Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  “Well,” Pierce said. “I remember in de Sade women alone were always at it. So.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In de Sade,” Pierce said. “The Marquis. As in S and M.”

  “Oh.” Now he really did blush, and Rosie watched with interest as it came and passed. “Well, wouldn’t apply to me anyway,” she said, placing the old book back in the box. “I have to fight them off.”

  “Suitors?”

  “I’m sitting on a couple of offers.”

  “Spofford.”

  “Not only him. My ex wants to get married again. To me I mean.”

  “I didn’t think you were even completely divorced yet.”

  “Whatever.” She looked back up at the populated sky. “I remember Boney saying once, when I told him about Spofford—you know Spofford was always coming around—that a second marriage represents the triumph of hope over experience. Quoting somebody.”

  “Samuel Johnson. But you know I don’t think back then it meant the same thing we mean.”

  “No?”

  “We think it’s a sort of cynical wisecrack—you couldn’t get along with A but you’re sure you’ll get along great with B. We think it’s about divorce. In Johnson’s time there was hardly any divorce. But there was a lot of early death. The way you parted from your spouse was, she died. Johnson’s did. So that was the experience, love somebody and she dies. The hope was the new one wouldn’t die.”

  Pierce had seen while he told this that Rosie’s eyes had grown moist, almost as though melting; now she covered her mouth (he could see the band of pale skin on her finger where her ring had recently been). She shut her eyes tightly, though the forming tears pressed out, pooling on her lashes.

  “What,” he said.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Jesus I am so scared.”

  “Of marriage?”

  “Of death. Oh I don’t want her to die.”

  Yellow leaves fell around them. A tiny wind-demon lifted a few of the fallen into the air to play, and let them go again.

  “Is there any,” Pierce said. “I mean.”

  “No,” Rosie said. She sighed hard. “Nothing I guess that’s going to make her die. She’s basically maybe pretty okay. Oh damn damn damn.”

  Pierce ventured nothing further. Rosie at length put her hand over his and patted it, as though he not she needed comfort. “So, so,” she said. She shook her box of books. “So what am I supposed to.”

  “Just keep them dry and cool,” Pierce said. He rose; they walked across the driveway to his car, whose hood and windshield were already decorated with fallen leaves. He got in. “There’s this kind of plastic bag you can buy now, that seals up when you press the top edges together.”

  “Okay.”

  He donned dark glasses, a pair bought on his first journey to these hills and miraculously held on to since. “And no fingerprints. Collectors care a lot. We don’t want to have to downgrade from ‘fine’ to ‘near fine.’”

  “I hear you.”

  “The Bodin is kind of fragile. And the poem.”

  “Speaking of which,” Rosie said. “How are you getting on with Rose Ryder?”

  She was smiling, looking into his face frankly and openly, but what she might be reading there he couldn’t tell. “Speaking of what which?” he said.

  “Well,” Rosie said, “the two of you were certainly becoming a couple. So it seemed.”

  “Seemed to whom, for instance?”

  “Oh Val, for instance. Spofford.”

  The Nosy Parkers of a tiny town, he thought: Spofford himself had once warned him of them, the shifting alliances of a small cast of characters and the unflagging interest everyone took in everyone else.

  “So you coming to Val’s tonight?” she asked, still regarding him.

  “Oh Christ, is that tonight? Yes, yes sure.”

  “With …”

  “No,” he said. “Alone.”

  Behind him, a van from The Woods (bringing Sam home) turned in at the gates of Arcady. Pierce pulled shut his door, waved goodbye, and backed up to turn around, a move he had not yet entirely mastered and which took all his attention; he went out, passing around the wrong side of the incoming van, to which he waved apologetically.

