Words as magic; the writer as alchemist

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

A wind rises -- a counter-wind to John Dee's -- that shifts the spirit of the age from the word-drunk relativist Giordano to the orthodox Rene Descartes. The young Decartes has a number of vivid dreams -- one of a "great deforming wind" that blows him toward a chapel and a school -- and determines to join the bloody siege of Prague.

The wind blows through the military ranks arrayed before Prague; a light wind at first, but finally one that "sweeps away" the "various unearthly powers" ranked behind Frederick's forces. Their heavenly supporters gone, the soldiers feel "their warm mammalian breath condensed on the cold damp air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of heaven."
The wind blows across the world hardly noticed, but neverethess "rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of open books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath . . . separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other."

Walking through, but hardly noticing, the bloody devastastion of Prague, Decartes begins to formulate "a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations." He seeks "a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely."

In the failure of Rosicrucianism as a political force, a lesson from the epigraph to the "Chemical Wedding," perhaps, Crowley half-suggests, one that only appeared there with the end of that old world: "Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass." [Thus, Bruno's metamorphosis into ass is philosophically undone as is the mythic transformation of Apuleus's "Golden Ass" returned to human form by eating roses].

Following Bruno, following Kraft, Pierce has the sense ("a dream-sure certainty") that the secret item, the surviving token of AEgypt, for which he is searching is still in Prague. He has a vivid dream in which his father, Axel, brings it to him, only to have it snatched away by spirits with "horripilating hands."

Fellowes Kraft's first book (one thinks here of the similarly dillitantish Ralph Roeder) was on Catherine de Medici and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. His brand of whisky, inevitably, is Four Roses.

When traveling, Kraft prefers antique sepia postcards "as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past as well, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut"

As Kraft feels death approaching, he consults Boney -- he addresses him, as habitually, "Mon Emperor" -- on how to keep his papers from falling into the wrong hands. Boney suggests that Kraft could burn the sensitive papers himself, to which the novelist replies: "It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have a profound horror of suicide."

Kraft's lifelong quest is for what the Cabbalists call the "Shekhinah," the stone from the hollow of God's heart that transforms matter to spirit: "it is the lapis exulus, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can of yellow jackets, and was badly stung."

Kraft's trips to Prague are just prior to Hitler's invasion and during the Russian suppression of Czech freedom in 1968. He thinks of the Adamite sects that lived in Bohemia prior to the wars of religion and reflects that similar groups are said to exist in the Faraway Hills where he lives.

Revisiting Prague on the brink of the Russian invasion, Kraft meditates on the local tradition of political change through defeneatestion and thinks of how "the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past r future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves and being down steeples in another."

Similarly, he sees how one masters history in order to "impose [its] irrefutable Laws on Time's body . . . to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus in any age that the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth."

Thus, the way to defeat power is to propose new laws of history: "laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutible, and unimposible on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own."

Kraft finds not the magic relic that Boney sent him in search of but, perhaps inevitably, another novel. The unfinished manuscript Pierce has been charged with editing contains the secret of that departed world. It is, Kraft reflects, "a book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood."

The writer is the true alchemist. Kraft thinks "give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. . . . Transformation was what language could do. It was all it could do."

As death approaches, Kraft sees an unfamiliar car, an Olds 88, approaching (and in it, no doubt, Beau Brachman, who collects the souls of heroes and monsters to take them to the hereafter).

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Bruno's refusal

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Forces gather in heaven and earth for the (or rather another) battle for the end of the world. Terestrially, it takes place in Prague where Frederick and Elizabeth -- the Winter King and Queen beloved of the Rosicrucians -- reign in Rudolf's mystical castle, in defiance of the Catholic order.

Dee's old skyrer Kelly is there, and sees the forces of heaven in array for battle: "the angel bands issuing from their watchtowers at the four corners of the universe: red as new-smitten blood, lily white, green and garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin, black as raven hair or bilberry juice, the four kinds of which the world is made, coming together in war. . . . In the lower heavens the souls of heroes, the great daemons, the tutelary spirits, the angels of the nations, were thereupon set upon one another. They couldn't know that what was being fought over in Heaven was the shape of the world to come, in which none of them would figure. Yet since the lowest of the rulers of the air are coterminous or contiguous with the highest rulers of the earth, the states and nations, princes and churches, were agitated too, and thought they were plotted against."

Inside the castle, Frederick and Elizabeth come to the tetradic chamber with Archimboldo's paintings. At its center, where Giordano had seen an absence, now lies "a humpbacked black iron trunk waiting to be opened."

In the terrestrial battle for Prague, Rabbi Lowe's Golem fights on the side of Frederick's doomed forces against the Catholics as do the werewolves who harry them at night -- Jews and pagans alike have an interest in preserving the spiritual pax of Rudolf's imaginitive reign.

In the midst of the raging battle a funeral takes place. The Rosicrucian play and tract-writer Philip a Gabella -- the transmigrated Giordano -- who no one had been able to find "to thank or burn" has, in his last sickness, reverted to Ass's form. "He had only hoped -- he had even expected -- that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and, in their coming together, know themselves as they had been."

In the battle, the Catholics -- the forces of repression -- are vanquished and a call goes out via astral messenger to gather "all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rosy Cross" -- those who commune with angels, shapeshifters, nightwalkers, goldmakers, doctors of all sciences. They gather in the golden city of Prague, now transformed into the mystical capitol of AEgypt: Adocentyn. An age of learning, tolerance, and love is ushered in. The result is "a backwards revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Age of Gold." [Which would be a defeat of Y-shaped time].

Except, in one of history's -- one of Crowley's -- reversals, none of that happens. Bruno refuses the chance proferred by his interlocutor Cardinal to escape the flames into four-legged freedom. "What happened next," Crowley writes, "was that, twenty years earlier, Giordano Bruno chose not to escape from the papal prison in Rome and go wandering forgetful on four legs into the world."

