What The Witching Tide Gets Right.

A historical novel that understands its past better than most.

Hi everyone!

Since Helene arrived here in Western North Carolina, I’ve not had time to think about the original focus of this newsletter: seeing shit in books, specifically historical fiction that I both love to read and love/loathe to write.

But I’ve had to take a break to read a bit this week to avoid complete burnout, and one left a particularly powerful impression.

Hope you enjoy!

The Tides of Life

I had planned a whole series of Halloween-related posts, as it’s my favorite holiday.

Well, best laid plans, etc etc. But I ended up having one of my library holds come through for me right around Halloween: Margaret Meyer’s 2023 novel The Witching Tide.

Based on a series of witch trials that took place across multiple towns in England’s East Anglia from 1645-47, The Witching Tide does the best job of any book I’ve recently read — and I’ve read a few — to convey just how easily it would have been for early modern Europeans to believe in witches.

How? Primarily by taking their religious beliefs seriously, even her protagonists. Religious belief infuses every part of everyone’s lives in this period of European history. Multiple war are tearing England (and soon Scotland and Ireland) and Europe apart as people fight for their preferred form of Christianity to win. Because what’s at stake, after all, is not even earthly power, but eternal salvation or damnation.

Let’s look at some of the ways that Meyer succeeds in weaving in these religious beliefs so well.

When Witches Are Real

First off, it’s in the Bible, the Ur-text that guides life in that time and place. Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Meyer quotes it directly, albeit from the mouths of some men who are harassing the main protagonist, a mute middle-aged woman named Martha Hallybread:

“You might know how Mogg loves his Bible. And on the matter of witches, it says this: Suffer not—”

“—a witch to live,” Mogg said, thrusting out his worn book so forcefully that Herry had to move aside. “That’s what it says, directly. On the matter of witches. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ he intoned, in his most sonorous tenor. In the air between them he made the sign of the Cross.”¹

Unfortunately, the Bible is not as clear as to how to tell who is a witch. That leaves a giant space in which people can pour their fears and uncertainties about the world.

How do you know who is a witch? That’s where it gets tricky. The Devil, you see, is the ultimate deceiver. And his witch minions, well, they can lie with ease. They can say one thing straight to your face and do another at night, in the dark.

You cannot trust their words. So, what can you trust? Well, you look for signs of the devil. Strange marks, strange afflictions. In The Witching Tide, moles become nipples on which imps suck.

One of the things I appreciate in The Witching Tide is how Meyer subverts the idea of the persecuted disabled person. The protagonist, Martha Hallybread, has been mute her whole life, a condition unique in her small village. She speaks with her hands, and those motions are threatening to those who don’t understand.

It’s easy to see Martha in the beginning as a sitting duck, as the woman surely bound for the gallows. She’s disabled. Her mother sold her body for money and met a bad end. She is a midwife and healer with a small herb garden in the yard of her employers, Kit and Agnes Crozier. (The name Crozier, which is a Catholic bishop’s staff, is a pointed choice in this heavily Puritan England.)

But thankfully, Meyer is not that simple. She makes us better understand the kinds of conditions where witch panic can take over because Martha herself — the person we are meant to identify with and root for — starts to doubt longtime friends and allies as, one by one, they fall to accusations and are dragged off to jail.

Consider this passage, which takes place before the witch hunts have even started. Here are Martha’s thoughts as she holds a deformed, dying child after his birth:

He must have been cursed, to be born so ill-formed.

Her bowels writhed. How dreadful it was, how unworthy, to harbour this singular terror — primitive, ancient — that among them, these women, her friends, there could be a witch. The thought spread, consuming, eclipsing all things of grace in the world, dawn light on a pearly sea, the various golds of an autumn harvest, the miracle of a newborn, the kindness of neighbours. Which of them was it? Which?²

It was widely believed at the time that what a woman was looking at when a child was conceived could be stamped on the child, resulting in a monstrous birth. (As a result, people tried to ensure that there were beautiful pictures in strategic places in the bedchamber.)

Consider this delightfully ridiculous woodcut from a 1617 pamphlet about “a prodigious and Monstrous Child”:

(credit: Electra Street)

While at its heart these beliefs about conception about about the anxiety around paternity — if the child looks like its father, then it can be more easily determined if a woman has been faithful — it did stretch to ideas that thinking on evil things, or being cursed by a witch, could deform a child.

And by showing us how quickly Martha is willing to entertain the idea that her friends might be witches before the witch hunters even appear on the scene, Meyer makes it easier to understand when Martha’s neighbors starting doubting her in turn.

