Voltaire on the Modern Sorcery

Le conseiller Courtin lui demanda de quel charme elle s’était servie pour ensorceler la reine: Galigaï, indignée contre le conseiller, et un peu mécontente de Marie de Médicis, répondit: « Mon sortilège a été le pouvoir que les âmes fortes doivent avoir sur les esprits faibles. » Cette réponse ne la sauva pas; quelques juges eurent assez de lumières et d’équité pour ne pas opiner à la mort; mais le reste, entraîné par le préjugé public, par l’ignorance, et plus encore par ceux qui voulaient recueillir les dépouilles de ces infortunés, condamnèrent à la fois le mari déjà mort et la femme, comme convaincus de sortilège, de judaïsme et de malversations. La maréchale fut exécutée (1617), et son corps brûlé.

Counselor Courtin asked her what magic she had used to cast a spell upon the queen: Galigaï, outraged against the counselor and a bit miffed with Maria de Medici, answered: “My magic spell was the power that strong spirits may have upon the weak.” This response did not save her, several judges were intelligent and just enough not to support the penalty of death, but the rest, influenced by public prejudice, by ignorance and still more by those who sought to reap the plunder of those unfortunates, sentenced both the already deceased husband and his wife to death—for sorcery, Judaism and miscreancy. The maréchale was executed (1617) and her body burned.

–Jean-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire, depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, ch clxxiv, 7ème lettre (1756) in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. xii/3 (S.H. transl.)

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December 1, 10:34 PM

The Modern Sorcerer

One of the more intriguing accounts of the life of the inimitable Jane Austen emerged in the pages of The Times in 1926 with the publication of a letter which had been carefully guarded and passed on within her family up until then. The document hailed from the time of Austen’s near-fatal illness in the late winter of 1815-16, just after she had finished up Emma and rushed it to the printers. She had turned delirious, but, in a moment of lucidity, she suddenly began to mouth some rather fantastic words in French. “Mon sortilège a été le pouvoir que les âmes fortes doivent avoir sur les esprits faibles,” she said, “My magic spell was the power that strong spirits may have upon the weak.”

These were the words that Voltaire put in the mouth of Eléonore Galigaï de Concini, a favorite of Maria de’ Medici, who was accused of witchcraft and was executed in 1617. What Voltaire had in mind was clear enough—he was an exhaustive chronicler of the barbaric practices that followed from superstitions like witchcraft. Galigaï was certainly not a witch; she and her husband had been dabbling in high politics with Maria de’ Medici, who had turned on them to protect herself when the plot was exposed. In the end the young Louis XIII took the affair as cause for the internal exile of his mother.

So this “sorcery,” Voltaire reminds us, is the sort of manipulation to which high politics is accustomed. It is the modern sort of sorcery. This is one of several passages in Voltaire’s historical opus where a seemingly innocent observation is vested with dramatic power; it seems to fly off the page as the perception of a deep human truth behind the historic pageant.

And, as we learn, the words had just this influence on the mature Jane Austen. We don’t know how or when she came across them. We do know that they penetrated deeply into her conscience. In fact, the timing makes clear that Austen had been thinking a great deal of this passage as she completed one of her greatest, and darkest novels: Emma.

It’s a quaint, domestic work, recounting a tale of ordinary life far from the reach of the great and powerful. But this indeed is part of the greatness of Jane Austen, her ability to show us that important moral choices occur in the every day world of the little people, not just among the high born and powerful. Emma is a person well-liked in her community, and a person who thinks very well of herself. She is also one of Austen’s most flawed characters. Emma was cast as a demonstration of the courtroom words of Eléonore Galigaï.

The novel turns on Emma’s robust, assertive, and clearly snobbish character. Emma fancies herself a matchmaker, indeed she suggests that the game amuses her. She exercises her influence on Harriet Smith, the naïve and rather simple illegitimate daughter of a “somebody” (at least this is what Emma presumes, though, as we learn near the end, her natural father is merely a tradesman). Harriet has a suitor whom she likes, but Emma intervenes to persuade her that the suitor is “beneath” her. Harriet gives way to Emma’s stronger will, though the decision leaves her unsettled and unhappy.

Emma’s strong-willed snobbery and inclination to meddling leads her astray several more times, and causes her to visit unhappiness on several other friends as the novel winds on. Indeed, her misdeeds make for one of Austen’s more complexly interwoven plots. It seems, even as we approach the end, likely to be the first Austen novel with a truly gloomy ending. But in the final chapters, a chastised Emma recognizes that her manipulative and coldhearted conduct has brought unhappiness on her friends. She rights her course, and the novel ends with reconciliation, marriage and bright good cheer.

