"An irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives": "Daemonomania" begins

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Daemonomania," the third volume of Crowley's "AEgypt Cycle" spans, we are told, the autumn houses of the Zodiac -- "it contains the middle of life, passages, friends and enemies, loss, dreams, dying, safety and danger. Its matter is the answering of calls, or the failure to answer them."

Traveling via bus to the declining factory city of Conurbania where Rose Ryder has become caught up in a Christian cult that overtook her workplace, Pierce Moffat reflects of the intrusion of the ineffable into the diurnal: "How often he had marvelled, when reading stories or watching movies about the sudden irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives -- the activation of an ancient curse, the devil in the flesh -- that the heroes seem to feel so little. They are surprised, they gasp, they deny it at first, but they gather their wits soon enough and begin to fight back; they don't faint from unsupportable dread, as Pierce believed he would."

Pierce perceives that "an awful slippage or instability had just lately come over things, or Pierce had just lately come to perceive it; he seemed to have discovered -- though he refused to assent to the discovery -- that he could make choices that would bring the present world to an end, and begin another, indeed that he was already helplessly making such choices."

Pierce's role in shaping the new world involuntary: "Like a man awaking from an earthquake trying to hold the pictures on the walls and the dishes on the shelf and thinking What is it? What if it?, Pierce wondered what he had done, and tried to make it stop."

The summer had brought strange, isolated dislocations and coincidences that signal the shift between the old order of things and the new. "When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul alive to see it . . . . But though the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it -- or through whom it passes -- will be able to look back and know that it he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though all around him his neighbors are still living in the old world, amid its old comforts and fears."

Rosie plans a Hallows Eve party in the old resort castle in the river. Like Bo and Pierce, Rosie can fly in her dreams ("whyever had she forgotten she could do this"); her flight is that of a witch rather than Bo's magic carpet or Pierce's captain on the bridge.

Rosie, who still hasn't formally accepted the Secretaryship of the Rasmussen Foundation, recalls Boney's refusal to name an heir during the period of his "fast-approaching nonexistance."

Discussing with Rose Ryder the pop-psychological concept of "climacetrics" she has been involved in researching-- seven year cycles of life, a sine curve the up and down passage years surrounding each seventh year -- Pierce asks why they cannot be instead an always rising spiral (Dante, Bunyan): "as through climbing a mountain: every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different."

Considering the account of Helvetius, in 1666, transmiting lead into gold, Pierce reasons one of three things occured; 1) Helvetius made gold, proving our current understanding of elementary science wrong; 2) Helvetius lied; 3) Helvetius could make gold but we cannot because "gold is not the same as it once was, earth is not the same, fire is not the same."

Pierce, proposing in the book he is writing that a. New Age is emerging, keeps a file of news clippings documenting "impossibilities that could not be accounted for, holes in Big Science's increasingly leaky roof."

Pierce's skepticism regarding his own inquiries: "Did he believe it himself? No, he didn't, not entirely, not yet. In the (actually rare) moments when he fully grasped what he was indeed saying, he would often stop writing and stand in mute awe before his own impertanence, or laugh hugely, or quit work for the day, wary and afraid. No, it actually seemed to him that those first shudders of the coming age that so many perceived had in fact passed and left the world the same; there had come no irreversible disasters really, no salvations either; the roads still ran where they had run; life was mostly hard work, and all the odds remained unchanged."

The Christian post-psychoanalytic cult, led by Ray Honeybeare, into which Rose Ryder is pulled, also sees the world as in a moment of transition, "a time full of possibility for good or evil. A time when God's kingdom comes very close to our old earth, maybe not to arrive for good, maybe just to give us a glimpse."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry