Reading Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence – IV
This is the last (for now) of my four mammoth Twitter threads commenting on Dion Fortune’s 1930 book, Psychic Self-Defence. This thread was originally posted on Twitter on 29 August 2021.
First, some general observations. Dion Fortune generally seems to be regarded as one of the great feminist occultists of the 20th century. I confess, from re-reading Psychic Self-Defence I can see little sign of this feminist sensibility being present. Also, the more I read of her, the more her casual racism and xenophobia become obvious in a way I had not really cottoned onto when I first read her fiction and non-fiction in my 20s and 30s. So after this post, I will be taking some time off from reading PSD. I hope to get back to it after a rest.
Now onwards.
Chapter 13: The Motives of Psychic Attack
[Warning, matters of a sexual nature are about to be broached here. We trust you will forgive any indelicacies.]
DF opens with the very down-to-earth point that we must always seek motives in order to discern whether or not the victim of an alleged psychic attack is “romancing” or not. If there’s no obvious motive, it’s more likely to be their imagination running wild. Common things like revenge, greed, and lust will be immediately obvious but there are other motives too why the “ordinary [ie non-occult] investigator might miss.
Now she has something to say about love-charms and that kind of thing. Are we to take them seriously or are they just like diet pills that don’t work. She talks about “firms in France” that manufacture chocolates laced with aphrodisiacs and that these have caused some deaths.
[Those dam Frenchies and their loose morals again! But this sounds like something worth looking into. Did it really happen or is this DF dramatizing again? We know chocolate on its own was widely considered to be an aphrodisiac even without anything added. It would be good to find out the details.]
She also mentions cocktails in this country (Britain) that contain “tonic” ingredients whose effects are not known.
[Possibly a reference to Absinthe, which was never actually banned in the UK. The French banned its manufacture in 1915. Again, something worth looking into.]
She then mentions a certain firm in Britain that was supplying “occultist’s sundries”. Including [sharp intake of breath] “Incense for the operation of Venus.” [Well! Enough said] Apparently the police got wind of this and both partners went to jail!
[Maybe someone brave could do a newspaper search on this to find out if it was reported in the popular press? But the idea that Venus incense is inherently dangerous has not, I think, aged well.]
DF comments “it is not difficult to see what uses could be made of mental influence in this direction.” She’s seen several cases but says that it’s very difficult to get all the facts. The attack is intangible, and the victim may be “entirely ignorant not only of the psychic side of sex but also of its physical and subtler emotional aspects.” Plus those who have suffered the most usually don’t want to talk about it.
Back to purely occult practices. “psychic pressure may be brought to bear upon the desired person so that he or she shall come under the influence of the operator; or the psychic operation known as congressus subtilis may take place.”
[Crowley also uses this suggestive phrase – congressus subtilis. Here’s Aleister:
“The one really easy “physical” operation which the Body of Light can perform is Congressus subtilis.
“The emanations of the “Body of Desire” of the material being whom one visits are, if the visit be agreeable, so potent that one spontaneously gains substance in the embrace. There are many cases on record of Children having been born as the result of such unions.”
That’s from “Of Our Lady Babalon and of the Beast whereon she rideth. Also concerning transformations.” Chapter IX, Magick in Theory and Practice, Part III of Book 4 (1929).
[New comment. Is DF “cribbing” from AC I wonder, as we know she’s seen this particular tome, given her comment: “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.” See post 2 in this series.
So what exactly is this congressus subtilis according to DF? That’s going to take a while to explain.
Well DF now launches into a discussion of the occult side of sex. Starting with Lilith, the first wife of Adam, she mentions witches receiving the attentions of the Devil, St. Theresa, the Virgin Mary & Holy Ghost, St. Anthony, whole nunneries suffering attacks. It’s everywhere you look. Then she turns her attention to personal cases.
Firstly, she is visited by a young man having an affair with a married woman. They have had vivid dreams of “visiting” each other [the unwritten implication is, I think, that these visits involved rather more than tea and cucumber sandwiches.] The young chap wanted DF to help him perfect his technique of visiting his paramour via his dreams. Needless to say, she was unsympathetic.
