The wind blows through the military ranks arrayed before Prague; a light wind at first, but finally one that "sweeps away" the "various unearthly powers" ranked behind Frederick's forces. Their heavenly supporters gone, the soldiers feel "their warm mammalian breath condensed on the cold damp air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of heaven."
The wind blows across the world hardly noticed, but neverethess "rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of open books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath . . . separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other."
Walking through, but hardly noticing, the bloody devastastion of Prague, Decartes begins to formulate "a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations." He seeks "a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely."
In the failure of Rosicrucianism as a political force, a lesson from the epigraph to the "Chemical Wedding," perhaps, Crowley half-suggests, one that only appeared there with the end of that old world: "Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass." [Thus, Bruno's metamorphosis into ass is philosophically undone as is the mythic transformation of Apuleus's "Golden Ass" returned to human form by eating roses].
Following Bruno, following Kraft, Pierce has the sense ("a dream-sure certainty") that the secret item, the surviving token of AEgypt, for which he is searching is still in Prague. He has a vivid dream in which his father, Axel, brings it to him, only to have it snatched away by spirits with "horripilating hands."
Fellowes Kraft's first book (one thinks here of the similarly dillitantish Ralph Roeder) was on Catherine de Medici and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. His brand of whisky, inevitably, is Four Roses.
When traveling, Kraft prefers antique sepia postcards "as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past as well, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut"
As Kraft feels death approaching, he consults Boney -- he addresses him, as habitually, "Mon Emperor" -- on how to keep his papers from falling into the wrong hands. Boney suggests that Kraft could burn the sensitive papers himself, to which the novelist replies: "It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have a profound horror of suicide."
Kraft's lifelong quest is for what the Cabbalists call the "Shekhinah," the stone from the hollow of God's heart that transforms matter to spirit: "it is the lapis exulus, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can of yellow jackets, and was badly stung."
Kraft's trips to Prague are just prior to Hitler's invasion and during the Russian suppression of Czech freedom in 1968. He thinks of the Adamite sects that lived in Bohemia prior to the wars of religion and reflects that similar groups are said to exist in the Faraway Hills where he lives.
Revisiting Prague on the brink of the Russian invasion, Kraft meditates on the local tradition of political change through defeneatestion and thinks of how "the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past r future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves and being down steeples in another."
Similarly, he sees how one masters history in order to "impose [its] irrefutable Laws on Time's body . . . to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus in any age that the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth."
Thus, the way to defeat power is to propose new laws of history: "laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutible, and unimposible on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own."
Kraft finds not the magic relic that Boney sent him in search of but, perhaps inevitably, another novel. The unfinished manuscript Pierce has been charged with editing contains the secret of that departed world. It is, Kraft reflects, "a book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood."
The writer is the true alchemist. Kraft thinks "give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. . . . Transformation was what language could do. It was all it could do."
As death approaches, Kraft sees an unfamiliar car, an Olds 88, approaching (and in it, no doubt, Beau Brachman, who collects the souls of heroes and monsters to take them to the hereafter).
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