A deal with the devil is always made in darkness, in silence. Even while talking in the brightest daylight, with hot noontime sun hammering down on us, in a crowd, or in the midst of commotion, the deal itself is always made in the inner landscape away from light or sound. The tempter, be it Christian devil or Buddhist demon, written words, or seductive popular opinion, in the simple damnation of everyday suffering that tempter only reaches out a hand, offering a choice. We may choose to take the hand or turn away, but if we grasp that extended hand, clasping happens deep within the quietest places in ourselves, where tendrils of emotion and instinct wind away from our conscious existence, extending into the primal roots of collective humanity.
Not that there are not sometimes complications or extenuating circumstances. In the Confessions of the Forfar Witches of 1888, Joseph Anderson tells us that, after her arrest for witchcraft in Edinburgh in 1671, Kethren Portour offered an excuse for finding herself in the devil’s presence:
“Kethren Portour was a blind woman who confessed to having met the devil in the company of two other women. In her confession, she repeatedly emphasized her desire to leave her companions and their associate but was unable to walk away due to her disability. ”
Anderson further notes that “While Kethren laid the blame on her female companions, she also confessed herself to having been “a great banner and a terrible curser, and a very wicked woman’ in her life.“*
Albeit it may seem that in 1671 more people may have met the devil as an actual figure, someone passing in the street or in the forest. But we are always meeting the devil really. Ah, the wicked world (or perhaps that is the merely the wickedness of humankind). Angus Graham, in his book Disputers of the Tao, points out that much of the debate in classical Chinese philosophy (roughly supposed to have expanded greatly from 500 BCE to 221 CE) focused on how to rule, but that the underlying argument was about the moral nature of humanity. At base, were people naturally good, bad, or were they basically good (for example) but also very easily misled?
We always want something. Need something. But does that make us bad? We want to live longer, writer better, make perfect music, have an ideal lover, or be wealthier. On and on the list thunders just beneath the threshold of our hearing, while our spirit listens to the inaudible din. Our physical selves may hear nothing, but that is unimportant.
Rudolpho Anaya writes:
The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for lasts only a brief lifetime, then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever… But the soul survives. The soul lives on forever. It is the soul that must be saved, because the soul endures.**
Yet, that turning point. Ahab seeking the whale even at the great expense of others. Dorian Gray rejects the Shakespearean actress out of hubris, precipitating her suicide and his own descent into increased debauchery and crime. When we seek what we want most in ways that cause others to come to harm, then we alter not only our own threads of fate, but so many others.
Rudolpho Anaya’s curandera character, Ultima, speaks of “the rules that guide the interference with any man’s destiny”, and in that character’s transgression–as she breaks the rules of destiny to save a man’s life–Anaya illustrates how intertwined we all are. Perhaps Clarence, the angel in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, says it best:
We damage our own souls, our own selves, by figuratively or literally damning helter skelter, left and right, all about us as we trudge through life. We judge others, curse at them, betray their confidences and tell their sins to others. Sometimes, we do these things while halfway convincing ourselves that we are somehow doing right or good.
Should whistleblowers alert the public to corporate or government wrongdoing? Absolutely. Should we individually judge and punish others for their transgressions? Doing so may start us on a precarious path to damnation. We may spend subsequent decades mopping up, damning ourselves for our own transgressions, lonely as the houses on our little street scream and then fall asleep.
Long ago, after a long day of difficult battles, two soldiers found themselves heading home across a desolate heath. Covered in mud and blood, they worked their way across a barren landscape when suddenly three witches appeared to them. The witches spoke to them and told them things, offering information.
Macbeth is often seen as being trapped in some kind of web of constraint (and it is notable that this web is suspiciously female). Shakespeare was hardly above being sexist. On the contrary. But to blame the witches (and perhaps Lady Macbeth’s ambitions) for Macbeth’s fate also seems reductionist and simplistic.
When the witches say “the charm’s wound up”, it doesn’t seem to mean that they’ve made Macbeth’s choice for him. As is often noted, the word choice suggests the threads of fate tended by the three norns, the fates (sometimes in mythology personified by a maiden, a matron, and a crone) who spin, measure, and cut the threads of human destiny:
Yet, Macbeth himself says “If chance will have me king, then chance may crown me without my stir.” Then he does stir. He grasps the hand of the devil and goes ahead and murders Duncan anyway.
The point is that he sees it. He knows it ahead of time. But in the fevered moment of decision, he grasps the vision of the dagger from the air, reaching for the bloodied instrument offered to him and embracing it in his decision. “I go and it is done; the bell invites me.” Simple words. Simple choice seemingly simply made. Yet it is those words and their accompanying choice, determine Macbeth’s fate more than any witches may do.
Banquo’s less ambitious contrast remains important as well. There is no indication of Banquo pushing for his son, Fleance, to be heir to the throne. He does not push the wheel of fate, urging it to turn one way or another. His prophecy is fulfilled without his stir.
So is it all preordained? Again, Macbeth’s choice, his “I go” moment, suggests that it is not. Otherwise why would such a moment be written into the play at all? As for the Wyrd Sisters, they seem terrible, throwing awful things into a cauldron, selfishly cursing people for refusing to share chestnuts. They apparently deal in life and death constantly, and possibly eternally. A “finger of birth-strangled babe” is nothing to them. It is only another flicker in the constant parade of fated shadows that dance incessantly against the walls of their perception. Who knows how such eternal beings might perceive human activity and the passages of human fate? A longer, perhaps immortal outlook might obliterate kindness in the end, replacing it with a twofold attention, split between the eternal and the momentary with little room for anything in between those two extremes.
The witches’ existence is hardly to be envied, not only because they are ugly or cruel. Rather, they suggest the natural end of Macbeth’s path, what Dorian Gray’s picture of his inner self has become. In seeking to interfere with human fate, to intervene in selfish ways that lay wholesale waste to others, shaping or cutting their threads indiscriminately, our own thread becomes twisted, knotted, and unfit for further weaving, eventually causing defects in the fabric of human existence. In the Harry Potter books, it isn’t Voldemort’s evil quest to dominate the world that sets his downfall in motion. It is the murders that he commits in order to work the dark magic of splitting his soul so that he might always live forever.
Better than being wealthy, beautiful, being king or queen, being all powerful, or living forever might be living in harmony. Sounds terribly clichéd, doesn’t it? Yet, it may be in those contact points, the points where our lives and our fates touch those of others, where salvation or damnation lie. At each turn in life, each day, some or other tempting hand reaches out for ours. Do we take it? And where will it lead if we do?
*Anderson, Joseph. 1888. “The Confessions of the Forfar Witches (1661), from the Original Documents in the Society’s Library”. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 22 (November), 241-62. http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/view/6265.
**Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley, CA: TQS Publications, 1972.
***Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1793434