SONS OF HERMES 2

ELIPHAS LEVI – ALPHONSE LOUIS CONSTANT

Even though our concern is with the remarkable activities of the ‘Sons of Hermes’ in Paris a century or so ago, it is worth taking a look at those who inspired them in the previous generation. And one name that stands before all is that of Eliphas Levi Zahed – usually shortened to Eliphas Levi – derived from a Hebrew letter transliteration of his baptismal names and surname Alphonse Louis Constant.

Born to a poor Parisian shoemaker and his wife in 1810, the only way a brighter than average lad could better his lot was to be selected for training for the priesthood. Although little could the  parish priest have foreseen that his protégé would one day become famous for writing books on magic!

Not that Eliphas Levi considered himself to be anything other than a good Catholic. He voluntarily submitted his books to the church authorities in Paris and received the somewhat backhanded assurance that “we neither approve nor disapprove; your books are neither heretical nor impious, they are simply eccentric.”

But in the end he never became a priest. Having passed through parish school and junior and senior seminaries, he recoiled from being ordained after a period teaching young girls their catechism which led him to doubt if he could live up to the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience; and chastity in particular!

It was no light matter to take such an honest and radical step at this stage. Although well schooled in theology and ecclesiastical history and with the ability to read Latin, Greek and Hebrew, these  accomplishments were unlikely to earn him a living. But he had natural artistic talent and after a few months working as a travelling actor began to make money painting devotional pictures for local churches, a line of work that eventually extended into portraits of actresses, dancers and society ladies for the journal Les Belles Dames de Paris (The Beautiful Ladies of Paris).

He also tried his hand at journalism, although his high ideals and firsthand knowledge of grinding poverty led him to political pamphleteering, and his work called La Bible de la Liberté (The Bible of Freedom) earned him eleven months in prison, the harsh conditions of which were ameliorated by his comrade in arms, the feminist Flora Tristran (and future grandmother of the artist Gauguin) who sent in food for him.

He also demonstrated a high religious idealism in a work on the Virgin Mary La Mère de Dieu – about which a friend frankly observed: “My friend, your work is deplorable in its idealism; it is celibacy gone to the head; your excessive purity makes you a libertine, my friend, and if you knew women a bit better you would not adore womankind  so much! “

Not that he was particularly a womaniser but after a long bachelorhood, at the age of 36, he embarked on a romantic runaway marriage with a 16 year old Marie-Néomie Cadot. 

Marie-Néomie was a very bright and talented girl and it was not long before she was making her way writing articles for newspapers and journals, and posing for a celebrated sculptor. Some representations of her as Psyche and other classical figures are said to have decorated the Parisian scene and may still do so. Meanwhile her husband made a modest income by his art work and restoring antiques and other decorative ware. They had four children of whom three, including twins, died in infancy, with the eldest, Marie, expiring at the age of seven. Such were the conditions of urban life in those days in gay Paree!

However, by the time she was 21 Marie-Néomie was beginning to feel the need to spread her wings and duly left him, eventually divorcing and marrying a prominent politician. This was a devastating blow for Alphonse, Almost the death of him in a sense, only to be reborn as the celebrated teacher of magic –  Eliphas Levi.

He had probably been studying occultism in some shape or form for some time and already had something of a reputation for it, attending discussion circles and even taking students in Kabalistic studies. Indeed he was sufficiently well known to be welcomed to London in the Spring of 1853, with “letters of introduction to eminent persons curious of revelations about the supernatural world.”

He was disappointed with most of his contacts however, finding English gentry well mannered but superficial, and expecting him to provide spectacular wonders. This was a likely consequence of the great influx of spirit phenomena from the United States that began to cross the Atlantic after 1848. Eliphas Levi therefore withdrew to private study of Kabalah, probably at the British Museum, aiming to return to France in a few weeks.

Before he did so, however, he was tempted into a quite bizarre magical experiment – an attempted evocation of the spirit of the 1^st century thaumaturge Apollonius of Tyana. For English readers sufficiently curious, the circumstances are described in Chapter XIII of the first part of Transcendental Magic, the main lesson of which is that reciting medieval or ancient magical formula in a highly nervous state is not the best way of going about things however impressive one’s equipment in the way of gilded marble altar tops, magnetised chains, magic mirrors and tripods of burning incense.  Certainly, he got some results, a numbed arm after threatening a vision with a magic sword, followed by an immediate physical and nervous collapse. It is perhaps to his credit –  at any rate in courage and determination – that he had two more goes at it! But with similar results.

From now on he made it a rule with students  that he was not interested in teaching techniques of ceremonial magic. A caveat, it should be said, that was not taken too seriously by his followers a generation later, who launched themselves whole heartedly into practical work of one kind or another, whilst taking on board the general theoretical structures he had laid down. In particular the concept he called the Astral Light – which had been approached from various angles since Anton Mesmer in the 18^th century and developed through various theories and practical experimentation under different names, from animal magnetism to odic force, somnambulism or trance, and associated clairvoyant or healing phenomena, and eventually hypnosis, ‘positive thinking’ and the New Thought movement of the 1920’s. Its last puff as an occult theory possibly being Israel Regardie’s Art of True Healing, a 1937 amalgam of New Thought practice with elementary Kabalistic symbolism.

 In some respects the Astral Light has been psychologised into theories of the Collective Unconscious – and is still with us as a force, not least in the advertising, entertainment and journalistic industries, wherever the human imagination is manipulated for whatever purpose.

Eliphas Levi was also responsible for providing an imaginative symbolic structure that could be regarded as compatible with the Kabalah. That is to say the set of symbolic diagrams preserved in the Tarot. Whether one regards Tarot as a popular game, an oracular device or remains of an ancient system of transcendental wisdom, it can provide the structure for a coherent magical system – or map of the inner realms of the universe. 

One can approach such a system in various ways, from the trivial and superstitious to the learned and academic. The latter approach has been fulsomely provided in recent years by  A Wicked Pack of Cards – the Origins of the Occult Tarot by Decker, Depaulis & Dummett and A History of the Occult Tarot by Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett. First class academics all, with all the wisdom and all the blind spots of the disciplined academic mind. Their blind spots a consequence of the fact that they do not realise that the system works – whatever the illogicalities or irrational assumptions of the card reader, magical operator or transcendental philosopher.

It is a matter of embracing the wisdom of the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark – “If I say something three times it’s true!” And is no more difficult or irrational than quantum mechanics if taken on its own terms. A more hifaluting way of expressing it would be the evocation of Faith, Hope and Charity.

