Hammer of Witches

Portland State University bought the Malleus Malficarum from a Parisian rare book store. The infamous “hammer of witches” provided civil authorities guidelines for identifying, trying and punishing (torturing/killing) witches without falling victim to their spells.

One of my many odd jobs while living in Paris in my 20s decades ago was to translate volumes of Santeria from Caribbean Spanish to French. I was in an ancient, rambling six-bedroom apartment off of St. German des Pres. It was filled floor to ceiling with ancient volumes. The only furniture was the desk where I worked on a (then modern) Mac computer, looking down over a courtyard.

The owner of the apartment had been in charge of curating books about witchcraft, magic and pagan culture for the Centre Pompidou. There had been some sort of dispute and he had left with his entire library, many of which had been in his aristocratic French family for generations. They were now crammed in this apartment with me, in no apparent order, with no visible means of preservation — even though many of them dated back to a pre-printing-press time when monks wrote out books by hand.

He was an older, plump, balding Frenchman. His girlfriend was a beautiful American twenty-four-year-old redhead. The Frenchman was hopelessly ADHD, a true creative, wandering amongst his many Parisian and country properties in a state of confusion, with a privileged disdain for things like money or tradesmen’s bills. The girl, despite her youth, managed his entire life.

She and I would go to the Arab baths not far from the Bastille, where we would lounge by the pools and spas getting ancient mud treatments and being pummeled and scraped. We would emerge glowing, in the grey Parisian winter sky, and return to the vast dingy apartment, although she would never enter.

I would stay up all night tap-tapping on the Mac keyboard, wearing fingerless gloves, smoking Gitanes, watching my breath in the air, translating things like “como hacer un ser humano”.

When I read about PSU’s purchase, I wondered if the Hammer of Witches had been in that great library. I vaguely remember the old man excitedly sputtering in French amongst his stacks “marteau des socieres, marteau des socieres, tu a encore disparu!” He was trying to find something quite remarkable, 600 years old, to impress his red headed girlfriend’s blonde translator friend.

I also remember when it all fell apart. It was spring, The books were confiscated, the doors to the apartment locked, the red head disappeared.

The man haunted the touristic cafes of the quartier Latin for several months, looking more and more crazed and homeless. When he could catch my eye he would pull on my coat and beg for me to put him in touch with his Elizabeth.

Now I imagine Elizabeth escaped far away somewhere exotic, the Hammer of Witches safely in her possession, and witches everywhere safe from its harms.