Book Synopses

The Goat-Foot God

Principal Characters:
The Man	Hugh Paston, a wealthy man living in Kensington
The Woman	Mona Wilton, an artistic young woman living in bohemian poverty
The Mentor	Jelkes, an old bookseller, a failed Jesuit priest, and a student of occultism

Hugh Paston is depressed and lost, having just buried his wife. She died in a car crash with his best friend as they were on their way back from an extramarital liaison.

Hugh finds himself unable to stay in his home and district. He walks across London from the smart end of the city into the seedier and unknown places, letting his body’s instincts lead him. He finds Jelkes’s bookshop there, and immerses himself in novels of black magic and then more mythologically oriented books. He decides he wants to revive the cult of Pan and employs an artist, Mona Wilton, and Jelkes, the bookseller, to help him find and restore an old monastery. Having found Monks Farm, an old abbey with a bad reputation, Hugh and Mona set about renewing it. In the process, they come into psychic communion with Ambrosius, a medieval abbot who turns out to have been a previous incarnation of Hugh Paston.

Hugh and Mona start to embrace the mysteries of Pan through meditation and ritual. They address the banishing of Pan in the Christian Middle Ages, release the souls of dead monks who are earthbound in Monks Farm, and awaken the pagan aspects of their own soul. Hugh’s family attempts to get him committed in order to control his money, but by integrating the figure of Ambrosius within him he prevents this.

The book concludes with Hugh and Mona marrying and performing a ritual that summons the god Pan to bless their marriage and lives.

The Sea Priestess

Principal Characters:
The Man	Wilfred Maxwell, an asthmatic estate agent living reluctantly with his mother and sister
The Woman	Vivien Le Fay Morgan, a minor adept of the Western Mystery Tradition
The Mentor	The Priest of the Moon, an inner plane teacher
Molly Coke	Wilfred’s secretary

Wilfred is an estate agent who lives in a seaside town with his mother and sister and is frustrated and trapped in a provincial life. At the beginning of the book he suffers a significant asthma attack, and while recuperating begins to commune with the moon and awaken his innate psychism. He continues this communion and discovers some stables at the bottom of his garden in which he makes his home. As he installs himself in the stables, he finds a hidden river that runs down to the sea, and this deepens his contemplations.

He receives a letter from a client of his firm, Vivien Le Fay Morgan, who is looking for a property in his area. She turns out to be a glamorous and mysterious woman who has been trained in the mysteries by an inner plane teacher, the Priest of the Moon, but who needs Wilfred’s help in order to take her next step (in terms of the Qabalistic schema we are working with, this is from step three to step four, from Tiphareth to Daath).

Together they find and renovate a sea fort, creating it as a temple of the sea mysteries, which are concerned with fertility at all levels and derive ultimately from the lost continent of Atlantis. Vivien teaches Wilfred the ways of these mysteries, causing him to fall in love with her, which enables her to create the magical image of her deeper nature. In the course of this, he discovers his artistic side and, by communing with the sea and the moon, paints extraordinary murals that depict aspects of the sea cult. He recovers memories of a past life in which Vivien was a sea priestess from Atlantis who came to Britain to sacrifice a young man to the sea; he recalls that he was the sacrifice that was offered to the sea gods. Their relationship concludes in a ritual in which the sea gods are invoked; Vivien embodies the Goddess while Wilfred embodies the masculine principle who gives his life energy to her. In the ritual, the Priest of the Moon overshadows him and becomes his teacher. At the height of the ritual, Vivien vanishes into the sea and is not seen again.

The book concludes with Wilfred returning to his town broken-hearted and, through a strange combination of circumstances, marrying Molly, his secretary, who we discover has always been in love with him. Vivien has left some jewellery to be given to Wilfred’s wife. In the box of jewellery, Molly finds a letter that explains the work Vivien did with Wilfred and outlines a training through which Molly can become a priestess and make a true marriage with Wilfred. She does so, and the book concludes with a ritual between Wilfred and Molly in which they act as priest and priestess and find fulfilment.

The Winged Bull

Principal Characters:
The Man	Ted Murchison, an ex-army officer who fought in the Great War and cannot find his way in civilian life
The Woman	Ursula Brangwyn, a hidden priestess and initiate of the mysteries of the Winged Bull
The Mentor	Colonel Brangwyn, Ted Murchison’s commander in the Great War and an occult initiate
Hugo Astley	A black magician
Frank Fouldes	Hugo’s disciple

The novel begins with Ted Murchison walking in the London fog outside the British Museum. In a powerfully evocative scene, the fog rolls into the museum, blurring the boundaries between the everyday and the mysterious world, and he has an encounter with one of the winged bulls of Babylon, called the gatekeeper of the gods. The bull connects him to deeper possibilities of being, and he wanders into the museum communing with the images of the gods found there and feeling the life within them. He emerges feeling as if he is at the beginning of creation. He is inspired and shouts into the night, “Evoe, Iacchus! Io Pan, Pan! Io Pan!”3 A voice, replying, turns out to be his old commander Colonel Brangwyn, who offers him a job to take part in an experiment involving his sister, Ursula. She was involved in an occult working that went wrong and as a result is susceptible to the manipulations of black magician Hugo Astley and his acolyte Frank Fouldes. The occult operation Brangwyn plans is the Mass of the Winged Bull, of male and female, spirit and matter, in an alchemical marriage.

