The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER XXX

  THEN we came round to midsummer, and Molly and I got up early on Midsummer Day and went up on top of Bell Head to see if the sun really did rise over Bell Knowlc and could have been sighted through the pylon; and we found sure enough that it could, and the alignment, if prolonged, went right over the point; and I took Molly out on to the point for the first time, and showed her the flat table of rock where the sea-fires were lit, just visible through the shallow water as the level light came over the down. Then we discovered that two of the casemates were still full of the cedar and juniper, and I said I would have it carted back to the farm and we would burn it. Molly asked if it did not now belong to the National Trust? I said it might, but what the eye did not sec, the heart did not worry about. Morally it was mine, and I was disinclined to spend time or money on legal arguments, having heard so many. Then we went home to breakfast, which by now we needed, and I went off to the office, and found myself, in my capacity as city father, let in for a dreadful kind of carnival, and got a lot of confetti down my neck, which made me wild. The charmer who threw it was just such another as my Bon-bon Boxer, but I felt no inclination whatever to follow the matter up, but went down a side-street and took off my collar and shook myself, so I had evidently come on a lot since the Dickford days. Then, being fed to the teeth with the general foolishness, and no business being likely to be transacted in the midst of it, I shut up shop and ran over to Bristol, where a decent sobriety hangs permanently over the town like a fog, and got a further con- signmcnt of sandal from the Tibetan. I asked him where he hailed from, but he only smiled. I asked him if he came from the hills, and his eyes lit up and he nodded. Then back to the farm, and Molly frightfully intrigued by the sandal-wood. She was a business-like young woman, and had got hold of a farmer and had the other stuff hauled already. So when the evening chill came off the sea we made a little Fire of Azrael in the living-room, and sat together to watch it, and Molly told me of what she had been doing all these weeks while I had been too busy to attend to her, and perhaps, if the truth were known, too full of myself. She had been communing with the Moon, as Morgan had instructed, and she had got a lot, but had found, like I had, that it was too abstract to be of any practical use. I told her the trick of the magical images, and how they enabled one to get a purchase on things, and though they might not be essential they were uncommonly useful. She said, weren't they hallucinations? I said yes, they probably were, but that was nothing against them so long as they did their job. Then we talked of the Priest of the Moon, and I found myself speaking of him as if he were as real as Morgan and the Trcths. He might be a hallucination, but he was on the job all right. We both felt him as we talked of him. Molly asked if he would flop letters on our noses, like the Mahatmas did with Mmc Blavatsky, and I said I hoped not; I had had enough things thrown at me for one day. I judged from her remark, however, that she had been making use of her time by reading Morgan's books. Then for the first time since Morgan's passing, I took pencil in hand and began to draw. I drew the Priest of the Moon for her as I remembered him in my sea-picture, sitting on the throne of the sea in the deep sea-palaces; and the eyes came alive, even in black and white, in just the same way as they had done before. But somehow I could not do the curling waves that had arched over like a sky, but instead there stood up on his either hand the two great pillars of polarity that arc at the porchway entrance of King Solomon's temple--the Black and Silver pillars--and upon their capitals rested the terrestrial and celestial spheres. The Fire of Azrael burnt low on the hearth and fell apart in caves of flame as it had in the days of Morgan Ie Fay, the pale ash of the juniper gleaming golden in the midst. Its incense odour drifted over the room, and I thought of the fort, and caught myself listening unawares for the sound of the sea working among the rocks, unresting as ever out there on the point. But instead there came to me through the open windows another sea-voice that I had not heard before--the patter and rustle of light surf on the shingle as the tide closed round the narrow neck of land where stood the farm. It was all different here from the fort, and yet it was taking on a life of its own. There was more of earth and less of sea here than out on the point, just as there was more of earth in Molly than in Morgan; yet it was cosmic earth, and I remembered that the Great Goddess ruled both moon and earth and sea. Molly would never be a sca-pricstcss, like Morgan, but there was awaking in her something of the primordial woman, and it was beginning to answer to the need in me. Molly in her selfless, tireless, courageous giving was the eternal mother, and the eternal child in me went out to her. It was a beginning, but it was not enough. I should never have been faithful to her without a struggle if that were all there were to it. But there was something more than that, and although we neither of us knew quite what it was, we were feeling our way towards it. But there seemed to be a great gulf fixed between us and the invisible realities we sought, and unless we could cross it I felt that we were doomed to perish; and I think that Molly felt it too, for she spoke of these things with a sort of desperation that reminded me of a starving fish in an aquarium hitting its nose against the glass. And we sat and talked in the dusk as the fire sank lower. Something was needed to swing us across that gulf, but what it was we did not know, and we fell silent in the gathering dark and sat and looked at the fire. Outside the sea was working among the shingle, for the tide was high to-night. We could hear the soft crashing and rustling of the breaking waves coming nearer and nearer. They had never sounded so close before; it seemed as if they must be right under the garden wall. I was on the point of getting up and going out to see what was happening when I heard the bells in the water, and knew that this was no earthly tide we were hearing. A long ray of moonlight came through the open window, uncurtained to the mild night, and the blend of moonlight and firelight was very strange, and dazzled the eyes. The moonlight fell on the fire and made it look like an opal amid its grey ash; the curling smoke and its shadows took on the appearance of squirming creatures rising out of the coals, and I reremembered the medieval tales of salamanders. The odour of the incense woods kept on coming to us in wafts, and it seemed to me as if the fire must