The Dovekeepers

In the garden, where I learned my letters, there grew a variety of rare white water lily that gave off a perfumed scent at night. These blooms have been my favorites ever since that time. A single one is worth a barrel of balsam or myrrh. The wild red lilies of Moab, glorious as they may be, are weeds when compared to these blossoms, their scent mere air when considered alongside the lilies of Alexandria. My mother rubbed their perfume on her wrists, and because of this no man could deny her.

While other women were contained within the walled courtyards of their houses, venturing no farther than the marketplace—and then only accompanied by servants or kinswomen—my mother was allowed to do as she pleased. Every spring she made the journey to visit her family in Jerusalem during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It was there in that city that my fate awaited me.

IT IS SAID THAT, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, two angels offered to enter our world to teach humans the knowledge God would allow us. These angels have eaten meals with humans, fallen in love with them, had sexual relations with them, watched their children be born. Because of this, they can never return to the spirit world. They continue to walk the earth to this day, teaching the wisdom of sorcery to those who yearn to know it. My mother came from a line of women who were willing to listen when the angels began to speak. She kept her most private possessions in a box of carved ironwood, the key to which she wore around her neck on a strand of braided horsehair. The key had been formed into the shape of a snake. When I was a child, it seemed a living thing. Whenever my mother allowed me to hold it in my hand, I could feel it coldly inch across my palm.

Inside the locked box was a notebook of parchment upon which my mother had written the many secrets she had accumulated over the years. It was a recipe book for the human heart, for our people believe that all we know and all we have experienced is contained there.

*

THERE WERE SPELLS on every page of my mother’s diary: For Night Blindness. To Catch a Thief. For Headache. For Fever. For Loyalty. For Love. While other girls were playing with string or with carved wooden animals, I was learning what had been written by my mother, secrets passed down to me that I would one day entrust to a daughter of my own. The spells themselves were transcribed in code, so that no outsider might understand them or fully gauge their power.

There have always been ancient books of mysteries. Men who practiced magic were teachers who were called abba, fathers blessed by knowledge from The Book of Mysteries. Even Moses himself was said to have what magicians and great teachers call The Moon Book, a collection of magic so strong no other human has ever dared to open the pages, lest he be burned alive by the heat of the words within. There were those who said that Moses could make the sea disappear and that he could have destroyed the whole world had he wished to, or if God had called upon him to do so. Noah, too, had a book of incantations. The voice of an angel in The Book of Jubilees recounts that the angels themselves taught Noah all manner of secrets so that he might use the herbs of the earth to heal his sons. Among men it was rumored there was a priceless treasure called The Book of Watchers, which offered direct instructions from the Almighty, a mystical treatise so complicated, so hidden and wrapped within riddles, only the wisest sage could begin to understand its meaning.

This was the work of men, of scholars and priests. There were two schools of magic men were privy to, that which the priests practiced publicly, the exorcisms and curses and blessings, and the lesser works crafted by the minim, men, be they sages or magicians, who offered magic for payment outside the synagogues. Beyond that, in secret, in the dark, there was the magic women practiced behind locked doors, with our recipe books of pharmaka, our medicines, and philtrons, our love potions. Women had secret uses for ashes, green bay leaf, blood, sulfur, myrrh, musk, honey, oil and flowers, along with the roots of plants such as the mandrake, yavrucha, and that of the ba’aras, often called wondershine, red hot and aflame when pulled from the earth. At the Temple it had been decreed that no one should tolerate a sorceress, for such magic was said to be the work of harlots, their wickedness set beneath a mantle of wisdom they should not be allowed. There were ten varieties of wise men known but only two kinds of women who might hear the voice of the Almighty: prophetesses and witches.

For women who practiced in secret, there was no one but Him, our God, the radiant one, who was far greater than any magician. But we did not agree with the rules of men, and we ignored certain decrees, even though the sort of magic women such as my mother were known for was outside the law and therefore considered to be a sin.

We knew why this was so, and why our great goddess, Ashtoreth, both a warrior and a seer, had been defiled and warned against in writings that followed the Prophets. Ashtoreth’s presence was denied to us, the images of her form melted down into pools of silver and brass, the cakes we made in her image outlawed, the trees we decorated in her honor torn down long ago. The expulsion of the Queen of Heaven had occurred for the same reason that Samson had once lost every bit of his strength; it was the reason men burned their hair and nails, lest such tokens be used against them in any woman’s spell. Women who practiced keshaphim were considered witches and punished as such, cast out, burned, defiled. They were powerful and dangerous, and no man wanted such a creature near to him, except perhaps in his bed for a night before he rid the world of her.