  A couple, huh. He supposed that he must have been seen often driving the roads hereabouts with Rose in her well-known little car, no place to hide; and Pierce was not capable of invisibility, though it was a skill he had suggested that Rose might be able to acquire after some years of practice and exacting study under his tutelage. He was comforted that, though they could observe him and come to their conclusions, they could not know what he and Rose had said and done together; there were limits. What he could not suspect was that Rosie Rasmussen had herself done some outrageous things in bed with Rose Ryder; nor that once upon a time, in a flaming rush incited by her weird unresistance, his friend Spofford had laid her on a table. It wasn’t time for him to be told these things, though the time would come: when he needed help, and there was no one else to help him.

  It wasn’t Mike who was bringing Sam, but one of the open-faced smilers whom Rosie had identified as operatives of the Powerhouse in residence at The Woods. Tidy in khakis and a windbreaker with a logo on it she wanted to read but could not, just a brand name certainly probably.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  “So where’s her father?”

  “Oh,” said the young man, as though it were unimportant, “he’s real busy. Organizing a trip.”

  “A trip.”

  He went on smiling, ready to go and obviously not about to say more.

  “Okay thanks,” Rosie said.

  He put his hand on Sam’s head. “She’s quite a gal,” he said. “Really.”

  “Oh yes,” Rosie said. She smiled for his smile, and for a moment he seemed about to speak, and a flash of unreasoning fear arose in her breast. She got her daughter from him, and he waved and Sam smiled at him distantly, regally. Rosie shut the door on him as fast as she could consistent with minimal manners; and though Sam seemed clean enough, and objected violently to the procedure, she drew a bath and plunged Sam within it, and washed her a long time.

  The question, Pierce supposed, is—or was—this: to what extent were the witch and the dæmoniac responsible for their condition, and for the evil that they did or said? Did they always invite the devil in, and therefore were they always guilty; or was the devil capable of possessing souls by force, or winning their allegiance by irresistible trickery, and were the victims therefore not guilty but only unfortunate?

  He begins first with the phantasy, & moves that so strongly, that no reason is able to resist: so Burton said, a sufferer himself, who knew more about the subject than any man who ever lived, most of it wrong or useless, but he knew that too. The Anatomy of Melancholy was balanced on Pierce’s bare knees, open to Part 1, Section 2, Member 1, Subsection 2, where Burton quotes Jason Pratensis, who’s he, that the devil, being a slender incomprehensible spirit, can easily insinuate himself into our human bodies, and cunningly couched in our bowels, vitiate our healths, terrify our souls with fearful dreams, and shake our minds with furies. Once settled in, the dæmons sport themselves as in another heaven; they go in and out of our bodies, as bees do in a hive.

  At the very least responsible for this wretched constipation, Saturnian affliction, can’t let go of anything. Pierce shifted his bottom on the cold toilet’s ring, sighed, turned the page.

  There was no doubt (Burton thought) that those who were possessed by or who enslaved themselves to dark powers suffered from the physical imbalance or disease of melancholy. The predominance of atra bilia or black bile in the humors of their bodies, drying and chilling the spirit, warped them in predictable ways, toward self-involvement, mistrust, bitterness, and apathy; melancholics tended to be solitary, cowardly, and equivocating, bachelor farmers, masturbators, conjurers, misers.

  The grand melancholics though, those who suffered from the hot form, melancholia fumosa
, rather than the colder, might turn their nameless longings toward the contemplation of higher, hidden things (ad secretiora et altiora contemplanda) and, rapt, leave the body and the unsatisfactory world behind. Or they could also be the great dæmoniacs, hosts to the grandees of the underworld, and capable of fabulous feats of prophecy and suffering. Melancholy all by itself, the plain condition, was regarded by the Scholastics as one of the seven forms of vacatio or spiritual absence, along with sleep, fainting, rapture, what else. Epileptic fits, of course. That’s four. And sex. No no not sex, it wasn’t known to have been one, though Pierce Moffett knew it to be. The rapt contemplation of hidden things; absence, blessed absence.

  Where is she right now, Pierce suddenly wanted to know, Rose, what are they doing to her there in that city he had never seen, to which he had himself been travelling when Coincidence brought him here, where he still was.

