by Dion Fortune
PART II
THE MOON MISTRESS
Oh Thou, that didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my fall to sin?
—Omar Khayyam
CHAPTER FOUR
I am not absolutely sure how old I am, but I think I am about 120. At any rate, I have lived long enough to see the things for which I worked come about. It is for this reason I think I shall go soon.
There was a time when I was regarded as the priestess of all evil. A certain wise man said that every step forward in morality must always be immoral to start with. Anyway that time is long past, and the crimes of Martaban are chaste in Clapham nowadays. I expect in due course I shall be identified with the principle I exemplified and worshiped as a goddess, for who am I to expect to escape the universal fate of the Lightbearers? At any rate, the world I live in today is as free from nervous disease as the world in which I did my work was free in its civilised parts from typhus and plague and cholera, improved mental hygiene like improved physical hygiene, clearing up the dirt diseases. It was recognised, even in my day, that if a man lived in insanitary conditions he could not expect to be healthy, and still less could he expect to rear normal children, but we little realised the insanitary conditions in which the vast majority of people led their emotional lives. To read of them today is like reading an account of working class conditions in the Hungry Forties. We ask how such things could be endured; but people will accept as inevitable anything they are used to, never dreaming that it is due to ignorance and bad management.
I was born at a time when a repressive morality was in full force and still serving its purpose. In those days women were divided into two classes, the sheltered, protected women, who suffered from the vapours and the unsheltered, unprotected women, who suffered many things, some of which are unprintable. I was born into the sheltered class but poverty forced me into the other, and I suffered. Such was the first stage of my apprenticeship.
My father, as the family name of Le Fay indicates, was of Gallic extraction, with Breton blood in his veins; my mother was of that strange pre-Keltic strain that lingers on in the remote valleys of the central mountain mass of Mid-Wales. Some say these people were Phoenicians, but that is incorrect; they were older than the Phoenicians being Atlanteans, drawn to these metal bearing islands by trade and surviving when the parent country was cut off by catastrophe. They are a strange folk, set apart even to this day by a remoteness of soul, for they do not, I think, fully belong to this world. The Bretons, too, are an other-world people, and the faith of Carnac lives on in their hearts to a much greater extent than is suspected. These two strains, crossed, produced me. They were normal enough until they were crossed, and then they produced me. To add to the complications, I was supposed to have died when a baby. I was declared dead, and lay dead many hours on my mother's lap, for she could not be persuaded to lay me down; and then, at dawn, I revived, but the eyes that looked up at my mother, she told me many years afterwards when I asked her the cause of my strangeness, were not the eyes of a child, and she knew with the unerring instinct of a mother that I was not the same one.
I was never young, even in those days; I had the same mind that I have now, but with the emotional outlook of a child; with such a mind I could never be a child with children, and the adults of that day were a hostile race. Moreover we were gentle-people who had become poor and we saw at its worst the workings of the class system of the time; so although I was a friendly child, eager for play and companionship, I was forced back on myself and compelled to solitude. This I believe to be the pre-requisite for that which was to follow, for it is only by turning within that we can find the Inner Path, and those whose fate destines them for that path are prevented from turning outward and finding their place in life, just as the feet of the Chinese child are bound. It is a painful process at the time, but the result is a personality that can be used for the purpose for which it is designed, being free from attachments and inured to solitude. Such, I believe, is the law of the Higher Path, for I have many times watched it at work. To those who are accustomed to find happiness in their attachments and can conceive of no other kind, it may appear a melancholy lot; but once the fact of detachment has been accepted, life opens up in the most marvellous manner, only one must be very careful never to form ties, for they invariably have to be broken. Yet, by a strange paradox, one has an extraordinary richness of experience, for one may enjoy anything as long as one does not become dependent on it. It is an old saying that an initiate possesses nothing but has the use of everything.
Wilfred Maxwell has told the story of my beginnings, and how I found the Inner Path, so there is no need for me to tell it again. * He has also told of the experiment we worked together; but what he has not told, for he could not know, was the way in which that experiment appeared to me.
That I will now tell as briefly as may be, for it is the prelude to what is to follow.
I had travelled some distance down the Inner Path, and had developed my psychism to the point where it was as reliable as psychism is ever likely to be—that is to say I could trust it in matters in which I had no personal concern. I was also well acquainted with the theory and philosophy of the Secret Teaching as it has come down to us by tradition. But there is a big difference between the psychic and the adept; for the psychic is a psychic and nothing more, but the adept, to be worthy of the name, must be not only a psychic but a magician—that is to say, he must be able to wield the powers of the spirit objectively as well as subjectively. When I met Wilfred Maxwell I was what is called an Adeptus Minor, and I had not made that transition.
