Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Undoubtedly, Gurdjieff’s mastery of these disciplines gave him remarkable Psi powers—the way he could revitalise an exhausted follower by some inexplicable transmission of energy is only one example. He was also able to establish telepathic links with his followers. Ouspensky has recalled how, when they were in Finland, he began to hear Gurdjieff’s voice inside his chest, and was able to carry on conversations with Gurdjieff who was in another part of the house. At the Prieuré Gurdjieffs pupils would give displays of telepathy for visitors, transmitting the names or shapes of various hidden objects from the audience to the stage. Gurdjieff obviously had profound psychic gifts. One day he told his pupils that a newcomer, who was out of the room, was susceptible to a certain chord of music. When the person came in he struck the chord on the piano, and she immediately underwent a kind of hysterical fit.

  There are many stories of Gurdjieff’s fund-raising skills that demonstrate not only his special psychological insight but also his sense of humour. Before one of his parties to raise money in New York, Gurdjieff asked Fritz Peters to teach him all the most obscene four-letter words he knew. When a large number of respectable and rich New Yorkers arrived, Gurdjieff began to talk to them about his ideas, gradually introducing more and more talk of sex. Finally his conversation consisted almost entirely of four-letter words. His guests relaxed, and then began to flirt with one another. Eventually, all inhibitions gone, they proceeded to behave with total abandon. Suddenly Gurdjieff stood up in the centre of the room, thunderously demanded their attention, and then pointed out that he had revealed to them something about themselves that they had never suspected. Surely, he asked, that was worth a large contribution to his institute? At the end of the evening, he was some thousands of dollars richer.

  During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject. Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers. Gurdjieff was in almost every respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley. Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it. Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff, on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow. One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him. He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples. What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.

  Nevertheless, Gurdjieff undoubtedly understood all the tricks of thought pressure. One of the most typical stories of him is told by the writer and traveler Rom Landau. One day, Landau was sitting in a restaurant with an attractive lady novelist. She was facing away from Gurdjieff, who was sitting on the other side of the restaurant. Suddenly she turned as if she had been struck, and her eyes met Gurdjieff’s. Then, blushing, she turned away. Later she admitted to Landau that Gurdjieff had somehow ‘struck her through her sexual center’, including a powerful sexual response as if with an intimate caress.

  Like Rasputin, Gurdjieff was no saint in his personal relations with women. Unlike Rasputin, however, he knew how to direct and control his extraordinary powers. His disciples regard him as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, and it is not necessary to be a disciple of Gurdjieff’s to think that they may be right.

  Among the most remarkable—and at present underestimated—magicians of the 20th century is the brilliantly talented writer who called herself Dion Fortune.

  Little is known of her childhood, as her biographer, Alan Richardson, admits.1 Born in Llandudno on December 6, 1890, the only child of a lawyer, and of a mother who became an ardent Christian Scientist, Violet Mary Firth seems to have been an introverted child who began to have ‘visions’ at the age of 4. (She later came to believe they were of past lives.) She was also sensitive to psychic phenomena from early childhood. Another well-known psychic, Phoebe Payne, has described how as a child she always saw pretty ‘auras’ surrounding flowers, and was surprised to discover later that they were invisible to most people. Violet Firth found that she was able to sense people’s hidden thoughts and feelings. From the beginning, she ‘walked in two worlds’, and later developed into a good medium.

  At the age of 20 in 1911 she became a teacher in a private school. The principal was a highly domineering woman—a power-hungry bully who had studied the occult in India. After several fierce arguments with the principal, Dion Fortune decided to quit her job. A colleague advised her to leave without telling the principal, saying that if she did not, she would never get away. Against this advice she told her superior. The principal said she was welcome to leave if she first admitted that she was incompetent and had no self-confidence. Dion Fortune indignantly denied the charges. The principal then fixed her with her eyes and repeated the statement hundreds of times for four hours.

