The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  I confess: I heard little of what was said to me as I stood at the head of that strangest of receiving lines. Finally, chilled through, unable to stay a moment longer, I said, to whoever was speaking at me, “All this talk of trees and bushes and berries is well and good, but it must be continued inside. Beside the fire.” And then I left the gardens. A bit brazen, perhaps, to leave my Soror Mystica and all the other sisters standing in the shadows. But not a one had introduced herself properly, most had come without gifts, and the trouble I’d taken had gone unremarked by all but Téotocchi…Damn them, I thought. Let them slink about the gardens till sunrise! Oh, I damned them indeed, the whole pack of hell-born bitches!

  My sauces had long ago curdled or burned; and so I sat beside the hearth and stoked the dying fire back to life.

  One by one the witches came into the house, Téotocchi first.

  She came to me fireside. “Strength,” she whispered. “Strength, dearest. The sisters come at significant peril, you know; and for your benefit…. It is dangerous to gather.” I put my hand atop hers, where it lay on my shoulder. I wanted to say so much: that I had thought by night’s end the course of my life would be determined, my way in the world set. That I would know what it meant to be what I was, who I was…. Instead, ridiculously, I stood to ask of all present, “Shall we eat?” But Téotocchi bade me sit. “It’s being taken care of,” said she.

  With a churning stomach I turned to see several sisters in the dining room, dismantling the scene I’d so carefully set. Folding up the screens. Tasting the cakes, tossing them back half-eaten. Gulping the wine as though it were water. Twin Ming vases smashed into octuplets when a broad-ended witch backed into the pedestal atop which they’d sat; she made no apology, simply nudged the sea-green shards aside with her sandaled foot. “Pearls before swine,” whispered a smiling Téotocchi. Others rolled up my rugs, shoved the salon’s furniture against the walls. They rearranged the thirteen chairs in a circle before the fire. One sister set about pitching the wreaths of laurel into the fire, “to scent the room”; too, she stuffed into her smock the white grosgrain ribbon I’d used to secure the wreaths to the chairs.

  So be it, I thought. At least the night was taking shape, and the esbat was coming to order; for the sooner it started, the sooner it would end.

  We took our seats. A convocation was read by Téotocchi. My duties as Summoner were set forth—I was to listen and learn. And somehow record it all.

  25

  The Greek Supper, Part II

  Excerpted from “The Record of the Esbat

  of 1788; or The Witches’ Pharmacopoeia, with

  Advice on the Proper and Right Casting of Spells”

  THE SISTERS have formed a circle. I sit savoring the fire’s warmth and writing by its light, for they have darkened the salon. I will do as I’ve been told, and I’ve been told to sit here in silence, this Book in hand, listening, recording, and, as Téotocchi has rather cryptically said, “learning so that I may live.”

  A very tall witch has gone center-circle to speak. (Not Cléofide, met in the gardens earlier—not as tall, but thinner.) She has closely cropped hair, gone gray. Her eyes are the palest blue. There is a most welcome warmth to the smile she offers me, a smile that shows charmingly crooked front teeth. She is beautiful, I think; plain, but beautiful. Her slate-gray robe is tailored to her frame; the man’s culottes she wears beneath are black. She is barefoot; her sandals—the kind that wind up the leg, Roman-style—sit coiled snake-like beneath her chair. “My name,” she says, “is Hermance.” (Perfect Parisian French.) She says she has chosen to speak of the Witches’ Calendar, its six great festivals. “One of which,” she says, “is this very night. Hallowe’en, the eve of hallowed souls.”

  The dates she gives are these: Candlemas, the 2nd of February; May Eve, the 30th of April; St. John’s Eve, on 23 June; Lammastide, the 1st of August; Hallowe’en; and on the 21st of December, St. Thomas’s Day. She says a bit about each, but she speaks too quickly for me…. I am lost, as this Record, as Hermance’s unrecorded words, attests.

