by Dion Fortune
OTHER BOOKS BY DION FORTUNE
OCCULT STUDY
Machinery of the Mind
The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage
Psychology of the Servant Problem
The Soya Bean
Esoteric Orders and their Work
The Problem of Purity
Sane Occultism
Training and Work of an Initiate
Mystical Meditations on the Collects
Spiritualism in the Light of Occult Science
Psychic Self-Defense
Glastonbury—Avalon of the Heart
The Mystical Qabalah
Practical Occultism in Daily Life
The Cosmic Doctrine
Through the Gates of Death
Applied Magic
Aspects of Occultism
The Magical Battle of Britain
OCCULT FICTION
The Demon Lover
The Secrets of Dr Taverner
Goat-Foot God
The Winged Bull
The Sea Priestess
Moon Magic
This edition first published in 2003 by
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
York Beach, ME
With offices at:
500 Third Street, Suite 230
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.redwheelweiser.com
Copyright © 1956 Society of the Inner Light
Foreword Copyright © 2003 Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 1956 by Aquarian Press, London.
Dion Fortune™ is a registered trademark.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 1-57863-289-7
Typeset in Sabon by Garrett Brown
Printed in Canada
TCP
10 09 08 07 06
8 7 6 5 4 3 2
www.redwheelweiser.com
www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART I: A STUDY IN TELEPATHY
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART II: THE MOON MISTRESS
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART III: THE DOOR WITHOUT A KEY
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It is because my novels are packed with such things as these (symbolism directed to the subconscious) that I want my students to take them seriously. The ‘Mystical Qabalah’ gives the theory, but the novels give the practice. Those who read the novels without having studied the ‘Qabalah’ will get hints and a stimulus to their subconscious. Those who study the Qabalah without reading the novels will get an interesting intellectual jig-saw puzzle to play with; but those who study the ‘Mystical Qabalah’ with the help of the novels get the keys of the Temple put into their hands. As Our Lord said: “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?”
—Dion Fortune
Dion Fortune's ability as a chronicler of the esoteric can only in the end be equalled by the acknowledged talent of Huysman and Charles Williams.
Details of the ‘Work and Aims’ of the Society of the Inner Light, founded by Dion Fortune, may be obtained by writing (with postage please) to the Secretariat at 38 Steele's Road, London NW3 4RG, England.
FOREWORD
Dion Fortune, who died in 1946, left the manuscript of this book which is now published.
The Western Esoteric Tradition, to the teaching of which she devoted her life, covers too wide a field to find full expression in the work of any one writer, but Dion Fortune had planned books dealing with other aspects of that teaching than the one covered here. This would have resulted in a balanced presentation in the form of fiction of the main groupings of the teaching.
These main groupings, or ‘Paths’ as they are sometimes called, refer to the broad divisions of the temperament of the human being in incarnation and the corresponding approach to truth. A full description of them is given in a chapter of the Study Course of the Society founded by Dion Fortune, and an extract is given here:
The Hermetic Path alone is the way of completion. By the Hermetic Path alone is it possible to attain the goal, and those who go by either of the other Paths can make progress in their evolution but will not complete it in that incarnation, but must come back to master the other paths.
The Green Ray or ‘Pagan’ Path is for the primitive type of soul that has not yet evolved intellectually—the children of nature: equally is it a corrective for those in whom civilisation has deformed the soul and who need to stress the undeveloped in order to bring about a balanced development ... upon the Green Path and upon the Mystic Path will be the pathologies of civilisation (in addition to those to whom the Green Ray or Mystic Path is proper for their evolutionary stage) receiving curative treatment to bring them into equilibrium. In the Hermetic are all three Paths in equilibrium.
The choice of a Path depends upon the soul's development in evolutionary time or upon the abnormal bias given it by the constricting influences of a false sense of civilisation. Some souls are made rebels by ‘civilisation’ and some are made cripples. The rebels are dealt with in green pastures, the cripples in quiet chapels.
It should be noted that the protagonist of the story—met before in The Sea Priestess—is an adept working deliberately: she is an initiate of the Hermetic Path.
FOREWORD
TO THE 2003 EDITION
In Moon Magic, Vivien Le Fay Morgan, Dion Fortune's charismatic “sea priestess” from the novel of that name, reappears to work more of her unique brand of magic. She is now living in London, far from the sea, 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 real 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 it. Rupert Malcolm's first awareness of Lilith Le Fay Morgan occurs on the north side of the river, upon the Victoria Embankment. 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 resides on the south bank in an old converted church, whose lighted window can be seen across the river from Rupert Malcolm's own apartments.
In Dion Fortune's day, this location was composed mainly of warehouses. Today, however, it is taken up by the Royal Festival Hall and other leisure facilities extending down
to the New Tate Gallery and the Millennium Bridge. 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 organization.
In 1936, a wealthy member of the Society of the Inner Light leased it for Dion Fortune's use, 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 organizational 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.
Because 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 and 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, Anne Fox (later Greig), who attempted to channel the material after the latter's death. How successful she was in this endeavour is for the reader to decide. 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 Priestess and 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.
As in The Sea Priestess, there is a fairly close identification of the author with the character in her mode of dress—the large, floppybrimmed hats; the long cloak; the furs; and the chunky jewelry. 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—which is by no means a hard and fast one—between the mental processes of the creative artist and those of the mediating occultist.
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. Throughout her life, Dion Fortune was staunchly Christian in principle, if a little unorthodox about it. 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 achieve 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 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 of 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. As a result, an attempt was made a year later to lay the character to rest by creating another sequel called The Death of Vivien Le Fay Morgan. This short piece entered the public domain in 1962 as part of a collection of Dion Fortune articles under the umbrella title Aspects of Occultism 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 (Sun Chalice Books, Oceanside, CA, 2000).
In this fragment, Vivien, or Lilith, prepares for her death and, after taking leave of her friends, is ritually assisted by a fellow senior initiate to voluntarily pass out of her physical body and 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, a London University academic who befriended Dion Fortune and attended a performance of the Rite of Isis notes, the costumes she used were more Egyptian than Greek. On being asked about this, Dion Fortune confided that it was the ancient Egyptian overtones to the Greek symbolism that had always attracted her.
In any case, Bromage came away impressed by what he witnessed, writing afterward 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.” While one might question his choice of the word “pantomime” in relation to ritual magic, there is no doubt a certain connection between ceremonial magic and the performing arts. One principal difference 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 so when the emotions are aroused and focused 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 physical—relationship, with one another. An important point being that magic of this type, although dependent upon the polarity of gender, is not preliminary or 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 practiced to this day in India, and they call it Tantra.
At the time Dion Fortune was working upon her novel and practicing 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 research at that time included texts on Hindu tantra and some of this material he put 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, Loughborough, in 1998), 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 that is easily misunderstood, even by sympathetic colleagues, and that as Lilith had warned can easily run out of control. But if sex creeps in through the door, so 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.
