Gareth Knight's Blog, page 7

When is a Second Coming not what it seems?

When is a Second Coming not what it seems?
I pen these words as we approach the religious period called Advent, which is popularly associated with the coming, or advent, of Christmas, although more fundamentally it refers to the Second Coming of the Messiah, which in the eyes of Christians represents the end of the world and the coming of a better one.
Whatever the eschatological possibilities, to occultists it calls to mind matters rather closer to home and the question of the return (spiritual, astral, etheric or physical) of certain gurus or significant forerunners close to our hearts.
I am reminded of this question by a remarkable little book just published by Alan Richardson entitled Me, mySelf & Dion Fortune. A very personal work by one of her biographers and also a bargain (currently about £4 on Amazon) for a hundred odd pages of rare and honest wisdom and self revelation.
As the author admits: “The older I get, the less I understand about Dion Fortune. The more I read (and write) about her, the less I actually know. Is Dion Fortune simply the pen name of a woman who died in 1946? Or a convenient name given to an entity who has floated in and out of many peoples’ minds ever since?
“Yet again, could ‘Dion Fortune’ be more accurately described as ‘It’? That is to say, instead of being seen as a wise and powerful soul on the Other Side, could ‘It’ be more in the nature of an energy, an inner plane impulse which pushes us in certain directions? Honestly, I don’t know.
“But here is how she influenced me from a very young age. I have often said that it would take a book in itself to describe the incredible levels of chance, coincidence, synchronicity and totally bizarre serendipity that enabled (and often forced) me to research and write about this energy/entity/great magical soul known as Dion Fortune.”
Anyway, this is the book. And a valuable one because what it has to say about Dion Fortune can be applied to a whole host of inner plane gurus or legendary or ancestral characters, together with  a range of startling serendipities and synchronicities involving such figures. Some that may appear puzzling or pointless. Others open to being glamorised or misinterpreted.
When researching his biography of Dion Fortune, Alan discovered an awful lot of people who felt they had meaningful links with her. In fact he doubts if there is any DF fan who does not claim some link. And although to anyone else such links might seem far fetched, to the person involved they can be important keys.
Some links seem so powerful that those concerned have even wondered if  they were Dion Fortune reborn – although more likely to have been cases of being temporarily overshadowed. A possibility with which I would concur from my own experience and of others known to me. As Alan Richardson is called, from personal experience, to say, the only danger is when you expect everyone else to believe this, and fail to accept within your own self that – almost certainly – something else is going on.
 These days he is more inclined to think in terms of Other Lives rather than past lives. That is, that time is not linear. That everything is happening now, at this instant, ever-becoming.
Be this as it may, it seems we all have our own stories to tell and puzzlements to express. And Alan reckons that the only thing we can be dogmatic about is that no-one can be dogmatic about it! That whether ‘Dion Fortune’ is a great soul on the inner planes or a flow of energy rather like an electrical current shouldn’t worry us too much.
To which I would add that it is of course possible to be both – or even something quite Other. My esoteric sparring partner, the Rev Anthony Duncan, was thus ever chary of an occult tendency to call the Second Person of the Trinity a ‘Christ force’ rather than a Divine Being. It can be spiritually demeaning to make an abstraction out of life.
Much the same could be said about various inner contacts one might have had, including the three canny lads that jumped me into writing The Abbey Papers. Anyone who has a copy could here profitably turn to Section 55 for some handy hints about much of this, but for those who have not I abstract the following.
When, under guidance in the Mysteries we come upon the spirits of the Ancestors, they are like guardian angels of the race, for they partake more of the angelic than of the human spirit that gave rise to them. So when we come upon them we are not taking part in a kind of spiritualist séance. These are not spirits of the departed as commonly understood. They are more in the nature of intelligent holograms – to use a souped up image of modern technology. They are representations of power – or ensouled magical images.
They are not put there or imaginally created by us. They have an objective existence of their own and  may be used by those who are invested with sufficient authority and who have the power and ability to do so. Much of their emotive power comes from emotions embodied in the ideas attached to the particular archetype they represented as individuals when in incarnation.
In normal circumstances they are put before us with a purpose. They are brought before our field of attention, to be, in a sense, restimulated within our aura, thereby imparting a certain energy to the image, and also stimulating a corresponding energy in us.  An exchange of energy takes place, an energy that may last and be drawn from for some time.
In other words it has the effect of dedicating a certain part of our aura to the works and the powers of that particular archetype and its needed work in the world today. This may be by realisation as much as by physical action. It is what practical magic is all about.
 
 
 
 

MOON MAGIC

Reports and comments on the recent Dion Fortune seminar have been coming in over the past few days, suggesting that it was a very good do, with support from members of a number of related groups and individuals. All topped off with some interesting and unusual lunar phenomena which will not be seen again for another generation.  With this in mind it seems appropriate to round things off with a piece I once wrote on Dion Fortune’s last novel – “Moon Magic” – where the sea priestess moves off to London to do her stuff on the banks of the Thames. I think my piece was intended as a Introduction to an American edition of the novel but in the end was not used. However, the story in all its glory is still available from Red Wheel Weiser.
 
MOON MAGIC
In Moon Magic Vivien Le Fay Morgan, Dion Fortune`s charismatic “sea priestess” from the novel of that name, reappears to work some more of her unique brand of magic. She is now far from the sea, living in London, although not entirely disconnected from the element of water, for her apartment overlooks the River Thames. In keeping with the slightly changed nature of her magical role she has also taken a change of name, now preferring to be known as Lilith Le Fay Morgan.
Lilith has also chosen a rather different type of man to train as her priest in the magic she has in hand. In place of the small town estate agent dominated by his mother and sister she now finds Dr Rupert Malcolm, a highly successful medical consultant at the top of his profession, yet married to a demanding invalid. His earthy masculinity combined with a domestic life of sexual and emotional frustration make him an irascible tyrant to patients, nurses and students alike.
Dion Fortune had a great feeling for the sense of place, as she has demonstrated in her evocations of the western coast of Somerset in The Sea Priestess.This sense of place is now extended to London and the river that runs through the city. Rupert Malcolm`s first awareness of Lilith Le Fay Morgan is upon the north side of the river, upon the Victoria Embankment, along which, after finding her haunting his dreams, he compulsively follows her, along the stretch from Blackfriar`s Bridge, past Cleopatra`s Needle, to Westminster Bridge over which she turns. She now resides in an old converted church on the south bank, whose lighted window can be seen across the river from Rupert Malcolm`s own apartments.
          Nowadays this location is taken up by the Royal Festival Hall and other leisure facilities extending down to the New Tate Gallery and the Millennium Bridge, although in Dion Fortune`s day it was composed mainly of warehouses. Yet the original building that inspired Lilith`s house and temple still exists, although it is located north of the river, about a mile distant from Chelsea Bridge, in West Halkin Street, Belgravia. Known as the Belfry, it started life as a Presbyterian church in about 1840 but was eventually converted to secular use, and for a time acted as the headquarters for a somewhat idiosyncratic spiritualist organisation.
In 1936 a wealthy member of the Society of the Inner Light leased it for the use of Dion Fortune, and it was here that she staged, to invited audiences, celebrations of her Rite of Isis, extracts from which are featured both in The Sea Priestess and in Moon Magic.  The outbreak of war in 1939 put an end to these activities, but the striking looking building remains and in latter days has operated as a restaurant.
          Dion Fortune did not find Moon Magic an easy book to write, and made several false starts before she turned to writing it in the first person, in the words of Lilith herself.  Then it began to gel. She also had some difficulty in finishing it, probably because of the exigencies of war, which put a great strain upon her energy and organisational abilities. And when shortage of paper had all but crippled the publishing industry, the writing of novels might well have taken a low priority in a busy life. As a consequence the manuscript was incomplete at the time of her death in 1946.
In consequence of this the book falls into three parts. The first part, (chapters 1, 2 and 3), may be regarded as the best of her early attempts to start the novel. It sets up the action, introducing Dr Rupert Malcolm and his meeting with Lilith, at first telepathically and then in the flesh.
 In the second part, (chapters 4 through 15), Lilith takes over, explaining much of herself and her intentions, her magical temple, and the work that she intends to do within it with Rupert Malcolm as her priest.
The third part, (from chapter 16 to the end), which brings the magic to a natural close through the eyes of Rupert Malcolm, was provided by a close associate of Dion Fortune, who attempted to channel the material after the latter`s death. The completed novel eventually saw publication in 1956, some twenty years after Dion Fortune started it, and ten years after her death. 
Dion Fortune claimed that she mostly wrote her fiction by allowing the images to rise, letting the characters have their head and listening to their conversations, not entirely sure what the eventual details of the story would be. This applies to the style of her narrative in Part One, as well as the whole of The Sea Priestessand her earlier novels. In Part Two, she pursues much the same method, but writing in the role of the main character herself, brings about a much more vivid ambience. We might say it gives a more direct glimpse into the soul of the author than does narrative written in the third person.
Once again, as in The Sea Priestess, there is a fairly close identification of the character with the author, in her mode of dress – the large floppy brimmed hat, the long cloak, the furs and the chunky jewellery. What is more, she goes out of her way to justify this mode of attire, explaining that it is not simply the facile exhibitionism of a poseur, but a way of creating a role in which to focus the magical imagination of those with whom she comes into immediate contact.
Now that she was writing directly from Lilith`s point of view, she began to find that the character was also taking on a greater feeling of independence from herself, which led her to wonder, half in jest, if she had created a kind of “dark familiar” for herself, or that the character might well represent her Freudian subconscious. Certainly we are here at the borderline between the mental processes of the creative artist and those of the mediating occultist, which is by no means a hard and fast one.
She recognised that she had a great deal in common with Lilith Le Fay but that there was also a great deal that they did not have in common. Lilith revealed far deeper knowledge of magical things and taught Dion Fortune a great deal she had not known before. Dion Fortune throughout her life was staunchly Christian in principle, if a little unorthodox about it in practice. Lilith Le Fay, on the other hand, as Dion Fortune admits, was purely pagan, a rebel against society, and bent upon its alteration – which she intended to do by magical means.
One strange point in common between author and character is the idea of being some kind of changeling. (Oddly enough, a thought that also crosses Wilfred Maxwell`s mind with regard to himself in The Sea Priestess). The origin of  this story came from Dion Fortune`s mother, Jenny Firth, who confided to her more intimate friends that the child she bore had died soon after birth, but had revived some hours later with a completely different look in its eyes, as if it were another being. This idea  Dion Fortune revealed in a paragraph in an issue of The Occult Review, a major esoteric magazine of the inter-war years, and it is much the same story that appears in Lilith`s introduction to herself in the novel.
The claim to being 120 years old we can perhaps best regard as a symbolic statement, deriving from Rosicrucian or numerological lore, rather than speculate what she might have been doing since 1815 or thereabouts. 
          An odd sequel to this melding of author with character is that after the publication of the novel in 1956 a certain confusion developed in peoples` minds between Dion Fortune the author and Lilith Le Fay Morgan the character, exacerbated by the paucity of photographs of the real woman that were then available. Therefore a year later an attempt was made to lay the character to rest by a further sequel, called The Death of Vivien Le Fay Morgan. This short piece entered the public domain as part of a collection of Dion Fortune articles under the umbrella title Aspects of Occultism in 1962, with the annotation: “This fragment which was mediumistically received after Dion Fortune`s death, is an epilogue to Moon Magic.”  The medium concerned was Margaret Lumley Brown, some of whose remarkable work I have edited, along with her story, in Pythoness  (Thoth Publications) and her account of her remarkable psychic beginnings in Both Sides of the Door (Skylight Press).
          In this fragment Vivien, or Lilith,  prepares for her death, and after taking leave of her  friends, ritually assisted by a fellow senior initiate, voluntarily passes out from her physical body to enter into the dissolution processes of the post mortem state, described under the ancient Egyptian symbolism of the Judgment Hall of Osiris.
          It is interesting to note the ancient Egyptian ambience of this fragment, as compared to the largely ancient Greek basis for Dion Fortune`s Rite of Isis. But as Bernard Bromage notes, a London University academic who befriended Dion Fortune and attended a performance of the Rite of Isis, the costumes she used were more Egyptian than Greek; and on being asked about this confided that it was the ancient Egyptian overtones to the Greek symbolism which had always attracted her.
In any case, Bromage came away impressed by what he witnessed, afterwards writing that it was “one of the best attempts I have ever witnessed to stimulate the subconscious by means of `pantomime` drawn from the more ancient records of the hierophant`s art.”  Whilst his use of the word “pantomime” may seem odd in a modern context, he is using it in its original technical sense, which was an ancient art form with a close connection between ceremonial and theatre. One principal difference from modern theatrical performance is that ceremonial magic is performed for the benefit of the participants rather than the spectators, in addition to whatever objective results, via the inner planes or the collective unconscious, might be deemed to accrue therefrom.
          Objective results were certainly sought by Lilith Le Fay Morgan as (in chapter 15) she tries to explain to Rupert the existence and nature of etheric magnetism, which is given out in any form of human interchange but more especially when the emotions are aroused and focussed upon a single person.  What Lilith is trying to get across to Rupert is that the process of magic requires the two of them to form an imaginative, not a physical relationship, one with the other. An important point being that magic of this type, although dependent upon the polarity of gender, is not preliminary or an accompaniment to erotic games. A physical relationship, should it occur, would simply be the operation of a safety valve if the forces – via the instincts and emotions – ran out of control, and would consequently spell failure in magical terms.
As she explains: “The physical is simply the end result, and we never let it get there. When you and I work together in ritual, you are the archetypal man and I am the archetypal woman…What I do to you, I do to all men; and what you receive from me, you receive from Great Isis Herself, for I am Her priestess and you represent the people…Telepathy is the active factor but it is more than that. We are telepathing the group mind of our race, but we are transmitting cosmic forces…This was what was practised in the temples of the Great Goddess in ancient times. It is practised to this day in India, and they call it Tantra.”
          At the time Dion Fortune was working upon her novel and practising the Rite of Isis at the Belfry, she was also in close contact with Bernard Bromage, a specialist upon Eastern religions at the University of London. His current research included texts on Hindu tantra, and he put some of this material at her disposal. She began to draw her own conclusions from this in a series of articles published in the Inner Light Magazine from February 1939 to August 1940, under the title The Circuit of Force (subsequently published in volume form by Thoth Publications), in which she examined what, in her view, constituted “the lost secrets of western occultism”.
It is of some interest that her immediate successors in the running of her Fraternity did not share her enthusiasm for this line of work, and probably not without reason. It is a type of magical relationship which is easily misunderstood, even by sympathetic colleagues.  As Lilith had warned it can easily run out of control and if sex creeps in through the door, magic flies out of the window – to say nothing of whatever personal and social consequences may result if those concerned have obligations outside their charmed esoteric circle. As Dion Fortune had pointed out years before, in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life, this is an area of esotericism that is fraught with hypocrisy, involving specious claims of reincarnationary links, twin souls and linked destinies that at root are no more than mutual self deception.
Its most positive manifestation, outside of the esoteric world, is probably best seen in the function of the poetic or artistic muse – where the artist is stimulated by some desirable member of the opposite sex without necessarily entering into a physical relationship. Examples abound ever since the troubadours of Languedoc spun enchanting lyrics inspired by inaccessible 12th century ladies, and perhaps saw its apogee when the young Beatrice transported the imagination of Dante into writing one of the greatest works of western literature.
Lilith reveals at the same time something of her high magical intentions and the difficulty of retaining the necessary impersonality of the adept at the end of Part Two (and incidentally in the last words of fiction written by Dion Fortune herself):  “As I thought of him as he lay sleeping in the room below with my cloak thrown over him, there came to me a wave of such intense tenderness that it alarmed me. I must not feel like this towards my priest, I thought, or I shall spoil the magic; and then it came to me that only thus could I do magic with him – the magic that was to be done through one man for all men in order to lift burdens grievous to be borne in a world that has forgotten the holiness of the Great Horned One.”  By this somewhat unusual title, it should be said, she refers to the goddess Isis, whose head dress is the horned moon, rather than to the god of the witches, “Old Horny”.  For that side of things she had already written The Goat-foot God with its Rite of Pan.
By the “burdens grievous to be borne” she has in mind the rigid sexual and social mores of the 1930`s. This was a time when, for instance the heir to the throne of England, who would have been Edward VIII, had just been forced to abdicate for insisting on marrying a divorcée. At the same time a play by Charles Morgan, The Flashing Stream, caused something of a sensation, provoking the playwright to justify himself by publishing an explanatory book. Dion Fortune was moved to call it “one of the great plays of all time.” It certainly was not that, but its theme was close to her heart,  that “the face of the whole world would be changed if the experience of sex were considered to be innocent unless its circumstances made it guilty.”  Such an idea might be regarded as commonplace today but was quite beyond the pale in 1938. 
The subsequent liberation of sexual mores in the succeeding decades would have been much in line with what Lilith Le Fay Morgan was trying to aid with her magical rites. As she later says to Rupert: “We have done what we set out to do. Something is present in the world that was not there before, and it will work itself out in its own way.”  Perhaps it began to do so in the liberating decade of the 1960`s.
However, for the inner side of the magical experience we must turn to Part Three, which reverts to third person narrative, although expressed largely from the point of view of Rupert. In the magical climax of the novel he finds himself passing through a number of stages of consciousness, as memories of incarnations of the distant past come welling up from the depths of the instinctual and emotional levels. These his rationalising mind tries to cope with, explain or justify as best it may. Then passing through the levels of consciousness of the personality in the world, he finds himself at a level of higher awareness that transcends all  previous doubts and justifications and rationalisations.
He feels the beginnings of the gathering of power as the magic starts to work. He feels a tide rising within him along the hollow rod of the spinal column until with a flash the spiritual and physical levels coalesce, beyond the bounds of physiology and  even of psychology. He finds himself floating amongst the stars, with Lilith as Isis before him. The two have passed beyond personality, are no longer two circles bounded by their peripheries, but two centres of radiation, whose contact and interchange is like a lightning bolt as the cosmic forces run down through the lower levels, blowing clear all obstructions and blockages. After this virtual initiation he feels as a man utterly reborn or re-made.
He has, in other words, passed through “the Door Without a Key”.  This is the subtitle of the concluding part of the novel, and it has been previously defined by Lilith, as “the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry, according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.”
          Here speaks the voice of the pragmatic magician that was Dion Fortune, and in this, the last of her novels, she demonstrates how, and in what way, it can be effectual. The tools of her trade may be the magical temple, with its symbols and mirrors and lights, but within that construct is the power of the trained mind and imagination honed into diamond sharpness by an unreserved dedication to the forces of light as she understands them.
 
