by Dion Fortune
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 have abound ever since the troubadours of Languedoc spun enchanting lyrics inspired by inaccessible, twelfth-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, she refers to the goddess Isis, whose headdress 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 1930s. 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—“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”—was close to her heart. Such an idea would be regarded as commonplace today but it was highly controversial 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 1960s. 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 rationalizing 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 rationalizations.
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 among the stars with Lilith as Isis before him. The two have passed beyond personality. They are no longer two circles bounded by their peripheries, but are two centers 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 sensitives escape into insanity when life is too hard for them and the window in a watchtower used by artists. 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.
—Gareth Knight
INTRODUCTION
It has been said that when a novelist imagines a situation he brings it to pass. Be that as it may, when I imagined the character of Vivien Le Fay Morgan, or Lilith Le Fay, as she variously called herself, I brought into being a personality, and in the second book in which she figures—the present volume—she is very far from being a puppet in my hands, but takes charge of the situation.
Any fiction writer knows that characters can “come alive,” and that if they fail to do this, the resultant novel is a pasteboard affair. Any reader with experience of the writer's craft knows the difference between dialogue that is “reported” and dialogue that is merely written. The truly creative writer records the dialogue he hears his characters using; but I have gone one better than this in the case of Lilith Le Fay—I have let her speak for herself. After the conclusion of The Sea Priestess she would not lie quiet in her grave, but her ghost persisted in walking. It walked to such good purpose that it forced upon me the writing of this book.
I had no clear idea of the plot. Six times I started the book, and six times I scrapped the result, till finally the rejected chapters reached the dimensions of an average novel. Then finally I decided to tell the story in the first person, and Lilith Le Fay took charge.
I had not the haziest idea of the plot, and had to write the book in order to find out. Nor was I in the least expecting it to end as it did. Some people, perhaps, would call it a piece of automatic writing; I do not know that I should dignify it by that name; I should say rather that I carried out the intentions of the principal character; but in any case I accept no responsibility for either the plot or the characters—they created themselves.
It is exceedingly difficult for me to judge of its merits in the circumstances. I have not a very high opinion of it as literature, but it is certainly a psychological curio. It contains, moreover, an amount of very odd lore, much of which I did not know anything about until I read it in these pages.
The viewpoint of Lilith Le Fay is purely pagan, and she is a rebel against society, bent upon its alteration. She may, of course, represent my Freudian subconsciousness, and there is admittedly a great deal of me in Lilith Le Fay, but there is a great deal more that is not me. At least I am not a hundred and twenty years of age—not yet, anyway.
Malcolm comes from many sources. I have never been guilty of the bad taste of pillorying my friends. I have known a great many Malcolms in my time, and shall probably know a great many more before, like Lilith Le Fay, I decompose into my component particles, the power that supports me being withdrawn.
The house, however, is an actuality. Its doors have been shut in my face, and I go there no more, but it is nevertheless a dedicated place.
Those who read this story for the sake of entertainment will, I am afraid, not find it very entertaining. It was not written for its entertainment value. I wrote it, in fact, to find out what it was about. I have put a great deal into it, and there is a great deal more in it than I ever put in. One might even say that the writing of it was a magical act. If it be true that what is created in the imagination lives in the inner world, then what have I created in Lilith Le Fay? Malcolm can take care of himself in this
world and the next, but who and what is Lilith, and why did she live on after the book about her was finished, and insist on appearing again? Have I furnished myself with a dark familiar?
Lilith considers herself a priestess of the great goddess Nature, and as such can claim divine right in the face of all man-made laws. This is a matter in which I cannot judge, for I do not know. I can only know that Lilith lives after a curious manner of her own; she lives for others as well as for me; and it may well be that to some of those who read these pages she will come as a shadowy figure half-seen in the twilight of the mind.
For to how many have the laws and conventions done a cruel and unnecessary wrong, as to Malcolm? And may there not be for them a way of escape out onto the hills of dream even as Lilith led her lover? These are questions that all must answer for themselves, for as Lilith sang to a weary man: “Forgotten are the ways of sleep and night”, we may well echo the ending prayer of that hymn of invocation:
Open the door, the door that hath no key -
The door of dreams whereby men come to thee.
Shepherd of goats, O answer thou me!
—Dion Fortune
PART I
A STUDY IN TELEPATHY
Come back to me, stay by me, lull me with a touch of forgotten
caresses,
One warm dream clad about with a fire as of life that endures;
The delight of thy face, and the sound of thy feet, and the wind of thy tresses,
And all of a man that regrets, and all of a maid that allures.
For thy bosom is warm to my face, and profound as a manifold flower,
Thy silence as music, thy voice as an odour that dies in a flame;
Not a dream, not a dream is the kiss of thy mouth and the bountiful
hour
That makes me forget what was sin, and would make me forget
were it shame.
Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips that are loving,
Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a dream;
And my heart yearns baffled and blind , moved vainly towards thee, and moving
As the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream.
—Swinburne
CHAPTER ONE
The fine hall of the medical school was crowded for the prize giving. On the dais, under the famous memorial window that commemorated the charity of the founder, sat a long semicircle of scarlet-clad figures brilliant against the dark panelled oak of the background, the hoods of the different universities, crimson, cerise, magenta and various shades of blue, rendering the colour-scheme even more startling. Above the bands of the hoods appeared a row of faces, bovine, vulturine, vulpine; and in their centre, looking comparatively normal among the striking selection of headpieces that housed so many first-class brains, sat the titled chairman who had just presented the prizes. Down in the body of the hall the dark mass of students and their friends and families stared up at this collection of birds of paradise.