  Eventually some deep instinct warned Dion Fortune to pretend to give way, and to beg her principal’s pardon. The older woman then relented and let her go. But the damage was done: Dion Fortune was a physical and mental wreck for the next three years. After more than a year of the illness, she later wrote, ‘my body was like an electric battery that has been completely discharged’. A psychologist’s diagnosis would probably be that the principal had used a kind of hypnotic power to deflate her self-esteem, to make her feel helpless and accident-prone. The effect was to drain her vital reserves, as Gurdjieff would have put it, so that the slightest effort exhausted her. She came to the conclusion that the woman had damaged her with a ‘psychic attack’, causing her astral body to leak vital energy. She plunged deep into the study of occultism as an antidote. Perhaps the most interesting part of her account of this experience is her statement that the principal had used not merely hypnotism but also telepathic suggestion—in other words, thought pressure.

  It seems to have been this encounter that decided her to become a student of psychoanalysis, which was just then arousing much hostile attention amongst the British medical fraternity. In Psychic Self Defense, her story of the battle with the domineering principal, she states briefly: ‘I took up the subject and became a student, and eventually a lecturer, at a clinic that was founded in London.’ This was the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square. She goes on to explain that she soon noticed that some patients left her psychologically drained, and that when one of the nurses told her that some patients seemed to ‘take it out’ of the electrical machines, and could absorb high voltages without turning a hair, she began to wonder whether she was not dealing with some vital force that was quite distinct from Freud’s libido. She became convinced that some people are ‘psychic vampires’—a conclusion in accordance with the principles of ‘occultism’.

  When she discovered that the Theosophical Society had founded a club not far from the clinic in Brunswick Square, she joined it—not, as she explains, because she was interested in Theosophy, but because it was a convenient place to get a cheap meal. As a Freudian, she was contemptuous of the doctrines of the Theosophists; but when one day she decided to attend a meditation class—‘in a spirit of mischief’—she was startled to observe in front of her eyes a clear image of a garden with blue plants. When the leader of the group announced that she was trying to transfer the image of delphiniums, she realised that some kind of thought-transference had taken place. Feeling that thought-reading would be an admirable gift for a psychoanalyst, she became a regular member of the meditation class. And as she recognised the reality of thought-transference, she also began to feel increasingly dissatisfied with the narrow materialism of the Freudians. With typical honesty, she decided to give up psychoanalysis and join the Land Army, which she felt to be a more useful job in war time. She was placed in charge of a laboratory where research was being conducted into food. Her job involved hours of waiting while bacteria brewed in an incubator. And in the long hours of silence, her vision turned inward. The result,
she explains, was the sudden opening of ‘astral sight’, ‘which gave me one of the frights of my life’. With a sense of being helplessly swept into something she failed to understand, she hurried along to the library of the Theosophical Society in Tavistock Square, and borrowed Annie Besant’s book The Ancient Wisdom. Suddenly, she was converted to a belief in the Masters (although she always maintained that Madame Blavatsky was stretching the truth when she insisted that she had seen them in the flesh). For the next ten days she seemed to live in a strange, twilit world (which she would later identify as the ‘astral plane’ of the Cabala). On the tenth night she had a dream of tremendous vividness, in which she stood in the presence of the Master Jesus, and other Masters. In her dream, she was accepted as a pupil. When she woke up, she was convinced of the reality of her experience. A second Master she later identified as the Comte de St Germain.

  Now her problem was to understand what was happening to her. She read R.M. Bucke’s classic Cosmic Consciousness, and Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. She also met an Irishman named Theodore William Moriarty, a Freemason and occultist who became her teacher in magic. (She later fictionalised him as her ‘psychic detective’ Doctor Taverner.) Soon she had become a member of a group of female disciples who studied with him at a house in Bishops Stortford and another in Eversley, near Wokingham. More extraordinary psychic events took place there, which she describes in Psychic Self Defense. It seems, though, that Violet Firth was not much liked by her fellow disciples, who regarded her as ‘pushing’.

