Tag Archives: fiction

What Wines to Pair with Esotericism?

Cover of Ægypt by John Crowley, 1988 edition

John Crowley’s novel Ægypt came out in 1987. It gained three sequels: “The series describes the life and work of Pierce Moffett, a history professor who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills at the border of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania” (Wikipedia).

Ægypt is set in the late 1970s (Crowley’s preferred title for it was The Solitudes—follow the link for longer plot summary). The imaginary Hudson Valley (?) town of Blackberry Jambs seized my imagination, because at the point of my life my wife and I had ended up in Cañon City, an unglamorous small town in Colorado, both unemployed or unemployed (1987 was the “bottom” year of my life), and I, at least, wondered if I would ever leave or if this was the quiet backwater in which I would build some kind of writer’s life.

My first introduction to Crowley’s writing was Engine Summer (1979), an America-after-the-Big Collapse story, that has stuck with me. Little, Big gets more attention, maybe because of the large part played by the Fae in it. Phil Ford and J. F. Martel of the Weird Studies podcast gave it an entire episode, with the assistance of Erik Davis.

Unlike Little, Big, the Ægypt books do require some familiarity with the Western esoteric tradition, which is bookish. If you don’t know of Giordano Bruno, or the magickal partnership of John Dee and Edward Kelley, a lot if going to go right past you,

Or the scene in the prologue where ten-year-old Piece Moffatt (the main character), a Catholic boy in a Kentucky mining town, rises early to serve as an altar boy at 6:45 a.m. weekday Mass, and stumbling off into the predawn thinks, “I’m not from here. I’m from someplace different from this.”

That’s a big foreshadowing, (There is more on the novels’ structure here.)

But to this re-reading, I can add one thing: wine pairings! Such has my taste changed since my first reading in that little 1908 smelter worker”s cottage.

I have selected two wines to go with the reading because I can do that now. The Theurgist (red blend) comes from the Abbey Winery in Cañon City, so there is that connection, while Lapis Luna (Stone Moon) winery in Lodi, California, makes a red blend whose label proclaims, “This way one gets to the stars.”

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Witchcraft, Paganism, and Detective Fiction

Jen Bloofield’s Witchcraft and Paganism in Midcentury Women’s Detective Fiction is avallable as a free PDF download from Cambridge University Press through 7 July 2022, if I understand correctly. Paperback copies are US $20.

From the publisher:

Witchcraft and paganism exert an insistent pressure from the margins of midcentury British detective fiction. Gladys Mitchell’s Come Away, Death is dedicated to ‘Evelyn Gabriel, whom Artemis bless and Demeter nourish; upon whom Phoebus Apollo shine’.Ngaio Marsh’s Off With His Head revolves around a folk dance when ritual words are muttered and a murder is committed. Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady depicts the spontaneous rebirth of witchcraft in the depths of the English countryside. The theme appears across the work of multiple writers, going beyond chance occurrence to constitute an ongoing concern in the fiction of the period. This Element investigates the appearance of witchcraft and paganism in the novels of four of the most popular female detective authors of the British mid twentieth century. I approach the theme of witchcraft and paganism not simply as a matter of content, but also as an influence which shapes the narrative and its possibilities. The ‘witchy’ detective novel brings together the conventions of Golden Age fiction with the images and enchantments of witchcraft and paganism to produce a hitherto unstudied mode of detective fiction in the midcentury.

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