Jane Austen, her family tell us, expressed revulsion over the infidelities and excesses of the Prince Regent, detested the death penalty, considered slavery and the slave trade an abomination, thought her local Tory M.P. a hopeless boor—and beyond this was utterly indifferent to politics. But in a sense of course, her novels are subtle and ironic portraits of the society of her times, filled with profound moral assessments. What seems at first trivial or inconsequential is really the stuff of the moral judgments that people of her time and circumstances were called upon to make. Her treatment of these matters is witty and bright, but it is also infinitely serious. (Edward Said, of course, says that she is unserious and in Mansfield Park shows herself the willing beneficiary of the luxurious life that the slave trade brought to slaveholders. But Said badly misreads Mansfield Park. It says just the opposite.) The rules of human interaction that Austen explores on a small scale can be transposed without too much difficulty on the greater stage of life that we call “political.”

On the political stage, the modern sorcery involves no supernatural powers, but it does entail people of strong will influencing the weak. In particular, the strong-willed are the political strategists and the weak are the journalists who uncritically write about them. The unchallenged master of political manipulation and gamesmanship in recent times is Bush’s “brain,” Karl Rove. His full tool chest is impressive, and many of the tools he uses are legitimate. Others, and in fact, his forte, fall under the heading of “dirty tricks.”

But today we see the sorcerer pushing his skills to the breaking point. In an appearance on the “Charlie Rose Show,” Karl Rove decided to explain the originals of the Iraq War. This war has been the Bush Administration’s grand misadventure, and Rove shamelessly turned it into partisan political fodder like no war in prior American history. But with public opinion now turned on the president and the Republican Party over its handling of the war, Rove decided it was time to rewrite history. Here’s the exchange:

And here’s a transcript of the key exchange:

ROVE: The administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002.

ROSE: But you were opposed to the vote.

ROVE: It happened. We don’t determine when the Congress vote on things. The Congress does.

ROSE: You wish it hadn’t happened at that time. You would have preferred it did not happen at that time.

ROVE: That’s right.

So evidently the White House was stampeded into the war by overzealous Democrats in Congress. Apparently they’re the same Democrats who in prior Rove formulations treasonously shortchanged the White House with their support of the war effort.

Obviously, Rove follows the same formula he’s used since his cadet days in the Nixon campaign. Tell a falsehood, but tell it firmly, unequivocally and forcefully enough, and the weak-minded will actually believe you. Rove has proven that this formula works. Hell, he’s even elected a president using it. He is the modern sorcerer. . . or perhaps he’s just the sorcerer’s apprentice and the mess we find ourselves in today is the product of his spells—they may well be enough to affect the weak-minded, but they don’t change reality. That summarizes things very well, in fact.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Gospel Truth

By APRIL D. DECONICK

Published: December 1, 2007

Houston

AMID much publicity last year, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost 3rd-century religious text had been found, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. The shocker: Judas didn’t betray Jesus. Instead, Jesus asked Judas, his most trusted and beloved disciple, to hand him over to be killed. Judas’s reward? Ascent to heaven and exaltation above the other disciples.

It was a great story. Unfortunately, after re-translating the society’s transcription of the Coptic text, I have found that the actual meaning is vastly different. While National Geographic’s translation supported the provocative interpretation of Judas as a hero, a more careful reading makes clear that Judas is not only no hero, he is a demon.

Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a “daimon,” which the society’s experts have translated as “spirit.” Actually, the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon.”

Likewise, Judas is not set apart “for” the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated “from” it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because “it is possible for him to go there.” He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can’t go there, and Jesus doesn’t want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

How could these serious mistakes have been made? Were they genuine errors or was something more deliberate going on? This is the question of the hour, and I do not have a satisfactory answer.

Admittedly, the society had a tough task: restoring an old gospel that was lying in a box of its own crumbs. It had been looted from an Egyptian tomb in the 1970s and languished on the underground antiquities market for decades, even spending time in someone’s freezer. So it is truly incredible that the society could resurrect any part of it, let alone piece together about 85 percent of it.

That said, I think the big problem is that National Geographic wanted an exclusive. So it required its scholars to sign nondisclosure statements, to not discuss the text with other experts before publication. The best scholarship is done when life-sized photos of each page of a new manuscript are published before a translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently work through the text.

Another difficulty is that when National Geographic published its transcription, the facsimiles of the original manuscript it made public were reduced by 56 percent, making them fairly useless for academic work. Without life-size copies, we are the blind leading the blind. The situation reminds me of the deadlock that held scholarship back on the Dead Sea Scrolls decades ago. When manuscripts are hoarded by a few, it results in errors and monopoly interpretations that are very hard to overturn even after they are proved wrong.

To avoid this, the Society of Biblical Literature passed a resolution in 1991 holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business. It’s a shame that National Geographic, and its group of scholars, did not follow this sensible injunction.

I have wondered why so many scholars and writers have been inspired by the National Geographic version of the Gospel of Judas. I think it may stem from an understandable desire to reform the relationship between Jews and Christians. Judas is a frightening character. For Christians, he is the one who had it all and yet betrayed God to his death for a few coins. For Jews, he is the man whose story was used by Christians to persecute them for centuries. Although we should continue to work toward a reconciliation of this ancient schism, manufacturing a hero Judas is not the answer.

April D. DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, is the author of “The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.”