NB: the previous two essays in this series are currently available to paid subscribers only, although they will be accessible later this year.
in the epic roman poem, bellum civile (civil war) lucan writes of an infamous thessalian witch by the name of erictho. she isn't the first roman witch, but she is the 1st century's preeminent “hag”, and around her constellate a number of interconnected and equally unpleasant ideas, ideas that will become central to the western's world's notion of the “witch” or “horrida mulier” (horrible woman). ideas, moreover, that will echo and emerge with disastrous persistence for so many women throughout the ages. ideas that survive into our present political moment.
quick recap: civil war takes as its theme the conflict between the roman emperor, julius caesar, and the figurehead of the republican cause, pompey. erictho first appears in book six, consulted by sextus, the son of pompey, who is desperate to learn which side will emerge victorious in the coming battle of pharsalus. here is the reader's first glimpse of this renowned sorcerer:
the blasphemer’s face
is gaunt and loathsome with decay: unknown to cloudless sky
and terrifying, by stygian pallor it is tainted,
matted with uncombed hair.
awesome. thanks. but there's a lot going on in this pejorative description that is really worth unpacking. firstly, throughout civil war, thessaly in northern greece is characterised as a peripheral “elsewhere”, an extreme and unruly wasteland of negative civility. it was purported home to a race of witches who spent their time (and not-inconsiderable powers) working erotic spells, hexing the weather, interfering with the course of “nature” by causing rivers to flow backwards, mountains to collapse, and by drawing down the moon (larks!). the text implies a porous symbiotic relationship between these witches and the land on/in which they lived; this land is said to produce magically potent flora and fauna. even the rocks of thessaly carried a charge/ taint. if it was the witches who absorbed their power from/ through the land, or if a portion of their magic discharged itself into the surrounding environment is never entirely clear, but what is plainly legible is the (over) identification of thessaly's native inhabitants with their unruly, “wild” and potentially dangerous home, producing what we might recognise today as a highly racialised ecology.
if all of this is sounding vaguely familiar, then yes, correct, welcome on board this air lingus flight to edmund spenser's hateful hymn to protestant ascendancy: the faerie queene (1590). spenser creates a feral “elsewhere” out of ireland in the same way that lucan does out of thessaly – albeit spenser's text operates through the far-from-subtle allegory of “faerie land”. again, as the literally ten of people who have read vulgar errors/ feral subjects (2023) will know, my least favourite poem of all time constructs ireland in such a way so as to serve as a foil for english protestant “virtues”; to justify the occupation of irish land, and to excuse the brutalising treatment of a native irish-speaking populace by successive generations of english planters. in lucan, thessaly – and northern greece in general – serve as a foil to roman virtues, although it's worth pointing out, to slightly different ends: while lucan emphasises the corruption, decline and decay of greece at every turn, and contrasts this powerfully to the marshal strength and endurance of rome, such comparisons are intended more as a warning to his first roman audience about where internal strife, political ambition, and popular unrest might lead.
but now that i've introduced the grim spectre of edmund spenser, we will be circling back to him, because i want to talk a little more about the characterisation of erictho, and how this is similar/ relevant to later middle english and early modern projects with xenophobia, classism, and misogyny at their hearts. so: while for lucan, all thessalian women are “witches” – dangerously expert practitioners of magic, related in the text to the “barbarous” and negatively racialised figures of the persian magicians – erictho is figured as being extreme even by their standards. while thessaly is already an “elsewhere” or “edge” for the roman world, erictho's home is at the edge of the edge: in a cemetery, in a tomb. she holds converse with the dead, and courts the favour of underworld deities, as opposed to seeking dispensations from the upper gods like a model roman citizen. what's really important, i think, is that erictho does not merely defy roman social norms and moral conventions, but that she inverts them (she is often described as a perverse mirror-image of the cumaen sybil). such an inversion renders erictho not merely disgusting (that is concretely, physically loathsome), but abject. as rina arya notes in the absolute banger abjection and representation: an exploration of abjection in the visual arts, film and literature (2014), while the abject attaches itself to objects and others, it is an amorphous state that 'has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to i'.
erictho provokes and revolts that roman “i” on a number of levels: firstly, she is ugly and unkempt in a way that signals her disregard for the niceties of dress and grooming. secondly, she is old, and ancient rome shares something with our contemporary scene in that it was a hetero-patriarchal culture that tended to value women mostly as sources of sexual and reproductive labour. as a post-erotic, post-reproductive body – a body that has outlived its usefulness – her degree of agency is disturbing, her very survival potentially obscene. related to this post-reproductive aspect of hagdom, erictho is specifically anti-fertile: she is barren, with absolutely no interest at all in procreative sex or the “sacred” structure/ organising principle of the roman family. further (and this, to me, is the most interesting aspect of her abjection), erictho exists in perpetual funestatus. this translates as having been polluted or disgraced, and it refers to a state of mourning, characterised by dishevelment of dress, and symbolic of having been soiled by contact with the dead. something an elite (thus ideal) roman matriarch would avoid at any cost. it isn't merely that death itself stains erictho, but that her contact with the dead is a profound marker of low social status.
and i have been wondering: does erictho haunt graveyards, gibbets and battlefields, not merely the better for plundering corpses towards her macabre hexerei, but because she is, in fact, in a state of protracted and recalcitrant grief; driven feral by exorbitant and distorting loss? in every way, erictho is associated with the dead. does she also identify with them? certainly, in civil war, she becomes a walking reminder of man's material origins and ultimate end. so much so, that lucan has her physically embody death: her very breath turns the air to poison. in erictho, even natural bodily processes are corrupted or suspended; her troubling social aspects are incorporated into a repertoire of ill affects. she is one of the earliest examples of the “hag” figure being used to convert the dangerous qualities of old, post-reproductive, (hetero) sexually disinterested women into a florid symptomatology and a grotesque visual language.
