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[from http://www.oakgrove.org/GreenPages/bos/2211.txt ] 2211 Subject: A GODDESS ARRIVES: THE NOVELS OF DION FORTUNE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GARDNERIAN WITCHCRAFT by CHAS S. CLIFTON No one occultist of the 20th century worked more vehemently in a d- vocating a "Western" - and within that, "Northern" - path of eso teric spirituality than did the English ceremonial magician, Dion Fort une. She founded an esoteric school that still persists, but beyond t hat direct transmission, her ideas seeded themselves into modern Neo pagan religion to the point that they seem completely indigenous, thei r origins invisible. Certain of Fortune's key ideas, however, were not so much transm itted through her mystical writings and articles in The Occult Review of the 1920s, as they were passed on through a unique series of novels, one of which stands fifty years later as "the finest novel on real m agic ever written," in the words of Alan Richardson, her most adept b iog- rapher1. Primary among these key ideas was her raising up of a l unar, feminine divine power - not that she was the first modern magici an to do it, but by taking the two paths of ritual and literature she gave the power two ways to go. The second idea was that of egalitarian magical working, somethi ng she came to late in her life (she lived from 1890-1946). This was a fairly radical idea in that all her associations with the Theosophical Society, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and her own Fraternity (l ater Society) of the Inner Light included the idea of hierarchies and grades, going back in her own self-proclaimed reincarnational hi story to lifetimes among the sacred priestly caste of legendary Atlant is. Both of these ideas are found in the Anglo-American branches of modern Witchcraft, which first made its presence known in Great Britain in the early 1950s, having, I suspect, been developed and codified into its modern form during the later 1930s and 1940s. While a demons trable personal connection between the modern witches and Dion Fortune cannot be proven - unless one had her entire mailing list circa 1939 in hand - I think a literary connection can be shown. Her ideas about an earth-based Western tradition of esoteric, ma gical religion, which exalted the feminine principle, fit so neatly wi th the cosmology of those modern witches who came out of a similar esot eric British milieu, that the connection is unmistakable. The reason it has not been acknowledged until recently is that to do so would conf lict with the frequent assertion that Witchcraft was the "Old Religio n" brought forward unchanged in its essentials from centuries ago. Unfortunately for that assertion, the historical records, such a s they are, showed little evidence for secret goddess religion persisti ng until recent centuries in Northern Europe. The voluminous "witch trial" documents of England, Scotland, and France, which the arc haeol- ogist and folklorist Margaret Murray used to buttress her argume nt for the survival of a pre-Christian religion, do not mention goddess worship. 2212 If one looks for other evidence of a goddess arriving in the mid -20th century, the other suspect typically is Robert Graves, whose wid ely influential book, The White Goddess, was written in 1944. Parall el and contemporary with Graves is Gertrude Rachel Levy's The Gate of H orn, which treats much of the same material Graves does, principally from the viewpoint of art history.2 The thesis of The White Goddess, which has been enormousl y influential among modern Pagan groups, is "that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in h onour of the Moon-Goddess, or Muse,some of them dating from the Old St one Age (Palaeolithic), and that this remains the language of true p oe- try." Graves believed that this language "was still taught...in the Witchcovens of medieval Western Europe."3 I do not contend that Graves and Levy supplied the dual m ale and female divinities of most modern Witchcraft covens. Their books were both first published in 1948, after Fortune's works had been in print for a decade or more. Before examining the influence of Fortune' s works, however, I will summarise the "coming out" of the British covens. THE RE-EMERGENCE OF BRITISH WITCHCRAFT In 1951 the British Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act of 17 35 - largely at the urging of Spiritualist churches, who objected to its prohibition of mediumship. This statutory change unexpectedly le d to the emergence into public view of a religious tradition thought to be extinct: Witchcraft.4 These British witches defied definitions of the term common both in the vernacular and in anthropology textbooks . They were of both sexes, all