Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  Alcindus of Araby knew: every object propagates itself through the universe spherically, that is by rays proceeding from every point on it. The lodestone’s nature of attracting iron or other lodestones proceeds spherically outward from it with diminishing force through almost any medium, water, air, anything—except, of course, garlic juice. The planets, the sun and the moon, are the most potent propagators of rays; earth and all its beings are bathed constantly in their angular intersections (Dee had described the mathematics of it in his Prapædeumata aphoristica). So, to counter the natural tendencies of a soul or a body formed by a maleficent planet’s rays, John Dee lifted the face of his mirror to the sky, and caught within it the rays of a contrary planet in a good aspect (like Venus, just then following the sun toward the west, effulgent, brightest object in the fading heavens). The mirror focused them not on but at a point somewhat in front of its curved surface. A man standing just there, before that focus, and looking in, would seem to see her, Venus, hovering in the middle of the air, twice or thrice as bright as in the evening sky—or he would if he happened to be made of glass, for Venus’s light cannot pass through his body’s solidity to reach the mirror’s surface. Instead he sees himself, inverted as in a silver spoon. But though her light will not pass through him, the other rays of Venus will; so if he be placed there, his brain at that focus, or his shrunken heart, Venus’s rays will still warm him, like a young girl rolled in bed with an old cold sick man.

  There was no doubt of the efficacy of the procedure. The power of curved mirrors was known to the ancients, and even if the story of how Julius Cæsar had used a curved mirror set up on the shores of Gaul to see the Britons preparing for war weren’t true, it was certainly the case that a catoptric, turned to face the sun, could cause a thick stick held at its focus to take fire. And if the sun, why not Venus and Jupiter? John Dee had first succeeded with his mirrors in curing his wife of a melancholy, after their first son Arthur was born: a mother-sorrow post partum that she could not shake.

  The melancholy of the man-wolf would be a deeper one; and it might be that even such sure and certain arts as catoptrics were weakening and failing now. No way to be sure but to use them, and see.

  John Dee made a slight adjustment to his mirror, turned his hourglass, and sat to wait in the deepening darkness.

  He thought: We tear to pieces the melancholics who have fallen, through their disease, from man’s estate, and believe themselves beasts. Once it was not so; once they were known to be unfortunate, and in need of our care and love. We burn deluded old women who think to make in their iron pots the wonderful elixirs they have heard the wise can make—they take the coded and hidden recipes of the old books and tales for plain truth, and try to do a work with cock feathers, horse piss, field grasses and the moon’s light. Maybe, once, some deluded one—hearing tales of the Homunculus, the Son brought to life within the athenor—put in to seethe a birth-strangled babe found in a ditch, or a babe’s corpse dug up: wicked, surely, and deserving punishment, but inefficacious, hurting no one but the hag herself.

  Old despised and outcast women. They frighten their neighbors with their curses, and when later a child falls sick or a cow dries up the neighbor remembers. And the fear spreads, reaching at length the students of arts the vulgar cannot understand. Arts that the priests and judges, most of them, can understand no better.

  They will burn you too, Madimi had said.

  Perhaps. Let him see what good he might do, till then.

  When Venus had fallen far toward the west and her beams struck this tower at too oblique an angle, John Dee smacked his knees, arose from his stool, and consulted his ephemeris; he looked east to where Jupiter, jolly giant, had risen: as sovereign against melancholy as his beautiful blue daughter, if she is or was his daughter, as Hesiod saith. Dee sighting with his astronomical staff and the boy John ratcheting the dishes around at his command, they caught the star; they wheeled the caged (and weary) wolf to the focus of the parabola (John Dee’s word for the mirror-shape he had devised). And feeling the ruddy star’s heat on his cheek, the boy blinked, looked up, like a man awakened by the sun through a knothole; his mouth opened and he wet his lips and swallowed.

  Dee came to the cage, opened the door of it. He said to John:

  —Ask if we may safely let him come forth.

  John spoke to the boy, who had begun to shiver; the boy made a short answer, and began to creep from the cage.