  …Attends…. Yes, she speaks now of Candlemas: “…the feast of Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the day on which She underwent ritual purification in the Temple of Jerusalem and lit a candle to signify that her Son would be ‘the light of the world’”…

  …Talk. There is chastening talk. It seems that at Hermance’s words another witch—Sofia, they call her—has spit on the floor. (The parquet floor of my salon!) In disdain, this Sofia says, “Ach! All this talk of the Virgin and her Brood!” (Brood? Presumably she refers not only to Christ but to all Christians?) She stands now, Sofia does. (Hermance remains center-circle.) Her dress…rags! Waxen black sheets, wrapped around her person. Stained, ripped. Is she mad? It seems so to me. I am surprised the sisters let her speak now, out of turn.

  “Tell her,” says Sofia, pointing to me but speaking to Hermance, “tell her of the days before your Virgin. Tell her of the true Candlemas, as you call it.” Virgin, Candlemas—Sofia lets fly these words like venom. (Her accent…I cannot place it.) “Long before Christ,” she says, “and long before talk of his pure, pure mother overtook Europe, true witches marked the coming of February with the great Festival of Fire, inducing the Goddess of Spring to drive away the darkness and warm the soil. That is the true rite of winter!”

  Téotocchi reminds the witches of their mission, says they have not come to indoctrinate me, to win me to one set of beliefs or another. Their mission, as best I can understand it, is to give me information that I may use, that I will need to survive as a witch in the larger world. She is interrupted now as——stands and tells how best to break a curse: a cloth doll stuffed with nettles and inscribed with the name of the cursing witch will work, as will nettles sprinkled about the room where the cursed person sleeps…. Now Téotocchi insists on order. She deems it best to proceed around the circle. Each sister will rise in ritualized turn, sharing what she pleases. She hopes in this way to avoid debate and spare time. “It is, after all,” she says, “Hallowe’en.” (What does she mean? Best not to think on that.)

  So, seated to Téotocchi’s right, for we will proceed widdershins around the circle—that is, against the clock, for “It is the witches’ way,” they say—an unnamed sister stands and recites the following, which she knows from a text of old Egypt. “To secure the sexual services of a woman, make a wax image of her, pierce it with thirteen needles, as though making an effigy, then place the doll at sunset on the grave of someone, male or female, known or not, who died young or by violence.” This has never failed her. The secret, says she, lies in the state of the deceased’s soul: best to seek out the grave of one who died young and by violence. “The more violent the death, the better,” she says, adding, “A suicide is best.”

  I wonder, is it shame I feel as I watch this witch, this street-hag rise again to speak? Sofia, it is. Truly, I am repulsed. Yet I know I ought to accord her the same respect as the others, those who are set with jewels and dressed in silks. (And who is the younger witch, so familiar?)…I have much to learn from all of them; this I know…. But I cannot help it, I am shamed and repulsed by my association with this sister as she drags her chair center-circle and draws from her burlap bag a…a Hand of Glory, she calls it….Hideous thing, this relic! Dark dirty shriveled thing. Can it be?…Mon Dieu, it is a human hand, petrified and—

  It is indeed the severed hand of a murderer she holds, sawed free while the corpse still swung. “Of course,” she adds, apologetically, “the most effective Hands are harvested during the moon’s eclipse. This Hand is not such a one.”

  (Am I to be sick to my stomach? How do the others even look upon the Hand?…I will continue. I must continue.)

  The hag comes closer to me now. (The breath that seeps from her toothless smile bespeaks a diet of vermin and dirt! Foul, foul thing she is!) Lowering the Hand to my face, she says, “You must take the Hand and tie it in a shroud.” A pause; she waits, asks am I getting every word into the
Record. “Then you must wring the blood from the fingers; saving it for love philters, of course.” Some others laugh now at this witch’s economy. She curses them and continues on: “Pickle the Hand in an earthenware jar, with salt, long peppers, and saltpeter; let it sit two weeks…. Write it!” she adjures me. I show her that I have written it. “Bien. Then dry the Hand in an oven with vervain; or better, set it out beneath the summer sun.”

  (She unnerves me; the proof is here, in my unsteady hand…. Step away, witch. Step away.)

  She returns center-circle. She tells how, once preserved, she fits her Hand with candles, fixing them between the splayed fingers. The candles should be made from…from the hanged man’s fat, from a slab of it sliced from his buttock or thigh and boiled down. (Can I go on? I am sick. I am disgusted and sick. I am disgusted and sick and so very disappointed.) “And take care to save the skin,” she adds. “And a few hairs from his head, for they’ll serve nicely as wicks.”

  Go on. Write.

  “Forty-four years I’ve passed uncaught through the finest flats of Paris,” brags the hag, “and all thanks are due to my Hands of Glory.” Apparently, she uses the things thusly: she takes a Hand to the targeted place, presumably a home she hopes to burgle. She waits there, watching. Then, in a place where it will burn undisturbed (“beware of cats,” she warns), she lights the thumb and first finger—the thumb for protection, the first finger to still the wind—and then she enters the place through a window, in case the homeowner has placed some repelling iron on the threshold—split scissors are favored—to ward off a witch. As long as the Hand burns it is safe to walk about within the house “for whatever purpose”; it is clear, from the snickering of her sisters, that this witch’s “purpose” has always been burglary. The sharer drags her chair to the circle’s edge, sits, satisfied…. She is suddenly up again, and nearing…

  “I almost forgot to tell you!” cries the foul one, rushing back at me, “there is but one thing that can extinguish a Hand once lit, and that,” she comes nearer, nearer still, “…and that is Mother’s milk”; and with a horrid crack of laughter she—the beslimed bitch!—she takes my left breast in her knotted hand and squeezes!

  …Tears. The hag laughs. Téotocchi reprimands her and she sits, laughing still.

  I ask for some moments alone, and it is granted.

  They have called me back to the salon from the kitchen, where, crying, I surveyed the damage done. The dining room too: a shambles…. My recess has ended.

  ———speaks now, re: the efficacy of blood:

  The blood of executed criminals is of use in the distillation of philters. Some hold that the blood of a redheaded murderer is most potent; others say it is the semen of such a one. The point is argued for some time. I sit, my pen still.

  The blood of menses, it is said—though never that of a witch’s flow—is potent indeed. A few drops mixed into a man’s meal will secure his love. “Carry seeds to planting in a cloth thus stained or soaked,” says———, “and crops will ripen regardless of the season.” None present can attest to the truth of a belief popular in old Rome: that a woman’s blood could blunt knives, blast fruit, sour wine, rust iron, and cloud mirrors. “The Romans were right about much,” says———, “but they knew neither their women nor their witches.”

  There is laughter; and this same witch leads a song—spell? incantation? prayer?

  “Rue, vervain, and dill,

  Hinder witches from their will…”

  she sings.

  More laughter. Is it because the song is wrong?———rises to speak of vervain, “the Herb of the Cross,” said to have stanched the flow from Christ’s wounds. The undiluted juice of vervain, says she, will bring to pass the simplest of wishes, may bestow immunity to disease, can enhance clairvoyance.

  Another song, this one from———; more recipe than song, it seems to me:

  “Hemlock, juice of aconite,

  Poplar leaves with roots bound tight,

  Watercress; now add oil,

  Rat’s fat, and let it boil;

  Bat’s blood, and belladonna too—

  Now kill off those that bother you.”

  At this last line the sisters fall into hysterics. I transcribe. I am the Summoner of the coven, the one directed to call these sisters together; I am hostess of this esbat and keeper of this Record; and these women, witches all, have come together for my benefit, but how am I to learn when they—

  Téotocchi. She stands and quiets the sisters, insists again on order; and so the din evolves from songs and spells and talk of Christ’s blood to organized Sharing. (T. calls it that.) The circle is rejoined as several sisters return from the far corners of my house, to which they have wandered for purposes all their own. (Before she leaves, I must check the bag of the one who hoards my white ribbon.) I sit fireside. Téotocchi counts twelve heads, excepting her own—always thirteen at an esbat—and the Sharing resumes. I cannot identify the speakers: I know few of their names, and often they speak, several at once, in a sort of contradictory concert. I shall scribble all I can discern from this cacophony of curses, spells, and stories.

  The subject now, it seems, will be the use of herbs. (This will not be as orderly as T. would wish; I can see it.)

  “Beware the nightshade—belladonna, mandrake, henbane,” says———. “I have seen the like of these send a man elsewhere, never to return.” (Q: “Elsewhere,” she says. Does she refer to a prolonged dream state? Or does she mean death? I cannot ask this aloud; that much has been made clear.)