ages, and were not isolated practitioner s of maleficent magic; rather they claimed to be inheritors of the is lands' pre-Christian religions. Their religion was duotheistic: they wo r- shipped a male god, often called Cernnunos, Kernaya, or Herne; a nd a goddess, sometimes called Aradia or Tana. Of the two, sometimes seen as manifestations of a nonpersonal Godhead, the goddess had the greater importance, and her earthly representatives, the coven's priestess, had greater ritual authority. Greatly condensed, this is a description of what came to be know n as "Gardnerian Witchcraft," after Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), who r etired from the British colonial customs service in Malaya in 1936, ret urned to England and - as he described - was initiated into what he hi mself thought was a dying religion in 1938.5 This was no overnight co nver- sion: Gardner was fascinated for many years with magical religio n and "practical mysticism". A recognised avocational archaeologist an d anthropologist in Malaya, during a visit to England in the 1920s , he set out to investigate the claims of British Spiritualists, tran ce mediums and the like. As he wrote: "I have been interested in magic and kindred subjec ts all my life and have made a collection of magical instruments and ch arms. These studies led me to spiritualist and other societies..."6 Gardner wrote three books on Witchcraft, one novel, and t wo nonfiction works. The novel was High Magic's Aid (1949), a stirring tale of late- medieval English coveners dodging secular and clerical foes with something of the feel of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow to it. Interestingly enough, the "wi tch- 2213 craft" portrayed in High Magic's Aid differs from what was later called "Gardnerian Witchcraft." In it the goddess is de-emphasis ed; the rituals are more in line with the post-Renaissance tradition s of ceremonial magic. Gardner's next two books, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) and W itch- craft Today (1954), are more definitive of the tradition. All th ree of the forenamed remain in print; an earlier novel, with the sugges tive title A Goddess Arrives, is long out of print, and I have not be en able to locate a copy. Gardner and his followers also produced a "book" that was, until the early 1970s, passed on as handcopied manuscripts: "The Book of Shadows." It is a collection of "laws" and suggestions for running a clandestine coven, performing rituals, resolving disputes between witches inside the group, and so fort h. Although it appears to be written in perhaps the English of the 17th century, I have concluded that it was produced during and immedi ately after World War II. Its atmosphere of secrecy and underground or gan- ising is not a product of the witch-trial era, but of the early years of World War II when an invasion of southern England by the Germ an Army appeared quite likely, and patriotic Britons were planning how they would organise a Resistance movement like those in France, Norway, and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. The woman often assumed to have birthed the idea of a Pagan unde r- ground in Christian Western Europe was not Dion Fortune, but the Egyptologist Margaret Murray of University College, London. Prof essor Murray, better known as the time for her work with Sir Flinders Petrie in Egypt, began researching Pagan carryovers while convalescing from an illness in 1915. World War I had interrupted her work in Egyp t, and she wrote in her autobiography, My First Hundred Years:7 "I chose Glastonbury [to convalesce in]. One cannot stay in Glaston- bury without becoming interested in Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail. As soon as I got back to London I did a careful piece of research, which resulted in a paper on Egyptian elements in the Grail Romance... Someone, I forget who, had once told me that the Witches obvious ly had a special form of religion, 'for they danced around a black goat .' As ancient religion is my pet subject this seemed to be in my line and during all the rest of the war I worked on Witches... I had star ted with the usual idea that the Witches were all old women sufferin g from illusions about the Devil and that their persecutors were wicked ly prejudiced and perjured. I worked only from contemporary records , and when I suddenly realised that the so-called Devil was simply a d is- guised man I was startled, almost alarmed, by the way the record ed facts fell into place, and showed that the Witches were members of an old and primitive form of religion, and that the records had bee n made by members of a new and persecuting form." Murray's researches into medieval and Renaissance witch-trial do cu- ments from Britain, Ireland, and the Continent (including those relating to Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais) led to her writing t hree books, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), The God of the W itches (1931), and The Divine King in England (1954). In them she descr ibed her evidence for the survival of a pre-Christian religion centre d on the Horned God of fertility (later labelled "The Devil" by Chris tian authorities) up until at least the 16th century in Britain. 