The Emotional Connection
The lives of a man are strung like pearls on the thread of his spirit; and never in all his journey goes he alone, for that which is solitary is barren. 59
Dion Fortune has told us that she viewed her fiction as if on a screen. The images arose and she transcribed what she saw—as the psychology of the characters gradually opened to her, dictating the action of the plot. And each of the characters was simultaneously Everyman—the typical human on their journey—and also of heroic stature: a representation of the possibilities within us all.
Archetypal Resonance
It is easy to categorize three of her characters: Ted is the Warrior, Wilfred the Artist, and Rupert the Priest. Hugh is more difficult, having made no independent mark in the world. Absorbed by his journey of integration, he is initially led by Mona and Jelkes. But as his alter ego, Ambrosius, becomes integrated into his psyche in a healthy way, he soon starts to make things happen: he becomes the archetypal Active Man of Earth who crafts the work of change.
The archetypal resonance of each character is mediated by their upbringing and experience, and, in stories where even the domestics are well sketched, these main characters have an authentic presence that provokes our empathy.
Ted
Ted needs to strive for goals, to dare and achieve—all of which has been denied him in peacetime. Altruism is an essential part of his psyche: he needs to be loyal to a cause, to be of service, and to protect. We feel the frustrations of a strong, dependable person tethered by circumstance. His transformative power is anger—at injustice and at abuse of the weak—and whilst this warrior energy can be utilized productively in peacetime as in war, it requires the right opportunities.
Ted has experienced the energy of the warrior in the inebriation of battle, in protecting Ursula: then, he loses his self-doubts and inhibitions and is completely effective. The only time he makes this transition without the catalyst of anger or emergency is in the early rituals, where his emotional connection to a primal level of consciousness makes him a worthy Priest. For the first time with awareness, he courts, submits to, and experiences divine inebriation, and becomes one with the greater life. He becomes the vehicle for Horus, and everything that is Ted Murchison is swept away. He feels himself reborn in the knowledge of ritual from the oldest times.
Wilfred
It is the artist Wilfred’s “dynamism” that makes him so useful for magic. His priestess Vivien notices that despite his illness, he has an amazing store of it. His magnetic vitality increases in relation to the depletion of his body. Through the freeing nature of his illness for his psyche and his imagination he can regain past-life memories: but as artist, he needs to work under the direction of a muse, and his emotional connection to her underpins his development. Surrendering to her influence opens a creative path: his achievements are recognised by the artistic world as well as by the priestess in the sea fort. His other latent qualities slowly begin to emerge, along with his artistic and ritual development, so that by the end of the book he is transformed into a councilor and city father. More importantly, he develops the capacity and depth to adopt magical principles in his marriage, making it the highest and most complete union.
Wilfred’s passive nature is important to the relationship of muse/artist, which is essentially magical and a reversal of traditional gender roles. In the relationship of Wilfred and Vivien, she inspires him, and he gestates and gives birth to artistic expression. His negative temperament is perfectly suited to this role, in spite of his anger at Vivien’s insistence on his many feminine qualities. Having lost his attachment to life, he, like Ted and Rupert, becomes aware of his sacrificial role, and is the one whose temperament allows him to submit most gladly to it.
Hugh
Hugh is the most profoundly negative of the characters, both temperamentally and through circumstances, relying on external stimuli such as big game hunting and car racing to start to feel at all. He cannot access his deeper levels; the personality generally on show, nervous and inhibited, is the result of the inquisition he suffered before his last death. He is tall and stooped, with jerky, awkward movements. Everything is uncoordinated and he has no stamina, subsisting on nervous energy that burns out quickly. His mastery of fast cars is a result of his past-life persona, Ambrosius, coming to the fore in the heat of excitement. Later he will find a connection to those deeps through internal processes. Hugh’s past-life recall develops throughout the book, and his personality changes as he absorbs Ambrosius into his psyche. As with the other male characters, it is through his priestess that he can harness the depth of emotion he needs, through anger at his frustrated life—in both incarnations—and at the thought of her being taken from him. To access that subconscious part of his personality, he realises, requires danger or the threatening of his relationship with Mona.
Rupert
The outwardly dominant Rupert has a taste for martyrdom: he no longer wants to fight to protect the weak, but to put himself in the hands of a woman who will make demands on him. After a wasted emotional life, he has had his fill of giving where his gifts are not appreciated. He wants to know what is required, but he is the most generous in his giving: Lilith’s strength provokes a willingness in him to “pour out his life like wine” 60—like Wilfred, to surrender completely. Lilith delights him because he can never conquer her.
