The spell of the lost metropolis is a captivating phenomenon that has intrigued explorers, historians, and mystics for centuries. This enchanting spell is said to possess an ancient city, hidden away from the modern world and shrouded in mystery. Legends and tales passed down through generations speak of a once-thriving metropolis that mysteriously vanished, leaving no trace behind. The spell is said to have been cast upon the city, rendering it invisible to the naked eye and eluding all attempts to rediscover it. Many have attempted to break the spell and find the lost metropolis, but none have succeeded. Some believe that the city is protected by powerful forces, guarding its secrets and treasures from those unworthy or ill-intentioned.
The beauty and wickedness of this lurid case captured Paris’s imagination. Madame de Sévigné, an aristocrat famous for her witty letters, was present on the day of de Brinvilliers’s execution. “Never has Paris seen such crowds of people,” she later wrote. “Never has the city been so aroused, so intent on a spectacle.”
She was wheeled in after three days of torture, and as the flames began to lick at her feet, she swore profusely, frequent execution observer de Sévigné noted, and went very red in the face. It would be deeply humiliating for the King to be seen to have been persuaded by a love potion, especially as he had legitimized all their many offspring.
Some believe that the city is protected by powerful forces, guarding its secrets and treasures from those unworthy or ill-intentioned. The spell is said to have been cast by a powerful sorcerer, who sought to protect the city and its inhabitants from impending doom. It is believed that the spell was meant to serve as a refuge, preserving the metropolis and its advanced civilization for future generations to discover.
A Lament for Witches
The West has been threatening to get rid of the witch for centuries, but back she’s come anyway. When the fashion for witch trials died out in Europe by the middle of the eighteenth century, the witch’s spectral powers—otherwise known as her particular talent for inducing hysteria—might have become a thing of the past. The Enlightenment had arrived, with science and logic ready to wrest broom from hand. But the witch remained a skilled survivalist even in defeat.
She flourished for hundreds of years in her natural habitat: theological debate. In 1835, for instance, David Strauss, a young, upstart theologian and a former student of Hegel’s, published “Das Leben Jesu,” a book in which he treated the life of Jesus not as historical or even religious fact but as a legend. He read and thought about the Testaments in just the same way one might think about a novel. He detected certain fibs, of course, but he was most interested in discovering what the authors of the Bible meant, the morals they conveyed, and not in the literal or historical truth recorded there. To prove his point, Strauss highlighted traces of the authors’ own eras left behind in Biblical texts—like his old teacher, Hegel, he was a historicist. Today such an attitude toward the Bible might be obvious; in Strauss’s time, it was blasphemous. He lost his university position and never taught again, but his message had already cast a certain spell.
A heretofore obscure Lutheran cleric named Wilhelm Meinhold, living on the Pomeranian island of Usedom, saw the writing on the wall. He, like the theologians clutching their robes and calling for Strauss’s censorship, did not believe the Bible should be read as a literary document, but he saw enough clerics in thrall to the that idea to become worried. He was not interested, however, in writing a polemic to make his point—he thought Christians would require something stronger than mere argument to combat this new heterodoxy. He needed to show people that the enchantment of a story was a seduction, that “historical” clues about authorial intent and about “meaning” could be manipulated. In short, he wanted to demonstrate that Biblical “critics” like Strauss were little more than empty conjurers themselves. He decided the best way to do that was to forge a historical document, publish it as a true story, and play his readers for fools for awhile, until he chose to reveal his deception. This, he thought, would startle them out of their belief that a story’s power was independent of its literal truth.
For this purpose Meinhold dreamed up a story of a young girl falsely accused of being a witch, and then forged his “rediscovered” manuscript. The inherent sensationalism of the subject matter had a certain irony in it. A hundred years before Arthur Miller, the witch trial was an allegory for the dogmatism of Roman Catholicism—superstition and persecution were portrayed as characteric of the Church. And that dogmatism was precisely what Lutheran Protestantism claimed to have escaped. But here Meinhold wielded the anti-Catholic prejudices of the audience against them. His story pointed out that Protestants were just as zealous in their witch hunts as Catholics. Meinhold knew that any discussion of witch hunts would stir up troubling questions about Protestant identity; a detailed account was guaranteed to hook clerical readers. And there was a further chunk of unsavory appeal in his project: in his conservatism, Meinhold stopped short of relieving Protestant fears about the threat of witchcraft. “Maria Schweidler” is innocent, but her accuser, an older woman, eventually confesses to being a worshipper of “abominable Satan.”