Ted agrees, going with Brangwyn to his house, which is bigger and more beautiful on the inside than the outside, and enters into a secret life in which he learns to work with Ursula Brangwyn in ritual. He is both attracted to and repelled by her, and a process unfolds in which she is passive on outer levels but active on inner levels, opening up the inner ways to him. They perform solar-based rituals in which she is the green earth and he is the sun, but their relationship is characterised by ambivalence and friction.

Whilst Ursula, in a state of passivity, is taken by the black magician, who wishes to use her in a degraded version of the Mass of the Winged Bull, Ted makes contact with Hugo Astley and pretends to double-cross Brangwyn, thereby finding Ursula, who is washing Hugo’s front doorstep as a spiritual discipline. Ursula challenges Ted about betraying her brother and walks off. In a moment of deep affection, he finishes her job for her, which has the effect of opening her heart.

The connection between them flowers in the midst of the black magic ritual, the Mass of the Bull, in which Ursula is cast as the woman who is the living altar and who is to be impregnated by Fouldes whilst Murchison is tied to a cross overlooking the altar. At the height of the ritual, the room is plunged into a darkness in which polarities shift. Ursula rouses herself from passivity and frees Ted from the cross, and together they go deeper into the building into a small room where they cannot be reached and they come into a deep sense of intimacy. The black magician cannot stand against their united wills and they are freed.

On returning to the outside world, their ambivalence reappears and they separate, Ursula going to Wales and Ted planning to take a job in Alexandria. He does one last job for Brangwyn, which is to find Ursula a home. This is an old farmhouse in East Anglia that had been the only place where he had felt happy as a child, renovating and creating it. In the course of his moving her in, Ursula speaks to him without reserve or ambivalence, in a sense revealing herself as the Priestess of the Winged Bull and offering to initiate him. The book ends with their intention to mate on all levels.

Moon Magic

Principal Characters:
The Man	Rupert Malcolm, a consultant physician at the top of his profession married to a sick wife who cannot bear him; he is profoundly frustrated with his life
The Woman and Mentor	Lilith Le Fay, a greater adept of the mysteries; the same figure we met in The Sea Priestess (called there Vivien Le Fay Morgan) but now having taken her next step of development
The Concealed Mentor	The goddess Isis

The book begins from the viewpoint of Rupert Malcolm. We meet him as he leaves a graduation ceremony at his teaching hospital, stripping off his robes to walk along London’s Victoria Embankment and contemplate the River Thames. As he stands on a bridge, he considers his life and wishes it to be otherwise, fantasising that he would have been happier if he had run away to sea. He remembers a series of dreams he had in which a woman in a broad-brimmed hat and a long cloak led him through misty seascapes, and he actually spots the “dream woman” walking ahead of him. He follows her along the Embankment but loses her at a crossing, then each night afterward he visualises following her before falling asleep and finds a great sense of peace in the practice.

He encounters the dream woman again one night and follows her across the bridge to her home, a chapel directly across the river from his lodgings. He tries to enter the chapel, but she challenges him and asks him to leave. His fascination with her deepens: he visualises entering the chapel and them being together. He becomes more and more connected both to her and to his inner life. This section of the book comes to a dramatic end when the dream woman walks into his office, precipitating a crisis, and takes him back to the chapel.

The second section of the book is told from the point of view of Lilith Le Fay. We learn that she is a priestess of the cult of the Black Isis, and she describes the art and practice of magic to us. We accompany her as she finds the chapel that will be her temple, renovates it, creates the inner temple, and invites the presence of the Goddess into it.

The story catches up with Rupert as Lilith trains him to be a priest of the Black Isis. We learn that in a past life he had been a sacrificial priest as a penance for a crime he committed and that Lilith wishes him to work with her in order bring the potency of the Black Isis back into the world. They work together building the charge between them until Rupert becomes a priest who can match Lilith—there is a critical moment in his private life when his wife dies, and he is freed—not to be her lover but to be her priest. The novel ends with them experiencing a union that embraces and supersedes the unions touched on in the previous books.

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3. Dion Fortune, The Winged Bull (London: SIL Trading Ltd., 1998), 12.