Influenced by a strict upbringing, Rupert would never countenance an affair, and that, combined with a huge reserve of life force that must have an outlet, makes him ideal for magical work. He is Lilith’s equal intellectually, and his medical training mirrors the dedication of her occult path: he soaks up her teaching. It is when he submits completely to her in a perfect sacrifice, even at the risk of his death, that he achieves greatness, and becomes the powerful priest that Lilith needs.
So far we’ve seen that a spontaneous shift of perspective, time, and space combine to allow the characters to progress. One very natural reaction to these unsettling experiences might be to switch on lights and radio and return to normal as quickly as possible: for they are all aware of the potential danger of their fragile states. Rupert particularly strains to return to his usual habit through focusing on his work. But, with nowhere worth returning to, all are impelled by extreme need. The next stage will be making time and space for a more considered exploration of what they have experienced. And, if the voice of our inner need is not to be swamped by everyday concerns, we need to find hints in the texts to maintaining our own practice.
The main component in their, and our, development is accessing the imagination, and wedding it to the emotions. A strong emotional attachment is essential if magic is to work. The fiction tells us that the pump must be primed; the characters must be in the right state if they are to have the right responses, and so must we, the readers.
Emotional Responses
In all the books, there is a rhythm to the prose and a mantra-like repetition of words to build atmosphere. Words such as tranquil, lull, drowsed, aromatic, sweet, shadowy, and gleaming form a ribbon of rich vowel sounds, which we could repeat to form an effective relaxation exercise.
Reading key paragraphs aloud from any of the books can have a profound effect on listeners, and extracts from Dion Fortune’s stories have often been used for this purpose. We are drawn into the characters’ emotional responses, and how we react depends on what the author makes overt through the text.
As Wilfred’s prose style echoes the rhythms of the sea, so Rupert’s journey between his inner and outer worlds is rhythmic, ebbing, and flowing, but all the time gaining in strength. We remember the liminal state and how we can progress whilst in it, and what is possible for us, as we read these texts. We also realise, by contrast, the strong drag and pull of our habitual, rigid thinking. Liminal space is fluid—an organic process of flux and reflux, not a forward-only linear progress. Considering this through reading helps us in developing an understanding of the relationship between our inner and outer states, and the appropriate parameters for each.
This fluid water/moon effect is reinforced in Moon Magic, when we regularly return to revisit scenes from the perspective of the priestess, and past lineage connection is so very important.
In the first of these books that Dion Fortune wrote, The Winged Bull, the magical component, after the first profound ritual, is not stated until much later in the text. Ted’s journey is literal, and the recurring imagery is vehicular. Ursula’s state is described as a car smash; Ted’s conversational powers are like a car that is a poor starter and so on. There are long car journeys across the country from east to west and back again, and Dion Fortune makes it clear that Ted’s response to the land affects his behavior.
This is valuable food for thought for all of us in the modern world, where so many of us feel uprooted and constant travelling is seen as necessary. For Ted to be secure in the liminal state he needs to feel at home physically, a space that he finds only at the very end of the book. Through him, we are invited to consider these questions: What are the optimum conditions, the right places, for our own practice? Where are we truly at home and empowered?
With Hugh, we have a satisfying example of a dormant priest and the relationship necessary to realise his potential. The Goat-Foot God explains the feminine fecundating principle that will transform him, and we are pulled into the mystery of his inner work of incorporating Ambrosius, whose nature is left open. Is he a dissociated personality, spirit control, or previous incarnation? What is Ambrosius? is the question that exercises Mona and Jelkes: they decide, with the voice of the pragmatic lay-analyst Dion Fortune—or Miss Firth, as she was known at that earlier stage of her career—that whatever theory they choose, for all practical purposes the result will be the same. We embark on our own personal quest to find our inner priest and priestess. We are not trying to find answers, for we are not dealing with the world of absolutes, and literalism will stop the magic dead. Our job is simply to work, to embrace the mystery and find our right place within it.
The First Deep Connection
With reference to the Qabalah, the first connection that each of the characters makes is along the path that brings them to the sphere called Yesod. This is also often called the underworld journey, reminding us that the journey along the paths of the Tree of Life can be considered not only up the Tree but also at the same time deep into the more profound parts of ourselves. They are two ways of relating to the Tree that the student holds simultaneously.
