Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – III
The third of my excessively long Twitter threads examining Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence, originally posted on 28 August 2021.
Onwards with yet more reading of Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence. I could give it up at any time you know.
Chapter XI: “The Psychic Element in Mental Disturbance”
This is all about the part played by psychic attack in nervous and mental disorders.
[After the revelations about the “Black Lodges” in the previous chapter, it’s very much a change of pace.]
First off, DF makes a key distinction. The mind is part of the personality, “commencing at birth and ending at death”, at which point its essence is absorbed by the individuality which evolves and presumably reincarnates into the next stage of its evolution.
On to the mind. The mind, DF tells us, “is essentially the organ of adaptation to the environment, and it is when that adaptation fails that neurotic and hysterical troubles begin.”
“Each living creature is a channel of life-force that proceeds from the Logos, the Creator of this universe.”
This current of the life force divides into 3 great instincts: Self-Preservation, Reproduction, and the Social Instinct. “The pressure of Life itself is behind them, and if they are thwarted beyond their power of compensation … they are like streams whose channels are blocked, and which in consequence overflow and make a morass of the adjacent land.”
[These 3 instincts rather remind me of classical Samkhya.]
[NB: I have only a vague idea of what I was referring to here. When I find the relevant document, I’ll update the article.]
According to DF, all emotions can be rooted in one or other of these three Instincts. Each instinct has a spiritual aspect and an elemental (physical) aspect.
[This identification of instincts with emotions emerged in the late 19th century in the work of Schneider, William McDougall, and William James. Here’s James on Emotions
Instinct theory was united with psychoanalytic theory by Sir Frederick Mott in the early 1920s. So in a way (odd though it might sound to us today) DF is explaining “cutting-edge” stuff!
The instinct as emotion model fell out of favour for a while in psychology, but it still has its adherents.]
For example, hysteria.
“The dammed-up forces of life remain in the channel, but spurt with concentrated force through any sluice that may be opened to them.” The river below whatever’s blocking it goes out of control, creating areas of rapids and whirlpools, creating a swamp. “In other words, the temperament becomes tempestuous and unduly emotional, and the non-emotional factors of the mind, such as judgment and self-control are demoralised. … periodically the repressed emotions boil over in fits of screaming, crying” etc, which are like safety valves attempting to relieve the pressure.
[Kind of a hydrodynamic account of psychological processes.]
She then differentiates between neurotics and hysterics – again, its all about repressed emotion and a failure to adapt, but the “life-forces set to work to cut fresh channels for themselves” in order to get around a blockage. This leads to “what the psychologist calls displacement of emotion.” Some “innocuous matter” becomes the object of an outpouring of emotion – it is a substitute for something else.
The organic insanities are similar, but their origin is physical, not mental, and not really treatable by psychotherapy, DF says. “The body is the vehicle of the mind. If the vehicle be faulty, the mind cannot express itself accurately” [fair enough]
“esoteric science says the brain is the organ of perception of sense impressions and co-ordination of efferent impulses. It is the telephone exchange of the nervous system.”
[Again, this reads to me like a development of Theosophical adaptations of Samkhya – the Antahkarana in particular. Look it up.]
(the brain) “is only one of the points where mind touches body, the others being the ductless glands of the endocrine system … to which may be added the Solar Plexus and Sacral Plexus. The Student of Tantric physiology will be very dull if he has not observed that the Chakras coincide in their physical location with the endocrine organs.”
[It’s comments like this that have led some of DF’s biographers to conclude that DF was a keen student of Tantra. Chakras, when they were “rediscovered” in the latter part of the 19th century were first identified with “nerve plexuses” by many writers of the period, both European and Indian. By the 1920s, the identification had moved on to the endocrine organs. It’s still a popular element in chakra discourse but is not actually found in any classical tantric literature, that is to say, anything written between the 5-18th centuries CE. It’s an interpretation made for a variety of reasons, mostly nothing to do with the occult. In his 1918 book, The Serpent Power Sir John Woodroffe spends over 60 pages discussing the various attempts to correlate chakras with nerve plexuses, and concludes it’s a mistake. I go into it a bit in the 3rd booklet in my series on the history of chakras The Judge and the Bishop – available from Treadwells Bookshop unless they’ve run out.]
