The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE specialist had advised that owing to the state of my heart I should not be allowed to get up for a week, a piece of advice which I, in view of the state of that organ metaphorically as well as literally, was nothing loath to accept, and a very enjoyable week it was. I won't go so far as to say that I lay flat on my back for seven days, but anyway, I had a very good holiday. For the first couple of days I was naturally pretty glad to be in bed, and I lay and listened to the swell that followed the storm pounding away at the rocks like artillery; then there came the most marvellous halcyon days, which I have noticed often follow a gale, and I lay out in the forecourt in the sun and listened to the gulls having the time of their lives among the huge piles of wrack washed up by the surf. There was one piece of fucus whose stem was as thick as my arm and that measured twenty-eight feet from root to tip; there were also, tragic relics, bits of blue and white and scarlet board that could only have come from a lifeboat. We had, too, the most marvellous sunsets, as if the Fires of Azrael had been lit in the west, and the moonrisc over that heaving sea was a thing I shall never forget. Then, too, Morgan sang to me. I never knew before that she could sing. Her singing was like nothing else that I have ever heard; it was half-way between folk-song and jazz, rising and falling by quarter-tones, and very rhythmical. And her songs were not like any other songs, either, being hymns to the old gods and the chants of priests. Moreover her pitch was not the modern pitch at all, but in between, so that at first it sounded curiously flat and out of tune; but as one's car became accustomed to the strange intervals, one realised that it was true music after its kind and that it spoke direct to the subconscious. And she sang it, not with the full singing voice of the concert singer, nor yet with the wail of the crooner, but with a mantric chanting, not loud, but of a pure resonant tone that to me was very beautiful, and the rhythm in it was like the beat of the sea. And there were times when there came into her voice a strange inhuman timbre, curiously metallic, and when this came there was a change of consciousness, and she was someone else. Then it was that I learnt something of the secret of the magical images and their use, for borne away on the wings of her song she became that which she had imagined herself to be in the making of the magical images. Then I saw the seapriestess of Atlantis standing before me, Morgan Ie Fay, the foster daughter of Merlin, learned in all his lore. I said to her one evening after she had been singing to me: "Morgan, you have become that which you have imagined." She smiled, and said: "That way lies power." Then I told her of my vision of the sea-cave of Bell Knowie, and said: "Supposing I too play that game, Morgan Ie Fay? Shall I have power?" And she smiled again, and said: "Why not?" Then I told her that in my vision she had not been herself, but all women; and I had not been myself, but all men. I could not put it clearer than that, for I did not know what it meant. And she looked at me strangely and said: "That is the key to the sea-cave of Bell Knowie." "Morgan, what do you mean?" said I. "Do you not remember," said she, "that in Atlantis the priests and priestesses did not marry for love, but as the rites' required?" "You were more than a priestess to me in that cave," I said. "I thought you were Aphrodite herself." "I was more than Aphrodite," she said, "I was the Great Mother." "But the Great Mother is an earth goddess," said I. "How can you be her priestess as well as the priestess of the sea?" "Do you not know the Mystery saying that all the gods arc one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator? Do you not know that at the dawn of manifestation the gods wove the web of creation between the poles of the pairs of opposites, active and passive, positive and negative, and that all things are these two things in different ways and upon different levels, even priests and priestesses, Wilfred?" "Then," said I, "if you cannot love me as a man, Morgan Ie Fay, will you work with me as a priest?" She smiled her curious smile. "Certainly," she said, "that is what I have been aiming at." "Good Lord I" said I. "You've got a nerve!" Then Morgan Ie Fay began to tell me about herself, and how things looked from her point of view; it was a curious experience, for I had never dreamt there could be such a viewpoint for any human being. She told me that those whom the gods chose were dehumanised and semi-deified. "For that remark," I said, "you would have been burnt in the good old days, and quite right too." "What are the gods?" said she. "God knows," said I. "I think they are natural forces personified," said she. "So to be made one with the gods is to become the channel of natural forces. And that is not as rare as you might think." And she told me that devout men of all faiths had held that it was possible to bring the soul to a single-pointed focus by adoration and meditation and dedication; and that when this took place, the god came down and possessed the worshipper, and the power of the god shone out from him like light from a lamp. She told me, too, that the ancients had known things of which we moderns had only touched the fringe. "When the Priest of the Moon came to me in