DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (14 page)

—Just now that war is a cold one, said the Don. I mean one in which little blood is shed. It is nonetheless war; a war for—how
shall we express it?—for hearts and minds. In this cold war, clerks and scribblers and deep thinkers like yourself are valued
soldiers. And those who have seen their former errors are most valued of all.

—Of all religions, Bruno said, the Catholic pleases me best.

Don Bernardino regarded him without readable expression. He was dressed in Spanish black from head to foot, his shirt and
simple collar of whitest white to make the black more deep.

—Certain difficulties stand in the way, he said. Certain obstacles.

There were indeed obstacles. There was Giordano’s flight from his order under threat of a Holy Office investigation for unorthodoxy.
There were the periods he had spent in heretic capitals: Geneva, Lyons, London. Also his books, deep-dyed magic, a fact obvious
to anyone
who could read them; fortunately few could, and Don Bernardino was apparently not one.

—I hoped, Bruno said, to be reconciled to the Church, yes, but. But not to return to my Order’s rule. To live as a lay person.
If possible.

Don Bernardino had invited Bruno to sit; he himself remained standing, and now Bruno saw why. The Don, his hat, even the silver
head of his ebony stick, rose above Bruno’s head.

—And do you, Don Bernardino said, profess and believe what the Church teaches? That Jesus Christ is God made man, that He
died for our sins, rose from the grave? That we who believe in Him shall also rise?

Bruno clasped his hands before him, raising his two index fingers like a steeple.

—I would not, he said, wish to alter any of Mother Church’s doctrines.

—You do believe and hold these things.

—I believe and hold all that the Church teaches. Understood in a certain sense. Not all men understand alike.

Don Bernardino studied the small smiling man seated before him. The head of his tall stick revolving in circles around its
foot seemed to think for him. At length he said:

—I am no theologian. But it seems to me you wish to be a Catholic again without actually being a Christian.

He came a step closer to where Bruno sat.

—Life is short, he said. There is no salvation outside the Church. Another tenet you perhaps hold in a certain sense. My advice
is, Return to your Order. You may bring it glory, as Aquinas and Albertus did, men of firmer faith than yours.

—I honor them. I, I …

—There is no place in such times as these for parties of one. Who is not with us is against us.

All this time the man had been advancing by degrees upon his visitor. It occurred to Bruno that the room they sat in and the
maison
the Spanish Embassy occupied were, by diplomatic convention, Spanish soil; French law did not run here. As a Neapolitan,
Giordano Bruno Nolano was—in a certain sense—a subject of the Spanish King. Somewhere a door slammed, echoed. Bruno leapt
up from his seat, where he had sat frozen like a small animal before an onslithering viper.

—I thank Your Excellency for this advice, he said.

—Because of the honor I owe to your former master, said the Don, I will submit your request to His Eminence the Nuncio. You
should expect little.

He nodded almost imperceptibly, and turned away.

When Bruno had gone, Don Bernardino returned to his private chamber, and the business to which he gave every waking moment
he could; it often filled his dreams as well. The Enterprise of England. How many ships, how many men. How long, O Lord, how
long.

So.

A freelance now, Bruno advertised a lecture at the Collège de Cambrai on the errors of the Aristotelians (always bound to
draw a crowd, even if a hostile one) and by dint of able self-advertisement and a day and time well chosen by the stars, drew
a good one: young students, who laughed at his extravagances, got his jokes, safe themselves from his assertions. At the end
of the lecture he surveyed the crowd, lifted an arm, and invited someone, anyone, to defend Aristotle and attack himself,
Brunus Nolanus; he would take on all comers. But the smiling man who rose (after a pregnant silence gave birth to him) and
came forward to oppose him was a man Bruno knew to be an intimate of the King’s inner circle of spiritual advisors, Orphic
musicians, and Hermetic doctors. This sign or signal from the King was clear: Bruno was not just out of favor, he was to be
actively opposed, maybe suppressed. Bruno in the
speculum
of his huge heart saw the King, his white makeup and the false roses in his cheeks. His little evil dog. His lifted eyebrow.

He yielded the chair,
prego
, and retired. Before the King’s man completed his refutation, Bruno had slipped from the hall.

After that there was the incident of Fabricio Mordente and his wonderful compass. Bruno came to know the man among the Italian
emigrés of Paris, and he was remarkably like his name, a lank-haired mordant melancholic and a great fabricator. Mordente
had invented a new sort of compass, one that could be used not for constructing figures but for deducing the proportions between
various shapes, lines and surfaces—not only on the page but on Earth.

—The two arms have several scales inscribed on front and back, Mordente told him, and scales are drawn too on this disk, the
nocella
, by which they are connected. And see, the different scales inscribed on the quadrant, into which I fix the compass arms
by these little screws, these
galletti
.

Bruno handled the beautiful brass thing, unwilling to give it up. Entranced with the luster of it, with the screws, with Mordente
who had called the screws “cockerels” for some reason, most of all with the operation of it: Mordente showed him how to sight
along one arm of the compass to a distant object (a tower, a door at the street’s end) and by
examination of the scales to construct a triangle that was proportional to the triangle formed of the object, the eye and
the ground. And thus to find the distance. Useful, Mordente said gloomily, for armies on the march, or surveyors; Bruno laughed.

He would make Mordente famous. He borrowed the compass and set to work to write a funny dialogue in Latin. It was evident
that Mordente had not understood what he had created, just as Copernicus had not understood that his system had destroyed
Aristotle’s universe: that was for Bruno to reveal. For what Mordente had done was to build an engine by which the geometries
of which the earth is made could be extracted: their souls, Pythagoras would say, lying hidden within them, fooling us into
thinking they had none, until this new knife laid all things open to show them. Useful for armies on the march! Mordente,
plodding mathematical pedant, was like the ass in the parable who bears unwittingly the ineffable effulgent Sacrament upon
his back: strong, patient and good, but deeply ignorant. No matter; he benefitted mankind anyway; the ass of useful toil is
a divine being compared to the braying fools who willfully oppose knowledge. Bruno called his little dialogue
Idiota triumphans
: the
idiota
being, of course, Mordente himself.

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.

“D
emonomania?” 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 stared 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:

“A little rough,” she said.

“Awful,” said Pierce. “And long. Nearly a thousand lines.”