La Sorcière

A voice sweeps across the shores of the Aegean Sea: Great Pan is dead. The early Christians rejoice, convinced that Nature is about to perish, that temptation will cease, and that the world is drawing to an end. But the old gods do not die so easily. They are driven from the temples, their statues are shattered, they are cursed from the heights of the councils—and so they seek refuge in fountains, in oak trees, in the hearts of women. In vain does the Church proclaim their demise: century after century, she is incensed to find them still alive. They are demons, she declares. Therefore, they live.

The Middle Ages settle in, and with them a leaden-gray fog that shrouds the world for a thousand years. The people are told: be children, imitate, copy, repeat. The people obey, but in their own fashion: they create saints, they invent legends, they bring the ass into the church and sing of the light chasing away the night. The Church, terrified by such audacity, forbids all invention, all creation, all singing of new songs. The priest chants in Latin beneath a cope of gold, and the people, no longer understanding a word, yawn in the nave. Yawning, that convulsion of boredom, becomes the malady of the age.

Meanwhile, the horrifyingly slippery slope that leads from free man to vassal, from vassal to servant, from servant to serf, plunges an entire world into despair. The viscous earth clings to the foot, the contagious air turns man into a living corpse, a soul worth a pittance. The lord encloses his domain from the heavens to the earth. He who was once valiant, who had built the first tower, who had dammed the river against the Normans, finds himself a serf because he married, fifty years earlier, a neighbor's lowly serf-girl. His blood rushes to his throat, his veins burst, he dies before the mute assembly.

In the isolated hut on the edge of the forest, the serf's wife spins her distaff and dreams. She is born. The solitary hearth has forged the true family; the nest has shaped the bird. She possesses so little—the distaff, the bed, the chest—but this poverty is furnished with a soul. The ancient spirits of the land come to visit her. She leaves them a little cream at night, she carries a humble lantern to the great oak where they dwell. She preserves the realm of fairies and sprites, this womanly treasure, this fantastical mirror wherein she sees herself beautified. The fairy, too, is a woman.

A little familiar spirit takes up residence at the hearth. He rocks the child, he sweeps, he tends the garden. He is mischievous, indiscreet, hiding among the roses and the sparks. The woman loves him too much; she feels a pang of guilt, and loves him all the more. But time passes, and the little sprite grows alongside misfortune. The lord demands gold, always gold. The serf knows not where to find it. The woman, whom the spirit has made cunning, sells, lends, trades, single-handedly sustaining both castle and village. She grows prosperous, she becomes made of gold. They say she has the devil in her.

And the devil does, indeed, work upon her. He invades her like smoke, courses through her veins, inflates her with his breath. She resists, she says no, she rears back. But the outrages pile up: the lord's right of the first night, the beatings, the raids, the pack of pages and greyhounds unleashed upon her, the green dress slashed to the waist before the crowd. One day, chased away, beaten, abandoned by her husband, she flees onto the moor in the dead of night. She gathers acorns like a beast. And there, in the bramble forest, beneath an old oak, Satan finally speaks to her. He offers her everything: wealth, power, vengeance. She asks for nothing but the power to do harm.

She has become the Sorceress. She no longer has a father, a mother, a son, or a husband. She is a monster, a meteorite fallen from who knows where. She lives in impossible places, on the moor where thorn and thistle bar the way. Yet she is the sole physician of the people for a thousand years. Emperors, kings, and popes have their doctors from Salerno, their Moors, their Jews. The people have only her—the Saga, the Wise-Woman—whom they call, out of fear and respect, the Good Lady, the Beautiful Lady, the very name bestowed upon fairies. She knows the plants, the nightshades, the salutary poisons. Paracelsus, when he burns the whole of medical literature in Basel in 1527, declares he knows nothing but what he learned from witches.

The Witches' Sabbath is born of despair. In 1348, the Black Death ravages the globe and kills a third of the world. The pope is degraded; the lords, defeated and taken prisoner, extort their ransoms from the serf, stripping him even of his shirt. The people are so furious that they dance. The Black Mass, the great and solemn defiance of Jesus, springs from the horror of the age. Thousands of wretches gather at night—twelve thousand souls in a small Basque canton, six thousand for a mere Italian hovel. There, worship is parodied, the world order is inverted, the woman officiates, the serf commands, and cursed nature reclaims her rights in an orgy of fury. Satan the physician distributes the remedies the Church forbids. Satan the liberator releases birds, the symbol of freedom.

But the Sorceress undoes herself. From fierce and proud, she becomes sordid and malignant, an industrialist, an empirical factotum, an agent of love and abortion. Satan's kingdom is cunningly divided: against his daughter, the Sorceress, they arm his son, the Physician. The Church declares in the fourteenth century that if a woman dares to heal without having studied, she is a witch and must die. But how could she study publicly, she who is burned by the thousands? Seven thousand in Trier, five hundred in three months in Geneva, eight hundred in Würzburg, fifteen hundred in Bamberg. In the Würzburg registry, one finds an eleven-year-old sorcerer who was still in school, a witch of fifteen, and in Bayonne, two of seventeen, damnably pretty.

What remains in the spotlight of the great seventeenth-century trials is no longer the sorceress, but the bewitched. In Aix, the priest Gauffridi burns for having seduced a penitent under the guise of demonic possession. In Loudun, Urbain Grandier perishes in the flames while the Ursulines writhe in expertly orchestrated convulsions. In Louviers, the same scenes repeat themselves in a convent where the nuns, confined since childhood, have known nothing of the world but its walls and the guidance of dubious confessors. Everywhere, the same mechanism is at work: a spiritual director who assumes absolute dominion over the woman, a community fermenting in silence and boredom, convulsions breaking out, and the Inquisition arriving to reap what it has sown.

Finally comes the Cadière affair in Toulon, in 1730. A pious, exalted, and stigmatized young girl falls under the direction of the Jesuit Girard. He molds her, kneads her, leads her by degrees from ecstasy to possession, from possession to scandal. When she seeks to free herself, she is the one accused. The trial divides all of France, Jesuits against Jansenists, the Parliament against the Church. La Cadière escapes the stake by a single vote. Girard dies unpunished. But something has changed: laughter has arrived, the laughter of Voltaire, and this laughter kills more surely than the pyre. Colbert, as early as 1672, had unceremoniously dismissed Satan by forbidding judges to hear witchcraft trials. The Norman Parliament had protested: to meddle with the eternal vanquished, is that not to meddle with the victor? The pillars of heaven have their footing in the abyss, and the fool who shakes this infernal foundation risks cracking paradise itself.

The Sorceress has perished forever, but not the Fairy. In the former Jesuit seminary of Toulon, now a naval hospital, young surgeons chip in their own money to expand a fine medical library. The chemistry laboratory prepares the cure for the poor sailor. The insensibility the witches sought with their narcotics is now provided by ether. Steam traverses space, lightning obeys the hand, the balloon ascends into the air, the telegraph unites thoughts from one pole to the other. Everything the Middle Ages dreamed of, the present age realizes. And over the immense harbor of Toulon, in the prodigious transparency of the winter air, between the stars that resist the dawn and the dawn that respects the night, a sunrise is brewing—an indefinable bluish hue that the rosy light does not yet dare to tint, a sacred ether that turns all nature into spirit.