Another stumbling block to rationally minded students is the fact that Eliphas Levi’s method of structuring and interpreting the cards differs from that of the savants behind the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as indeed from umpteen other ways of approaching the oracle.

Levi placed Trump 0 between Trumps XX and XXI, and as we shall see, the leading lights of the Sons of Hermes opted to follow him. Whilst in England the Golden Dawners placed Trump 0 at the beginning of the sequence – adding their own nips and tucks, such as swapping the places of VIII and XI Justice and Strength, with Aleister Crowley suggesting likewise for IV and XVII the Emperor and the Star.  Latterly British occultists of the calibre of W.G.Gray (The Talking Tree), R.J.Stewart (The Dream Power Tarot) and others have come up with their own evocative versions, whilst I have had my own tilts at windmills in Tarot & Magic and The Magical World of the Tarot.

Confused? It is simply a matter of letting the symbols talk to you. And having the confidence that your conversation is likely to be as good as anyone else’s. One of the first true realisations in magic is avoiding the sticky bogs of intellect – particularly someone else’s intellect. Of course you can also go wrong as well! Second true realisation of magic.

By their very nature, the Tarot cards are capable of varieties of interpretation. Which is why they are so useful in divination. That depicting Death, for example, can be regarded not merely as an end but as a new beginning. A curse or as a blessed release. And operative at any level of human experience.

When Eliphas Levi was asked the source of his wisdom by Kenneth Mackenzie, a delegate from the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, he said that after twenty years meditation any truths he had brought through resulted not from his own wisdom but from the diverse combinations of the cards themselves.

He did at one point write that a prisoner in solitary confinement with simply a deck of Tarot cards could have access to all knowledge. A claim thought patently ridiculous by Michael Dummett – who should have known better.  In fairness to Michael Dummett and the academic approach, one should quote his view on p.252 of A Wicked Pack of Cards.

 “But although occultists would prefer grounds for their theories in order to convince others, they can convince themselves without grounds. An elaborate theory known only to those who take the trouble to study the occult is satisfying enough in itself, and, being satisfying, is to be believed; grounds for thinking it to be true are welcome, but dispensable. The theory can be claimed to be a key to unlock further doors, but then tacitly ignored when those doors are to be opened.”

But it is the opening of the doors that is important – whether or not the lock has been picked.

Nothing should be too readily taken for granted in Levi’s work, one example being the figure of the 15^th Trump, popularly called the Devil, which on close examination is revealed to be not an evil card but one that contains balanced and equilibrated powers that can be used for good or ill, and could more accurately be regarded as a symbol for the Astral Light in its various manifestations. (Although it could be said that Levi’s heavy mid 19^th century style of drawing does not make the figure a particularly attractive one.) Aleister Crowley was not so far out when he attributed the card to the force of Pan! A force that is also quite palpable in another mode of action in Dion Fortune’s Rite of Pan.

We shall return to these matters when we come to examine The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, the great populariser of occultism in France, and one of the few French occult books translated into English. It has its faults, although it is little realised that at the time of writing the author was only a 24 year old medical student. They developed talent young in those days – with all the advantages and disadvantages that this implies.

One or two other points should be cleared up before leaving the life and times of Eliphas Levi, for he was not an advocate of some aspects of esoteric theory that nowadays tend to be taken for granted.

One was that he did not take spiritualism – or spiritism as it is more usually called in France –  at face value. Like his contemporary English occultist friend Edward Bulwer Lytton he considered  most assumed contacts were not with discarnate spirits but were a species of natural clairvoyance between the living. From my own experience I would tend to agree – although there may well be exceptions – if somewhat rarer than wished for or supposed.

The same applies to reincarnation. Despite a few scattered references to metempsychosis in Pythagorean times, (not quite the same thing), it was not  much considered before the Theosophical Society popularised elements of Eastern philosophy in the West after its foundation in 1875. As a good Catholic Eliphas Levi gave it no credence. Nor does it feature in the classics of western esotericism prior to the 19^th century, nor very largely in spiritualism apart from the version promulgated by Allan Kardac in The Spirit Book  of 1857. Whilst apart from a few scattered references, it is not until 1912 that we find Papus responsible for a book devoted to the doctrine of Reincarnation.

There are fashions, even in the secret wisdom!

SONS OF HERMES - 1

SONS OF HERMES 1

Back in the closing years of the last millennium, when I was approaching 70 years of age and thinking I might be reaching the end of my useful time, I found myself called to the colours again with an invitation to rejoin the Society of the Inner Light, where I had learned my trade back in the 1950’s.  What I have found useful – and printable – to say about all that I glossed in my esoteric memoirs I Called It Magic having reached 80, when I thought that might have come to the effective end of the line as far as this incarnation goes. However, here I am, another half decade  on, and somewhat awed by my impending approach towards ninety. Shall I make it that far? And in the meantime however – what to do?

I am not sure that I am up to writing another book. Assuming there is any kind of hunger out there for yet another one. Nonetheless I have had one at the back of my mind that has been nagging away with increasing insistence, and stems from some time I spent in France back in those pre-millennium days. There had been over the years a small French publisher, (Ediru) , now alas defunct, who translated and published some of my books: A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, A History of White Magic, The Rose Cross and the Goddess, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend which led to me undertake some lecture trips around France to help along sales between 1984 and 1999.

In the course of those trips and getting to know a number of French occultists I began to realise what a huge gap there was between the English and the French when it came to the development, aims and attitude toward the esoteric. The English Channel might just as well have been a Cosmic Abyss.

 I thought not a lot more of this at the time although I was conscious, on one or two occasions when invited to sit in on some practical workings with the French, that something was happening on an inner level of which I ought to take notice – although at the time I could not think what it might be. One just had to ‘bear it in mind’ for possible future use.

It seems as if the time for this possible further use is upon me. I have been prodded by some very sharp elbows on the inner planes to do something about it, and as a result in the last few months have gradually amassed about a couple of yards of books in French that weigh heavy on my mind and my bookshelves. I also realise why it was, when I retired from fulltime work, that I was obsessed into spending the next eight years at the University of London acquiring an external BA in French language and literature.  

The hour has now struck. Or as one of my French friends said in relation to the Tarot card of the Magician, that they call Le Bateleur – it is Le Bat á l’Heure!  Or in good old plain English: “Get on with it!”

The trouble is that, being a highly Aries kind of person, I am not good at being patient about things. If I am going to do something I need to have done  it yesterday – not tomorrow! And at the age of 85, how many tomorrows have I got to look forward to?  I don’t intend to ask the Tarot or anyone else. Sufficient unto the day is the labour thereof. However I cannot bring myself to embark on what might turn out to be a lengthy task that I might not be able to finish. So a formal kind of book I find out of the question.

