Having nearly finished the second of John Crowley’s AEgypt novels, Love & Sleep, I was finally beginning to understand Crowley’s purpose in his Aegypt novels: he creates a sort of dreamy atmosphere, topped with some new age mysticism, whose purpose is to capture the small mysteries of life.

The long digressions into Elizabethan and Renaissance alchemy and magic serves mainly to inform the sense of mystery and confusion Rosie Mucho feels when her daughter picks up an ordinary ear infection. In short, it is not really fantasy. Nor is Crowley attempting to be the American Umberto Eco.

But then, when I reached the last few pages, he threw in this bit of fantasy, implications of a possible real mystic conspiracy (though admittedly, a low stakes one) and the possibility that all the discussions of magic and alchemy was not actually a means to understand one’s present life, but that actually there used to be (and maybe still is) such things.

I should step back and talk about one premise of the book. The main character, Pierce Moffett, is writing a book. The premise of that book is that things changed. That sometime in the sixteenth century, magic ceased to work. Not only that, the records of it truly working are gone. Erased. All those miracles happened. But not really. Because when the shift occurred, the world changed so that they never happened. But some memories remain of the world where they did happen (could happen again). In short, that our world, is not the first (which, by the way, is the premise of the whole Maya 2012 prophecy thing – not that the world will end, but that the world will change dramatically, so that, in a sense, the old world will have ended and a new one begun).

So, I’m curious what the next volume (Dæmonomania) will hold.