The second case is a woman who had been engaged to a missionary who was murdered whilst in West Africa. She then marries a second cousin, who was a semi-invalid and “a weed into the bargain.” Whenever she had “relations” with her husband, the woman always visualized the form of her first lover. She herself was dark and petite, but her 3 sons were “tall, upstanding blond men of the nordic type, bearing a strong resemblance to the dead man.”
[DF definitely approves of the nordic type, as we will shortly see. Also, note her disparagement of the semi-invalid “weed”.]
She’s also known two alleged ‘changelings’ [back to those non-human souls again. See post 2.] The male “had the pointed ears of Pan, and if anyone was ever a son of the Devil, he was. The female was a curious and fascinating creature, essentially non-human, and when her child was born it came into the world with no more trouble than a kitten.”
Again she says that both of these “beings” were conceived whilst their mothers were under the influence of drink, and both of them were “characterised by a marked callousness” but at least they were not “defective” and were highly intelligent.
[Time for some wider context. I did a bit of reading up. During WW1 and afterward, there was a rise in concern in Britain about women’s health (particularly the lower classes). We might think of it in terms of a “hygienic turn” in which the state first began to take an interest in the health of women – a response to their entry into the workplace in vast numbers. There was also considerable alarm over women drinking, as even women from the “respectable classes” began patronizing public houses during the war. See David W Gutzke, Gender, Class, and Public Drinking in Britain During the First World War for more.
The “drinking mother” was deemed to be particularly harmful due to theories of “racial degeneration”, aka eugenics. Alcoholism itself was widely believed to be hereditary, plus alcoholic parents produced “degenerate children” who were mentally “defective” – note DF’s use of that term – and National Fitness was at thus at stake. Campaigners for birth control were often influenced by eugenics, Marie Stopes being a famous example. Is DF’s thing about ‘changelings’ an articulation of these eugenic anxieties? Can we see any evidence of “eugenic thinking” in any other of DF’s works?
In The Esoteric Philosopy of Love and Marriage (1922) There are some comments about avoiding “the deliberate admission of souls into poverty-stricken homes, or running the risk of giving birth to “children of an enfeebled or diseased physique”. She also states that: “Abortion is the murder of the unborn child, and is only justifiable in order to save the life of the mother.” (It’s also in this book that she discourses on the two forms of “sexual perversion” – “solitary stimulation of the generative organs” and “mutual stimulation by two people of the same sex.” Not necessarily related to eugenics, but useful to know in relation to her comments about “vicious relations” and “unnatural vice”.)
Turning to her fiction, there are some very eugenic exchanges in her 1935 novel, The Winged Bull. In chapter 7, there is a conversation between Colonel Brangwyn (a firm believer in “hygienic living”) and “officer and gentleman” Ted Murchison (described as “big boned, upstanding, Nordic”):
Brangwyn: ‘The fag-end of anything is apt to be unpleasant,’ he said, ‘but I don’t believe there is any such thing as innate evil, but only misplaced force. It was the same in Atlantis. It’s end was evil, but its heyday was great. There was knowledge there that we have never matched since, and that went down with the Lost Continent, save such as was preserved by the Egyptian priests. They bred for knowledge in those days, bred humans, I mean, just as we breed racehorses for speed. And they got their results. They say that it is the Atlanteans’ Intensive breeding that gave us the high human forehead, and that the primitive tribes tried to imitate it with the cradle-board, that squashes the heads of the babies into the aristocratic shape.’
‘Dashed sensible,’ said Murchison, ‘the breeding, I mean. Pity we don’t do the same thing nowadays – heads of colleges at stud – I beg your pardon, Miss Brangwyn, I didn’t mean to say that!’
‘It was a wise old divine who said, Why should we be ashamed to speak of what God was not ashamed to create?’ said Brangwyn. ‘An enormous amount of the troubles of modern civilization come from our ignorance concerning the breeding of humans. I think that the Atlanteans were absolutely right when they gave very careful thought to the matter, and the priests kept the stud-books.’
The conversation continues with more from Murchison:
‘What the Government ought to do is to subsidize the breeding of humans instead of horses and cows. Give the hefty young chaps who are drawing the dole a chance to become fathers of families. It would be a dashed good national investment.’
