“There might be.” Nissa grips my shoulders, her eyes wide with excitement. “Do you know what this means, Ruth?”
I shake my head.
Her thousand-watt grin lights up her face. “It’s time for a good old-fashioned research project.”
Her enthusiasm is contagious. “The best part of any investigation—”
“Is the part with the books,” she finishes, and drops into the chair beside me. Nissa taps the cover ofAn Arcane History. “I’ve been fascinated by the history of southern Louisiana all my life.” Her words come faster, charged with passion. “At LSU, we were starting to see more research come out on precolonial history from indigenous scholars. What I wouldn’t give to still have access to those archives—” She stops herself, biting her lip. “Anyway, one of the things that interested me most was evidence that southern Louisiana used to be a sanctuary for people escaping religious persecution.”
“Like the Pilgrims fleeing England?”
“Oh no, honey. I’m talking about people who held beliefs ProtestantsandCatholics considered so profane that even being associated with them was enough to get you killed. Something about this area made it a haven for the outlandish and eerie. The truly heretical.”
Bottom Springs: a place that looked like it had been created with the otherworldly in mind.
“The kind of beliefs that might be linked to the symbol in the woods,” I guess.
“Mm-hmm.” Nissa opensModern Wicca. “Hopefully we’ll find something.”
We sit reading side by side as the minutes tick by, the only soundNissa’s hum of contentment. I scanAn Arcane History. Its pages on Bottom Springs are scant, but it does outline Trufayette Parish’s bloody history, how years before France sold Louisiana to the fledgling United States, European colonizers arrived on the coast of southern Louisiana and began a campaign of terror against the Chitimacha people, until they’d killed or driven most of them away. After that, control over the area had passed back and forth between the French and Spanish—even between Catholics and Protestants of the same country—but the fighting was no less deadly, massacres over who controlled Bottom Springs’s precious access to the gulf. Though I know this history, it still pains me to remember how deeply our soil is soaked in blood.
What’s new is a chapter titled “French Intra-Religious Wars.” Like Nissa said, it seems Europeans fleeing religious persecution were drawn to southeast Louisiana, particularly those from France. But, according to the book, the promise of freedom in the New World was a ruse. A group of mystics called Les Voyants, who escaped the guillotine in France, built a strong reputation in New Orleans only to be hunted down and beheaded by traveling Catholic priests. Another group of French exiles called Le Culte de la Lune, who practiced an offshoot of Catholicism that worshipped the Virgin Mary, settled in what’s now Forsythe.
I have to read this part twice. “Above all,” I whisper aloud, “Le Culte de la Lune worshipped a goddess known as the Queen Mother, believed to be a reimagining of Mary the Virgin, a deity responsible for all creation, symbolized by the moon. Catholic in origin but pagan in practice, Le Culte de la Lune performed rituals to ensure the earth’s continued balance. Light and dark, summer and winter, genesis and destruction, they believed all must be held in harmony.”
I keep going, scanning the page. “To achieve balance, Le Culte de la Lune’s ceremonies could involve bloodletting and animal sacrifice. Adherents often dressed in animal pelts, emphasizing their place in thenatural world, and their matriarchs wore antler crowns, meant to invoke the image of the Queen Mother. Catholic settlers in the eighteenth century who reported visions of Satan haunting the woods are now believed to have sighted Le Culte de la Lune.” I wince as I read the last line: “While Le Culte de la Lune managed to persist longer in the New World than many other persecuted groups, eventually they too were hunted to extinction.”
I close the book and swallow hard.
“I’ve got something,” Nissa says, and splays outModern Wiccaon the desk, pointing to a black-and-white photo of a group of men and women standing in a clearing ringed by trees. They’re wearing dated clothes and giving the camera apprehensive smiles, as if unsure they want their picture taken. The caption reads:Trufayette Parish Wiccan circle, photographed 1985.
“Wiccanshere?”
“Look at the trees,” Nissa urges.
I squint until I realize the trees surrounding the clearing are covered in carvings: so many symbols my eyes swim, like the trees have been transformed into living books. And there, among them, is the circle with twin moons.
I look at Nissa with wide eyes.
“IknewI’d seen it,” she says triumphantly.
Scanning the paragraphs accompanying the photo, a sentence leaps out at me: “In the late twentieth century, southeastern Louisiana is home to many practicing circles, including Le Culte de la Lune (pictured l.), a richness that reflects the area’s history as a religious sanctuary.” Excitedly, I shove my book at Nissa. “I just read about them. But this says they were hunted to extinction.”
I wait with bated breath while Nissa reads. Finally, she looks up and raises an eyebrow. “I think those tricky heathens survived. And now they call themselves Wiccans.”
“Wiccans here in Bottom Springs,” I murmur. “As recently as 1985.” Pieces of a puzzle I’ve been working on for years appear in my mind. I need to talk to Everett.
“Your daddy probably wiped them out as his first order of business,” Nissa says blithely. “Exodus 22:18: ‘We shall not suffer a witch to live.’”
I tense. Nissa is as close to a friend as I have in this town, so sometimes I forget she’s a devout Christian, the first in church every Sunday.
“Many terrible things done in the name of God,” she adds, still scanning the book, and I relax.
“Anything in here about what the symbol means?” I clutchModern Wicca. “People are guessing it calls forth the Low Man. Do you think they’re right?”
Legend says the Low Man was trapped in the swamp by men who practiced spiritual magics now long forgotten. Could that refer to Le Culte de la Lune? Is the Low Man myth rooted in actual history?
Nissa scoffs. “This town. For such God-fearing folk, it shocks me what nonsense captures them. I don’t know what the symbol means, other than it clearly comes from Le Culte de la Lune, according to that picture. I’m going to put in a request to my friends at LSU.”