  —He says he thirsts.

  —Go, Dee said to John. Bring a clean shirt, a warm mantle. A cup of white wine, with water; apples; wheaten bread. No cheese, no greens. They have given him black beer and pease-bread in prison, and he is the worse for it.

  John went quickly, glad to go. Dee pushed away the cage from the wheeled cart, grunting with the weight of it, and the boy, seeing him struggle, turned to help him: but when he tried to stand he fell.

  —Hurt, said Dee. You are hurt—don’t rise. Be still.

  He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and kept him there, waiting for John. He thought of the night six years before when Edward Kelley came to his house in Mortlake, afraid, lost even, though not knowing it: the night this journey began.

  They dressed the boy and fed him, and made a pallet for him on the cart.

  John Dee altered his mirrors, for Jupiter had all this time been moving with the night and the stars. They turned the hourglass again. The boy slept.

  Half a billion miles away (John Dee thought it was some forty million) orange Jupiter shone with the Sun’s light (John Dee thought it had its own); into its great envelopes of gas, the heavier within the lighter, the little rays of the sick boy’s soul penetrated, going down thousands of miles, reaching to the core hot almost as a star; there they stirred the god’s generosity to an infinitesimal degree, and redounded stronger.

  By morning he was speaking, alert, cheerful even, his melancholy seemingly lifted already—if indeed it was one. John Dee, hearing his tale, wondered if it had not been a melancholy at all that had taken him but a plain madness.

  He was indeed a peasant’s son, he told them, and lived in a remote village in the Krkonóse Mountains, with his brothers and his mother and his grandparents in a small stone house. He had slept in a loft with four others, next to a small window that was his alone. It was only after his father was killed felling trees that his mother told him he wasn’t the man’s son at all but the priest’s; the priest took an interest in him, and taught him some Latin. John Dee began to speak to him in that language (to which he had not responded before, and no wonder) and the boy sometimes understood. His name was Jan, like John Dee’s own.

  Priests’ sons are known for having unlikely flaws and powers, though Jan (Jan thought) had none of them. But there was more to his birth than that. He had been born with a caul: not merely a cap like a woman’s lace snood, as some were, but a membrane shrouding all his face, through which (his mother said) his unopened eyes and mouth could be discerned, dimly, as though he had not yet wholly arrived.

  —Its right name amnion, said John Dee. Many cunning-women have their tales about it. And ancient writers too. A Frenchman I have read says: a foretelling of the shroud we will all one day wear to cover our faces; a sign, at our coming, of our going hither.

  —She dried the caul, he said. My mother. And sewed it into a little kidskin bag. She told me I must wear it always, here, in the pit of my left arm, and tell no one.

  Not until he was fourteen did he learn that the caul was a sign of what he had been born for: to be, on certain nights of the year, along with others of his kind, a wolf.

  Sweet, pliant and helpful, his voice rising hardly above a whisper as he willingly told his tale; eyes dark as a deer’s, and his plump cheeks rosy now that he had rested and eaten.

  —A wolf, said John Dee. How, born to be.

  He shrugged: If I had been born female, I would have more likely been born a witch.

  —Are not werewolves witches? John Dee asked. The authors say …
>
  —A witch a werewolf? The boy glanced at his translator, puzzled: had he heard right? A witch a werewolf, he said: you might as well say a day that is a night, a fire that’s water. They oppose each other; fight, to the death sometimes. They must.

  —Why do they fight?

  —For the harvest. If we did not fight them, the witches would carry off the life of the earth to their lord beneath the earth; the harvest would fail, the young of the animals would be stillborn, or not thrive.

  —Where do they fight?

  —Near the gates of Hell, or within them; a meadow where no grass grows. I have never seen the place.

  The night he had been captured he had been on his way with others of his kind to do battle with the witches, as at certain times of the year, he said, they were bound to do; in the Ember Days, and at Epiphany, the feast of the Three Kings, who were their patrons. The witches had other patrons, he didn’t know who they were; saints whose names were known only to them. That night was the first he had ever gone out to the battle: the first night, and he had not got to the place, did not know how far from it he was even, when he was seized in the trap meant for wolves.

