Kathryn Nuernberger - The Witch of Eye

KATHRYN NUERNBERGER

ESSAYS

Copyright 2021 by Kathryn Nuernberger

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without
written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nuernberger, Kathryn, author.

Title: The witch of eye : essays / Kathryn Nuernberger.

Description: Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2021

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016771 (print) | LCCN 2020016772 (e-book)
ISBN 9781946448705 (paperback) | ISBN 9781946448712 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: WitchesBiography. | WomenMiscellanea. Marginality, Social. | WitchcraftHistory.

Classification: LCC BF1571.5.W66 N84 201 (print)
LCC BF1571.5.W66 (e-book) | DDC 133.4/30922 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016771

LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016772

Cover and interior design by Alban Fischer.

Printed in Canada.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

for M. Patricia Nuernberger, PhD,
my mother

&

Sam Nuernberger,
my sister

THE WITCH OF EYE

A n aspen grove lives for a thousand years, the tongues of the leaves shaking after the wind. No aspen tree is just a tree, each is also a limb rooted into a much larger body that is an entire forest breathing together.

They called the old women crones, hags, cunning women, and witches. Names to make a daughter think she should devote herself to becoming something, anything, other than what she is. Like the women I descend from, the ones called hysterics and manics, obsessives and depressives, I feel as if I have an aspen grove that stretches from my stomach to my throat. Sometimes I can hardly speak for trying to hush those leaves.

This little apothecary I keep of wild lettuce, St. Johns wort, a dozen jars of elderberry syrup, is a way of saying to myself what I need to know of myself. My great-grandmother swore by Lydia Pinkhams compound of unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleurisy root, and fenugreek seed preserved in 19 percent alcohol, so I keep a half-empty bottle dug from a barn loft fifty years ago on the shelf. My grandmother, locked away by a patriarchy of doctors who didnt want to ask and didnt want to know, never stopped calling for someone to bring the pills, so I keep an unopened cardboard tube labeled Lithium Carbonate and stamped 1968 there too. I keep an even older medicine I found among the forced confessions and brutal executions, a torn page with a little spell to cure your ague, that ancient disease of trembling.

It was no cure, how I begged God to turn me into a bear or a cow, a constellation, or winter. No use translating myself into lullabies or ending every sentence with Im sorry. For no use I ran like a woman wishing to be released into the still silence of a laurel tree.

The aspen leaves shake because the cross was made of aspen wood. Or, the leaves shake because this is where the wives gather to tremble their tongues. Or, the leaves shake because the tree was cursed by Jesus after it would not acknowledge him when he spoke to it. This was after he smote a fig tree just because it was winter and the tree could bear no fruit for him. There are so many stories in the margins about what an asshole that young, handsome Jesus could be.

For a thousand years the theory of medicine was the same as the theory of magic. Called the Doctrine of Signatures, the axiom was that herbs resemble the parts of the body that they can be used to treat. Toothwort has those baby teeth blossoms; eyebright blinks its petals. Walnuts have the perfect signature of your aching head. The theory is that the world is talking to us. The theory is that God is talking to us through the world.

William Henderson did not save the name of the woman who gave him the spell I have come to think of as Spell for the Likes of Me to be included in his Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. If he even asked her about it, he made no notes of what it had taken for her to carry such knowledge into a future one hundred years beyond the last witch trial.

I cut a lock of my hair and used it to bind the bark, wishing, I thought, to be turned into the kind of woman who can hold still and keep her peace. Whether or not it worked is a complicated question tied to the larger question of whether or not I wanted it to. There were words to go along with that ribbon of hair laid against the wood and I hesitated to say them. What is it to live, I wonder, if not to tremble?

Not only did the aspen tree refuse to bow before the Lord, but it declared that it was free of sin and had no reason to weep. This is the tree, the clerics say, that became the cross. This is the tree used to pierce the buried body of a witch through the heart to prevent her from rising again.

Watching my lock sway in the wind, I thought about the elixirs and unguents, the scoldings and catechisms I have been offered as a way of living into some shape and form and voice twisted away from my own. The Doctrine of Signatures promises God created Herbes for the use of men, and hath given them particular Signatures, whereby a man may read the use of them. It promises you can find a resemblance of yourself that will be your medicine somewhere in these woods.

Among those old bowers it felt then as if a metaphor of myself separated back into its two halvesthere was me and there was the woman I have been afraid of becoming looking back. The vision perhaps was magic or perhaps it is just what the words do if you let yourself say them. Aspen tree, aspen tree, the old spell goes, I prithee, shiver and shake instead of me.

A day may come, if I live this life as well and courageously as I hope I can, when a tribunal decides to stake a branch into my old heart to hold me down. As if it werent rooted there already. I will not bow down just because some man who withered a fig is passing by. I am going to spill every last leaf into the ear of this endless wind.

FOR LYN COOPER (19512013)

T he settlement of Lisbet Nypans estate was assessed at eighty-five silver coinsquite a comfortable living for a wife and a tenant farmer. Their wealth came from Lisbets practice of healing muscle aches and rheumatism by conducting rituals of salt.

When questioned, she was only too glad to explain her methods. This, after all, was her business and had been for over forty successful years.

She would lay salts over the body of the afflicted and smooth them with massaging hands as she prayed:

Jesus rode over the moors, he stood forth

and made the leg, Lord in flesh, skin, bones

ever since as before. Gods word. Amen.

Then she brushed all that salt onto a plate and either she ate the salt or the patient did. One woman testified that Lisbet cured her pains and agony by giving her a potion of soil, water, and salt. She said this not with malice but gratitude. And confusion. Had Lisbet sinned? Had she? It had never occurred to her that this could be wrong.