‘The trouble is,’ said Ursula, ‘that humans are so fastidious. They would want to marry to please themselves, not the Government. The hefty young men would probably fall in love with girls with awful ancestors and the human stud-book would go all wrong.’
‘It would certainly require wisdom to arrange the matings,’ said Brangwyn, ‘and wisdom is one of the lost arts. I fancy it went down with Atlantis.’
This is straight out of the eugenics playbook, as it were. Some links for reading up at the bottom of the post.
In chapter 26 there is another exchange between Murchison and the clerk of an employment agency. They are discussing a job in Egypt. The clerk:
‘You go round to the Savoy and see Mr. Agassiz. He’s a Heinz; do you mind that?’
‘What in the world’s a Heinz?’
‘A mongrel Levantine from Alexandria, the world’s very worst. We call’em Heinzes because fifty-seven varieties have gone to the making of ‘em, see? This fellow is as rich as Croesus, and he’s apparently been having trouble with his poor relations and he wants someone as a kind of bodyguard-cum-secretary.’
(Murchison:)
‘Sounds all right. I ought to be able to put the fear of God into a Heinz’s poor relations.’narration:
Murchison took a bus to the Savoy and interviewed a small, skinny, sallow-cheeked little man, with eyes like black currants and greasy ringlets all over his head, who scuttled about the expensive suite like a hen in traffic all the time he was talking, too nervous to sit down.”
Now it might well be that she is simply having two characters discuss ideas that she herself does not hold personally, but I think not, in this case.]
Back to Psychic Self-Defence
DF says that anyone who knows about “the esoteric aspect of sex knows that union is as much etheric as physical” and this is why union is “vitalising and harmonising” and “self-abuse” is “exhausting and nerve-wrecking.”
[“self-abuse” is one of the two sexual perversions, for DF as I noted above. The heyday of anti-masturbation campaigns was in the 19th century, but these ideas were still around in the 1920s, and were sometimes discussed in terms of “racial health”.]
She then speculates (darkly) about the possibility of beings “whose densest vehicle is etheric” (or those who can project the etheric body) and how, under certain conditions – pathological forms of mediumship for example, “unions” (between a human and etheric partner) might bear strange fruit. “What manner of soul might come through into incarnation under such conditions?”
[Nothing good, seems to be the implication.]
She continues to speculate along these lines, now on about Incubi and Succubi, stating that “the lustful imaginings of men’s hearts (and women’s too, for that matter) do indeed produce artificial elementals” and discusses how via these extruded thought-forms “we give ourselves telepathic suggestion”. “We little realise the extent to which we are psychically poisoned by our own emanations of unguarded and unpurified thoughts.”
[There’s the necessity for “psychic hygiene” again with respect to self-governance I’ve mentioned before. Again, a common concern. Note she mentions both men and women here.]
“It is well known that orgasm takes place in dreams, accompanied by appropriate dream-pictures.”
“It is not so generally known that there are people, both male and female, who can produce the same reaction at will solely by means of day-dreams.” She then speculates about the possibility that it (orgasm) might be produced by means of telepathic suggestion, “and whether this may not have played a part in the operations of many covens?”
[More witchcraft badness. DF does not like witches. This sort of thing is yet another aspect of the Left-hand Path, btw. It does seem that anything DF does not approve of becomes Left-hand path.]
Time for a “case”. “Miss Y”. Young woman, “simple-minded and unsophisticated” living with her widowed mother and socially isolated consults Mr. X the psychic. Via their mutual social circle, she meets the prominent Mr. Z, who has the reputation for being knowledgeable about magic. Mr. X tells Miss Y that he has read the (Akashic) records of her past lives, and discovered she had a “karmic tie” to Mr. Z. She is instructed to meditate upon Mr. Z. every night before going to sleep. Miss Y does this but gets a bit worried over the disturbing effects of the practice. Mr. X assures her it will all be okay and Mr. Z will at some point marry her. Some “compromising letters” play a part too.
Enter sensible DF who tries to get Miss Y to drop the whole thing. Miss Y doesn’t, but eventually, she talks to leaders of the organization to which she and Mr. X & Y belong. Anyway, the leaders support the same advice that DF gives to Miss Y, get the compromising letters off her, and put the whole thing down to Miss Y’s imagination. They do not do the decent thing, which is DF says, “turning this choice pair of scoundrels out of their ranks”. DF says (with emphasis) she has seen the letters.