[In "Daemonomania," Bruno's escape from the stake was parallel with Sam's being freed from the Powerhouse Christian cult. End of the world events with opposite outcomes?]

Bruno refuses to recant because "were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show that they only have power over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time, men will laugh at their structures rules bulls anathemata."

Giordano sees the impossibility -- and the peril -- of attempts to remake the world, either by the forces of godly repression or by those of liberty seeking to usher in an age of "self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation." He has learned "it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can'th know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll."

In his cell, Bruno "sifts the days of his past and walks the roads of this future and that one" conjuring in his mind an image of the spirit (Sam?) glowing in Dee's seeing stone and of the English magus himself who "had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from this world. Because the time was past when even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid."

With Bruno's refusal to escape dissolution in the flames of the Inquisition "all the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time."

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Holy ass and rosy cross

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

"Endless Things" begins a Rosicrucian metaplot as Pierce traces Fellowes Kraft's pilgrimage through Europe decades before.

Pierce has, of course, been in the service of two Rose's -- the benevolent pagan Rosie Rasmussen and the destructive Christian Rose Ryder.

The revolutionary appearance of the first Rosicrucian texts, notably the romance "Chemical Wedding," linked to the doomed reign of the enlightened Winter King Frederick of Heidelberg and his bride Elisabeth Stuart, for whose betrothal Shakespeare's "Tempest" was staged.

"If all the world were made of letters and names, then a text out of nowhere could explode it, enter into its tissues like a germ or seed, working both ways at once, toward foreword, towards epilogue, and remake its sense. That's what happened in Europe in 1615 when the Rosicrucian texts appeared, with their fantastic provenances and alphabetical prophets: or would have, if the world really were made of letters and names and not of the stuff it's made of. No one can account for why these texts, unlike all the other wild prophecies, encoded romances, politico-chemical allegories, and religious polemics of the time, should have so taken the imagination."

Christian, the hero of the "Chemical Wedding," is fated, when all the other celebrants have departed, to be left behind to tend the gate of the castle -- punishment for having glimpsed the naked Venus. He replaces an aged gatekeeper who was sentenced to a similar fate before Christian came to replace him. [This succession a clear reference to that of PIerce for Fellowes Kraft].

Pierce's seemingly fated connection to Kraft: "He had always known Kraft. So it seemed now. He knew Bruno because of a book Kraft had written about him. . . . Would he have been surprised if, in that year 1952, some agent of Y-shaped Time had come to tell him that he would be allied with Kraft in life and death (Kraft's), repeating Kraft's journeys and his thoughts?"

Kraft's own autobiography, "Sit Down Sorrow," begins: "In 1930 I closed my childhood like a book, and took ship for the world." The fatherless Kraft, it is revealed, was brought up by his mother into in a small mystical cult." Kraft's mother refers to his absent father as "Guess Who?"

Kraft's novels, forgotten at the time the AEgypt Cycle opens, have now gained a cult following and have been reissued in uniform trade paperbacks "all of them reissued in numbered volumes so that you could remember which ones you'd read and which were yet to go (they were admittedly pretty similar). It could be seen then that they told a single story, the main branch of them anyway, unfolding over time and populated by a large cast that migrated from book to book with the turning years."

Kraft's first and last books were about Girodano and Pierce perceives that in the last, unfinished one, the novelist helps the cosmological monk escape, his soul fleeing the stake in (as we saw at the end of "Daemonomania") the body of an Ass. Now revealed that the cross on the Ass's back, which we knew was not that of the Savior, is the human cross of Dee's "monas" figure.

Pierce, apparently living in a kind of monastic retreat, has a moment of revealtion regarding Kraft's intentions for Bruno -- to save him from the stake -- and picks up again the work of editing or completing Krafts's final book about the monk. He follows, or projects, the Ass's travails until, invoking the Cabbalistic arts of metamorphosis, Giordano remakes himself into a man -- and conspires to launch a new philosophy, which turns out to be Rosicrucianism (the story once again spiraling back upon itself).

Bruno, for Kraft, was the first to see the universe as infinite and subjective, he proved "there was no Down, no Up, no Inside, no Outside"; his gods were "bumblers, and the history of the universe a record of their crimes, follies, and misfortunes."

Kraft makes the idea of "endless things" his own "small prayer and mantra": "to him it meant those things that roll on forever: travel, and the intoxications of thought and gaze and words, and possibility; sex, the sea, childhood and the view from there, the way ahead."

As Kraft works on his final manuscript, feeling death coming on, his thoughts turn to his mother and to his boyhood. Reading one of his mother's letters, memories of his solitary boyhood return: "He pocketed the letter in its envelope, disheartened suddenly, having glimpsed that eager receptive kid, and missing him: lost to him now, he alone left inside his flesh. Wonderful and terrible, how children love the world, and swallow it down daylong in spite of everything, everything."

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The Mystical Figure Y: "Endless Things" begins

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Endless Things" begins with a different, tangible view of new worlds emerging from old -- a visit to the 1939 World's Fair by Pierce's parents, Axel and Winnie, and his Uncle Sam and his wife. Crowley describes "there were a hundred maps of the World of Tomorrow, all of them a little different. At the AT&T pavilion, Sam's wife Opel is selected to make a phone call to anyone and picks the town clerk their rural home in Bondieu, Kentucky. When the call doesn't go through, Crowley reminds us that "The World of Tomorrow" arrives in different places at different moments.

The excursion to the 1939 World's Fair comes as Hitler is invading Poland, his tanks famously rolling through the Polish cavalry. The World's Fair pavilions for Poland and Czechoslovakia embody the temporary persistance of the old order as the new world is created -- in this case, violently.