“He oughtn't to wear that coloured hood with that coloured hair,” said a little old lady, obviously up from the country, to the clumsy young colt at her side who sat nursing a diploma which entitled him to do his worst to his fellow men.
“He's got no choice. It's his university hood.”
“Then a man with that coloured hair oughtn't to go to that university.” The mixture of magenta and scarlet certainly was an unfortunate combination for a red-haired man, but the granite-hard, granite-grey face under the brushed-back red hair that was beginning to recede slightly on the temples, stared out into space oblivious and indifferent.
“He looks a proper butcher,” said the little old lady.
“You're wrong, he's one of the physicians.”
“I shouldn't like him to physic me.”
“I don't suppose he could; there's not much physic given in his department.”
“What does he give?”
“Doesn't give anything. Nothing much you can give. Sometimes the surgeons can operate, and sometimes they can't. He tells them whether they can or they can't. Only chap they take orders from. If he says go in, they go in; and if he says leave it alone, they leave it alone.”
“I only hope he leaves me alone,” said the little old lady.
“I hope so, too, mother,” said her ribald son with a chuckle, and made a mental note of the joke for the students’ common room. Then the singing of “God save the Queen” brought the proceedings to an end and the object of their interest took advantage of his position on the extreme wing of the semicircle to slip quietly off the platform ahead of the crush of his colleagues.
His end of the platform, however, was the end remote from the robing-room, and he found himself in the passage leading to the refectory still clad in his gaudy plumage and engulfed in a sea of humanity surging in search of refreshments. Pressed up against him by the crowd was a little old lady who stared at him with the same absorbed, impersonal interest that is bestowed on the Horse Guards on duty in Whitehall.
He, not being accustomed to this kind of attention concluded she must be an old patient.
“Good afternoon, how are you keeping?” he asked with a curt nod.
“I'm very well, thank you,” she replied in a meek, rather startled voice, obviously not expecting to be spoken to.
“My mother, sir,” said the youth beside her.
“Huh,” said the older man ungraciously, and suddenly, to the astonishment of all present, peeled off his gorgeous robes, appearing in his shirt-sleeves. Twisting the magnificent garments into a bundle, he thrust them into the hands of the startled student.
“Put these in the senior common room, will you?” he said, and went shouldering off through the press, using his elbows mercilessly to clear a way for himself.
“What a funny man!” said the little old lady.
“You can afford to be funny when you've got a reputation like his,” said her son.
“I don't think I like him,” she said.
“Nobody likes him,” said her son, “but we jolly well trust him.”
Meanwhile the object of her disapproval raced up a flight of stone stairs three at a time, entered an empty laboratory, got an old tweed jacket from a peg, and thus incongruously clad and hatless, let himself out by a side door into a dark quadrangle. He crossed it, treading heavily on the gravel, causing a nurse to glance out of a ward window and add another item to the legend of the famous Dr. Malcolm's eccentricities, and went on his way regardless, through back streets to the Underground station. Arrived there, he swore—his pocket-book, with his note-case and season ticket, was in the breast pocket of the jacket left behind in the robing-room, and the miscellaneous collection in his trouser pockets yielded exactly three halfpence in coppers.
He was too impatient by temperament to return to the hospital; the weather was exceptionally mild for the time of year, and he determined to walk back along the Embankment to his rooms in Grosvenor Road, no great distance for a man as active and energetic as he was.
He made his way over cobblestones past warehouses, till climbing up steps by the abutment of a bridge, he came on to the Embankment.
It had been raining, and the usual quota that gather on the Embankment seats at dusk had taken refuge in casual wards and the shelters of voluntary charity; there were few pedestrians at that hour, and he had the wide riverside pavement practically to himself.
He strode along at his usual rapid gait, enjoying the freshness of the rainwashed air after the stuffy steam-heat of the great hall in which he had spent a boring afternoon. He watched the shimmer of the lamps on the water and the riding-lights of the hulks moored here and there; a tug toiled upstream with its barges, and a launch of the river police went chugging down-stream; all the familiar life of the river went on as the man watched it, forgetful for a time of the great city and the great hospital and the daily grind of his routine that alternated between Wimpole Street and the slums.
With the abruptnes
s that characterised all his movements he halted so suddenly that another pedestrian following just behind had to chassée sideways to avoid a collision. Leaning his elbows on the granite coping, he followed in his imagination the ebbing tide going down past the docks and shipping, and thought of himself as he would have been if he had followed his first choice of a career and gone to sea. He would be a ship's officer now, keeping watch—a poorly-paid, hard, comfortless life. His present life was hard because he was a merciless taskmaster to himself, but it was not poorly paid, and as comfortable as he had the wit to make it.
But that was not saying a great deal. He was not a man who knew how, to make things comfortable either for himself or others. His wife, an invalid since the birth of their child in the first year of their marriage, made her home at a seaside resort where he visited her at fairly frequent weekends. She dreaded these visits, and he hated them, but he was a man with an inflexible sense of duty, so they went on year after year till his fiery red hair began to be dulled by grey and to recede on the temples and his temperament likewise cooled down a little, and he congratulated himself on the achievement of self-mastery.
The years of semi-celibacy had not been easy ones; endowed by Nature with a fierce integrity and uprightness, the idea of an illicit liaison was abhorrent to him. Moreover there was in him a pride in his own imperious will that made him take a perverse delight in wrestling with wild beasts at Ephesus, and the more Nature tried to force the door of his moral code, the tighter it jammed. The result was admirable from the ethical point of view, but it had not sweetened his temper or made him a pleasanter colleague or more agreeable companion. Red hair does not take well to repression, and a restless irritability of temper was the reward of virtue. Moreover, he was an uncertain sleeper, which did not improve matters, and only his tremendous vitality and rugged physique took him through a terms work.
