Dancing in the Palm of His Hand

dancing in the palm of his hand

A novel of the witchcraft persecutions in 17th century Germany

annamarie beckel

A novel of the witchcraft persecutions in 17th century Germany

annamarie beckel

Breakwater Books Ltd.
100 Water Street P.O. Box 2188
St. John's NL A1C 6E6
www.breakwaterbooks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Beckel, Annamarie L.

Dancing in the palm of his hand / Annamarie Beckel.

ISBN 1-55081-217-3  ISBN-13 978-1-55081-217-6

1. Trials (Witchcraft)--Germany--Fiction. I. Title.

PS8553.E29552D35 2005  813'.54  C2005-902612-X

Copyright © 2005 Annamarie Beckel

Design: Rhonda Molloy

Editor: Tamara Reynish

A
LL
R
IGHTS
R
ESERVED
. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical— without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or storing in an information retrieval system of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6. This applies to classroom usage as well.

We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.

Printed in Canada.

Historians estimate that between 80,000 and 200,000 people, 75 percent of them women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe between 1500 and 1750.

This novel

is dedicated to the memory of the innocents who suffered.

“A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of the Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy.”

–Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, 1486,
Malleus Maleficarum
, known in the Holy Roman Empire as
Der Hexenhammer, The Hammer of Witches.

Dancing in the Palm of His Hand
is a work of fiction. Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg and his chancellor, Johann Brandt, lived and ruled in early 17th century Würzburg, and historians estimate that von Ehrenberg burned 900 witches between 1623 and 1631. Throughout the novel, characters quote from theologians' and jurists' treatises on witches. These treatises are real historical documents:
Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum
(Peter Binsfeld, 1589),
De la Demonomanie des sorciers
(Jean Bodin, 1580),
Discours des sorciers
(Henri Boquet, 1602),
Disquisitionum Magicarum
(Martin Delrio, 1599),
Malleus Maleficarum
(Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, 1486),
Demonolatreiae
(Nicolas Remy, 1595), and
De Praestigiis Daemonum
(Johann Weyer, 1563). With the exception of
De Praestigiis Daemonum
, which was written by Johann Weyer, an opponent of the witch persecutions, these documents were the guides for the witch hunters. Moreover, the universities in the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and France regularly issued “opinions” on legal procedures in witch trials, which in the Holy Roman Empire were guided by the
Constitutio Criminalis Carolina
, popularly known as the “Carolina Code,” the basic criminal law code formalized under Emperor Charles V in 1532.

Witch trials existed during one of the most creative and dynamic periods in the history of Europe. The theological and legal aspects of “demonology” were considered serious intellectual pursuits, and these horrific and misogynistic treatises on witchcraft existed side by side with brilliant Renaissance art and literature, with the works of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Galileo, Montaigne, and Descartes.

They conjured me into being. Floods of pious words were my birth waters. The Dominicans served as midwives, the Jesuits wet-nurses. The black ink flowing from their quills was the bitter milk I suckled. The dark stream sustains me even now, giving me life and strength
.

They call me Lucifer, Prince of Devils. The Antichrist. I am as real to them as the Virgin's Son. And nearly as powerful. I bring fire and hail, death and pestilence, impotence and barrenness. I take the shape of a handsome man, an alluring woman. I seduce the unrighteous. So they say.

I am awed by the number of souls they claim I have won. Yet, I care not for a single one of them. So they say.

The end-time is near, and I am at war with God. In the dark of night, deep in the forest, my army gathers around me. We desecrate the host, trample with cloven hoof all that is sacred. We make an ointment from the flesh of unbaptized babies, use it to fly through the air, to kill and to maim. So they say.

They have granted me extraordinary powers, almost unlimited. I am nearly an equal to God, they say. Yet, because no Dominican or Jesuit can find a pathway around his belief that God is omnipotent, they say I can act only with God's permission.

I should think such a notion offensive to God.

People began gathering at dawn, just as the cathedral bells rang out. Eva watched from the window as men and women streamed past the bakery on their way to the town hall. Everyone came: craftsmen and journeymen, merchants, priests and monks, peddlers and beggars, town councilmen, peasants from outside the Würzburg city walls. Some brought children: little boys astride their fathers' shoulders, babies squirming in their mothers' arms, younger sisters and brothers clinging to the hands of older siblings.

Eva did not join them. She tried not to hear the trial, but the town hall was only a few buildings away from the bakery on
Domstrasse
, and the voice that read out the
shrift
was loud and resonant. The reading of the women's crimes lasted nearly two hours: they had turned away from God and signed a pact with the Devil, attended the sabbath where they fornicated with the Devil and his demons, caused illness and death among their neighbours, curdled milk and caused grain to spoil, raised up fierce storms with lightning and hail to ruin the crops, caused men's members to go limp and women's wombs to close or their babies to die within, dug up the graves of unbaptized infants to make a flying ointment from their flesh.

The voice and the crimes chilled Eva and made her heart quicken. She tied and retied the lacing of her bodice, trying to relieve the tightness she felt within. She kept herself busy and distracted by standing behind the counter, taking people's
kreuzers
and
pfennigs
in exchange for the heavy dark loaves the journeymen
had baked before first light. She tried to distract her daughter as well, to keep her from hearing and from seeing. Katharina was too young, only eleven. She would have nightmares, and the child was already plagued with disturbing dreams and visions.

No matter what she did, however, Eva's thoughts returned again and again to the three accused women. She had no need to hear the voice. Leaflets listing the women and their crimes, shown in etchings for those who could not read, had appeared in the marketplace the day before. She'd not been surprised to see an old woman, a beggar, among the accused, but she'd been shocked to see Frau Basser's name – and her crimes. She was the wife of a prosperous tavern-keeper just down the street, a plump jovial woman who'd known everyone in Würzburg. She'd come to the Rosen Bakery for her family's bread, and Eva had thought her a good woman, a pious woman, a woman she'd never have suspected of witchcraft. Never. But Eva had read the litany of crimes Frau Basser had confessed to. She'd even admitted to poisoning one of the tavern's patrons.

And there was a girl, too, just sixteen, only five years older than Katharina.

The bakery was vacant now; everyone was outside, watching. Eva heard loud cheers and knew that old Judge Steinbach, in his tremulous voice, had rendered a verdict. The accused had been condemned. Eva leaned against the counter and tried to breathe, but there was not enough air. The roar of the crowd grew louder, and Eva found herself drawn yet again to the window. The enraged mob, waving fists and shouting curses, followed the slow-moving cart as it lurched through the street. The monks, in sombre black robes, chanted, warning that all that had been predicted was coming to pass; the end of the world was near.

The crowd surrounding the tumbrel parted slightly, and Eva saw the three wretched women behind the wooden bars: the girl, barely old enough to be considered a woman, Frau Basser, and the
old beggar. A priest sat with them, a small black book clutched in his hands. Frau Basser leaned close to him and shouted, but her words were lost in the boisterous din. Eva's throat closed, and she had to look away. The women had been stripped to the waist, their heads shaved, their arms bound behind their backs. Their pale skin was mottled blue with cold. Blood streaked their bare mutilated breasts.