After a deal of pushing and shoving between the planes a compromise has come to me that I can live with, which is to deal with it all in a piecemeal episodic manner. As a series of separate articles or chapters that feature in each case a particularly important character or issue on the French occult scene during its heyday at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

At the time when the London occult scene was dominated by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the characters that went with it, Paris had its equivalent organisations and colourful characters. Some of these I would like to take a good look at, one by one, as Sons of Hermes, as they liked to regard themselves.

Very little has made it across the English Channel apart from A.E.Waite’s rather stodgy translations of Eliphas Levi (History of Magic and Transcendental Magic)  and a grotesquely inaccurate ‘professional’ translation of Papus’ Tarot of the Bohemians, where they even got the title wrong! Over a period of fifty years these were the only serious occult books translated from French into English after the 1890’s, until a highly imaginative History of Magic by Paul Christian.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to acquaint themselves with a little of the material ahead, in the form of the French interest in ‘animal magnetism’ during the 19^th century, from Anton Mesmer onward, they could do worse than peruse a copy of The Circuit of Force, subtitled Occult Dynamics of the Etheric Vehicle.

This was written by Dion Fortune as a series of fifteen articles between February 1939 and August 1940, published by Thoth Publications in 1998, with commentary by me. My commentary is largely based on a strange book, Théories et procédés du Magnétisme by Hector Durville, that I picked up from a bouquinist’s bin on the quays of the Seine. This was a subject that greatly interested Dion Fortune in the late 1930’s and in her private library I came across, amongst others, Private Instructions in the Science and Art of Organic Magnetism by Miss Chandos Leigh Hunt, privately published in 1884 in a lockable binding of gold velvet. Style as well as substance in those days!

This caused some fluttering in the esoteric dovecots, then and in later years. So much so that with the publication of a collection of her articles, Applied Magic, in 1962, the alleged inclusion of The Circuit of Force was reduced to the first and last chapters. The other thirteen chapters were missing! A very frugal sandwich! Which no doubt led to Ernest Butler’s fondness, in relation to occult groups, for quoting the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass – “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today!”  A rule that, I must say, has never appealed to me.

When is a Second Coming not what it seems?

When is a Second Coming not what it seems?

I pen these words as we approach the religious period called Advent, which is popularly associated with the coming, or advent, of Christmas, although more fundamentally it refers to the Second Coming of the Messiah, which in the eyes of Christians represents the end of the world and the coming of a better one.

Whatever the eschatological possibilities, to occultists it calls to mind matters rather closer to home and the question of the return (spiritual, astral, etheric or physical) of certain gurus or significant forerunners close to our hearts.

I am reminded of this question by a remarkable little book just published by Alan Richardson entitled Me, mySelf & Dion Fortune. A very personal work by one of her biographers and also a bargain (currently about £4 on Amazon) for a hundred odd pages of rare and honest wisdom and self revelation.

As the author admits: “The older I get, the less I understand about Dion Fortune. The more I read (and write) about her, the less I actually know. Is Dion Fortune simply the pen name of a woman who died in 1946? Or a convenient name given to an entity who has floated in and out of many peoples’ minds ever since?

“Yet again, could ‘Dion Fortune’ be more accurately described as ‘It’? That is to say, instead of being seen as a wise and powerful soul on the Other Side, could ‘It’ be more in the nature of an energy, an inner plane impulse which pushes us in certain directions? Honestly, I don’t know.

“But here is how she influenced me from a very young age. I have often said that it would take a book in itself to describe the incredible levels of chance, coincidence, synchronicity and totally bizarre serendipity that enabled (and often forced) me to research and write about this energy/entity/great magical soul known as Dion Fortune.”

Anyway, this is the book. And a valuable one because what it has to say about Dion Fortune can be applied to a whole host of inner plane gurus or legendary or ancestral characters, together with  a range of startling serendipities and synchronicities involving such figures. Some that may appear puzzling or pointless. Others open to being glamorised or misinterpreted.

When researching his biography of Dion Fortune, Alan discovered an awful lot of people who felt they had meaningful links with her. In fact he doubts if there is any DF fan who does not claim some link. And although to anyone else such links might seem far fetched, to the person involved they can be important keys.

Some links seem so powerful that those concerned have even wondered if  they were Dion Fortune reborn – although more likely to have been cases of being temporarily overshadowed. A possibility with which I would concur from my own experience and of others known to me. As Alan Richardson is called, from personal experience, to say, the only danger is when you expect everyone else to believe this, and fail to accept within your own self that – almost certainly – something else is going on.

 These days he is more inclined to think in terms of Other Lives rather than past lives. That is, that time is not linear. That everything is happening now, at this instant, ever-becoming.

Be this as it may, it seems we all have our own stories to tell and puzzlements to express. And Alan reckons that the only thing we can be dogmatic about is that no-one can be dogmatic about it! That whether ‘Dion Fortune’ is a great soul on the inner planes or a flow of energy rather like an electrical current shouldn’t worry us too much.

To which I would add that it is of course possible to be both – or even something quite Other. My esoteric sparring partner, the Rev Anthony Duncan, was thus ever chary of an occult tendency to call the Second Person of the Trinity a ‘Christ force’ rather than a Divine Being. It can be spiritually demeaning to make an abstraction out of life.

Much the same could be said about various inner contacts one might have had, including the three canny lads that jumped me into writing The Abbey Papers. Anyone who has a copy could here profitably turn to Section 55 for some handy hints about much of this, but for those who have not I abstract the following.

When, under guidance in the Mysteries we come upon the spirits of the Ancestors, they are like guardian angels of the race, for they partake more of the angelic than of the human spirit that gave rise to them. So when we come upon them we are not taking part in a kind of spiritualist séance. These are not spirits of the departed as commonly understood. They are more in the nature of intelligent holograms – to use a souped up image of modern technology. They are representations of power – or ensouled magical images.

They are not put there or imaginally created by us. They have an objective existence of their own and  may be used by those who are invested with sufficient authority and who have the power and ability to do so. Much of their emotive power comes from emotions embodied in the ideas attached to the particular archetype they represented as individuals when in incarnation.

In normal circumstances they are put before us with a purpose. They are brought before our field of attention, to be, in a sense, restimulated within our aura, thereby imparting a certain energy to the image, and also stimulating a corresponding energy in us.  An exchange of energy takes place, an energy that may last and be drawn from for some time.

