by Dion Fortune
CHAPTER XXXI
THERE were two things that I saw clearly as the result of that night's work--firstly, that the Priest of the Moon meant to come to us as he had come to Morgan Ie Fay when she was Miss Morgan the First's companion; and secondly, that he meant to use Molly as they used the Moon-priestesses in Atlantis; and I wondered how Molly, who had been brought up by Mrs Muckley, would take to this, and hoped to God she had had her fair share of original sin before education got in its work upon her. Our conventions have so stereotyped the polarity between a man and a woman that it has got stuck and no one knows how to shift it. But what we want in the part of marriage that is behind the veil is the dynamic woman, who comes in the name of the Great Goddess, conscious of her priesthood and proud of her power, and it is this self-confidence that the modest woman lacks. These are vitally important things, and we have forgotten them, and I think it was to bring them again that Morgan Ie Fay and the Priest of the Moon were working. But it was not enough that Morgan Ie Fay should do them, for she was not, I think, of our evolution or epoch, but one sent to us from another place; it was needed that those of our own age and race should do them, and someone had to break trail for those that came after. Someone had to find in marriage neither an animal function nor a remedy for sin, but a divinely instituted sacrament for the bringing down of power, and in this sacrament the woman must take her ancient place as priestess of the rite, calling down lightning from heaven; the initiator, not the initiated. And to this end I, being a man, had to learn to receive, which is not easy for a man, for he will not admit his need, wishing to be self-sufficient unto himself and always the giver; but God knows, he isn't! If there is one thing on God's earth he isn't, it is self-sufficing. We had to reverse the conventional polarity in our inner relationship, had Molly and I, before our marriage would light up for us. She had to become the priestess of the Goddess, and I, the kneeling worshipper, had to receive the sacrament at her hands. This a man can readily do when he has reverence for a woman as well as being passionately in love with her, for then to him marriage with her automatically becomes a sacrament. For there can be no greatness of any kind that is purely personal and an end in itself. When the body of a woman is made an altar for the worship of the Goddess who is all beauty and magnetic life, and the man pours himself out in worship and sacrifice, keeping back no part of the price but giving his very self for love, seeing in his mate the priestess serving with him in the worship--then the Goddess enters the temple, roses in her hands and her doves flying around her, called down by the faith of her worshippers. It is because we have no faith that we do not see the Goddess behind all womanhood and thereby invoke her; and it is because they do not realise the sanctity of Great Isis that women have no respect for the gifts they bring us. For if marriage is a sacrament, as the Church avers, it is so by virtue of being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, but that grace is not the grace of the Crucified, but of Great Isis, giver of life on earth. We blaspheme when we call it a remedy for sin--it is a rite of evocation and the power evoked is Life. It is the rite of the adoration of Beauty which, together with Wisdom and Strength, form the Three Holy Pillars that support high Heaven. For there is a mysticism of Nature and her elemental powers as well as a mysticism of the spirit; and these are not two things, but two aspects of one thing, for God is made manifest in Nature, and Nature is the self-expression of God; and when we deny the natural, we deny the gift of God, which is to our use and His glory. How can we better worship God than in the sanctity of the act of creation that hands on His gift of life? And shall it be more holy as an animal function and remedy for sin than as the evocation of all beauty in the soul of man and the expression of his love? These are not things that it is particularly safe to say, but they are things that need saying. Day by day, as the moon-power got in its work on her, I watched Molly change from a little, quiet, staunch, faithful thing, very sweet, but entirely Itless, into a pocket edition of Morgan, with the same vitality and magnetism, and the same lithe grace and bell-like tone of voice, for these, it seems, are the things the moon-power brings to women. And I saw, too, the change of the moon-tides in Molly, ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea, never twice alike; and learnt why it is her right to summon to the worship as priestess in charge of the shrine, for she alone knows the set of the tides of the moon; for a man's tides are the tides of the sun, changing only with the seasons, and under civilised conditions changing so slightly as to be negligible. In those days there were not two at the farm, but three, for Molly and I constantly felt the coming and going of one who came to us from another sphere. And in the dusk, when the moonlight fell on