  While she was still a member of the Moriarty group, she renewed acquaintance with a lady named Maiya Curtis-Webb, whom she had known since childhood. She was a ‘walking encyclopedia of occultism’, and it was she who introduced Violet Firth to J.W. Brodie-Innes of the Golden Dawn. The result was that, in 1919, Violet Firth was initiated into the London Temple of the Golden Dawn, where she was given the magical name ‘Deo, non Fortune’, which she later transmuted into Dion Fortune.

  It was at the London Temple that she met Moina Mathers, the widow of MacGregor Mathers, who was still running a remnant of the Golden Dawn. Mrs Mathers at first liked the attractive younger woman, and even agreed when Dion Fortune proposed forming a group of occultists more open to the general public—an idea directly opposed to the secrecy of the original Order. However, after Dion Fortune had written a number of books and articles on occultism, Mrs Mathers began to feel threatened by the energy and talent of the newcomer. It seems probable that Mrs Mathers hoped to turn the Golden Dawn into a source of income. In any case, Mrs Mathers ordered her to stop publicising the secrets of the Order. According to Dion Fortune, when she ignored the other woman’s wishes, Mrs Mathers launched a black-magic attack on her. The opening salvo seems to have been a plague of black cats: dozens of them invaded Dion Fortune’s house, and two of her friends were bothered by the odour of cats in their respective offices several miles away. Then one morning Dion Fortune saw a giant cat walking down the stairs toward her. As she stared, terrified, it vanished—and she realized that someone was using a kind of telepathic hypnotism on her. An hour later, the street outside her home was filled with dozens of howling black cats.

  Dion Fortune’s major struggle occurred when she made an astral journey. Her description of this is interesting because it gives us some insight into what magicians actually do when they visit the astral plane. A number of her followers formed a circle around her as she lay down and went into a light trance. ‘In the language of psychology,’ she wrote, ‘it is autohypnosis by means of a symbol.’ (Bear in mind that the Golden Dawn believed certain symbols are universal archetypes from the racial unconscious. Each of these symbols has a precise meaning, and will therefore elicit a particular response.) ‘The trained initiate, therefore, does not wander on the astral plane like an uneasy ghost, but comes and goes by well-known corridors.’ In other words, it is essentially a voyage into inner space, which the occultist believes to have a geography as precise as the world we live in, and to be common territory, like the world outside us, in which separate individuals may sometimes meet.

  As soon as she had entered this inner space, Dion Fortune became aware of Mrs Mathers in her magical robes, barring her path. Mrs Mathers was of a higher grade in magic than Dion Fortune and, therefore, theoretically, stronger. ‘There ensued a battle of wills in which I experienced the sensation of being whirled through the air and falling from a great height, and found myself back in my body.’ When she emerged from her trance, her followers were in disarray: she had somersaulted across the room, bowling them over, and was lying in a corner. Realising that if she were to continue as a magician she had to return to the fight, she ordered the group to reform the circle. After invoking the Secret Chiefs, she went into a trance. ‘This time, there was a short sharp struggle, and I was through. I had the Vision of the Inner Chiefs and returned. The fight was over. I have never had any trouble since.’ That night when she undressed to go to bed, Dion Fortune found that her back was scratched—as if clawed by a huge cat.

  Of course this story could be pure invention. Yet, in one important respect, that is not the question at issue. We have no way of determining whether the story is objectively true—whether Dion Fortune actually journeyed the corridors of the astral plane. The question is whether the account has its own kind of integrity, and whether the experience was different in kind from an ordinary nightmare. Dion Fortune, like other magicians, certainly took the concept of the magical attack very seriously. She described in one of her books how one of her followers, Netta Fornario, was killed by an ‘astral attack’. Miss Fornario had gone to the Holy Isle of Iona in western Scotland to practice astral travel. One day she seemed panic-stricken and told her landlady that she was being attacked telepathically—her silver jewellery had all turned black overnight. The next day her body was found some miles away, dressed only in a magical robe. The soles of her feet were lacerated as if she had run over sharp stones. She had died of a heart attack, and Dion Fortune was convinced that Mrs Mathers was responsible.

