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Daemonomania
by
John Crowley
Bantam
Books, 2000
451
Pages, US$24.00
ISBN
0-553-10004-1
This
book is the third of the projected four in John Crowley’s major novelistic
treatment of gnosticism and
hermeticism. As in the two prior books, “Aegypt” (1987) and “Love & Sleep”
(1994), “Daemonomania” is held together, rather loosely, through the character
of Pierce Moffet, a young historian living on a publisher’s advance. We meet
him in the first book as he settles down in the Upstate New York town of Blackbury Jambs in the 1970s, to write
a hermetic interpretation of history. (Inevitably, the working title of the
manuscript is “Aegypt.”) Through Moffet’s friends and lovers, we are introduced
to a local mystery that, in this third volume, builds to a climax of universal
significance. His researches link this mystery to a parallel story that
encompasses Dr. John Dee (Elizabeth I’s favorite magus), Giordano Bruno and the
uncanny Prague of Emperor Rudolph von Habsburg. The series makes use of the
latest research about werewolves and witchhunts, ancient and modern. Readers
interested in the academic study of the occult will love all this. The author
is generous with bibliographical information.
“Daemonomania”
has the distinction of being one of the few books in which the world ends
twice, once in 1588 and again in 1979. The author’s notion of apocalypse works
like this:
“When
the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see
it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world
like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. The coming of the end might at
first lift and shake just one county, one neighborhood, and not the others
around it; might feelably ripple beneath the feet of these churchgoers and not
of those tavern-goers down the street, shatter only the peace of this street,
this family, this child of this family who at that moment lifts her eyes from
the Sunday comics and knows for certain that nothing will ever be the same
again.”
A
recurring theme is that “there is more than one history of the world.” Each new
age not only looks forward to a different future but remembers a different
past. The “Aegypt” of hermetic wisdom that was known to the scholars of the
Renaissance had only a few points of contact with the “Egypt” of modern
archeology. The difference is not just a matter of more and better information,
but of distinct conceptual universes. What seems to us to be a continuous
history of ideas is really divided into “dispensations” in which people have
quite different conceptions about what is reasonable and possible.
This
way of looking at history is familiar to us from, for instance, Thomas Kuhn’s
notion of successive “scientific revolutions,” and from Michel Foucault’s
proposal that different “epistemes” governed different regions of the past. At
least for the purposes of this series, however, the author goes beyond
intellectual history to suggest that not just the sense of the possible, but
the possible itself may change as one age fades into another.
The
“Aegypt” series is about an archetypical story that is enacted during such
transitions. In 17th century Prague, the Emperor Rudolph hoped to begin a new
golden age by acquiring the power to make gold. He subsidized a cottage
industry of alchemists, one of whom, in “Daemonomania,” succeeds. In 20th
century New York State, there was a wealthy old man, one Boney Rasmussen, who
was terrified of death. He subsidized a writer named Fellowes Kraft to ferret
out the emperor’s secret, which is also the secret of immortality. Moffet takes
up their work after they become unobtrusive ghosts. The closest we come to a
resolution of the story so far is this explanation:
“’Well
you know the basic idea...Kraft’s idea...[t]hat the world -- you know, reality,
all this -- goes through changes. Every now and then it enters a sort of period
of indeterminism, anything is possible; and it stays in that passage time
until, well, until...a certain thing is found. A certain thing that only
exists, or comes to be, in that time. It’s the stone, or the elixir, or the
thing that Boney wanted found. If it’s not found the world stops changing, or
never stops changing, and dies. But it’s always found so far.”
In
the 20th century part of the series, the myth takes the form of the rescue of a
little girl with the ability to see dead people. (At the risk of stating the
obvious, this rescue recapitulates the gnostic myth of the rescue of the Divine
Sophia from the world of matter.) The people the little girl needs to be
rescued from belong to a Christian cult called “The Powerhouse,” which
specializes in therapy through exorcism.
The
whole “Aegypt” series is anti-Christian, but anti-Christian in a way that I
have never seen in fiction before. Consider this remarkable passage from “Love
and Sleep”:
“Where
was it ...said...that in the religious history of the West the old gods are
always turning into devils, cast from their thrones into dark undergrounds, to
be lords over the dead and the wicked? It had happened to..the Northern
gods...who became horned devils for Christians to fear...And now look, the
wheel turns, Jehovah becomes the devil. Old Nobadaddy, liver-spotted
greasy-bearded jealous God, spread over his hoard of blessings like the Dragon,
surrounded by his sycophants singing praises, never enough though...”
In
a way, this is an argument from process theology: Christianity may have been
true in the past, or at least effective. However, it will not be so in the
coming age.
That
insight is far from the final truth. In a book as relentlessly post-modern as
“Daemonomania,” it is hard to know exactly what we should take as a joke, as
metaphor or as the author’s considered opinion. Still, it is fairly clear that
the author does take seriously the gnostic hypothesis that the world is a hoax.
We come from beyond the world, but are trapped in it by a succession of frauds
perpetrated by powers that do not have our best interest at heart:
“O
the traps the gods have prepared for us, their worshippers; how long and well
they’ve worked. We are older than they, far older than the oldest of them; we have
come from farther away, way back beyond where they were born: but we don’t know
that, we have forgotten it -- and they know we have forgotten it. And that’s
why they can do with us what they like most of the time, especially when we
think we have escaped them. That’s why, in other words, the world has lasted so
long, and why we are still here.”
Despite
the commercials for the Old Time Gnosis, however, the “Aegypt” series is not
primarily an indictment of Christianity or an exercise in cosmic paranoia. The
Moffet character, a ferociously lapsed Catholic, is suspicious of Christianity
in general. However, Crowley uses what he depicts as the provincialism and
self-regard of the Powerhouse chiefly as a way to indict Moffet’s own sense of
spiritual superiority. Moffet knows that the Powerhouse is right about the
nature of magic, because he is a magician himself, in his own small way. (He
uses it chiefly on his girl friend.) When this brings disaster, he realizes
that “the greater error was the one that had tempted Pierce himself, to believe
that we ourselves are the authors of the tales we live within. That’s the
ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all gods believe
themselves self-created, and believe themselves to be issuing their own strong
stories, news to us.”
There
are some self-referential gimmicks in the series that are more ingenious than
entertaining. We have seen, for instance, that the “Aegypt” series is nominally
about the writing of a book called “Aegypt.” Crowley even allows himself this
authorial soliloquy, put in the mouth of the producer of a failed amateur
production of “Faust”:
“I
so much wanted to *knit*...[p]ast and present, then and now. The story of the
thing lost, and how it was found. More than anything I wanted it to *resolve*.
And all it does is *ramify*.”
Indeed
it does, so much so that it is not obvious that anything remains to be said
after this third volume. The world has already ended twice, after all.
Nonetheless, the publisher assures me that a fourth book is planned. Some hints
in “Daemonomania” suggest that a further book might deal with the near future,
as did Crowley’s novella, “Beasts” (1976).
Despite
these criticisms, Crowley’s blend of magic, blasphemy and postmodernism works
very well as fiction. He can create uncanny affect better than anyone since
Arthur Machen. Unlike Machen, he also has the sense to confine most
manifestations of the supernatural to dreams and coincidences. The hermetic
twilight has rarely been made to seem so plausible.
Will
the series persuade many people to its view of the world? Probably not, but
that may be the measure of its success. The merit of these books is that they
express the indeterminacy of a time of transition. The nature of twilight,
however, is to resolve into either day or night.
Copyright © 2001 by John J. Reilly
This review originally appeared in the March 2001 issue of First Things.