THE WITCH OF EYE

An award-winning poet wonders what it means to be a witch.

There is an idea that those who describe themselves as witches are following traditions that can be traced back to an ancient, woman-positive, nature-based religion—and that those who suppressed its practices were afraid of anyone who didn’t fit neatly within a patriarchal society. This is the version of the past Nuernberger was seeking when she first started reading histories of witchcraft and the transcripts of witch trials. What she discovered was more complex. As she explores the lives of women accused of witchcraft, the author investigates the relations among their experiences, her own life, and contemporary American society, and she brings both a poet’s intuition and a philosopher’s insight to the text. For example, writing about Agnes Waterhouse, the first woman executed for witchcraft in England, Nuernberger quotes Foucault and mentions Frazier v. Cupp—in which the Supreme Court ruled that police can use deception when interviewing a suspect—as she considers the phenomenon of false confession. As Nuernberger shows, many of these women were often broken by torture and forced to confess to their “crimes,” a process that reflected Christian ideas about evil prevalent during their time rather than relics of a matriarchal prehistory. There are a few exceptions to this pattern, though, and the author ends with one of them. As the “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, Marie Laveau (1801-1881) has been transformed into tourist kitsch. There is no question that Laveau practiced rootwork and other spiritual modalities informed by African and Native American beliefs, and it would be wrong to discount the value of these practices among communities of color in the 19th-century South. However, as Nuernberger explains, Laveau also possessed a keen understanding of how to work within a legal system designed to make even free people of color live like slaves. As it turns out, her greatest magic may have been her mastery of property law.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, entirely fascinating.