The Work of Change
And with the change came a sudden feeling of something dynamic; of a self-confidence and self-will he had never known before. 48
The work of change applies both to the fictional characters and to the reader. Reading the stories to find connection, we realise that our circumstances may mirror theirs. Holding the possibility of an initiatory experience, we can expand into magical thinking through studying the texts.
We pick up each of the characters at a point in their lives when they must change. Up until this point they have kept a hold on their lives in a way that society tolerates, but it has been to the detriment of their psychological and spiritual health. Now, their situations have altered in a way that makes their present way of life unbearable to them.
We all have a longing within, coming from our need for congruence between our inner and outer worlds: we feel that they should be harmonious and mutually supportive. This need is uppermost in Dion Fortune’s characters, and reading her fiction seems to promise that those yearnings can find resolution in the outer world. Her two aims are to investigate her characters’ psychological processes and to prompt psychological responses from her readers in a particularly magical way. So every reading gives us the opportunity to start an initiatory journey.
Dion Fortune warns the student that the occult life requires strength and health. She recommends having the stamina of the blacksmith, so we might feel intimidated and never attempt esoteric study, yet some of the stories have physically weak characters taking important magical roles.
There is a good reason for this seeming discrepancy, concerning the ethics of the occult teacher. Any who disseminate ideas, theories, and practice in nonfiction have a responsibility to the potential student, and so Dion Fortune favoured a cautious approach. Writing fiction allowed her a freedom of expression and explanation without the need for caveats, and the stories seem much truer to Dion Fortune’s actual stance. Throughout her life, she made the mysteries as accessible as possible, dependent upon the limitations and talents of the individual.
We meet the main protagonists of The Winged Bull, The Goat-Foot God, The Sea Priestess, and Moon Magic at their personal tipping points when a series of small incidents have contributed to an internal revolt against their lives. We learn that the ranks of those who serve the higher powers can—and sometimes must—be drawn from the weak, the profoundly ill, the damaged, the disenfranchised, and those seemingly powerless to cope with the demands of the modern world.
It is reassuring reading to the aspiring student, and a cursory look at the heroes of the four “Qabalah” books shows how very different their psychologies, limitations, and talents are.
Hugh Paston * Wilfred Maxwell
* Ted Murchison * Rupert Malcolm
The Goat-Foot God introduces Hugh Paston. Born into wealth, he was married and seemingly successful yet has given up on a life that is unsatisfactory. His mother and sisters and their families batten upon him for money: his marriage financed his wife’s affair with his best friend. After a futile attempt to connect to his senses via a Parisian call girl, he has drifted along the path of least resistance. A fish out of water, he feels a faint disgust for the sophisticated manners of London’s Mayfair and needs extreme situations, such as big game hunting and driving fast cars, to feel alive. He has no need to earn a living and has been going steadily downhill, until the crisis after the funeral of his wife and her lover, when we meet him.
It is hard to find a less “manly” man than Wilfred Maxwell, hero of The Sea Priestess: he is slight in build, henpecked, and has chronic asthma. He is set firmly in middle-class society in a small town, in the bland role of estate agent. Like Murchison, he has been robbed of his youth and freedom by the death of his father—he has had to rescue the family firm. Living in his imagination, he allows his mother and sister to dominate him, like Hugh in The Goat-Foot God. Keeping up appearances is their major concern, and, largely through emotional blackmail, they retain control.
Through Wilfred’s diary we learn he is a true egalitarian in a small, class-ridden society. Being by natural instinct out of place in his own echelon, he makes friends with waiters in small pubs, the local doctor, and Scottie, the socially inferior partner in the firm. He is pragmatic, quietly subversive, and mischievous. Surrounded by snobbishness, he slyly pokes fun at the pompous and small-minded.
The hero of The Winged Bull, Ted Murchison, is a man’s man, a warrior who was in his element in the trenches of the First World War. His straitened circumstances preclude marriage, and enforced celibacy does not suit his constitution. Profoundly class-conscious and uncomfortable around women, he’s unsettled by the sophisticated heroine, Ursula. He dislikes the idea of both Christianity and marriage, having lived with a cleric brother and his harpy wife. He was cheated of training after he came out of the army and consequently has suffered through a series of dead-end jobs. He is frustrated and dour and possesses huge resources of strength, resilience, and an animal obstinacy.
Rupert Malcolm of Moon Magic is a success: an eminent man, a trusted neurologist whose word is law. Yet he is unsatisfied and undeveloped in every other area. He resembles a butcher, grizzled with an impassive, granite-like countenance. He has great physical strength and fitness and an excess of vital energy.
Rupert behaves eccentrically, with no awareness of or consideration for others or the conventions. Yet his persona conceals a child-like simplicity and integrity. He cannot connect emotionally and does not understand his students’ worship or his humiliating reprimands by the hospital authorities. His semi-invalid wife and strict moral code force him into celibacy. He has coped by developing a hard shell and a formidable manner, a persona that no one can crack, and his nerves suffer to the point of breakdown.
To sum up, Hugh is a man of independent means, Wilfred has a mid-position in a bourgeois setting, Ted is solidly of the unskilled working class, and Rupert is a respected professional at the top of his tree. This teaches us immediately that magic has no artificial social constraints; it is available no matter where we are in life.
We also note that there are two single men (Ted and Wilfred), one widower (Hugh), and one man with a non-marriage (Rupert): all are celibate, frustrated to the point where they are withdrawing mentally and emotionally from social interaction and life itself. They are lost and isolated, fish out of water, square pegs that society has tried unsuccessfully to cram into round holes.
But despite this similarity, they are very different characters. In magical terms, this means that they have different energetic qualities, which explain how they have lived up until now. Rupert and Ted, who are positive, vital, and energetic, have suppressed their instincts and libido, drawing on their reserves. The receptive, sensitive men, Wilfred and Hugh, who seem powerless in the face of an unsympathetic society, retreat from the world, Wilfred into illness and Hugh into a state that he later self-diagnoses as the gradual disintegration of the personality.
The Need for Magic
So why couldn’t these characters sort themselves out by more conventional means? Why the recourse to magic? To answer this, it is worth looking briefly at Dion Fortune’s early experience of psychology and psychotherapy.
In her early twenties, Dion Fortune was in the forefront of psychotherapeutic practice: she was a lay analyst at a medico-psychological establishment known as the Brunswick Square Clinic. The clinic developed the first psychoanalytic training programme in Britain, and was founded by two women, Jessie Murray and Julia Turner. It was open from 1913 to 1922, meaning that many of its patients were soldiers suffering the ghastly aftermath of the First World War.
Some of the leading lights of the early British Psychoanalytical Society had their first training there, and Dion Fortune was not the only woman analyst to write fiction with significant psychological content. The “talking cure” was then being piloted, and was practiced in the clinic in a variety of ways. In the days of early experimentation, the individual analyst determined the type of treatment. This free approach was later narrowed down to conform to a narrow definition of the Freudian approach, and Dion Fortune makes her opinion clear when Hugh Paston comments in The Goat-Foot God that Freud’s system would be better if he had remembered the stature of the priapic gods, instead of treating them like mucky boys playing with dirt. We can learn more of contemporary views of psychology from reading the discussions of Mona and Jelkes in The Goat-Foot God.
Dion Fortune’s own occult studies, pursued almost concurrently with her psychological work, opened up possibilities wider than those then offered by psychoanalysis. Underlying influences on mental and spiritual health such as reincarnation, non-human entities, mixed-parentage with non-human races, and the importance of elemental contacts are all explored in her earliest short stories, The Secrets of Doctor Taverner,49 which she famously dedicated to her teacher, Dr. Theodore Moriarty.
She came to significant conclusions when contrasting psychological and magical approaches in prompting change. Fortune was a forward thinker and the first to acknowledge that ideas and theories could develop for the better. Her stories seem almost to anticipate the direction psychology would travel, into areas that might now be described as spiritual psychotherapy. In light of these developments, it is probable that if she were alive today she would change the opinions she formed then of psychology and psychotherapy:
• That analysis alone does not effect cures
• That there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the psychologist’s philosophy
The stories show clearly her belief that it is through dealing with underlying occult causes that people can be healed.
Psychology in her time was in its infancy and was intent on gaining its credentials through strict adherence to the scientific method: it is within that model that Fortune made her pronouncements. As she heralds the possible harmonizing of the magical and psychological methods, we can assume that she would have welcomed psychology’s progression in favour of fluid and intuitive approaches in tune with magical precept, and its increasing effectiveness in treating the mind, psyche, and soul as a result.
So although each character is going through a dramatic psychological awakening, Fortune’s message is that the magical component is also necessary to effect a transformation. The magical aspect of their cures, including glamour in no small measure, is what halts them as they teeter on the brink of catastrophe, and then redirects their journey to wholeness.
In the liminal spaces of the mind, it is the opening up to uncertainty that allows magic to enter, that activates a response from the universe and increases synchronicity in their, and our, lives. In the mundane world, each hero’s journey is expedited by the following:
• The total removal from normality and everyday concerns
• The glamour of the unfamiliar
• Being introduced to a deeper way of thinking about life
• A burgeoning awareness of life’s interconnections and unfolding possibilities
• Becoming fixated on new projects
All these aspects speed each hero to the conclusion of this part of his life story.
Essential Character and Our Place in Magic
Dion Fortune’s writing promotes a subtle difference in the way we think of the characters: Wilfred and Hugh, weak and ineffectual in the apparent world, are referred to by their first names, whilst the manly heroes have their surnames, Murchison and Malcolm, reinforced by the text. But from both the psychological and the occult viewpoint, their importance is not how they appear in the everyday world. The essential ingredient is quality of each of their natures: positive, outgoing, and energetic or negative and receptive.
These are their links to the universe, the qualities that place them in their own sphere on the Tree of Life. These dictate how their understanding develops through magical work. They are qualities, unrelated to gender, with which we can all identify and that link us to the greater society of life.
By placing ourselves in the place of each character, Dion Fortune intended that we should undertake the magical journey with them. Through working with their unique gifts they will become “joined up”—within themselves, to society, and to the greater cosmic life of the universe. From a starting point of no connection, pushing themselves until they “run on empty,” we see them developing relationships in both the inner and the outer world. And they gain an understanding of the interactive, energetic nature of the universe, the “reality behind the reality.”
Working with the Qabalah can bring the balancing and integration of the personality, which goes hand in hand with an understanding of the harmonious interaction of microcosm and macrocosm. As we reread the books, we respond instinctively to the underlying message driving the story, which is that our spiritual task is to work towards a state of congruence, within and without. Our job is to remain aware of the magical possibilities of life in abundance. Dion Fortune plotted meticulously and deliberately for psychological effect—both on the characters and the reader—and this is the reason that the books have captivated generations of readers over seven decades.
Although the contrast between the inner and the outer self is most marked in Rupert Malcolm, all of the men possess a childlike simplicity. Each has a nature that cannot attune to the dictates of a society that Fortune makes plain has an unnatural and superficial morality. So they are constantly at odds and are baited by uncongenial companions—frustrations that we all know only too well. The vital connection to life that will complete them, and the psychological and magical journey to this sense of completion, is an aspiration that we share, making us deeply involved in the journey.
Microcosm to Macrocosm—
The Ills of Society and the “Sex Question”
Fortune introduces the idea of finding a way of living life in abundance in an artificial world through romantic fiction. She uses the examples of working magically with a member of the opposite sex, or “polarity magic,” to illustrate how we can all make connections with our inner and outer selves and our relationship with the world.
Through the romantic story, she can clearly allow her individual characters to embody and express the dissatisfactions of society as a whole. For the time in which she was writing, it is an impressively forward-thinking approach, and her main commentator, Gareth Knight, has postulated that the magical work of Dion Fortune and her Society in the 1920s and ’30s was responsible for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Reading the books encourages us to examine the mores of our own society, and to be reminded that their rules should not run counter to our own instinctual, naturally moral stance.
But it is important not to interpret the books’ messages too literally. The emphasis on male/female magical working, necessary for a good story, is not the only way to work magic nor the only valid expression of intimate relationship. The novels should not encourage us to be “on hold” until our occult soul mates magically appear in the world: that is to misunderstand their message.
For through the various devices of each plot, the psychological changes throughout the stories are within the person; and so it can be with us. Regardless of gender or orientation, the changes to our view of the world and our relationship to it must happen internally. We will lose the opportunity for magical change if we simply wait for a literal reenactment of the novels to act as a catalyst. That’s not to say that such a thing is impossible; who knows what might happen in an instant in our extraordinary world? But if we do wait, we are using the books as an aid to daydreams—tools to distance ourselves from reality.
Instead, we will read in a way that will set the process in motion regardless of physical circumstances; we will stop procrastinating and start to help ourselves. And in the magical way that the world has, synchronous events do seem to indicate when we have made an internal connection and are on the right lines. A tiny example: in The Goat-Foot God, Mona finds the statuette of Pan when she starts to decorate Monks Farm as a place for his worship.
Remembering Dion Fortune’s strictures on the hard work involved in magic, we need not only to read and dream but to make a commitment to disciplined work. Our engagement with the novels must progress to active and inner work for our own journey to a magical life. The gods love the smell of human perspiration, and we don’t work up a sweat by sitting waiting for our magical mate to materialize.
The stories explore polarity from a traditional stance, but even the most superficial readings show us that there can be equal and complementary connections between people of varying degrees of “masculine” and “feminine” qualities. The strong female characters alone make these designations seem old-fashioned and redundant. Thoughtful reading shows us that the qualities of activity and receptivity within us all are not necessarily gender-based—a point illustrated conclusively by the designations of the Tree of Life.
Our personal connection to the stories focuses on our yearning for fulfilment. But, as part of that spiritual development, Dion Fortune has a greater message, implied through all her fiction and a major theme in The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic: that the personally satisfying effect of magic is a byproduct of the greater work, performed for the benefit of all society.
If we choose to be co-creators of our own world, we have to have thought out what we are trying to achieve. And the main reason for magical work is take a share in the ongoing journey of humanity. The chief tenet of Dion Fortune’s vision was I desire to know in order to serve. In claiming her fiction as a valid teaching material, even though we are learning from her at one remove, it behooves us, her present students, to tread the path in the same spirit.
Our first stage is accompanying the characters through each story, along the middle pillar of the Tree of Life. This diagram is drawn as a fixed template, but we do not work with it as a static tool: we will find that the Tree is infinitely fluid and relational, as we compare the four stories. Revisiting the stories with this understanding will help us to integrate the theory and practice, just as Dion Fortune promised.
48. Fortune, The Goat-Foot God, 288.
49. A collection of psychic physician short stories published 1926. See Bibliography.