Review: Ægypt by John Crowley

Having quit his history professorship and put a match to his life in New York City, Pierce Moffet moves to an idyllic community in the mountains to write a book about the secret history of the world, the synthesis of a lifetime of reading and daydreaming. To pay the bills (and enable his own procrastination), Pierce takes a part-time gig sorting through the possessions and papers of the late writer Fellowes Kraft—a historical novelist in the mold of Robert Graves—whom Pierce had read extensively as a child. Among the author’s cigarette-burned detritus, Pierce discovers his final, unpublished work, an account of the lost land where magic came from—a place Pierce himself has been trying to describe in his own work. A place called Ægypt. On finishing Kraft’s book, Pierce thinks to himself:

He knew now that his whole life up to this time, the religion he had been born into, the stories he had learned and made up and told, the education he had got or avoided, the books somehow chosen for him to read, his taste for history and the colored dates he had fed it on, the drugs he had taken, the thoughts he had thought, had all prepared him not to write a book at all, as he had thought, but to read one. This one. This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that they each be the one book he required, his own book.

Ægypt, the 1987 novel written by John Crowley (under his preferred title, The Solitudes), is the first volume of a tetralogy about Pierce Moffet writing his book, a seemingly mundane experience that still feels preordained and guided by the deep currents of western Hermeticism. It’s about finding the magical in the ordinary, trusting intuition, traversing the rift between youth and adulthood and losing—then finding again—that sense of wonder and imagination.

Carl Jung developed the concept of synchronicity as a way to describe moments or experiences or symbols that feel meaningfully related—or even magical—without a discernible causal relationship. In both psychology and modern esotericism, it’s a way of understanding how the mind makes connections and misconstrues them as externally or objectively true. Pareidolia, the Discordian Law of Fives, and Robert Anton Wilson’s 23 enigma are all illustrations of synchronicity, reminders that when you look for meaning you’re bound to find it.

Embracing a certain amount of synchronicity makes life more interesting. In earlier points in my life Ægypt might have felt like a magical transmission—late college, maybe, when I was straining against the boundaries of academicized literary fiction and philosophy, or during my mid-20s deep dive into Thelema and black metal. But something tells me it couldn’t have happened before now, the middle of my 34th year, the same age as Pierce Moffet. I see so much of myself in this awkward, yearning man, struggling to write something that feels definitive and important, who puts into words my exact experience of reading the book in which he is the main character, “his whole life…prepared him not to write a book at all…but to read one. This one.”

Of course, this makes for a pretty skewed critical analysis—this isn’t a book I experienced with anything approaching objectivity. Each page feels like a rediscovered memory, like I read this book when I was young and forgot about it, but every idea in it stuck with me, buried deep until now. And that’s only reinforced by the fact that Pierce has this exact experience with the works of Fellowes Kraft—though he actually DID read Kraft’s work as a kid.

So, at the risk of fanboying, I am enamored with nearly everything about this book. The hopeful expression of wanting to experience magic in the world, along with a reserved rationality. The interweaving of the Renaissance-era alchemy of John Dee and Giordano Bruno, Arthurian legend, the Campbellian hero myth. The books within the book. The honest, direct approach to love, sex, drugs, and friendship. The kind of halcyon mid-century setting I developed unfounded nostalgia for by reading so many books by authors of my grandparents’ generation. The highly considered structure based on the houses of the zodiac. The feeling of the world beneath the world just beginning to reveal itself, if you’re willing to look for it. Crowley and I are clearly the same kind of nerd, and I just can’t get enough of this shit.

With just a chapter left, I did something I do most mornings: drew a tarot card. Usually an idle exercise, a way of contextualizing my thoughts and feelings for the day, but over the preceding weeks an increasingly obscure one—most cards coming up reversed, signifiers of things out of balance, failed projects, wasted time—all of which I could understand, to a degree, but that I didn’t see playing out in my daily life. But on this idle morning my card was, startlingly, the Magician. Ægypt is a book about magic that accomplishes its task in its mundane everyday-ness, the slow act of individual being becoming a part of everything, or of everything coming to know itself. It’s a moving, beautiful work, and exactly the book I needed to read.