Gods and Demons

In reflecting the strangeness of reality and the diabolical darkness of evil, Tim Powers’ “The Mills of the Gods” takes its place alongside other cautionary tales of fictional supernatural realism that prefigure and reflect reality. They show real-life figures in the light of the truth that exposes and vanquishes the diabolical darkness.

Not facts first; truth first. This pithy paradox, coined by G.K. Chesterton, is an apparent contradiction pointing to a deeper truth. Chesterton’s point is that we need to distinguish between physical facts and metaphysical truth. Whereas the former can be weighed and measured, placed on a scale or cut into pieces, the latter cannot be quantified in this way. Truth itself cannot be treated this way, nor can goodness and beauty, nor love and life, nor gods and demons, nor indeed God Himself.

If the measurement of physical facts cannot convey the deepest truths, then truth itself must be sought in the world beyond the facts. This world includes faith and philosophy but it also includes the world of fiction because deep truths can be found in fictional narratives. This is true to such an extent that even the strangest stories can convey the deepest truths because truth itself is stranger than the strangest stories.

This brings us to the novels of Tim Powers, a pioneer of what has become known as steampunk, whose stories are about as strange as they come. On Stranger Tides (1987), which inspired Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series, takes us to the eighteenth century world of pirates practicing voodoo, encountering zombies and searching for the fabled Fountain of Youth. Last Call (1992) descends into the sordid and satanic depths of the Las Vegas casino culture in which dealers of death play with Tarot packs for the highest stakes of all, their eternal souls. Declare (2000) is a spy novel with a supernatural twist in which demonic forces are being harnessed as weapons in the Cold War.

Powers’ newly-published novel, The Mills of the Gods, continues the strange tradition. Set in Paris in the 1920s, it follows the fortunes of an American expatriate, Harry Nolan, who finds himself sucked into the life and death struggles of a nineteen-year-old waif, Vivi Chastain, as she tries to prevent her soul from being evicted from her own body by the parasitic presence of a malevolent spirit seeking to possess her body as its own.

As with his previous fiction, Powers situates his supernatural thrillers in real-life historical settings in which famous historical characters mingle and converse with his fictional protagonists. On Stranger Tides featured historical figures from the age of piracy, including Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Woodes Rogers, and Juan Ponce de León. Last Call features the mafia mobster, Bugsy Siegel, who helped finance and operate the Las Vegas casinos in the 1940s. Declare features the communist spy and convicted traitor, Kim Philby, and also T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, while other novels by Powers feature Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poets and novelists, including Lord Byron,  Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters. Speaking of his placement of factual and fictional characters side by side in his novels, Powers explained that his fiction sought to be true to the facts: “I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar – and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.” This fictional genre, of which Powers is truly a master, has become known as “secret history”.

True to form, Powers peoples his new novel with several celebrated historical figures, including the American expatriate novelists, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and the Spanish artist and pioneer of cubism, Pablo Picasso, all of whom were living in Paris at the time the novel is set. Taking known facts from the biographical records, Powers weaves these factual characters into the lives of his fictional protagonists, embroiling them in the supernatural action of the plot.

The supernatural dimension of The Mills of the Gods involves neo-paganism and the efforts of rival neo-pagan sects to call up the power of their respective demonic “gods”. Members of one of these sects, the sauteurs, seek to channel the demonic power to enable them to cheat death by inhabiting and possessing the bodies of those who are still living after they have themselves died. This desire to conquer death through physical immortality is a recurring feature of Powers’ fiction, which places the supernatural realism of his own novels alongside J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien described the relationship between “death and immortality” as a key moral focus of his greatest work. Whereas the elves are immortal, men are defined as “mortal men doomed to die”. It is mortality that defines us. We are doomed to die. As for the elves, who are doomed not to die, they consider death to be a special “gift” that God has given to mortals, which enables them to escape the “long defeat” of history. For virtuous characters, in the world of fact as in the world of fiction, the memento mori, the reminder of our mortality, inspires contemplation of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. For those lacking virtue, and especially for those who have sold their souls to the devil, factually or figuratively, death is to be avoided at all costs so that judgment might be avoided and hell also. This anagogical aspect of the works of Powers and Tolkien reflects the deep Catholic faith of both authors, a faith which is evident in Powers’ work through his weaving of a nuanced Catholic thread through many of his plots, its presence providing hints of sanity and sanctity amidst the satanic madness.

Let’s conclude by returning to the earlier assertion that even the strangest stories can convey the deepest truths because truth itself is stranger than the strangest stories. Take, for instance, the strange story of Jeffrey Epstein’s life. Apart from the sordid sex trafficking in the service of the globalist elites for which he is known, Epstein sought to conquer death through the pursuit of transhumanism. At the prideful heart of transhumanism is a disdain for all that is authentically human and a prideful desire to replace human frailty with superhuman or transhuman strength, ultimately through the attainment of immortality itself. Most of Epstein’s so-called “philanthropy” was directed to the financing and promotion of transhumanism. He was fascinated with the possibility of creating the “superman” via the path of eugenics and hoped to help in a practical way with plans to “seed the human race with his DNA” by impregnating up to twenty women at a time at a proposed “baby ranch” at his compound in New Mexico. He also supported the pseudo-science of cryonics which freezes human corpses and severed heads in the hope that technological advances will eventually make it possible to resurrect the dead. He had planned to have his own head and genitalia preserved in this way. Those reading The Mills of the Gods might feel a shiver run down their spine as they see the uncanny and creepy parallels between Epstein’s “baby ranches” and the “nurseries” in Powers’ novel in which kidnapped babies are raised in order to provide the bodies for recently deceased diabolists wishing to cheat death at the expense of the lives of the innocent.

In reflecting the strangeness of reality and the diabolical darkness of evil, The Mills of the Gods takes its place alongside other cautionary tales, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Such works of fictional supernatural realism prefigure and reflect reality. They show real-life figures, such as Jeffrey Epstein, in the light of the truth that exposes and vanquishes the diabolical darkness. They also show that, beneath the physical façade of the visible facts, we live in a world in which false gods and demons war against the goodness, truth and beauty of God’s Creation. Since this is so, we should all give thanks to God for those who reveal the strangeness of truth in the strangest of stories.

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The featured image, uploaded by José Luiz, is “Saint Michael Archangel” (circa 1620), by Vasco Pereira. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.