[New comment: DF seems to have backpedaled on her earlier assertion (Chapter 9) that “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.” ]
She then follows up with another case of a woman who got involved with Mr. X and Mr. Z and ended up leaving her husband. But, says DF, she was unable to get away from the influence of Mr. X: “Her condition when I last saw her was deplorable – emaciated, wild-eyed and twitching with convulsive movements.”
[It would be fascinating to learn who all these people are.]
A colleague of DFs has come across similar cases. “It is cases such as these which make the honest investigator of occult phenomena thankful that there is upon our statute-book a law which enables magistrates to deal effectually with occultists to prostitute their powers.”
[Presumably the Witchcraft Act, 1735-1951.]
She sez it is so generally known that no initiate may use the occult arts for gain that she finds it difficult to sympathise with people who “pay some advertising occultist his half-crown … then find themselves let in for unpleasantness.”
[What would she thought of about people flogging occult stuff on the internet, I wonder?]
More discussion in the same vein. Okay, the ‘organisation’ she was discussing earlier was an occult one, and the “notorious Mr.Z. the head of same. “The same group have to their credit a recurring series of scandals in connection with “unnatural vice.”
[insert exclamation of horror here]
This (unnatural vice) “appears to be used systematically as a means of obtaining occult power.”
It’s all to do with the control of “the Kundalini force”. There is a right way of directing Kundalini, which she has explained in her book The Problem of Purity.
[I checked. She doesn’t actually use the term “kundalini” in that book. She does however go through a system of “thought control” which begins (p46) “As soon as the sex impulse makes itself felt, concentrate your attention on the base of the spine.” She stresses that it is necessary to view the sex force in its highest aspect, and not to dwell on “the awful consequences its illicit uses may bring in their train.”
The next step is to visualise the spine as a hollow tube and make a mental picture of your hand, and begin to massage the spine “with an upward squeezing motion.” Once the “invisible energy” reaches the brain, visualise the third eye and choose a “philanthropic movement that is of national service” and imagine yourself to be taking part in that work and *willing* “the energy you are sending to be a driving force behind it.”
[NB: Subtext about occult forces being used selflessly – HPB was big on this – and not for self-indulgence. Presumably the same thing for the sex-force. It also indicates she thought the concept was important enough to discuss and incorporate into practice.]
Back to PSD and the kundalini:
“but there is another method, which consists in stimulating this force, and then directing it into abnormal channels where it will not be absorbed, but remain available for magical purposes. It is for this reason that in certain forms of the Black Mass the altar is the naked body of a woman who may either be still living, or have been slain sacrificially.”
[This whole notion about the “improper” direction of kundalini may have come from Leadbeater. In his ‘classic’ work The Chakras he describes how Kundalini can “rush downwards in the body instead of upwards, and thus excites the most undesirable passions … Such men become satyrs, monsters of depravity (although) “They may probably gain supernatural powers … as will bring them into touch with a lower order of evolution…”
For a discussion of Leadbeater, seek out the third booklet in my series on the early history of chakras, The Judge and the Bishop. Buy it from Treadwells.
Of course, if DF has pulled her ideas about the improper direction of kundalini from Leadbeater, it’s a bit ironic because she definitely does not like him either, given the great ‘Leadbeater scandal’. And no wonder. See posts tagged Leadbeater for my 5-part essay on the ‘Leadbeater Scandal’]
In closing, she says that less expert operators cannot control this form of force, and “as soon as they generate it, it has to go to its logical conclusion. They therefore employ another type of stimulus, not the woman, but the boy or youth. The practice of paederasty in connection with occultism is very old, and was one of the causes of the degeneration of the Greek Mysteries.” Apparently, there’s more about these subjects in detail in Sane Occultism. She also says to look up actual cases in the periodical Truth.
[I discussed Truth in the 27 August thread. See this post.]
This whole narrative about Greek paederasty and degeneration kicked off with Gibbon in his History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (1782) and remained popular, to varying degrees, ever since. There’s much more that could be said about that – particularly in relation to British Imperialism, Symonds, Wilde, etc., but not for now.