I used Wilfred's faith in me to establish my own confidence in my magical powers; for if one believes in them, one can use them; and if one does not believe in them, one cannot use them, and a sceptical, rational person like myself does not find it easy to believe in such things until they have been put to the test and found to work; and, paradoxically, they will not work unless one believes in them, for one is all the time receiving negative suggestion from one's own incredulity, and by the same token, breaking up the astral forms as fast as one makes them. But when I made Wilfred, who had faith, see an astral form by means of suggestion, his faith held it steady for me to see. This is a subtle but useful point in the practical workings, and I offer it to those who can appreciate it. There are not many people who know these things, or, if they know them, will tell them.
I made Wilfred see me as I wanted to be, and by this means I built up my magical personality. A magical personality is a strange thing. It is more like a familiar than anything else, and one transfers one's consciousness to it as one does to an astral projection, until finally one identifies oneself with it and becomes that which one has built.
Then having used Wilfred, I left him, but not until I had put him in touch with the cosmic forces.
I remember coming into London at the peak hour of the traffic. I came in by an unfamiliar route and lost my way in the great tangled boroughs of the Surrey side, where all the streets look alike but are pushed askew by the windings of the river, and one loses all sense of direction. The only landmark I had was the great chimney of Doulton's factory, which I knew would guide me to the bridge I wanted; but the twisted streets would not run as I wished, for that part of the world is a mass of culs-de-sac owing to the railway. Suddenly I saw ahead of me at the end of a street the leaden-grey surface of the river. Thinking that this would be the Albert Embankment, and known country, I made for it only to find myself in the oddest little forgotten village in the world, looking across the water at the ragged sky-line of the mean streets of Pimlico.
It was not a slum but, in fact, intensely respectable. Every little house had a little front garden, and without exception they all had lace curtains to their windows. A number of the gates bore brass plates to the effect that sweeps, undertakers, midwives, and suchlike folk lived
there. It proved to be another cul-de-sac, however, and I had to turn perilously on a tumble-down wharf at its end, and retrace my route to the rightangled turn. In that angle stood a small and dismal church, black as a London cat with accumulated grime, its upper windows protected from stone-throwing by closely woven wire screens; its lower ones by heavy, wrought-iron grilles; its door a massive oak affair studded with great nails. It looked, in fact, like a miniature private fortress disguised under the cloak of religion. I have never seen a more forbidding façade; it might have been a prison of the Inquisition.
To complete the picture of neglected gloom, a To Let board drooped in front of it. This surprised me, for I had believed that once a church, always a church, and that ecclesiastical property could not be sequestrated. But this church had apparently been too much even for the ecclesiastical authorities and they wished to be rid of it. It looked to me as if it might be very badly haunted.
I got across the river at last, and found myself in civilised parts once more.
I was glad to be back, and my little home in the hayloft looked very welcoming, with its huge fire and deep divans piled with innumerable cushions, and all the soft, rich, dark colours that I love.
The flat seemed strangely alien although I had only been absent a few months. I could tell that my life had already withdrawn from it and that I should not be pulling up any roots when I left there. But that did not make me any happier, but rather the contrary, for I felt alien and alone and homeless, and atmospheres have always meant a great deal to me; they have meant, perhaps, more than persons, owing to the law of aloneness under which I live.
I was glad, on the whole, that the atmosphere of the flat was dead, for I had been dreading the parting, fearing that I would feel as if I were abandoning some humble friend by whose help I had climbed, for this was the first settled home I had ever known. But it does not do to be sentimental over either places or persons upon the Path. The days of my training were finished, and I was changing over from the Lesser to the Greater Mysteries. What I had learnt I now had to put into practice.
The Law by which I live is so strange that unless I tell something of it, no one will understand what follows. Many tales have been woven round the theme of the black-cloaked adept with mysterious powers, appearing from nowhere in response to some call for help, and disappearing equally mysteriously after help has been given; but no one, not even Bulwer Lytton, who could have done so, has told the story from the adepts point of view, showing why he came and why he went and what he really did.
This, then, is what manner of person an adept is. There are those who are concerned with the inner governance of the world; not its politics and wire-pullings, but with the secret spiritual influences that rule the minds of men. Behind them are those greater than they, who are concerned with elemental forces and the influences that rule the æon. These are to those others as the tides are to the breaking waves. Then, upon the physical plane, are those who are sent through into incarnation to co-operate with them. They are sometimes spoken of as initiates, and they are that, but also something more than that. They must, of course, be initiated into the Tradition otherwise they would not have the keys to the contacts and would not command co-operation. There are, of course, also initiates who become adepts, but I am speaking now of what are called the cosmic adepts, and they come in for a purpose, and all their time until maturity is given to preparing the personality as an instrument for that purpose; it would be a cruel training if there were not within one an inner awareness which knows whence one comes, and why—as I had known, even as a child, that I was a stranger and a sojourner and did not belong; therefore things do not hurt as they would hurt others. But one is always alone, for there are very few with whom to find companionship, and because one is strange, one is hated.
Then there comes the time when the transition must be made from one mode of consciousness to the other, when we learn to use the instrument we have wrought for the purpose for which it has been designed—and that instrument is our own human personality. It is a strange thing to stand back from one's personality and use it, and not easy to do.
Those of us who come in thus have been trained and made in a previous life, and I have always been a priestess of the Great Mother. Such male incarnations as I have had, have been negligible, and mostly violent and unhappy. But a priestess I have been, and a great one, right down from the days of Atlantis, for the higher the grade, the earlier the initiation, and I was one of those who served in the courts of the great Sun temple of the City of the Golden Gates in the island of Ruta.
It was I who was sent away before the end, when they were taking out the Seed-bearers for the next epoch, and I saw from the sea great Atlantis go down in the last final catastrophe that ended all. Then my soul became affiliated to the group-soul of Egypt and I came in and out through the doors of the royal house down through all the Egyptian Dynasties. I was never of those that sat upon the throne, but I was a mysterious figure that came and went in the background of the temples.
I was of the cult of the Black Isis, which is very different from that of the green-robed Goddess of Nature to whom the women prayed for children. They represent Her with a human face, or horned like a cow; but the Black Isis is the Veiled Isis, upon whose face none may look and live, and because I represent Her, I too went veiled and cloaked, and I have never lost the habit to this day; I do not like people to look upon my face in bright light, and if I must show it, I show it masked in laughter and animation. Very few have ever seen my face in repose, for repose is a transparent mask.
Some equate the Black Isis with Kali, and say that She is evil; but I do not think She is, unless one counts elemental force as evil, which I do not. She is indeed the Breaker in Pieces, but then She sets free. She is also most ancient Life, and people fear the primordial as they fear nothing else. Freud knew that. She is a reservoir of tremendous and dynamic force, and when dynamic force comes welling up, that is She.
I broke Wilfred, and he rose like a phoenix, reborn from the ashes of his dead life, and knew Great Isis. I slew him and I gave him birth. That is not evil, unless you reckon pain as evil, and I do not; for pain brings power, and destruction is freedom.
I do not think there is any such thing as innate evil; what men call evil is simply misplaced force. Some define good as that which preserves, and evil as that which destroys; but destruction can be cleansing and purifying, for there is such a thing in both men and races as spiritual constipation, which comes from too much preservation of the status quo.
So I came back to the world yet once again as the priestess of the Great Goddess, bringing with me the memory of forgotten arts, one of which is the art of being a woman. I came because I was sent. There was that needed which I had to give. They did not send in a priestess of the Bright Isis, but of the Dark and Veiled One, because that was the need; and They said to me: “You will have tiger teeth, for you will be a Breaker in Pieces. Men will call you the Priestess of All Evil, but you know better.”
So I came in at the dawn of a new æon. There were those who had gone before me who watched over the break-up of the old world. They had been armed and mailed—great sworded Ones, but I was unarmed save for the weapons of a woman.
I had only my woman's personality with which to work, and I had to create and build it as if it were a work of art, and I worked on myself like a sculptress. It was an odd sensation to feel the two aspects of myself merging, and finally uniting. In the earlier stages I would be either in one consciousness or the other. I would slip into the wider consciousness, returning on waking, but able to bring through no more than faint shadowy memories of dreams. Twice, in crises that might have destroyed the physical personality I was so laboriously building, I united my two selves momentarily, but the child-mind could not stand more than a brief uniting—life was difficult enough as it was.
With adolescence everything closed down—for no mind could stand the double strain; then, when I stabilised with maturity, it began to
open again and I was conscious of an overshadowing, for by this time the focus of my being had been fully transferred to the physical body. Familiar with the language of spiritualism, I thought of this overshadowing as a spirit-control, but gradually I became aware that it was simply my own higher self, and still more gradually I learnt to rely on it. My two selves have never been permanently in me, for no human physique would stand that; nor can I invoke my higher self at will, but I know how to make the conditions that cause it to come in. Unfortunately that is a thing in which I always need to have help: I cannot do it single-handed; some one has to see the Goddess in me, and then She manifests. I am not the Goddess, but I am the priestess of the Goddess, and She manifests through me, for all women are Isis. Not many can see the Goddess manifest, and of those that can see, not all can bear it, and then they hate me because they fear Her. I have been much hated in my life, and I have, likewise, had more than my fair share of love.
As I have already said, Wilfred gave me the help I needed in formulating myself to myself. My weapons were now ready, and the next phase of my career lay with the world. I had already passed the age when a woman can hope to charm by her looks, but the forces that came through me had miraculously re-created me, and I lived with a strange inner vitality that was ageless and deathless and timeless. I was neither young nor old; neither a young girl nor a mature woman. People knew I was not young, and yet they could not think of me as old. I was simply alive with a vitality that prevented people from seeing me as I really was; that glamoured them into seeing me as the ageless and deathless priestess of Great Isis. I knew, moreover, how to set myself against an appropriate background, and when I chose I could wrap my aura about me and pass unseen as a shadow. People sneered at my backgrounds as theatrical and called me a poseuse; but I knew that my backgrounds were psychological and my pose an auto-suggestion.