Perhaps it would have all come to naught if Meinhold had not had an innate talent for this sort of thing. Though he had grown up on his island and never been to school, he had a knack for knowing his zeitgeist. The book he wrote displayed the instincts of a Romantic, a flair for drama and fetishizing of the past. He used contemporary colloquialisms, he added details from the Thirty Years’ War to enhance the setting, he even used antiquated legal terms. And to make the story more enticing, he gave it a happy ending, allowing his “Maria Schweidler” to be rescued by her lover on the way to the stake.
When Meinhold published fragments of his “manuscript” in a Christian circular, in 1838, he provoked exactly the reactions he wanted: credulousness, and widespread discussion. The fragments were so intriguing that they reached the highest echelons of German society, and caught the attention of King Frederick William IV of Prussia himself. The King was so enamored of the tale that he asked to see the whole manuscript. Meinhold obliged, though he confessed that he’d fabricated it. The King, unfazed, found a publisher, and Meinhold received the bound end-product, titled “Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe” (“The Amber Witch”), by post. (It came complete with an honorarium.) Meinhold had constructed a backstory to justify the book; he claimed to have “discovered” the text in a nook underneath the choir benches of his church. But it took only a few months before his readers became suspicious. He set the record straight in the newspaper, explaining that he’d meant to point out the pitfalls of the scientific technique. In Germany Meinhold’s name became synonymous with a charlatan; even the King, who’d been in on the ruse all along, was disenchanted.
But the endlessly resourceful Meinhold promptly parlayed his storytelling gifts into another kind of fame altogether—he transformed himself from a religious polemicist into a romance novelist. News of the popularity of “The Amber Witch” reached England, and an 1843 translation was an instant hit. The pre-Raphaelites, with their taste for Gothic romance, ate it up. Meinhold quickly followed his initial success with “Sidonia, the Sorceress” (1847), a retelling of the true story of a woman who was something like a Pomeranian Anne Boleyn, accused of witchcraft by a disgruntled husband. Though acquitted, Sidonia died just a year after her trial.
Meinhold’s “Sidonia” was translated by a new fan of his, the Irish poet and activist Jane Francesca Elgee, who in three years would become Lady Wilde, and in six the mother of a boy called Oscar. Jane’s son shared her love of dark and fantastical stories, and Oscar later said that as a child “The Amber Witch” and, particularly, “Sidonia” were favorites. Scholars find stray threads of these stories in “The Canterville Ghost” and even “The Picture of Dorian Gray”: Meinhold’s Sidonia had a portrait showing her as a beautiful, youthful noblewoman in fur and blue velvet, with a “terrible spectre … arrayed in her death garments” looking over her shoulder. So even as Meinhold’s books dropped into obscurity, Maria and Sidonia found a way to endure in subtler forms. Meinhold had conjured his witch to suppress critical inquiry into the Bible, to conserve a narrow view of the text. Yet in further popularizing the figure of the witch, his themes would eventually picked up by subversives like Wilde.
In our own age, the witch has less success with her magicks, though you have to look hard to see her decline. Thousands of girls will step out on Halloween in a perenially popular witch’s costume. Even in this post-Harry Potter age, by and large that still consists of the black hat, black robe, and green skin that Margaret Hamilton wore seventy years ago in “The Wizard of Oz,” proving once again that movies leave more serious visual footprints on us than books. The Wicked Witch endures as an icon in an age where few Americans conceive of the witch as a real threat; the musical “Wicked,” a hugely successful Broadway production, is predicated on a revisionist view of the Witch as petulant teen-ager and misunderstood freedom fighter against the tyranny of Oz. There are evangelical sects that worry over witches still, and laws on the books criminalizing witchcraft (in Canada, it’s still in the federal Criminal Code), but the demonizing has now been replaced by witch-boosterism. Even the satanic panics of the nineties have receded, and those were always more about young men than young women.
