Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – II
Continuing on from the previous post, here is a condensation of my Twitter thread originally posted on August 27, 2021. Here’s part two (see thread of 26 August) of my interrogative reading of Dion Fortune’s classic Psychic Self Defence, a book for which the phrase “paranoid reading” seems somehow appropriate (with apologies to Eve Sedgwick).
Chapter 7: “The pathology of non-human contacts”
DF is now going to explain those forms of life other than ours, which is to say fairies and suchlike, becoz well folklore. No smoke without fire. Must be something in it.
She kicks off with a lengthy discussion about people who are “soulless”.
“Although seldom deliberately evil, they are singularly detrimental to all with whom they come in contact. They, for their part, are unhappy and lonely in our midst. They feel themselves to be alien and uncompanioned… they resemble nothing so much as a blend of Persian kitten and pet monkey.”
[Is she on about queer folk again? Probably not, but it is rather suggestive. A digression: many years ago, some complete knob wrote a letter into the Lamp of Thoth going on and on about homosexuals being elementals in human form. Wish I’d hung onto it for its classic occultization of homophobia.]
“I have been able to investigate the history of two such beings, and it is interesting to note that both of them were conceived while their mothers were under the influence of drink.”
[Oh, come on! She really should have illustrated this with one of those Hogarth pictures about the evils of gin. I wonder if these mothers were “party girls” or lower class? Anyhow, Dion does not like drink.]
She gives an occult explanation about psychic vortices at the moment of sexual union, and how non-human entities can sneak into incarnation. Just in case we have any doubts about these non-human entities in human bodies, she says that “the morals of the non-human are those of the barnyard.”
Still, on the same topic, she says that whereas in man, all 4 elements are combined, non-humans only belong to one element. Again, she warns against getting involved with such beings because “non-humans are promiscuous in their sexual habits” so any relationship can only lead to divorce.
[moral: women, please don’t aim to conceive a child when you’ve had too much to drink, that’s how sexually promiscuous non-human entities get born. Does she think that everybody who is sexually promiscuous is one of these walk-ins? I’m prepared to wait and see.]
She then distinguishes these elementals/nature spirits from the “controls” of spiritualism. Apparently, the spiritualist movement is very well organized on the inner planes, and “promiscuous controlling is not permitted.
[So she approves, in general, with Spiritualism, which is a definite break with HPB et al.]
Apparently, Western Occultism has not quite got its act together on this score, although “The great Orders have their have their definite contacts and work strictly within them, keeping a firm hand on neophytes” but “outside the Orders there is a good deal of chaos and banditry…”
[Magical Orders: please keep a firm hand on your neophytes! to be said aloud only in a Kenneth Williams voice]
She then starts on about the Deva kingdom [another Leadbeater thing] and how people try by meditation and ritual to get in touch with it. This says DF is very risky unless one is an “initiate” because you can become unbalanced, if not actually obsessed. She explains: “Persons in whom the subconscious mind is near the surface, such as the artist, the crank, the unstable, and for the matter of that, the genius in any walk of life, love the elemental contacts because they stimulate the elemental forces in their own nature” but “the average citizen, whose mental content is organised largely in a basis of repression … is upset by the elemental contacts according to the proportion of repression to compromise in his make-up.”
[Note: “Initiate” here means initiate of a great Order, and not something you’ve done yourself one night after watching Sabrina.]
She then goes on to describe the various pathologies relating to each of the 4 elements in turn.
[I’m not going summarize this bit.]
She winds up with some comments regarding other countries:
“I am not personally acquainted with the West Coast of Africa … but I am of the opinion that the elemental forces and the atmosphere made by Juju rites are between them more responsible than the climate for earning that part of the world its sinister reputation as the White Man’s Grave.” and “The only other place that is at all comparable to it is the Caribbean Sea, which produces, not so much a demoralisation, as a fierceness and violence quite alien to the racial characteristics of the people who go there.”
[So it’s not malaria that killed off all those Europeans who went into Africa and didn’t have immunity, it’s the effects of “Juju”. Nice bit of colonial rhetoric there.]
