by John Crowley
Mordente chased Bruno across Paris in a fury. Mad beast, why was he angry?
The mathematician bought up all the copies of the dialogue he could lay his hands on, beggaring himself in the process, and to Bruno’s friends declared that he intended to go to the Guises about the matter.
So it was time for Bruno to be gone. “Brunus,” a gossip wrote home to Italy, “has not been seen in this town since.”
If I worked a plough or tended a flock, he later wrote, no one would look at me twice; but since I work the field of Nature, hoe and harrow the Mind, and shepherd the Soul—look, here is one who having seen me upbraids me, another who, having got close enough to me, bites me, another who, having got hold of me, devours me. It’s not one person, it’s not a few, it’s many, it’s almost all.
That crude little manuscript manual called Picatrix, where Bruno’s journey started, went on radiating down through the succeeding centuries, becoming illegible over time as its black-letter Latin ceased to be read. Having wandered far to the north, and shorter then by several pages of curses and cures, the very same copy was picked up in a stall in Prague by the novelist Fellowes Kraft for a few crowns in 1968 (Russian tanks were that day passing through East Germany on their way to the city and old books were not at the forefront of most people’s minds). It travelled from there to Kraft’s library in Stonykill in the Faraway Hills, was sealed in a plastic bag against the mold and the bugs and locked in a glass-fronted case, whence it was abstracted by Pierce Moffett. For some time it lay on the table beside his bed in Littleville, and though he couldn’t read it either, he’d felt its rays; and so had Rose Ryder, as he intended she should.
Is it real magic? she’d wanted to know. It really once was, he’d answered. Once.
And he had drawn it out of its plastic container, and opened it, and put her hand on a leathery page.
13
“Demonomania?” asked Rosie. “Is that right?”
They sat at the stone table that overlooked the long back lawns at Arcady. Its surface was stained by the acids of leaves fallen in other years and the ghosts of caterpillars who had died there; Pierce wouldn’t let her put down on it the books he had brought.
Amomg them was a big beautiful polyglot edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Paris 1586, with woodcut illustrations, thousands of dollars’ worth of book Pierce thought, though he was not really expert in such matters. There was “an oddity,” as he’d described it to Rosie, and a pile of other things to go through, including Picatrix in its plastic bag.
And there was this book, Jean Bodin’s tract proving that witches had to be put to death, that was circulating in Paris in the years when Bruno was there. A first edition it appeared to be, though shabby and apparently much-handled, with no indication of the title on the leather covers. Pierce opened it with gentle reverence and held it so she could see the title page. De la démonomanie des sorciers.
“Demonomania,” said Pierce. “Right. In Latin, and there was a Latin translation for scholars and priests, dæmonomania.” He spelled it with a finger on the table, the æ joined. “It didn’t exactly mean what we might mean by it, ‘mass craziness about demons,’ though actually that was part of what he meant. It means more like Sorcerers stuck on demons or maybe Demons stuck on sorcerers, or witches. Its about witchcraft, what it is, how it works. Mania means attachment, obsession; the maniac is somebody obsessed with or stuck on something.”
“Like possessed by.”
“Well exactly,” Pierce said, looking at her in appreciation. “It’s about demonic possession, not only of the witches we usually think of, the Macbeth types with the boiling pots, but of the learned Faust types who studied the stars and summoned planetary spirits.”
He handed it to her. The dark, foxed paper, printed in not very regular rows of large type, gave off a strange smell, less the smell of the paper, Rosie thought, than the smell of the crabbed language, old French, with extra letters in many of the words she recognized; the smell of its import, which she didn’t yet grasp.
“Basically,” Pierce said, “Bodin was in a fight with the fashionable intellectuals of his time, people like Bruno, who believed that the universe was filled with a divine spirit, expressed in higher and more refined ways as you moved up through existence, from rocks and stones to animals to human souls and beyond to the spiritual powers, angels and so on, and up to God. If you knew how, you could attune your human spirit to those spirits, contact them, maybe learn from them; maybe even command them.”
“So what was wrong with that?”
“Bodin wanted there to be only one supernatural being, completely nonmaterial: God. Only God was above nature, only God deserved worship. If you got involved with the lower spirits, that was idolatry. Case closed.”
“He thought those spirits were there, you just shouldn’t worship them.”
“Almost everybody thought they were there. They were how the universe was managed. Nobody in Bodin’s time believed that it could just go by itself, the way they would come to believe two hundred years later, and still do. So Bodin supposed that the universe was operated by demons—beings that are maybe good or maybe bad but are mostly just the power within inert matter. They were mostly invisible but they did have bodies—very fine ghostlike bodies, with minds and hearts and organs of some kind.”
“Hum,” said Rosie, and clutched her bare knee in her two hands. “And were they, like. Like little.”
“Some little, some big. Some of enormous size and power, like the ones who inhabited the stars and made them go. They were in the air and the water and the mountains, in fire and steam, in the wind and the weather. They operated the universe at every level, from making the stars go around and the sun shine to making the grass grow.”