In other words it has the effect of dedicating a certain part of our aura to the works and the powers of that particular archetype and its needed work in the world today. This may be by realisation as much as by physical action. It is what practical magic is all about.

 

 

 

 

MOON MAGIC

Reports and comments on the recent Dion Fortune seminar have been coming in over the past few days, suggesting that it was a very good do, with support from members of a number of related groups and individuals. All topped off with some interesting and unusual lunar phenomena which will not be seen again for another generation.  With this in mind it seems appropriate to round things off with a piece I once wrote on Dion Fortune’s last novel – “Moon Magic” – where the sea priestess moves off to London to do her stuff on the banks of the Thames. I think my piece was intended as a Introduction to an American edition of the novel but in the end was not used. However, the story in all its glory is still available from Red Wheel Weiser.

 

MOON MAGIC

In Moon Magic Vivien Le Fay Morgan, Dion Fortune`s charismatic “sea priestess” from the novel of that name, reappears to work some more of her unique brand of magic. She is now far from the sea, living in London, although not entirely disconnected from the element of water, for her apartment overlooks the River Thames. In keeping with the slightly changed nature of her magical role she has also taken a change of name, now preferring to be known as Lilith Le Fay Morgan.

Lilith has also chosen a rather different type of man to train as her priest in the magic she has in hand. In place of the small town estate agent dominated by his mother and sister she now finds Dr Rupert Malcolm, a highly successful medical consultant at the top of his profession, yet married to a demanding invalid. His earthy masculinity combined with a domestic life of sexual and emotional frustration make him an irascible tyrant to patients, nurses and students alike.

Dion Fortune had a great feeling for the sense of place, as she has demonstrated in her evocations of the western coast of Somerset in The Sea Priestess. This sense of place is now extended to London and the river that runs through the city. Rupert Malcolm`s first awareness of Lilith Le Fay Morgan is upon the north side of the river, upon the Victoria Embankment, along which, after finding her haunting his dreams, he compulsively follows her, along the stretch from Blackfriar`s Bridge, past Cleopatra`s Needle, to Westminster Bridge over which she turns. She now resides in an old converted church on the south bank, whose lighted window can be seen across the river from Rupert Malcolm`s own apartments.

          Nowadays this location is taken up by the Royal Festival Hall and other leisure facilities extending down to the New Tate Gallery and the Millennium Bridge, although in Dion Fortune`s day it was composed mainly of warehouses. Yet the original building that inspired Lilith`s house and temple still exists, although it is located north of the river, about a mile distant from Chelsea Bridge, in West Halkin Street, Belgravia. Known as the Belfry, it started life as a Presbyterian church in about 1840 but was eventually converted to secular use, and for a time acted as the headquarters for a somewhat idiosyncratic spiritualist organisation.

In 1936 a wealthy member of the Society of the Inner Light leased it for the use of Dion Fortune, and it was here that she staged, to invited audiences, celebrations of her Rite of Isis, extracts from which are featured both in The Sea Priestess and in Moon Magic.  The outbreak of war in 1939 put an end to these activities, but the striking looking building remains and in latter days has operated as a restaurant.

          Dion Fortune did not find Moon Magic an easy book to write, and made several false starts before she turned to writing it in the first person, in the words of Lilith herself.  Then it began to gel. She also had some difficulty in finishing it, probably because of the exigencies of war, which put a great strain upon her energy and organisational abilities. And when shortage of paper had all but crippled the publishing industry, the writing of novels might well have taken a low priority in a busy life. As a consequence the manuscript was incomplete at the time of her death in 1946.

In consequence of this the book falls into three parts. The first part, (chapters 1, 2 and 3), may be regarded as the best of her early attempts to start the novel. It sets up the action, introducing Dr Rupert Malcolm and his meeting with Lilith, at first telepathically and then in the flesh.

 In the second part, (chapters 4 through 15), Lilith takes over, explaining much of herself and her intentions, her magical temple, and the work that she intends to do within it with Rupert Malcolm as her priest.

The third part, (from chapter 16 to the end), which brings the magic to a natural close through the eyes of Rupert Malcolm, was provided by a close associate of Dion Fortune, who attempted to channel the material after the latter`s death. The completed novel eventually saw publication in 1956, some twenty years after Dion Fortune started it, and ten years after her death. 

Dion Fortune claimed that she mostly wrote her fiction by allowing the images to rise, letting the characters have their head and listening to their conversations, not entirely sure what the eventual details of the story would be. This applies to the style of her narrative in Part One, as well as the whole of The Sea Priestess and her earlier novels. In Part Two, she pursues much the same method, but writing in the role of the main character herself, brings about a much more vivid ambience. We might say it gives a more direct glimpse into the soul of the author than does narrative written in the third person.

Once again, as in The Sea Priestess, there is a fairly close identification of the character with the author, in her mode of dress – the large floppy brimmed hat, the long cloak, the furs and the chunky jewellery. What is more, she goes out of her way to justify this mode of attire, explaining that it is not simply the facile exhibitionism of a poseur, but a way of creating a role in which to focus the magical imagination of those with whom she comes into immediate contact.

Now that she was writing directly from Lilith`s point of view, she began to find that the character was also taking on a greater feeling of independence from herself, which led her to wonder, half in jest, if she had created a kind of “dark familiar” for herself, or that the character might well represent her Freudian subconscious. Certainly we are here at the borderline between the mental processes of the creative artist and those of the mediating occultist, which is by no means a hard and fast one.

She recognised that she had a great deal in common with Lilith Le Fay but that there was also a great deal that they did not have in common. Lilith revealed far deeper knowledge of magical things and taught Dion Fortune a great deal she had not known before. Dion Fortune throughout her life was staunchly Christian in principle, if a little unorthodox about it in practice. Lilith Le Fay, on the other hand, as Dion Fortune admits, was purely pagan, a rebel against society, and bent upon its alteration – which she intended to do by magical means.

One strange point in common between author and character is the idea of being some kind of changeling. (Oddly enough, a thought that also crosses Wilfred Maxwell`s mind with regard to himself in The Sea Priestess). The origin of  this story came from Dion Fortune`s mother, Jenny Firth, who confided to her more intimate friends that the child she bore had died soon after birth, but had revived some hours later with a completely different look in its eyes, as if it were another being. This idea  Dion Fortune revealed in a paragraph in an issue of The Occult Review, a major esoteric magazine of the inter-war years, and it is much the same story that appears in Lilith`s introduction to herself in the novel.

