Spassky at a Safe Distance, Issue 17
“The Other Half”
1: Introduction
2: Spassky’s Assorted Somethings
3: Bonus + Short Story of the Week
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Witches – aren’t they enchanting? Some would say spellbinding.
I wouldn’t.
Not to stir the cauldron (really, hats off to them for their mythological longevity) but witches and me are like witches and water – we have very little regard for one another, and one is at great risk of disintegration if one comes in intimate contact with the other.
Fortunately, I know someone who really does like witches, and is giddy to tell you about them.
Readers of Spassky 9 will no doubt welcome him with open arms. Just don’t expect him to welcome you back with open arms, or with any arms at all. Alfie Betical, in his 150th year at St. John’s Home for Bodily Displaced Persons, has found a calling for witch-hunting. But, seeing as his alphabetical incarnation disallows him the use of pitchforks and torches (of even the smaller dimensions), he has adopted the old proverb of “If You Can’t – Coach!”, and, assuming the offices of Salesman and Witch-Hunter-Safari-Guide, will instruct you in how to detect witches, what tools with which witches should be disposed of, and the price by which he will part with these – invariably – priceless instruments. Some would probably have found their place in Betical’s Great Exhibition of Victorian Inventions if only they had been invented two hundred years after they were.
Without further introduction, here’s Alfie.
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Starting right off, I will ask you to please weather your wallet. Go on – I will wait.
Splendid; now, that wallet will see a great deal of utility before our CONversation is over, so nevermind putting it back again – in fact, to even begin with this delectable [brief intrusion: Alfie went on to try and sell you a 400 year old pamphlet for about the price of a colonoscopy on Uranus (not even adjusted for inflation). I confess, it is a useful pamphlet, and no good witch hunt is complete without it; I’ve linked it (“The Discovery of Witches”) as this Issue’s Bonus. Carry on, Alfie!]
I feel as though a part of my soul has been ripped out and replaced with something slimy and unpleasant. Is this… indigestion?
Oh dear…
…
“The Discovery of Witches”, by our lord Matthew Hopkins, from the year of our lord, 1647, has a great deal of wisdom in it. It practically brims with the stuff. It is, one could say, the witch-hunter’s Bible. It is also very short; he answers 14 “Queries” [Intrusion: Hopkins probably didn’t want to stop at 13 for – perhaps – unsurprising reasons, all things considered. Naturally, if he’d read Spassky 13 these fears would have quite subsided…].
Oh, my bowels!
…
Right! that’s right, the book is short. It is very short. I suppose it was intentionally cut short, so that a witch’s question of ‘Why on Earth am I being burned alive, you monsters!! I only did rudimentary arithmetic!!!’ could be answered with speed and satisfaction before she became one with the troposphere.
But I feel there is one item I should prime you on, and that is Hopkins’s language. Here is a supplement of it: “[…]and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him.”
To be perfectly frank (michael and george), I haven’t the faintest notion why it was written that way. Modern English had since long come about, and was even used in the King James Bible (1611). So there was, really, no reason for the strange spellings and awkwards syntax – the book made about the same amount of sense in 1647 as it does today.
Anyway – how do we kill witches? To kill a witch, it is absolutely paramount to first identify one. To go about this, Hopkins, when faced with a suspect, would ask himself three questions (that occasionally split into more questions), and acted according to the answers:
Question the First: Doth the suspecte loouk dodgie? Hath she a “Fishy” aspect? Iffe so, doth the subject have fins or gills? Iffe so, ascertaine whether thou art not, inne fact, looking into an aquarium.
Question the Second: Doth the suspecte have odd birthmarkse or a third teat [he wasn’t very clear on what he meant by “teat”, I guess, he means “breast”]? Iffe not, complimente her necklace, andde make it seem as though thou wert looking only at that the whole time.
Question the Third: Doth the suspecte float?
Hopkins had developed a system for investigating the first two: Torture. This was so effective that suspects, who had not been witches to begin with, would – after some starvation and deprivation of sleep – passionately confess their witchery.
And as for that last one, it was entirely the product of Hopkins’s genius. He explained why witches don’t sink, so: “[…]Witches deny their baptisme when they Covenant with the Devill, water being the sole element thereof, and therefore saith he, when they be heaved into the water, the water refuseth to receive them into her bosome, (they being such Miscreants to deny their baptisme) and suffers them to float[…]”.
This method did, however, have the occasional, “fluke”.
Hopkins had long been – unjustly, we true witch hunters say – suspected of being a wizard. “How else,” said the degenerate degenerates of degeneracy, “could he have such intimate knowledge of witches?”. Despite using a quarter of “The Discovery of Witches” to defend himself, and routing all suspicion, Hopkins was sent to trial for wizardry. Getting nowhere in verbal arguments, the court decided to simply put Hopkins to his own test and pick the matter up from there. I fear a witch must have put a levitation-charm on poor Hopkins, for he did not sink; perhaps the water was shallow. Whatever the true explanation, our lord was convicted for wizardry and executed.
A minute of silence, please.
To Kill a Witch:
Convicting the witch of witchery is really the hard bit; the Dip In the Pond approach was highly esteemed in Hopkins’s time, but is rather too traditional to be any fun anymore.
Having existed in an alphabetical form for so long, outside of time and space, I have rather lost track of what century it is. I remember Witch Trials beginning to go “out of print” as I began to go into it, so all the prosecuting might resemble more of an “uphill struggle” in this century (whatever that may be), than in Hopkins’s.
The methods for killing witches, however, are timeless; may I direct your attention to this device; if you turn it upside-down, it can, with some effort, be inserted–[in the interest of this periodical’s continued publication, I will leave this issue here…Damn it, Alfie! Aquatic Velocipedes will never be the same…]
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Bonus: ”The Discovery of Witches” (Matthew Hopkins, 1647)
Story of the Week: ”The Hand” (Guy de Maupassant, 1883)