Note: Similar essays of mine on Dion Fortune’s The Secrets of Dr Taverner, The Demon Lover, The Winged Bull, The Goat-foot God, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic can be found in THE OCCULT FICTION OF DION FORTUNE published by Thoth Publications in 2007. Also recommended is Dion Fortune's Rites of Isis and of Pan Skylight Press, 2013.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Dion Fortune and the Three-fold Way

Looking back over my many years of our shared vocation and tribulations as editors of esoteric magazines, my thoughts still dwell with affection on Michael Howard, whose presence will be sorely missed as an intelligent flag waver for what he believed in. I sometimes had the impression that he never quite got over the fact that as a Christian occultist I would deign to talk to a Pagan one. However, whatever part of the spiritual spectrum we come from, we all have to make the best of how others choose to see us, and I do not lack, among the righteous, a fair number who regard me as somewhat to the nether side of a Dennis Wheatley villain. With this in mind I append a lightly edited article I wrote for the Inner Light Journal in 1998 after I had rejoined the Society after a lapse of 33 years doing my own thing. It endeavours to show the all round aims and capabilities of Dion Fortune – after which I went on to write her full biography ‘Dion Fortune & the Inner Light’ in 2000, which should still be available from Thoth Publications.
 
The three major strands to the Western Mystery Tradition, using the colour symbolism popular when the Society of the Inner Light was first founded, were called the Green Ray, the Orange Ray and the Purple Ray.
The Green Ray consists of the nature contacts in the broadest sense, and encapsulates most mythopoeic formulations relating to nature and to the Earth, including Elemental and Faery traditions. The Orange Ray describes the study of symbolism and its manipulation in ceremonial or visualised forms, frequently in terms of the Tree of Life of the Qabalah. The Purple Ray denotes religious mysticism, a direct approach to the spirit, and the devotional way usually expressed in the West in Christian terms.
These three Ways can be equated with the three Paths that depart from Malkuth as we leave earth consciousness on the Tree of Life and visualise the three immediate Sephiroth in their Queen Scale of colours: the Green of Netzach at the base of the Pillar of Energy, the Orange of Hod at the base of the Pillar of Form, and the Purple of Yesod on the Middle Pillar of Aspiration.
The reason for this short dissertation upon the Three Rays is because Dion Fortune’ s whole life and work was based upon them. I was recently reminded of this when approached by someone seeking information about her, and whose preconceptions were so inaccurate as to be bizarre. They assumed she had started out as a pious moralist in the 1920’ s, had become an active convert to paganism in the 1930’s, and by the time of her death was on the way to becoming a disciple of Aleister Crowley. In colour terms I suppose this might have been expressed in terms of watery violet, turning bright green before relapsing into rather murky grey.
Taking this scenario for granted the question put to me was, had she lived longer, what direction would her next work have taken? The answer to this question was simple. She would have gone on writing in much the same way that she always had - by a balanced exposition of the three fold way.
As in any practical occult work, there is always a certain cyclic action at work, based upon inner tides of one sort and another. One aspect may come more to fore at any particular time, but overall the balanced picture will be seen. One simply has to make out a chronological list of Dion Fortune’s published work for this to be plain.
However, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and it would appear that a cursory glance at the 1920’s titles of The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage and The Problem of Purity, were enough to give substance to my respondent’s assumption that Dion Fortune began life as a pious moralist. Her novel The Winged Bull was sufficient to label her as a pagan evangelist in the 1930’s, and an entry in Crowley’s diaries recording some correspondence from her in 1945 was enough to put her in the ranks of the followers of the Great Beast.
To appreciate the full picture of a great occultist we have to take account of the many other books she wrote and their true nature. The 1920’ s titles mentioned above are of the nature of psychology rather than sanctimony, to which we might add The Machinery of the Mind, with an introduction by an eminent scientist of the day. Together with The Secrets of Dr. Taverner they reveal her early interest in psychoanalysis and in the medical applications of esoteric knowledge. She was married to a doctor with esoteric interests in 1927, and her principal teacher in the Golden Dawn, from 1919 onwards, was the wife of an eminent head of a large psychiatric hospital.
.During the same period she wrote a number of articles on the nature of the esoteric tradition as it was currently being practised. These were collected and published in volume form as Sane Occultism, The Training and Work of an Initiate, The Esoteric Orders and their Work and Avalon of the Heart, rounded off by Psychic Self Defence and an early occult thriller The Demon Lover.
Moving into the 1930’s we have an analysis of spiritualism in Spiritualism in the Light of Occult Science and a couple of popular booklets Through the Gates of Death and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. The major event of this decade however is her pioneering textbook The Mystical Qabalah, that spelt out the theory of occultism in readable and commonsense terms. The clutch of novels that immediately followed it, The Winged Bull, The Goat-foot God, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic were written to exemplify in practical terms some of the theoretical principles expounded in The Mystical Qabalah.
Whether they were altogether successful in this respect is a matter for informed debate, part of which she initiated in a series of articles in the Inner Light Magazine. The novels were written to demonstrate certain applications of particular Sephiroth, Tiphareth for The Winged Bull, Malkuth for The Goat-foot God and Yesod for The Sea-Priestess, whilst its sequel Moon Magic also has elements of the higher analogue of Yesod in the “hidden Sephirah” Daath. She was not an advocate of working directly upon the side Sephiroth, at any rate in her public works.
With their commercial requirement to entertain as well as instruct it is arguable whether the full demonstration of any particular Sephirah of the Tree of Life is attained by any of the novels, or even whether this aspiration is possible in works of popular fiction. However they may rate in terms of esoteric or commercial success or failure, the novels were an interesting and courageous literary experiment and have proved to be a lasting monument in genre fiction.
To appreciate some of the thinking behind the experiment we have to cast our minds back to the general atmosphere of secrecy that was very much a part of the Western Esoteric Tradition in those days. Israel Regardie, as he later confessed to me, was distinctly nervous at the time and for some time afterwards, of what might happen to him as a consequence of publishing the Knowledge Papers of the Golden Dawn. There is also evidence to suggest that Dion Fortune had a qualm or two as to whether she had gone too far in revealing esoteric secrets in The Mystical Qabalah. Such fears over such an innocuous book may seem little short of ludicrous today, but only a few years previously she had been bitterly attacked for allegedly revealing secrets in some of her early works. “Secrets” moreover that she had not been vouchsafed in the first place!
Nowadays at any weekend “workshop” one can sample magical techniques that were once held sacred to the innermost inner, whether presented in these terms or in the guise of some form of psychotherapeutics. My own first introduction to “path working” was conducted in most guarded Lodge conditions but nowadays similar techniques are the stock in trade of anything from day centres for the elderly to adult education classes in creative fiction.
Thus have the Mysteries progressed over the past sixty years in what is sometimes known as “the externalisation of the Hierarchy.” This does not mean, however, that the Mystery schools are denuded of all power and wisdom. The greater secrets are concerned not so much with techniques but with the mythopoeic calibre of the material being processed, where indeed the secrets do not have to be artificially guarded for the simple reason that they are likely to be incomprehensible to whoever is not of the “grade” to work them. The pearls of wisdom are quite safely rolled before the snouts of the porcine fraternity.
The outbreak of war in 1939 put a sudden stop to the flow of publications, fictional or otherwise. In Dion Fortune’ s case this did not mean a withdrawal from the world or some kind of mental collapse as some have speculated. The reason is rather more prosaic, that is to say - paper rationing.
Even the Inner Light Magazine had to fold for lack of paper in May 1940 but Dion Fortune still kept writing away in open letters for students and associates, first on a weekly basis until 1942 and then, rather more expansively, every month. It has been my privilege to sort through much of this recently with a view to book publication.
Already published under the somewhat bizarre and catchpenny title of  The Magical Battle of Britain is a selection from the weekly letters of 1939-41. It is odd to hear that some have chosen to look at this phase of Dion Fortune’s work in terms of jingoistic patriotism. One can only say, as one who still remembers those times, that being machine gunned, bombed and threatened with invasion puts a rather different emphasis upon what may be deemed to be politically correct, whatever the long term merits of universal pacifism. Even so, the general tenor of Dion Fortune’s approach to current danger, without rancour or vindictiveness, gives nothing that calls for apology.
Other writings of this time include The Circuit of Force, which appeared between 1938 and 1940 before closure of in the magazine, and Principles of Hermetic Philosophy  together with Esoteric Principles of Astrology that date from the monthly letters of 1941-2. . Most of this work, it should be said, is of a more practical nature than the pre-war material. She discusses in some detail the circulation of force within the human aura, comparing western methods with those of the east, including tantrik yoga and the raising of kundalini.
Another initiative she pursued of a practical nature in 1942, evidently under inner plane direction, was an approach to the spiritualist movement, seeking common ground. She gave lectures at the Marylebone Spiritualist Association and wrote some articles for Light a weekly newspaper of the spiritualist movement since 1881 that is still published as a quarterly journal by the College of Psychic Studies. It also appears that C.R.Cammell, then editor of Light, was given the highly unusual privilege of being invited to the headquarters of the Society to attend trances at which Dion Fortune was the medium.
Her mediumistic skills were announced in the Monthly Letters in 1942 although there had always been a series of articles called Words of the Masters in the Inner Light Magazine, and in an article of April 1938 entitled How Communication is Made she quite openly describes the technique of trance mediumship and what it feels like to the medium concerned, which is obviously herself.
The Editor of Light was not the only outsider to be allowed into the inner recesses of the Society however, for there are scripts surviving of medical doctors being invited in for trance interviews with one known as the Master of Medicine through the mediumship of Dion Fortune. These were of variable success. One early attempt shows the doctor concerned trying to trip up the communicator with technical questions and the atmosphere is plainly sceptical. Later interviews with a more open minded medical practitioner seem more promising and useful to all concerned however.
Some of these scripts circulated privately to those sufficiently discrete or qualified and the earliest date from 1921 and have since been included in Principles of Esoteric Healing. It is worth bearing in mind Dion Fortune’s long association with medical practitioners, since her pioneering days in psychoanalysis in 1913 through to her meeting with Dr Penry Evans in 1925 and their subsequent marriage. This regrettably did not last much beyond 1938 but it is an interesting synchronicity that in the immediate post-war years a very bright young medical student was generally regarded as likely to be her eventual successor as Warden in the years to come. That this did not come to pass is another matter.
This is a far cry from the mysterious correspondence with Aleister Crowley in early 1945 and the last year of her life. They had known of each other for some years, but kept rather distant relations, as if often the way with occultists of some reputation, who find no call to cosy up and join each other’s groups. He did send her a fulsomely autographed copy of The Book of Thoth upon its publication but whether she returned the compliment with copies of her own books is open to question. The resemblance of the villainous Hugo Astley in The Winged Bull to the Mega Therion suggests that she was not entirely impressed by Crowley as a person but if he was aware of the parallel it would probably have amused rather than irritated him.
There is evidence to suggest that a rather sinister oriental group was flinging its inner weight about in the disturbed political conditions of 1945 and this may have led her to seek some advice from one who was certainly familiar in one way or another with various kinds of occult unpleasantness. There has even been speculation that an occult attack of some sort may have led to her death. Unexpected as this event was, it is not a theory I subscribe to, nor is it confirmed in the esoteric diaries of those actively involved at the time.
Indeed, by some accounts she seems to have been quite a bouncy inner plane presence very shortly after her physical demise, even becoming involved in helping to finish writing the incomplete Moon Magic. Some intermittent inner unpleasantness from an oriental source certainly went on for those sensitive enough to receive it, of which Margaret Lumley Brown bore the brunt, but it seems that all was satisfactorily resolved by August of 1946.
Contrary to popular fiction and film that sees occultism in terms of cops and robbers there is a very much more weighty and metaphysical side to it, which because of its abstruse nature, tends not to attract the public eye. Central to this is one of the first books that Dion Fortune wrote, on a high cosmic trance contact, The Cosmic Doctrine dating from July 1923 to February 1925. Until its publication in 1949 it was a text reserved as a senior study course, and was only published in full in a new edition of 1995.
The problem that one finds with outsiders trying to assess the work of any occultist is that most of the important work goes on behind the scenes, that is to say upon the inner planes, where few commentators have the ability to operate. Even if they have a certain facility in this respect they tend to be limited by their own esoteric horizons. Thus those not capable of appreciating the three-fold nature of the Mysteries, as expressed by Dion Fortune, will ever be lumbered with somewhat dim and distorting spectacles, only able to register the limited wavelengths to which they happen to be focused.
There is nothing that tends to throw this problem into glaring light as the so-called purple ray of devotional mysticism. Time and again one sees problems being thrown up by individual occultists or schools trying to come to terms with the Christ force. I use the term “force” with some reluctance as it is a very personal contact. However, in metaphysical and personal terms it is also a very potent force - and one that is not easy to deal with, by virtue of two millennia of historical presence in the west with many misapplications and distortions of it upon the way, by those who have sought to bend its power to their own institutional devices or dogmatic preferences.
The history of modern esoteric movements is becoming a fashionable subject in academic circles these days and I recommend to some aspiring PhD to attempt a thesis upon this particular subject. I have no time to develop it in depth but can give a few pointers to crisis points in the past where one can see the sparks fly. The electrical analogy is appropriate for such crises are just like a lightning flash - complete with rumbling thunder. They are caused by the same kind of hidden conditions, a difference of potential (electrical or spiritual) between the above and the below.
An early thunderclap and pyrotechnic display was to be witnessed at the foundation of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1883. The two poles between which the sparks flew were those who looked to the east for wisdom, as represented by Madame Blavatsky’s protégé A.P.Sinnett (the recipient of most of the Mahatma letters) or the photogenic and charismatic Christian hermeticist Anna Kingsford.
Later we see similar sparks flying in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which led A.E.Waite to form his own more mystical group, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. One of the more distinguished members of this was Charles Williams, who went on to write some profoundly occult novels shortly before Dion Fortune was writing her own. I have analysed his fiction at some length in The Magical World of the Inklings (Element Books 1990) together with that of his friends C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and the anthroposophist Owen Barfield.
We find Dion Fortune herself involved with the self same spark generating problem when she had a profound vision involving the Christ and the Lord of Civilisation that propelled her in the direction of the Theosophical Society in 1925 and its Christian Mystic Lodge, despite already being a member of the Golden Dawn and having her own small informal but very active group. So hot and fast did the sparks fly that little documentary information has survived to tell the story. Suffice to say that the official Theosophical line at the time remained with a largely Hindu perspective of the Christian dynamic as interpreted by Besant and Leadbeater, and the Christian Mystic Lodge, of which Dion Fortune was then President, relaunched itself as the Community of the Inner Light.
The Christian element continued to be nurtured by a regular Sunday performance of a Grail related communion rite under the banner of the Guild of the Master Jesus. Dion Fortune herself also published a series of mystical meditations upon the Collects of the Anglican church.
So things continued in the three fold strand of Hermetic, Pagan and Christian Mystical celebration until the outbreak of war. It is true that for a number of members, any one of these three strands might be the preferred option. One of her stalwarts, an ex-military gentleman who wrote some fine pagan articles in the magazine under the pen name of F.P.D. was famous for his attitude to those he considered his esoteric and intellectual inferiors by his recommendation to “chuck ‘em in the Guild!” However, although specialisation has its place, either in the beginning of an esoteric career or at certain more advanced stages, true adeptship requires that one play more than a one-stringed fiddle, and sooner or later all three paths from Malkuth have to be trodden on the long and complex road to higher consciousness in Tiphareth.
The post-war Society of the Inner Light as I knew it no longer operated the Guild although there was a genuine mystical religious strand within its workings, as one might expect under a Warden who had been educated by the Jesuits and whom some even suspected of being an under cover Jesuit himself! However, a very powerful Christian dynamic burst into the group in 1960/1 and one which was sufficiently powerful to cause many sparks to fly and various members to disperse and go their separate ways.
I had a very powerful experience of this myself whilst by myself in the Library. Suddenly, out of thin air, it seemed that Jesus, the Risen Christ, simply walked into the room. He did not do anything or say anything, and the experience lasted but a few seconds, but it was sufficiently powerful for me to go straight out and buy a devotional book to mark the occasion. It was a copy of Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ and I wrote the date in it. I have it before me now: 27th September 1961.
The group as a whole took a new turn as a consequence of all this. The old graded structure was abandoned and all reverted to the 1st Degree again. Members were encouraged to wear plain clothes or ecclesiastical cassocks instead of magical robes. I was prepared to accept all this as a necessary cleansing period prior to building up the structure of the lodge again. However after four years of things, according to my lights, remaining much the same almost exclusive emphasis on the purple ray, I felt a yearning for the orange and the green and came to the conclusion I would have to seek elsewhere to find it. So reluctantly I resigned. If you don’t like where you are being led there is no point in dragging your feet and grizzling.
Anyhow if your dedication remains in the Mysteries, when one door is closed another will open, and “coincidence” caused my path to cross with that of a highly psychic and mystically experienced Anglican clergyman, who as a young curate had the daunting task of preparing me for confirmation into the Anglican communion. The result of the sparks we struck off each other led to the writing and publication of a handful of books, including The Lord of the Danceand The Christ, Psychotherapy & Magic by Anthony Duncan, and Experience of the Inner Worlds by myself. [Also, very latterly, Christ and Qabalah, from Skylight Press, a record of our forty year relationship.]
Suitably equipped with what I hoped was now a stable foundation, I set about building my own lodge, with a structure incorporating bricks of purple, orange and green. How well I succeeded over the subsequent years is part of another story. [I Called it Magic – also from Skylight Press.]
 