The claim to being 120 years old we can perhaps best regard as a symbolic statement, deriving from Rosicrucian or numerological lore, rather than speculate what she might have been doing since 1815 or thereabouts. 

          An odd sequel to this melding of author with character is that after the publication of the novel in 1956 a certain confusion developed in peoples` minds between Dion Fortune the author and Lilith Le Fay Morgan the character, exacerbated by the paucity of photographs of the real woman that were then available. Therefore a year later an attempt was made to lay the character to rest by a further sequel, called The Death of Vivien Le Fay Morgan. This short piece entered the public domain as part of a collection of Dion Fortune articles under the umbrella title Aspects of Occultism in 1962, with the annotation: “This fragment which was mediumistically received after Dion Fortune`s death, is an epilogue to Moon Magic.”  The medium concerned was Margaret Lumley Brown, some of whose remarkable work I have edited, along with her story, in Pythoness  (Thoth Publications) and her account of her remarkable psychic beginnings in Both Sides of the Door (Skylight Press).

          In this fragment Vivien, or Lilith,  prepares for her death, and after taking leave of her  friends, ritually assisted by a fellow senior initiate, voluntarily passes out from her physical body to enter into the dissolution processes of the post mortem state, described under the ancient Egyptian symbolism of the Judgment Hall of Osiris.

          It is interesting to note the ancient Egyptian ambience of this fragment, as compared to the largely ancient Greek basis for Dion Fortune`s Rite of Isis. But as Bernard Bromage notes, a London University academic who befriended Dion Fortune and attended a performance of the Rite of Isis, the costumes she used were more Egyptian than Greek; and on being asked about this confided that it was the ancient Egyptian overtones to the Greek symbolism which had always attracted her.

In any case, Bromage came away impressed by what he witnessed, afterwards writing that it was “one of the best attempts I have ever witnessed to stimulate the subconscious by means of `pantomime` drawn from the more ancient records of the hierophant`s art.”  Whilst his use of the word “pantomime” may seem odd in a modern context, he is using it in its original technical sense, which was an ancient art form with a close connection between ceremonial and theatre. One principal difference from modern theatrical performance is that ceremonial magic is performed for the benefit of the participants rather than the spectators, in addition to whatever objective results, via the inner planes or the collective unconscious, might be deemed to accrue therefrom.

          Objective results were certainly sought by Lilith Le Fay Morgan as (in chapter 15) she tries to explain to Rupert the existence and nature of etheric magnetism, which is given out in any form of human interchange but more especially when the emotions are aroused and focussed upon a single person.  What Lilith is trying to get across to Rupert is that the process of magic requires the two of them to form an imaginative, not a physical relationship, one with the other. An important point being that magic of this type, although dependent upon the polarity of gender, is not preliminary or an accompaniment to erotic games. A physical relationship, should it occur, would simply be the operation of a safety valve if the forces – via the instincts and emotions – ran out of control, and would consequently spell failure in magical terms.

As she explains: “The physical is simply the end result, and we never let it get there. When you and I work together in ritual, you are the archetypal man and I am the archetypal woman…What I do to you, I do to all men; and what you receive from me, you receive from Great Isis Herself, for I am Her priestess and you represent the people…Telepathy is the active factor but it is more than that. We are telepathing the group mind of our race, but we are transmitting cosmic forces…This was what was practised in the temples of the Great Goddess in ancient times. It is practised to this day in India, and they call it Tantra.”

          At the time Dion Fortune was working upon her novel and practising the Rite of Isis at the Belfry, she was also in close contact with Bernard Bromage, a specialist upon Eastern religions at the University of London. His current research included texts on Hindu tantra, and he put some of this material at her disposal. She began to draw her own conclusions from this in a series of articles published in the Inner Light Magazine from February 1939 to August 1940, under the title The Circuit of Force (subsequently published in volume form by Thoth Publications), in which she examined what, in her view, constituted “the lost secrets of western occultism”.

It is of some interest that her immediate successors in the running of her Fraternity did not share her enthusiasm for this line of work, and probably not without reason. It is a type of magical relationship which is easily misunderstood, even by sympathetic colleagues.  As Lilith had warned it can easily run out of control and if sex creeps in through the door, magic flies out of the window – to say nothing of whatever personal and social consequences may result if those concerned have obligations outside their charmed esoteric circle. As Dion Fortune had pointed out years before, in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life, this is an area of esotericism that is fraught with hypocrisy, involving specious claims of reincarnationary links, twin souls and linked destinies that at root are no more than mutual self deception.

Its most positive manifestation, outside of the esoteric world, is probably best seen in the function of the poetic or artistic muse – where the artist is stimulated by some desirable member of the opposite sex without necessarily entering into a physical relationship. Examples abound ever since the troubadours of Languedoc spun enchanting lyrics inspired by inaccessible 12^th century ladies, and perhaps saw its apogee when the young Beatrice transported the imagination of Dante into writing one of the greatest works of western literature.

Lilith reveals at the same time something of her high magical intentions and the difficulty of retaining the necessary impersonality of the adept at the end of Part Two (and incidentally in the last words of fiction written by Dion Fortune herself):  “As I thought of him as he lay sleeping in the room below with my cloak thrown over him, there came to me a wave of such intense tenderness that it alarmed me. I must not feel like this towards my priest, I thought, or I shall spoil the magic; and then it came to me that only thus could I do magic with him – the magic that was to be done through one man for all men in order to lift burdens grievous to be borne in a world that has forgotten the holiness of the Great Horned One.”  By this somewhat unusual title, it should be said, she refers to the goddess Isis, whose head dress is the horned moon, rather than to the god of the witches, “Old Horny”.  For that side of things she had already written The Goat-foot God with its Rite of Pan.

By the “burdens grievous to be borne” she has in mind the rigid sexual and social mores of the 1930`s. This was a time when, for instance the heir to the throne of England, who would have been Edward VIII, had just been forced to abdicate for insisting on marrying a divorcée. At the same time a play by Charles Morgan, The Flashing Stream, caused something of a sensation, provoking the playwright to justify himself by publishing an explanatory book. Dion Fortune was moved to call it “one of the great plays of all time.” It certainly was not that, but its theme was close to her heart,  that “the face of the whole world would be changed if the experience of sex were considered to be innocent unless its circumstances made it guilty.”  Such an idea might be regarded as commonplace today but was quite beyond the pale in 1938. 

The subsequent liberation of sexual mores in the succeeding decades would have been much in line with what Lilith Le Fay Morgan was trying to aid with her magical rites. As she later says to Rupert: “We have done what we set out to do. Something is present in the world that was not there before, and it will work itself out in its own way.”  Perhaps it began to do so in the liberating decade of the 1960`s.