Pregnant with Pierce in the era before airconditioning, Winnie often takes refuge during the day in the American Museum of Natural History. The war in the Pacific now raging and she ponders the difference between the news stories of devastation and death on the island battlefields and the dioramas of placid wildlife: "Empty. Before humans." She is tempted to wish "men or Man had never gone to those places, never found them and put them at risk so thoughtlessly. For there were no birds there, she bet, no blossoms. Which led to the thought that it would be better if men hadn't come to be at all, the peace and endlessness without them: and she drew away from that thought in a little awe."

"Endless Things" will apparently take its form from the mystical figure "Y" -- the crossroad, the forking path the divides salvation from damnation, fortune from bad luck. It can also represent the cross -- the Tree of Life -- in the division between the saved and the damned that came with Christ's coming. And its stem can be seen as representing youth: before the major choices of adulthoood are made. "Its mystic significance is Choice: the two branches signify the paths of Virtue and Vice, respectively, the narrow right way leading to virtue, the wider left to vice."

The Y is also known as the "Samian figure," a character said to have been invented by Pythagoras. And, expressed by "the hand with bent forefinger," it represents the male member. Axel's Quiz Show failure came from his inability to answer a question about the Samian figure.

The boy Pierce who, from an early age, has "his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made" dwells on the inability to trace life backwards in order to reverse an errant decision: a wrong fork taken. "The Y -- the crosroad, the forking path -- only allows for forward movement. "There's no provision for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shot our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead . . . no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture."

Pierce nevertheless begins his new quest to retrace Fellowes Kraft's European expedition by retracing -- or revisiting anyway -- his past life: visiting his father and his lovers Julie and the gypsy Sphinx in New York and encountering his mentor Frank Walker Barr at JFK airport.

A Union of Souls: "Daemonomania" concludes

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IX

Beau Brachman begins retracing a route he took long ago in which he located and united a network of believers ("a union of souls") in the old world that was lost and the new age to come -- similar to the people Bruno finds throughout his journeyings who display the monus glyph.
The U.S. highways on which Beau made his original journey in his Olds 88 (double infinity; double worm; double ouroboros) are now overgrown, bypassed by the Interstates: "the older roads whose numbers in their white badges had once been codes for escape or pursuit" passing the "ruined shells" of places, "amoeba shapes whose lights were out and broad windows boarded."

One continuity: Beau picks up the Evangelical radio station WIAO he'd listened to many years before in seeking the Old Holiness, the uncorrupted "more perfect gospel bearer" amid the snake-handling religions of Appalachian Kentucky.

The holy man he finds explains the true meaning of Simon Magus's heresy: that not just Jesus but every soul on Earth contains the full power of God and that every woman, not just Mary, possesses the full wisdom of God.

Preparing for Rosie Rasmussen's solstice party -- the invitations read "come as you aren't" -- at the old tourist castle, Pierce tries to craft for his costume the head of a knight's charger but it comes off as an ass's head instead.

Giordano Bruno, in the dungeons of the Venetian Inquisition, tells his fellow prisoners the story of Onorio, the Universal Ass whose earthly foolishness causes it death on earth but whose soul is a brave servant of God in heaven.

The love-sick Pierce increasingly dissociative, living in several worlds, enacting several choices at once. At the solstice party, he unawarely speaks with the ghost of Fellowes Kraft, who laments his own failure to knit past and present together.

Kraft's ghost exhorts the befuddled Pierce: "It'll have to be you that does it. Somehow, I don't know how. If you don't make a contribution, haven't I labored in vain? Not to speak of your own sufferings."

Sam, now in the hands of Powerhouse, is to be cured of her seizures by Roy Honeybeare -- first by denying her medicine and then (inevitably) by helping her remember -- that is: inducing false memories of -- sexual abuse by her father.

Beau and Spofford launch a successful plot to help Rosie steal Sam from the Powerhouse cult. Beau warns the others that, once Sam is freed, he won't himself come back: "Beau said to go on. . . . He said he'll be all right, and don't look for him. He won't be coming back."

Crowley explicates: "When the world ends, it ends differently for each person then alive to see it, each person who chances to see it among the other things to be seen and felt and understood around us all the time; and then very soon it begins again. And almost everyone persists into the new world, which is exactly like the old in almost every respect, or seems to be in the brief moment when the old world can still be remembered.

"Almost everyone. The creatures of the passage time do not persist, who only came into existence for the length of time the world wavered undecided over what shape it would take next. . . .

"When the West was endless, a sea reaching into the sunset, that was where the beasts and heroes of an old age went at last, stepping aboard a ship restless at anchor. . . . So now too."

With that, Beau Brachman heads West to gather all those who will not be a part of the new age: "It may take long, it may be years still, but Beau will gather them all up, as leaves are gathered: as leaves, or pages."

Pierce, without awareness, agrees to take up the task Boney had proposed to him of retracing Kraft's journeys in Europe.

Spofford gives him a ride to Arcady, and Pierce brings up the shepherd's crook he had seen him with in the Spring. Spofford says he never had such a crook. Sam relates to the distracted Pierce that the "ode home" she used to see in Dee's seeing stone is gone. In such small absences, the old world's end is apparent.

In Kentucky, Sister Mary Philomel hears the old box (clearly, the one assembled by Rudolf's court magicians) whirr and clank.

At Solstice, finding Pierce awake in Boney's office at Arcady, Sam says she has been awakened by the snow. She asks him to sing "Silent Night," but he cannot. Then her "favorite," "We Three Kings" -- song of the Magi, patron saints of alchemists. They sing it together.

The date is "the twenty-second of December, 1979. When Sam was Pierce's age, it would be ten years into a new century, no a new millenium, and the world would be as it was coming to be: it would not be the way it had all along been, nor yet what we then thought it would become."

"Daemonomania" ends with Giordano Bruno being led to the stake to burn and his soul's escape into the body of a holy ass. "Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind, none could catch him. Some noticed the sacred Cross on his shaggy back, the Cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, Whom one of their kind once carried; but this Cross was not the same, no not the same."