AWEN - THE POWER IN THE MAGIC CAULDRON

 
By accounts received so far the recent Dion Fortune Seminar at Glastonbury was a great success and already plans are afoot to continue the tradition. The occasion only marred by the sad news that Michael Howard, editor of that remarkable  journal, ‘The Cauldron’ is no longer with us – and by extension the journal too! By way of a farewell memoriam I append a few ideas I had back in 1999 about cauldrons and the power that might be found within them.
 
When we speak of magic we do not mean a bizarre indulgence in some fantasy world that promises to provide some means of escape from reality. Nor do we mean a mental toolkit to gain power or influence over others by dubious methods of applied psychology. True magic is something that lies at the very heart of human consciousness and the expression of the human spirit in an evolving universe.
Some of the subject matter of true magic may seem somewhat strange when we come upon it for the first time. Yet as we progress, certain topics turn up again and again, regrouping in various ways. These recurring topics refer to a complex of mysteries that includes concepts such as:
a)       the place of the Earth among the Stars,
b)       Power within the Land,
c)       Divine and Sacrificial Kingship,
d)       the Poetic Inspiration of the Bard,
e)       the Principle of Sovereignty.
Our use of capital letters signifies that we mean something rather more than is commonly implied by these astronomical, cultural or geophysical terms
Some of these ideas might seem easier to understand if put in psychological terms. We might regard them, say, as structures of archetypes in the collective unconscious – whether of races or of nations, or ultimately of humanity as a whole. After all, the terms of psychology are more familiar to most modern readers than those of ancient magic.
However, although psychology may give a rough approximation of what true magic is all about, its assumptions tend to promote some serious misunderstandings. For in terms of magic, psychological labels are at best half-truths. They confine us to a self-imposed “psycho-sphere” that is itself the product of physical brain consciousness. A prison house of the skull.
When we speak of magic we speak of a far wider world, and not one that is simply subjective, or even telepathically shared. The psychic and spiritual worlds are supremely objective – as objective as the Earth itself. As objective as its rivers, lakes, seas and mountains, and the stars and planets in the vibrant space that surrounds the globe in which we live and move and have our being.
The physical shell of the universe is investigated, catalogued and manipulated by physical science and technology. But resonating within and beyond it are the psychic and spiritual worlds that embody consciousness in many different modes and forms.
These concern not only the psychic and spiritual elements of the human, animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms but extend into realms that may commonly be regarded as fantasy. They have their ancient roots of exposition in folklore and in myth – which are none the less potent today, presented through popular fiction via the media. They are preserved in traditions embracing our own ancestors, whether near or remote in time; in tales of the worlds of faery, “the lordly ones” who dwell in the hollow hills; and in religious beliefs incorporating heavenly messengers and angelic choirs.
There is nothing new in any of this. It is no recently hatched fantasy fiction. Beneficent beings and spirits of nature and of the starry firmament were well known to the ancients, and it was by a strange quirk of human nature that the medieval church elected to demonise them. Unfortunately, in our cocksure faith in the wonders of science and technology, we have gone to the other extreme. With sceptical rationality have very efficiently banished them.
This does not mean that these wondrous realms have been destroyed. It simply means that we have adopted the defence mechanisms of the ostrich and voided them from our own sight and consciousness. The discipline of magic is a means of withdrawing our heads from the sand and looking around at a wider world. Hopefully, even communicating with it.
                Communication, however, requires a common language. The vocabulary of which is contained in the characters, objects and events of myth and of legend, or in metaphysically loaded symbols. Much of what is left of the ancient commerce between the worlds is now fragmented folklore. It is as if a once universal language remains only in isolated pockets of local dialect. Is this perhaps the true meaning behind the story of the tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues?
There have been many attempts to fashion some kind of common language between the outer and  inner worlds. One example is to be found in alchemy. In particular the acrostic VITRIOL to represent the idea of a “universal solvent”. It stands for “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem” which we might render as “Visit the interior of the Earth to find and rectify the hidden stone.”
Even so this may be difficult for us to comprehend, confined as we are within our concrete intellectual bunker. Nonetheless, the solidity of the concrete is gradually crumbling. Some have deplored this tendency as “a flight from reason”. However the flight is one of eagles not of fugitives. We do not seek to escape from reason, but merely to put it in its proper place. To see it as a mental tool whose use may be better understood from a higher and wider perspective.
There is a useful Celtic term that pertains to this: “Awen” – which might be translated as Inspiration. In its fullness however, it is untranslatable in a single word. It signifies a kind of irradiation of the soul from paradisal origins, which in turn depends on what we may understand  by Earthly or Heavenly Paradise.
Our descriptions and definitions can only be rendered in poetic terms. Hence the importance of the Bard. And in bardic language the source from which this Awen or inspiration rises is the Cauldron of the Underworld, of Annwyn,  or, in alchemical terms, “the interior of the Earth”.
This has its later cultural manifestation as the Holy Grail. In classical times it saw the sun god Apollo surrounded by the Nine Muses around the Pierian Spring. Apollo also, of course, was patron of the oracle at Delphi, to which the wisdom of inspiration ascended from the inner earth, emanating from a dragon power. The dragon, known as Ladon, originated in the far west, to which various heroes went in search of various inspirational treasures that were kept by various guardians, from the head of the Medusa, to the golden apples of Atalanta. There are many ways by which we may approach this fount of inspiration. Indeed, left to the speculations of the concrete mind, they may seem to lead us only into an encyclopaedic labyrinth.
Yet an Ariadne’s thread to lead us to the source has been preserved in the Celtic folk soul. This is not the only vehicle of inner wisdom, but nonetheless is one of the most evocative guardians of the lost and ancient tradition.
The Celts provide an immediate bridge that leads to a very ancient world. They preserved much of the traditions of the Bronze Age beaker people, and beyond them of the Neolithic builders of stone and wooden circles and burial mounds. Behind these, yet again, some believe there to be an even more ancient wisdom – derived, it is conjectured, from the lost world of Atlantis. The existence of that world may not conform to modern scientific theories but scientific theories do not extend to the provinces of Annwn.
 
At the same time it was Celtic bards who laid the foundation for the knightly legends of the high middle ages. Most of what has come down to us as Arthurian Tradition was seeded by Celtic bards who, leaving Wales and Cornwall for Brittany, after the Saxon invasions, sought service with Frankish lords, and provided the tales that informed the Arthurian romancers of twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
 
Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron and others, wove them into tales of Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere, the Lady of the Lake and the Questors of the Grail. Later Sir Thomas Malory rendered these tales in Old French into the English tongue, his works being one of the first great volumes from Caxton’s printing press. So if we find our imagination stimulated by Arthurian tales, we may get closer to their origins by a studying their ancient roots, and the Celtic inspiration which lies directly behind the medieval French.
Fortunately no knowledge of ancient Welsh is required, thanks to Lady Gregory, who translated what has become known as The Mabinogion, and to later scholars for surveying the ground with more scholarly vigour. Furthermore, many clues have been given us as to where to pan for true gold in these remote mountain streams of wisdom.            
We may cite Robert Graves, (The White Goddess), R.J.Stewart, (The Underworld Initiation, Earth Light, Power within the Land, The Prophetic Vision of Merlin etc.), Caitlín Matthews, (Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain, Arthur and the Sovereignty of Britain, etc.), John Matthews (Taliesin),and most recently Awen, the Quest of the Celtic Mysteries by Mike Harris, who presents an account derived from magical field work in his native Snowdonia.
Despite its cosmic resonances, it is not a tradition of  remote metaphysical abstractions. It speaks in terms of the relationship of people to the land upon which they live. It speaks of the inspired songs and stories of the minstrels and the bards. It speaks of great kings and heroes. It speaks of wondrous hallows and consecrated objects. It speaks moreover of the powers of the inner Earth and the hollow hills. Of  the faery tradition. Of  the Earth’s  relation to the stars. Above all it speaks of the great game of life played out on the chequer board of daily experience, known as the chess like game of Gwyddbwyll, (approximately pronounced as gweeth-buth), which also signifies the land.
The general public has an intuitive realisation of the current importance of these things. This is largely undefined, coming through instinctive channels. It is expressed in cultural terms by the explosion of interest in stone circles and other ancient sites. Time was when I can remember visiting Stonehenge and having the place to myself; likewise Avebury.  No chance of that now!
Fortunately it is not essential to confine one’s esoteric interests to famous sites. There are many other places of power, untouched by commercial exploitation. The important point is that the universal may well be found within the locality, even, if you are lucky, within your own back yard.
This is simply a down to earth demonstration of the philosophical axiom that the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. In its ultimate sense, this is to see the world in a grain of sand, as the modern bard William Blake proclaimed. Less rigorously, a postage stamp of land can contain the pattern of the greater universe. A recent book, The Star Mirror, (by Mark Vidler, Thorsons 1998), has analysed this in relation to the pyramids of Gizeh and the stars of Orion, amongst other locations and constellations. Mike Harris has found similar effects in the lakes and mountains of Wales.
Much the same local discovery was made by the pioneer anthropologist W.Y. Evans Wentz. He crossed the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean to research The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. Having produced this book he proceeded to the Himalyas, and over thirty years established himself as a world authority on Tibetan Buddhism with translations and commentaries on The Tibetan Book of the Dead and other major texts. In the evening of his days he went back to the place whence he had started, and found wisdom back home in San Diego county, California, on Cuchama, a local sacred mountain. Yet this is no parochial matter, the focus is universal.
 

Dion Fortune in Bristol and Somerset

Sorry I can’t be with you all at the Dion Fortune conference at Glastonbury next Saturday but as a starter I attach a talk I gave at a similar event laid on by Marian Green at Bristol, nine years ago.DION FORTUNE IN BRISTOL & SOMERSETI am not sure that Bristol is entirely the most appropriate place to celebrate Dion Fortune, as she tended to express a certain antipathy to the city. This was based in part, I think, on an assumed reincarnationary memory of once having been hanged here as a pirate! However she did have happier associations in her most recent incarnation when affiliated to a temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, that operated here under the control of her friend Hope Hughes. She was very grateful for this at the time, having been drummed out of her original temple through falling out with Moina Macgregor Mathers. The formidable widow of the founder of the Golden Dawn, it seems, considered her something of an upstart. And perhaps what is more unforgiveable, a highly successful upstart - with her own group, establishments in Glastonbury and London, and her own direct access to the Secret Chiefs, under whose aegis she published a raft of teachings which Moina felt ought to be reserved for the elect of the innermost inner. Unfortunately, her reinstatement to the Order, albeit by another branch, did not last for long. For Dion Fortune and her husband were instrumental in introducing the young Israel Regardie to the Bristol temple. In fact they were present at his initiation – coyly referred to in correspondence as his ‘vaccination’. It turned out to be however a vaccination with a violent and painful reaction. For Regardie found the kind of magic dispensed by Hope Hughes and her friends at the Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina to be far beneath his expectations.This is perhaps not surprising given the fact that, despite his youth, he had already written two books on the subject, and had just spent three years in Paris as an acolyte of Aleister Crowley. The upshot was that he denounced the Golden Dawn adepti, root and branch, and published all their secret papers, on the grounds that they ought to be out in the public domain rather than kept under close concealment by those whom he considered to be incompetent. Whilst it is arguable that this may be have been a good thing in the long run, it shattered Dion Fortune`s relationship with Hope Hughes and she was once more cast upon her own resources. Again no great harm was done in the long run, for she proved quite capable of establishing her own school which became, and still remains,  a  force to be reckoned with upon the esoteric scene, through the portals of which many well known occult writers and teachers have passed.Nonetheless, whether or not she did end a former life swinging from a yard arm on the Bristol waterfront, there was arguably something of the buccaneer in Dion Fortune. Indeed such an element might well have been deemed essential in the character of one destined to prove such a pioneer and adventurer. One who, so to speak, built, vitalled and captained her own ship, and made up her own rules of engagement on the esoteric scene. We could well ask how much of a transition there might be from plying the trade of Captain Morgan, to following in the footsteps of Morgan le Fay?  She was not afraid to cut loose from any organisation which seemed to her to be falling short of her expectations, and then set to, to do things better herself. Her interest in the inner side of things started with psycho-analysis, which in her early twenties, before the 1stWorld War, she hoped to make her living as well as her life`s work. However, despite achieving some standing among her fellow practitioners she became increasingly aware that none of them seem to be  having much success in alleviating human misery, and that because a whole dimension was missing from orthodox psychological theory. Thus she moved on to para-psychology, having been greatly impressed by the case work of Dr. Theodore Moriarty, a maverick anthropologist, freemason and practical occultist, who became her exemplar and first teacher. She later eulogised him in a series of short stories entitled The Secrets of Dr. Taverner and went so far as to claim that if there had been no Dr. Taverner there would have been no Dion Fortune.She also joined almost everything esoteric in sight, including the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But spurred on by the example of Moriarty, she was not content with taking other people`s theories or psychic impressions for granted, but deliberately set out to develop mediumistic powers of her own. Which took her some years to achieve, her method being intense concentration in identifying herself with an inner communicator to the point of losing awareness of the physical vehicle. She could keep this up for several hours. This technique was the secret weapon in her armoury, the source of most of her own teaching, and, she maintained, the source of spiritual power to inspire others and make things happen.The first written evidence we have of her seership was in collaboration with Frederick Bligh Bond, at Glastonbury, in the autumn of 1921. Bligh Bond was an architect and antiquary who many years before, in 1907, had been appointed by the Somerset Archeological Society to direct excavations at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. He achieved remarkable success, but provoked a storm of controversy when, in a book called The Gate of Remembrance, published some years later in 1918, he revealed that he had been guided where to dig by recourse to a psychic skilled in automatic writing. The Church of England authorities, who had subsequently come into ownership of the ruins, were horrified rather than enthused by these disclosures from beyond the grave, and took firm steps to distance themselves from Mr Bligh Bond and Mr Bligh Bond from their hallowed ruins.Somewhat frustrated and sidelined, and shortly to emigrate for most of his life to the United States, Bligh Bond, who had become editor of a journal of the College of Psychic Science, was apparently interested to try out the burgeoning talents of Miss Violet Firth, as Dion Fortune was then more generally known.The result was an interesting document, generally referred to as the Glastonbury Script, which formed an important plank in Dion Fortune`s platform of belief. It proclaimed the uniqueness of Glastonbury as a gate between the Seen and the Unseen, and one that had been open from long before Christian times. And one where, in accord with the legend of Joseph of Arimathea founding the first Christian church in England, a link was established between the ancient Druid faith and the incoming religion for the new age, at a time when no antagonism was felt between Christian and pagan. Indeed where both Christian and pagan felt the best way was to hedge their bets and have a foot in each spiritual camp. This meant that there was an unbroken line of descent of mystic power, from past to present, connecting directly with the elemental powers of the soil, in which are the roots of the soul of the race. That is to say, of those who inhabit the land, who are its children. It is this heritage that is the power behind the wide field of esoteric lore surrounding Glastonbury, not least of which is the Arthurian legend. Much of this heritage is celebrated in Dion Fortune`s little book Avalon of the Heart, which began as articles in her monthly magazine, and was published as a book for the general reader in 1934. It is still in print, albeit published in America, and remains a moving evocation of the place and its varied traditions.Growth of the work she had so tentatively begun with Bligh Bond at Glastonbury was rapid, when she found herself linking up with a wider spectrum of inner plane contacts than the medieval monks. Some years before she had been much impressed by Annie Besant`s book The Ancient Wisdom, whose teaching about hidden Masters in the Himalayas induced in the young Violet Firth a profound early visionary experience, in which she felt herself to be confronted by two of such beings.Those with whom she now found herself in touch were not, however, the largely oriental contacts promulgated by the Theosophical Society, but a group of individuals with strong connections to the west. Of ancient Greece at the time of Pericles, Plato and Socrates; of Georgian England, via a former Lord Chancellor, animal rights pioneer and defender of human rights; and a representative of the recently fallen in the 1stWorld War. Later too, with a 19th century pioneer of modern medicine. This inner group had a specific end in view, which was to found an esoteric school, and moreover seemed to have the ability to operate the levers of power by which to do it. The small group of like minded friends and psychical experimenters, who first met up in 1922, thus became a formal group by 1927, with sanctuary and guest house at the foot of Glastonbury Tor and headquarters in the west end of  London, who published a monthly magazine, followed shortly by a series of textbooks and works of occult fiction. The Society thus founded continues its work to this day. Times pass, and priorities change, and it no longer owns a nest of chalets at the foot of Glastonbury Tor. The last material link with Glastonbury are perhaps the physical remains of Dion Fortune herself, which lie within the municipal cemetery, with that of her close friend, colleague and general factotum, Thomas Loveday, close by. A steady flow of visitors still goes there to pay their respects, although, as was said in another context, there may be better places to seek for the living than amongst the dead. The spirit of Dion Fortune, and the spirit of what she stood for, is closely associated not only with Glastonbury at large, but with the country surrounding it.And so as we are all met today in Bristol, which is not a million miles away from any of these places, it would seem appropriate to pay attention to this particular tract of land, the wider Avalon, which embraces most of the county of Somerset. And hopefully, some of you may feel inspired to take a trip to this fascinating territory, this doorway to the Unseen, that lies upon your doorstep.As Dion Fortune says of it, in the opening pages of Avalon of the Heart,  “Legend and history and the vision of the heart blend in the building of the Mystical Avalon. It is to this Avalon of the heart the pilgrims still go. Some in bands, knowing what they seek. Some alone, with the staff of vision in their hands, awaiting what may come to meet them on this holy ground. None go away as they came. Here the veil that hides the Unseen is thin. Here the invisible tides flow strongly; here indeed rests the foot of Jacob`s Ladder whereby the souls of men may come and go between the inner and outer planes. Glastonbury is a gateway to the Unseen.” Nor is this confined to the more obvious historical and religious human associations. She was also aware of another level of the powers behind the Veil of outer appearances. An opening up to her of this level was at the Glastonbury Festival of 1920 – which, I hasten to add, was a rather more decorous affair than the pop music raves of our own day. She attended a performance of The Immortal Hour at the Glastonbury assembly rooms – with lyrics by Fiona McLeod, the Celtic secondary personality, if you will, of the journalist William Sharp, and haunting music by the local composer Rutland Boughton - which apart from its literary or musical merits is a powerful evocation of the realm of faery. As she wrote more than a dozen years later, “I had the unique privilege of seeing a performance of The Immortal Hour, which, timed to fit in with the exigencies of the local buses and trains, began at sunset. The first scene started with broad daylight shining in through the uncurtained windows of the Assembly Rooms. But as it progressed the dusk grew on, till only phantom figures could be seen moving on the stage and the hooting laughter of the shadowy horrors in the magic wood rang out in complete darkness, lit only by the stars that shone strangely brilliant through the skylights of the hall. It was a thing never to be forgotten.” Indeed, one can believe so, simply by contemplating the lyrics of the voices from beyond the Veil, as King Eochaidh`s faery lover is drawn back to her own people: How beautiful they are,/The lordly ones/Who dwell in the hills,/The hollow hills. They have faces like flowers/And their breath is a wind/That blows through summer meadows/Filled with dewy clover. Their limbs are more white/Than shafts of moonshine, They are more fleet/Than the March wind. They laugh and are glad,/And are terrible./When their lances shake and glitter/Every green reed quivers. I am pleased to say that it is now possible to savour, in some degree, something of what Dion Fortune experienced all those years ago, as an excellent recording has been released in two CD`s on the Hyperion label. (CDD22040). Two hours of sheer magic.But as in all things Dion Fortune was not content to experience things at second hand. And in the Pentecost of 1926, walking with some friends on Glastonbury Tor, shortly after performing an invocation of the Element of Air apparently, they were all overtaken by a feeling of ecstasy - which set then whirling spontaneously in an impromptu dance. Then they saw a  friend rushing across the fields below, who raced up the hill to join in their revelry. In the whirling dance a repetitive chant seemed to beat through into consciousness, which they rendered into words, a kind of affirmative ritual, often used in later years as a means of stimulating Elemental contact and vitality. The wind and the fire work on the hill –             The wind and the fire work on the hill -                         The wind and the fire work on the hill - Evoke ye the wind and the fire. The wind and the fire work on the hill -             The wind and the fire work on the hill -                         The wind and the fire work on the hill - Trust ye the wind and the fire. And as they later sat in their newly erected hut at the foot of the Tor one of the Masters under whom they worked explained that they had met a messenger from the Elemental kingdoms, and that this was no chance contact, but part of their development and training as a group. He went on to say: “In the Elements is power if you dare to use it. And that is a thing we have always tried to teach you, that you must have Elemental power if you are going to do anything. Many people have the best of intentions but they have not got the Elemental power, and therefore their intentions are fruitless. That is why you have been given this house at the very centre of these forces. It is not for nothing that you came to the Tor and have built on the Tor. Not for nothing believe me. You will have your devotional aspect in the city. You will have your nature contacts here, but you will have your deeper wisdom contacts where earth and water meet.” I find these latter sentiments quite intriguing. It is true that at their headquarters in London, together with their hermetic ritual working, they did have a focus for devotional mysticism open to the public on a Sunday morning that eventually became known as the Church of the Graal. Here they endeavoured to bring a direct mystical experience to those who attended, by evoking the presence of the Holy Graal, which was built up in the form of a chalice over the heads of the congregation by a band of acolytes trained in the techniques of magical visualisation and the descent of power. These meetings continued until the outbreak of war in 1939 when hostilities and restrictions on travel and public meetings made them impracticable.   However, what is this we hear about this other place, and the “deeper wisdom contacts where earth and water meet”? My feeling is that here we have an indication of the line of work that blossomed into her foray into occult fiction and the most evocative of all her novels, The Sea Priestess.This  takes us beyond Glastonbury to the surrounding countryside of the Somerset levels, and a ridge of land that forms the southern arm of the bay that contains Weston-super-Mare.It was at the end of this promontory, called Bell Head in the novel, that the Sea Priestess built her Temple. It is an evocative countryside both in fact and fiction. Bell Head exists in real life as Brean Down, a limestone peninsular one and a half miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, that juts from the coast of Somerset off the small stretch of shoreline that faces due west onto the deep Atlantic, without Ireland or the coasts of Wales or Devon and Cornwall getting in the way. It forms part of a ridge that makes up the local group of hills, knolls and tors that once were islands in an archipelago of which the Mendip Hills, Glastonbury Tor,  and the islands of Steep Holme and Flat Holme in the Bristol channel form a part. Brean Down was owned by Glastonbury Abbey in medieval times, but is now in the care of the National Trust not least as a nature reserve. It contains traces of civilisation and worship that go back through Romano-Celtic to Bronze Age and Neolithic times. The ruined fort at its end, dating from the 1860`s as a defence against the French, was abandoned in 1900 although pressed into service again during the second world war, the buildings of which still stand.Dion Fortune spent much of her schooldays at Weston and took the land into her consciousness to form the esoteric topography of the novel. Of the surrounding country described in the book, Bell Knowle may well be the very prominent Brent Knoll just off the modern M5 motorway, whilst Dickmouth compares closely with the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. And Dickford equates with the village of Axbridge, which sits on the River Axe, a river which Dion Fortune chose to call the Dick, as a play on the name Naradek – which is traditionally the river which ran by the City of the Golden Gates in ancient Atlantis. It is in the context of this physical and legendary topography that the sea priestess and her acolyte weave their psychic visions which in turn form the channel for their magical work.One lesson the novel teaches is the importance of creative fantasy. Whether such fantasy is objectively correct in all its historical or legendary details is less important than the pooled intention of the pair of them to believe in it. If faith can move mountains it should also be efficacious in the context of the green hills of Somerset. This is the rationale behind the importance of a group being of one mind and in one place. And a group can be as little as two. This is the basis of magical polarity work, which is not a form of exotic sexual foreplay that prurient outsiders or naïve and lonely esoteric wannabes often assume it to be. Or wish that it was.The imaginative pictures that most people spin in various circumstances of daily life are generally kaleidoscopic and evanescent, and so remain for the most part subjective. However, if others can be induced to share a steadily held vision, then mutual suggestion is added to autosuggestion, and a kind of oscillatory circuit may be set up, a form of psychic feed-back. Then subjective imagery can take a quantum leap into a state of inner objectivity. In conventional esoteric terms, a form will have been built upon the astral ethers that can become the channel for occult or spiritual forces. The level and type of force depending upon the moral, ethical, and spiritual status of the participants, both inner and outer. In the case of the sea priestess, Vivien Le Fay Morgan, and her assistant and trainee, Wilfred Maxwell, their shared vision, buttressed by some weeks of hard and demanding dedication and work, mental, imaginative, and physical, in building a fitting temple in a remote location, results in their increasing awareness of an inner plane presence, who is simply called in the book the Priest of the Moon. Of this being, one of the characters says: “The Priest of the Moon had personality in a very marked degree, and if he was a product of my subconscious, I am proud of it. There were times, not infrequent, when I used to wonder what he was, and whether I was deluding myself, or whether I was loopy; but each time I met him afresh I knew what he was, beyond all doubting, and he left his mark on me.” All this is in much  the same fashion that Dion Fortune and Thomas Loveday and their small circle of friends at Glastonbury made contact with their own inner priesthood, or masters of wisdom, and embarked upon the work that still goes on today, a couple of generations after its inception.The intention behind the magic of the sea priestess and her inner plane contact, the Priest of the Moon, was nothing less than to tap, as a source of power, the inner tides of moon and the sea. This is why they were out there establishing a gateway between the planes upon this deserted headland. Nor is it for nothing that she went by the name of Vivien Le Fay Morgan, with its legendary and magical overtones.Within the artistic licence of a popular novel, this apparent exhibitionism is an outward demonstration of the archetypal role playing and image making of an adept, rather than the superficial trappings of an esoteric poseur.Although alas, she has perhaps provided a somewhat distorted role model for a number of misguided aspirants who may think that all that is necessary is to camp up and down in a long cloak and floppy hat. Terry Pratchett has described the type well in his novel Lords and Ladies.If you would like to view the physical launch pad of Dion Fortune`s fictional and magical imagination, then a trek along the back of Brean Down is well worth the effort. Whether along the rough track of its spine, which was transformed into a sacred way in the novel, or via the old single track military road that leads along the northern side out to the fort. Beyond the fort, with its moat and underground rooms, a rough pathway runs out to a little cabin, covered with sea weed, that once housed a searchlight. It retains an evocative resonance of the temple envisaged by the Sea Priestess, as it overlooks the dark line of rocks that extends into the sea where Wilfred Maxwell, one moonlit night, saw to his wonder and alarm the sea priestess, treading their shining and slippery surfaces, as the Atlantic rollers broke at her feet. There she raised her arms to the sky in the form of the horns of a crescent moon, to chant her evocation to Isis: O Isis, veiled on earth, but shining clear In the high heaven now the full moon draws near, Hear the invoking words, hear and appear Shaddai el Chai, and Ea, Binah, Ge. I will say, that even now, viewed in broad daylight, that location has an ambience sufficient to bring you out in goose bumps! It still holds a certain magical ambience. At least it did, the last time that I was there. Hopefully it has not been improved into a cafeteria or other tourist amenities by now. There is, however more to magic than going in search of atmospheres for a  bit of otherworldly frisson. What was it that the Sea Priestess was about?In the book, Wilfred Maxwell is matured and empowered by the experience to throw off his previous emotional shackles of being an ineffectual wimp, hen pecked by his mother and elder sister. He marries one of the office girls, despite her being of a lower social class than his immediate female relations would like, and embarks upon a happy married life, in which he and Molly form and continue a contact with the Priest of the Moon. Thus their home, besides being a perfectly natural expression of human domesticity becomes also a hallowed place where the goddess is recognised and revered. No bad achievement in the nineteen thirties – even if we are still in the realms of fiction.          For her part, the dedicated sea priestess moves her sphere of operations to London, where she sets up a temple in a disused church overlooking the south bank of the Thames - another place where earth and water meet, and embarks upon another magical operation, described at length in the ensuing novel Moon Magic.Here again her mode of working consists of polarity magic, this time with a very different neophyte of her choosing, who once again benefits personally from the experience by coming to terms with his repressed emotional nature.  Once more there is a certain connection between fictional and factual life, in that at about this time Dion Fortune was herself operating from an old former Presbyterian church, known as the Belfry. Although it was not actually located on the water front, but anyway within a mile of it, to south and east, as the Thames curves around Westminster and Belgravia. Here she celebrated semi-public performances of the Rite of Isis, parts of which are quoted in both Moon Magic and The Sea Priestess. And also, it would seem, to keep the balance right, the Rite of Pan that features in her earlier novel The Goat-foot God.   Much of this work she had developed intuitionally but at about this time she began to formulate an intellectual background for it after meeting up with Bernard Bromage, a University of London academic who was running a course of extension lectures on occultism in literature. She became one of his best students and together they set up a series of public meetings with literary celebrities of the day discussing the merits of occultism in general. At the same time Bromage had been researching elements of eastern religion and mysticism, and through him she was able to borrow translations of texts on tantrik yoga which enabled her to formulate a series of articles entitled The Circuit of Force.  She just had time to publish these in her magazine before war broke out and brought an end to all that had gone before.One of the first tasks I embarked upon when invited to go through Dion Fortune`s papers with a view to rescuing anything that was worth publishing, was indeed to issue The Circuit of Force, through Thoth Publications. Again, I have heard this work described, most bizarrely, and by those who ought to know better, as “a most dangerous book”. Danger, like evil, or beauty, or any other emotive power source, is often in the eye of the beholder. But as far as Dion Fortune was concerned, the principle of polarity, or the Circuit of Force, was “one of the lost secrets of western occultism.”Therefore it much pleased me when two former students of mine, Wendy Berg and Mike Harris, recently published a book of their own, precisely with the title Polarity Magic. It moves things along considerably from Dion Fortune`s early The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, in the 1920`s, which so upset Moina Macgregor Mathers for its explicitness, although which now, it must be said, seems rather quaint. But is an example of how the torch is passed along from one generation to another, and how the esoteric tradition is an evolving entity with insights that move in step with the realisations and attitudes of society at large.           It is to a larger and wider context that I would however now seek to draw your attention. Beyond the personal, or microcosmic view of magical dynamics, to the general, or macrocosmic view of human life in the world. For we are all bound up in this together. No one is on a magic island divorced from general human problems or general human responsibility. So although there is an important element in the personal approach to Isis, it is also important to realise just what is implied in the wider vision of the goddess Isis.As Dion Fortune saw her, she is a power that is veiled on Earth by the luminous garment of nature, but who can be imagined, unveiled, in the heavens, in the radiance of the moon`s reflected light. Thus is Isis appropriately evoked by the sea priestess at the time of the full moon. Yet she is not specifically identified with the moon, but with the entire divine feminine principle, which can be evoked under a variety of names, associated with the heavens, with the earth itself, or with the sea. Isis Veiled is Our Lady of Nature. Isis Unveiled is the Heavenly Isis. Ea is the soul of space and parent of time. Ge, or Gaia,  is the magnetic earth that forms an aura about the physical planet. Binah is the Great Sea of the Qabalah from whence all spiritual life arose. And beyond that the Limitless Light of the Uncreate Realities from whence all creation springs. So it is more than personal polarity magic that is being evoked.Let us go back to the early days of Dion Fortune`s work, at Glastonbury. Before she had even set up her chalets on the Tor, and was staying either at Alice Buckton`s guest house at Chalice Well or else renting an old farmhouse in Chilkwell Street. This was a series of metaphysical teachings that came to be known as The Cosmic Doctrine.This was quite demanding stuff, not at all easy to understand. So much so that it was generally referred to as being “designed to train the mind rather than to inform it”. However, it contained a number of insights that proved to be of considerable importance once their significance was realised. And perhaps the one of most immediate importance is the concept of the Planetary Being – although it was called Planetary Spirit in the original script – a term later changed because the being involved is not so much spirit, in the sense of living up there on Cloud Nine, but very much closer to our business and bosoms, being the physical and etheric globe upon which we all currently live, and move and have our being.It came to be realised that we owe a considerable debt to this Being, and indeed have a responsibility towards it – which if ignored might very well hold karmic consequences, to use an eastern metaphysical concept, that would be dire indeed.This has but comparatively lately been taken at all seriously by the world at large. And that thanks largely to a scientist, an environmentalist by the name of James Lovelock, who thirty years ago, conceived the idea that the planet is special in a way no-one has hitherto realised. That it is indeed a great super-organism that regulates itself chemically and atmospherically to keep itself fit to bear life. That it is, to all intents and purposes, a living being itself.He did not call it the Planetary Being, but being a scientist, preferred the term, “biocybernetic universal system tendency.” It was left to a literary neighbour, the novelist William Golding, to come up with a more preferable name – Gaia – after the Greek goddess of the Earth. She whom Dion Fortune`s sea priestess sung of as Ge. Well I am sure we are all aware of the resultant controversy that blows about our heads in the increasing concern about global warming and all the rest of it – but this is simply the most materialist outlook and concern with it, looking entirely on the outside of things. What is the outlook and concern of the esoteric world? Which includes you and me. Surely we should be able to contribute something, not only in perception but in some form of action – with our knowledge and belief in the inside of things?Not least of which is that we are not the only inhabitants of the globe, but that we share it. Not only with the animal kingdom, but with many and various elemental beings, from the lordly ones in the hollow hills to the lesser beings who are intimately concerned with the organic functioning of mineral, plant, animal and indeed human life. The need for this is not new. And we owe it to a contemporary and fellow student of ours, R.J.Stewart, who used to live in these parts, and was particularly well known for his researches into the inner side of the ancient waters of Bath. Indeed some of us remember well a series of workshops and various workings in a temple above his flat, just across the road from the baths, that are now a neo-Regency tourist attraction, but once a temple of Sulis-Minerva and of more ancient mysteries beyond that, going back to the mysterious King Bladud. The concept he proposes is known as the Triune or Three-fold Alliance – which is between the human, the animal and the faery kingdoms. This is no mere contemporary fad dreamed up out of his own head. This crisis has been seen coming for some time now, and he quotes extensively from an 18th century document in his possession, which you can read for yourselves in two of his books The Living World of Faery, and Power Within the Land, which, along with both his earlier and more recent work, seek a working relationship between humans and the spiritual forces of the land or region in which they live. Within these spiritual forces are included the animal as well as the elemental. This is why I have felt it important to draw your attention to the land round about us here, and particularly in relation to Dion Fortune who did a great deal of practical import here within your own backyard. For all this challenges us in many different ways. It is not enough to confine our interest in these matters to a safe and purely intellectual level. It calls upon us not only to “believe in” faeries, but to understand who and what they are, where they come from, where they are going, and what our mutual relationship with them may be.It makes similar demands on us to think about how we relate to the animal kingdom, for the patience and suffering of the animal kingdom needs to come through to our awareness loud and clear. It  requires us to open our minds to areas we are not accustomed to explore; to open doors of consciousness which have remained shut for a very long time. The faery and elemental forces are the only true inner expression of the natural world, since much of scientific thinking remains detached, mechanical and Newtonian. The human majority are conditioned by the familiarity of everyday perception and see nothing to be wondered at in the constant sustaining of the entire universe second by second and day by day, from the stars down to the tiniest atomic infrastructure.So we should rouse ourselves and reach out to our companions on this planetary globe. Make ourselves known to these beings who are part of the evolution of the inner Earth in high or low degree. Seek out what lies within these parallel worlds behind appearances. And in particular the hidden evolutionary expression of the faery world that is often concealed behind the curtains of myth and fantasy.This challenging relationship to the world of faery is real enough to those who may have experienced it, but has been sadly misrepresented. Despite the witness of seers from Thomas the Rhymer, and Robert Kirk, to Evans-Wentz, W.B.Yeats and George Russell, it remains a fragmented and misunderstood corpus of legend and folklore. Even condemned as demonic by religious authority. And in some respects this may be understandable. Even Terry Pratchett`s young witches discovered it was possible to get the wrong side of a stroppy elf queen. Although the hidden lesson here is that they made that kind of contact because it was a reflection of their own stroppy adolescent hubris. The inner worlds can be very reflective of our own attitudes. Which is why dedication and pure motive are all important.There are many types of faeries. Just as there are many types of animal species, and ethnic variations of the human race. And there may well be some who have little love for human beings – and not without just cause.However, the general concensus from a more cooperative part of the faery host is that time is running short for this kind of work; that they are affected by our neglect of them, and that we emasculate them with our notions of prettiness and “airy fairy”. That element of human whimsy and sentimentality that sees them all gossamer wings and frilly knickers. However, there is a general resurgence of awareness of the existence of this kingdom, in various forms. We see it evident in the imaginative response to the works of Tolkien, a somewhat cantankerous Oxford don who decided to sit down and write his own mythology, just for his own satisfaction, and ended up, albeit posthumously, stirring the imagination of a new generation with his tales of elven kingdoms. Not that all Tolkien wrote should be taken as literal truth, but he dug deep in mining his fantasy, and has presented a painted curtain behind which breathes a true elven reality. As may be apparent by close reading of his essay On Faery Stories  or his short faery tale Smith of Wooton Major. The theme of a threefold alliance of human, animal and faery seems also evident in the filming and popular reception of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by his friend C.S.Lewis. Whether or not you choose to accept any element of Christian allegory within his work, it nonetheless depicts a joint communication and cooperation between human, animal and faery against devolutionary forces.There are also more specialist works available for those who seek to pursue these lines. One, recently published, that comes to mind is by John Matthews, entitled The Sidhe – Wisdom from the Celtic Otherworld. It is an account of a contact with what would appear to be a representative of  one of the Lordly Ones at an Irish archeological site, a Neolithic barrow, on a trip which turned out to be the most exciting journey of his life.It may be that John has psychic gifts a little beyond the ordinary, but the gist of the message he received was that work of this nature does not require any especial psychic gifts, or the organisational requirements of formal ritual, but is simply a matter of attitude, or what William Blake might have  called “cleansing the doors of perception.” I quote from a key passage of what he received, in relation to a view of the sidhe as to how the human race were falling short. “You would be better to see yourselves as allies of creation rather than its rulers. By choosing to work in harmony with the natural world – as once all living things did – you could still redress the balance. “If your life brushes against that of another creature you feel something. If you take the life of another creature you feel something. It is no great step to extend this to feeling something when you touch a rock or a tree, when you feel the energy of a river or the sea. “Many feel these things, yet your race continually shut out these feelings. Just as you attach devices to your horses so that they can see only ahead, so you have done to yourselves, limiting your vision until  you can see nothing save that which is before you. Only when you learn to remove the guards will you experience true vision. You must seek to become reconnected to everything, end the separation you have created for yourselves. “There are many things you can do to bring about a re-connection. Begin by noticing the world around you. By truly looking. By seeing past the surface of things to the level of Spirit. “At the moment when you go out into nature you see only the surface of things. Trees, grass, water, plants. Yet the reality of these things is far greater. Once you knew this. You can discover it again if you truly wish. Next time  you are outside look around you. Try to see beyond the surface into the true nature of things you see. Though you may find it difficult to do so at first, in time you will begin to see more. If you continue far enough and deeply enough you will even begin to communicate with the spirit within the things you are observing. In truth you will cease to be observers at all and become part of the thing you are looking at. “This is what the ancient bards of this land meant when they spoke of having `been` a thing. This was more than a poetic image, but a very real truth. To truly know a thing is to become one with it. Just as to become one with it is to truly know it. “When you do this you will begin to understand the true nature of things, and of your own relationship to them. Perhaps then, when plants and rocks and animals are no longer soulless things, you will cease to treat them as such, cease to take them and use them as you have now for so many of your ages. If you are truly ready to enter a new era then you must discover how to make such changes to the way you view things. Only when you have done so will you be truly liberated from the narrow place in which you have put yourselves. “At present you are just as much prisoners as if you were truly locked up within stone walls. The walls of your prison are not ones that you can see with your eyes, but they can still be recognised.” It seems to me that this may well be true of the great majority of the human race, although I venture to think that it may be less true of those of us who are assembled here. The very fact that we are present here demonstrates that we realise that there is something more to life than the surface illusion – hard, brash and self-sufficient though that surface illusion might appear. Thus it is with a certain degree of puzzlement, mixed with sympathy, that I read within the pages of Quest sometimes, the plight of those who feel they follow a path alone. Believe me, you are never less alone than when you think you are alone. You simply have to reach out. Have faith and be aware. And prepare to be surprised. So I suggest you could do yourselves and others a favour by going forth to tread the land that Dion Fortune trod with your senses open to what you may discover. And I conclude with the comments that David Carstairs, one of her contacts, made to her in 1923. “You should make a practice, when the occasion offers, of getting into touch with the elements and the Nature Spirits, you`ll find it a very enjoyable process. They quicken the vitality and the perceptions and the sense of enjoyment. They quicken the `animal` in you of course, but as long as it`s a healthy animal and properly broken in you`ll be none the worse for that. “You do it by going to the appointed place at the appointed time and sympathising with them – that is to say, feeling with them. You want to practice in getting the feel of a place and analysing it. “You`ll find it consists of several layers. There will be a layer of human associations on the surface, then below that you will get the animal or the natural life that lived there, and below that the trees and the sub-tones of the plants – herbaceous stuff that dies to the roots each year – and below that again you`ll get the elements themselves, and you want to train your ear so that you can hear the different themes and pick them out and listen to them.” And so these words I leave you to ponder, in the hope that they inspire you, as they did Dion Fortune, with the urge for diligent travelling, imaginative courage, and fruitful listening.  Recommended books Gareth Knight: Dion Fortune & the Inner Light (Thoth Publications)Dion Fortune & Gareth Knight: An Introduction to Ritual Magic (Thoth Publications)Dion Fortune & Gareth Knight: The Circuit of Force (Thoth Publications)Dion Fortune & Gareth Knight: Dion Fortune’s Magical Battle of Britain(Skylight Press)Dion Fortune & Gareth Knight: Dion Fortune’s Rites of Isis and of Pan(Skylight Press)

 

Camelot revisited

The latest contribution to the ‘endless debates’ about Arthurian origins by Dr Andrew Breeze are certainly worth consideration – at their own level. Although my own wanderings into Arthurian tradition over the years have not been limited to geographical or historical speculations. Where is Camelot? Everywhere and nowhere is the best I can contribute to any debate on that question. Which is not quite so evasive as it may sound.
Anyhow, I append a few lines I wrote a couple of years back for the Inner Light Journal that may stimulate some thought and suggestions for further inner knight errantry on the part of fellow companions of the way.  
Camelot Revisited                          
One of my earlier works has recently reappeared in a new edition, namely The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend (Skylight Press). There is an involved and fascinating history to this book and to its origins. It was first published in 1983 following a quite remarkable workshop I conducted at Hawkwood college in 1981.  As Caitlín Matthews, who was there at the time, reported – “It was truly an awesome and splendid thing that we did. The power which we invoked was both visible and perceptible to every sense: the candles on the altar shimmering with a radiance greater than their own. None of us wanted to leave: we were gripped, not by fear, but by longing to remain. One by one the company dispersed to bear into the world the substance of what we had experienced, and to continue the work of the Round Table within our own sphere of life.”  The whole event is reported in somewhat more detail in my esoteric autobiography I Called It Magic.
            This series of workshops was part of an initiative based on the principle of the Externalisation of the Hierarchy to take into the public domain certain techniques that I had learned in the Society of the Inner Light, and from working with the occultist W.G.Gray in the late 1960’s, (whose biography, by the way, The Old Sod, by Marcus Claridge and Alan Richardson is a remarkable insight into the ways (and peccadilloes) of an earlier occult generation).
However, the theme of this particular Arthurian weekend, and much of the power behind it, was largely based on a Society of the Inner Light script called The Arthurian Formula. This had originated as a series of trance communications received by Dion Fortune between April 1941 and February 1942, assisted by her old Golden Dawn mentor, Maiya Tranchell-Hayes, and later supplemented by her remarkably gifted successor Margaret Lumley Brown. The script had formed the basis of the inner work of the Society for the following twenty years in a project known as the Redemption of the Archetypes. Although all was highly secret in those days, in 2006 I was able to edit a published edition of The Arthurian Formula, with an amount of supplementary material on Atlantean and Faery traditions.
But when it comes to the matter of revisiting Camelot, a lot depends on what route one is taking to get there. We need to bear this in mind to avoid being confused by what may appear to be direct contradictions in interpretation. Atlantean? Faery? Celtic? Malory? Mabinogion? Chretien de Troyes? Lancelot/Grail?
The Arthurian Formula, and by extension, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend is largely based on Le Morte d’Arthurof Sir Thomas Malory, a classic of early English literature published by in 1485, and upon which Atlantean theories were grafted by Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown and their inner contacts.
Atlantean speculations had their heyday in the 1920’s, the ground having been laid in 1892 by a retired American politician Ignatius Donnelly with Atlantis: The Antediluvian Worldas part of a serious scientific proposition. That is to say whether such a catastrophe as a lost continent was geologically likely or possible, along with comparisons of flora and fauna and human culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Theories were taken seriously enough for the British Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone (unsuccessfully) to seek government funds to send a ship to test some of them out, and for the explorer Colonel Fawcett (also tragically unsuccessfully) to seek remains of a civilisation antedating ancient Egypt in the Amazon jungle. The respected occult researcher Lewis Spence  published a series of works on the subject during the 1920’s and Dion Fortune was familiar with all of these, so that the outlines of the tradition were replicated in The Esoteric Orders and their Work (1927). The more esoteric strands stemmed from Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), the clairvoyant researches by W. Scott-Elliot in The Story of Atlantis(1893), and Rudolf Steiner’s  Atlantis and Lemuria (1911).
Most of the scientific theories seem to have been sunk  by more recent oceanographic studies and the theory of tectonic plates, but the tradition of a lost continent lives on as a scenario that appeals to the popular imagination, and in a way has resurfaced with J.R.R.Tolkien’s evocation of Numenor in The Silmarillion. Not published until 1977 but which may have been written as far back as the early 1920’s, not that Tolkien seemed to rely on anything beyond his own mythopoeic imagination – and nothing wrong with that! And it is quite possible to build a workable Mystery tradition upon them.
Dion Fortune’s long term interest in the matter of sexual polarity as exemplified in her novels and in her early psychological work is also plainly shown in The Arthurian Formula in an analysis of the domestic problems experienced by Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot, and in which the king’s half sisters Morgan and Morgawse play a questionable role. 
Wendy Berg, however, has set a number of other hares running with remarkable pair of books, one theoretical the other practical,  Red Tree, White Treeand Gwenevere and the Round Table, with the suggestion (buttressed by at least a couple of respectable academic works) that the main problem at the court was not that King Arthur fancied faery women to humans, but that the queen herself was a faery. And following up on this suggestion, my own researches into the first Arthurian romancer, Chrétien de Troyes, have convinced me that faery elements played a major role in Arthurian legend, and that far from the emphasis being on chivalrous knights rescuing human damsels in distress, the damsels were more likely to be feisty faery women initiating a mortal knight into inner world planes and adventures. Such is my theme in The Faery Gates of Avalon.
The routes to Camelot taken by Wendy Berg and myself were, respectively the early 13th century Lancelot/Grail cycle, and the late 12th century romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Not that Sir Thomas Malory was ignorant of this material, for his Le Morte d’Arthur was a free translation of much of it. But he was a down to earth English knight with an outlook influenced by the culture of his day, that celebrated 14th century codes of chivalry as exemplified by Henry V, the hero of the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
Quite a natural tendency one has to say, for each generation is likely to see ancient material in its own light, and he certainly tells a good story, if a somewhat prolix one at times. Fast forwarding for some four hundred years we find the 19th century Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson tends to feature the Camelot ladies as languorous Pre-Raphaelite maidens and the knights as decent Victorian chaps whose characters could well have been formed on the playing fields of Eton. 
Nonetheless, before one gets too patronising it should be said that the most powerful working of that 1981 Hawkwood weekend was based upon a reading straight out of Tennyson!  
Our cultural attitudes today might well be characterised by a neo-Celtic influence. When The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend first appeared, it did attract some criticism for being largely based on Malory rather than more direct Celtic material such as The Mabinogion. But although the Mabinogion was translated by Lady Charlotte Guest as far back as 1838-49 there was not a lot of esoteric commentary on it at the time of the publication of The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend.
However this was soon put to rights by the end of the decade with major works by Caitlín Matthews Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain (1987) and Arthur and the Sovereignty of Britain(1989); John Matthews on Gawain – Knight of the Goddess (1990); The Grail Seeker’s Companion (1986) by John Matthews and Marian Green; and R.J.Stewart’s The Mystic Life of Merlin and The Prophetic Vision of Merlin (1986) drawing upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain  and Vita Merlini. All these writers were present at that Arthurian weekend – not that I lay claim to inspiring them, but simply that we were all part of a current that began to flow strongly in the 1980’s. And if there is one thing I have learned about practical occultism it is that, like small boat sailing, it is all a question of learning how to go with the winds and the tides – inner or outer. How to pick them up, use them to best advantage, and not be wrecked by sailing too close to the wind!
Looked at in this way, revisiting Camelot is like a voyage to a mystical island  through a network of various shoals and channels, deeps and shallows, that each are navigable with a bit of luck and skill, as long as you don’t stop en route to argue the toss as to which way might be the one and only true. For the best compass is your own character, motivation and intuition.
On that memorable occasion in 1981 when, upon impulse from I know not where, I took up a hunting horn and blew three long blasts at the end of an evocative reading, I had no sooner done so than it seemed as if great doors opened in the West bringing a waft of sea air, and even spray. A mighty figure of the King came through the doors, crowned, with short golden beard, robed, and with the great hilt of the sword Excalibur very prominent, impressive with its jewelled work, in its mighty runed scabbard. With the king came Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Tristram and all the knights and ladies. Larger than life they took up their positions about the Table Round. In the centre rose a column of incense smoke with astral rainbow colours manifesting as the powers of the Grail, the Cauldron, Merlin and Nimuë. The rest can be read up in Chapter 15 of I Called It Magic.
All images that could well come out of illustrations by Arthur Ransome rather than what any historical 5thcentury Arthurian dux bellorum might have been like. But like Atlantis, these images well up from the universal mind, rather than any physical historical scenario. For there are many interconnecting spheres that we inhabit, beyond the physical one we are currently anchored to in our outer lives.
And such images from them, once experienced, are never forgotten. But you need to have been there when the gates were opened, to experience the power. Although those gates have by no means since been shut. As was announced at the time from an inner plane source “A light has been rekindled tonight that has for too long been extinguished.”  It still shines if you go and look for it.
Likewise: “The sword is unsheathed and should be kept on the altar in that way.” It too is still there, if  you know how to find your way to the mystic chapel. By the crystal boat of the magical imagination.
 
 
 
 
               

FAERY LORE

An exhibition on the subject of Faeryland at the Royal Geographical Society (of all places!) from the 10th to the end of September stimulates me to repeat a few lines that I once wrote on the subject.
Faery lore has always been with us, as long indeed as faeries, but only in the last twenty years has it come to such prominence. This largely thanks to R J Stewart who has published some very practical books on the subject, starting with The UnderWorld Initiation in 1985, passing through Earth Light and Power within the Land in 1992, to The Living World of Faery  in 1995 and The Well of Light in 2004. These have been particularly stimulating works because they present us with an important challenge.
They call upon us to do something about it, with particular reference to the doctrine of the Threefold Alliance – the mutual recognition of the interconnection of the human, animal and faery worlds. And how we can make the necessary connections by means of structured visualisations in conjunction with certain sites, such as standing stones, earthworks, forest paths, springs, pools, wells, woods, trees, meadows, crossroad tracks or the confluence of waters.
In the pursuit of otherworld experience we have, of course, to take care that such contacts are not subjective fantasies. Faeries are not quite such wish fulfilment figures as they are sometimes made out to be, and so we should not regard the quest as some kind of otherworld dating agency. Those forlornly seeking  fulfilment of unsatisfied desires should stick, for their own good, to the human sphere. If  you cannot make it with one of your own kind then you are not likely to have much luck with one of the Shining Ones!
In my own experience the start of any worthwhile contact has come as something of a surprise. The initiative came from the other side. When I found myself whipped up into some kind of spiral of euphoric awareness, with aura lit up like a Christmas tree, to discover I was standing in muddy shoes over a spring, in close proximity to a rowan tree. Or coming across part of a hedgerow where trunks of oak and ash formed pillars each side of a hawthorn gateway, to find it open before me on the level of inner awareness.
First comes the experience, then the realisation. Following upon this, if you are lucky and play your cards right, a deepening relationship forms from which friendship, companionship, guidance and teaching may arrive. At any rate, to a born scribbler such as myself, the consequence has been the writing of two books (The Faery Gates of Avalon and Melusine of Lusignan and the Cult of the Faery Woman) which are meant to be subtle guides and stimuli to action rather than otherwordly street maps. 
Above all they seek to be modern. The study of old traditions of faery lore that have come down to us in legend and ballad can be very fascinating and indeed instructive but they speak of other times and other conditions. The faery world moves on as does the human one, and means of intercommunication now are not the same as once they might have been.
Indeed older forms of tradition speak not so much of intercommunication as of complete transition. Either a human is lured into faery land – or a faery enters the human world – visitors in an alien environment to that in which they were born. And such adventures tend to end in grief. Either the human being cannot find the way back, or if successful crumbles to dust, having been away for a very long time indeed in a different time dimension. Or the faery is driven back to fairyland because the human being breaks faith in some way, unable to unwilling to fulfil the conditions of such an unusual relationship.
There are of course rare cases where a successful transition seems to have taken place. The most celebrated being the 13th century Thomas the Rymer and his seven year dalliance in the hills with the Faery Queen. Or the successful recovery of Tam Lin from fairyland by a persistent and courageous human lover. All of which demonstrate that we are not dealing with a fluffy bunny kind of world when we approach the faery condition, but nor, on the other hand, are we consorting with demonic agencies as monkish scribes have tended to describe them.
Apart from ballad lore, which R J Stewart, as a musician has explored in some depth, there are other areas in which it is profitable to look, particularly in medieval times when humans and faeries seem to have been more closely connected than they are now. Perhaps because humans tended to believe in them more. On the one hand are the historical traditions of certain families that have claimed faery ancestry, and on the other early versions of Arthurian legend.
Three ancient families in particular spring to mind – those of Bouillon, of Anjouand of Lusignan.
The first concerns King Lothair of Lorraine who allegedly met a faery in the woods who bore him seven children, one of whom became the Knight of the Swan who sailed down the Rhineone day in a boat to champion Beatrice of Bouillon who was having some trouble with a local lord. He married Beatrice’s daughter Ida but left her when (despite his strictures) she became too curious about his origins.
The second was the powerful and widespread family of Anjou. An early member of the family, Fulke the Black, was said to have married a water sprite, who bore him at least two children before disappearing through the roof of the church in great distress when compelled to attend the consecration of the mass (an obvious monkish interpolation). This monkish libel did not faze the family at all in after years. Richard Coeur de Lion in particular revelled in being a member of “the Devil’s Brood!”
A third instance is that of the family of Lusignan, which like the town named after them near Poitiers, was founded by the faery Melusine, who originally hailed from Scotland, and returned to Avalon when after some marital strife her husband publicly called her a demon.
Taking into account the time scale of these family histories any such actual  intermarriage would appear to have taken place a little before the dawn of the first millennium. Was there a window or door of opportunity that opened between the worlds at that time, making such interchange possible? And is there a cyclic connection with the sudden upsurge in faery interest that has occurred to us at the dawning of the second millennium?
One thinks of the elfin mythology of Tolkien that seems to have sparked much popular contemporary interest. But how much and in what way do we tend to believe in such things nowadays? I only know that when interviewed by an American radio show host I was asked to speculate a reason for this remarkable interest in Tolkien’s elven otherworld. I said that maybe it was because people were subliminally realising it to be true that we shared the world with another order of existence. At which the interviewer hastily interjected that they dared not broadcast such a possibility! Shades of Orson Wells causing a panic with his radio broadcast of H G Wells “War Between the Worlds” in the early days of radio? Are the alleged faery folk with whom we have shared the planet for millennia any more dangerous than science fiction invaders from Mars?
Who knows?  What I have found intriguing is that descendants of all three families mentioned above played a leading role in the Crusades. Which suggests that for whatever reason the Christian west felt the need to go marching off to Jerusalem – then regarded as the centre of the world – the Faery powers felt the same way too!
Thus in 1099 a leader of the 1stCrusade, Godfrey of Bouillon became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalemin 1099, and in 1101 his brother Baldwin its first king. Then thirty years on, when that line had died out, Fulke V of Anjoumarried the heiress to the kingdom, the princess Melisende, thus establishing the Anjouline on the throne. And by a similar process of marrying an heiress to the kingdom, the crown passed to two Lusignan brothers, first Guy who, had married the princess Sibylla, in 1186 and then Amalric who wed her half sister Isabella in 1198.
There is  plenty of room for conjecture here as fascinating as holy bloods and holy grails, which has given me plenty to mull over for some time to come.  But there are more significant indicators of a close human faery interconnection to be found in a close reading of Arthurian legend.
            Particularly early legend, recorded a couple of hundred years before Sir Thomas Malory set pen to paper in about 1370 to produce Le Morte d’Arthur. Admittedly it is a classic of English literature but in which, despite Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake, much of the faery content is lost. Sir Thomas, a contemporary of Henry V and Agincourt, was more focused on the conventions of feudal chivalry in the human world. To find the faeries coming out of the woodwork we need to go back to around 1170 when Chrétien de Troyes, the court poet of Countess Marie of Champagne, was versifying the first Arthurian romances. Not that Chrétien (who thought himself a very modern 12thcentury man of the world) entirely believed in faeries, but he was drawing his material from older sources who did. 
And when we examine his stories in depth, we realise that the commonplace romantic scenario was not so much human damsels in distress calling upon knights to go and solve their problems. It was more a case of a faery woman acting as initiator of a human knight into the faery world.
 This seems to have been the case with regard to Erec and Enide, (Geraint in the Mabinogion version), for although it appears to be Erec who is taking the initiative, it is really Enide who is calling the shots and leading him on into his various adventures, ending up in ruling a dual kingdom with her. Similarly Yvain after certain rites at a magic fountain is led on by Lunette through a series of tests that end up with him married to the faery Laudine. Even in the Grail romance Percival has his Blanchefleur and Gawain his Orgueilleuse of Logres as intermediaries on the way to very faery locations – one the Graal castle and the other the Castle of Maidens. And Lancelot’s adventures to rescue Guenevere plainly take place in a faery kingdom. All this I have spelled out in some detail in The Faery Gates of Avalon, in the hope that it will encourage others to go back to the tales, keeping an eye out for the faery dynamics, which become obvious once one knows what to look for.
This also applies to slightly later versions of Arthurian Legend such as the Lancelot Grail of 1220/30.  Wendy Berg has shown in her remarkable work, Red Tree, White Tree - Humans and Faeries in Partnership,  (Skylight Press 2011), that this stratum of legend leads to the conclusion that Queen Guenevere herself was one of the faery kind.
This view of Guenevere is no new agey fad, for the possibility has been seriously put forward by academics of some distinction, in Guinevere, A Study of her Abductions by Professor K G T Webster in 1951, and Lancelot and Guenevere by Professors T P Cross and W A Nitze in 1930. It is simply that Wendy, with her keen esoteric sense, has brilliantly illuminated a neglected academic thesis, and shown the whole Arthurian scenario in a new light. The light of Faery.
Guenevere was abducted on a number of occasions, but rather than passing her off as some kind of Persephone figure connected to the cycles of nature, a role which she really does not fit, a more likely possibility could have been the faery world trying to get her back! We find much the same kind of situation in Fiona Macleod’s The Immortal Hour where the faery Etain is taken back to fairyland after having wandered into the human world and been married to the Eochaid, the High King of Ireland.
Following this theory through leads to some startling conclusions as to the origin and destiny of the Grail Hallows, which as sword and lance and cup and stone, came originally from faery land. And which – like Arthur’s sword Excalibur – need to be returned there. Hence the need for the legend of Joseph of Arimathea returning the Graal to Logres, from whence it had been taken to Sarras (the inner side of Jerusalem) by the Grail heroes in the Ship of Solomon. Whilst the two cruets associated with his mission back to Glastonbury, one containing a red liquid and the other a white, signify amongst other things, the sap of the red tree and the white tree, the human and faery blood lines. 
This provides the prospect for some exciting esoteric work. As Wendy points out, if it was the duty and opportunity of the knights (of whom we are the modern equivalent) to seek out the structure and nature of Faery, one way of doing this today may be to give more attention to way showers such as Melusine, Etain and Gwenevere. Those who left behind their birthright in the Immortal Clan to enter the human world. And there the challenge rests. Are we capable of responding to “the faint call of Faery” and taking steps to answer it?