  Just then as in the sixteenth century a plague of melancholia was upon the world, but Pierce’s age lacked the system by which the manifestations of the temperament were once understood, no name for what overtook them beyond the suddenly vacant categories of psychiatry, why do I feel this way, why so sad, why so obsessed, why do I believe I have lost something irreplaceable that I cannot name, why do I long always for cold water to slake a thirst that will not be satisfied? Melancholics, shut up in their indolence and solitude, turning over the same few thoughts like a miser his coins; or searching, roaming the night streets of lupine cities seeking to be devoured, to be possessed by what they long to possess.

  In the coming age there might be help for these unfortunates, their condition seen to be not their fault after all. Clinics where they can be, not cured of course, but cared for; where they can be taken for walks in the sun when it is exalted in Leo or in Aries, when Venus is in transit; where they will gather dandelions and primroses, wear blue, drink white wine from copper cups—and where they will be taught at last about love, real love. And when Saturn is in the ascendant they will hold the hands of their nurses, of their fellows, and wait it out, one day at a time.

  Or there will not be.

  A naked branch tapped at Pierce’s window as though for his attention, and he saw with surprise that the day was already near done. Darkness falling so early, darkness out across the Faraways where soon he must go. Hands in the pockets of his unbuttoned pants, he stood unmoving in the little room oddly placed between dining and bed. He did not want to go out, but he didn’t want to stay in; didn’t want the phone to ring, yet he felt a primitive dread in being alone in the silence and the fading of the light. He would start a fire in his little stove, he thought; get that warm at least; sit for a while by its cheerful glow. Start a small one in his heart too, a drink of something. He thought these things, and other things, and went on standing, at once still and restless, wondering just what was wrong with him.

  14

  First, the angels told them, they were to burn their books. All the twenty-eight volumes that had been dictated to them (the holocaust of all that which from the beginning of the world had been most precious John Dee wrote on the page where he recorded their commandment); so Kelley and he put them into a bag and the bag in the fire of the furnace where they had made their tittle of gold, and prayed and wept and cried aloud as they built up the fire with dry scraps of wood; Kelley looked in and in the flames saw a person there busily gathering the leaves of the books as they curled up one by one and were burnt. They stirred the fire and sweated (it was the tenth of April, 1586, near Easter, and warm) until there was nothing left within but ashes and live coals and the corners of a few leaves, black, the writing burnt white upon them.

  Then those same burned books were returned to them unchanged, or perhaps not unchanged.

  About half past one on the twenty-ninth, a man pruning some blooming cherry trees in the garden of their little house called up to Edward Kelley to send the Doctor down; and he went on pruning the cherries, until he reached the end of the garden, and began to walk up into the air and away, with his pruning hook over his shoulder; and when Kelley and Dee went down into the garden they could not find the man.

  —Some wicked spirit, Kelley said.

  But as they stood there, and blossoms dropped on the shoulders of their dark gowns, Doctor Dee noticed far off “a faire white paper lying tossed to and fro in the wind” under the almond tree; and when he chased it he found there one of the books that had been burned before, its pages white as blossoms, ink black as soot.

  —A gardener, he said. He sat beneath an almond, the book in his lap (was it heavier than it had been?) thinking of Jesus and the Marys at Eastertide, and of renovation.

  Eventually the spirits restored to them all the books they had burned. The vial of precious powder that Kelley had expended was refilled too with a stuff like dried blood and silver, whose time, they said, was near, but not yet. Meanwhile the two Englishmen were summoned before the Nuncio: Giovanni Dii e suo compagno, autori d’una nuova superstitione, the Nuncio described them in letters to Rome, and though not quite denouncing them as heretics, he got them expelled from Prague. The Emperor himself, perhaps in one of his fits of superstitious dread, signed the order.

  All of them afraid, John Dee thought: afraid of any new thing, no matter if it came from the mouth of God Himself; afraid of the souls of those they lived among as though they were bad dogs, that must be chained lest they bite.

