Page 13 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

I was reading an article about the use of defensive magic in early modern England when it came to me.

The bottles—I knew what they were! Throughout history, people have believed in supernatural forces as a way to make sense of that which they couldn’t explain.

When their loved one suddenly grew feverish and died, it was perhaps easier to attribute that misfortune to the work of evil spirits.

They of course had no knowledge of viruses and bacteria, so the horrors of the bubonic plague must have felt like the wrath of an angry god or the work of a hungry demon.

By displacing their fear of disease and mortality onto an external visible source they could use folk magic to try to protect themselves against, people could at least recapture some semblance of agency.

This sense of agency, real or imagined, often involved the use of what were called apotropaics, physical objects believed to be endowed with the ability to protect against bad magic and evil spirits.

A quick internet search of apotropaic bottles reminded me that they had been used by many cultures, mostly by benevolent folk healers specifically to protect against attack from entities and spirits.

As I continued to search, I found a reference to the left-hand path.

I knew this term. If I wasn’t mistaken, it first appeared in the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a nineteenth-century mystic and founder of Theosophy.

According to Blavatsky, there were two kinds of magicians.

The first were those who followed the right-hand path that she recommended, operating within the confines of strict ethical rules, avoiding taboos, and believing that any bad magic practiced would come back threefold to the practitioner.

Alternatively, adepts of the left-hand path broke taboos, had little consideration for human suffering, and summoned demons in an attempt to harness their power.

Their own selfish ends always justified the means.

Apparently the bottles were often used to protect against these diabolical practitioners of the left-hand path.

But why did Isabelle have witch bottles in her basement? Was Isabelle really trying to protect herself from evil spirits? She was a scientist. She should have known better. Shouldn’t she?

Just then I heard a cough coming from over the garden wall and a magnificent cloud of pot smoke bloomed into the air. I started laughing, and a few moments later, I heard an embarrassed sorry, followed by another series of coughs.

I closed my computer and went over toward the wall.

Stepping up on a rock, I peered over the wall to find Finn sitting there in board shorts and flip-flops, his hair tied into a messy bun atop his head.

He looked incredibly sexy, but I tried to pretend I didn’t think so.

He gave me a moderately embarrassed shrug, but didn’t say anything more.

I waved and he nodded, and then, feeling awkward, I climbed down and went about the rest of my decidedly non-sexy day.

I spent the better part of the afternoon in the scriptorium, drifting from pharmacopoeia to pharmacopoeia, eventually landing on another series of ancient bestiaries. I was lingering over some of the images—dragons with tiger faces, snakes with multiple heads—when I looked up to see Dorian.

“How’s your research going?” he asked.

“Good. Just perusing some of your marvelous bestiaries.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad you found those. I would have pointed them out myself, but I was taught that one should never show his bestiary to a woman on the first date.”

“An outdated custom,” I said, leaning back in my chair.

Grinning, he took a seat opposite me and leaned forward, rested his chin on his hand like a girl with a crush. “So let me ask you. I know you study witchcraft and monsters and such, but you don’t believe in all that, do you?”

“Do I believe in witches and monsters?” I laughed. “Like real witches and monsters? No, of course not. When it comes to the supernatural, I’m a firm skeptic.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So you don’t believe in the supernatural, but what about biblical entities like angels and demons? Do you believe in those?”

“Hmm. Do I believe in demons?” I considered for a moment.

“Not actual demons, of course. But every time I look at the news, I see something horrifying—brutality, inhumanity, seemingly ordinary people committing unspeakable acts. Part of me wants to believe in demons if only to point to their influence in such cases. I would rather believe that than the truth—that humans are inherently bad, and for some reason, getting worse.”

“That’s a cheery thought.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Do you believe in demons?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Really?” I said, laughing in a way that I realized was rude only after the fact.

“Yeah. But I haven’t really thought about it much. I believe in angels, though, and if you believe in angels, you must believe in demons.”

“Angels, huh?” I winced.

“You don’t believe in angels?”

“God knows we could use some, but no. I don’t believe in angels.”