More about the importance of the endocrine organs follows. Endocrine balance is “intimately associated with emotional states, and especially the alertness or stolidity of the temperament. …”
[Over the course of the 1920s, the importance of the endocrine system became hugely popular both as an element of psychological theories and popular rejuvenation treatments, and a whole bunch of other things. DF’s readers would no doubt have been aware of this.]
“The breathing exercises of the yoga system are based on this knowledge
[really? No, but again by that period, it was often thought to be the case. I don’t want to go into it here. It comes out of the scientific study of Yoga.]
“and are exceedingly potent, as are all occult practices which are brought through correctly to the physical plane. In fact, we may say that no occult process is really potent, nor can it be said to have completed its circuit, unless it has its point of contact with dense matter: a point which many occultists leave out of their calculations.”
“In the great majority of cases of insanity, organic brain changes cannot be demonstrated, but alienists are more and more coming to recognise that they may look for the lues of Hecate in the blood.”
[WTF is “leus of Hecate”, anyone? Leus is an old term for plague or pestilence, often used in respect to syphilis. In this period, many “alienists” were doctors of physical medicine.]
She continues, explaining the relationship between emotions and blood chemistry. Now onto “the part played by the Unseen.” She begins by saying that when a person takes up occultism and learns about the Invisible Worlds, he immediately comes into contact with them, if only subconsciously, and is affected by them. An observer will know the signs.
“There are great forces moving like currents in the Unseen and we are drawn into these according to our temperamental affinity for them.”
[Occultists don’t really use the term “energy” very much at this point in time. Theosophical literature, for the most part, uses the term “forces.” Obviously, there is a semantic drift towards the use of the term “energies” but I am not sure when it begins to take off.]
Anyhow, an example of these currents is “The violent personality is drawn into the Current of Mars”
“the occultist working under a proper system, knowing that he has got to meet these forces sooner or later, picks them up one by one voluntarily and by means of the appropriate rituals, and sythesises them within his own nature. He knows too that each aspect has its obverse. The Virgin Mary is reflected in Lilith.”
[I don’t think this requires any comment. Note the use of the term “proper” though. There are obvious improper systems about.]
She says that popular Christianity has forgotten this, becoz Reformation and that “all the pagan pantheons have gross aspects of divinities as well as etherial ones.” We need to “search the refuse-heap of history” and she recommends the Qabalah and the Gnostic traditions, altho’ she says much of the latter has been lost.
So back to Qabalah. The emanation of the Sephiroth, Archangels, and the “obverse Sephiroth, or Qlippoth.”
[All fairly straightforward stuff if you are familiar with the Western Esoteric Tradition.]
She’s going to talk about the Sphere of the Moon. Luna – Lunatics. Luna was represented as Diana “symbol of sublimation” and by Hecate, “patroness of witchcraft and childbirth.”
[Whenever DF starts on about Hecate you know it’s going to be bad.]
“when the unstable soul advances by the Path of Saturn that bridges the Astral and enters the Sphere of Luna, he touches her Hecate aspect and finds himself en rappart with the Gamaliel, the Obscene Ones, whose chief is Lilith, she who giveth lustful dreams. Need we then wonder that Freud finds the dreams of the neurotic filled with sexual images in their most perverted and debased form? The Rabbis knew their psychology just as well as he does.”
Neurotics and psychics. If a soul has taken initiation in a past life, and retained the psychic development, and then incarnates into a neurotic personality “He will come under the dark dominion of the Moon, and Lilith will be his mistress. Through the ill-fitting doors of the neurotic temperament the forces of the Abyss find ingress. The dissociated complexes of the Microcosm are reinforced by the dissociated complexes of the Macrocosm, for that is precisely what the Qlippoth are.”
[Insanity caused by the Qlippoth. I seem to recall Kenneth Grant using this argument.]
Occultists have apparently always known that insanity had to do with demonic possession. Psychologists dispute this. DF believes that the two schools will eventually come together on this issue ‘cos the occultist can show how visions can be produced at will via ceremonial magic and dispersed and the psychic faculties closed down.
[A tad overly optimistic there, I feel.]
Anyhow, DF then turns to the issue of how ritual magic can be applied “to the relief of mental disease.” She notes that a difficulty with dispersing phantoms is that the patient is continually re-invoking them. “As fast as we break the rapport with the Abyss, the patient renews it.”
Exorcism prior to psychotherapy can be helpful in the case of neurotics. It might take several goes though. The patient has though, to obey instructions and have nothing to do with the Unseen, ie reading occult books or associating with others interested in these matters.
Human consciousness is not closed, but “cosmic forces are circulating through it all the time.”
“The subjective self has only the kindling, the Cosmos supplies the fuel.”
“Just as the devout Catholic is inspired by the influences of his patron saint, so the neurotic is hag-ridden by his obsessive demon, invoked by the morbid broodings of the dissociated consciousness.”
She goes on to say that “obsession” in occult terms, is the *complete* domination of one soul by another – a hypnotic domination where the “hypnotist” is an astral entity. In closing, she briefly outlines the practice of “assuming the god-form” and hypothesizes that obsessing entities use a similar procedure. The entity identifies with its victim and superimposes its own personality upon his, “obtaining a vehicle of manifestation.” This can only take place though in certain abnormal states, induced by disease of mind or body, or “black magic”.
Now for Chapter 12 [wait for it….]
“Methods employed in making a Psychic Attack”
[Now we’re into the tech stuff.]
If you read the books on witchcraft by professional witch-finders from the confessions of alleged witches extracted under torture, you’ll see that the categories are so constant – all over the world – that DF says, “there must be some fire behind so much smoke.” Ditto “accounts of the practices of primitive people all over the world.”
[DF has her anthropology hat on.]
First up is drugs “which the Black Fraternity in all ages have possessed a remarkable knowledge.” Many examples of the use of drugs and poisons. These aren’t really psychic methods of attack though. She’s only mentioning them in order to exclude them from diagnosis.
There are 3 factors in a psychic attack – and any or all of them can be used in a given instance.
- 1. Telepathic hypnotic suggestion.
- 2. Reinforcement of the suggestion via the invocation of “invisible agencies”
- 3. The use of a physical substance as a link.
“The force employed may be used as a direct current, transmitted by the mental concentration of the operator, or it may be reserved in a kind of psychic storage battery – either an artificial elemental or a talisman.”
She’s already covered the psychology of suggestion – “the essence of telepathy consists in the sympathetic induction of vibration.” She then talks about how emotion is “closely akin to electricity” and that psychologists have “proved conclusively” that emotional states alter the electrical conductivity of the body.
“The occultist believes that emotion is a force of an electrical type” in ordinary people it radiates outwards in all directions, but “in the case of the trained occultist it can be concentrated into a beam and directed.”
[presumably becoz “will” etc.]
If you can do this, says DF, then all the life-force coming into your soul from the cosmos will flow into this beam. It requires terrific concentration, “but it will only be achieved at a terrific price.” This is why Western Saints and Eastern Yogis practice “torturing asceticism.”
Sounds great, but there’s a catch. “Such a concentration is good for one purpose, and one purpose only.”
You can concentrate on healing, or destruction, but not both at the same time, and you can’t readily change over from one to the other either.
[So once you’ve zapped someone because they blocked you on Twitter, it’s pretty dam near impossible to later heal someone who’s liked one of your tweets. At least that’s what I gather from what she says.]
There’s a lot about how the Soul moves with the tide of evolution, “spinning clockwise, or deosil and that “the flywheel has to be stopped before the engine can be reversed – and that a big flywheel takes a lot of stopping.
The gist of it seems to be that “We need to think many times before we undertake to reverse that spin even momentarily, in order to undertake a work of malediction and death.”
[Takeaway: don’t curse people. Once you start you won’t be able to stop.]
[It’s all very “Human Motor” at this point. See this post for some thoughts on that.]
As an example, she describes a person who wants to “avail himself of a fighting force” and performs a ceremony of the planet Mars. She briefly describes how one goes about doing this. Classic ceremonial magic.
[Great fun, if you’ve ever done it. There’s a write-up of a Mars ritual in my book Prime Chaos.]
The key point of which is that the magician becomes a channel for the manifestation of the force [of course]. Now DF says there are many extant formulae that purport to bring a force through without the magician being the channel, but in her opinion they are “all ineffectual.” “if you mean to be a magician you have to ‘go the whole hog.'”
“To be the channel of such a force is a great privilege and is an initiation in itself.”
The magician has to maintain his concentration without wavering, and the worst that can happen is that the ritual simply doesn’t work.
“But” [here we go] “when it comes to bringing through the demonic aspect of a sphere, the matter is on an entirely different footing.”
“I do not believe there is any reliable device for invoking the devils without being obsessed by them save the method of Abramelin (which takes 6 months’ preparation and the whole HGA thing too). “The edge of the Abyss is well fenced. It is not possible to fire a gun and avoid the recoil.”
[Takeaway: don’t try and invoke demons unless you’ve done the Abramelin.]
Onwards. After a sorcerer has invoked and concentrated his force, he then has to get into (astral) contact with his victim. Which actually isn’t that easy. He has to establish a point of contact in the victim’s sphere and pierce his aura. The usual method is to get hold of some object “impregnated with the victim’s magnetism” [hair, nail-parings, underpants, etc.]
“He then proceeds as does any other practitioner of suggestion who has succeeded in getting his victim into the first stages of hypnosis.”
If the Black Magician can’t get hold of something magnetised, the most common method is substitution. Baptising an animal with the victim’s name and then immolating it, usually with torture, or using a wax image, or driving nails into a wooden statue. She says that the act of driving a nail doesn’t affect the victim, but helps the operator to concentrate.
[At one time in London chaos magic circles, this sort of thing was referred to as “Malicious Dolly Magic”]
Talismans may also be used. Workers of “black occultism” stick these objects in rooms occupied by their victims, or bury them in his path. They work evil by their own power, and also help the sorcerer focus concentration.
Then there’s a couple of paras about objects which have been used in black magic which turn up in auctions and secondhand shops and people take them home and well I think you can guess the rest.
Now onto “artificial elementals”.
“A portion of the Akasha is moulded into a definite form and held thus by the will of the operator, until, as it were, it “sets.”
[like a jelly. Notice a bit of Theosophically-inspired Sanskrit creeping in there.]
“Into this mould is poured the concentrated energy of the operator, something of his own self goes into it. This is its soul, and it is like a self-steering torpedo [woo! Hunter-Killer Servitor or what?] which is set to move in a curve towards a chosen mark.” Or, she says, if the operator is an expert, he can “ensoul” the thought-form which essence drawn from one of the elemental kingdoms, endowing the elemental with an independent life of its own.
She says that “In the case of a quarrel with an occultist … an adept who is not the whitest nearly always suffers from that unpleasant psychic disease of “hypertrophied ego.” He’s up his own arse, basically, and takes offense at just about anything and will go to extraordinary lengths to get his own back for any slight. [Sounds all too familiar.]
“there seems to be no lengths to which a jealous guru will not go in order to smash his chela (who’s broken up with him) psychically.”
[Moina Mathers for example?]
She gives an example about a concert singer who got cursed by a so-called adept.
Then another example, a bit more involved, which is about a woman who nearly got hypnotised by a dodgy bloke who was pretending to be a spiritual healer.
She then has something to say about the practice of sending people’s names to healing circles
[something that took off during the Great War. Owen Davies covers it in his excellent book A Supernatural War. Here’s my review]
and also about generally meddling with other people without permission.
“How can we judge the intimate spiritual needs of another, especially if that other has not elected to confide in us? What right have we to invade his spiritual privacy and thrust our tampering fingers into wheels of his innermost being?”
She goes on to assert that “healing circles are usually so futile that nobody need mind being concentrated upon by them even if they were attempting murder.”
[So: Doing occult stuff to other people (including healing) without their consent is just *not done*, even if your intention is good.]
Last sentence. “I think I can honestly say that I have never wished to direct the great currents of destruction upon my fellow-occultists, but there are some of them I would like to get face downwards across my knee!”
[Well that’s an image that I think will resonate with some readers for quite some time!]
Some closing observations.
It’s actually really interesting how DF attempts to reconcile the psychological approach (which at this point in time is very much focused on cognitive and physiological processes) with the occult dimension of cosmic forces and Qabalah. She’s obviously riffing on some of the ideas developed by the Theosophists but is more oriented towards the body than a lot of their ideas were. So she develops this idea of consciousness being permeable to external forces (cosmic, astral, mental contagion from other people and the Unseen). Then uses a variety of metaphors – mechanical, electrical, hydrodynamic, cooking, etc. to get the message across to her readers who are not, after all, trained psychologists or “initiated” occultists.
Yes, she is overly didactic in her style to the modern reader, but this is something occultists tend to be, even nowadays sometimes. She has that same hope that you find in Theosophical books that modern science and occultism were just about to join together and work everything out between them, perhaps raising the status of occultists as equivalent to scientists. She’s so sure of her facts that you could bounce rocks off her confidence! She has opinions about the right way to do magical stuff and isn’t afraid to state them boldly.
Her casual racism and continual banging on about the “Black Fraternity” is rather wince-inducing. She seems to think that Britain is the center of the civilized world and once you get as far as France even, you’d better keep your hand on your purse, as it were, lest you end up in a seraglio or opium-den.
That Gertrude Stein uses the word “gay” in her 1922 story Miss Fur and Miss Skeene to describe a lesbian couple in Paris might give you some idea of the Années folles of post-Great War Paris (it is the first time an American writer used “gay” in respect to a homosexual relationship, btw)
It was just as notorious and tut-tutted about as Berlin was in the 1930s. Small wonder DF seems to disapprove – or is she just dissembling so as not to shock her audience?
Oh and on that note and apropos the previous thread, I did find that Crowley “limerick” I mentioned. It’s not actually about DF at all (at least directly) but her close friend and mentor Maiya Tranchell Hayes. Kenneth Grant says Hayes was the inspiration for the character of Vivien le Fay Morgan, star of The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic in his book The Magical Revival). Anyway, it’s a poem called The Fly Catcher under which title Crowley adds in parentheses (Mrs Curtis Webb) – the name of Maiya Hayes’ first husband:
The final verse of the poems runs:
"Mrs Webb does what she can As a lusty lesbian To make Sappho of the filly Who never trots in Picadilly; Girl to girl and man to man, Is part and pattern of her plan; Lad to lass and lass to lad (bread to bread alone, is bad); So the changes she must ring, If the angels are to sing. Aristo; and putrid pleb, Harridan and dainty Deb, There's never one that misses web(b)."
Also in The Magical Revival, Kenny G also mentions the “close relationship” between DF and Maiya Hayes and comments that Maiya’s behavior was “notorious” in certain quarters, but he does not elaborate further.
Has there been any scholarly interest in Hayes? I know of only one book about her – Ishtar of the Star: Seeking Maiya Tranchell Hayes by Soror Syrinx – which I haven’t read.