However we look at it, the heroes come to a special place, to the experience of Yesod, meaning “foundation.” For Ted Murchison, it is the British Museum; for Hugh, Jelkes’s bookshop; for Wilfred, it is his bachelor flat; and for Rupert, the Thames Embankment.
Here, as we journey with the characters, we directly encounter our unconscious selves, our images of ourselves and of the world. Yesod has the title “the treasure house of images,” as it is the repository of our life experience. It is also the place where we start learning about, and working with, the deep imagination and the archetypal world. As we become established in Yesod we develop a depth of connection to our inner life, so that thoughts, feelings, and the intuitive ground of our being become more tangible and vivid.
Hugh
Hugh begins to emerge from his emotional anesthesia with raw emotions. He looks for diversion beyond his experience of everyday life and finds it in Jelkes’s lamp-lit bookshop, in the shape of books that were commonly available at that time: The Prisoner in the Opal, describing the feeling of being imprisoned and the need to break out into a larger unseen reality; The Corn King and the Spring Queen, about the magic of ancient Sparta; The Devil’s Mistress, about Scottish witchcraft, and the black magic of Huysmans’s Là-Bas. These flood his imagination with occult images and rhythmic prose. Their influences, in a place so different from his normal surroundings, are powerful calls to revision his world that he responds to wholeheartedly. Reading that scene is a powerful call also to the reader.
The profusion of stimuli acts like a psychically resonating mirror. The shop is mysterious and redolent with the smell of old books and incense; Hugh feels that the “shell of the world might crack and some streak of light come through.” 61 This corresponds exactly to his moving to the Qabalistic place of the imagination: Yesod. His soul is stirring after a lifelong dormancy, and the books literally surround Hugh with new avenues for exploration. The shabby inner room represents the acme of comfort and warmth, and its apparent disorganisation is gradually revealed as a simple system for living. Hugh judges the hollowness of Mayfair by comparison with Jelkes’s arranging his life to his priorities, reading and thinking. The shop is the polar opposite of Hugh’s fashionable home, whose brightness, sharp lines, and ugly furniture and textiles are so upsetting to his senses. In the shop, plain food and simple comradeship minister to his soul; he rediscovers his appetite.
Fired up, Hugh’s starved senses want sensationalism: the Black Mass. Like a pendulum, he needs to find his level between apathy and recklessness. He is taken in hand by the bookseller out of sheer humanity, and led gently to a connection with life—the deep connection that has been hitherto denied him.
In the seedy nobility of a four-poster bed, he visualises, a contact is made, and his real inner work begins.
Wilfred
Wilfred constructs a place of privacy and nurture in which he can learn and investigate properly after his spontaneous connection to the moon. How he goes about it, exploring without any help or advice, provides practical hints as to how we can proceed.
His “journeys” have been inner dialogues with the moon: because of his illness and the effect of his medication, he is the only character to make a connection with the deep imagination before finding his own sanctum.
Wilfred feels that he has gained a relationship with the moon, learning about the secret laws of her strange kingdom and influence of the cosmic tides. Alone of all the heroes, Wilfred is also an author, and he tells us that his writing echoes the deep, rhythmic pull of the tides. We accompany him on his visions, sharing his fascination and his experiences. And the lesson we learn is that by simply allowing space and time, we can access a deep emotional response. This can give us a genuine experience of connectedness and start to erode our habitual sense of separateness from the world.
Through Wilfred’s development, we learn what to expect when we study: not a smooth progression, but a pattern of advancing followed by a period of consolidation until the next impetus to growth. Wilfred’s solitary training is eclectic and reminds us of Dion Fortune’s dictum that there must be an intellectual component to the path of the adept. Wilfred responds to the magnificent literature of the Old Testament and flirts with Theosophy, which he finds disillusioning. To this material he adds moon communications; he daydreams and devises reincarnation stories when halfway between sleeping and waking. He notices especially vivid dreams when he slides from there into actual sleep, as does Hugh Paston.
Wilfred especially develops “my power of ‘feeling-with’ nature-things.” 62 His body has attuned to the tides through the tidal nature of the stream running under his window. He is pulled in imagination to the drowned-land mythos of his region, in his bachelor flat, his own place of Yesod.
Through his imagination and connecting to a place in himself that is not bounded by space and time, Wilfred visions the practices of the earliest peoples on the drowned land. It is after a vision of a flaming pyre on the sea edge that he takes his most significant journey, a fully realised reincarnation dream, just before he meets Vivien, his mentor and priestess.
Ted
We might tour a museum many times with only the mind engaged, but Ted Murchison in the British Museum is primed for a profound emotional experience. The warmth and dim light encourage his senses to reach out. The wreathing fog along the corridors fuels his, and our, imagination. In an unfamiliar and exotic Otherworld, the logical side of his brain is in abeyance, allowing an instantaneous communication with the huge carved winged bull guarding the doorway—a good-humoured and probing personality, which has vital life lessons for him. Ted feels he has more in common with this ancient carved figure than with the humans in his life. In his heightened state, the museum exhibits begin to come to life: the huge red granite “hand of power” exudes benign divinity, the Egyptian gods brood quietly, and the aboriginal “godlets” reek of blood.
Retreating, Ted longs for a life worth living, as he remembers the glory days of his army life. A long-suppressed part of his psyche is awakening and he takes charge: he senses a portal of opportunity and deliberately plunges into the pathless way.
Like Wilfred, Ted gains an awareness of the dawn of creation. But unlike Wilfred’s moon-influenced vision of the mechanics of the starry heavens, the thick fog fires Ted’s imagination to the void before creation, and the glory of great winged bull-beings as they manifest. Ted is disorientated, and, not knowing which spirit might appear, he takes the initiative, choosing that it will be a mighty arm cleaving the darkness. Freed from his inhibitions, rapt in the emotion of the moment, he calls out for the fullness of life he craves, in an invocation of Pan. And the call, of course, is answered instantaneously.
Rupert
With Rupert Malcolm, Dion Fortune intensifies the experiences of her earlier heroes, so it is worth using his experience to put them all in context, cranking up the emotional pressure almost unbearably. Rupert is the culmination, the evolved priest, existing not for personal happiness but to fulfil the esoteric work of the aeon. His story is given further emphasis by our reading it twice; first from his point of view and then from the viewpoint of Lilith Le Fay. And, although an adept, Lilith is not infallible. Her worry about her personal fondness for Rupert is misplaced: by the end of the book she realises that for the magic to work, her emotions must be engaged.
Rupert has a strong visual sense and the habit of intense concentration, and his ruthless control of his mind to subdue the “beasts of Ephesus”—his libido—has developed it further. Combined with an intense emotional need, his is potentially a very dangerous mental situation. Thus, “A Study in Telepathy” begins. In it, the natural boundaries between the worlds will be eroded, as Rupert’s stabilizing beliefs in the twin responsibilities of job and marriage begin to crumble.
Rupert suffers a depth of agony to reach the state that will make magical work with a priestess of Lilith’s stature possible. Like Hugh, Rupert is feverish and vacillating, but to a greater extreme; his first glimpse of her thrills and intrigues him, banishing his boredom. Straight after this, his wife’s doctor discharges him of any emotional responsibility to her. He is free, yet anchorless, and at the mercy of every wind that blows. Pursuing his dream woman provokes obsession, agitation, ecstasy, and nightmares. Deciding to sacrifice his fantasy, he realises that she “had wrapped herself round the very roots of his being.” 63 The depth of his emotional range is insisted upon, for great capacity is needed for great magical working.
Dion Fortune’s tenet is that sacrifice is necessary to magical work, and nowhere in her fiction is this more starkly depicted. Fuelled by Rupert’s extraordinary strength of will and capacity to endure, his deep well of suffering is an integral part of the process of bringing forth the power needed by Lilith, and an indicator of how powerful that is.
Rupert Malcolm strives for vision and the recurring dream that comes in that mysterious place between waking and sleeping, until eventually he oversteps the bounds of reality and gets manifested sensations. These lead to the second stage of his understanding, the most valuable for the work to come, and for us too. He learns that he can experience the presence of his priestess but never possess her. This is partly a reflection of the precept that the adept can have the use of everything yet own nothing. It says clearly that although the work is fuelled by intense emotion, we must transmute that into a dedicatory experience of service if we are to achieve anything of worth.
After Rupert’s profound experience of “blessing and peace”—the sensation of sleeping on a woman’s breast—his conscience tries to force him to relinquish his inner life. This leads to an upheaval of the soul, a compulsive call for help to his mentor to rescue him. After months of visiting the half-world where they can meet, she determines to grasp the nettle and introduce herself in the real world.
