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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