fire, iron, and the holy name of god

(part 2 of metal and fire)

“(sword hearted)”

~Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game

The three things kill demons. I read, in The Name of the Wind. Fire, iron, and the holy name of god. I’d immediately put down the book and googled, does iron kill parasites? And texted my friend, what is the name of god?

That conversation would take hours, he said.

“When someone places a black magic curse on you, they die a slow death from the liver giving out,” one Reddit post told me. I’d just come from my practitioner who said my liver was working just a bit slowly. That a little bug in my blood was causing toxic sludge and the liver was taking a while to clean out.

While at the appointment I’d asked him to check fire for me. These practitioners put things on your stomach and your body responds to them with yes’s and no’s. 

Fire? He asked. What do you mean? He is a holistic healer and his wall is papered with certificates. I don’t care about any of them because he saved my life five years ago. His credentials now include my life.

Probably just sunlight, he added. And described the scientific mechanisms of sunlight.

No I mean fire, I said.

He said he’d never done that before, but he checked fire. His face crossed with confusion.

Interesting. He said. You do much better with fire.

We checked candles. Yes. My infrared heat lamp. Yes. Sunlight?

No. 

That was where he really got puzzled.

Is there some symbolic meaning fire has for you? He asked. What is it?

Just — fire. I said. It felt — right. Imagining myself sitting in the blooming heat. Like a burning witch. Like Joan of Arc.

Then the fire goes out. And I am sitting in a hole, feet against metal, cold like a fog over the ocean. I forgot all about the fire and fixated on the metal: why am I stuck here?

I remember another person who said black magic is fear. I remember reading somewhere that the microbial issues in our guts and blood mirror the macro, spiritual energies that move in the world around us. Was it Rupert Sheldrake who theorized that maybe angels and microbes are the same thing? Lewis called angels macrobes, saying they were like photons — they could only all be in one place at a time.

I could have just lit myself on fire again.

~

Spearfinger

There is a Cherokee legend in the hills of Tennessee and North Carolina. It is about a woman made of stone. 

Spearfinger eats livers. She haunts the hillsides and her right finger eviscerates the liver. She is a monster of fear. She eats the tools your body has to alchemize fear. She gobbles them up. She is attracked to the brush fires that the tribes burned, coming down from the hills to find her victims.

I eat liver, too. Maybe its where I got the bugs in my blood. I was eating liver to try to build resiliency, to clean out fear, but I was eating it when my defenses were already down. Inside and out, the fear ate back. 

Black magic.

Maybe Spearfinger eats fear because she’s made of it. You are what you eat. Both and the other way around. Maybe she’s been fed so much fear that finally she wants to create it. She eats children now.

Do you know how much you have to put a mother through to make her want revenge?

Mothers nervous systems are primed differently. When I had my second daughter I stopped being able to watch violent scenes in movies. Before that war movies were my favorite and I never turned my eyes away from a fight. After my second, now, I cover my eyes more than the children. I don’t want any of it.

When a mama or a mama of a mama balls up her fists — when a mama wants to hurt —something has brought her to a ragged edge.

When the monster-mother hunts children, you know it is something even deeper at play. When the body that made the children is brought to the edge.

To turn a mother into a monster, you’ve already welcomed something into your home more sinister than what’s eating you. The monster just points a torch at it.

~~

Spearfinger’s right hand is also where she holds her weapon. In the Cherokee legend it is made of obsidian, it is long and sharp.

Like an iron sword. Like a hook.

But the most interesting part of the story is Spearfinger’s heart. In the legend, she was made of stone. Like a woman in armor.

But her heart was her one soft place.

A heart is always vulnerable. But Spearfinger is a shapeshifter, and she is good at tricks. 

Spearfinger takes her own heart out of her chest and hides it in the most open place:

Spearfinger hides her heart in her right hand.

~~

*next story I’ll introduce another old woman — not a mother, who has her own experience of heart-hiding, and who makes close friends with fire: Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle.