Moon Magic:
The Depths and the Heights
And even as she watched, the mirror seemed to open and another world appeared. She and the priest working opposite her were vast forms of light, their feet in the dark chaotic deeps, their heads in starry space, between them the earth as an altar and their hands linked across it. 36
Moon Magic is an extraordinary achievement. Together, the story and the changes of perspective within it produce a pure vehicle for initiatory experience—Rupert’s and the reader’s. We will examine how the deep themes are relevant to our magical study.
As we progress in magical practice, we notice the resonance of flux and reflux in the organic nature of our work. Dion Fortune establishes the main character and his situation, then loops back for a master class from Lilith in the creation of the magical personality, via the techniques of psychology. But this is psychology informed from a higher source—the tools to break the chains of society’s mores, to allow transformation into the wider life.
We move from the linear time of the first three novels into a sinuous, spiralling, touching, and receding of past, present, and future. We visit and revisit scenes from differing viewpoints, and the action waxes and wanes like the moon; it ebbs and flows like the tidal River Thames, and the sea in The Sea Priestess.
Rupert Malcolm
With Rupert Malcolm, Dion Fortune’s early psychological training has culminated in the creation of a conflicted personality whose journey to full expression is mesmerising. Within Moon Magic, the resentments of Ted, Hugh’s search for intimate connection, and Wilfred’s need to subsume himself in service to the divine feminine are deepened excruciatingly, in a way that makes us feel, as Lilith says, as if we are looking “into a man’s soul.” Rupert’s psychology is dominated by his most significant previous life: he is the only character whose past incarnation came through at puberty as ghastly stories, and he carries the horror of blood with him from a past aeon. He also has a legacy: although a renegade, he had a priestly role and so comes to his present incarnation equipped with that training. The work he does with Lilith allows him to fully remember his past-life memories.
The theme of death by torture is not new in the books. In The Goat-Foot God, Hugh works through it by entering imaginatively into his past incarnation, but his visionary experience of Ambrosius’s suffocation soon gives way to the freedom of ancient Greece. In The Sea Priestess, death is part of Wilfred’s reincarnation experience; his past-life death by drowning is dreamlike, the culmination of an ecstatic spiritual experience that transcends its horror. It is after the vision that the resultant asthma attack becomes his gateway to his vision of the sea gods. In Moon Magic, however, Rupert’s past death is not left to the elements—water and air. As a deliberate desecrator, his death is protracted and agonising, at the hands of men. During it he is confronted by the shade of the violated priestess; this is deliberately equated with Lilith’s forensic probing during their first meeting in the consulting rooms. Later, she makes important points about the modern interpretation of “sacrifice” through this juxtaposition.
Rupert’s past-life agonies are reflected through his continuing humiliations, which are exacerbated by being witnessed by Lilith. For the first time in Fortune’s fiction we have an awareness of a genuinely dangerous man. Rupert has been pushed to the brink; he could easily take revenge on the world, and on womankind through Lilith, for the wrongs he has experienced.
Every emotional response—the fuel of magical workings—is powerful, because Rupert is mentally, ethically, and physically stronger than the earlier characters. He has a huge reservoir of energy and is more frustrated, and therefore is more dangerous. Ultimately, far more hangs upon the outcome of the Lilith/Rupert rituals, as the magical focus of the book is consciously to align to, and inject new energy into, the group-soul of humanity.
The story externalises the techniques of magic. Rupert achieves astral travel over water; he infiltrates the depths of Lilith’s magically guarded inner temple, and he achieves a partial manifestation. Safely within her temple, his trained mind quickly takes him out into the astral deeps and the magical mirror allows him direct communion with the goddess Isis.
Our emotional involvement with Rupert encourages us to ponder which parts of our own personality have been bent out of shape in their growth. There will be many incremental steps that have taken us away from the path of our soul’s calling. Most will be made up of our “Hugh” passivity, taking the line of least resistance and fulfilling other’s expectations; or of Ted’s lack of opportunities and subsequent resentments; or Wilfred’s having to shoulder unfair responsibilities early in life; and some might be owing to the cruelty of our fellow humans. But we can hold all this knowledge gently, for we also have within us the Priestess of the Dark Mother, who can support us throughout the process of re-expressing these energies creatively. With discipline and distance, we will not identify personally with our past in a way that revisits despair; rather, the part of us that is Lilith will hold us until we emerge, as Rupert does, into magical transformation.