However, for the inner side of the magical experience we must turn to Part Three, which reverts to third person narrative, although expressed largely from the point of view of Rupert. In the magical climax of the novel he finds himself passing through a number of stages of consciousness, as memories of incarnations of the distant past come welling up from the depths of the instinctual and emotional levels. These his rationalising mind tries to cope with, explain or justify as best it may. Then passing through the levels of consciousness of the personality in the world, he finds himself at a level of higher awareness that transcends all  previous doubts and justifications and rationalisations.

He feels the beginnings of the gathering of power as the magic starts to work. He feels a tide rising within him along the hollow rod of the spinal column until with a flash the spiritual and physical levels coalesce, beyond the bounds of physiology and  even of psychology. He finds himself floating amongst the stars, with Lilith as Isis before him. The two have passed beyond personality, are no longer two circles bounded by their peripheries, but two centres of radiation, whose contact and interchange is like a lightning bolt as the cosmic forces run down through the lower levels, blowing clear all obstructions and blockages. After this virtual initiation he feels as a man utterly reborn or re-made.

He has, in other words, passed through “the Door Without a Key”.  This is the subtitle of the concluding part of the novel, and it has been previously defined by Lilith, as “the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry, according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.”

          Here speaks the voice of the pragmatic magician that was Dion Fortune, and in this, the last of her novels, she demonstrates how, and in what way, it can be effectual. The tools of her trade may be the magical temple, with its symbols and mirrors and lights, but within that construct is the power of the trained mind and imagination honed into diamond sharpness by an unreserved dedication to the forces of light as she understands them.

 

Note: Similar essays of mine on Dion Fortune’s The Secrets of Dr Taverner, The Demon Lover, The Winged Bull, The Goat-foot God, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic can be found in THE OCCULT FICTION OF DION FORTUNE published by Thoth Publications in 2007. Also recommended is Dion Fortune's Rites of Isis and of Pan Skylight Press, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dion Fortune and the Three-fold Way

Looking back over my many years of our shared vocation and tribulations as editors of esoteric magazines, my thoughts still dwell with affection on Michael Howard, whose presence will be sorely missed as an intelligent flag waver for what he believed in. I sometimes had the impression that he never quite got over the fact that as a Christian occultist I would deign to talk to a Pagan one. However, whatever part of the spiritual spectrum we come from, we all have to make the best of how others choose to see us, and I do not lack, among the righteous, a fair number who regard me as somewhat to the nether side of a Dennis Wheatley villain. With this in mind I append a lightly edited article I wrote for the Inner Light Journal in 1998 after I had rejoined the Society after a lapse of 33 years doing my own thing. It endeavours to show the all round aims and capabilities of Dion Fortune – after which I went on to write her full biography ‘Dion Fortune & the Inner Light’ in 2000, which should still be available from Thoth Publications.

 

The three major strands to the Western Mystery Tradition, using the colour symbolism popular when the Society of the Inner Light was first founded, were called the Green Ray, the Orange Ray and the Purple Ray.

The Green Ray consists of the nature contacts in the broadest sense, and encapsulates most mythopoeic formulations relating to nature and to the Earth, including Elemental and Faery traditions. The Orange Ray describes the study of symbolism and its manipulation in ceremonial or visualised forms, frequently in terms of the Tree of Life of the Qabalah. The Purple Ray denotes religious mysticism, a direct approach to the spirit, and the devotional way usually expressed in the West in Christian terms.

These three Ways can be equated with the three Paths that depart from Malkuth as we leave earth consciousness on the Tree of Life and visualise the three immediate Sephiroth in their Queen Scale of colours: the Green of Netzach at the base of the Pillar of Energy, the Orange of Hod at the base of the Pillar of Form, and the Purple of Yesod on the Middle Pillar of Aspiration.

The reason for this short dissertation upon the Three Rays is because Dion Fortune’ s whole life and work was based upon them. I was recently reminded of this when approached by someone seeking information about her, and whose preconceptions were so inaccurate as to be bizarre. They assumed she had started out as a pious moralist in the 1920’ s, had become an active convert to paganism in the 1930’s, and by the time of her death was on the way to becoming a disciple of Aleister Crowley. In colour terms I suppose this might have been expressed in terms of watery violet, turning bright green before relapsing into rather murky grey.

Taking this scenario for granted the question put to me was, had she lived longer, what direction would her next work have taken? The answer to this question was simple. She would have gone on writing in much the same way that she always had - by a balanced exposition of the three fold way.

As in any practical occult work, there is always a certain cyclic action at work, based upon inner tides of one sort and another. One aspect may come more to fore at any particular time, but overall the balanced picture will be seen. One simply has to make out a chronological list of Dion Fortune’s published work for this to be plain.

However, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and it would appear that a cursory glance at the 1920’s titles of The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage and The Problem of Purity, were enough to give substance to my respondent’s assumption that Dion Fortune began life as a pious moralist. Her novel The Winged Bull was sufficient to label her as a pagan evangelist in the 1930’s, and an entry in Crowley’s diaries recording some correspondence from her in 1945 was enough to put her in the ranks of the followers of the Great Beast.

To appreciate the full picture of a great occultist we have to take account of the many other books she wrote and their true nature. The 1920’ s titles mentioned above are of the nature of psychology rather than sanctimony, to which we might add The Machinery of the Mind, with an introduction by an eminent scientist of the day. Together with The Secrets of Dr. Taverner they reveal her early interest in psychoanalysis and in the medical applications of esoteric knowledge. She was married to a doctor with esoteric interests in 1927, and her principal teacher in the Golden Dawn, from 1919 onwards, was the wife of an eminent head of a large psychiatric hospital.

.During the same period she wrote a number of articles on the nature of the esoteric tradition as it was currently being practised. These were collected and published in volume form as Sane Occultism, The Training and Work of an Initiate, The Esoteric Orders and their Work and Avalon of the Heart, rounded off by Psychic Self Defence and an early occult thriller The Demon Lover.

Moving into the 1930’s we have an analysis of spiritualism in Spiritualism in the Light of Occult Science and a couple of popular booklets Through the Gates of Death and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. The major event of this decade however is her pioneering textbook The Mystical Qabalah, that spelt out the theory of occultism in readable and commonsense terms. The clutch of novels that immediately followed it, The Winged Bull, The Goat-foot God, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic were written to exemplify in practical terms some of the theoretical principles expounded in The Mystical Qabalah.