2214 As the late historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, "Murray's theory was criticised by archaeologists, historians and folklori sts alike."8 Pointing out some parallels between medieval witchcraf t and Indo-Tibetan magical religion, Eliade gives qualified approval t o part of Murray's conclusions. "As a matter of fact, almost everything in her construction was wrong except for one important assumption: that there existed a pre-Ch ris- tian fertility cult and that specific survivals of this pagan cu lt were stigmatised during the Middle Ages as witchcraft....recent research seems to confirm at least some aspects of her thesis. T he Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg has proved that a popular ferti lity cult, active in the province of Friule in the 16th and 17th cent uries, was progressively modified under pressure of the Inquisition and ended by resembling the traditional notion of witchcraft. Moreover, re cent investigations of Romanian popular culture have brought to light a number of pagan survivals which clearly indicate the existence o f a fertility cult and of what may be called a "white magic," compar able to some aspects of Western medieval witchcraft." One may thus argue that the existence of Murray's three works "p aved the way for Gardner's reformation", as J. Gordon Melton of the I n- stitute for the Study of American Religion put it.9 Gardner's " reform- ation" of whatever British witchcraft existed prior to his initi ation into it had both theological and ritual aspects. The works he an d his associates produced give a style of worship, a new set of ritual texts - and increasing emphasis on the goddess-aspect as the tradition grew - all of them pre-figured not in Murray's works but in Dion Fort une's. A PRACTICAL OCCULTIST In my experience, there is hardly a British, Irish or American w itch of the revived, post-Gardnerian traditions who has not read some thing by Dion Fortune, and the same probably holds true in Canada, Aus t- ralia, or New Zealand. Until 1985, however, biographies of her w ere nonexistent, even while the American Books in Print reference vo lumes listed twenty of her books in that year's volume - not bad for s omeone considered at best an obscure genre writer by the literary estab lish- ment of fifty years ago and of today. Neither her book on psychology, The Machinery of the Mind, writt en in the 1920s nor her works on occult philosophy, nor her five "occu lt" novels and volume of short stories received much critical notice when they came out. Such notice as was received was almost worse than none. A 1934 (London) Times Literary Supplement review of her book Ava lon of the Heart begins, "The author tells us that she is the last of t he Avalonians - of those who were drawn to Glastonbury as 'a centre of ever-renewed spiritual and artistic inspiration,' whatever that may mean." And clearly the reviewer was not interested in finding out! Alan Ri- chardson's 1985 work, Dancers to the Gods, while primarily about two members of Fortune's magical order, contained the first well-res - earched material on her life.10 He followed it with a full biog raphy, Priestess, two years later, an affectionate and sensitive portra it of this woman whose spiritual trajectory has yet to reach the horiz on.11 Charles Fielding's and Carr Collins's The Story of Dion F ortune contains more details of her and her associates' magical work, b ut is 2215 written in a wooden "true believer" style and marred by numerous edi- torial blunders.12 To summarise greatly, she was born Violet Mary Firth in 1 890 in Wales, where her English father, together with his wife's relatives, op erated a seaside hotel and health spa catering to a well-to-do clientel e. When her grandfather's death led to a dissolving of the partners hip, her father moved the family to London where he could live comfor tably off his inheritance. Her spiritual quest as a young woman led he r to Christian Science (which her mother adopted when it came to Engl and), Freudian psychology, the "Eastern wisdom" of the Theosophical So ciety, the Qabalistic magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn, 8and study with an Anglo-Irish occultist, T.W.C. Moriarty, the model for "Dr Taverner" in her book of short stories, The Secrets of D r Taverner. She would have liked to have studied Freemasonry, but could not, being a woman. She studied psychology while in her twenties, before the outbrea k of World War I, and practiced as a psychoanalyst for a time, the fi eld not yet being closely controlled by the medical establishment. F ortune was probably the first writer on ceremonial magic and hermetic i deas to draw upon and acknowledge the work of Freud and later Jung. I n her novel The Goat-Foot God, published in 1936 and dealing with the effects of both psychological repression and past lives, its cen tral character, Hugh Paston, asks a friend, "Are the Old Gods synonymous with the Devil?" "Christians think they are. "What do you think they are?" "I think they're the same thing as the Freudian subconscious."13 After Moriarty's death she headed the Christian Mystic Lo dge of the Theosophical Society. In 1927 she married Thomas Penry Evans, a Welsh doctor practising in London, nicknamed "Merlin" or "Merl" for hi s own magical interests. They were priest and priestess, but never fat her and mother. The marriage, magically productive but contentious i n the mundane world, lasted until 1939 when Evans left her for another woman. Fortune continued to head their group, which became the S ociety of the Inner Light and maintained, for a time, both a large comm unal house in London and another establishment in Glastonbury. The So ciety continues to this day, but Dion Fortune herself died of leukemia in 1946. Her penname derived from the motto she took as her magical name in the Golden Dawn, "Deo Non Fortuna", or roughly, "by God, not by Chan ce." Her involvement with the Golden Dawn lasted roughly from 1919 to about 1922, and while these were the sunset years of the Order, which had been founded in 1888, they set for her a significant pattern of what an esoteric order should be. That Fortune also eventually was influenced by Jung is apparent in her work, although she was an occultist first and a Jungian second. Since her time there has been a great deal of discussion of the "gods and goddesses" by such neo-Jungians as James Hillman and Charlotte D ownin- g. Surely Fortune's blending of psychoanalytical ideas, Hermeticism, Qabalah, and Christian myst icism in the two orders she headed prefigures Hillman's question, "Can the atomism of our psychic paganism, that is, the individual symbol- 2216 formation now breaking out as the Christian cult fades, be conta ined by a psychology of self-integration that echoes its expiring Chr istian model?"14 I doubt that Dion Fortune would have answered as dogmatic ally as H- illman did, "The danger is that a true revival of paganism as re ligion is then possible, with all its accoutrements of popular soothsay ing, quack priesthoods, astrological divination, extravagant practice s, and the erosion of psychic differentiation through delusional enthus - iasms." Where she did agree with Jung is that Western methods are best f or Western people. Jung wrote: "Instead of learning the spiritual t ec- hniques of the East by heart and imitating them... it would be f ar more to the point to find out whether there exists in the uncons cious an introverted tendency similar to that which has been developed in spiritual principles in the East. We should then be in a positio n to build on our own ground with our own methods."15 Compare Fortune's chapter "Eastern Methods and Western Bo dies" in Sane in which she stated:16 "The pagan faiths of the West developed the nature contac ts. Modern Western occultism, rising from this basis, seems to be taking fo r its field the little-known powers of the mind. The Eastern tradition has a very highly developed metaphysics.... Nevertheless, when it come s to the practical application of those principles and especially the proc- esses of occult training and initiation, it is best for a man to foll- ow the line of his own racial evolution.... The reason for the i n- advisability of an alien initiation does not lie in racial antag onism, nor in any failure to appreciate the beauty and profundity of th e Eastern systems, but for the same reason that Eastern methods of agriculture are inapplicable to the West - because conditions ar e different." It is clear from Fortune's novels that a "true", that is psychol ogic- ally informed, Paganism, was indeed what she sought in the late 1920s and 1930s. Time after time she created plots that mixed the t- herapeutic and the magical, drawing characters who combined psyc ho- logical acumen with non-ordinary wisdom. She defined her ideal m ixture thus in Sane Occultism: A knowledge of [occult] philosophy can g ive a clue to the researches of the scientist and balance the ecstasie s of the mystic; it may very well be that in the possibilities of rit ual magic we shall find an invaluable therapeutic agent for use in c ertain forms of mental disease; psychoanalysis has demonstrated that th ese have no physiological cause, but it can seldom effect a cure."17 I see her as someone who shared a significant degree of p hilosophical accord with what would become "Neo-Pagan Witchcraft", but who in practice followed a different path. I have said her contribution to "the Craft" has not been sufficiently acknowledged; there is one exception. The works of two English Witches, Janet and Stewart F arrar, produced during the late 1970s and early 1980s, frequently refer their readers to Dion Fortune. In a recent instance, having laid out a ritual based on one in Fortune's novel The Sea Priestess and hav ing received permission from the current leadership of the Society o f the Inner Light to do so, they write:18 "In their letter of permission, the Society asked us to s ay 'that Dion Fortune was not a Witch and did not have any connection with a c oven, 2217 and that this Society is not in any way associated with the Craf t of Witches.' We accede to their request; and when this book is publ ished, we shall send them a copy with our compliments, in the hope that it may give them second thoughts about whether Wiccan philosophy is as alien to that of Dion Fortune (whom witches hold in great respec t) as they seem to imagine." Despite the Society of the Inner Light's disavowal, a good circu msta- ntial case can be made that Fortune's works, particularly her no vels, could have influenced Gerald Gardner and his initiates. This ins ight was brought home to me while reading The Goat-Foot God, publishe d two years before Gardner's initiation into the Craft. Its plot is ty pical of Fortune: a person down on his or her luck and near psychologi cal collapse is rescued by a powerful magician or priestess and re-i nte- grated socially and psychically. Hugh Paston, quoted above, is a wealthy Londoner on the verge of a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife and his friend - revealed to be her lover - in a car wreck. Aimlessly walking the streets, Paston finds a used-book shop run by a scholarly occult ist who becomes the catalyst of his psychological integration. This incl- udes finishing some actions begun by a heretical medieval prior in an English monastery who may have been an earlier incarnation of Pa ston's or who otherwise overshadows him. What caught my attention was a remark given to the character of Jelkes, the bookseller, who in guiding Paston's reading on magic tells him, "Writers will put t hings into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose, where you hav e to dot the Is and cross the Ts.19 Fortune's literary output was divided between novels and "sober prose- ". Other "sober titles" included Practical Occultism in Daily Li fe, The Cosmic Doctrine, Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage an d what is often considered to be her masterpiece, The Mystical Qabalah. Robert Galbreath, writing a bibliographic survey of modern occul tism, defined her message as "spiritual occultism."20 "Spiritual occultists state that it is possible to acquir e personal, empirical knowledge of that which can only be taken on faith in religion or demonstrated through deductive reasoning in philosop hy. Further, this knowledge, arrived at in full consciousness throug h the use of spiritual disciplines, is said to reveal man's place in t he spiritual plan of the universe and to reconcile the debilitating conflict between science and religion. The goal of occultism, th e- refore, is the complete spiritualisation of man and the cosmos, and the attainment of a condition of unity." The novels, however, convey a parallel but somewhat different me ssage. They do it using a different vocabulary, a more consciously Paga n vocabulary. While published statements of the Society of Inner L ight proclaimed it "established on the enlightened and informed Chris tian ethic and morality," its founder's novels say repeatedly that Christianity has had its day and a new Renaissance is dawning. A fter his experience of inner integration Hugh Paston muses:21 "It is a curious fact that when men began to re-assemble the fragments of Greek culture - the peerless statues of the gods and the agel ess wisdom of the sages - a Renaissance came to the civilisation tha t had sat in intellectual darkness since the days when the gods had wi th- drawn before the assaults of the Galileans. What is going to hap pen 2218 in our day, now that Freud has come along crying, "Great Pan is risen!" - ? Hugh wondered whether his own problems were not part of a universal problem, and his own awakening part of a much wider aw akeni- ng? He wondered how far the realisation of an idea by one man, e ven if he spoke no word, might not inject that idea into the group-mind of the race and set it working like a ferment? Likewise, in The Winged Bull, set not long after World War I, Co lonel Brangwyn the magician tells his new student, one of his former j unior officers:22 "It [Christianity] had its place, Murchison, it had its p lace. It sweetened life when paganism had become corrupt. We lack somethi ng if we haven't got it. But we also lack something if we get too much of it. It isn't true to life if we take it neat." Later, during a ritual Brangwyn quotes Swinburne's poem "The Las t Oracle" in praise of Paganism past - it was this aspect of Swinb urne that G.K. Chesterton mockingly called "neo-Pagan" - making Murch ison remember "that great pagan, Julian the Apostate, striving to mak e head against the set of the tide," and Murchison thinks to himself:23 "And the trouble with Christianity was that it was so dar ned lop-si- ded. Good, and jolly good, as far as it went, but you couldn't s tretch it clean round the circle of experience because it just wouldn't go. What it was originally, nobody knew, save that it must have been something mighty potent. All we knew of it was what was left aft er th- ose two crusty old bachelors, Paul and Augustine, had finished w ith it. And then came the heresy hunters and gave it a final curry-combi ng, taking infinite pains to get rid of everything that it had inher ited from older faiths. And they had been like the modern miller, who refines all the vitamins out of the bread and gives half the pop ul- ation rickets. That was what was the matter with civilisation, i t had spiritual rickets because its spiritual food was too refined. Ma n can't get on without a dash of paganism, and for the most part, he doesn't try to." The notion of injecting a key idea into the collective unconscio us of Western humanity appears over and over in Fortune's novels. It i s not surprising that the writer who had two favourite maxims - "A rel igion without a goddess is halfway to atheism" and "All the gods are o ne god and all the goddesses are one goddess and there is one initiator " - should repeatedly call for attention to be paid to the Great God dess. In another of his soliloquies, Hugh Paston thinks, "Surely our o f all her richness and abundance the Great Mother of us all could meet his need? Why do we forget the Mother in the worship of the Father? What particular virtue is there in virgin begetting?" DRAWING DOWN THE MOON When the British witches went public in the early 1950s, the ide a that Christianity had had its day and furthermore was not always the right path for Westerners was often heard. The major difference betwee n their religion and that portrayed in the witch-trial documents M ar- garet Murray studied, however, was the reintroduction of worship of the Great Goddess. She was seen both as Queen of Heaven and Eart h/Sea Mother, depending on the context. The best evidence for Fortune' s inf- 2219 luence here lies in the construction of the key "Gardnerian" rit ual called "Drawing Down the Moon."25 In that ritual, developed and/or modified by Gardner and his contempo- raries, the Goddess is invoked by the priest in the body of the priestess. It is expected that a type of divine inspiration will res- ult. Drawing down the Moon is a key part of every Gardnerian rit ual c- ircle - and its elements and purpose are easily discernible in F ort- une's novel The Sea Priestess, which she was forced by publisher s' lack of interest to self-publish in 1938.26 Richardson, her bio graphe- r, calls it and its sequel, Moon Magic, "the only novels on magi c ever written," considering the competition. Although Gardner only hints at the workings of the ritual in his boo- ks, his successors, the Farrars, explain it more fully in Eight Sabb- ats for Witches.27 It comes after the drawing of the ritual cir cle - a conscious creating and marking of sacred space, defined by the c ardi- nal directions and purified with the four magical elements, fire and air (incense), water and earth (salt). While the priestess stand s before the altar (in a traditional Gardnerian circle she holds a wand and a lightweight scourge in her crossed arms, like a figure of Osiris), the priest kneels and blesses with a kiss her feet, kne es, womb, breast and lips. Then a shift occurs, both in language and action. He ceases to address her as a woman and begins to addres s her as the Mother Goddess, beginning with the words,"I invoke thee a nd call upon thee, Mighty Mother of us all..."28 When the invocation is completed, the priestess is consid ered to be speaking as the Goddess, not as herself. She may go on to delive r a passage (authored by Doreen Valiente, whose role I deal with bel ow) that is based partly on material collected during the 1890s in I taly by the American folklorist Charles Leland.29 I am the gracious Goddess, who gives the gift of joy unto the heart of man. Upon earth, I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal; and bey- ond death, I give peace, and freedom, and reunion with those who have gone before. Nor do I demand sacrifice; for behold, I am the Mot her of all living, and my love is poured out upon the earth." She may, of course, speak spontaneously; Janet Farrar comments t hat "'she never knows how it will come out.' Sometimes the wording i tself is completely altered, with a spontaneous flow she listens to wi th a detached part of her mind."30 Dion Fortune believed that a re-introduction of both ritu al and ps- ychological approaches to the Great Goddess would even the psych ic balance between men and women, a theme carried on today by a num ber of feminist psychologists and writers, although with scant acknowle d- gment. She wished every marriage to take on an aspect of the hie ros gamos (divine marriage), and it is there that a parallel with Wi tch- craft ritual lies, since many rituals turn on sexual polarity, b oth symbolically and literally. Fortune foreshadowed this in The Sea Priestess when she wrote:31 "In this sacrament the woman must take her ancient place as priestess of the rite, calling down lightning from heaven; the initiator, not the initiated.... She had to become the priestess of the Goddess , and I [the male narrator], the kneeling worshipper, had to receive t he sacrament at her hands....When the body of a woman is made an al tar 2220 for the worship of the Goddess who is all beauty and magnetic li fe... then the Goddess enters the temple." This is not just Fortune's description of the magical side of ma rri- age, but a virtual schematic of the Drawing Down the Moon ceremo ny and its concluding Great Rite, as Gardner called ritual intercourse at its conclusion (something more frequently performed symbolically). A s the Farrars state, "The Great Rite specifically declares that the bo dy of the woman taking part is an altar, with her womb and generative organs as its sacred focus, and reveres it as such."32 I would suggest that when the Farrars openly built a new ritual upon the Sea Priestess, the "seashore ritual" mentioned earlier, whic h for- ms Chapter X of The Witches' Way, they were openly admitting a d ebt to Fortune which modern Witchcraft has always carried on its books. To recapitulate, the circumstantial case for Fortune's influence on the beginnings of modern Witchcraft fits the chronology. Gerald Gardn- er's initiation took place in 1939 in Hampshire. In the late 194 0s he "received permission" to publish some things about Witchcraft in his novel High Magic's Aid, which appeared in 1949 and had little of the Goddess element in it. The Sea Priestess was written in the 1930 s, but only available in a private edition at first, while its sequel, Moon Magic, was available in 1956. The Great Goddess becomes more central in Gardner's works from t he 1950s and is absolutely central to the Craft as it developed in that decade. She did not, however, appear in Margaret Murray's works on the alleged underground Paganism of the Middle Ages, which Murray wr ote in the 1920s. There may, however, be echoes of a Goddess religion i n It- aly, based on Leland's research there in the mid-1800s. Leland p r- ovided another literary source for the Drawing Down the Moon cer emony. The person who re-wrote that ceremony and gave Gardnerian- tradi tion ritual much of its form is now known to be Doreen Valiente, who wrote four books on the Craft as well. Her contributions to the texts are discussed at length in The Witches' Way. Although not the only o ne of Gardner's original coveners still living (i.e., after he moved a way from the coven that initiated him, most of whose members were el derly in the 1930s), she has been the only one publicly involved in a critical re-evaluation of the tradition's beginnings. Although Gardner and Fortune were contemporaries, she does not k now if they ever met, she told me in a 1985 letter. She did, however, s ay that she is "very fond of Dion Fortune's books, especially her n ovels The Sea Priestess, The Goat-Foot God, and Moon Magic. It is nota ble that her [Fortune's] outlook became more pagan as she grew older ." Whether this is a tacit admission that she drew upon Fortune's w orks, I cannot say. Witches are known for oblique statements, and Vali ente walked a fine line between secrecy and disclosure. Given England's size, its relatively interwoven cliques of occul tists, and the small number of novelists dealing with Pagan themes, it is unlikely that Valiente and Gardner were not aware of Fortune's n ovels at the time they were giving their religion its present form. As we h- ave seen, Gardner was himself engaged in a conscious search for ma- gical learning in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was in the 1930s t hat F- ortune's novels began appearing, while the chapters of SaneOccul tism were published serially in The Occult Review , and influential B ritish journal it is unlikely he would have overlooked. 2221 Valiente, meanwhile, was initiated by Gardner as a priestess in 1953 and left his coven to form her own in 1957, the year after Moon Magic came out. With such a coincidence of subject matter, place and d ates, it is difficult not to see Dion Fortune as a previously unadmitt ed but significant influence on the development of Gardnerian Witchcraf t. Today the Goddess revival seems to have its "applied" and "theor - etical" wings, with the Neo-Pagans in the first category and var ious Jungians, writers on feminist spirituality and historians of rel igion in the second. With her combined psychological and magical train ing, Dion Fortune could be considered a foremother to each. NOTES 1. Alan Richardson, Priestess: The Life and Magic of Dion Fort une. (Wellingborough, Northants: The Aquarian Press, 1987), p.37 . 2. G. Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn: A Study of Religions Conc ep- tions of the Stone Age and Their Influence upon European Th ought. (London: Faber and Faber, 1948). 3. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A historical grammar of p oetic myth. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), p.12. 4. Raymond Buckland, Witchcraft from the Inside. (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1971), p.55. The law was a successo r to the Witchcraft Act of King James I, passed in 1604 and repe aled in 1736. 5. J.L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch. (London: Octagon Pres s 1960). 6. Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today. (London: Rider & Co., 1954), p.18 7. Margaret Murray, My First Hundred Years. (London: William K imber, 1963), p.104. The title was no exaggeration; she was born i n 18- 63. 8. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions: Essa- ys in Comparative Religions. (Chicago: University of Chicag o Pre- ss, 1976), p.56 9. J. Gordon Melton, Magic, Witchcraft and Paganism in America : A Bibliography. (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1982), p.1 05 10. Alan Richardson, Dancers to the Gods. (Wellingborough, Nort hants: The Aquarian Press, 1985). 11. ------, Priestess: The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune. (- Wellingborough, Northants: The Aquarian Press, 1987). 12. Charles Fielding and Carr Collins, The Story of Dion Fortun e. (- Dallas, Texas: Star and Cross Publication, 1985). 13. Dion Fortune, The Goat-Foot God. (London: The Aquarian Pres s, 1971), p.89 2222 14. James Hillman, "Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic." Appendix to David L. Miller, The New Polytheism. (Dallas, T exas: Spring Publications Inc., 1981), p.125 15. C.G. Jung, "Yoga and the West". In The Collected Works of C .G. Jung. (London: Pantheon, 1958), Vol XI, p.534. 16. Dion Fortune, Sane Occultism. (Wellingborough, Northants: T he Aquarian Press, 1967), pp.161-2. 17. Ibid. pp. 25-6. 18. Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches' Way. (London: Robert Hale, 1984), pp. 95-6. 19. Goat-Foot God, p. 89. 20. Robert Galbreath, "The History of Modern Occultism: A Bibli o- graphic Survey." Journal of Popular Culture, V:3 (Winter 19 71), p. 728/100 21. Goat-Foot God, pp. 352-3 22. Dion Fortune, The Winged Bull: A Romance of Modern Magic. ( Lo- ndon: Williams and Norgate Ltd., 1935), p. 169. It is no co in- cidence that the leading female character was named Ursula Bra- ngwyn,a name used by D.H. Lawrence for a character in Women in Love; Fortune was trying to re-state "the sex problem" on a "h- igher plane" than Lawrence had. 23. Ibid. pp. 154-6. 24. Goat-Foot God, p. 349. 25. A term that deliberately or otherwise echoes Plato's descri ption in the Georgias of "the Thessalian witches who drawn down t he moon from heaven." 26. Dion Fortune, The Sea Priestess. (London: Wynham Publicatio ns Lt- d., 1976). 27. Janet and Stewart Farrar, Eight Sabbats for Witches: and Ri tes for Birth, Marriage and Death. (London: Robert Hale, 1981), p. 15. 28. The exact terminology may vary from coven to coven; the Far rar's give Gardner's favourite. 29. Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia: or the Gospel of the Witche s. (L- ondon: David Nutt, 1899). Leland may indeed have found some fragments of a goddess religion. Gardner and Valiente expur gated parts of it, such as the invocation of the Goddess as a poi soner of great lords in their castles, and other homely arts. 30. The Witches' Way, p.68. 31. The Sea Priestess, pp. 160-1. 32. Eight Sabbats for Witches, p.49.
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