the crystal," she said, "he asked me if I would like to learn these things, and I said that I would. And he told me that to do this I must give myself up to them; and I said that I would do this also. Then he said he would teach me, and little by little he has taught me. "He taught me that there is but one priesthood, which is the service of the One, whence all life proceeds and to which all returns, and It is Unmanifest, and no Man at any time hath known It, or ever shall know It. Only in Its works is It known to us, and from these we deduce Its nature, and Its nature is Nature. Primitive man personified Its powers and called them gods; modern man depersonifies them and calls them forces and factors. Both are true," said she, "but neither is the whole truth; for the gods are forces, and the forces are intelligent and purposive, being expressions of the nature of the One. "And as It is, so is creation, for creation is the expression of Its nature; for as the Chaldean Oracles say, 'The wise man looketh upon the face of Nature and beholdeth therein the luminous countenance of the Eternal.' And human nature," said she, "is a part of Nature, and you learn a lot about both Nature and the gods if you study it." Then she told me the idea the ancients had of priesthood-- that it was mediumship; but it was not the personified god that spoke through the possessed and inspired priest or pythoness, for the personified god is the form under which man represents these potencies to himself, and the real god is far otherwise--but that the priest, overshadowed by the god, put forth his powers; that which was latent in him was released, and he became for a time what all men would be when perfected. "Then that being so," said I, "what are the gods?" "God knows," said she. "But we know that by doing certain things we get certain results." "And what do you propose to do?" said I. "I will tell you," said she. And she told me that each man had it in him, by virtue of his manhood, to be a priest; and each woman by virtue of her womanhood had it in her to be a priestess; for the Source of All Life created the worlds by dividing Its Unmanifest Unity into the manifesting Duality, and we that are created show forth in our beings the uncreate Reality. Each living soul has its roots in the Unmanifest and draws thence its life, and by going back to the Unmanifest we find fulness of life. But because we are limited and imperfect beings we cannot show forth the Infinite in Its totality; and because we arc imprisoned upon the plane of form we can only conceive the Formless as far as minds habituated to form can imagine it. "And that," said Morgan Ie Fay, "is not very far, and the mathematicians go furthest. But we who are men and women, Wilfred, and who want to know God as He manifests in Nature--we see the luminous countenance of the Eternal in the beautiful forms of the gods. And in that way," she said, "we learn more, and can do more, than if we strive after abstract essences that elude us." She told me how the Priest of the Moon. who instructed her, had bidden her go back to the Great Unmanifest and dedicate herself to the One, leaving aside all lesser manifestations; and having made that dedication and won that realisation, and found the roots of her being, he bid her see the One Life manifesting itself in all things, and in herself too. And he taught her that the manifesting Life had two modes or aspects--the active, dynamic, stimulating--and the latent and potent which receives the stimulus a
nd reacts to it. He showed her how they changed places one with another in an endless dance, giving and receiving; accumulating force and discharging it; never still, never stabilised, ever in a state of flux and reflux as shown by the moon and the sea and the tides of life--ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning, building up and breaking down in the dance of life to the music of the spheres. And he showed her how the passing of the sun through the starry belt of the Zodiac makes the greatest of all the tides. "And these Zodiacal tides," said he, "are the illuminations of faith. And to-day the sun is passing over into Aquarius, the Sign of the Man, and the old gods are coming back, and man is finding Aphrodite and Ares and great Zeus in his own heart, for that is the revelation of the aeon." Morgan Ie Fay told me that she had chosen for her part the cult of the Great Goddess, the primordial Mother. And this goddess was symbolised by space and the sea and the inmost earth. She was Rhea, and Ge, and Persephone, but above all she was Our Lady Isis in whom all these are summed up; for Isis is both corn goddess and queen of the dead--who are also the unborn--and the lunar crescent is upon her brow. Under another aspect she is the sea, for life first formed in the sea, and in her dynamic aspect she rose from the waves as Aphrodite. And Morgan Ie Fay, pursuing these things, had studied the symbols of cult after cult, for all worshipped the same thing by different names and under different aspects, till at last she found that to which her own nature was attuned. And it was not the austere Egyptian faith, nor the radiant gods of Greece, but the primordial Brythonic cult that had its roots in Atlantis, which the dark Ionian Kelt shares with Breton and Basque. "For this," she said, "is older than the gods of the North, and there is more of wisdom in it, for the gods of the North are