Whether they were altogether successful in this respect is a matter for informed debate, part of which she initiated in a series of articles in the Inner Light Magazine. The novels were written to demonstrate certain applications of particular Sephiroth, Tiphareth for The Winged Bull, Malkuth for The Goat-foot God and Yesod for The Sea-Priestess, whilst its sequel Moon Magic also has elements of the higher analogue of Yesod in the “hidden Sephirah” Daath. She was not an advocate of working directly upon the side Sephiroth, at any rate in her public works.

With their commercial requirement to entertain as well as instruct it is arguable whether the full demonstration of any particular Sephirah of the Tree of Life is attained by any of the novels, or even whether this aspiration is possible in works of popular fiction. However they may rate in terms of esoteric or commercial success or failure, the novels were an interesting and courageous literary experiment and have proved to be a lasting monument in genre fiction.

To appreciate some of the thinking behind the experiment we have to cast our minds back to the general atmosphere of secrecy that was very much a part of the Western Esoteric Tradition in those days. Israel Regardie, as he later confessed to me, was distinctly nervous at the time and for some time afterwards, of what might happen to him as a consequence of publishing the Knowledge Papers of the Golden Dawn. There is also evidence to suggest that Dion Fortune had a qualm or two as to whether she had gone too far in revealing esoteric secrets in The Mystical Qabalah. Such fears over such an innocuous book may seem little short of ludicrous today, but only a few years previously she had been bitterly attacked for allegedly revealing secrets in some of her early works. “Secrets” moreover that she had not been vouchsafed in the first place!

Nowadays at any weekend “workshop” one can sample magical techniques that were once held sacred to the innermost inner, whether presented in these terms or in the guise of some form of psychotherapeutics. My own first introduction to “path working” was conducted in most guarded Lodge conditions but nowadays similar techniques are the stock in trade of anything from day centres for the elderly to adult education classes in creative fiction.

Thus have the Mysteries progressed over the past sixty years in what is sometimes known as “the externalisation of the Hierarchy.” This does not mean, however, that the Mystery schools are denuded of all power and wisdom. The greater secrets are concerned not so much with techniques but with the mythopoeic calibre of the material being processed, where indeed the secrets do not have to be artificially guarded for the simple reason that they are likely to be incomprehensible to whoever is not of the “grade” to work them. The pearls of wisdom are quite safely rolled before the snouts of the porcine fraternity.

The outbreak of war in 1939 put a sudden stop to the flow of publications, fictional or otherwise. In Dion Fortune’ s case this did not mean a withdrawal from the world or some kind of mental collapse as some have speculated. The reason is rather more prosaic, that is to say - paper rationing.

Even the Inner Light Magazine had to fold for lack of paper in May 1940 but Dion Fortune still kept writing away in open letters for students and associates, first on a weekly basis until 1942 and then, rather more expansively, every month. It has been my privilege to sort through much of this recently with a view to book publication.

Already published under the somewhat bizarre and catchpenny title of  The Magical Battle of Britain is a selection from the weekly letters of 1939-41. It is odd to hear that some have chosen to look at this phase of Dion Fortune’s work in terms of jingoistic patriotism. One can only say, as one who still remembers those times, that being machine gunned, bombed and threatened with invasion puts a rather different emphasis upon what may be deemed to be politically correct, whatever the long term merits of universal pacifism. Even so, the general tenor of Dion Fortune’s approach to current danger, without rancour or vindictiveness, gives nothing that calls for apology.

Other writings of this time include The Circuit of Force, which appeared between 1938 and 1940 before closure of in the magazine, and Principles of Hermetic Philosophy  together with Esoteric Principles of Astrology that date from the monthly letters of 1941-2. . Most of this work, it should be said, is of a more practical nature than the pre-war material. She discusses in some detail the circulation of force within the human aura, comparing western methods with those of the east, including tantrik yoga and the raising of kundalini.

Another initiative she pursued of a practical nature in 1942, evidently under inner plane direction, was an approach to the spiritualist movement, seeking common ground. She gave lectures at the Marylebone Spiritualist Association and wrote some articles for Light a weekly newspaper of the spiritualist movement since 1881 that is still published as a quarterly journal by the College of Psychic Studies. It also appears that C.R.Cammell, then editor of Light, was given the highly unusual privilege of being invited to the headquarters of the Society to attend trances at which Dion Fortune was the medium.

Her mediumistic skills were announced in the Monthly Letters in 1942 although there had always been a series of articles called Words of the Masters in the Inner Light Magazine, and in an article of April 1938 entitled How Communication is Made she quite openly describes the technique of trance mediumship and what it feels like to the medium concerned, which is obviously herself.

The Editor of Light was not the only outsider to be allowed into the inner recesses of the Society however, for there are scripts surviving of medical doctors being invited in for trance interviews with one known as the Master of Medicine through the mediumship of Dion Fortune. These were of variable success. One early attempt shows the doctor concerned trying to trip up the communicator with technical questions and the atmosphere is plainly sceptical. Later interviews with a more open minded medical practitioner seem more promising and useful to all concerned however.

Some of these scripts circulated privately to those sufficiently discrete or qualified and the earliest date from 1921 and have since been included in Principles of Esoteric Healing. It is worth bearing in mind Dion Fortune’s long association with medical practitioners, since her pioneering days in psychoanalysis in 1913 through to her meeting with Dr Penry Evans in 1925 and their subsequent marriage. This regrettably did not last much beyond 1938 but it is an interesting synchronicity that in the immediate post-war years a very bright young medical student was generally regarded as likely to be her eventual successor as Warden in the years to come. That this did not come to pass is another matter.

This is a far cry from the mysterious correspondence with Aleister Crowley in early 1945 and the last year of her life. They had known of each other for some years, but kept rather distant relations, as if often the way with occultists of some reputation, who find no call to cosy up and join each other’s groups. He did send her a fulsomely autographed copy of The Book of Thoth upon its publication but whether she returned the compliment with copies of her own books is open to question. The resemblance of the villainous Hugo Astley in The Winged Bull to the Mega Therion suggests that she was not entirely impressed by Crowley as a person but if he was aware of the parallel it would probably have amused rather than irritated him.

There is evidence to suggest that a rather sinister oriental group was flinging its inner weight about in the disturbed political conditions of 1945 and this may have led her to seek some advice from one who was certainly familiar in one way or another with various kinds of occult unpleasantness. There has even been speculation that an occult attack of some sort may have led to her death. Unexpected as this event was, it is not a theory I subscribe to, nor is it confirmed in the esoteric diaries of those actively involved at the time.