  At this the boy reached down to put his hand gravely and tenderly on his broken ankle.

  —You were taken in your bed, Doctor Dee said. The watch believed it was you who had been caught in the trap, and got free, but their reasons are very weak. Only that you were in your bed, with a wound to your leg.

  The boy nodded, rapidly, thoughtfully, as though to say he understood that the watch had done the best they could and could not probably be expected to understand: and then he said that indeed it had been he in the trap. He had freed himself after a dreadful nightlong struggle, and with a crutch made from a tree limb returned just at dawn to his village, and to his home and his brothers, and got into his bed.

  —Your brothers did not awaken at that? Nor your mother?

  —No.

  —They made you believe this tale, John Dee said. In jail, in the cage they put you in to bring you to the city, in that dungeon in the White Tower. On the rack or in the boot. Told the tale to you so often when you were in pain and afraid that you have come to believe it. …

  The boy shook his head, shook his head as John Carpio told him what the Doctor had just said.

  —No no, he said. No, it was the night of the summer Ember Days, and the greatest battle ever to be fought; the last battle perhaps, the last of the world; there were many many on their way, witches in the wind riding their pigs and mice and infants and spoons, and we over the ground: more than any battle before, even the oldest among us had never seen so many on the way to battle, and I was to be there, and help to save the crops and the coming year from them, and I failed, I erred, I allowed myself to be caught and now I will never ever see the battle or take part in it before I die. And what will become of my soul then?

  He looked at John Carpio and then at Doctor Dee, in a plain despair that nothing could make right.

  —What will become of my soul then? he asked them. How can I hold up my head now among the dead, the day when I go down to them?

  3

  For fourteen nights John Dee went on bathing his wolf in starlight for his health. He would have continued the treatment in the day as well (for the planets are of course there in the day, and just as often in good aspects), except that he would have had to guide his mirrors not by eye but by published star tables; and as every astronomer and astrologer knew, all current star tables and ephemerides were hopelessly incorrect, and not until the Emperor’s new Rudolphine Tables were completed and published would such a task even be thinkable; at which time half the nativities cast in Europe would be shown to be absurdly wrong.

  He went on, but it was evident there was no trace of a melancholic affliction in the boy; he was strong, high-colored, restless, witty. Sir Wolf John Dee still called him, and the boy in return called him Pan sora, or Sir Owl. For his beak nose and the great surprised eyes behind his round black spectacles. They slept in the tower room below in the day, Jan in his own small chamber, the two Johns together in the one bed; they called for meals when they were hungry, they went aloft at sundown to study the sky (strangely clear, night after night, Doctor Dee wondered at it, the great wind had blown away the clouds for good), and as the boy sat for his time on the wheeled cart, his hurt leg favored and his chin in his hands, they talked.

  Who set the witches and the wolves in opposition? Dee did not yet know if he believed any of the boy’s tale, but he wanted to know the whole of it. Are there such battles in other places, east, west? Do you recognize, in the day, those whom in the night you have pursued?

  Jesus set the opposition between wolves and witches when he made the heavens and the earth; just as he set the opposition between water and fire, the living and the dead, the ass and the viper, vervain and fever. It was one of the oppositions that make the world as it is and not a different way instead. So all over the world the battles are fought; on the night of wind when Jan himself went out to fight there were wolves and witches from many lands on their way to Hell-mouth, witches from Livonia, Moravia, Rus; black Bohemian wolves, red ones from Poland, gray wolves of far northern lands. He had seen them, or known they were near.

  He did not know those he pursued in the day; perhaps he would if he had gone out to fight them on many nights and not once only. It seemed to him (he didn’t know why) that he was destined to pursue and punish one witch, one witch linked or bound to him, his own opposition amid the larger oppositions of the battle and the world.