which brings me neatly back to spenser, and the faerie queene's monstrous women. specifically, on this occasion, errour. if erictho can be said to embody erin harrington's notion of the 'abject barren' (2018), then errour enciphers precisely the reverse, what we might call the “abject fertile”, or – to quote the late, great, barbara creed, writing in her book of the same title – 'the monstrous feminine' (1993). creed argues that the feminine is fabricated as monstrous through abject associations with our sexual and bodily functions (duh). in the case of erictho, her womb is a dusty trench, a grave. in the case of errour, it is a site of outlandish fecundity; excessively spawning both “children” and ideas. she is described as an ‘vgly monster’ who is ‘halfe like a serpent’, most ‘lothsome, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine’. a hideous hybrid mother, suckling a brood of ill-formed ‘sundry shapes’ from her ‘poisonous dugs’. yeah, thanks. on one level, she serves as a rather ham-fisted metaphor for the catholic church in ireland, its insidious spread and the proliferation of its teachings. on the other, spenser seeks to portray the female catholic body itself as an “unnatural” locus of feral excess. that we “breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin” (ian paisley, circa 1969) is a trope as old as time; a staple of the animalising/ mostrifying language that seeks to identify us with the killable “swarm” or “infestation”, in spenser's nauseating allegory it serves the very specific purpose of inculcating disgust for native bodies the better to guard against that most colonial of fears: miscegenation.
in different directions, erictho and errour demonstrate the pedigree and longevity of this tendency to use the female body as a scrim for a variety of (racist/ xenophobic, misogynist, classist) ideas connected to the horrible or monstrous o/Other. to me, civil war, is the most striking example of this particular model, but i think there are others. horace, for example, creates the “hags” canidia, sagana, veia, and folia in 30 bce. these are repulsively/ inappropriately masculine older women who, in horace's fifth epode, kidnap a boy with the intention of burying him up to his neck in order to torture him with food just out of his reach. they believe that hunger will cause his liver to grow – and it's the liver they want for the purposes of a powerful erotic potion. while certainly grotesque, these witch figures are intended to be the objects of ridicule. through them, horace twists and parodies greek witch conventions of lasciviousness and magical dexterity by applying these qualities to old butch women. which, yeah, always hilarious. the rites of canidia et al inform portrayals of witches throughout the middle ages and the early modern. in shakespeare's macbeth (1623), for a big, famous example. but i also recently came across an anonymous broadsheet from about 1616 that treated of frances carr, countess of somerset's alleged murder of sir thomas overbury, which satirises her as 'canidia'. the poem, 'a satyre entituled the witch', is notable in that it conceptually links a real, living (and powerful, and sexually self-determined) woman to a monstrous fictional hag. in jest, obvs. but the hatred feels real. and the idea of witchcraft was taken seriously enough in the 1600s that – slight tangent, but not really – during a trial that would determine carr’s annulment of marriage to the 3rd earl of essex, one of the judges genuinely suggested he travel to poland (why poland, i've no idea) to have his dick “unwitched” so that he might be able to perform sexually with her, thus mitigating the need for an annulment at all.
yeah. there is a metric fuck-ton to say about the fear of castration/ impotence and the way this fear plays out in the pathological fantasies of texts such as the malleus maleficarum (1486) and the dæmonologie of king james i (1597), and we'll come to that – who am i, after all, to deny you the image of a sassy older woman feeding oats to a bird box full of severed mail members? – but for now i cannot stop thinking about the metaphorical function of the “hag”; how she serves the same purpose as the animal at the centre of dehumanising animal comparisons. i bang on about this a lot, but it bears repeating: for the pejorative to be effective there needs first to be a consensus as to the worthless or abject nature of the animal. the broadside must transform the youthful frances carr into a frightful old woman in order to render her “safe” for ridicule. or horace transforms the young, sexually provocative witches of greek epic tradition into ghastly “hags” in order to render them objects of both horror and laughter simultaneously. then there's erictho. were she in her “prime”, she might still have held some claim on/ to the human community, but being old and ugly, she is cast against “nature”, removed from the remit of moral concern, hollowed out as a receptacle for all the ideas and affects roman culture deemed unacceptable to look at or think about. since the 1st century bce there is a strong (surviving) representational strand that refuses to accept older, post-reproductive women as meaningfully human. k and i have started making a list of contemporary horror films where hideous hags are the “baddies” or used simply as jump-scares, where the ageing female body is not merely the site but the central source of abjection. there are a lot. and i'm going to be coming back to those in a big way. but for now i'll end with a suggestive passage from lucan, which offers (i think) a space for reading queerly into erictho, so that this outcast and abject “hag” becomes an avatar of old-ass female power:
her tread has burned up seeds of fertile grain
and her breath alone has turned fresh air deadly.
she doesn’t pray to gods above, or call on powers
for aid with suppliant song, or know the ways
to offer entrails and receive auspicious omens.
she loves to light altars with funereal flames
and burn incense she’s snatched from blazing pyres.
at the merest hint of her praying voice, the gods grant her
any outrage, afraid to hear her second song.
next time: the lips that frame her “second song”: gynaecological horror at the limits of representation. woo-hoo!