Have we really lost anything, you might ask? We’ve always had a good witch to go with the bad, of course. Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (though it was South in the books) was no innovator there. She was just a modern ambassador for an ancient tradition of wise women and cunning folk, her powers submerged in yards of tulle and masked by a treacly voice. But as Alison Lurie once pointed out, just the word “witch,” applied to an allegedly good character, once held enough menace for Baum to be forced to change it (Glinda is called a “sorceress”). Baum’s audience sensed a threat in there, the kind of thing feminists will tell you is really an instance of the fear of the uncontrollable wildness of the feminine. The good witch was not approachable, because even in her beneficence she had a certain unpredictability; hold her close, and she might cut you.
But the witch is no longer terribly wild to us; she’s domesticated, normal, prone perhaps to a spell of madness but one from which she’ll emerge sunny and whole. She no longer signals a liberating spirit. Culturally, we have replicated witch-figures like Samantha of “Bewitched,” whose powers aid her in serving her husband. Our emblematic witch is Hermione Granger, who performs all the magic and takes none of the credit from Harry Potter. She is self-effacing and noble and never in any real danger of contamination by the dark. There are bad witches in Harry Potter, indeed, bad witches in many stories. But their cartoonish one-dimensionality cancels out any real portent. The internal conflicts go to Snape, while Bellatrix is irretrievable.
Which is only a shame if you think of this: just as the truly threatening witch has gone out of style, the people who most want to control women are out in force. You can barely walk these days without tripping over an old man planting a flag on someone’s reproductive organs. There are persecutions you can carry out without the aid of matches and a pile of lumber. It would at the very least be satisfying to have some uncontrolled she-witch stored in a closet. In the name of Maria, and Sidonia, and all the other women of loose character and bad morals whose sins cannot go unpunished, we could unleash the witch to her fun with all the righteous zealots we still have left.
Michelle Dean is a journalist and essayist who lives in New York.
Illustration: The New York Public Library.
Ronvid is back, and this time he's in a foul mood - and has friends. If you can't calm him down with Axii, this fight will be for keeps (left). Calm down some rowdy Skelligers in the traditional Skellige manner (right).
The allure of the lost metropolis and the spell that encases it have inspired numerous expeditions, books, and films. The quest to unravel the mystery and find the hidden city has become a symbol of the human thirst for adventure and discovery. While the spell of the lost metropolis remains unbroken, it continues to captivate the imagination of people worldwide. It serves as a reminder of the vast mysteries that lie beyond our understanding and the endless possibilities that await in the unexplored corners of our world. So, the enchanting spell of the lost metropolis has become more than just a story or legend. It represents the enduring human spirit of curiosity and the quest for the unknown. The search for the lost metropolis is a testament to our innate desire to unravel the mysteries of the past and explore the uncharted territories of our world..
Reviews for "The Spells of the Lost Metropolis: Fact or Fiction?"
1. John - 2 stars - The "Spell of the Lost Metropolis" was a real disappointment for me. The story felt rushed and underdeveloped, leaving me feeling like I missed out on a lot of potential character growth and plot development. The dialogue was clunky and forced, making it hard to connect with the characters. The ending felt abrupt and unsatisfying, leaving me with more questions than answers. Overall, I found the book to be a letdown and wouldn't recommend it.
2. Sarah - 1 star - I couldn't finish reading "Spell of the Lost Metropolis" because I found it incredibly boring and unengaging. The writing lacked creativity and the characters felt one-dimensional and unrelatable. The plot was predictable and lacked any suspense or excitement. The pacing was slow and I struggled to stay interested. I would not recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a well-crafted and engaging story.
3. Mike - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "Spell of the Lost Metropolis" but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The world-building was weak and the descriptions lacked detail, leaving me struggling to visualize the setting. The plot was unoriginal and filled with clichés, making it hard to stay engaged. The main character was flat and lacked depth, making it difficult for me to connect with her journey. While there were some moments of potential, overall, I found the book to be lacking in originality and depth.