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Stay away, as from a chasm's lip or an exploding cigar

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

As Rosie Rasmussen glances idly at Kraft's final manuscript, Pierce "had an impulse to warn her, to warn her away, as from a chasm's lip or an exploding cigar."

Showing her father, Mike Mucho's, influence, Sam interrogates Pierce: "Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian or a Jew?" Pierce responds to the little girl: "Neither. There's not just the two."

Pierce, asked by Rosie to watch Sam while she meets with her lawyer, reflects that he will never have a flesh-and-blood child in his life. He thinks of his figment Robbie: "The only child of his person there would ever be he had constructed by himself in his workshop, like Gepetto; had prayed then to the smiling powers that he might be made into a real little boy. And -- like that lonely old puppeteer -- he had got a sort of conditional yes. Real to you: as real as unreal can be; as real as the god's gifts ever are. And what had he done with his new son then? What had he imagined he had done with him then? His heart struck loudly within him like a door slamming shut upon him. Did he really know of no other way of love except that, was it so?"

Pierce reads to Sam the Little Enosh comics he prized in his own childhood. Opposing that fantasy, Mike Mucho is driving with Ray Honeybeare, who is utilizing the resources of Powerhouse to back the battle against Rosie for custody of Sam. Honeybeare warns that Sam has been exposed to imagination (a form of magic) as part of her play at the daycare operated by Beau, and that it is the ill that if causing the girl's seizures. "We've been fighting magic for two thousand years" he states, using as his evidence the story of Peter's contending with Simon Magus who, among other things, said he could fly (the fantasy common to Beau, Rosie, and Pierce).

Dee, back in England, struggles to do good with his spiritual knowledge and despairs: "We must not call down the powers from their spheres, John Dee thought, lest they answer us. For they never will be comfortable to our wills, and their own wills are no more bent to helping us than is the sea's or the wind's. Job asked God, who had permitted his wife and children to be slain, for help and understanding: and in answer God showed him the greatness of his creatures, and the strength of his arm, and told him to be silent."

Dee's descent toward death a devolution. He sells his books, then his plate; removes from his house and "practically stops eating, as an old cat or dog does, seeming to live by consuming the last of his life itself, day by day, until it was all gone." Finally, he sells his seeing stone, knowing it is now just a piece of flawed crystal. "No one but those who had used those Arts great and small for so many decades knew that all true sorcerers, both the wicked and the wise, were dead, and what they had once done could be done no more."

Pierce notices the copy in the Blackbury Jambs library of the cyclopedia he pored-over in his boyhood: "Deities, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind." He "lifted it into the lamplight, knowing even as he opened it that it would ask something of him or offer him something. He could almost hear the whir of gears, the clicking of works long stopped."

Comparing his innocent childhood intimacies with the feral girl Bobby with his perverse pleasures with Rose, Pierce again thinks of the (Dantean; Bunyanean) spiral: it was "as though he had climbed a spiral track up a mountain, he saw that he had come to the same place where he had once stood, only one turn higher up. He could see himself now, down there on a former turn, in his own room in that house, bent over a book, this book or another; he could look with pity down upon himself, at the back of his big shorn head, the vulnerable tendons of his neck."

Mike Mucho gains custody of Sam to "raise in his religion. Rosie Rasmussen and Pierce, now having both lost their loved ones to the Powerhouse, comisserate late at night in the kitchen at Arcady. Pierce begins, somewhat reluctantly to reveal the nature of his sexual relations with Rose Ryder "laying down only low cards at first." In response, Rosie reveals that she too knows Rose's masochistic tendencies firsthand.

Rosie takes Pierce to bed. After, she advises him "You should get married. Have kids. . . . Get out of your head. Get down in the shit and the blood."

And as she drifts off to sleep: "Good night, you dope."

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"Too much reading, too much knowledge, not enough wisdom"

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

We finally are told the reason why Pierce is boarding the Greyhound Bus ("its blue and silver side marked with a fleeing or pursuing hound") at the beginning of "Daemonomania" -- it is not in an attempt to rescue Rose Ryder from Powerhouse International but because she has been sent, as a kind of Christian succubus, to try and recruit him into the group.

The Powerhouse conclave occurs at a bypass stripmall, including a dinner at a horrifying chain barbecue restaurant (the Powerhousers "their mouths open wide, baring their teeth and scrunching their eyes into a semblance of fury, lifted sandwiches as tall as they were broad and dripping with glossy gravy") and the meeting itself at a sterile motel with a phony Dickensian pub. "There is or was then a certain acrid smell to new motels, arising from the artificial woods and wools they are furnished with maybe, or the harsh cleaners used to scour away the traces of so many humans passing so constantly, or from all that and also another subtler stink of falsity and veneer."

Watching the Powerhouse evangelist Pitt Thurston "a new kind of despair entered Pierce. Long ago in Kentucky he and his cousins with a delicious sense of trespass had used to watch the preachers on TV, they had just begun use the new tool, they were clownish in every sense, they talked too loud and their haircuts were amazing, and their faith was so real and frank it was shaming. Pitt Thurston had learned not from such as they but from late-night talk-show hosts and corporate sales managers."

Pierce on Pitt Thurston: "Oh hateful man, a catalog of all that Pierce despised and feared . . . The suit of pale wintergreen, supressed at the waist, sculpted and tufted at shoulder and lapel. The horrid familiarity with the Deity, his boss man, his chum; the smug self-love, the violent energy directed against others; who could not see in him the smooth beast horned like a lamb who fronts for the Big Beast in Revelation, the top salesman, who marked the foreheads of everyone so they could buy and sell."

The "Big Beast" Honeybeare? "He was heavy, both large and fat; his pants taut around his loins, constricting the large lump of his privates."

