The modernity of Demon hunters

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

The demon-hunters of the 16th century -- notably Jean Bodin, author of the treatise "Daemonomania" -- believe that Hell's mouth had opened due to the increased sinfulness of men and women: "Now it seemed [devils] walked or flew over the earth in legions, herding the wicked like cattle toward their pens, contracting with the desperate and the proud for their immortal souls, their signatures in blood smoking on the parchment; or in female form hovering oven men in the night to steal their seed as the men tossed in guilty dreams."

Bodin inveighs that "witches by the thousands are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as the worms in a garden" and warns they have formed a heretical church or sect of their own. Their rites, he insists, include the eating of children ("killed and eaten like fowl"). Crowley notes this is the same crime -- the very image of hell on Earth -- with which the Romans charged the early Christians and then the Christians charged their Gnostic rivals and then the Jews.

Dee is called by the Emperor Rudolf to cure a prized specimen in his collection -- a young werewolf (and, in fact, the same boy caught in a wolf trap on his way to the night battle that closes the previous volume). Dee cures the boy, who had been held chained in a narrow dungeon, by giving him doses of starlight and good food: wine, apples.

Madimi had warned Dee: "They will burn you too." In agreeing to take on the cure of the young werewolf, he thinks in response: "let me see what good I might do till then."

Dee and Giordano Bruno encounter each other at Rudolf's court and see the tetrad shaped room for which he commissioned Archimboldo to create human figures made from the elements of the world. Archimboldo's figures revealing a kind of heretical knowledge of how man is of the same matter as all other life.

Bruno looking at the paintings: "This is what we are ourselves. . . . For we are only composites of the elements of the world, held together while we live by our souls. This soul is perhaps nothing more than the form within matter, the form particular to us. It dissolves when we do, as those faces would vanish if the animals stirred and took themselves off, or when the flowers faded and the fuses and matches burned up."

In another part of Hradschin Castle, learned men in the employ of Rudolf secretly collaborate on a clockwork mechanism that would embody their hermetic knowledge and preserve it for the future, much as Hermes was buried clutching a tablet conveying his learning.

The nurse in the children's hospital (once nicknamed "Little Ones") where Sam goes for tests is Bobby, the feral girl from Pierce's boyhood. She is also a member of Powerhouse International and meets Rose Ryder there. Bobby suspects that Rose is another like her -- that is, a witch.

The nonsense song ("His head if a doughnut and his name is Aiken Drum") that Sam sings in the hospital has an Archimboldean resonance. Pierce, struggling with his manuscript, has a counter-Archimboldean sense of emptiness that "his head was a bread box, his heart was a birdcage."

Pierce sees the modernity of Bodin and the demon-hunters: "Jean Bodin, who wanted to find and burn all witches, all those who took animal form or believed they did -- all those who had illicit or unregulated dealings with the dead -- was in fact a modern man, a man of the time to come: he was fighting against the tendency to slip back into the older ways, the old world. . . . Clearheaded men like Bodin, Catholic and Protestant, antiphantasmic warriors, pushed back the dark together, rejecting the age-old truce between the Church and the pagans, both with their old philosophers and their old gods, with the small gods of everyday life, with the warning and helping dead. No more, said Bodin, Calvin, Mersenne."

"And it worked too. Frightened or ashamed, those who investigated Nature or nature drew in their researches, shut out the universal rays, narrowed their questions to those that had some promise of clear answers, and to whose formulations no power could object. If they hadn't done so the plain stepping stones of science couldn't have been uncovered, and swept."

Struggling to recover the "multilayered earth" in his manuscript, Pierce thinks of how "years before, when he had finally and wholeheartedly abjured the Church and all its pomps and works, had denied wholesale and at large all judgments it could make or had made on him, he had remembered the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, which no one could define but which Jesus was very clear in stating could not be forgiven, and that he had said in his mind 'All right, whatever it is I hereby commit it': and had felt a sudden chill nakedness, as though he had been taken notice of, and his statement recorded. Which was what he felt now too."

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