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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