Encountering his aged landlord, Mr. Winterhalter, who arrives in a large sedan, Pierce contemplates that "the more they shrink and shrivel, the larger their cars become."
Tucked in the pages of one of his books, Kraft had secreted a "getaway fund" -- five hundred dollars in old 50s. Rose Ryder too has a getaway fund that she uses to pay for an advanced course from the Christian healing cult, Powerhouse International, into which she is increasingly pulled.
As both Pierce and Rosie Rasmussen are deserted by their lovers, they separately contemplate an Early-Modern tract on autoeroticism from Fellowes Kraft's library.
In Bavaria, deserted by his skyrer Kelly, Dee laments that he himself has never seen or heard the angels who have directed their alchemical work. He wonders if the angels that speak to men "are ours alone, hidden inside" rather than heavenly. With that understanding, Dee for the first time looks past the surface of his seeing stone and speaks with Madimi.
Madimi confesses that she dictated Dee and Kelly share their wives in common for her own "amusement" and, responding to his horror at this, explains that "all angels are fallen angels." She warns that there is a battle in Heaven that "will have its mirror on Earth": a "war of all Christ's churches against their enemies: those who invoke the gods daemons and angels of heaven and earth from the places where they reside. They will burn all who do so. They will have them into the fire as paper."
Madimi prophesizes the new world soon to dawn: "She had said to them that a new age was to come, that many now alive would see it before their eyes were closed forever; it would steal upon many, and bewilder them. Much would be taken then, and much of value would be thrown away as trash; but nothing would be lost that would not be replaced by something of equal worth, somewhere, in some sphere, but far from here." She gives Dee a present of a wind he can control and, not long after, Kelly gives him his perfected means of making gold with the ease with which a baker makes bread.
Heralding the war in heaven, the Duke of Bavaria outlaws folk beliefs: "No longer were these beliefs and practices of country people to be allowed, for it had been determined that they had all along been worshipping the Devil -- perhaps without knowing it -- by their superstitions. Ghosts, manikins, ogres, mountain giants, will-o-the-wisps, the imps that combed sparks into cats fur and soured milk, all the small creatures of everyday and every-night life: either they had been suborned by the Enemy, or they had always been devils in disguise."
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