  “Do not listen to her,” counsels another witch. (I have met this one in the kitchen. Her name is Yzabeau.) “To deny the mandrake is foolish. Perhaps our Sister has simply misused it.” The first witch takes umbrage, rises to counter the claim that she—But Téotocchi calms her. It is Yzabeau who continues to speak of mandrake, of its history and “proper” usage:

  “The Greeks and Romans used it as an anesthetic before surgery,” she says. “It was said that Circe used mandrake juice to transform Odysseus’s men into swine.”

  “Which trick,” interjects———, “they so often effect themselves.” (This witch speaks slowly, deliberately. A southern accent, is it?)

  Yzabeau tells how her Soror Mystica—whose name, I see, is known by some here, and revered—harvested mandrake at night, from beneath a gallows tree sprung up from “bodily drippings.” “Wash the harvested root in wine,” she says, “and wrap it in silk; or better, velvet.”

  “No, no; too dangerous, that,” says another witch, speaking now for the first time. “If the torn-away root resounds like a struck fork or seeps a bit of blood, the harvester will die.” She has seen this happen. “Far better to harvest it thusly,” says she. “Dig around all but a small portion of the root with a silver spade. Tie one end of a string to the exposed root and tie the other end to a bitch. Turn away at once—at once!—and let the bitch pull the root from the ground. The dog will die, but you will be safe.”

  Three others testify to the efficacy of this method. One adds, “Never but never use a male root; neither a female if the berries of its bush glow at dawn.”

  I am exhausted. I ask for a respite, a second recess. T. grants me a quarter hour, and I think her ungenerous until she draws from her robe a vial of the most fragrant oil and asks for my writing hand. Ah, yes, yes…Happily, I set down this pen.

  We resume.

  ———explains the proper use of those herbs that, in combination with certain spells, she promises, will induce “dreams of divination.” She lists the herbs: “Sinum, sweet flag, cinquefoil, oil, and solanum somniferum; add to these a bit of bat’s blood. Rub all this into a ball—fist-sized—formed of an animal’s fat.” These words, this hideous recipe, sounds so strange, coming as it does from this exquisite Italian witch standing before me in bright silks. Though in fact her gold-bladed athame, pendant from her necklace, its blade glistening, does look more like an instrument of murder than a tool of white magic. She has paused now to take some
wine. Mine? Or has she brought her own? She resumes, speaking in a richly accented French. In summation, this: “The ointment, thus rendered, is best absorbed through the moist tissues of the vagina, upon which it is to be liberally applied.” With a nod to me she sits, rejoins the circle.

  Some commentary now, none of which I can distinguish. And so:

  It is———’s turn to speak. She is old and worn. She sports a Breton scarf of finely worked lace. The sisters listen respectfully. “What has worked best for me, in late years,” says she, regarding divination, “is this: aconite, two drops of poppu juice—no more than two drops!—foxglove, poplar leaves, and cinquefoil, all married in a base of beeswax, and almond oil.” Talk now, the topic of which is this: how best to procure two drops of poppu juice! (Q: What is poppu juice?)

  Lest she be doubted, the Breton witch reminds all present that it was she who “saw” the death by drowning of la famille Gremillion some days before it occurred; what’s more, it was she who “witnessed” recent and weird events in Quimper involving two cows and a daft dairy farmer. She sits, triumphant.

  ———counters with her ointment: “Deadly nightshade, henbane, wild celery, parsley, and a fistful of thornapple ground with an alabaster pestle; all in a base of hog’s lard.” Discussion now, which I cannot record. Instead, I am imagining———’s cuffs of Brussels lace trailing through a bowl of boiling hog’s lard! There is something about this witch I do not like. (Is she from the Lowlands? I wonder. It is possible, for I have overheard her say that last night’s coach ride took some seven hours.) I am glad now that she sits.

  Oh, but who is this? A grimy, malodorous creature comes center-circle. (It is whispered that this one lives in the hollow of a tree, deep in the Bois de Boulogne. Is that possible?) She offers this, re: divination: