“Fulgor”, a novel by the Mexican writer Alma Mancilla

With an interesting and extensive career as a storyteller, writer, social anthropologist and doctor of political science, Alma Mancilla (Toluca, Mexico, 1974) was left with a thorn in her head when she wrote in 2018 from the shadows. It is an apocryphal biography of Heinrich Kramer, the author of the book Malleus Maleficarum: Witch’s hammer, a treaty that appeared in Germany in 1487 and was fundamental in the development of the terrible persecution and witch-hunting that reached its peak in the Renaissance between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. In her taste for terror and fantasy (she grew up reading Poe and Horacio Quiroga), this desire to write a story or novel about witches led her to explore the dark territory represented by the demonization of women by the heteropatriarchal regime, especially with regard to the imposition of motherhood as irrevocable fate. The dreamy tone serves to deepen the separation from reality of the protagonist, Eva, a young student of anthropology — an urban person who is the narrator’s voice, in the first person, almost as an echo of consciousness — who ends up in a cabin in the forest to do fieldwork about one of the local communities and their customs. She soon discovers an unusual group of women dressed in white that no one talks about and that she likes (also an albino teenager), as she tries to adapt to the strange environment while trying to heal the painful wound of a recent miscarriage. The archaic nature of rural Mexico, the earthy and primitive nature of the forest and the bankruptcy of everyday life eroded by daydreaming worsen his mental health, driven by a conscious (and irresponsible) decision to stop taking psychiatric drugs prescribed to treat trauma. In this almost sci-fi habitat, in an alien dimension, Eva will , dragging their spirits, to search for the light of redemption.