The broken machine of magical knowledge

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Via Rose's reading of Fellowes Kraft's novel about Shakespeare, "Bitten Apples," the book detours into the future playwright's life, projecting a meeting with Dr. John Dee, who offers the youth access to his library: "there are books here a player might well study . . . If you like, you may come back, and look into them. Read what ones you like. There are many who come here to find this or that. Tales. History. Knowledge.

Pierce's rejected parallel course to History 101 is Mystery 101: "how history hungers for the shape of myth; how the plots and characters of fable and romance come to inhabit real courts and counting-houses and cathedrals; how old sciences die and bequeath their myths and magic to their successors; how the heroes of legend pass away, fall asleep, are resurrected, and enter ordinary daylit history, persisting as a dream persists into waking life, altering and transforming it even when the dream itself has been forgotten or repressed."

Dr. Dee's vision of angels as a great machine: "Nine choirs of angels fill up the universe, each choir meshing with the higher and lower ones like immense gears of different ratios, their meshing making for hierarchy throughout creation, making distinction, difference, this, that, and the other . . . if God were to withdraw them the universe would not only come to a halt and die, it would probably disappear altogether with a single indrawn breath."

Dee's angelic research resonates with Pierce's earlier classroom lampooning but then reconsideration of Dante's geography of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

At about the midpoint of the novel, the events of the two prologues are recapitulated, expanded -- Dr. Dee meets the earless skyrer Edward Talbot and Pierce narrates to his gypsy-blooded ex-girlfriend Julie, now a book agent, the story of Giordano Bruno. Both link back to writings by the novelist and polymath Fellowes Kraft.

Girodano Bruno "the first thinker of modern times, really, to postulate infinite space as a physical reality . . . What was it, Kraft was wondering, that compelled Bruno and Bruno alone to break out of the closed world of Aquinas and Dante, and find an infinite universe outside." Bruno's heresy, for which he was burned at the stake, was that man's mind contained all potentiality. The mind itself if infinite and contains all creation.

Giordano Bruno's revelation traced back by Pierce, himself following Kraft, to arrival in Italy of the spurious Greek works of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great) based on Egyptian texts. Purportedly, Hermes had transcribed Egyptian magical practices and conveyances of those texts to Europe "responsible for serious people taking up the practice of magic." But, in reality, the "Egyptian" texts were spurious: the work of a Hellenic mystery cult of the second or third centuries A.D.

The spurious Egyptian magic texts misled adepts from Roger Bacon all the way to Aleister Crowley.

Magic belongs not to Egypt but to AEgypt, a parallel place. Pierce explains: "You can trace the story of Egypt back, and back, and at a certain point (or at several different points) it will divide. And you can follow either one: the regular history book one, Egypt, or the other, the dream one. The Hermetic one. Not Egypt but AEgypt. Because there is more than one history of the world."

"It is as though there had once been a wholly different world, which worked in a way we can't imagine; a complete world with all its own histories, physical laws, sciences to describe it, eytmologies, corespondences. And then came a big change in all of them, bound up with printing and the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and the Cartesian and Baconian ideals of mechanistic and experimental science. The new sciences were hugely succcessful, bit by bit they scrubbed away all the persisting structures of the old science. . . . The whole old world we once inhabited is like a dream, a dream we forgot on waking, even though, as dreams do, it lingered on into our all-awake thinking."

The lost knowledge of the pre-scientific system of knowledge "a drowned mountain," a broken machine."

Pierce: "We've forgotten the whole story. All we retain are details, impressions, bits and pieces scattered through our mental universe, like parts of a huge machine that's been smashed, and can never be put together again."

Pierce proposes to the book agent Julie "a kind of archaeology of everyday life" to recover the old knowledge. Julie, sensing a potential payoff ("lucrum" is the title of this section of the novel) counterproposes that Pierce actually reconstruct the lost system of magic.

Pierce's immediate response: "Nonononono"

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