The Witch Who Rode a Man Through the Market as a Donkey

A man on a road in the East stopped at an inn for nothing more than bread and a place to rest his feet, and he walked out of it on four legs. The innkeeper was a woman who knew the older arts. She had given him something to drink, or pressed a word into the dark of the doorway, and by the time the floor swayed under him his hands had hardened into hooves and his voice had collapsed into a bray. He could think. He could remember his own name. He simply could not say it.

She threw a halter over his head and led him out into the daylight as if he were any beast bought at market.

She Rode Him Through the Marketplace

She climbed onto his back and rode him down the main street, past the grain sellers and the water carriers, past men who had spoken with him an hour before and now stepped aside for a donkey. He strained every muscle to make a human sound. Nothing came but the long ugly note of an ass. The crowd parted. No one looked twice. A woman riding her animal to fetch a load is the least remarkable thing in the world, and that was the cruelty of it. The whole street had been turned into a place where his agony could pass for ordinary commerce.

For a day, or for many, he carried her where she pleased. He drank from troughs. He stood tied in the sun. The man inside the animal waited, because waiting was the only act left to him.

The Honest Companion Who Broke the Spell

The witch was not the only one of her kind in that place. She kept the company of others who worked the same craft, and one of them was more honest than her friend. This companion saw what had been done and would not stand with it. There is a Name that undoes such workings, the plain Name of God spoken aloud, and the honest one spoke it over the beast. The hooves split back into fingers. The spine straightened. The bray broke open into a human throat gasping a human breath. Yannai stood in the street again, a man, his name his own to say.

The sages who kept the account did not flinch from it. They held that such a thing could truly happen, that a person could be folded into the shape of an animal and walked through a crowd, because they believed the world still carried the residue of an older saturation of sorcery.

Why the Old Teachers Blamed Egypt

Ten measures of witchcraft, they said, came down into the world. Egypt took nine of them, and all the rest of the earth divided the single measure that was left. Egypt was the laboratory where every dark art had taken up permanent residence. When Moses stood before Pharaoh, he faced not only an empire's soldiers but the full arsenal of its magicians, men who threw down their staffs and made them writhe like living serpents. The plagues were not cheap tricks against a frightened people. They were blows aimed at the one country on earth where sorcery had made itself at home.

And the nine measures did not stay buried in Egypt. They leaked into the bloodstream of the whole world, the teachers warned, so that a traveler could lose his shape at a doorway in any town, and only the spoken Name could give it back.

The Witch Who Strangled Children Before Birth

In another town the harm was quieter and far worse. A young woman had been married for years and could not conceive. She and her husband prayed together, month after month, and the months answered with nothing. They went to physicians. They went to sages. The cradle stayed empty.

Then a neighbor leaned close and named the thing aloud. At the edge of town lived a woman known to prevent births by sorcery. She would take a figure of clay, scratch into it the name of the woman she meant to curse, and bury it beneath the threshold of that woman's house. While the buried figure lay in the earth, no child would come. Somewhere under the young wife's own doorstep, a small clay shape held her womb shut like a fist.

The husband carried this to the local sage, who would not let him march out to the witch's door. "If what you say is true," the sage told him, "then the answer is not to confront her, for that would only call down a worse harm. We turn to prayer and to the merit of the righteous." He set the couple forty days of psalms, of charity to the poor, of immersion in the ritual bath. On the fortieth night the husband dreamed an angel stood at his door and dragged a blackened clay figure up out of the ground beneath the threshold. That same night the spell broke. Within the year the woman bore a healthy son, and the witch fell ill and never recovered her power.

The Law That Will Not Let Her Live

Scripture had already passed its sentence on such women. "You shall not allow a sorceress to live," the verse commands, and the old teachers asked why it names a woman when the same law binds a man. Because women, they answered, are most often found practicing the craft. Then they argued over the death itself, the way they argued over everything that mattered. Rabbi Yose the Galilean read the words against the verse "you shall not let any soul live" and ruled the sword. Rabbi Akiva read them against "it shall not live," the law of the beast pressed to death under stones, and ruled stoning. Ben Azzai set the sorceress beside the one who lies with a beast and made the same hard judgment.

They did not debate whether the power was real. The clay under the threshold, the man on four legs in the market, the strangled child in a sealed womb. To the men who fixed the law, these were the things the verse was written to end.