Tiphareth and
The Winged Bull
I am Horus, god of the morning; I mount the sky on eagle’s wings. I am Ra in mid-heaven; I am the sun in splendour. I am Toum of the downsetting. I am also Kephra at midnight. Thus spake the priest with the mask of Osiris. 32
The Winged Bull is concerned with Tiphareth on the Tree: the middle sphere that balances the pillars and the inner and outer. It is the pre-eminent sphere of healing, redemption, teaching, and guidance. Unusually for a Dion Fortune book, however, we can see a clear link here between this novel and that of another writer—namely The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. One of the key figures in Lawrence’s book, published in 1915, is Ursula Brangwen. The book is based on relationships between men and women and concludes with a powerful description of Ursula envisaging a new creation as a rainbow manifests over the grim landscape of urban Britain.
This image of a new world and a new relationship between men and women is key to much of Dion Fortune’s work. At the centre of The Winged Bull are a brother and sister, Alick Brangwyn and Ursula. Brangwyn is the overt teacher figure in the book, but behind the scenes Ursula is the hidden teacher. She is in a way the rainbow bridge into the new world.
There are four levels to this work of Tiphareth:
• Malkuth of Tiphareth is Murchison wandering around London, homeless and directionless.
• Yesod of Tiphareth is the British Museum.
• Tiphareth of Tiphareth is Brangwyn’s house.
• Daath of Tiphareth is Hugo Astley’s house.
Malkuth of Tiphareth
The point-of-view character in this book is Ted Murchison, an ex-army officer who has not been able to find his way after being discharged. He is unemployed, living with his brother and sister-in-law in Acton. There is a sense of despair and purposelessness about him; he has just failed to get a job.
Ted’s situation is the matter of Malkuth—he can be seen as the wingless bull with nowhere to place his energy. We meet him walking restlessly.
The Underworld Path
Ted is on the underworld path, walking through a fogbound London; like Hugh Paston, letting his body and instinct dictate his way. His feet guide him to the entrance of the British Museum. As the major focus of this book is Tiphareth, the underworld way is not dwelt on, yet its key feature is presented—the journey by night into the unknown parts of the psyche.
Yesod of Tiphareth: The British Museum
The British Museum is Yesod, the treasure house of images—in a strange way open to the outdoors, with mist filling the galleries; and Ted, walking into the museum in the mist and being confronted by the figure of the winged bull, communes with him. This is an initiation moment for him: he walks into the inner and is given access to the treasure house of images, contemplating the healing and salvic images and the images of disturbance. Later we learn that he has a capacity for ecstatic trance and during his war years drew on the collective energy of the Race to keep himself and his men safe in very dangerous situations. In a sense the war gave him a purpose, and he was able to surrender himself to those deeper energies behind him. In this moment he goes into this realm with the permission of the winged bull as gatekeeper, and meets the images on their own ground.
The winged bull is a central symbol and doorway into the mysteries expressed by this book. Babylon’s ancient name is the Gateway of the Gods, and the human-headed winged bull a clear image of the illumined initiate of Tiphareth—the human, animal, and the spiritual at one and the capacity to mediate between the depth and the height.
The Alchemical Path
As Ted emerges from the museum into the mists, we find him on the alchemical path and seeking to penetrate the veil. Behind him is the energy of the bull and the raw power of creation that Ted used to draw on in the war. He finds himself in silence and total blackness and opens himself to the potential of life. At the moment of making the invocation “Evoe, Iacchus! Io Pan, Pan! Io Pan!” 33 he penetrates the veil and encounters Brangwyn, the first of his teaching figures.
Tiphareth of Tiphareth: Brangwyn’s House
Brangwyn, Ted’s old colonel, leads him through a series of alleys to his house: these are the deeper reaches of the alchemical path and the entrance into Tiphareth. It is a feature of this path that as you deepen into it you have to pierce the veil Paroketh 34 and work with the experience of opposites.
This sense of opposites and mystery is held in Alick Brangwyn’s house, which from the outside fits into a slum street but, once you penetrate through two locked doors, is revealed to be a palatial house that, Tardis-like, is bigger on the inside. Once admitted into the sanctum, Ted is given a warming, sandalwood-tasting cocktail and asked to remove his outer clothes and don a robe. This is the beginning of the teaching process: he steps forward a little into what we might call his magical personality, reflecting that it would now be easy to invoke Pan in a green/blue robe. He is being shown the path of the chameleon, the use of colour, smell, and taste as entrances into deeper parts of ourselves.
