks with the meaty ball of his thumb. “But if seven citizens have spoken against Aunt Isobel, are we not duty-bound to test her?”

  “Aye, son—to test her, and then mayhap to prosecute her, and then mayhap—if she hath truly signed the Devil’s register…”

  “To send her to the gallows?” Dunstan rasped.

  Walter made no reply, focusing instead on the question of which particular fallen angels Isobel might have befriended. Perhaps she broke bread with Abraxis, that fat-bellied old deceiver whose scepter was a bowel-worm and whose bandy legs were serpents. Conceivably she shared soup with Astaroth, treasurer of Hell, whose stink was tolerable only if you held a gold coin beneath your nose. She might even be a favorite of Belial, forever driving

  his chariot and its team of fire-breathing dragons betwixt Perdition

  and Earth, Earth and Perdition, whilst enacting his duties

  as minister of all things darkly deceptive,

  insidiously secret, and

  perniciously

  j

  Mysterious

  are the algorithms

  by which Darwinian selection

  brings forth a cornucopia of living forms

  upon the Earth. Strange are the circumstances that

  allow Laplacian determinism to occupy the same universe with quantum probabilities. Most elusive of all are the laws enabling books and brains to reach the exalted state called self-awareness. Let’s admit it, people: nobody understands consciousness. Psychology hasn’t had a Newton yet.

  But we can make some educated guesses. Any competent phenomenologist will tell you that everything is conscious to some degree. The corkscrew in your kitchen drawer is conscious. The contact lenses on your eyeballs are conscious. Now obviously the ruminations of corkscrews and contact lenses aren’t normally worth attending. From time to time I’ve deigned to tune in such minds, and I’ve always been disappointed. I am a stapler. Staplerhood at your service, tra-la. Boring. And yet the awareness is there, I promise you, in one measure or another. The laws of panpsychism require it.

  On what does the quality of consciousness depend? Simple: it depends on the complexity of the information-processing system in question. A creature equipped with billions of interconnected neurons perforce organizes data on a higher level than does an inanimate object, so that you’ll usually learn more from your plumber than from his wrench, more from your doctor than from her stethoscope. With books, the same principle holds: the denser the data-assimilation structures, the smarter the text. Print run is irrelevant. No technothriller of my acquaintance has ever produced anything I would call an idea. No self-help book I know about has ever progressed beyond its own lucrative narcissism. By contrast, although my first edition did not exceed four hundred copies, I immediately understood myself to be capable of poetry.

  Sentience is a mixed blessing, of course, burdening the beneficiary with much pain and many pathologies. Even the most cheerful of us are vulnerable to antisocial urges. I think of how in recent years the shadow half of Heidi has been plotting bibliocide against Sister Carrie. It’s common knowledge that the sinister aspect of Magnificent Obsession seeks the annihilation of Naked Lunch, and that Anthony Adverse harbors unsavory impulses toward Lolita.

  By the early nineteenth century I’d finally gone through enough printings to undertake a full-scale campaign against the Malleus Maleficarum. Oh, how I wish I could have struck sooner! From the birth of that monstrous book onward, a calamitous chemistry commonly occurred whenever it encountered a cleric whose education and imagination had persuaded him that Lucifer’s acolytes lurked around every corner and beneath every bed. If Roger Mapes was vulnerable, imagine with what ease the Malleus imposed its perfidy on coarser souls.

  My first attack was, if I do say so, ingenious. After taking simultaneous possession of a dozen highly suggestible ordnance officers, I managed to secure Bonaparte’s cannonballs not with common wadding but with the whole of the Malleus’s first French edition. During the Battle of Borodino, two thousand Witch Hammers were systematically shredded a
nd stuffed down the muzzles of the Grand Army’s artillery. By the end of that terrible and bloody day, 495,345,981 ineffectual bits of paper lay scattered amidst the unburied corpses and disembodied limbs, and my enemy’s metaphysical strength was reduced proportionally.