  Doctor Dee nodded, for he thought it might well be that the two—witch and wolf—were but one person: that they were, in fact, the melancholy and the man. The chaser and the chased sought each other because they were one, and the struggle between them was a dream-struggle. He thought of Kelley.

  —It may be, Jan said thoughtfully, that a wolf might live alongside the witch it is his destiny to pursue and never know her, or him, except in the battle-night; or it may be they would know one another, and yet live peaceably.

  —Why not name them, Dee said. Have them seized and burned.

  The boy lifted his eyes dismayed to John Dee when he realized what the man had said.

  —Homo homini lupus, Dee said, trying to provoke. Do not suffer a witch to live. Does not the Scripture say so?

  —Wicked spellcasters who cause harm by their magic should be punished, the boy said. Who could deny that? If one turns a man’s wife against him, or with the Devil’s help blasts a field, or makes a cow barren, or causes an illness. But not these. For they alone can consort with the dead, and bring back news of them to the living.

  —Can they do that?

  —They can see them, the dead and the soon to be dead. If such a one, say an old woman, were to say to someone You will be dead within the month it is because she has seen that person’s spirit in thrall to the Good Woman who is their leader. Perhaps the spirit could still be released, or brought back; perhaps not. But if the person die, then the old woman is remembered; they think that she did not only warn or prophesy, but caused the death.

  —You are not feared and hated too for that?

  —No. We don’t have that knowledge. We can only go to give battle in that land, and we return forgetful of what we saw and did. They are there somehow always. Theirs is the greater gift; they are the strong ones.

  —You are the benefactors. They do harm, or intend it.

  —No, said the boy, thinking hard; no. For unless this battle is fought and won the crops will fail, the animals waste away and their young be stillborn. If the people knew how we save the good things of earth they would love and honor us. Some do. But the witches, though they must fight just as we do in order for the earth to be fruitful, will always be hated for what they do: steal the seedlings and the lambs and kids, and carry them to their land of death. Still, they do what they must. I could not. I would not.

  —You pity them?

  —That night when I went abroad I hungered
, the boy said. I with others slew a lamb and ate it. Then I was satisfied. I blessed the lamb, and thanked God. But their hunger cannot be satisfied; and they cannot remember that it cannot be.

  He ate now, not bloody meat but white bread and wine with water. John Dee watched him. The men and women he had come to know in this country were largely Austrians, many of whom had learned their manners in Spain or from Spaniards; they dressed in Spanish black and cultivated careful Spanish gestures. Or they were Jews, or Italian craftsmen or priests, or Dutch clockmakers who had spent years in Paris or the Savoy. Watching his Bohemian wolf Dee saw there was a Bohemian way in the world too, not quite like any other way, a Bohemian way to break bread, count on the fingers, bless oneself, a Bohemian yawn, a Bohemian sigh.

  He had one question for John Dee.

  —Why have I not been hanged? he asked.

  —Why, hanged?

  —It was said that I would be. After the Emperor had seen me, and judged my crimes.

  —I fear he wants you for his collection, said Dee. He will keep you locked up and chained, lest you escape by devilish or magic means. Keep you weak. But not kill you. He would not kill you.

  —Collection? said the boy, and looked to John Carpio for a translation, who looked to Dee.

  —You are one of a kind of thing he does not have, Dee said: he has one of every other kind.

  He thought: the lad is strong, and may live many years; and when he is dead they will cut him open, and see if there be a wolf’s skin within; and whether there is or isn’t they will flay him and dry his skin and keep his flesh preserved like mummia, and preserve his skull, more precious than any narwhal’s or two-headed babe’s: perhaps they will jewel it, or write upon it, or make a case of ebony or red oak to keep it in, a case carved to resemble a wolf’s head.

  —For now, he said, you are in my care. For now.

  The moon had been waxing through those days; it blotted out the stars now, and ended the treatments, which were anyway unnecessary; they began to sleep in the nights again, staying aloft in their tower only because John Dee did not know what else to do. The Ember Days of autumn had come; here in the countryside the vintage would be gathered; in England they would be mourning John Barleycorn, dead that his countless sons might live.