There is an important moment when, drowsing in his armchair, Ted feels as if the face of the winged bull is superimposed upon that of Alick Brangwyn. He experiences the two becoming one, his arm in its red robe as the arm of power of an Egyptian god he had been attracted to in the British Museum. The episode concludes with his accepting a job as chauffeur and being offered a bed in Ursula Brangwyn’s part of the house.
Here the inner teaching begins, for as Ted looks at one of her books, Jung on the psychology of the unconscious, he comes across the image of the winged bull again on a bookplate bearing Ursula Brangwyn’s name. This is followed by a dream of the war with celestial music and coloured searchlights. It comes together in a moment of clarity in which he sees a small woman’s head floating at the foot of his bed focusing intently on him.
This is the beginning of a whole process of development and interaction between him and Ursula in which she leads him deeper into the inner worlds while needing his energy and power on outer levels. When he returns to the house to take up his position, it is she who receives him, leads him upstairs to his room, and shows him the rooftop garden and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He also spots that she is wearing a winged bull pendant, and his reaction to it leads him to tell her the whole story, up to and including her appearance in his dreams the previous night. In response she hints about the work that is to come. The emotional tonality of both relationships is interesting to note. Ted and Brangwyn are comfortable with each other, but Ted and Ursula are uncomfortable—a meeting of opposites in which antipathy plays as much a part as sympathy.
The teaching then shifts back: Alick points out that he needs a different robe for the morning, in earth colours, and explains more concretely what he needs Murchison to do: he will work with Ursula and honestly recount his dreams and experiences. Ted recalls a dream of chasing a black kitten around his room, which Alick recognises as an image of Ursula and asks him to read and contemplate various works on mythology and Jungian psychology. He brings Ted back to the image of the winged bull, inviting him to consider what being the winged bull might be like: Ted remembers the feeling when he invoked Pan.
The work moves on as Brangwyn dresses Ted and Ursula in green to dance together and then shows Murchison watercolours of ancient Egypt and Amazonian temples, introducing the idea of Atlantis and the concept of sacramental mating. This leads to Ursula encountering Frank Fouldes, her previous lover but now a black acolyte, and Ted rescues her and defends her from him and Hugo Astley, Frank’s master and black magician, when they try to force entrance into the flat. Ted learns then that the magical operation he is engaging in with Ursula had been tried once before by Ursula and Frank with disastrous results.
There are various levels at which we can understand the story. On its simplest levels it is a story of recovery from loss—Ursula from the trauma of the failed magical working and Ted from the loss of purpose and direction following the war. On an interpersonal level it teaches about how men and women can work together magically, but perhaps at its deepest it reveals the relationship between different levels of our psyche.
The sphere of Tiphareth is the bridging sphere of the Tree—it mediates between the crown and the kingdom and it balances the pillars. Ted represents the outer aspect of ourselves, with our energy and dynamism like a maimed bull, with no direction. Brangwyn and Ursula are aspects of the deeper self acting as bridges and mediators—Alick is the more formed cognitive aspect of that bridging who teaches us about the nature of the personality senses and about the deep images that lead us onwards, who shows us the inner tradition and its roots in Egypt and Atlantis. Ursula is the hidden priestess, a Beatrice-figure 35 who constantly leads us onwards through hint and vision and longing. She bridges between opposites, between the white adept Brangwyn and the black adept Hugo; between the man of fire and earth, Ted, and the man of air and water, Frank. Her apparent passivity is part of the teaching—she is the still, small voice of mystery, sparing in her activity but potent when roused.
As Ted steps into being Ursula’s protector, we see a potency coming into him, replacing the depression and resentment that has so far been a strong part of his personality. Brangwyn teaches him about connecting with the group soul of the race and the idea of divine inebriation. The next phase of the work commences when Hugo Astley calls Ursula to him telepathically. She responds, only to be held by Murchison, who counters by projecting psychic force back to Astley in a berserker rage, freeing her from his influence for the time. Murchison is drained of energy and the following day is visited by Ursula, who places her palms against his and restores him.
At the next teaching session, Alick explains what he is asking of him, to Murchison’s disquiet; and he agrees to be a gigolo but not a bridegroom. We see his rage and resentment rising to the surface again; at deeper levels he recounts a dream of a zoo and a black panther being released, which can be interpreted as his deeper engagement with Ursula and feeling of fear of her power.
In a powerful ritual enacted in the deepest part of the house, the inner basement—a golden temple—is lit by six great candles (Tiphareth is the sixth sphere on the Tree). Ursula stands for the earth at springtime and Murchison for the returning sun, with Alick as the priest who joins them. Murchison experiences himself as the sun and they perform the Mass of the Sun, which has considerable resonance with the Rite of Pan found in The Goat-Foot God. That night Murchison dreams of riding a black horse across sand dunes and experiences a profound sense of freedom. On being questioned, he says that the blackness reminds him of Ursula’s hair—showing us again that while externally it seems to be Ted protecting Ursula, in reality she is carrying him.
The Desert Path
The desert path first manifests in Ursula returning to Wales and Ted longing for her, though not able to admit it to himself (Dion Fortune makes reference here to Achilles sulking in his tent). It continues with an attempt by Fouldes to get Ursula to go with him from the cottage in Wales that is foiled by a farm dog, and Murchison driving across country to Wales with Brangwyn to get her. In the process that follows between Ted and Ursula, both experience their darker sides and enact them with each other. Here we see the stripping away that is such a feature of the desert path and a swapping back and fore of polarities—attraction and repulsion, love and hate, depth and surface. This process concludes with Ursula going into the House of Darkness, Hugo Astley’s temple, and Ted following her there. Ursula here is a kind of Sophia excluding nothing: in her apparent passivity is a great mystery. There is a powerful interchange between her and Murchison, who finds her cleaning Astley’s doorway. In that moment he acknowledges that she must go her own way and that he cannot simply carry her off. He surrenders his will to the will of the Lady, in acceptance of which he swabs the step in her place.
Daath of Tiphareth: Hugo Astley’s House
Here the place of Daath and of profound transformation is in the experience of the Black Mass in Astley’s house. We are now in the Abyss in which a ritual is conducted with Ted as the crucified saviour and Ursula the living altar. There is an interesting echo here into the beginning of The Goat-Foot God when Hugh Paston wants to perform the Black Mass. In the way that The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic are a pair, the same can be said of The Goat-Foot God and The Winged Bull. The Winged Bull takes the themes of The Goat-Foot God deeper.
We are confronted with a strange and powerful tableau: Murchison as the crucified sun on the black cross of sacrifice, Ursula hooded in a white cloak over a silver robe and lying at his feet. Only he can see her face (there is an echo here of the meeting of Wilfred and Vivien). As the Black Mass of the Bull proceeds, Ted has a surreal and powerfully redemptive experience of surrender and sanctity, as he hangs on the cross looking at Ursula’s face. There is a moment when all light is extinguished, and in that moment Ursula frees him from the cross and, in a small but significant detail, they go backstage and find their way into a small room underneath the coal hole. There is no escape from the place, and in order to keep warm they shelter together under Murchison’s cloak. There is then an experience of great intimacy between them, in the course of which it becomes obvious that Astley and his minions cannot touch them—they have gone beyond the Abyss by embracing it.
Crowning: Daath to Kether
The desert path has not yet finished with them, however, as on returning Ursula goes to a nursing home, withdrawing once again, leaving Murchison to complete his part of the path. We see a resurgence of his resentment and anger and a desire to leave her and Brangwyn for a job in Alexandria. It is possible that Dion Fortune is indicating here that at a certain point there is no escape from the mysteries, Alexandria being the great ancient mystery centre.
Murchison does one last job for Brangwyn: finding Ursula a new home on the east coast of Yorkshire, his homeland. He finds a ruined farm that had been one of his primary refuges when he was a child. In the despairing moment of finding it ruined, he is touched by the sun’s rays and sees that it is the place that Ursula must live in. In an echo of Hugh Paston, he restores it, though here he is working not for himself but simply for her, expecting nothing. Not only does he restore it, but he arranges her furniture and clothes and makes the place ready for her. There is more than an echo here of the path of courtly love, and in this process his resentment finally subsides. Ursula comes to him and reveals herself as priestess by telling him she wanted to be a nun, and she starts teaching him the path of the winged bull. The book ends as the rite is going to be outwardly performed, in a way setting the stage for Moon Magic.
32. Fortune, The Winged Bull, 12.
33. Fortune, The Winged Bull, 12.
34. The “veil” between the middle triangle of the soul (Tiphareth, Geburah, and Chesed) and the lower triangle of the personality (Yesod, Hod, and Netzach).
35. Beatrice di Folco Portinari (1266–1290), the principal inspiration for Dante Alighieri’s work, who leads Dante deep into the world of vision.