The Four Characters
Rupert shares many resonances with the characters of the earlier books. Like Hugh, he is not valued for himself by the professional world or respected by his wife. Like Ted, the lost dreams of youth activate his imagination, and watching the ebb tide of the Thames brings back his fantasy of life as a ship’s officer. In a reflection of The Sea Priestess, the sea motif coalesces around Rupert as it has with Wilfred, before either of them meets their priestess in the flesh. Rupert shares Ted’s frustrations, but as he is successful in the world, they focus on his private life. And his mentor, like Ted’s, is working magic that is an energetic catalyst. Ted’s invocation is simultaneous with, and a response to, Brangwyn’s magic to find him, which is the reason Brangwyn was in the British Museum. In the same way, whilst Rupert is transported by his imaginings, he is being summoned by Lilith’s work on the inner planes. Rupert shares with Wilfred a reincarnation memory of torture, but it is only in Moon Magic that this physical suffering is emphasized. The other characters have a straightforward response to suffering. Ted’s is the egotistical reaction of a man disadvantaged by birth, breeding, and money in the presence of a cultured woman. His wish is to respond tit for tat, to denigrate Ursula in a chauvinistic way, proving his mastery, just as Wilfred belittles Vivien by fantasising about having an adventure with her. Rupert, immune to such pettiness, views the possible loss of his dream with desperation and the urge to murder.
Hugh’s escape has been from the deeper emotions. He has been branded a cuckold in the national press, yet it is Rupert, because of his struggles with his restrictive Presbyterian upbringing, who undergoes a purgatory of humiliation and self-reproach.
Lilith remarks that both Rupert and Wilfred suffer the restrictions placed upon a man’s soul by early influence—in Rupert’s case, his father’s rigid morality—as a tree grows bent according to the prevailing wind during its growth. We need to become aware of the restrictions caused by our own upbringing, and this is the reason for the dictum “Know thyself” as a requirement for occult training.
The Imaginative State Needed for Magical Work
To reiterate some very important points of the previous chapter, these examples are not suggesting that we need to experience a psychic upheaval in the way that the characters do; far from it. Dion Fortune has written elsewhere on the dangers of breakdown through Rupert’s type of experimenting. Both Ted and Hugh are desperate and reach out blindly for whatever occult help is at hand; but, in life, our integrity does not mean that the right influences will respond, and there is no guarantee that we, if we attempt magical work whilst in such a state, will be as fortunate. Dion Fortune’s strictures on drugs in occult working were also strict, and we see how even medicinal drugs have Wilfred hovering on the cusp of life and death.
We may approach aspects of the sphere of Yesod, the imagination, through story, myth, and archetype. Coming to it through the senses and the inner world, we need then to ground it in concrete experience. Yesod carries with it the danger that we can become lost in fantasy, causing a split between inner and outer experience, and all the characters run this risk. It is important that all of the exercises suggested in the third section of the book should end with the experience of grounding and the integration of the inner and outer.
Magic needs a head of emotional steam to function, and with the safeguards of ritual we can deliberately construct the right mindset using various techniques. We are at first fired by a longing we share with the characters for fullness of life. Our best course, after setting our intent, is then to engage all of the senses. This has happened most sensationally to Rupert Malcolm, with his visual and tactile sensations of a woman’s touch. Even the down-to-earth Ted responds to the sensual experience of colour and texture, and wakes to a vision of Ursula’s face, whilst Wilfred and Hugh’s inner work is “real” enough to manifest the smell of burning wood, from a sea-dowsed pyre and from smouldering cedarwood, respectively. These experiences are based on the actual experience of Dion Fortune and her colleagues, and are documented elsewhere.
As the four men enter a phase of more guided development, their senses will become ever more engaged. We have to work hard these days to do the same thing, as our senses are jaded and overstimulated by colour, spectacle, sound, and the widespread exoticism in the present world.
It is worth trying to look back into the mind of the reader of the 1930s when we read the stories. Imagine for a moment, in those conventional times, how strange and exotic the books’ locations and clothing are, and what a revelatory effect they would have on men from mainstream society. The characters experience saturation of the senses, underpinned by scents, for the sense of smell is closely connected to the emotional centre of the brain. Brangwyn’s and especially Lilith’s use of perfumes and incenses is a useful hint, and as we read all these evocative passages we can mentally plan how sensory stimuli might support our exercises.
The habit of connecting through our senses to feel in an authentic way comes as we learn to relax and notice our responses to the real world. And regularly accessing an emotional rapport with our inner state will not take us away from real life. Rather, it will help us to relate to the world as it actually is, not as we usually see it, through the spinning wheel of melodrama, judgment, and past assumptions that is assumed by the outer world to be the only way to respond. We return from each experience of our inner state ready and able to progress, like Dion Fortune’s characters, with clearer sight and a more grounded, prepared attitude.