The Witch of Cologne

From then on the girl devoted herself to her studies. She learnt that the Zohar contained a description of the essence of God, known in the kabbalistic text as Ein Sof—‘without end’—an explanation which deliberately encompassed God’s lack of boundaries in both time and space. She read how the kabbalists believed that Ein Sof interacted with the universe through ten emanations from this essence known as the ten Sefirot. The Zohar itself was divided into ten parts, one on each Sefirot, each section opening with a gilded representation of the emanation. The book began with the highest and worked down to the lowest, although the Sefirot themselves were not considered to be separate deities but intimately a part of God. Their configuration formed an illustration of the Divine connected in an instant with everything in the universe, including humanity. This idea captivated the young girl and, eager for more knowledge, she studied the manuscript late into each night, learning how all the good and all the evil man did resonated through the Sefirot and affected the entire universe up to and including God himself. She memorised the entire text, then began to introduce kabbalistic talismans into her own life—to protect her father, to make rain, to end a storm. On each occasion she recorded the cause and effect in a small diary she kept hidden with the tome. This journal was the forerunner of her scientific discipline, the training for later research.

Ruth decided that she would draw on magical powers to avenge her cousin’s execution. If the Jewish elders of Prague could summon up a golem—a giant made from the river mud of the Moldau—she could do something similar. Inspired by the lingering heat of her dead cousin’s fury, the bond by which she kept Aaron’s memory alive, she started to make a plan. A witness herself to the terrible power of the she-demon Lilith, she had hidden behind a curtain and watched her mother bleed to death after giving birth to a tiny but perfectly formed dead baby boy. If Lilith could strike down two lives so easily, who knew what else she could do if summoned? The young girl decided to inflict the evil spirit upon the authorities of Cologne.

To prepare, Ruth fasted for several days to ensure her body was pure enough to evoke the spirits. Feigning an optimistic disposition, she tricked Rosa into believing that her lack of appetite and strangely pale complexion were the result of an unnamed, unrequited infatuation. It was a notion the nursemaid found perfectly acceptable but one which the young girl found absurd.

Ruth’s plan was to wear an amulet for warding off Lilith but to reflect the lettering backwards through a looking glass to cause the reverse effect: the amulet would summon Lilith instead of repulsing her. She also decided to write the incantation in her own menstrual blood, believing this to be so profane it could not but attract the female demon.

The night of the waxing moon came. Ruth waited until the rest of the household was sleeping, then, after lighting four black candles placed at the points of the compass around her bedroom, she sat naked before a large curved looking glass and began to chant the kabbalistic incantations she had memorised to put herself into a trance.

At the stroke of midnight Ruth found herself staring at her reflection in the dim looking glass. Her dark hair was loose over her shoulders, the amulet—a handmade card with the three angels, Snwy, Snsnwy and Smnglf, drawn on it—hung between her budding breasts. Closing her eyes she repeated over and over the different names she knew for the demon: Lilith, Karina, Tabi’a, the harlot, the wicked, the false, the grandmother of Satan—until, her head spinning, she began to feel as if her body was lifting from the ground and she had started to float. Her soul streamed out from the top of her head, beyond the ceiling, up into the night sky like light from a thousand candles.

Just at the moment she was terrified that the sensation might be death, a noxious odour swept through the room. It was the smell of sulphur and decay, and under it lay a sickly musk, piercingly sweet, that reminded Ruth of old roses. She opened her eyes.

At first, gazing transfixed into the misty glass, she thought she had imagined the slight movement in the shadows. But as she stared harder, a twitching bluish-white form came suddenly into focus.

It was hideous. The creature, twisted like a crippled thing, lay on its side covered in its own slimy ooze. About seven feet in length, it had the upper form of a woman. A blindingly beautiful maiden with pale blue skin and large silver nipples, she was utterly without hair, her scalp an immaculate shiny dome. But what was most terrifying was her limbs. They ran from her sex into three long tails that Ruth recognised as eels. The writhing, shimmering, marish lengths snaked blindly across the wooden floor.

Paralysed with horror the young girl could not move, could not utter a sound. Lilith, with a violent convulsion, lashed her whole length about the room so that she could lift her colossal face. Gleaming aquamarine in the candlelight, she glared at her summoner through the looking glass. Her luminous eyes fastened unblinkingly upon Ruth, each pupil shining emerald from lid to lid.

‘Daughter! On what premise have you awoken me? I am not pleased. What desire hath called the great Unmaker?’ Lilith spoke without moving her vast soft mouth.

The demon’s voice filled the young girl’s head, its lascivious hiss making her simultaneously shudder with pleasure and retch with fear. All the commands she had learnt fled her as the abhorrent reality manifested. Shocked beyond thought she tried to scream but no sound emerged.

Disgust rippled through the demon’s body as she gazed at the terrified girl. ‘You should not have taken my name in vain, girl. From this moment onwards I have marked thy soul as mine.’

Her body shaking violently, Ruth’s voice returned and her cry of anguish filled the room.