Powerhouse a consumerist faith ("just ask"): prayer brings "health, wealth, new cars." Also promotes a belief in spiritual election, as members of Powerhouse are not responsible for any sins they commit -- Pierce recognizes the Carpocratian Heresy: "there is no sin for those who are saved" -- such sins being the work of the powerful demons who contend for their souls.

The ex-psychotherapist Mike Mucho, now an acolyte of Powerhouse, confronts Pierce on how he can explain existence without a belief in God. Pierce replies that "just because I rejected his or the Bible's explanation didn't mean I had to come up with one of my own."

Rose, also Mike Mucho's former lover, alludes to the upcoming custody battle between him and Rosie Rasmussen over their daughter Sam.

The Powerhouse cult as a new form of alchemy. Rose contemplates how "all the gifts she had been given (of the Spirit but not only those of the Spirit, other things too, amazing luck, finding yourself in the right time and the right place to get what you wanted or needed, a test grade, cash, a parking place even, a wake-up call, there wasn't anything too small that it couldn't be made to go right) that all of it was for the making of that new clarity and certainty and power"

The former feral girl Bobby -- now a physicians aide at the children's hospital where Sam is a patient -- had been drawn into Powerhouse International in the hope it could relieve her disturbing dreams of the dead -- manifestations of her nature as a witch. Powerhouse, inevitably, convinces her the dreams are the result of her having been a victim of child sexual abuse by her grandfather/stepfather and stokes her rage. Going back to Kentucky where her grandfather is dying, she begins to see the falsity of the memories implanted in her consciousness.

Pierce horrified, frantic, afraid at the love he conjured for Rose Ryder: "he had messed with magic for his own delight, to get for himself what he wanted but should not have had, and in consequence had harmed irretrievably the world, 'the world,' like a kid with a chemistry set who by chance learns to crystallize or liquify the bonds of space and time."

Beau Brachman goes to New York where he'd once lived. He is handed a flyer by a starveling boy who, when Beau looks back, has disappeared. The flyer, in tiny type, exhorts him to look for the universal goddess Sophia.

Beau recalls similar deliverances in his earlier life in New York in the 1970s: cards printed with the letters "MM" that led to an underground sex club that practiced the spirituality of "copulation without generation."

At "MM," Beau had met the literary agent Julie, who had been Pierce's lover. He goes to see her and they discuss the expected dawning of the new world, which Julie had expected to be a great rising of Atlantis. Beau suggests instead "it won't be a city from the sea, it will some small and unnoticed thing, apparently one of a million identical things but not identical, you will very likely miss it even if its in your own backyard."

Beau tells Julie that her role as a literary agent is important as "the world is made of stories" and that "at certain times" people hunger for stories "like food and shelter." Julie considers how the routine pulp fictions she agents -- the one before her begins, parodying Crowley's own production, "Something has happened in hell" -- all seem to have the mythic plot Beau suggests people are looking for.

[Per Beau's prophecy, Pierce's narrative, which Julie is agenting, may be the one among many seemingly similar things that reveals the coming of the new world].

After his return from the meeting of Powerhouse International in Conurbana, Pierce is psychologically undone. He wants to talk with Beau Brachman, but Beau is away (as we know, he is in New York). He calls the minister Rhea Rasmussen, who tries to counsel him to get over his grief at Rose growing away from him -- not realizing that Pierce's true fear is that the succubus Rose will come back to him, not give him up.

Casting her eyes over Pierce's collection of books on demonology and mysticism, Rhea wonders whether the demons are of his imagination. Explaining he is an historian not a believer, Pierce sees in Rhea's suspicious response "the Medieval answer . . . too much reading . . . too much knowledge, not enough wisdom."


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Bigoted religion and willed ignorance return in strength

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Pierce begins to investigate Powerhouse International. He asks advice of a minister, Rhea Rasmussen, but finds her too tolerant for his purposes: she points out that Catholics were themselves an anti-government, mystical cult. He goes to the. Blackbury Jambs library to consult a reference book, but finds it unrevealing, feeling like "a voyeur at an inadequate keyhole." A sensationalist book on cults shelved nearby repells him.

The Vietnam Veteran and erstwhile shepherd Spofford's sense of cults is that they accost lost children, runaways, and make them "into junior wizards and witches themselves, some element of personhood extracted from them and replaced with a weird eye-light and a pasted-on smile. Hollowed out, Spofford had said. You could do it yourself. You could do it to yourself; or you could allow it -- you could ask for it -- to be done to you." Similarly, but from an opposite perspective, Rhea Rasmussen speaks to Pierce of how "religion seems to many people now to be a bondage not a freedom; and a deeper bondage than any political kind because it is voluntary" but that there is "an elation in giving up freedom."

Pierce taunts Rose that now that she is saved, that means he is damned. St. Thomas, he points out, "proved" that it is an entertainment for the souls in heaven to watch the torments of the comdemned in hell.

Rose, for a moment, speaks in tongues -- possession by the spirit or by a demon?

Pierce and Rose interrupted by Rosie Rasmussen. Pierce suggests that her cancelled plan for a Halloween party at the old tourist castle could be shifted to Christmas, a solstice: "Celtic ghosts appear at times and places that are neither here nor there . . . They appear at solstices, and at equinoxes, and on the nights when one of the two seasons of the Celtic year turn into the other -- those are the May Day feast and Halloween night. Christmas is the winter solstice; its a solstice feast."

Christmas/winter solstice as time when animals are allowed to speak; earlier, the young werewolf had spoken of The Three Kings as the patron saints of werewolves and of all those who fight the night battles against witches. The opposition of Rose and Rosie being defined as Christian/Pagan?

Drifting into sleep: "he lay alert listening to his brain run . . . until at a certain moment his thoughts turned to nonsense and he passed over."

In a letter, Rose guilelessly lets slip the anti-semitic ideology of the Powerhouse International cult. Pierce horrified at the return of Christianity's vengeful, score-settling god. "It was just like them, Christians, always their way, to transfer their own spleen and self-regard to the Maker and Sustainer of the Universe; to make the settling of their imaginary scores (settled in their favor a thousand times over, never enough though) the very last thing the Infinite is to concern himself with in this world -- hurting, whacking, flaying, causing pain. Your enemies your footstool. Maybe gather them all behind barbed wire, sure make them wear gray pyjamas and starve them to skeletons." He could add to this the holocaust against witches and heretics.

Here again, parallel between the witch hunters of the Dee/Giordano story and the contemporary narrative.

The next morning, Pierce reads that the Liberal Arts college at which he used to teach in New York -- which had previously trendily adjusted from elite to experimental and back again -- has become a Christian college. AEgypt Cycle's narrative arc beginning to crystalize as cultural conflict between New Age mythos and spirituality on 70s and emergence in 80s of Fundamentalist Christianity.

Pierce again: "The one thing he could not have conceived, would not have believed if he heard it predicted: that bigoted religion and willed ignorance would return in strength, and not even in new and outlandishly intriguing forms, just the same old wine, the same old bottles, people believing impossible things in the manner of athletes inuring themselves to pain or soldiers to bloodshed."

Pierce writes Rose a horrified letter in return, perhaps (?) finally casting that Christian incubus from him.

"War in Heaven. A war of all against all; if you are not of one party the will make you of another."

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The modernity of Demon hunters

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

The demon-hunters of the 16th century -- notably Jean Bodin, author of the treatise "Daemonomania" -- believe that Hell's mouth had opened due to the increased sinfulness of men and women: "Now it seemed [devils] walked or flew over the earth in legions, herding the wicked like cattle toward their pens, contracting with the desperate and the proud for their immortal souls, their signatures in blood smoking on the parchment; or in female form hovering oven men in the night to steal their seed as the men tossed in guilty dreams."

Bodin inveighs that "witches by the thousands are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as the worms in a garden" and warns they have formed a heretical church or sect of their own. Their rites, he insists, include the eating of children ("killed and eaten like fowl"). Crowley notes this is the same crime -- the very image of hell on Earth -- with which the Romans charged the early Christians and then the Christians charged their Gnostic rivals and then the Jews.

Dee is called by the Emperor Rudolf to cure a prized specimen in his collection -- a young werewolf (and, in fact, the same boy caught in a wolf trap on his way to the night battle that closes the previous volume). Dee cures the boy, who had been held chained in a narrow dungeon, by giving him doses of starlight and good food: wine, apples.

Madimi had warned Dee: "They will burn you too." In agreeing to take on the cure of the young werewolf, he thinks in response: "let me see what good I might do till then."

Dee and Giordano Bruno encounter each other at Rudolf's court and see the tetrad shaped room for which he commissioned Archimboldo to create human figures made from the elements of the world. Archimboldo's figures revealing a kind of heretical knowledge of how man is of the same matter as all other life.

Bruno looking at the paintings: "This is what we are ourselves. . . . For we are only composites of the elements of the world, held together while we live by our souls. This soul is perhaps nothing more than the form within matter, the form particular to us. It dissolves when we do, as those faces would vanish if the animals stirred and took themselves off, or when the flowers faded and the fuses and matches burned up."

In another part of Hradschin Castle, learned men in the employ of Rudolf secretly collaborate on a clockwork mechanism that would embody their hermetic knowledge and preserve it for the future, much as Hermes was buried clutching a tablet conveying his learning.

The nurse in the children's hospital (once nicknamed "Little Ones") where Sam goes for tests is Bobby, the feral girl from Pierce's boyhood. She is also a member of Powerhouse International and meets Rose Ryder there. Bobby suspects that Rose is another like her -- that is, a witch.

The nonsense song ("His head if a doughnut and his name is Aiken Drum") that Sam sings in the hospital has an Archimboldean resonance. Pierce, struggling with his manuscript, has a counter-Archimboldean sense of emptiness that "his head was a bread box, his heart was a birdcage."

Pierce sees the modernity of Bodin and the demon-hunters: "Jean Bodin, who wanted to find and burn all witches, all those who took animal form or believed they did -- all those who had illicit or unregulated dealings with the dead -- was in fact a modern man, a man of the time to come: he was fighting against the tendency to slip back into the older ways, the old world. . . . Clearheaded men like Bodin, Catholic and Protestant, antiphantasmic warriors, pushed back the dark together, rejecting the age-old truce between the Church and the pagans, both with their old philosophers and their old gods, with the small gods of everyday life, with the warning and helping dead. No more, said Bodin, Calvin, Mersenne."

"And it worked too. Frightened or ashamed, those who investigated Nature or nature drew in their researches, shut out the universal rays, narrowed their questions to those that had some promise of clear answers, and to whose formulations no power could object. If they hadn't done so the plain stepping stones of science couldn't have been uncovered, and swept."

Struggling to recover the "multilayered earth" in his manuscript, Pierce thinks of how "years before, when he had finally and wholeheartedly abjured the Church and all its pomps and works, had denied wholesale and at large all judgments it could make or had made on him, he had remembered the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, which no one could define but which Jesus was very clear in stating could not be forgiven, and that he had said in his mind 'All right, whatever it is I hereby commit it': and had felt a sudden chill nakedness, as though he had been taken notice of, and his statement recorded. Which was what he felt now too."

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Prophecy of a fallen angel

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

Perverseness of chapter named for the astrological house of the Wife: "Uxor." Dee's angels, speaking through the skyrer Kelly, demand the two men sexually swap wives. Pierce Moffat's relations with his incubus, Rose Ryder, fall deeper and deeper into sadomasochism.

