Wolfe and Crowley, ancient and Renaissance

Adam Stephanides · 09 May 2000, 08:54 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: (urth) Wolfe and Crowley, ancient and Renaissance
Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 08:54:39
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0994 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0994.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The Tarot discussion got me wondering whether Wolfe ever alludes to the
Tarot.  I couldn't recall his doing so at all.  Then it occurred to me
that not only does Wolfe ignore completely, iirc, the whole field of
Renaissance magic which so fascinates Crowley; aside from the anomaly of
THE DEVIL IN A FOREST, he pretty much ignores the whole of medieval and
Renaissance Europe as a source of allusion or intellectual background (I
would tend to see the Arthurian backdrop of CASTLEVIEW as a reference to
myth in general, rather than medieval Europe in particular, and the same
with the Irish legends in PEACE).  This strikes me as being unusual for
a self-confessed Catholic author and admirer of Chesterton.  On the
other hand, the classical Greco-Roman world is all over the place: the
SOLDIER books, obviously, but also the pseudo-classical gods and
goddesses in BOTLS and THERE ARE DOORS; the setting of BOTNS is modeled
after the Byzantine Empire, which was contemporaneous with medieval
Europe, but which had much less of a break with the ancient world; even
the conjurations of the witch in THERE ARE DOORS and in Gold's fake
Necronomicon in PEACE seemed to me closer to ancient Greco-Roman magic
than to medieval or Renaissance magic, iirc.  Of course, it's been a
long time since I read most of these, and I don't have copies close at
hand, so I could be completely wrong.

On the other hand, while Crowley is fascinated by Renaissance magic, he
doesn't ignore the classical world.  In fact, the conflict between the
two is a minor subtheme of LB: both Smoky and (or so it seems to me)
Ariel Hawksquill have minds molded by the classics, though Ariel is of
course aware of the Renaissance tradition; and both are made to
unwillingly recognize the truth of the Renaissance magic worldview.

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net