Indeed, by some accounts she seems to have been quite a bouncy inner plane presence very shortly after her physical demise, even becoming involved in helping to finish writing the incomplete Moon Magic. Some intermittent inner unpleasantness from an oriental source certainly went on for those sensitive enough to receive it, of which Margaret Lumley Brown bore the brunt, but it seems that all was satisfactorily resolved by August of 1946.

Contrary to popular fiction and film that sees occultism in terms of cops and robbers there is a very much more weighty and metaphysical side to it, which because of its abstruse nature, tends not to attract the public eye. Central to this is one of the first books that Dion Fortune wrote, on a high cosmic trance contact, The Cosmic Doctrine dating from July 1923 to February 1925. Until its publication in 1949 it was a text reserved as a senior study course, and was only published in full in a new edition of 1995.

The problem that one finds with outsiders trying to assess the work of any occultist is that most of the important work goes on behind the scenes, that is to say upon the inner planes, where few commentators have the ability to operate. Even if they have a certain facility in this respect they tend to be limited by their own esoteric horizons. Thus those not capable of appreciating the three-fold nature of the Mysteries, as expressed by Dion Fortune, will ever be lumbered with somewhat dim and distorting spectacles, only able to register the limited wavelengths to which they happen to be focused.

There is nothing that tends to throw this problem into glaring light as the so-called purple ray of devotional mysticism. Time and again one sees problems being thrown up by individual occultists or schools trying to come to terms with the Christ force. I use the term “force” with some reluctance as it is a very personal contact. However, in metaphysical and personal terms it is also a very potent force - and one that is not easy to deal with, by virtue of two millennia of historical presence in the west with many misapplications and distortions of it upon the way, by those who have sought to bend its power to their own institutional devices or dogmatic preferences.

The history of modern esoteric movements is becoming a fashionable subject in academic circles these days and I recommend to some aspiring PhD to attempt a thesis upon this particular subject. I have no time to develop it in depth but can give a few pointers to crisis points in the past where one can see the sparks fly. The electrical analogy is appropriate for such crises are just like a lightning flash - complete with rumbling thunder. They are caused by the same kind of hidden conditions, a difference of potential (electrical or spiritual) between the above and the below.

An early thunderclap and pyrotechnic display was to be witnessed at the foundation of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1883. The two poles between which the sparks flew were those who looked to the east for wisdom, as represented by Madame Blavatsky’s protégé A.P.Sinnett (the recipient of most of the Mahatma letters) or the photogenic and charismatic Christian hermeticist Anna Kingsford.

Later we see similar sparks flying in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which led A.E.Waite to form his own more mystical group, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. One of the more distinguished members of this was Charles Williams, who went on to write some profoundly occult novels shortly before Dion Fortune was writing her own. I have analysed his fiction at some length in The Magical World of the Inklings (Element Books 1990) together with that of his friends C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and the anthroposophist Owen Barfield.

We find Dion Fortune herself involved with the self same spark generating problem when she had a profound vision involving the Christ and the Lord of Civilisation that propelled her in the direction of the Theosophical Society in 1925 and its Christian Mystic Lodge, despite already being a member of the Golden Dawn and having her own small informal but very active group. So hot and fast did the sparks fly that little documentary information has survived to tell the story. Suffice to say that the official Theosophical line at the time remained with a largely Hindu perspective of the Christian dynamic as interpreted by Besant and Leadbeater, and the Christian Mystic Lodge, of which Dion Fortune was then President, relaunched itself as the Community of the Inner Light.

The Christian element continued to be nurtured by a regular Sunday performance of a Grail related communion rite under the banner of the Guild of the Master Jesus. Dion Fortune herself also published a series of mystical meditations upon the Collects of the Anglican church.

So things continued in the three fold strand of Hermetic, Pagan and Christian Mystical celebration until the outbreak of war. It is true that for a number of members, any one of these three strands might be the preferred option. One of her stalwarts, an ex-military gentleman who wrote some fine pagan articles in the magazine under the pen name of F.P.D. was famous for his attitude to those he considered his esoteric and intellectual inferiors by his recommendation to “chuck ‘em in the Guild!” However, although specialisation has its place, either in the beginning of an esoteric career or at certain more advanced stages, true adeptship requires that one play more than a one-stringed fiddle, and sooner or later all three paths from Malkuth have to be trodden on the long and complex road to higher consciousness in Tiphareth.

The post-war Society of the Inner Light as I knew it no longer operated the Guild although there was a genuine mystical religious strand within its workings, as one might expect under a Warden who had been educated by the Jesuits and whom some even suspected of being an under cover Jesuit himself! However, a very powerful Christian dynamic burst into the group in 1960/1 and one which was sufficiently powerful to cause many sparks to fly and various members to disperse and go their separate ways.

I had a very powerful experience of this myself whilst by myself in the Library. Suddenly, out of thin air, it seemed that Jesus, the Risen Christ, simply walked into the room. He did not do anything or say anything, and the experience lasted but a few seconds, but it was sufficiently powerful for me to go straight out and buy a devotional book to mark the occasion. It was a copy of Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ and I wrote the date in it. I have it before me now: 27^th September 1961.

The group as a whole took a new turn as a consequence of all this. The old graded structure was abandoned and all reverted to the 1^st Degree again. Members were encouraged to wear plain clothes or ecclesiastical cassocks instead of magical robes. I was prepared to accept all this as a necessary cleansing period prior to building up the structure of the lodge again. However after four years of things, according to my lights, remaining much the same almost exclusive emphasis on the purple ray, I felt a yearning for the orange and the green and came to the conclusion I would have to seek elsewhere to find it. So reluctantly I resigned. If you don’t like where you are being led there is no point in dragging your feet and grizzling.

Anyhow if your dedication remains in the Mysteries, when one door is closed another will open, and “coincidence” caused my path to cross with that of a highly psychic and mystically experienced Anglican clergyman, who as a young curate had the daunting task of preparing me for confirmation into the Anglican communion. The result of the sparks we struck off each other led to the writing and publication of a handful of books, including The Lord of the Dance and The Christ, Psychotherapy & Magic by Anthony Duncan, and Experience of the Inner Worlds by myself. [Also, very latterly, Christ and Qabalah, from Skylight Press, a record of our forty year relationship.]

Suitably equipped with what I hoped was now a stable foundation, I set about building my own lodge, with a structure incorporating bricks of purple, orange and green. How well I succeeded over the subsequent years is part of another story. [I Called it Magic – also from Skylight Press.]