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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