The Anglicanism gone Polytheistic In Praise of Lilith Le Fay The Atlantis Line SUMMER SOLSTICE 2018 VOLUME 38 NUMBER 2 Established by Dion Fortune in 1922 1 I was recently asked to give a talk to a pagan group, it is always a challenge to think of a topic that will inspire and interest an audience, particularly when you do not know their level of awareness. Too basic a talk and you bore your audience and leave them with little new, too detailed you risk confusion. It is a case of being damned if you do or if you don’t. I decided to take the Qabalistic Tree of Life as the theme of my talk, and before I even started I had people saying that other talks on the subject had left them confused and bewildered, some saying they had even considered staying home. For me Qabalah has been the rock on which my understanding of the esoteric has been built. When I first encountered it and all its literature I must admit I too was bewildered but underlying the verdant morass of verbiage I found something elegant and beautiful. This led me to thinking about the way esoteric convention has sought to confuse and mislead the uninitiated seeker. Crowley’s writings were often deliberately wrong, with him saying those who knew would understand. It has been suggested that this was his way of being able to publish with a clear conscience, in the belief that he was not breaking the oath of his initiation. Thankfully for us Dion Fortune saw no such need, and I am with her on this. The esoteric knowledge of the type we find in her wonderful text ‘The Mystical Qabalah’ is surely the inheritance of all humanity and not just the lucky few. It is true that this is a dense volume with every sentence carrying a depth of meaning that can only be accessed through much thought and contemplation, yet this book is clear and accessible. Long before encountering her book I had dispensed with many of the more onerous aspects of Qabalah, such as gematria. So loved by Crowley, gematria is a way of using that quirk of the Hebrew language where letters are used as numbers, enabling words to be reduced to a numerical value, which is fine if you are a speaker of classical Hebrew – a now dead language. However, I asked myself the relevance of such a technique. Crowley had used it to test the validity of his realisations from pathworking, he wanted to know if what he had encountered was genuine. Surely there is a better way to do this and it is not an obsession with correspondence and symbolism. Dion Fortune drew, instead, on the work of William James, just as a trained theologian would. James saw that the encounter itself whilst being of value possessed particular chaaracteristics, notably that it was noetic and ineffable. In other words, we learnt something profound from it that we found difficult to express clearly in words. However, the test of its validity came not in what images were seen but, in the way that the vision had changed the person. That the individual had taken the experience and used it to shape their daily life. This idea is profoundly important to me, for if our practice does not lead us to encounter the Divine, and in turn we fail to apply that which we learn from our encounter into our daily life then it is pointless. No matter how many confusing words I write, how clever I appear on the page or in my speech, if what I am saying and doing does not help me to grow and become a better, more loving, more complete person, then it is merely chaff, and my energies have been wasted in an abortive act of self- misdirection. So how did my talk go you may ask. Well I kept true to my principles. I explained how I like DF jettison the peripheral distractions and take the core principles. It was these principles that I centred my talk on and the way that Qabalah helps me to grow and engage in right action in my daily life. My approach was clear and simple using accessible language and peppered with personal examples. The result was an increase of sales of the Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune! I hope these principles shine out in the pages of this journal, for I strongly believe it was the aim of DF to bring a clear and uncluttered understanding of the esoteric to all seekers so that they might use it to become better and fuller human beings. Christian 2 “Anglicanism gone polytheistic” Dion Fortune and the Emergence of Pagan Glastonbury Part 1 By Paul Ashdown in 1934 but it seems, surprisingly, to have won little immediate recognition in Somerset itself. It was the rediscovery of her writings in the wake the psychedelic era which gave her the retrospective prominence which she enjoys in Glastonbury today. From 1926, under the name of Dion Fortune, she published short stories and novels in which she encoded her own views on the supernatural world. One of these, The Sea Priestess, 1938, was set in a lightly fictionalised Weston Super Mare, where she had lived for a while as a teenager. This, with Moon Magic, in existence and circulated among friends by 1942 but not finally published until eleven years after her death in 1956, proved especially appealing for growing feminist approaches to the esoteric. Their heroine, Lilith Le Fay Morgan, references Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, the mistress of the Isle of Avalon, who in medieval sources is called both an What emerged most strongly from the recent enchantress and a 'goddess'. seminar, 'The Other Avalonians: Scholars and Eccentrics of Glastonbury's Romantic Era', was the importance of Anglican-Roman Catholic rivalries and Glastonbury was always the prominent role of clergymen of both confessions for her a retreat from a in shaping perceptions of Glastonbury in the first half of the twentieth century – Dion Fortune's London Glastonbury. This makes more striking the sudden transition at the end of the 1960s to contemporary, The topic of Pagan Glastonbury and Dion Fortune overwhelmingly neo-pagan, understandings of may be subdivided into four sub-themes: Glastonbury. Firstly, pagan Glastonbury as it actually existed in antiquity, approachable through archaeology and Dion Fortune was clearly a factor in that transition, analogy with similar places elsewhere. Secondly, but a slow-burning one. Unlike Alice Buckton perceptions of Glastonbury's pagan past before at Chalice Well, or operatic composer Rutland and during DF's lifetime. Thirdly, her own complex Boughton, who recruited local people for their personal attitudes to it. Fourthly, the contribution, if dramatic productions, she seems not to have any, of DF's practice and writings to those neo-pagan engaged to any extent with the local community understandings of Glastonbury which first emerged here. Glastonbury was always for her a retreat from at the end of the 1960s. a London which was the centre of her activities. Her tribute to Glastonbury, Avalon of the Heart, The Mendip hills within sight of Glastonbury Tor was published under her birth name of Violet Firth were home to some of the oldest humans known 3 to have inhabited Britain, over 550,000 – half a has the oldest evidence of burial in open ground, million – years ago. These were not humans of rather than in caves, anywhere in Britain. Evidence our species, however, and they disappeared with survives from the Mesolithic, though not so far from a return of the ice sheets. In succeeding warmer Somerset, of ritual head-dresses of deer antlers, periods, Neanderthals used the Mendip caves. Some reminiscent of the Horn Dance that survives at Neanderthals, elsewhere at least, had ideas we would Abbots' Bromley to this day. classify as religious, burying their dead with rituals. Neanderthals in turn would withdraw in the face of The Glastonbury landscape has often been described worsening climatic conditions. After the very severe as surreal. It is a place of three hills, a magically conditions of the Late Glacial Maximum of 20,000 significant number, set, before medieval drainage years ago had passed, however, around 15,000 years schemes, within a great meander of the river Brue. ago, the humans that returned were of our own The Tor is a striking feature as seen from around species, Homo sapiens - people just like us. The Greylake, where, as from the Mendips, it appears as a continuous occupation of this region, and therefore perfect pyramid, a regularity which must have seemed its pre-Christian past, dates from that time, and the quite uncanny to people who had no experience genetic base of the population of what eventually of stone buildings or indeed large buildings of any became Somerset has been remarkably stable since kind. The solar aspect it shares with the pyramids is then. 'Cheddar Man', who died about 12,000 years fundamental as, by chance or supernatural design, the ago, had, as is well known, a family descendant in the oval which forms the ground-plan of the Tor aligns female line who was teaching history in the local on its longer axis with the May morning sunrise and school when DNA tests were conducted there. the Hallowstide sunset, the cardinal points between Human bones from Gough's Cave show that these Summer and Winter in the ancient Celtic calendar. people were cannibals, a practice which, when met A Wiccan lady of my acquaintance once told with in more recent times, generally had a religious me she did not much like the Tor as it was 'too or magical element.