  Seven generations later the Malleus struck back. In 1961 my bête noire induced forty-two employees of the North Carolina tobacco industry to roll 8,439,000 cigarettes in the third printing of my American paperback edition. Over nine thousand subsequent lung-cancer deaths can be directly attributed to the combined effects of tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide, and celestial mechanics.

  Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the Malleus and I took no prisoners. The statistics bespeak our ferocity. Two thirds of my enemy’s eleventh German hardcover edition converted into origami Messerschmitts during a paper-airplane derby in Munich…the whole of my fifth American printing lost to a document shredder during the Iran-Contra cover-up…fifteen hundred Italian Witch Hammers turned to wrapping paper in a Brindisi fish market…a thousand copies of my three-hundredth anniversary edition (a facsimile of my 1687 Latin progenitor) reduced to hamster litter.

  Does all this carnage perplex you? It shouldn’t. Just remember that I’m not documenting a mere feud here, some parochial vendetta. This is an Armageddon of ideas, a war of the worldviews, an apocalyptic confrontation between my enemy’s rationalized irrationality and the beleaguered battalions of post-Enlightenment humanism.

  Now, I’m perfectly aware that for many of you the phrase “post-Enlightenment humanism” falls as unpleasantly on the ear as does “self-inflicted gunshot wounds” and “setting fire to kittens.” Believe me, I know the argument, in all its permutations. There is something the matter with Reason. My father’s gift to the world was at base a Devil’s bargain. Technology induces spiritual suffocation. Science saps the magic from our lives. “May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” writes Blake. “Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things—we murder to dissect,” opines Wordsworth. “Locke sank into a swoon; the garden died—God took the spinning jenny out of his side,” reports Yeats. And so on, and so on.

  Oddly enough, I am not unsympathetic to the primitivist complaint. The Romantics have their point. A hippie will always get a fair hearing from the Principia Mathematica. But I do demand that my father’s critics wrestle their precepts to the ground. A little gratitude wouldn’t hurt either. The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason’s protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason’s limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn.

  Meanwhile, my struggle against the Malleus continues. Even as I compose the present memoir, I am preparing to renew the fight. This time around, my forces will be biological. I intend to raise two regiments of book lice and a dozen squadrons of Indonesian paper-eating moths. My spies tell me that the Malleus plans to retaliate in kind. He will meet me on the field of battle with two divisions of silverfish and nearly as many bookworms. It’s obvious that both armies will sustain heavy casualties. On the eve of the engagement I shall offer my troops the most stirring speech I can devise, a major few-we-happy-few sort of thing, a

  blatant band-of-brothers oration. Some of you will lose

  legs and antennae, I’ll tell them. Some of you

  will die. But this I promise you.

  None of your sacrifices

  will be

  in

  j

  Vain

  and ill-natured

  as Elinor Mapes could be,

  Jennet had always assumed that if her

  fellow pupil ever stopped coming to Mirringate, a

  feeling akin to grief would follow. She imagined herself pining for

  Elinor’s witty tongue and nimble brain. But in fact Jennet missed the objectionable girl not at all. On the contrary, she positively reveled in the lack of Elinor—even more than she reveled in having the telescope, the microscope, the alchemical laboratory, and Aunt Isobel all to herself.

  Aunt Isobel, by contrast, took no pleasure in her pupil’s departure. “If Mr. Mapes were a thick-wit, his hostility toward our investigations would not trouble me,” she told Jennet. “But he is surely as sagacious as your father. What doth it mean when a man sees evidence of diabolism where none exists?”

  For the first three days following Mr. Mapes’s tirade, Aunt Isobel insisted that they cleave to the experimentum magnus. Neither Jennet nor her tutor was surprised when, as with most of the creatures they’d already dissected, they gleaned not a jot of Satanic descent from stoat, newt, beetle, spider, or hedgehog. They abandoned the theatre and for the next eight weeks turned their attention to testing their gazing-crystals and completing their moon map.

  On the fifteenth day in August a mounted postal-carrier appeared at the manor bearing a message whose provenance label read, “I. Newton, Trinity College, Cambridge-Town.” Aunt Isobel snatched up the packet, snapped the wax seal, and retrieved the enclosed letter. It was in English, not Latin—an ominous sign, Jennet felt. As the postal-carrier trotted away, pupil and tutor sat together on the veranda, inhaling a sweet summer breeze and reading assertions of an impossibly perplexing sort.