Ethics and Ways of Practice
Working for the evolutionary current, we are not concerned with the vivid psychic phenomena that endanger Rupert’s sanity. As Hugh in The Goat-Foot God says, “One expects psychic phenomena to be reasonably tangible and to have something of the miraculous about them. … We’ve had nothing you could call evidential … But all the same we’ve had—or at any rate, I’ve had, some pretty drastic experiences. I couldn’t prove them to anybody else, and I’m not such a fool as to try to; but I’m quite satisfied about them in my own mind.” 37
There is the guideline, learnt way back in the place of Malkuth, the earth. To wish and work for “effects,” and to regard them as some sort of proof when they appear, is to miss the point. They will come, as genuine experiences, and we will hold them lightly on their own plane—in the imaginal realms that are both subjective and a link to a wider, invisible reality. We learn to live with, and respect, paradox. When we are truly home in our internal space, this becomes part of our deep understanding, an acceptance of and release into mystery that cannot be comprehended rationally. The intense emotion in the story indicates the depths of experience that we can achieve on the inner planes, and Rupert’s mental state symbolises our profound yearning for connection. The corollary is, as Rupert finds, that the result of working will be an experience of the peace that passes all understanding. We step into our rightful place as valid and valuable connectors to the wider workings of the universe. Living with this knowledge is our place of ultimate rest.
Past Lives
Rupert’s journey is rooted in a seminal past life—so is our own history of past lives relevant? Feeling that we need to investigate them might equate to Rupert’s interfering with his process by consulting the New-Age thinker: it is unhelpful and might hold up the process for us. The whole thrust of this work is to loosen the tentacles of a self-obsessed culture from our psyche, to place ourselves in a wider arena; delving in this way can prove a personality-centred distraction that can easily glamorise us.
Our present reality is that for some reason we have been born with an instinct to consciously try to join with the higher processes of the universe, to advance our spiritual development and benefit humanity. It seems grandiose written down, but it is a sincere instinct that we need to satisfy to feel complete. We will do that to the best of our abilities developed in this, and perhaps other, lives. Maybe we’re fortunate “old souls” who have been here many times before, or maybe very young ones. Just writing that invites speculation—but it would be into areas where no one can know the truth. Whatever that should be, our only concern should be in taking our rightful place. And if any information should become relevant from other lives, from the higher planes or some other mysterious source, we can be assured that we will get the message. The clearest hotline is disciplined practice, focusing not on our personal line but on the greater good. When we pursue the work, the tools we need become available.
The Magical Dwelling
Lilith’s description of making the temple shows us how to prepare a magical space, as much in intent and attitude as in the very specific picture—pillars, furniture, mirror, lamp, altar, planetary symbols, and so on. She tells us this is a stripped-down magical lodge template, and it is far simpler than the Golden Dawn temples Dion Fortune would have experienced in her early occult career.
To each generation its own requirements: with limited incomes and small houses, most of us compromise, and without formal training from a magical lodge, the traditional accoutrements may not seem relevant. But Moon Magic is always there for us as a reference tool for many kinds of magical work.
We don’t need a reserved space to use the psychology of colour and scent to transforming effect: and however simple the tools at our disposal, like Brangwyn, Wilfred, and Mona, we choose and create with discrimination. Like Lilith, we go slowly, preferring the clarity and sparseness of the classical ideal until we find the perfect implements. Once they are chosen, we can keep our temple artefacts in a box or cupboard except when working. Without the inestimable Mr. Meatyard to wait on us, we are responsible for the essential physical and symbolic cleaning of the space before we start, and for returning it to the everyday on finishing. And we will keep our own temple gear—a lantern, an altar cloth, accoutrements—pristine.
To establish a temple space, we look at the bedroom, study, and space under the stairs with fresh eyes. The changes we make, even if temporary, will establish it as “in the world yet not of it.” Like the temple in Moon Magic, it will be completely camouflaged from the world of the everyday, a sanctum in which to connect when, like Lilith, we are waiting in faith for the next stage of the work to present itself. The book advises us on riding this uncertainty by grounding ourselves in practical action: as Lilith sews and cooks, walks and collects, so can we—or garden, walk in nature, and earth, sky and moon watch.
Tidal Nature of the River
Vital to Moon Magic are the deeps of the sea (represented by the tidal Thames) making us increasingly aware of the essential nature of elemental connections. The Thames floodwater and Lilith’s near-fall into the river exhilarates, reminding us of similar rushes of feeling—gusting wind on a hilltop, swamping waves on the shore, a deep cave-embrace, and the ecstatic response of every pore to a dazzling summer sun. In Moon Magic the elemental link is of water and the deep earth, but to us, the four elements are all equally available. Engaging emotionally to them not only empowers us but also reflects our understanding of the tidal, organic nature of our work: the deep currents of earth, sea, and sky and the movements of the cosmos.