  It was inevitable that Mrs Mathers and Dion Fortune would go their separate ways. In 1924, Dion Fortune founded the Community (later, Fraternity) of the Inner Light; originally conceived as a part of the Golden Dawn, it assumed its own identity, four years later, with Dion Fortune as its ‘Warden’. Her inner Master was now Melchizedec, ‘Lord of Flame and also of Mind’, and after initiation her pupils became High Priests of the Order of Melchizedec. Other Masters were Thomas Erskine, a Lord Chancellor at the time of Dr Johnson, Sir Thomas More, and—oddly enough—Socrates. She came to believe that Socrates was responsible for much of her magical magnum opus, The Cosmic Doctrine.

  In the year of The Cosmic Doctrine, 1927, she married a handsome and charming Welshman, Thomas Penry Evans, who was a doctor and two years her junior—she called him Merl, after Merlin. In 1930, she leased a house called The Belfry in West Halkin Street, near Belgrave Square. She ran her ‘magical school’ at a house in Glastonbury, Chalice Orchard (later bought by the Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe), and gave lectures at 3 Queensborough Terrace in London. During the next twelve years she wrote her novels The Winged Bull (1935), The Goat-Foot God (1936), The Sea Priestess (1938)—regarded as her masterpiece—and Moon Magic (1939.) They have been described as the finest novels about magic ever written, and there is no doubt that they are works of extraordinary fascination—certainly among the best fiction ever written by an ‘occultist’.

  She also tells us a great deal in the novels about the gradual break-up of her marriage. There seem to have been many reasons—her lack of interest in physical sexuality, her increasing bulk (it seems to be a characteristic of mediums that they put on weight), her autocratic temperament. In 1938, her husband went to Barcelona to help the Republican government with the nutritional problems of children; on his return, he met a younger woman, and asked his wife for a divorce, which she granted.

  During the war years, her life became increasingly dark. One of her leading disciple
s, Charles Seymour, defected—she regarded him as a great magician. Grandiose schemes for a national occult movement came to nothing. She became convinced that a black magician who was a member of Hitler’s entourage was launching a magical assault on her, and her health declined.

  In 1945, using the name ‘Mrs Matthews,’ she asked for an appointment with a Jungian psychiatrist, Dr Laurence Bendit. (Dion Fortune had become a ‘Jungian’, having long ago abandoned Freud.) She told him she felt she was approaching a crisis in her life, and wanted analysis. Bendit was struck by her keen intelligence. She described a number of dreams full of mythological images, but all, he noted, with an underlying tone of darkness. One day, as they were talking about the Cabala, Dr Bendit mentioned that the only book he had read on it was Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah, and went on to make some criticism of her interpretation of Tiphereth. His patient then told him: ‘I am Dion Fortune.’ (The book Dr Bendit mentioned is generally acknowledged to be her most important contribution to the theory of ritual magic.)

  Mrs Bendit had seen Dion Fortune passing through the waiting room, and had asked the identity of ‘that strange woman’. When her husband asked why she wanted to know, Mrs Bendit remarked: ‘I couldn’t help noticing she was just a burned-out shell.’

  At Christmas, as she made another appointment, Dr Bendit had a sudden intuitive certainty that she would not keep it. And when he sent her cheque to his bank in the New Year, it was returned stamped ‘Drawer deceased’. What had seemed a general malaise had suddenly flared into acute leukaemia.

  It seems appropriate that Dion Fortune should be the last ‘great magician’ of the 20th century. More than any other, she has left a personal record of herself in her works, and these are unique in that they reveal the inner life of an ‘adept’ in such intimate detail. They make it clear that the destiny of a magician is at the same time one of the most fascinating and one of the most difficult in the world.