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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