“How weird. What a strange world to live in.”
“Well,” Pierce said, “I would bet that most humans around the world over the last say hundred thousand years have mostly lived in that world. I’d say it’s the first explanation we come upon for why things are the way they are, why the weather changes, why storms happen or rain doesn’t fall. Well maybe the second explanation. The first one being that the things themselves—the trees and sky and wind—are alive and making choices.”
“The rain is Tess, the fire’s Joe.”
“You can see them, if you want,” Pierce offered. “The airy ones anyway. They move fast, but you can get a glimpse of them. Just look up.”
She looked up into the dense blue sky. Cloudless still. When would it rain again.
“See the little swarming sparkles?” Pierce said, looking up also, shielding his eyes. “Some of them red or gold edged?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” Pierce said. “Ever wonder what they are?”
“No.”
“That’s them. The airy demons. Or dæmons. Busy at work, keeping the sky blue, doing I don’t know what, their thing.”
Rosie stared. They came and wriggled and disappeared again, replaced by others, a bloom of becoming and activity, a school of tiny glittering fish. “And one could get inside you?”
“Well. Not one of those precisely. No reason for exaggerated fear here. The ones that are around us all the time, like ants, or breezes, or bacteria—obviously they’re not all harmful. Just going about their business.”
“But others.”
“If you invited one in. If you forgot to bless yourself when you sneezed, or wished upon a star, or wandered around old sites where they had once been worshipped. Possession could be involuntary—just bad luck—or it could be voluntary, your own fault. And Bodin said: witches wanted them inside, their demons, to give them power. Schemed to get one, begged for one. And Bodin said that was what the great intellectual magicians were doing too, with their Platonic ascension and their emblems and their star-rituals. They too would be seized on and inhabited. And not by some little imp bent on mischief. Maybe by some really terrible power. And his friends and relations. Dæmonomania.”
The more she s
tared at the bright sky, the more clearly she could see them, the little sperms of light, and the longer they lasted before sparking out or diving again into the blue. If she kept staring they might grow little faces. Catch her eye.
“Cheap trick,” she said, looking away and blinking, blinded.
“Yes. There were people even back then who said it was a cheap trick.”
“But a lot of people believed. Anyway in witches and possession.”
“A lot of people still do. Around the world, I’m sure, more do than don’t.”
It couldn’t be, Rosie thought, could it, that that was what Mike had meant in warning her? Be careful what you play around with. Her heart began for a moment to thump painfully, as though startled awake.
“They thought back then,” she said, “didn’t they, that if a person had seizures—epilepsy—they were possessed. Right?” Epilepsy: strange how naked saying the word aloud made her feel. How long would it.
“Well,” Pierce said carefully, “no. I think they knew there was a disease, epilepsy, which you could just have, like any disease; it had causes, though what those were could be argued about. And then there was possession, which could sometimes imitate epilepsy, or look like epilepsy, but was caused by a demon or a spirit.”
“I thought they caused everything.”
“Well not directly. Not everybody agreed with Bodin. Even in his time his view was a little extreme.”
“Ah.”
“Epilepsy had a medical description, an etiology. Symptoms, causes, cures. It was normal. It had its special patrons, saints who had provenance over it; most diseases did. Like St. Roche, for the plague, or St. Blaise for diseases of the throat, diphtheria and so on. In parochial school we had our throats blessed every year on St. Blaise’s day.”
She looked at him as though he should not know all this, as though such esoteric erudition verged on the impertinent. He caught her look and said: “The special patrons of epilepsy were the Three Kings.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.”
“Their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.”
“You know their names?”
“Every Catholic kid learned them.”
“And they told you they were in charge of epilepsy?”
“Well no. I learned that myself, later on.”
“Why them?”
“I don’t know. Somebody somewhere sometime prayed to them, got cured. The story spread.”
We three kings, thought Rosie. She imagined someone, a mother, back then, whenever then was exactly, kneeling before the crèche at Christmas, asking for their help—the three guys on camels, the youngest (Balthazar?) always black. She thought of Julius Cæsar and Edward Lear. She felt herself for a moment, herself and Sam, to be part of a huge and long-lived family, countless generations reaching into the far past, because the disease must always have existed; like a family, her family, that had suffered and been misunderstood, had had amazing and terrible adventures, a secret history linking its generations, a history that could probably never be recovered. All those children. The awe and fear they caused. And the doctors looking on helpless.
Oh Sam.
She looked at her watch. Where was she, what was he doing with her. The still afternoon was suddenly enormous.
“Awful, I guess,” she said. “Being thought to be possessed. What they put you through.”
“I guess,” Pierce said. “Certainly for most. But there were a number of famous demoniacs, who were sort of media stars for a while. Pamphlets circulated about them, people came from all over to see them. One French one, I remember, had her own platform set up in the church, where she, her demon rather, would give regular shows. Yell out blasphemies, talk in Greek and unknown languages, produce disgusting manifestations, blood, frogs.”