The Sea Priestess at Brean Down

If any Dion Fortune aficionados take the trouble to visit Glastonbury it is well worth going on to pay a visit to the sea side at Brean Down, the site of her novel The Sea Priestess. And having taken the trouble to go that far – it is well worth girding up the loins to walk the whole length of it to the rocks at the end where the Sea Priestess set up her temple, which is a thinly disguised copy of an old fort that stands at the end of it. At least I presume it still does and has not been made over into a fun fair or burger joint by now. Although as it comes under the protection of the National Trust so the worst excesses of popular tourism may be avoided.
I append a description of the place, along with much else, in an Introduction I wrote for an American edition of The Sea Priestess thirteen years ago. It is still available from RedWheel/Weiser but may have another Introduction by now. In any case, even if you have a copy of that particular edition, what follows is rather more extensive than was eventually published, as the copy editors, bless their hearts, felt I had banged on a bit too much on details of Brean Down, and cut out a few bits.  
However, much of this I gleaned from a most informative book called Brean Down Fort – Its History and the Defence of the Bristol Channel by Nicholas van der Bijl, BEM (Hawk Editions, Cossington Somerset, 2000) that may be hard to find as I bought from a remainder merchant some years ago. But I felt a bit of actual history would be appropriate as a background to the astral visions of Ms. Le Fay Morgan and the efforts of the long suffering Wilfred.  
Much of the ritual they performed appears in the novel although we have since been able to publish the complete script at Skylight Press in Dion Fortune’s Rites of Isis and of Pan that has turned out to be one of our best sellers. Whether you should try this stuff at home is of course up to you!
 THE SEA PRIESTESS AND BREAN DOWN
At the time Dion Fortune was writing The Sea Priestess, some time in 1936, she had a number of things in common with the main protagonist of her book, Vivien Le Fay Morgan. The most immediately striking was her mode of dress. Dion Fortune had a penchant for large very wide brimmed hats that partly concealed the face, together with a long cloak that descended almost to the ankles, rather like a once famous advertisment for Sandemann`s port; whilst underneath she might sport a scarlet dress. She was also very fond of furs and chunky jewellery, including rings with enormous stones.
            It would be a mistake however, on the strength of this form of esoteric power dressing to assume that author or character were no more than 1930`s poseurs. Beneath the façade was a woman of immense independence of mind and courage of her convictions. It might seem at times even to run to ruthlessness but it was balanced by a soul of great compassion and common sense. And what is more, a highly competent magician.
            The story concerns a high initiate who is about to undertake a major work of sea and moon magic, for which purpose she needs to find a suitable location upon which to build a purpose-made temple complete with living accommodation. At the same time she needs to find a man suitable to train as her assistant in the magical work. With commendable economy of means she kills two birds with one stone by selecting a local estate agent who has the necessarily professional contacts to find a location, together with sufficient artistic skills to help her refurbish and decorate it appropriately. He also has the temperament and personal circumstances that can make of him a capable, if unlikely, magical apprentice.
            Dion Fortune drew from her own experience in the setting of the novel, which takes place in the magical county of Somerset, not far from Glastonbury, reputedly “the holyest erthe in England” and closely associated in popular tradition with King Arthur`s Camelot, the Holy Graal, Joseph of Arimathea, and even more ancient legends that are exploited in the novel as colonial outposts of the lost continent of Atlantis.
The place that the Sea Priestess chose for her Temple can be visited and seen to this day. It lies on that relatively short stretch of English coastline that faces due west, directly upon the broad Atlantic Ocean, without Ireland being in the way. Here a spur of land juts into the sea, a limestone outcrop one and a half miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. It is an extension of the Mendip Hills of that rise above the Somersetshire levels, and is part of a series of outcrops that include Glastonbury Tor, Brent Knoll, and the small islands in the Bristol Channel that stretch towards Wales, Steep Holm and Flat Holm, inhabited only by birds.
            It forms an impressive southern arm to a bay that embraces the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, whilst further to the south, in Dion Fortune`s day, was a rough unexploited expanse of sand dunes extending past the village of Brean as far as the smaller resort of Burnham-on-Sea, today largely subsumed by holiday parks. But the headland itself, Brean Down, at the end of which she built her temple, still stands wild and stark much as described in the novel.
Once the property of Glastonbury Abbey in medieval times, it was sold in the seventeenth century to a family of landed gentry, the Wyndhams, who sought to exploit its potential as a harbour to exploit their sideline as smugglers of brandy, cloth and wine. It is now in the care of the National Trust as a site of special scientific interest in terms of its archaeology and natural history, and it is also a designated bird sanctuary.
            To the esoteric enthusiast keen to trace the foundations of Dion Fortune`s imagination the importance of Brean Down lies less in its flora and fauna, or its Neolithic, Bronze Age, or Romano-Celtic remains, than in the rocky outcrop at the very end, which contains the remains of a military fort. This fort, with its moat, underground rooms, and a rough pathway running out to a little cabin that once housed a searchlight, retains an evocative resonance of the temple envisaged by the Sea Priestess.
 We can easily imagine the searchlight cabin as a place of meditation for Vivien Le Fay Morgan, looking out over the dark line of rocks that extend like steeping stones into the sea, over which she trod at night to the alarm of her colleague William Maxwell as the Atlantic rollers broke around her. Rollers which did indeed snatch and engulf the young half-wit boy who had been helping them - an incident which the Sea Priestess remarked with typical sangfroid, was probably part of the sacrifice expected by the gods at the building of any temple of significance. Nonetheless against this chilling assessment it is only fair to point out that she risked her life in a vain attempt to save him.
            The fort was originally built as a defence against invasion by the French in the 1860`s. Abandoned in 1900 it was reactivated during the Second World War when two naval guns were installed against the threat of German invasion. However the Brean Down of the novel is very much as the young Dion Fortune would have remembered it, for she spent her teen age years in the vicinity and returned to establish her own base in nearby Glastonbury from 1922. The road up to the temple of the Sea Priestess can be trodden to this day, as the old single track military road that took supplies to and from the fort.
The imagination of Dion Fortune reached back beyond historical time however, to a priestess from legendary Atlantis arriving in an ocean-going long boat to visit colonial outposts formed upon the western seaboards of Ireland, Britain, and mainland Europe.  Human habitation of the place in the very distant past is not quite so fanciful as might be thought, as proved by the recent discovery of well preserved roundhouse walls at least 15,000 years old on the southern side of the Down.
            In the novel Brean Down is known as Bell Head, and the nearby town of Dickmouth may be regarded as Weston-super-Mare, where the River Axe that has wound across the Somerset levels debouches into the sea. This river in the novel is call the Dick, with a certain play on words in that one part of it, the Narrow Dick, recalls the great River Naradek, of Atlantean legend, that ran past the City of the Golden Gates. Similarly the little town of Dickford upon the same river, may be identified with the village of Axbridge that nestles under the Mendip Hills not far from the Cheddar Gorge, famous for its caves and its cheese.
Of the other local topography the Bell Knowle of the novel may be equated with Brent Knoll and Starber with Burnham-on-Sea. Bell Knowle of the novel is on the course of the original Narrow Dick, and a small watercourse still runs from East Brent into the Axe. In real life Brent Knoll still holds a certain magical ambience. Within living memory, school children climbed it every Good Friday to collect posies, my wife in her childhood being one of them; and in more recent times local opposition caused the building of the M4 motorway to be diverted so as not to desecrate it, and as one drives south it seems, by the bends in the road, to swing from side to side of the carriage way in a magical and disconcerting manner.
            As Wilfred Maxwell and Vivien Le Fay Morgan begin to work magically together, so they recover ancient memories of a previous incarnation, and the local topography takes on the significance of Atlantean colonial times. Bell Knowle contains a cave-like temple, and vines are grown at the landward end of Bell Head, within the paws of the headland that reminds them of a couchant lion. Here they also see a port, and indeed one did exist in Roman times, for in the course of ages this low lying land has been in turn salt marsh or even shallow sea to make of the Down an island. 
            Vivien`s relationship toward William Maxwell is however the important theme of the novel to which this ancient landscape forms a background. It reflects Dion Fortune`s own feeling toward men in general during the period at which she wrote this novel. It was a time when she was also performing her Rite of Isis to invited audiences at the Belfry, that strange temple in London that she later described in her subsequent novel Moon Magic, and it is excerpts from this Rite that are extensively quoted in this novel too.
Its purpose is to awaken her male partner to his full potential by acting as a priestess mediating a goddess to him. At the end of this experience he should have achieved greater psychic and spiritual wholeness, having met and realised the deeper and subtler powers of the feminine.  He has become an initiate of the goddess if we choose to put it in esoteric terms – whilst she, as the adept, in pursuit of her own magical destiny, passes on, uncommitted, to her next assignment from the inner beings for whom she works, represented in the novel by the shadowy figure known as the Priest of the Moon.  
The Rite of Isis, with its evocation of the powers of the archetypal feminine, although largely the fruit of Dion Fortune`s genius, has in large part its source of inspiration in the Dionysian and Orphic traditions of pre-Olympian Greece. There is evidence to show that at about this time Dion Fortune had just read and been much impressed by Jane Harrison`s Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion.
This work, with its somewhat forbidding academic title, was first published in 1903. Its author was a remarkable woman who, at a time when it was extremely difficult for a woman to gain a university degree, had not only done this but had broken into the enclosed male preserves of classical studies, studying under Sir James Frazer, author of the famous work The Golden Bough.  With her book she shook to the core the cosy conservative male establishment of Edwardian academe by approaching the religion of the earlier ancient Greeks from the standpoint of  evolutionary anthropology.
Jane Harrison`s book also vastly stimulated Dion Fortune when she came upon it some thirty years later, and there are parts of ancient rituals quoted within the text that have a close resonance with phrases from the Rite of Isis, as the initiate or the newly deceased approaches “the secret well beside the sacred tree” announcing “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven but my race is of Heaven alone.” 
            In practical psychological terms what Vivien Le Fay Morgan does for Wilfred is to release him from the hen pecking dominance of his mother and sister, release and develop his repressed imaginative and artistic talents, incidentally cure him of asthmatic attacks at the same time, and lead him to meeting and marrying a local girl with whom he seems set fair to live happily ever afterwards.
That this is done by recourse to ritual magic may be thought a little unorthodox in more conservative circles, but Vivien Le Fay Morgan evidently paid scant regard to these, whilst at the same time leading a life of virginal rectitude as uncompromising as the incumbent of an enclosed religious order. This is a side of the Sea Priestess which is apt to be forgotten by latter day aspirants to her as a role model.
            However, Vivien Le Fay Morgan is not going to the immense trouble of locating a likely site for a sea temple, and having it built and decorated virtually from scratch, purely for the regeneration of  William Maxwell. She intends to perform works of higher magic within it, and what he gets out of helping her with it is his incidental reward, or the just dues for the service he has put in. In all successful operations of magic the books have to balance at the end of the day.
Just what her magical aims and methods may be she tries to explain to Wilfred, in Chapter 17, and of course one aim of the novel itself was to give some instruction about practical magic to the reader, at a time when esoteric secrecy was taken very seriously and thought best not to be expounded as fact. Strange as it may seem, she had even felt uncomfortable about being accused of revealing too much in her innocuous textbook The Mystical Qabalah. Fiction was her way of slightly raising the veil of secrecy.
As she explains to Wilfred, her first aim is to make a “magical image” of herself,  but this is something that she cannot do unaided: “For me to make a magical image of myself is auto-suggestion, and begins and ends subjectively. But when two or three of us get to work together, and you picture me as I picture myself, then things begin to happen. Your suggestion aids my autosuggestion, and then – then it passes outside ourselves, and things begin to build up in the astral ethers, and they are the channels of forces.”
Something of what she means by this is immediately demonstrated when, stoking up the Fire of Azrael, she evokes within him a powerful vision of times from the remote past. And this is an experience which is not entirely subjective, for it has “signs following” in a great storm that lashes the place, together with the personal crisis of a severe asthma attack in which, slipping into unconsciousness, Wilfred, as he himself describes it, “meets the sea-gods”. There follows a passage of Dion Fortune writing at her evocative best, about the images he sees in the driving waves at the height of the storm on a fitful moonlit night between the dark of wind torn clouds.
As for Vivien herself, she reveals that she works under instruction from a discarnate being who is referred to only as the Priest of the Moon. It is under his instruction that she is undertaking this work, one of the goals of which is to contact herself to the ultimate spiritual source, known to Qabalists as the Great Unmanifest, the formless power behind the fount of creation itself.
This in turn relates to the great zodiacal tides of the precession of the equinoxes, whereby in the coming Age of Aquarius the old gods will be coming back, after another manner. Her own part in this is to make the way clear for the realisation of the divine feminine as part of the cult of the Great Goddess – who as Our Lady Isis comprises all goddesses, of the corn, of the dead, of the sea, of the moon. As she states, in Chapter 19, the magical work that they  do together is to break a trail for those who come after: “we shall bring back into modern life something that has been lost and forgotten and that is badly needed.”
This “something lost and forgotten” is something rather more than sexual relationship as a biological function, whether for reproductive purposes or for mutual diversion. Rather is it “a subtle, magical relationship that is very rare.”  As she goes on to explain: “People think that sex is physical and that love is emotional, and they don`t realise that there is something else between a man and a woman which is magnetic in just the same way as the compass turns to the pole; and it isn`t in them any more than it is in the compass, but it is something that passes through them and uses them, and it belongs to Nature. It is the thing that has kept me young, Wilfred, when I ought to be an old, old woman, and it is the thing that is making you, who used to be a mother`s boy, as quarrelsome as a cock on a midden.”
In this, is she is hinting at what alchemists of old referred to as the Elixir of Life or the Quintessence of the Elements or the Gluten of the White Eagle?
From explanations and beginnings such as this she teaches Wilfred how to help her in working of her Rite of Isis, and it should by now be obvious that there is more to working a ritual than reciting lines from a script. Magic is an art that requires the simultaneous linkage through the subconscious mind of the practitioner with an inner objective world that has been variously called the Anima Mundi, or latterly, if somewhat inadequately, the collective unconscious. 
In the course of realising this Wilfred comes to terms with the Priest of the Moon, the shadowy figure behind Vivien Le Fay Morgan in the ritual that they are working. It is an inner contact, and one about which he wonders, quite reasonably, whether it is but a figment of his own subconscious mind, implanted there by suggestion. To some extent it may be, but to leave it there is to be content with a mere half truth, for imagination and suggestion are but a priming of the pump. Once primed, the pump surges with objective force from a source that is beyond personality or the individual subconscious.
As Wilfred describes his contact with the Priest of the Moon,  the over riding impression is an awareness of a distinct dynamic personality: “The Priest of the Moon had personality in a very marked degree, and if he was a product of my subconcious, I am proud of it. There were times, not infrequent, when I used to wonder what he was, and whether I was deluding myself, or whether I was loopy; but each time I met him afresh I knew what he was, beyond all doubting, and he left his mark on me.” 
In his words, Dion Fortune is also confiding to us her own experience of this area of esoteric work, and her sentiments could be confirmed by most competent practitioners of the magical arts.
The Rite of Isis having been successfully performed, Vivien Le Fay Morgan disappears from the book and from Wilfred`s ken – to reappear in different circumstances in the subsequent novel Moon Magic. Her immediate disappearance coincides with a rock fall in the cave temple in which she has been working, perhaps suggested to Dion Fortune by the explosion at the fort that caused its closure in 1900. 
However, the magical function goes on. It has been successfully passed on to Wilfred and to his new wife Molly, together with the contact with the Priest of the Moon, who continues to work with them in what Wilfred can best describe as a waking dream. In these concluding chapters of Wilfred and Molly the development and work of two initiates in the world is described, indicating that magic is not only the prerogative of those rare examples of advanced initiation like Vivien Le Fay Morgan whose life is dedicated to nothing but the pursuit of the magical arts. 
Thus the novel, in addition to its narrower function of a demonstration of a magical operation evoking the powers of the Sephirah Yesod according to the theoretical principles outlined The Mystical Qabalah, serves also as a practical illustration of the principles that Dion Fortune outlined in her two earlier text books written immediately after she had founded the Fraternity of the Inner Light,  The Esoteric Orders and their Work and The Training and Work of an Initiate, upon which her earlier students were trained, and whose principles remain true to this day.
 