As historian Mikki Brock explained in a Halloween “Witchcraft Support” video from Wired:

The belief system meant that it was very rational to believe in witches. Think about it — early modern life is hard. We all live, by comparison, in homes with thousands of candles, and we have thousands of horses at our disposal if you have a car, and we never worry about what we’re going to eat³, and we have vaccines and all of those things. We don’t have to work in the same way to find explanation for misfortune. And I think if you understand that, then you can’t quite as easily dismiss the fears of witchcraft that were going on at the time period.

EXACTLY.

Another way that Meyer helps us understand these people is somewhat more subtle. The Witching Tide’s sections are named after the four humors, the dominant medical theory at the time. This theory dated from the second century CE and was the work of a Greek physician named Galen, himself heavily influenced by Hippocrates, as well as Aristotle and Plato.

He held that the body contained four fluids, or humors: yellow bile (hot and dry), blood (hot and wet), black bile (cold and dry), and phlegm (cold and wet). If you were ill, it was because these four humors were out of balance. Too much phlegm? You were not only prone to wet coughs but also depression, or melancholy. Too hot? Your blood is up.

(A fantastic 16th-century German woodcut that even includes the sexes. Men are hot, women cold. The addition of the Zodiac signs only underscores the excellent science behind this theory.)

It was truly medieval (and early modern), especially in the treatments. To balance the humors, your options were either to add something — often in the form of enemas — or try to remove something through blood letting or emetics to make patients vomit. It was enough to avoid the doctor altogether.

Without germ theory, endless plagues seem more like divine judgment than the act of invisible viruses or bacteria. Without an understanding of how weather systems worked, floods or crop failures seemed the act of an angry Creator punishing His people for failing him.

In other words, evil must be afoot.

And so you look for people to blame. Since it’s rarely the people in power — the wealthy, the ones with penises — who play the role of scapegoat, you look for the disposable. Women, of course. But not just any women. Poor women. Women with disabilities who require assistance. Women who are ugly. Women who sell their bodies to survive.

In actuality, few midwives and healers were targeted (as Brock points out), because they were useful. That doesn’t meant they couldn’t be caught up in the hysteria. But they were rarely the first, or even the tenth, to go down.

Meyer also understands this truth and weaves it into the novel in ways I won’t spoil here.

She’s also just a great writer, evoking the genuine physical horror of the situation. The stench of the jails, the sleep deprivation and forced walking until the soles of feet bleed with every step. The fetid water that is withheld to the point of near death, leaving the women to recycle the little urine they can squeeze out to wet their cracked and bleeding lips.

There’s also just beautiful writing. Phrases like “the mist seemed to clot and fold,” or “surly green waves streamed onto the beach, leaving drifts of scum like curdled milk that blew across the street.”⁴

But the most important aspect of this book is how much it humanizes this time of our history. By having Martha question the loyalties and purity of others, and by having them do the same, we are reminding of how quickly we can turn on each other when afraid, when unsure what to believe, when desperate to save ours skins while equally worried about damning our souls if we sacrifice our morals.

In other words, it holds up a window to the fragility of human reason then and now.

I could say so much more about this aspect of The Witching Tide.

But I’ll just leave you with this thought. After Helene, people genuinely believed that governments controlled the weather. People still believe that vaccines cause autism even though the paper that “proved” it was deeply flawed scientifically and has been completely retracted.

By more accurately portraying the beliefs of the past, Meyer reminds us that we really haven’t strayed that far from them as we want to think. And that is a crucial, crucial point.

Because if we don’t understand how far we’ve fallen into fear mongering and dehumanizing each other, it only stops when the chaos and finger pointing threatens to sweep everyone away, and we’re suddenly forced to snap out of it.

But by that point, too many lives have already been taken. And those who remain are forever physically, morally, and spiritually damaged.

*

If I’m honest, it’s the moments when this book becomes too on the nose that I blanch at it. There are some words that come out of the mouths of these 17th-century women that seem far more fitting at a modern-day feminist rally.

Here’s a beautiful example, presenting as a thought of Martha’s but truly a moment when it’s clearly Margaret Meyer speaking to us:

We are bitch. We are chit. We are slut. We are wench, harlot, bawd, madam, jezebel, whore, daemon, sorceress, doxy, cunt, slattern, jade, hag, Madonna, quean, tart, sow, vixen, bee, shrew, bird, mutton, maiden, harpy, succuba, dame, mistress, hellion, crone. We are repugnant to Nature, contumely to God; We are monstrous, legion; We are too many, We are never enough.⁵

Beautiful, for sure. And powerful. And true. But it does not ring true to me as the thought of a mute servant woman living in 1645.

