It’s a title that reeks of infamy — the Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of the Witches, a fifteenth-century guide to the persecution of witches written under the cloak of religious piety. I cannot hear or see those Latin words without recalling my knowledge of the historical Burning Times, without tasting ashes in my mouth. Unfortunately, the persecution still exists — there are still fires aplenty in this world for those deemed different, subversive, dangerous, and demonic. Now, as then, most of the victims are still women.
I knew these things when I first learned
about Maleficae, Emma Bolden’s
collection of poems relating this inhumanity by telling the story of one witch.
I knew there would be torture, flames and death, and I wasn’t sure I could bear
to open such a book. However, I am grateful that I did, grateful that my first
introduction to the poems came on a stage here in South Georgia, when I heard
Bolden read from Maleficae. These intensely
personal, painfully lyrical poems shattered the distance between me and the
anonymous witch whose voice is heard throughout. They sing and sting, indict
and provoke. They are woven with the threads of life and death and rebirth,
power in all its manifestations, survival in the face of extinction. Together,
they create a human story made intimate through the voices and visions
contained within, especially the narrative of the witch herself.
The words are evocative and often beautiful,
the imagery visceral, precise, wrenching,
vivid. Bolden’s carefully spaced words and phrases feel organic. They deliver
so much gratification on first read that one can’t help returning to the lines
again and again. It’s only on that second or third pass that the deeper
meanings bloom, as in this, the beginning of “The Witch Remembers Her Early
Learnings”:
When I learned to speak I learned
to speak in rushes entwining
their arms to wind
down the river which always
wanted
to escape its stays
Bolden respects the powers of visualization. She provides the necessary
sensory details, the one-two-punches of metaphor and description, and the
reader constructs the whole of the scene — the low-lit barn, the lovers in bed,
the circle cast in the oaks. Or here, from
“The Witch Remembers Her Body as Holding,”
the transformational agony of childbirth:
I became
animal pressure pain
howl
of wolf packs and women split
by the same shriek
the same muscles
snapped we are all unmade
by making
Though the rhythm
feels easy, these are finely wrought, carefully honed pieces. Their seamlessness
is seductive, and treacherous. When I
followed their heartbeat cadences, they led me
straight into the noose. Watch what Bolden does in this stanza, from “The
Liturgy of the Word”:
she who with hair
sun-slick even in moonfall a woman
of ribbons who glistens sent by God
and His Good Grace to punish to warn the other good
women of what good can do
The repetition of
the word “good” at first feels beneficent, coming as it does after the
description of the glory of a beautiful, nature-graced woman, a woman of God. Then
that sharp infinitive — “to punish” —
and the trap is set and sprung.
The witch of these poems is an
herbalist and midwife, healer and medicine worker. In her everyday labors, she
makes the hard choices for the village, and they let her. Her hands bring both life and death,
sometimes intertwined so tightly that they cannot be separated. In one poem, the
villagers express how they see her, what they think she can bring them —
“tables stacked high with fattened fowl and flock” — but on a deeper level, the most important
thing she delivers is a sense of control to their lives, which are often harsh
and filled with arbitrary tragedy.
This power she possesses is
dangerous, but in the eyes of her eventual accusers, the first and most damning
of the evidence against her is her gender. Women were considered the inferior
sex, and as such, more susceptible to Satan’s wiles. In the textual notes, Bolden
quotes from Malleus Maleficarum: “And it should be noted that there was a defect in
the formation of the 1st woman, since she was formed from a bent rib . . . . And
since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.”
Bolden echoes this belief in several
of the poems, with lines such as “An unwatched woman is a waiting calamity,”
and “Adam’s rib bent eternal/struck straight only by a man’s guidance.” Most
powerful to me is this stanza, at the end of “The Witch’s Apprenticeship,” a
poem detailing the witch’s delivery of an out-of-wedlock baby, an event that
ends with the death of the mother:
this is the hemorrhage that can’t
be contained this is the
woman now a body
unholy by priest forbidden from churchyard this is the salt
you’ll let fall in blessing her new-mounded grave
The poems are rich with the tangible details of this
nameless witch’s ancient craft— the herbs with their powers both mundane and
magical, the charms and candles, the spells and petitions — and with the spiritual vocabulary that the witch uses to describe her God. She uses the word in its
masculine sense, but her God is very different from the God of the Christian
priests. In the poem, “The Witch’s Testimony Hour Seventy-Two: In Which the Witch Describeth Her God,” she gives
voice to her understanding of the Divine in a fevered spill of torture-induced
words that are nonetheless an evocation of the Sacred Masculine:
the wolf ’s hair
standing guard against rain the rain
that slides from
the wolf ’s slate coat the forest marten furred
in darkness the
darkness itself and the light lying within its
sealed lips
In response to the accusations against her, the witch says, “yes I
understand the severity of charges, I understand of all things severity.” My
heart cracked at those words. I had heard this woman’s stories, glimpsed her
life. The connection between us had been
forged, an impossible connection that was nonetheless true and real.
Even though I am quoting from these
poems, I am leaving some of the more breathtaking phrases between the pages of the
book, to be discovered there. The experience of seeing the poems on the page
invites new meaning with each reading — the spaces and pauses open up new interpretations, sometimes twisting
the reader around mid-line. We know how
this story will end, for we know our
history; we know the hundreds of thousands of endings recorded throughout
Western Europe for centuries. Despite our knowing, the poems still startle. Consider,
for example, “The Witch’s Daughter Still Lives,” narrated by the witch’s young
child, a witness to her mother’s execution, which becomes in her eyes an
alchemical transformation:
that morning
with my new mother
I said the fire
was an angel I said
it was the story of burning
straw into gold and the sparks
were spirits I said someone
was making gold
One thing I
especially appreciate about this collection is that Bolden included explanatory
textual notes, as well as a listing of her resources (which included everything
from the Malleus Maleficarium itself to
Stephen Wilson’s Magical Universe:
Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe). While I recognized many of
the herbal and magical items, there were many references unfamiliar to me,
especially in this historical context. I learned a great deal, but because
Bolden saved these explanations for the end instead of using footnotes, the
poems themselves weren’t interrupted by pieces of documentation.
Bolden ends the collection with a
simple dedication: “Finally, for the witches
— Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua
luceat eis.” From Mozart’s Requiem, the words can be translated as,
“Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them.”
Bolden’s poems illuminate too. They cast light on a terrible subject, creating
new shapes, new shadows. While the darkness she conjures may be deep and painful,
readers should not fear these poems, heartbreaking
and soul-rending though they may be. Come to Maleficae as you would to the point of the sword, with perfect love
and perfect trust in your heart. You will be rewarded.
* * *
You can get a copy of Maleficae straight from the publisher GenPop Books or find it on Amazon.com or -- and you should do this if you possibly can -- from Emma Bolden herself. Learn more about Emma at her website: http://emmabolden.com/