be smoking a good deal; meanwhile the sound of the sea filled the room till it hummed like a shell. Something uncanny was afoot, and Molly knew it just as well as I did. Then suddenly we saw that where the moonlight fell upon the smoke a form was taking shape; the smoke no longer rose in slow eddying whorls, but hung in folds like drapery. I watched it rise in front of the chimney-breast as if the fire were smoking; and then out of the formless soft grey we saw a head and shoulders emerge, and the Priest of the Moon stood before us as I had so often seen him with the mind's eye, with his shaven head and ascetic hawk's face. The eyes were dark and sparkling and very much alive. The moonlight and smoke were amorphous, but the eyes were not. Then he began to speak as he had spoken in the rite out at the fort. Whether we heard with the inner car and saw with the inner eye, or whether it was the eyes and ears of flesh that apprehended him, I do not know; it was more like a waking dream than anything else, and yei it was as clear-cut as a diamond. I saw it was to Molly that he was speaking, and that I was a mere spectator; and I remembered that in most ancient times, when Great Isis was worshipped, it was the women who were dynamic, and it was not until corruption came upon the pagan world that the priests took all the power. And as I sat there, listening to the voice from the shadows and watching Molly listen, I thought of the House of the Virgins in lost Atlantis, and how the ancient priests must have talked like this to the young girls sitting at their feet under the incense-trees in the walled courts around the lotus-tanks, telling them what was expected of them, and how it must be done, and why; and then of the cloaked journey by the underground way to the great temple; the young girl taken silently from beside her sleeping comrades, going and returning without wakening them; and I wondered which was the more sacred way of dealing with sex--that, or the way of the nuns. I heard the voice of the Priest of the Moon going on and on, talking to his young priestess
, and it seemed to me that I was sinking back into the same state I had been in when I travelled in the Boat of the Dead over the underworld waters, and I wondered whether, on my return, I should see Molly glow all golden as I had seen Morgan do. The rhythmical speaking of the priest set something vibrating within me; I wondered what Molly was making of it all as she lay in her low chair, gazing up with rapt attention at the shadowy form standing over her, luminous with its own light, with dark sparkling eyes amid the shadows; for this was-a thing of which one understood much or little according to the knowledge one brought to it. "And even as the Queen of Hades is the daughter of the Great Mother, so from the Great Sea riseth golden Aphrodite, giver of love. And she also is Isis after another manner. "Equilibrium is fixed in inertia until outer space oversets the balance and the All-father pours forth to satisfy the hunger of space. Strange and deep are these truths; verily they arc the keys to the lives of men and women, unknown to those that worship not the Great Goddess. "Golden Aphrodite comcth not as the virgin, the victim, but as the Awakener, the Desirous One. As outer space she calls, and the All-father commences the courtship. She awakeneth Him to desire and the worlds arc created. Lo, she is the Awakener. How powerful is she, golden Aphrodite, the awakener of manhood!" The voice paused, and I thought of the travesties of golden Aphrodite who rule as divinities in bars and Bon-bon Boxes, and remembered the words of the Smaragdene Tablet; "As above, so below," and thought how creation and procreation mirror each other. Then the voice began again: "But all these things are one thing. All the goddesses are one goddess, and we call her Isis, the All-woman, in whose nature all natural things are found; virgin and desirous by turn; giver of life and bringer-in of death. She is the cause of creation, for she awakeneth the desire of the All-father and for her sake He createth. Likewise the wise call all women Isis. "In the face of every woman let man look for the features of the Great Goddess, watching her phases through the flow and return of the tides to which his soul answereth; listening for her call. "0 daughters of Isis, adore the Goddess, and in-her name give the call that awakens and rejoices. So shall ye be blessed of the Goddess and live with fullness of life." He was speaking to Molly as if he stood again in the courts of the Temple of the Sun and she were a virgin preparing for the ordeal that should make her a Moon-priestess. "Now this is the rite of the worship of Isis. Let the priestess show forth the Goddess to the worshipper. Let her assume the crown of the underworld. Let her arise all glorious and golden from the sea of the primordial and call to him that loveth her to come forth and come unto her. Let her do these things in the name of the Goddess and she shall be even as the Goddess unto him, for the Goddess will speak through her. Allpowerful shall she be in the Inner as crowned Persephone, and all-glorious in the Outer as golden Aphrodite. So shall she be a priestess in the eyes of the worshipper of the Goddess, who by his faith and dedication shall find the Goddess in her. For the rite of Isis is life, and that which is done as a rite shall show forth in life. By the rite is the Goddess drawn down to her worshippers; her power enters into them and they become the substance of the sacrament." He fell silent and stood looking at Molly, as if wondering how much she had understood, and how much she could or would do; for she lay back in her chair dazed and helpless, and only her eyes answered him. Then the moonlight faded and a shift of the shore-wind silenced the sea and we were alone in the darkness, Molly and I, for the Priest of the Moon had gone; and in the darkness we sat together silently for a long while. From that silent, formless communing we came back know ing many things. And I took Molly in my arms in a way I had never done before, and something suddenly flowed between us like warm light; it encircled us in a single aura so that our lives mingled and interchanged and stimulated each other and then flowed back to us, and I was reminded of the flow and interchange of force that had taken place in the rite I had worked with Morgan. We just stood there silently in front of the fire, now sunk to a dull red glow; neither could see the other; we were almost unaware of each other; then suddenly I felt the thing that Molly was letting flow out to me so unreservedly in her giving, and knew that it was the same thing that Morgan had invoked deliberately by her strange knowledge, and that it was using ignorant, innocent Molly because the conditions of her soul were right for it, she being a woman, and in love.