I can forgive these moments because Meyer does so much else better than other people who have tried to take on the European and English witch hunts. She recognizes that witches were only hanged in England; they were burned in Scotland and especially in Europe. She knows that not everyone was killed; people were found innocent.

And even a lot of the liberties she takes make literary sense. For instance, compressing a series of events that took place over two years into a febrile week, ramping up the intensity and the claustrophobic sense of dread.

For all the horror in it, The Witching Tide is neither a horror novel nor a downer to read. I devoured it in two days, eager to see who made it through and how.

And if you’re looking to understand how every day people from that period think, I haven’t seen a better example. (Wolf Hall’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is too singular a character for it to feel like a good portrait of average folks. It also takes place in that rarified slice of the court.)

Even so, The Witching Tide is still too secular in its rendering; it does not completely embrace the idea that Protestant Christianity (with some dangerous and clandestine Catholics sprinkled in) was truly the foundation of thought and action in 1645 England.

Meyer also nearly completely circumvents the war, gesturing to it briefly as something that’s happening elsewhere in England. On the whole, this is bullshit. The English Civil War — also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, since it did involve Scotland and Ireland (and Wales, which was never a kingdom) — killed about 2.5% of the population and wreaked true havoc across the country. East Anglia may have been comparatively spared, and I understand why Meyer realized she couldn’t manage to weave the two together in a single coherent piece. But excising it completely would be like trying to write a 2024 election novel laser-focused on issues of immigration but without mentioning the economy. Especially because the wars were, at their heart, about religion, and just how Protestant England was going to be.

The anxieties of the war — still ongoing in 1645, still not won by either side — played a massive role in creating witch panic. About half the country was your enemy at this moment. People weren’t just taking sides, they were lining up across battlefields and shooting each other down. They were sieging towns as people starved. They were committing what we call war crimes, shooting people dead after they surrendered.

But that’s a longer discussion for another time, when I have the brain space and time for that context.

Helene Resources

Pro bono mental health assistance for survivors. Feel free to send to people you know who might be willing to add their names.

A gargantuan resource guide, county by county. Shows how you can help and find information.

People Finder List and Form. These Google docs are for people to check on missing folks and to add them to the database if they’re not on it yet. Scroll through it, folks — there’s a lot of people still missing.

If you are still looking for someone, please let me know. I’ll try to find the appropriate Facebook group and place out feelers.

Cardinals at the Window Album for WNC Relief. If you like R.E.M, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, Jeff Tweedy, Gillian Welch, The Hold Steady, The War on Drugs, The Mountain Goats, The Decemberists, Phish, and more, then you’ll love this 136-track digital album for $10 and up. All proceeds are split between BeLoved Asheville, Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR). Lots of previously unreleased live tracks (R.E.M.’s is from 1988!), and some songs (covers, I believe) recorded just for this album.

Buy it for the ones you love (including yourself). Pay as much as you can. Spread the word to all of your indie rock friends.

Love Asheville From Afar. The holiday gift-giving season is coming! Do yourself a favor and get all of your gifts in a one-stop shop featuring Asheville businesses that desperately need money to survive the slow winter season. From coffee and food to art of all shapes, to simple donations, you can get a range of thoughtful gifts for just about anyone in your life.

Help our amazing mobile vet get a new van! This one is personal. We use PAWS Mobile Vet for our two cats, Mochi and Mini, because they get stressed enough in a carrier on the way to the vet. But more importantly, PAWS offers low-cost neuters and low-cost vet care for individuals and for organizations, including our beloved black cat rescue Binx’s Home for Black Cats.

Even though their van has been destroyed, they’ve been out in the community every day volunteering.

If you’re, say, thinking about getting a gift for me, then no gift would please me more than helping Dr. Dragon and Heather get their van up and running again.

Recommendations

The Witching Tide. It’s genuinely great. I can see what the fuss was about. The longer I sit with it, the more I’ll find both to celebrate and to pick. And it’s no Wolf Hall. But that’s too tall an order for us mere mortals.

Mikki Brock’s Witchcraft Support. So fun! And informative.

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: 퍼플키스(PURPLE KISS), “Ponzona”

I think I’ve already used this video, but hey — no K-pop song I love has a witchier vibe.

FYI: Ponzoña means “poison” in Spanish, another connection to the European witch hunts from the 14th to 17th centuries that, sadly, murdered hundreds of thousands of women.

1. The Witching Tide, 97.

2. Idem, 18.

3. (First world scenario for sure.)

4. Idem, 4, 216.

5. Idem, 292.