His eyebrows shot so far up on his forehead it was almost comical. “But there have been sightings. People have seen angels.”

“Have you seen an angel?”

He froze, a pained expression crossing his brow. “Isabelle. She was an angel in human form.”

I tried to ignore the obvious cringiness of that statement. “That’s very sweet, but I’m being serious. Have you seen an actual angel? A holy spiritual being?”

“No, but people have. It has been documented.”

I set my pen down and leaned back in my chair. “That’s absolute bullshit. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but angels don’t exist.”

“How can you prove something doesn’t exist?”

I groaned. “You’re not a conspiracy person, are you?”

He rolled his eyes. “We’re all conspiracy people. It just depends which one you believe in.”

“Listen, I don’t want to criticize your beliefs,” I said, holding up a hand.

“I really don’t. But I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God.

I don’t believe in the devil or demons or angels or any of it.

But I do believe that people think they’ve seen angels.

Just like in the nineties when everyone was seeing aliens around every corner.

I think those people believed in what they thought they were seeing. ”

“I’m sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Aliens?”

“Yeah. In olden times people read their holy books and then they saw angels or djinn or whatever supernatural beings were prominent in the texts they were consuming. Then in the nineties everyone was watching The X-Files and they all started seeing aliens. Really, if I’m being honest, I think these sightings are all part and parcel of the same thing. ”

He balked. “Did you just compare the Bible to The X-Files?”

“Yeah, that was rude. Sorry. I just mean popular media influences the collective unconscious.”

“You think that angels and aliens are the same thing?”

“Yes, but only in the sense that I believe that krakens and leviathans are the same thing. None of it is real, of course, but when someone sees something that’s not there, you can’t say for sure exactly what it is that they’re not seeing.”

He smiled. “One can’t argue with that, I suppose.”

“But I do think that they might think they see the same thing as someone else because of other shared external cultural influences. I think they’re having hallucinations that follow a pattern dictated by the era.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that sounds crazy to me.”

“It’s not crazy. It’s not even my theory.

But it makes sense. Sometimes people get lost. Who can blame them?

They get lost and they look for answers.

They long for transcendence, and that transcendence shows up in the form of an angel or an alien—some external force that’s going to show them that there’s more to this life than what we’ve got in front of us.

So they hallucinate these otherworldly beings out of a very human desire for deliverance and hope. ”

“You really think that the angel that appeared to the Virgin Mary and the little green men who abduct people and probe them on their spaceships are the same thing?”

“Yeah. That’s my best guess. It’s a shit thing to say to someone who’s religious, though, so feel free to tell me to piss off if you want. I get it.”

He looked down at his pencil. “So what about now?”

“What about it?”

“Like you say, we live in uncertain times, frightening times. Why aren’t people seeing angels and demons and aliens around every corner?”

I bit my lip. “Because I think there’s something much more dangerous going on.”

“What’s that?”

“I mean, the conspiracy theory thing you mentioned. There’s something weird going on with it, right?

They started popping up like mad the last few years.

And it’s not just from one walk of life.

You have people on every possible side of the political aisle, from all walks of life, people who normally would never agree on anything, and suddenly tons of them are convinced of these conspiracy theories. I mean, don’t you think that’s weird?”

He shifted in his chair, and from the change in his body language, I got the sense that the conversation was making him uncomfortable. “Yeah. What do you think it all means?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that the world seems especially chaotic and violent to me lately, like basic human decency has gone out the window.

Most days I think I’m imagining it, but some nights I wake up with this certainty that it’s real, almost like there’s this slow leak of evil drifting out into the world tainting everything it touches. ”

An easy lupine grin spread across his lips, and suddenly I felt a little flushed. “Lucky we’re in the middle of nowhere, then, isn’t it?”

Vaguely unnerved, I changed the topic after that. Soon we found ourselves discussing recent novels we’d enjoyed. He asked me a lot about my time in New York, and I told him everything about my grad school friends, my terrible ex-boyfriend, and my favorite professors at NYU.

I was careful, though, not to tell him too much about myself. I was never making that mistake again.