If you’re really interested, try Greek Love, Orientalism and Race: Intersections in Classical Reception (JSTOR account required)
And that’s all for the present. The original Twitter thread.
Postscript
Some comments I never got around to sharing on Twitter:
There is a section in The Problem of Purity (1928) where DF makes an explicit connection between “life-force” and race. “The life-forces belong to the race, not to the individual, and it is to the race they must be returned, if not through one channel, then through another.” She says that we must have either “children of the flesh” or “children of the spirit” (i.e. “good works”). She then starts worrying about people delaying marriage for economic concerns which “force on us either the sublimation of a large proportion of the sex forces of the race, or as a welter of promiscuity and contraceptives.” A bit later on she says “The need at the present time is for quality, not quantity in the children of the race” which is why social work is so important in improving people’s lives. Again, I think this indicates more than a passing acquaintance with eugenic arguments about racial quality, which were much in vogue during this period.
It’s taken a lot to get through this chapter, mainly because as I’ve progressed through reading PSD I’ve asked more questions which led to me looking stuff up, checking things out, and coming to some rather unpalatable conclusions, as opposed to just reading a chapter and tweeting my immediate thoughts. It’s a very different approach than just sitting reading PSD, which I was for the most part doing when I began this exercise. It is entirely possible I have misinterpreted, read DF’s meanings incorrectly, and jumped to conclusions that are unmerited. Of course, I have also shamelessly interpreted much of what DF has to say in terms of contemporary standards of morality and acceptability which of course is hugely problematic, although I think, understandable. For example, it is, strictly speaking, incorrect (i.e. problematical) to judge DF as “homophobic” as this is a concept that was not around at the time she was writing. All one can say is that in many of her published works she consistently states that same-sex activity is a perversion – which of course was a popular view at the time. Or so the argument goes.
Throughout these 4 posts, I have highlighted DF’s negative attitude to witchcraft, which of course is surprising to some contemporary witches. We should bear in mind though, that she was writing well before the rebirth of contemporary witchcraft, and was perhaps articulating commonly-held views concerning historical witchcraft during that period. Thomas Waters examines popular views of witchcraft prior to its ‘rebirth’ in his book, Cursed Britain, and Owen Davies’ A Supernatural War is of relevance too.
On a more personal note, when I first read Psychic Self-Defence at the age of 20, much of what she had to say passed me by. I was particularly enthralled by her account of accidentally extruding a werewolf, and attempted to do this deliberately to someone who had incurred my ire. It did not end well for me and was a salutary lesson. A few years later, reading Moon Magic and The Sea Priestess inspired me to commit to a five-year cycle of invoking goddesses, beginning with Isis. Again, I missed some of the undertones in those books. I will freely admit that her views about “unnatural vice” annoyed me considerably – largely because I found them unthinkingly repeated in other occult books and by people I encountered on the UK occult scene. This was also a positive influence from Fortune, as my annoyance led me to begin to fume about occult theories of sexuality in my writing. I do feel that there is a tendency to when reading occult works, to focus on the methods and screen out or ignore a particular author’s views on race, sexuality, etc., – or to accept those views uncritically due to them being “occult truths”. I would say in retrospect that I was more sensitive to Fortune’s expressions about “unnatural vice” as that was a subject I had a personal engagement with, as opposed to her views on other races, or the selective breeding of the population, as at the time I had no direct investment in them.
Dion Fortune is, for all we might find some of her views outdated and repugnant, one of the most influential occultists of the twentieth century, with considerable influence on contemporary esoteric movements and ideas. Having said that, I do not believe that it is wrong to embark on a critique of her views, any less than we might do so for Aleister Crowley, A.E. Waite, or HP Blavatsky. When approaching occult texts, it is useful (and necessary) to examine the wider context – the time in which they were written, and how far they reflect (or reject) the social concerns of the day. It has been interesting, to discover, for example, how many people seem to be unaware – and rather taken aback – to discover just how popular the eugenics movement was in Britain, prior to the Second World War.
Some sources regarding Eugenics
Eugenics and public health in Britain, 1900–40: scenes from provincial life (pdf)
Race in British Eugenics (pdf)
Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (pdf)
