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."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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