This is a book of many strata, each of which will delight its appropriate reader. At the deepest level, a certain readership will appreciate the pervasive presence of esotericism and the sophia perennis. They will spot the echoes of Plato's erotic metaphysics; Porphyry's Cave of the Nymphs; Paracelsus's Elementals; Pythagoras's Harmony of the Spheres; medieval treatises on angel magic and alchemy. None of this, however, weighs on the narrative, which is a jocus severus, a "serious jest" in the same ironic, playful style as The Story of Yew. One reads captivated by the surface, then at the end realizes that one has been touched by something profound.
--Joscelyn Godwin, author of Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, etc. |