A second later she woke in her own bed shivering, with Rosa standing over her.

‘’Twas a dream, a nightmare, my child,’ the woman whispered, rocking the weeping girl to her bosom.

She made her drink a glass of hot milk and cloves and left only when she was convinced Ruth had finally fallen asleep. As she crept across the bedroom floor, the nursemaid slipped on a piece of pungent reed still wet with river water. Puzzling over its origins, Rosa tucked it into her pocket, sensing that somehow it belonged to the phantasm her ward had refused to talk about and, if not disposed of, could be used against her in the future.

For weeks afterwards Ruth would not sleep alone and she swore to herself she would never again treat the Zohar or any of its sorcery disrespectfully, especially the magic of the she-demon Lilith. But the idea of harnessing and defeating the evil spirit started to fester within her. She began to plague Rosa with questions about her mother’s death. Knowing that Lilith was the slayer of newborns and the stealer of the souls of labouring women, she wanted to find out whether the right precautions had been taken at her mother’s second birthing, whether her death could have been prevented.

The old n

ursemaid, torn between earthly pragmatism and a stoic respect for superstition, evaded the young girl’s questioning until, worn down, she blurted out that Elazar, fearing the mysticism of his Spanish wife’s converso family, had torn away the amulets Rosa herself had hung to ward off Lilith when she realised that Sara was struggling badly. Shocked, Ruth asked whether her father was then to blame for her mother’s death? Rosa hastily explained that Sara had been narrow in the hips and birthing was difficult for such women, and that privately she held responsible the quack whom Elazar, desperate to save both mother and child, had rushed in at the last minute. A real butcher who had used birthing hooks, she told Ruth, gesturing graphically with her hands.

The notion that she herself might become the saviour of such women started to haunt the young girl. She thought that, somehow, by becoming a midwife she might magically complete her own mother’s labour safely over and over, for the reward of seeing her mother live on, flushed with health, and her baby brother pink and fat at the breast.

After months of nagging, Rosa finally allowed Ruth to accompany her to the birthing of a good friend. The young woman was having a difficult labour and the community doctor, Isaac Schlam, had been called in to assist. Rosa, busy helping the frantic doctor, asked Ruth to comfort the terrified mother during the delivery. She had excelled at her task, displaying a precocious gift of authoritative calmness which was of immediate comfort to the patient.

Ruth was captivated by the whole experience; she was astounded that from agony such joy emerged. It was at that moment her ambition was cemented: she would become a midwife. Not a butcher, but one who used herbs and craft.

Slowly her grieving over her cousin’s death subsided. But to keep Aaron’s memory alive, on the anniversary of his death she would take his sword and talk to it as if it were the boy himself, whispering all the dark adolescent secrets that had begun to crowd her heart, unaware that one day she would wear the weapon openly.

For some time Elazar had been preparing his daughter for an arranged marriage with the son of a scholar who lived in Hamburg. Having covertly indulged Ruth’s intellectual curiosity by allowing her access to his vast collection of religious and philosophical works, the bewildered father suddenly found himself confronted with the task of transforming a rebellious spirit—whom he privately thought too masculine—into a traditional Jewish wife. This meant Ruth had to learn to weave, embroider, cook the traditional high holiday dishes, as well as master some accountancy to manage household expenditure. Worst of all, she had to abandon her secret readings of the Torah. It was a rude shock for the strongwilled adolescent who found the tedium of weaving mind-numbing and often got sidetracked by the mystical meaning behind the numbers of her accountancy, forgetting the notion of balancing the books. Frustrated and secretly anxious that his daughter would be discovered to be unmarriageable, Elazar took extreme measures, caning Ruth with rushes and locking her in her bedroom until she finished her tasks.

The date for the marriage drew near. Despite Elazar’s praise for the young man and the painted miniature sent from Hamburg which hung over her bed, Ruth felt nothing but dread. She had the overwhelming sense that her life—as she had envisaged it—was about to end.

The harbour and its promise of escape was always visible through her bedroom window, and that was how the fifteen-year-old Ruth saw the Dutch ship with its tricolour of red, white and blue flying from the mast. As a cloud passed over the sun, its shadow fell across her haunted face and her plan of escape suddenly became manifest.

Dressed in Aaron’s clothes, the young girl crept out that night with the little money she had saved, her cousin’s sword and the kabbalistic word for strength inscribed on an amulet she wore hidden under her shirt.

She bribed the ferryman to take her across to the sleeping port and refusing to give any name other than Aaron, she offered herself as a cabin boy aboard the Dutch ship. The old merchant seaman only agreed to take her when she said she would cook in exchange for a free passage. On board she was befriended by a German chevalier who had fought for both the Dutch and the Spanish and would fight for anyone who would pay him enough. Cynical and bitter, he regaled the young boy with battle stories of famine and rape, of pillage and power.

‘Power is a whore and religion her pimp,’ he proclaimed, wondering why the boy had such smooth skin. ‘Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise, boy.’