The Eye of the Hagstone

Kathryn Nuernberger
| Memoir

 

For a long time I couldn’t understand Brian and I couldn’t understand myself. Anger raised the veil. I cursed him with a packed bag in my hand. I said terrible things that made us really separate, that made it easy to see myself as separate in a way that women, so often known only as wives and mothers, have to fight to know. Once I understood myself alone, I understood him, maybe for the first time. It felt possible after that to know other people too.

 

Hagstones emerge from boundary sites like caves and are powerful for being portholes born of portholes. In the hagstone’s eye we can see Isobel Gowdie for the bard that she was. Her confessions employ “powerful and vivid verbs, often in multiples: the Devil was ‘beating and scurgeing’; elf bulls were ‘crowtting and skrylling’; and the elf boys were ‘whytting and dighting’.” In the eye of the hagstone we see that so-familiar figure of the slumlord in the form of John Hay, the Laird of Park, trying to distract from and forestall his inevitable bankruptcy by crying witchcraft in the direction of anyone who grumbled at the sight of his face. We see Harry Forbes, the insolvent minister about to lose his congregation to changing theological tides and further undermined by credible rumors that he had an adulterous relationship with a servant. The trial cannot hold its glamour and we see this communion of judges, all deranged with fear they might lose a kind of power no one should have in the first place, pointing in the direction of persons they cannot, will not, see at all.
My hagstone emerged from the Eminence dolomite, formed by a chemical solution in carbonate rock. One way to understand the magical properties of these stones is to say that water moving through the cave was charged into a weak carbonic acid that never filtered back to a neutral pH. I have always preferred spells for dreams and visions to love spells. Though I am charmed by the love spell’s promise of human connection, I want something more powerful than another tepid rom-com. Charles Leland recorded a spell to activate hagstones in his 19th century survey of European agrarian shamanic practices, Etruscan Roman Remains, which I have whispered into the ear of my stone:

In the name of great Saint Peter
And for Saint Blausius’s sake,
By this stone I fain would see,
What form the spirits take.

 

In that year when I felt myself separating, I was desperate for a vision. But I couldn’t tell in what direction of separation or desperation I was headed. It seemed almost funny to buy a volume called On Lies, Secrets, and Silence at the used bookstore. Though it was no joke I was hoping someone—maybe a philosopher or feminist theorist, a flyter or a witch—would give me permission to have the affair or go insane or disappear into a mysticism I didn’t really believe in.

Kathryn Nuernberger has written three poetry collections: RUE, The End of Pink, and Rag & Bone, as well as the essay collection Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. The Witch of Eye, an essay collection about witches and witch trials, which is forthcoming in 2021. Awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and “notable” essays in the Best American series.

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