The Sanctuary at Chalice Orchard

Looking through the notes I compiled when I was writing  Dion Fortune and the Inner Light  back in 1999 I realise that the chalet at Chalice Orchard I recently referred to as the Shrine was in fact called the Sanctuary.  But no doubt, as the saying goes, a rose by any other name will smell as sweet!  And such a place played an important part in her work.
 Dion Fortune and Thomas Loveday acquired Chalice Orchard in 1924.  Up to then they had no headquarters of their own at Glastonbury, and most of the work performed so far had been either at Alice Buckton’s guest house at Chalice Well or in an old farm house in Chalkwell Street. (It was here that Dion Fortune experienced her celebrated vision of a salamander after a fiery accident with an oil lamp!)
The Fraternity of the Inner Light was formally founded in 1927, along with the Inner Light Magazine, although the first mention of Chalice Orchard by Dion Fortune is in the May 1927 issue of The Transactions of the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society (of which she happened to be president for a brief period) . She wrote:
“We are betraying no secret of the Mysteries if we remind our readers that ‘the holiest earth in England’ is Glastonbury. The veil is very thin there, and no sensitive soul that makes the Glastonbury pilgrimage returns as it went. It is for this reason that a pilgrimage centre has been founded there, and those who seek the hidden side of things may go thither and meet others like-minded to themselves.
“When the power-tides are flowing it is very necessary that all should be ‘of one mind in one place’ if the power is to be brought through in its strength. The critic and scoffer close the doors of the soul and the angel of the threshold turns back as he is about to enter the guest chamber. Only where knowledge and dedication have control of the conditions can the mental atmosphere be made that is necessary for the manifesting of the power-tides upon the physical plane.
“In the Chalice Orchard Club we have made a centre where these conditions can be maintained, and we cordially invite all those who seek the door into the Unseen to come to us there and share with us the wonderful atmosphere of the Isle of Avalon untainted by scepticism and heedlessness. In the old apple orchard high upon the shoulder of the Tor stands a little wooden building dedicated to the service of the Masters and the opening of the soul. All who seek that opening are welcome.
“Here will be found a realisation that the two aspects of force, spiritual and elemental, are necessary to the completion of life. Some parts of Glastonbury, such as the Abbey, are purely spiritual; other aspects, such as the Tor, are purely pagan. Under the apple trees in Chalice Orchard, we seek the realisation and harmonisation of both; the spiritual aspects bringing inspiration and devotion; the pagan aspects bringing joy, power and beauty.
“I may not tell the seasons of  pagan power, but the Christian Path has no secrets, and we invite all who seek the Graal to come to join us at Chalice Orchard for the great Christian festivals, and especially for the one that now draws near, the glorious feast of Pentecost. High up above the green water-meadows on the shoulder of the Tor, looking out across the Severn estuary to the hills of Wales, a low wooden house hides among the apple trees. Its doors stand open to all who seek the Way across the Threshold by the Western Gate.”
The chalet called ‘the Sanctuary’ was erected in 1932, following an appeal for funds.
“We want to establish at Chalice Orchard a sanctuary for meditation and practical occult work, and we ask all those who are interested in our Centre there if they will contribute to the fund we have opened for that purpose.
“Glastonbury is essentially a place of pilgrimage. No one who visits it can fail to realise its strong spiritual atmosphere. We feel that it would be of very great value to have there a quiet place set apart for prayer and meditation, where those who desire to do so may enter into the silence.
“We are therefore asking all those who realise the significance of Glastonbury and who have felt the inspiration  of its influence, and especially those who know and love the little hostel in its sheltered garden, to contribute to this fund in order that we may make a sanctuary and keep a perpetual light upon its altar.”
The importance that Dion Fortune laid upon a Sanctuary is revealed in comments from one of her inner contacts about the one they established at their London headquarters.
“You must maintain very carefully the sanctity and isolation of this home. It is for that reason that you are isolating your Sanctuary, and great power will concentrate there. Keep the lights dim there, and allow nothing to disturb it.
 “It is well for you to accustom yourselves to this means of communication. It is perfectly normal. I am just as much alive as you are. You must learn to accustom yourselves to the idea that man is consciousness, not a vehicle, and then there will be nothing strange to you in the idea of contacting consciousness. It is one of the chief bases of occult work that the imagination takes the initial step. Faith is the basis of all things. If you have faith, determination, and courage, you can achieve anything. It depends on no one but you.
“There is more power in meditating in silence, but you should invoke aloud. By invoking aloud you give rise to certain vibrations, which have an important effect because they have their correlation with the subtler planes. You invoke aloud in order to bring through from the subtler planes to the physical, but when you meditate you aim to go to the subtler planes.
“It is so much easier to go on to the subtler planes than you realise. First you imagine yourself to be there, and then you will yourself to be there. People usually reverse the process. It is necessary to make the form before you pour in the force. You do it now to a greater extent than you realise – you are functioning on two planes, you have more vision than you bring through to conscious consciousness.” (cf. Dion Fortune & the Inner Light  pp. 96-97 – Thoth Publications, 2000).
As regards further details of such form building see also my own Magical Images and the Magical Imagination (now also available as an e-book)  or indeed Dion Fortune’s Magical Battle of Britain, the editing of which in 1993 brought through some very live contacts to me, that resulted in The Abbey Papers, a very comprehensive demonstration of form building for a variety of purposes as seen from the other side. (All Skylight Press).
 

Dion Fortune and Glastonbury Tor

 My thanks go to David Walker who with his wife Corinne  runs the Enchantment book and esoteric merchandise shop at the foot of Glastonbury Tor for his clarification of just what is on sale for auction of the Dion Fortune associated bit of real estate. It is NOT the original Chalice Orchard but a slice taken out of it on which a very nice modern house was built round about the late 50’s. So if anyone is delving in their back pocket for something to spend at the auction, read the small print and make sure exactly what you are bidding for.
However, it is possible that DF spent some time on the space involved, depending on whether one of the original chalets, known as ‘the Shrine’ was located on that particular spot. I recall visiting the place back in 1954, as I described in I Called it Magic, and if my recollection is right the Shrine chalet was down towards if not in that area. I was shown it by Mary Gilchrist, who lived at Chalice Orchard at the time. It was in a rather sorry state, used to house what looked like old furniture, although it still had a certain amount of inner whizz bang about it, and would have last been used by Dion Fortune in 1945 following  its dedication and esoteric use by the group in the nineteen thirties.
However, the past is past, and we needs must embrace change when it is due. The Tor is still there and available to all – in recognition of which I append a little piece that I wrote a few years back, largely based on Dion Fortune’s Avalon of the Heart . It can form the basis of a pleasant little meditation whether you are physically there or not.
Dion Fortune’s vision of the Tor
If Joseph of Arimathea set his sights on Glastonbury Tor to identify the final goal of his long journey, for Dion Fortune it was above all a focus of elemental power and inspiration. Upon its shoulder she built her home, a guest house, and a sanctuary.
As she saw it, it was a Hill of Vision for anyone whose eyes have the least inclination to open upon another world. And she describes, in Avalon of the Heart, how, on many occasions, the tower is reported to have been seen rimmed in light. And she tells how a warm glow, as of a furnace, may beat up from the ground on wild winter knights; or the sound of chanting be heard from the depths of the hill; or towering forms of shadow and light seen to be moving among the ancient thorn-trees that clothe the lower slopes.
            But wonderful though the view from the Tor might be by day for the many pilgrims and tourists who climb it, far more wonderful, she says, is the sight by night for those who dare to climb it in the dark. Or most wonderful of all, perhaps, to climb the Tor at sunset and watch the sun go down over the far Atlantic, when from the Tor one may see two sunsets – the sun himself in his glory in the west, and his reflection upon the clouds in the eastern sky.
Whilst to see the moon rising through the rose-pink glow of low clouds over the darkening marshes is a thing she found never to be forgotten. As the lights come on in the town at the foot of the hill, at any rate in her day, they were seen to form a five-pointed star, for there are five roads out of Avalon – to Wells, Meare, Street, Butleigh, and Shepton Mallet – and the houses, following along these roads form a perfect star of light about the Tor with its tower.
            But there is one time above all others when it is well to ascend the Tor at nightfall, and that is at the full moon of the autumnal equinox, round about the Mass of St Michael. The nights are coming cold then, but the days are still warm with the afterglow of summer, and the cold of the darkness, chilling the warm breath of the meadows, causes a thick but shallow mist to form over the levels.
Through this the cattle wade knee-deep as in water, and trees cast shadows in the moonlight, black upon silver. As the night closes in, the mist deepens. Like a rising tide in an estuary it fills the hollows. Trees and barns slowly drown. Only the few scattered knolls like St Bride`s Beckary remain as islands in the white gloom. Gradually they too fade as the mist thickens, and Avalon is an island again.
            Local folk call this shallow mist that lies upon the levels the Lake of Wonder. And then perhaps to the eyes of vision may be seen coming slowly, a black barge, rowed by a dumb man, bearing the three weeping queens who bring Arthur, wounded unto death at Lyonesse, that he may heal him of his grievous wound in the green coombs among the apple trees.
            Into this Lake of Wonder Sir Bedivere flung the magic sword Excalibur, graven with strange runes in an unknown tongue. And the white arm of a Lady of the Lake, rising from the rushes, seized it to draw it under. And we may recall that Excalibur, was a gift to the human Arthur from the world of Faery, and to the world of Faery it was in due time returned.
But what of the other hallows of the Graal, the spear, the cup, the stone, or the cruets of white and red? Great mystery surrounds their origin as well as their fate. If we read the earliest Graal stories, we find there is much to suggest that the Graal itself had a faery origin. Was the rich Fisher King in his boat upon the waters, who directed Percival to the mysterious castle that was at first invisible to the eye, one of the Faery kind?
            In later legend the Graal winners took a strange boat, called the Ship of Solomon, in which they took the Graal to Sarras, which seems an inner aspect of the Holy Land just as Logres is an inner level of Albion. What was the mission of Joseph of Arimathea in all of this? Is the belief that he was bringing back the Graal to Avalon, a realisation that the Hallows were about to be returned to their faery origins?
            All these speculations, and many more, may come to us when, in Dion Fortune`s words, the Lake of Wonder rises from its faery springs under the Hunter`s Moon.
But, there are also visions of a different kind that can be seen from the height of the Tor by day; one of which Dion Fortune had witnessed twice and says is a sight never to be forgotten.
In the ordinary heat of day, she recalls, there are times when there falls upon the Glastonbury levels what is known locally as the Blight. A strange heaviness that will not turn to thunder is in the summer air. The sun glows dully like a copper disk through the low lying clouds, and in the oppressive dimness and heat, nerves are on edge with restlessness and uneasiness.
            On one such occasion, driven desperate by the oppressiveness of the levels, she and her companions set out to climb the Tor. Up and up through densest mist they climbed, moving in a sphere some ten feet in diameter, shut in by a white wall impenetrable as stone – until they reached the very summit. And there, from a white blindness, they came out of the mist as suddenly as a train runs out of a tunnel. For the crest of the Tor was above the cloud line.
The sky was of that deep indigo blue often seen at Avalon – a blue that should be seen through the boughs of an apple tree in blossom. From marge to marge no cloud flecked its depths, but below their feet there stretched to the very horizon a rolling, billowing sea of purest white, with purple in the hollows. While above their heads was the tower, its shadow flung far out over the cloudy floor. It was as if the world had sunk in the sea and they were the last of mankind. No sound rose through the mist, no bird circled above. There was nothing but blue sky, grey tower, billowing mist and blazing sun.
Physical though this vision might have been, and possibly because of this, I think this simple image is as important as any of the visions of the legendary tales. It is an image of the elemental powers as they exist at their most direct and most obvious way. Earth, Water, Air and Fire. The Air of the inverted bowl of the blue sky above. The Earth of the stone of the tower below, its foundations in the earth. The Water heaving and billowing within the mist all about. And the Fire of the great Day Star shining on all from above.
It provides the foundation for a fundamentally important symbolic structure to link between the Powers of the Above and with the Powers of the Below. The Power within the Heavens and the Power within the Land. The Heavenly Light with the Earth Light. The Overworld with the Underworld.
If you are familiar with the structure of the Tree of Life,  you may like to experiment with it.