Encountering his aged landlord, Mr. Winterhalter, who arrives in a large sedan, Pierce contemplates that "the more they shrink and shrivel, the larger their cars become."

Tucked in the pages of one of his books, Kraft had secreted a "getaway fund" -- five hundred dollars in old 50s. Rose Ryder too has a getaway fund that she uses to pay for an advanced course from the Christian healing cult, Powerhouse International, into which she is increasingly pulled.

As both Pierce and Rosie Rasmussen are deserted by their lovers, they separately contemplate an Early-Modern tract on autoeroticism from Fellowes Kraft's library.

In Bavaria, deserted by his skyrer Kelly, Dee laments that he himself has never seen or heard the angels who have directed their alchemical work. He wonders if the angels that speak to men "are ours alone, hidden inside" rather than heavenly. With that understanding, Dee for the first time looks past the surface of his seeing stone and speaks with Madimi.

Madimi confesses that she dictated Dee and Kelly share their wives in common for her own "amusement" and, responding to his horror at this, explains that "all angels are fallen angels." She warns that there is a battle in Heaven that "will have its mirror on Earth": a "war of all Christ's churches against their enemies: those who invoke the gods daemons and angels of heaven and earth from the places where they reside. They will burn all who do so. They will have them into the fire as paper."

Madimi prophesizes the new world soon to dawn: "She had said to them that a new age was to come, that many now alive would see it before their eyes were closed forever; it would steal upon many, and bewilder them. Much would be taken then, and much of value would be thrown away as trash; but nothing would be lost that would not be replaced by something of equal worth, somewhere, in some sphere, but far from here." She gives Dee a present of a wind he can control and, not long after, Kelly gives him his perfected means of making gold with the ease with which a baker makes bread.

Heralding the war in heaven, the Duke of Bavaria outlaws folk beliefs: "No longer were these beliefs and practices of country people to be allowed, for it had been determined that they had all along been worshipping the Devil -- perhaps without knowing it -- by their superstitions. Ghosts, manikins, ogres, mountain giants, will-o-the-wisps, the imps that combed sparks into cats fur and soured milk, all the small creatures of everyday and every-night life: either they had been suborned by the Enemy, or they had always been devils in disguise."

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The dispelling of Fellowes Kraft

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Pierce senses an inevitability in the events that link him from his boyhood to the present with the project of the writer Fellowes Kraft: "Pierce felt steal over him in the little room a species of dread. . . . This typescript, and his own book; the book's notes he had compiled, Kraft's old novels he had once read, these old books he was taking away from Kraft's shelves, the crystal ball Rosie said was still there in Boney's house, the letters Kraft had written to Boney from Prague and Vienna and Rome still piled on Boney's desk at Arcady, the Foundation's money awaiting him in the bank -- they all seemed for a moment to be items in a single list, compiled deliberately over the years; one of those huge and lengthy black-magic spells that can only be got out of by reversing them, step by step."

In Kraft's final manuscript, description of the wandering band of necromancers and alchemists who crisscross Europe in the 17th century recalls the "invisible college" imagined by the young Pierce.

On behalf of the Foundation, Pierce straightens and organises the chaotic contents of Kraft's cottege, in the process disturbing his wan ghost and helping to liberate his spirit: "Parts of his own disintegrating self remain behind after death, caught like dust or must [in accumulating papers and objects]. So pull it all out, full plastic bags with the worn shoes he had no reason to throw away, there being plenty of room in these closets; bang the old books together like erasers after school and watch the dust fly. You do him a favor: with every scrapbook opened, every ancient pile shifted, a little more of him is loosened, and gets away."

Pierce also finds an annotated copy of Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus," which it had earlier been revealed Kraft sought to put on in the old tourist castle.

Pierce's removal of Kraft's uncomplete final manuscript and several of his rarest books for safekeeping an act of dispelling: "The load of old books was damn heavy, and heaviest of all, resistant perhaps, tugging him backwards toward its resting place, was the typescript. Scotty -- Fellowes Kraft's malamute-lab mutt, who was buried there in the swale -- relaxed at last at it passed by him in Pierce's arms; his great breast fell in and eased as though in a sigh, his duties to watch and ward now done at last, all done."

The epileptic fits (she calls them "jumps") suffered by Sam, Rosie Rasmussen's daughter, apparently start when the child finds the seeing stone (allegedly belonging to Dr. Dee) that Kraft found for Boney on one of his Foundation-funded European expeditions. In the stone, Sam sees her "ode house," which her parents think is imaginary, but is apparently Dr. Dee's library. Dee, in turn, appears to have seen Sam in that self-same glass.

The "Daemonomania" of the title is from a book in Fellowes Kraft's library -- a 16th Century tract by Jean Bodin against those who are obsessed with spirits, both the possessed and those intellectuals who study supernatural forces other than God . . . in essence, that wandering band of necromancers imagined by the young Pierce. [In the present-day story, Bodin's line-of-thought seems to be carried forward by the Christian therapeutic zealotry of. Roy Honeybeare].

Pearce explains that in the 16th century, people assumed you needed spirits to manage the world: "Nobody in Bodin's time believed [the world] could just go by itself, the way they would come to believe two hundred years later, and still do."

At home alone -- with Rose off at her "training session" for Honeybeare's therapeutic cult -- Pierce meditates on the susceptability for Demonism of people of his own Saturnine, melancholic frame of mind.

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The Daemons of Sexual Desire

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Destiny as a misnaming of "mighty Chance, which we call Destiny when it deals us, after a million so-so hands, one undeniable straight flush."

An antique store ("Persistence of Memory") has opened in the apartment building where Pierce until recently lived. He sees and buys an odd dog-related frame with embedded whips and collars. Significance only becomes clear when it is revealed that his romance with Rose Ryder is a sadomasochiatic one.