mindless, being the formulations of fighting men; but the Great Goddess is older even than the gods that made the gods, for men knew the function of the mother long before they understood the part played by the father; and they adored the Bird of Space that laid the Primordial Egg long before they worshipped the Sun as the Fecundator. "They conceived all being as coming forth from the sea, and they were right, for there was a time when the waters covered the earth, as both Scripture and the rocks bear witness. Then came the time when they learnt the part of the father, and they looked in Nature for the fecundating father of all, and perceived it to be the sun. So they adored the sun as well as the sea; but the cult of the sea is older, for she is the Great Mother. "But in my dedication to the moon and the sea," said Morgan Ie Fay, "I had chosen the part that was passive, and I had to await the coming of the fecundator, and I still await it." "Might it be," said I, "that I should play that part to you, Morgan Ie Fay, for I love you?" "It might be," said she. "We can but try. And it does not matter whether you love me or not if you can bring through that power." "It matters very much to me," said I. "It does not matter to me," said she, "for I am a dedicated priestess; and if it matters to you, you will not be able to bring it through." I did not understand what she meant then, but I knew later. "How many men have you tried this with, Morgan Ie Fay?" said I. "A very great many, Wilfred Maxwell," said she. "And from all I have got something, but from none have I got everything, and I was beginning to think that it is not to be had, when I met you." "But surely," I said, "I, with my bad health, have less to give you than most?" "On the contrary," said she, "there are possibilities in you that I had not realised before." And she told me that in every being there are two aspects, the positive and the negative; the dynamic and the receptive; the male and the female; and this is shown forth in rudimentary form even in the physical body. In normal folk one of these is dominant and one is recessive, and this determines the sex; but though the recessive one is latent, it is nevertheless there, as is well known to those who study the anomalies of development and disease--and as is still better known to those who study the anomalies of the soul. But the ancients did not concern themselves with anomalies, but said that the soul was bisexual, and that as one or the other aspect manifested in the world of form, the alternative aspect was latent in the world of spirit; and if we look into our own hearts we shall see how true this is, for each of us has two sides to his nature--the side that is forth-flowing by its own dynamism, and the side that lies latent, awaiting inspiration, and that comes not forth unless it is evoked. "And this," said she, "is the greater side of each one of us; and in a man it is his spiritual nature, and in a woman it is her dynamic will." Then she told how in some the two sides of their nature came near to equilibrium, not in any physical or instinctual anomaly, but in temperament; for an anomaly is due to the repression of the dominant factor, whereas in that of which she spoke it was the two-sided soul that was finding expression through the higher self, and this was due to the work of initiation in past lives. "I learnt these things in Atlantis, when I was one of the sacred clan," said she, "and the memory was reborn with me, and I have always known it. But you, I do not think, were ever of the initiated priesthood; but by the trick you played upon the high priest of Bell Knowie you got something, though how much I do not know, and it remains to be seen." "At least I forged a personal bond with you," said I. "Priestesses have no personal bonds," said she. "Anyway, it served to bring us together," said I, but she did not answer, and that angered me. "There is another way of looking at it all," said I. "It may have been that my dreams and my visions all sprang from the same thing--sex-repression and wish-fulfilment, for God knows, if any man ever had a subconscious full of frustrations, I have." "That, of course, is an alternative theory," replied Morgan, quite unmoved. "And it maybe, Miss Le Fay Morgan, that both your priesthood and your inheritance under our client's will are--magical images?" " 'What is truth?' asked jesting Pilate." "And I suggest that you stop playing the fool with me lest my partner and I inquire into your antecedents in good earnest." Morgan laughed. "Whether my priesthood is a magical image or not, it has been effectual to wake the manhood in you, Wilfred Maxwell." That was an unanswerable argument, and I succumbed to it. Then she said a thing for which, in the mood I was in, I could cheerfully have hit her. "Do you realise, Wilfred, how much of the woman there is in you?" "Fifty per cent," said I. "Same as other folk. My mother was a woman." "I don't mean that. I mean in your temperament." "Yes," I said, "I suppose I am being catty. But it is no use arguing with me after I've just had a go of asthma, for there is no sense to be got out of me." "I don't mean that, either. I mean that your nature is predominantly negative." "Not as negative as you think, Morgan Ie Fay. Having lived all my life with women, I have learnt to assume protective colouring. I may pursue circuitous routes to save trouble, but I generally arrive where I want