Contracts and Relationships
Part of Rupert’s work is to slough off the past relationships that sap him. His loyalty to Lilith amazes her—whilst taking account of present responsibilities, he offers himself to her unconditionally. But because that is a trait of his nature, he has also offered it to his wife. It was a foolish choice, and, looking in hindsight at our own contracts, we find how often we have done it ourselves. We have to gently disentangle our early expectations of relationship on the human level and make sure that our present loyalties are still appropriate and feed our growth.
For Rupert, there are three stages to unclenching this primary tie from his soul. The first instruction comes from the outside world when the doctor gives him permission to stay away from his wife. This freedom, ironically, sets him adrift, for even an unhelpful tie gives our lives a structure. But as we begin to prioritise occult work over unsympathetic relationships, we use the discipline of Lilith to stop the drifting. Second, Rupert finally realises his irrelevance to his wife’s life and the waste of their long suffering, which allows him to reassess his rigid code. The third release is when he saves her life, in his own mind, repaying any residual debt to her. That final repayment is swiftly followed by her death and his release from the contract. But typically, bereavement leads to the looping back to past attitudes and stances. If we experience similar circumstances, responses, and reactions, we must simply be patient, allowing and observing the process. We remain aware that the time will come when a sharp jolt or a gentle nudge will take us back to the discipline of the path—and keep our senses alert for that message.
Through our work, we develop a productive relationship with our inner selves, our inner priest and priestess, to join with the work of the greater humanity and evolution. These are relationships that do not take us away from the world, but rather allow us to return from meditative states refreshed and ready for the wonderful challenges of life. Incrementally, we are opening connections that will result in the everyday being informed by the greater consciousness. It sounds so simple, but it is work for a lifetime.
Isis and Osiris
In the earlier books, the characters are under the auspices of gods and goddesses. In Moon Magic, the myth of Osiris informs the action and explains Rupert’s redemption. Here, the high king Osiris is killed by his brother, the red-haired Set, and then resurrected by the work of his sister-wife goddess Isis.
In his past life, red-headed Rupert is the butchering priest. He has, through his defilement and murder of the priestess, taken on some elements of the stealthy and jealous god Set, the bringer of destruction. Rupert in that ancient incarnation took what he had not the training to understand or appreciate, and the sacrilege was in his working from selfish human desire and not from a higher priestly function.
In this present incarnation, however, his main correspondence is to the murdered Osiris, torn and scattered by the vicissitudes of life. Rupert’s early Calvinist training, the lost profession of sea captain, a loveless marriage, and his uneasy relationship to the medical work he pursued as reparation for his mistakes have all caused a complete fragmentation of his psyche.
Early in the book Lilith reflects the ceaseless search of the goddess Isis for her lost partner through the worlds, and the shadowy fellow priestess who visits her periodically provides the help given by the goddess’s sister Nepthys. During that period of waiting and sewing, the flashing of Lilith’s black diamond and black pearl remind her of the two goddesses: it is then that she first experiences Rupert’s presence through astral projection. Once found, she emulates her divine sponsor, gently gathering the disparate parts of Rupert’s psyche and teaching him the art of magical connection.
Rupert, like Osiris, has been emasculated, through his non-marriage and his puritanical morality: his natural urge to sexual fulfilment cannot be realised. Yet Lilith, again following Isis, fashions a substitute virile function for him—in this case, the rituals of the higher evolutionary magic. These advanced rituals allow him to connect directly to the essence that is contacted during sex, resulting in a spiritual union. As in the other books, the proof of its success is in the perfect peace it brings to its exponents.
The lack of a physical marriage allows us to investigate the mythic strain so seamlessly interwoven, taking us beyond the give and take of human relationship in the other books. Fortune tells us through Lilith that the sexual act is no longer appropriate between priest and priestess: “That epoch has passed away. Evolution has moved on. We are in the airy sign of Aquarius today. The workings are astral. … That is why you get the ideal of celibacy in religious life instead of the old ideal of fecundity. The priestess is installed on the astral.” 38 And she also tells us about current practice, that “the use of the actual woman as the goddess is high Tantric magic, and rare.” 39 She is referring specifically to the ritual where Rupert naturally conflates Lilith and Isis at the beginning of the mirror working, but there has been no separation between the two from his earliest thoughts, just a gradual understanding of her qualities and potential.