Considering Rose's masochism, Pierce (ever precocious) thinks of his boyhood reading of Krafft-Ebbing: "mostly it was about people (unimaginable to him, people named with just a job and a single capital letter, E, a butcher, G, a married woman) whose sexuality had become accidentally bound-up -- it seemed to Pierce that it happened easily and often -- with something different from the persons of others. Fetishes was the word the book used. . . . He had wondered, then, if such a thing might happen to him, that his own mighty feelings might get loose somehow and seize blindly on the wrong thing forever. . . . He hoped if it did, whatever it was he ended-up with would not be loathesome or operose, as some of these were, or at least be easily acquired."

After an intense sexual encounter with Rose, Pierce is tempted to leave Blackbury Jambs, and his manuscript, forever, but instead heads home, stopping to relieve his own pent-up "spirit" of desire.

Spirit, Crowley explains, is "finer than body yet not quite immortal soul . . . quicksilver stuff that enwraps the soul and fills the heart and takes the impressions of the sense organs." It is expressed outside the body in two ways: song and ejaculate ("thick white stuff, spirit double-distilled, cooked up by heat, clouded into visibility like an egg's white").

Science changes the metaphoric unity of the cosmos by introducing experiment, man-made causality: "once, a universal animating spirit pervaded the whole universe, the reason why everything was as it was and not a different thing," there was "a continuity of the spirit within us and this universal spirit."

Rosie thinks back to the wheelchair-bound Boney, watching jealously as she rakes leaves at Arcadia: "That's one think I'll never do again. I wish I'd done it more. I wish I'd done everything more."

The Christian healing cult leader Honeybeare launches a creepily subdued rant at the ex-psychotherapist Mike Mucho (Rosie's husband) on the harm modern parents inflict on their children: "Sexual behavior, blasphemy . . . Even if they aren't consciously worshiping the devil, I mean assenting to him, these parents are caught up in these behaviors, and it comes to the same thing. An implicit pact. And the children are the ones to suffer. All over this land. . . . We are going to find that a generation of devils was laid in the souls of our children like eggs of some kind of insect."

The epileptic fits that Sam, Rosie's daughter, is having turn out to be realted to the young girl's having discovered Boney's seeing stone, in the gray depth of which she can see the other house that her mother assumes is imaginary: her "ode home."

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"An irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives": "Daemonomania" begins

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Daemonomania," the third volume of Crowley's "AEgypt Cycle" spans, we are told, the autumn houses of the Zodiac -- "it contains the middle of life, passages, friends and enemies, loss, dreams, dying, safety and danger. Its matter is the answering of calls, or the failure to answer them."

Traveling via bus to the declining factory city of Conurbania where Rose Ryder has become caught up in a Christian cult that overtook her workplace, Pierce Moffat reflects of the intrusion of the ineffable into the diurnal: "How often he had marvelled, when reading stories or watching movies about the sudden irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives -- the activation of an ancient curse, the devil in the flesh -- that the heroes seem to feel so little. They are surprised, they gasp, they deny it at first, but they gather their wits soon enough and begin to fight back; they don't faint from unsupportable dread, as Pierce believed he would."

Pierce perceives that "an awful slippage or instability had just lately come over things, or Pierce had just lately come to perceive it; he seemed to have discovered -- though he refused to assent to the discovery -- that he could make choices that would bring the present world to an end, and begin another, indeed that he was already helplessly making such choices."

Pierce's role in shaping the new world involuntary: "Like a man awaking from an earthquake trying to hold the pictures on the walls and the dishes on the shelf and thinking What is it? What if it?, Pierce wondered what he had done, and tried to make it stop."

The summer had brought strange, isolated dislocations and coincidences that signal the shift between the old order of things and the new. "When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul alive to see it . . . . But though the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it -- or through whom it passes -- will be able to look back and know that it he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though all around him his neighbors are still living in the old world, amid its old comforts and fears."

Rosie plans a Hallows Eve party in the old resort castle in the river. Like Bo and Pierce, Rosie can fly in her dreams ("whyever had she forgotten she could do this"); her flight is that of a witch rather than Bo's magic carpet or Pierce's captain on the bridge.

Rosie, who still hasn't formally accepted the Secretaryship of the Rasmussen Foundation, recalls Boney's refusal to name an heir during the period of his "fast-approaching nonexistance."

Discussing with Rose Ryder the pop-psychological concept of "climacetrics" she has been involved in researching-- seven year cycles of life, a sine curve the up and down passage years surrounding each seventh year -- Pierce asks why they cannot be instead an always rising spiral (Dante, Bunyan): "as through climbing a mountain: every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different."

Considering the account of Helvetius, in 1666, transmiting lead into gold, Pierce reasons one of three things occured; 1) Helvetius made gold, proving our current understanding of elementary science wrong; 2) Helvetius lied; 3) Helvetius could make gold but we cannot because "gold is not the same as it once was, earth is not the same, fire is not the same."

Pierce, proposing in the book he is writing that a. New Age is emerging, keeps a file of news clippings documenting "impossibilities that could not be accounted for, holes in Big Science's increasingly leaky roof."

Pierce's skepticism regarding his own inquiries: "Did he believe it himself? No, he didn't, not entirely, not yet. In the (actually rare) moments when he fully grasped what he was indeed saying, he would often stop writing and stand in mute awe before his own impertanence, or laugh hugely, or quit work for the day, wary and afraid. No, it actually seemed to him that those first shudders of the coming age that so many perceived had in fact passed and left the world the same; there had come no irreversible disasters really, no salvations either; the roads still ran where they had run; life was mostly hard work, and all the odds remained unchanged."

The Christian post-psychoanalytic cult, led by Ray Honeybeare, into which Rose Ryder is pulled, also sees the world as in a moment of transition, "a time full of possibility for good or evil. A time when God's kingdom comes very close to our old earth, maybe not to arrive for good, maybe just to give us a glimpse."

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