Convent of the Infantine Sisters placed amid a half dozen Protestant sectarian churches, one of which broadcasts its services ("songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning") to the entire town via loudspeakers.
Odd paganism of Infantine Sisters as well via the active role of Saints in their lives and devotions, almost as demigods. Their morning prayer invokes the moon and Egypt as well as the Virgin. Sister Mary Philomel has a wooden statue of Saint Wenceslaus whom she invokes to help her find misplaces objects (when he fails, she punishes him by turning his face to the wall).
"In some ways, dealing with Sister Mary Philomel was like dealing with a smart and powerful child . . . Saints and angels, when compelled by the proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner's behalf with the remoted divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped weathermen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered."
Sam's children have the absolute faith of the young, though Sam himself, as a doctor, is something of a deist -- "heterodox, Pelagian." Sam sees religious faith as, essentially, an aspect of childhood.
Pagan aspect of Catholic religious devotion. The Oliphant children and Pierce tutored by Sister Mary Philomel: "Sister Mary Philomel was their daily instructress in such pieties; she was the great pythoness of their cult, the guardian of the gate into the land of the dead."
Caught up in the spell of Sister Mary Philomel, Pierce's ritualesque turn of mind draws him into the seductive mysteries of Catholic dogma. Still he worries that her constant presence in the household, her "fuss-budgeting," will disrupt the secret society he has built for himself had his cousins: "The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven."
Pierce, reading Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle in the seclusion of the attic, empathises with werewolves, who feel their furry coats on the insider and, unbeknowst to mankind, protect the harvest by doing battle at night with witches: "he thought of their sufferings: to be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody of whom the welfare of everybody depends, even though they don't know it."
The boy Pierce develops a sympathy, a secret allegiance for "the doomed side, the side history History would leave behind." Which opens the question of which side to root for in the battle of the angels.
The Oliphant boys and Pierce at the movie house in Bondieu: 'the picture was ten years old, but thry neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, rapid rituals of destruction and revival." After the movie, they go to the variety store, Joe Boyd browsing "Guns and Ammo" and Pierce the horror comics.
In the dusk, Pierce walks home alone from town "superb in his loneliness" and, like a werewolf, "the black melancholy burden of his nature, turned outside-in" as "night was falling and the mild beings of the day hid themselves away."
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