“Good Lord. What was really wrong with them?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it was just one thing. Some of them were crazy, by our definition. Some were fakes, maybe set up by the Church. You just can’t say now. Nothing we can postulate explains away what people then say they saw and heard.”
“So maybe,” Rosie said, “back then, demons actually did run the world.”
“Hey. May be.”
Pierce remembered how in Frank Walker Barr’s Early Modern Europe seminar at Noate University, Barr and his graduate students (Pierce among them) had pondered the sudden and nearly universal outbreak in sixteenth-century Europe of demonic possession, witchcraft accusations, trials, burnings, hysteria about the Devil and his legions, succubi, incubi, sorcerers seen carried off by the familiar devils who had served them. The hysteria crossed doctrinal and sectarian lines, Catholics as well as Lutherans, Calvinists, Huguenots, everybody denouncing one another and blaming one another’s remedies for only making matters worse and inviting further inroads.
Barr had entertained a number of explanations for the plague—economic, social, cultural, even psychoanalytic (delayed Oedipal reaction on the part of those who had overthrown their old Holy Father). The only explanation he would not countenance—“even,” he’d said, with the famous Barr twinkle in his eye, “if it’s the right one”—was that there really was a big outbreak or inrush of spirits into the human world just then: bad spirits, or good and bad ones, or merely pesky, invited in by willful magicians or just come crashing.
A disease appearing suddenly in the nature of things, or more precisely in human understanding, suddenly fulminant; then over, the fit passing, the fever falling, the human corpus now mostly resistant. Of all that can befall us, that never can again. Other things, and worse too: but not the Devil and his pomps and works. Pierce was sure of that.
“How is she, anyway?” he asked. “Sam.”
“Oh. Well. No events lately. One or two till they figured out the dosage.”
“If there’s anything I can do.”
“I can’t think of anything,” Rosie said, whose soul was beginning to shrink from this offer that she had now heard many times, from her mother, from her friends: so easy to make, so useless. “Ask the Three Kings. Pray.”
“I haven’t prayed in a long time.”
“Well ask your cousin. Don’t you have a cousin who’s a nun?”
“I do.” He wondered if his cousin Hildy still prayed. Certainly she said the words. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
“So she should have some influence,” Rosie said, poking into the box that lay between them. “What’s this one?”
It was a large pamphlet lying on the bottom.
“Ah that one.”
“Ars Auto-amatoria,” she read from the cover. “Or, Every Man His Own Wife. What on earth.”
Pierce folded his hands in scholarly fashion. “That’s the oddity,” he said. “It’s maybe as valuable as all the others.”
“What’s it about?” Rosie asked, opening it with the careful reverence Pierce had displayed, which seemed to be the proper mode. It was at least in English. A poem.
“It’s about,” Pierce said, “masturbation, actually,” and Rosie thought she saw him blush: was that possible?
“Oh yes?” Rosie read:
The Widow Palm a House maintains,
And no Man whosoe’er disdains;
Her Daughters five your Hand-maids be
And Night or Day shall welcome thee;
The Pander, master Bates his Name,
Asks not a Penny, nor his Dame:
Without a Purse spend freely here,
The Pox and Clap thou need’st not fear.
“A little rough,” she said.
“Awful,” said Pierce. “And long. Nearly a thousand lines.”
“Why so valuable then?”
“Oh there are collectors. Anything old and dirty, I mean you know, pornographic.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Dunno. No name, no date. I would guess, from what we scholars call ‘internal evidence,’ like for instance a play on some lines of Milton’s, and the spelling, that it has to be eighteenth century.”
“Very pro.”
“I thought you were supposed to go blind.”
“That was later. Nineteenth-century pseudoscience. No one really cared about it much or even talked about it a lot before then. That’s why this is a rarity.”
Rosie read:
Ill-favoured, thou, nor hast a Place?
No Prospects neither? Nor a Face?
If short or fat, or bandy-legged;
If thou hast sinned, or failed, or begged,
One Bride is still betroth’d to thee
No Bride-price asks she, and no Fee.
“Supposed to save you time and trouble, I guess,” she said.
“And money.”
“Jesus.”
“Well at that time marriage was a big endeavor,” Pierce said. “Complicated and costly. Her dowry, his money. A property transaction before anything else. If you were the fearful indolent type, wanted to avoid trouble, you might.”
She looked at him sidelong. “Uh-huh,” she said. “And what about the women?”
“No mention of them,” Pierce said. “I mean as far as I read.”
“Somebody should write that,” Rosie said.
“Every Woman Her Own Husband.”
“But did they even?” Rosie wondered. “I mean of course they did. But did they know they did, or did men anyway know?” She had, herself, been a practitioner long before she knew it had a name, or that others did it too. The difference, name and no name, had seemed important, even though the feeling was the same. Two worlds.
