Jade Hurter | Of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made.

Jade Hurter is the author of the chapbook Slut Songs (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2017). She was a finalist in the 2016 Tennessee Williams Poetry Contest, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa, and her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia Poetry Review, Tinderbox, Passages North, New South, and elsewhere.

Also by Jade Hurter: Slut Songs Three Poems Moon Song

April 2018

Jade Hurter

Of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made

All language lifted from the title chapter of the Malleus Maleficarum, the most well-known manual for hunting witches, published in 1487.

there are three kinds of witches it is common to all of them to practise carnal copulation with devils a trembling in the hands the devil sexes his power bodies all her wishes we first tried to seduce her by night she rode through an illusion of devils we set our snares a secret truth: certain witches adore the command of virtue easily persuaded to consent a young man drinks from the skin through the mouth of someone else he promises surrender of body and soul approach her gently, exacting only small things that may gradually lead to greater things the heart the lips and the Angel despair

This poem is the first in a series of erasures I have been working on, all of which are taken from the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, a manual for hunting witches written by the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and first published in 1487 in Germany. For 200 years, it was second in sales only to the Bible. I have long been interested in the places where femininity and evil coalesce, and for Kramer, the woman is a natural source of evil, a porous medium for Satan to enter. According to the text, women who live independently or embrace their sexuality are most likely to be witches, because they lack the tempering influence of stable masculinity. In this poem, I wanted to use Kramer's own words to show the monstrosity of those who would (and did) torture women accused of being witches; basically, flipping the monstrosity described in the text on its head.

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