to get in the end. Moreover, I live and carry on my business in a very conventional town, and if I were suspected of being unconventional, I should lose business. So when I want to kick over the traces, as at the present moment, I come outside the three-mile limit, my dear." "And I don't mean that either. You are a beast, Wilfred. I know you are nothing like as mild as you look, and your slyness is the thing I like least about you. I mean that you arc not positive and dynamic as most men arc." "Well, my dear girl, I haven't got the physique for the job. You can't be a husky he-man under eight stone, you only get yourself thrashed. And what you are pleased to call my slyness is really tact and diplomacy. Why go out of your way to stir up avoidable trouble when there is so much unavoidable trouble?" "Then if those are your principles, why not live up to them? Why go out of your way to pick a quarrel with me?" "Why go out of your way to pick one with me, Morgan? Do you expect any man to like being told he is half a woman? And the truer it is, the less he likes it. And if any man ever asks you if you have played this game before, you swear you haven't, see?" "I thought you would be a little more understanding than this." "Then you thought wrong. I know in the good old days the priests of the Great Mother castrated themselves in her honour, but I'm not doing that. To hell with you, Morgan Ie Fay." "There is a commonplace relationship which you can have with any female of the species, and there is a subtle, magical relationship that is very rare. Which do you prefer?" "Have I any choice? Shan't I have to
be content with what I am given?" "Yes," she said, "I am afraid you will, but I am sorry you take it like that, for I could give you so much." "Why are you taking all this trouble over me, Morgan Ie Fay? I am certain it is not for my own sweet sake, quite apart from your repeated assurance that priestesses have no prefernces in these matters." "Because, Wilfred, if you and I can do this thing, we break trail for those who come after us, and we shall bring back into modern life something that has been lost and forgotten and that is badly needed." "That something being--?" "The knowledge of the subtle, magnetic relationship between a man and a woman, and the fact that it is part of a larger whole. Do you remember how you felt in the cave--that I was all women and you were all men? Do you remember how our personalities stood aside and we were just channels of force--the positive and negative forces out of which creation is built? And how, when this happened, primordial powers rushed through us straight from the Unmanifest, and it was a tremendous thing? This was what was aimed at by the templetrained priestesses and the heta-rae, and it is what is lacking in our modern understanding of these things. You can see dozens of marriages where there is an annual baby and occasional twins and yet something is lacking; and you can see curious companionships where they can't marry that yet fulfil a great need--and they don't necessarily go week-ending either, Wilfred. People think that sex is physical and that love is emotional, and they don't realise that there is something else between a man and a woman which is magnetic in just the same way as the compass turns to the pole; and it isn't in them any more than it is in the compass, but it is something that passes through them and uses them, and it belongs to Nature. It is the thing that has kept me young, Wilfred, when I ought to be an old, old woman, and it is the thing that is making you, who used to be a mother's boy, as quarrelsome as a cock on a midden." "Then in that case it is surely a thing that I am better without, for I was a good young man until I met you." "You will be a better young man before I have done with you," said Morgan Ie Fay. "But you do understand, don't you, Wilfred, why I won't marry you? Physically I may be a comparatively young woman, for they say a man is as young as his arteries, so I suppose a woman is as young as her endocrines; but mentally I am an old, old woman, and the sort of thing you need has no meaning for me, and I don't want to tic myself up in marriage; and if I did, I believe I should suddenly become the old hag I really am. It is not in me to love you, Wilfred, but I am exceedingly fond of you, and with what you will learn from me, I believe you will be able to love some girl very much indeed." "Morgan Le Fay, having known you, do you suppose that I will ever love anyone else?" "Yes, I hope so, Wilfred. If I do my work rightly, you certainly will; for what I want to study with you is the way in which these magnetic channels can be opened and the power brought through." "It is a cold-blooded proposition," said I, "but I suppose I must be thankful for small mercies; in fact, I ought to be used to them, for they are all I have ever had." I knew now the kind of golden knife that Morgan Ie Fay had been getting ready for me, and that history was repeating itself to perfection; and that like the Aztec slave, I would have my year during which I was royally treated, and then would come the end, and it would be slow and painful. Next day I got to work on the panel of the stormy sea, and I worked up from the foam of the white-capped waves the battle madness of the galloping sea-horses and their riders; and in the indigo hollows behind were the bleak, calm, ruthless faces of the greater gods.