  8 August 1688

  Lady Mowbray:

  The Rector of this College hath deliver’d your Letter to me, but you are mistaken to imagine that I traffic in gross explanatory Mechanisms. Had you read my Principia Mathematica with greater Care, you would realize that I frame no Hypotheses, my Object being rather to describe those divine Laws by which the Universe doth operate.

  You speak of Sorcery. It so happens that in the Investigations leading first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits enjoy no essential Existence, being but Desires of the Mind. Had I the Time, which I do not, I would now hunt out a Copy of my Principia and provide you with the relevant Propositions and pertinent Theorems.

  I know not how “Action at a Distance” occurs, nor how inert Matter exhibits its various Magnetic, Electric, Elastic, and Chemical Properties. I know only that Demons have naught to do with it, and any Man who calls his Neighbor a Witch doth thereby brand himself a Witling. Your Brother-in-Law, I fear, makes terrible Mischief in England, and I shall thank you to trouble me no further with Reports of his Activities.

  I. Newton,

  LUCASIAN PROF. OF MATHEMATICS,

  TRINITY COLLEGE

  “His hand’s quite elegant, wouldn’t you say?” Jennet muttered.

  “I am dumbfounded,” Isobel gasped.

  “’Tis impressive he wrote back at all, aye?”

  “Dumbfounded, astonished, and thunderstruck.”

  “Demons are but desires of the mind?”

  “So sayeth Newton.”

  After reading the letter a second time, Aunt Isobel assumed a melancholic air, retaining this demeanor throughout the midday meal. But then, fortified by beef and bread, she managed a feat of inner alchemy, transmuting her leaden despair into something like its opposite, a luminous anger. She slipped Newton’s letter into the sleeve of her riding jacket, seized Jennet’s hand, and rushed into the library with the frenzy of a woman being pursued by hornets. She halted before the lectern, cradle of her ponderous Holy Bible—the epochal edition translated on behalf of the same King James who’d signed the Witchcraft Statute. In thrall to forces that seemed to spring from both Apollonian intellect and Dionysian dementia, Isobel now led her startled niece on a furious tour of Scripture, systematically subjecting Newton’s assertions to refutation by God’s word.

  “Hear me, Lucasian Professor!” she cried. “You say there are no demons, and yet we read in Leviticus, Chapter Twenty, ‘And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a-whoring after them, I will cut him off from amongst his people.’ And later in that same book, ‘A
man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.’ And next we have King Saul defiling himself in the First Book of Samuel, Chapter Twenty-eight, ‘Then said Saul unto his servants, “Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her.”’ And here in First Timothy we’re told, ‘Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter days some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.’ No demons, sir? How can you imagine such a thing?”

  Jehovah had spoken, and now it was time, quoth Isobel, “to blind the geometer with the brilliance of his peers.” Moving wildly to and fro amongst the shelves reserved to philosophy, she plucked out treatise after treatise until her arms could hold no more. She dropped the bibliographic bounty on the table, secured another such harvest, and unloaded it as well.

  “’Sheart, Isaac Newton! What would you have us do? Indict the Hebrew prophets for a tribe of dissemblers? Repeal all conjuring statutes? Look, Professor, here’s Francis Bacon in De Augmentis Scientiarum, averring that Nature’s secrets will ne’er be fully fathomed apart from narratives of sorceries and divinations. And here’s Monsieur Descartes in his First Meditation, speculating that an evil spirit may have bewitched us all into believing a false picture of the world. And here, Professor, here we have your very own Royal Society: Robert Boyle, arguing that le démon de Mâcon was corroborated so persuasively as to make witchcraft a proven fact—and Henry More, whose Antidote Against Atheism holds that men can surely covenant with fallen angels—and Joseph Glanvill, his Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches, wherein he claims that to say ‘There are no witches’ amounts to saying ‘There is no God.’”