  Homeless then, and moving from Prague to Leipzig, back to Cracow, to Erfurt, on to Cassel and Gotha, keeping just beyond the Emperor’s reach, until they found a protector: Vilem of Romberk, the greatest magnate of Bohemia, devotee of the Art, hoarder of books and manuscripts, patron of artists and doctors—a smaller version in fact of his King and Emperor, whom he even resembled, at least in the unmistakable yearning softness of his liquid brown eyes. He and the King-Emperor were joined not only by their melancholia and their hunger for the Stone, but in the search for precious and unusual gems with special powers; they owned mines jointly and employed gem hunters who roamed the Giant Mountains in the northeast with picks in their belts and Imperial licenses to prospect for “treasures, metals, precious stones, and all the hidden secrets in the whole of nature.”

  Romberk had a great palace in Prague practically contiguous with the Emperor’s far greater one, its white face covered with black images of knights, saints and wise men, sgraffito they called this form of decoration, like a white page drawn on in black ink. He had wide lands in the south and the west, and at his house in Tebo John Dee and his family were offered shelter. To this the Emperor (ashamed of himself, maybe, and sorry to have lost the two Englishmen) made no objection.

  And thus a year had passed, and John Dee wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham at home, how he had been persecuted (but all in vain, for force human we fear not) and had triumphed (the Nuncius Apostolicus is gone to Rome with a flea in his eare, that disquieteth him and terrifieth the whole state Romish and Jesuitical) and how now he was able to, now he could promise them that he could, now he was sure that he would soon … do what? No human reason can limit or determine God His marvellous means of proceeding with us, he wrote: and yet there was nothing still, the secret remained unsaid, the angels prayed and hemmed and mocked and scolded but did not tell.

  Madimi appeared among them again, grown into a woman now, and all naked (John Dee wrote And she sheweth her shame also). She told them to love one another in perfect love as they had not yet done, despite her commandments; told them Paul the Apostle abounded in carnal lust, and not boy nor girl among his brethren was safe from him, so that he was ready to have left his vocation, but the Lord did say unto him My mercy and grace sufficeth unto thee.

  As they could not comprehend the heavens, so likewise they could not comprehend the wisdom of God, Who said: I shall be merciful unto whom I list, and unto whom I will not I have none in store; foolish is he that asketh why.

  And if God abrogated His laws for them alone, what reason could they bring against Him? Whatsoever the Spirit of G
od teacheth us from above, though it appear a sin before man, is righteousness before Him. Behold you are become free, she said. Do that which pleases you.

  —She is gone, Kelley said.

  What did she mean? What sin before man, not sinful before God, were they invited to? What had they done that they should not have done, what had they not done that they should have?

  —I know this, Kelley said to John Dee. Gold is a generation, like the generation of children. It cannot be done, therefore, by a man who is without issue. Who is, who cannot.

  They spoke low, though there was no one in the room to hear them. It was May again.

  —Has thy wife, John Dee asked, not been subject to thee?

  Kelley tugged down the cap he always wore (it covered the scars where long ago his ears had been docked, a punishment for coining, or conjuring, or both, he would not say).

  —In some wise she has, he said. Not entirely.

  Years before in England the angels chose Joanna Cooper of Chipping Norton, eight years his junior, to be Edward Kelley’s wife; at least they told him he must marry, and she was willing. She was only twenty-four, uncomprehending and patient. Kelley hated her. He could hardly bear to be next to her.

  —Is she, Dee said carefully, still a maid? Virgo intacta?

  —As good as.

  John Dee pressed his beard with the flat of his hand. His friend had always been mixed of hot and cold, of male and female too. He had once made medicines for the younger man, to strengthen him.

  —But thou, Kelley said. And thy Jane. She from whose womb so many have come.

  —Tumbled, said John Dee.

  —Arthur, Rowland, Katherine, Michael, said Kelley. And those who did not live.

  —Two, said John Dee.

  Kelley, restless and unsatisfied, stood up from his stool, clasped his hands behind him, clasped them before him, sat again folded up as though in pain, his head in motion, searching.

  —This our quadrature, he said. We four. There is a breach or gap or lack in it, that must be made perfect.