[I need to vent a bit at this point. It really annoys me how some occult authors just have to place occultism behind every kind of global phenomenon, like James Bond villains secretly pulling the strings in the background. It’s as though someone who’s really into biscuits insists that everything going on in the world is biscuit-related.
“Global Warming?”
“well that’s obviously related to overconsumption of Custard Creams”
“Brexit?”
“Too long have the Belgians tried to oppress us with their fancy foreign biscuits and loose morals!”]
[As I get further through PSD it will become readily apparent that DF is something of a xenophobe.]
On to Chapter 8 “The risks incidental to ceremonial magic”
First, some “evil gods” are mentioned. In Hinduism “Shiva and Kali”, for Egypt: Set, Besz and Typhon: in Greece: Pluto and Hecate.
[She doesn’t really say why they are evil at this point. Just accept it and move on.]
She then drags in Milton, and goes all Qabalistic in order to explain “the esoteric theory of evil”. Two types: Negative Evil and Positive Evil. [I’m not going to go into it in too much depth. My Qabala is very rusty.]
“Negative Evil is the thrust-block of Good: the principle of resistance, of intertia, that enables Good to “get a purchase.” “But Negative Evil is more than this. We might call the principle of resistance the negative aspect of Negative Evil, for it also has a “positives” aspect, the Principle of Destruction” … “its esoteric name of the Scavenger of the Gods. Its function is to clear up behind the advancing tide of evolution, removing that which has become effete so that it may not choke and clog evolving life.”
[okay, so this is a cosmic principle that takes care of things that have become worn out, degenerate, self-indulgent.]
The Devil, says DF, is the cosmic “thrust-block and Scavenger of the Gods. It is this aspect of evil which is given a more detailed symbolism in the pantheons of other faiths”
[Shiva, Kali, Pluto, Hecate].
“We can now see why these resistive and destructive forces are classed as gods and not demons, for they are reactions according to cosmic law, not anarchical and chaotic forces.”
[They are evil, but they are kind of like garbage collectors, taking away stuff that has outgrown its usefulness, is what I think she’s saying here. Useful but not welcome in the parlour, unless dusting, as it were.]
Now onto “Positive Evil”. Again this has both its negative and positive aspects. Negative Positive Evil is “pure chaos, unformed substance and uncoordinated force. “It has aptly been called the Cosmic Abortion.”
[I think DF got quoted a lot back in the early days of chaos magic by peeps who didn’t like the idea.]
The sphere of positive “Positive Evil” is that of the Qlippoth.
[Oo-er!]
“When we consider all that must have been poured into these ten sinks of iniquity since the days of Atlantean Magic, through the decadence of Babylon and Rome, down to the Great War, we can guess what rises up from them when their seals are broken.”
Not only do the Qlippothic forces “tempt and corrupt souls” but there have been formed “evil intelligences” probably due to “the workings of Black Magic”. They can appear as “dreams, hallucinations and may produce a considerable degree of objective phenomena” [noises, slime, blood, balls of light, horrid smells etc.]
The Qlippoth are always present and even if you don’t deliberately call them you can still end up with them on your case becoz “every planet is a Jekyll and Hyde.” Ceremonial magic has got a bad name because of “untoward results” but its people’s “imperfect technique” which is the problem, not the system.
There’s a long passage quoted from the Occult Review which is all about some dude who made an Abra Melin Talisman and got into bother. Mayhem ensues. The moral seems to be don’t use any printed occult work unless you really know what you are doing i.e have absolute control over the forces you’ve invoked.
DF then makes some observations on the Qlippotic demons which are “as rare as anthrax in England”. Many warnings about the dangers of dabbling in occult matters follow. Don’t buy charms advertised in occult papers, second-hand books on magic can be dangerous; so can new books; beware of occult groups whose contacts are “debased”. Occult practice is dangerous [yaddah yaddah yaddah] with more of DF’s own experiences. We get the idea.
Another passage from Occult Review about a woman found dead on the island of Iona. DF says [darkly] “The body bore marks of scratches.” And proceeds to speculate about why she died and what she was up to.
In closing, DF makes some remarks about initiation ceremonies. She’s a bit dismissive of HPB and her “prejudice against ritual magic” saying that Mme B judged western esotericisms by Eastern conditions, “where Tantric magic has become depraved in the hands of Dugpas and similar sects”.
[Those darned Dugpas again.]
This ends Part 1 of Psychic Self-Defence.
Part 2 kicks off with Chapter 9: “Distinction between objective psychic attack and subjective psychic disturbance”
DF starts with a somewhat surprising attack on “psychism”.
“Psychism, however genuine, is a fruitful cause of self-delusion. A psychic is invariably highly sensitive and suggestible. … Psychism not being a normal development, among Europeans at any rate, the psychic is … unstable, liable to violent emotional reactions, and in general exhibits those abberations of conduct we are accustomed to associate with artistic genius.”
She continues:
“Unless a psychic is trained, disciplined, protected and watched over by those who understand his condition, his psychism is never reliable because he is blown about by every wind of influence.”
Psychics are like neurotics and vice versa. It’s pointless opening the door of the Unseen unless you can shut it too.
[Psychics – unless you are under the watchful care of a great Order or a great Adept, expect trouble.]
Now a bit about occult progression.
“In the case of a person who is coming onto the Path for the first time, progress is necessarily slow and laborious;”
[I wonder if she’s hinting at the Theosophical view that it can take several lifetimes to get anywhere.]
“A soul that has taken initiation in previous incarnations may reopen the latent psychic faculties so rapidly that the problem of maintaining the harmonised coordination of the personality may become a serious one.”
“It is exceedingly common for a person who is making his first contact with the occult movement to experience psychic disturbance.”
She says that these disturbances may be attributed to evil influences or entities but that might not actually be what’s going on. She compares the newbie with a kid at the seaside who is over-excited by the donkeys and eaten too much ice cream. “an attack of occult indigestion.”
[Pro tip: If life is getting weird, take a break from occult practice.]
The partial recovery of past life memories may include “painful episodes, especially such as are connected with esoteric studies. The entry of occult concepts into the conscious mind tends to awaken the subconscious memory of similar experiences in past lives. The emotion surrounding a memory is invariably recovered before the actual image of the incident.”
[This sounds uncannily like a lot of those self-help books that tell you those odd emotions are because you are suppressing memories of being satanically ritually abused by your parents.]
DF advises caution in “drawing conclusions from the psychic impressions of an inexperienced student, who is apt to be as full of alarms as a two-year-old thoroughbred.”
[Yeah, well, Novices, eh?.]
But, she reminds us, there are such things as “Black Lodges and evil entities”, so again, caution is advised.
A complainant she says will have “filled his atmosphere with menacing thought-forms” making it difficult to decide whether or not the thought-forms are subjective or objective.”
[There’s that tension I remarked on in the previous post as whether or not ideation emerges from one’s self or from outside. By complainant she’s talking about someone leveling an accusation against another occultist or a group.]
DF says the thing to do is to “enquire into the record” of the group or occultist against whom the charges are being laid. And into the record of the person who is making them.
[She doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she’s obviously talking about the Akashic Records – the occult equivalent of an Experian credit check.]
Now DF turns to a more difficult area – “the vagaries of the sex instinct in a person in whom that instinct is repressed.”
There follow a few paragraphs all about women. First, there are women who get into the occult after their husbands have dropped dead and become “englamoured” by ritual and find themselves “strangely stirred”. “She will point an unerring finger at the magnetic male.” The outcome she says is either an accusation of hypnotic influence or improper advances. “A woman who is broadcasting the tale of her own shame is usually a woman scorned, and the reliability of her testimony in the matter is in inverse ratio to her loquacity.” (my italics).
[What so, the more a woman says she is abused, the less reliable her testimony? Am I reading that right?]
She says, in support of this view, that there is a common form of mental derangement known as “Old Maid’s insanity”
[also known as de Clérambault’s syndrome, a type of erotomania, described by Freud, Havelock Ellis, and many others. It’s in DSM-5.]
Then there are women who have crushes or fixations on other women. She says “this was alleged against me, and I was accused of being a man in disguise and attempting to seduce the complainant, and the charge found believers.”
[I seem to recall Crowley wrote a humourous limerick about DF being, erm, sapphically inclined. Does anyone know it? NB: I found it and posted it in a subsequent thread.]
Anyway, DF says that high-grade occultists have magnetic personalities and cannot, therefore, help it if unsuitable people are drawn to them, which is one reason why great adepts “always live in seclusion”.
She then mentions the case of a person who allowed an “alleged adept” who was under occult attack to take refuge in his studio, only to find that the adept was selling the furniture to buy drink. “there was every reason to believe that the only spirits who were in any way concerned with his troubles had entered the studio in bottles.”
[A flash of wit, there. Is this another Crowley story, I wonder?]
More about occult attacks being the delusions of the insane, i.e. folie des deux. One person may be insane and the other sharing their delusions. DF says this condition is rare with males, more common between sisters or women who live together.
[Shades of 19thC accounts of female hysteria!]
which women are particularly prone to, as “temperamental instability becomes greatly exaggerated during the times of the monthly periods … at any period when the sex life is stirred to activity, whether emotionally or physically.”
[So, some women are temperamental and prone to mania becoz periods. Henry Maudsley could not have put it better.]
Some related discussion about Maudsley and others of that ilk here.
A bit further on she describes a victim who “declared that he was being persecuted by telepathic suggestion” by the people next door. He said they didn’t, but DF tells us he’d never actually *seen* them do it, spoken to them, been in their flat, etc. DF says that telepathic suggestion is hard work and she can’t imagine anyone putting in the effort without good reason, tho’ of course she knows of cases where it has happened. And she does say that one should exercise caution when dealing with persons who are “obviously mentally unbalanced and who alleges a psychic attack” and bear in mind that “the mental unbalance may have been induced by the psychic attack.”
Chapter 10. [drumroll…]
“Non-occult dangers of the Black Lodge”
Now we getting into the really nasty stuff. There are 3 reasons for examining this unpleasant subject.
1. “the greater proportion of students of esotericism are women … they are usually ignorant of the life of the underworld, and a Black Lodge leads by a straight and narrow way into the land of apaches and demimondaines”
[NB: Both these terms originated in France. Apaches is a reference to criminal gangs, so savage that they were compared to native Americans, and later extended to cover marginal persons and subcultures. Demimondaines – a term coined by Alexandre Dumas (1855) and used to disparage hedonists, often women who flaunted their looks and sexual talents, entertaining high-class lovers and shocking the bourgeois with their scandals. Perhaps DF does not like the French and their loose ways?]
2. A knowledge of these facts is essential for differential diagnosis.
3. Occult powers get used for mundane ends, some occult organisations may be involved in “ordinary criminality” but then there’s the complications of what’s going on on other planes.
Lodges don’t necessarily start off doing naughty things, but because the very nature of the fraternity organisation is secretive, it can go that way. Examples: drug trafficking, being “riddled with unnatural vice”, being “little more than a house of ill-fame”, being involved with “subversive politics.”
[all these are indications of the LHP in DF’s book.]
DF recommends thoroughly checking out any esoteric fraternity before joining it. If in doubt, consult the periodical Truth.
[Truth was a British periodical (1877-1957) founded by Henry Labouchère, much given to exposing frauds and scandals, and sued many times. Labouchère is best remembered for the Labouchère Amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which outlawed “gross indecency” between men, under which Wilde was later prosecuted.]
See here for more about the Labouchère Amendment.
DF says blackmail is the commonest form of unpleasantness in Black Lodges. She advises telling the police straight away. Then its onto drugs. “All initiates of the Right-hand Path agree in declaring that to exalt consciousness by means of drugs is a dangerous and undesirable proceeding.”
[pretty unequivocal. Drugs are bad, okay?]
She’s not going to talk about “occult abuses of the sex-force” but the “purely normal form of loose living which is camouflaged under the pretext of occultism.” So, heads of groups systematically seducing their pupils under the pretext that it was part of their initiation.
[Still an ongoing problem today, as I’m sure many of us can attest.]
There’s also “as much danger of corruption in a Black Lodge for boys and youths as there is for women.” The police have intervened in such cases, “both here and abroad.”
[Possibly a dig in the direction of “Bishop” Leadbeater being investigated by the Sydney police?]
See this post.
Brief para about human sacrifice and ritual murder. “There recently came into my hands, however, a book upon magic published for private circulation, in which the statement is made that the ideal blood sacrifice is a male child.”
[Well no need to guess who she’s talking about there, is there?]
On to “revolutionary activities”. DF does say that politics are a matter of personal opinion but “I, personally, am of the opinion that an occult fraternity is extremely ill-advised to concern itself with politics” and refers readers to her book Sane Occultism for more about this.
[I’m not going to look it up.]
She briefly tells of how she was approached to allow a person who’d been previously deported to reside in one of her Order’s community houses – and was offered a few hundred quid to do so, but sent the correspondence “straight to the authorities.”
She then asserts that the “really Black Lodges” cannot be entered by outsiders. What she’s been writing about so far are the lodges of “dubious whiteness” populated by seedy adventurers and smart society folk out for cheap thrills.
Bad signs to watch out for: requests for large sums of money; adepts showing off their supposed occult powers. Genuine Adepts don’t do this.
Finally, people who get into the occult go through three phases:
- 1. They think its all superstition and fraud.
- 2. Having had their scepticism breached, they will believe anything.
- 3. They learn discrimination, and can distinguish between “the Black Fraternities, the White Fraternities, and Fatuous Fraternities.”
[what a wit our DF is!]
Some closing observations:
There’s a lot of nudging and hinting going on here, but DF is being cautious about what she can reveal becoz well, she has taken oaths of secrecy and cannot say too much lest people become even more confused than they already are. Which they are a lot, she obviously thinks. But PSD is an attempt to lay things out succinctly and clearly, which was quite radical for its time if you consider some of the occult texts that preceded it.
What’s tricky about a lot of what DF is saying is that a lot of it is “initiated” truth which is not open to critique from those who are not, after all, “initiates” (of one of the “Great Orders” of course). Annie Besant said on several occasions that ordinary mortals should not assume to judge Adepts by “mundane” standards becoz we cannot understand them. She said this a lot about Leadbeater when people accused him of being a kiddie-fiddler.
Some reflections on occult truth claims and games here
DF is giving us quite an eye-opening window on the occult world of 1930, albeit through the lens of someone who is a bit conservative, to say the least, looking around and obviously not liking a lot of what she sees. After all, the previous decade (the 1920s) was extremely turbulent in Britain. We tend to think of that decade as one of hedonism and frivolity, but it was a period of rapid social change. Pre-war ideas of femininity were challenged, and there was a lot of concern about the impact of dance halls, cinemas, and Hollywood-inspired celebrity culture on the morals of young working-class women. Women were beginning to experience greater social freedom and I think we can see this coming out in a lot of what DF goes on about when she discusses women – her stern warnings re: drink, drugs, and loose living in general. I would say that her motivation is to help people, especially women, to steer clear of the murkier dangers of the occult scene, however awfully it comes across.
See Judy Giles Playing Hard to Get’: working‐class women, sexuality and respectability in Britain, 1918‐40 for some context.
There’s an interesting bit for example in one of her Dr. Taverner stories where she makes a very specific reference to “the Chelsea Black Lodges”. After a bit of digging around I did come across the fact that Chelsea, in London, was at that time home to quite a vibrant bohemian scene of artists and people experimenting with drugs and sexuality – probably what DF is referring to, although she has to ‘occultize’ it.
Also, for all her sly digs at Crowley (and there is a great deal of them throughout her published work) she does seem to have made up with him, later in her life, and exchanged letters with him in the 1940s.
As to her middle-class orientation, I think it is clear she is writing to a middle-class audience. The upper classes always appear as rather degenerate in her works – see both The Demon Lover and The Goat-foot God for tensions between upper-class and middle-class characters. Lower class characters tend only to put in an appearance as servants, with no interest in the esoteric.
This ends the second thread. Original thread here.