There is a subtle dimensional shifting back and forth throughout the book that insists on Lilith both as Isis and as her ancient priestess. In a reflection of the forms of Isis—the unveiled Goddess of Nature and the veiled Deep Mother of the starry heavens—Rupert continually sees her afresh, from the shadowy form who turns into the invisible challenger to the regenerating spirit of life.
We see the adept’s journey and how her mythic status has grown, from the impoverished Vivien becoming the magical adept of The Sea Priestess to her present revisioning as Lilith. In The Sea Priestess Wilfred talks of the potency of sharing thought silently to give it power in a different dimension; in Moon Magic the living experience of that, the “experiment in telepathy,” is the motif.
The Thames is also the Nile; the chase along the Embankment is also a pursuit by a renegade priest. Lilith’s long wait for her priest is the search of Isis for Osiris, and Rupert is the despoiling priest of the past with his jealous Set-nature. When he, the impotent male, tries to dominate a ritual, Lilith controls it by arcing the power back up from the personal to the higher levels. In The Winged Bull the danger of Hugh’s subconscious urges cause Jelkes’s concern for Mona’s safety. Hugh learns to integrate them through his solitary work in the chapel at Monks Farm, but Rupert’s primitive archetypal levels come to the surface in ritual, and his civilised processes are in abeyance. Lilith knew that “the levels of consciousness were coalescing—the subliminal and the superliminal.” 40 It is tense, but with Lilith steadying the power, the levels come together in Rupert’s understanding.
At last Rupert is able to enter into the ritual as of right—as an acknowledged priest, not as a thief in the night. His role is spelled out: he has to descend into Hell to unleash the elemental forces for the priestess. Here we have the only past-life scene of the actual sacrifice of another human being, immediately moving to Rupert’s agonising death and the scene of his breakdown in the consulting room—disquieting scenes that are placed together deliberately. They show the progression of magical and ethical thought into the present day: that the only relevant sacrifice is of the self. This can come in a variety of forms, most frequently of time, effort, and commitment. But Lilith is unequivocal about responsibility in occult work: “I have passed out by the path of fear so often. … I do not mind [the danger] when I am alone. But I am the sacrifice! It is to that thought I cling. If anything goes wrong, I am first in the line of fire.” 41
There is in the scene of Rupert’s torture and death one priest who is more farsighted and wiser than the others. This we may equate to the deep voice of our authentic self, not bounded by the mores and laws of time and space but only by those of cosmic evolution: it promises that the time will arrive for those who have acted too soon and suffered because of it. Through his ritualised ordeal, Rupert’s very pulse becomes one with that of the primordial force, and it leads to the cosmic marriage.
Rupert undergoes a symbolic death; Lilith composes his limbs as if for burial, waiting over the body like Isis over Osiris and feeling the life flowing back into him. After the vigil, he compares her to her own mummy, which transforms into the likeness of a beautiful young girl, magically revivifying before his eyes. In Dion Fortune’s interpretation of the myth, the mummified Isis did so to her worshippers—making the point that the Goddess is in stasis until the time is right for her worship to return. Rupert says that they have paid the price to bring something new into the world. Like Isis and Osiris, having birthed the new aeon, their relationship will change yet still be a magical partnership.
Lilith promises that as the ritual has brought him peace—the peace that passeth all understanding—the next ritual will give him strength, as he will “learn to love as those love who are free from the Wheel of Birth and Death,” 42 which is the next phase. It leads to his truly understanding himself as a part of nature, with a level that has never been disconnected from the earth soul. It brings freedom from the personality and an acceptance of what is true connection with the whole cosmos. It gives him knowledge in a flash—not channelled through the rational mind but as a deep understanding beyond words. It equates to the mythic journey whereby Osiris moves into the depths to rule the underworld after his resurrection and magical mating.
Whilst Isis, and Lilith, continue to help orchestrate a changing world, both Osiris and Rupert will provide the power from the depths. As Isis and Osiris together brought nourishment to the ancient world—barley and corn, vines and grapes and the knowledge of how to farm along the fertile Nile—so Lilith and Rupert, working their magic on the bank of the tidal Thames, will continue to nourish the sterile society in which they live. From the union of Isis and Osiris comes Horus, the ruler of a new aeon; whilst Lilith and Rupert continue the ongoing work of bringing to birth a new paradigm for the coming age.