the wood-smoke, we saw, or thought we saw, the shadowy figure formulate; we built it out of our imagination in the shadows as one sees faces in the fire, as Morgan had taught, and to our eyes it took on life and spoke, for we were not imaging a phantasy, but the shadow of the real, and the real came down and ensouled it. Thus, I think, have the gods always manifested to their worshippers. And night by night, called down by faith and phantasy, the Priest of the Moon came to us as he had come to Morgan Ie Fay when she was an ageing and penurious woman--bearing the bread and wine that turned to strange life and vitality. For this was the work he had set out to do, and these were the secrets he had brought from lost Atlantis in those forgotten ages when he came to the Islands of the Sea with the Sea-king's ships--the secret of generation and regeneration by the wine of life, which is the moon-wine, the Soma. He told us of ancient Atlantis and its lost and forgotten arts, and the knowledge that, perverted to evil, was destroyed by a cataclysm that the earth might be cleansed. He told us how, foreknowing the coming of disaster, he had travelled to the Islands of the Sea, bringing with him his books, and that this was the origin of the Graal legend, for as the custom was, a Christian dress had been given to the old tradition. But the hearts of men becoming evil once more, the knowledge was withdrawn lest the tragedy of Atlantis repeat itself; but now it might be that the knowledge should come again if a way could be found; and he had found it in part through Morgan and had made a start with his work and carried it as far as he might. But Morgan, as I had always known, was a strange being, both man and woman at heart, as the higher adepts are; and for that reason she could not surrender herself to the mating; and although she fetched the Graal from Mount Salvatch and bore it to the shore, she might not walk the ways of men, but remained a sea-priestess for ever, coming to the water's edge at the uttermost ebb of the neap, holding out her Graal and waiting. Till at last her call was heard, and one came down, and she placed the Graal in his hands and went back to the sea again. I remembered how Morgan had always veiled her face, like the Great Goddess whom she worshipped, whenever she had occasion to visit the mainland, and only revealed her features out on the sea-girt down, the best part of a mile from the coast. Night by night, as the wood-smoke rose from the Fire of Azrael, we built up the form of the Priest of the Moon in the drifting shadows till he was as real to us as we were to each other; and though we knew his form was such stuff as dreams arc made of, there came through that form the touch of mind on mind, and that was the thing that counted, and no one who felt it could think that he was hallucinated. Now it was the touch of mind of the Priest of the Moon on ours that made everything possible. Without him, we should never have succeeded in bringing anything within reach; he gave us the start that enabled us to get going, and for that I shall be eternally grateful, and to that I shall never cease to bear witness in spite of scepticism and discredit. Mme Blavatsky talked of her Masters, and her words have the ring of sincerity, though the flopping of letters on to folks' noses has not, and was done, I think, to impress the polloi who were exceedingly hoi in her days. We had no phenomena, had Molly and I, but we had the sense of the touch of mind on mind and of the presence of power. After all, if telepathy is a fact, and survival is a fact, there seems no reason why the survivors should not telepath, even if the letter-flopping is open to question. As for me, I would sooner have that sense o
f the touch of mind on mind, with its tremendously stimulating influence, than any amount of objective evidence. But the Priest of the Moon could no more cross the gulf to come to us than we had been able to cross the gulf to go to him. Some device had to be found whereby we could meet half-way in the abyss of air, and that device was the art of the magical images whereby we visualised the form before the inner eye in the inner kingdoms and he projected therein the life by the power of his mind; and so we felt the touch of mind on mind where no man was, and heard the words where no one spoke, for the thing came across the gulf on the wings of phantasy; for phantasy is the ass that carries the ark, as they said in the ancient Mysteries. Now it is a very odd thing that I, who could visualise the Priest of the Moon at will till he seemed to stand out like an image in a stereoscope, always felt him to be a shadow thrown by some other reality; whereas Molly, who couldn't visualise him at all, was perfectly sure of his presence and actuality, and seemed to commune with him interiorly with as much certainty as if he were on the telephone. He taught me, and I learnt all manner of things from him about Atlantis and the ancient ways in Britain. But he did not so much teach Molly as change her; I watched her changing before my eyes, until finally the Priest of the Moon seemed to belong to her rather than to me, who had introduced her to him. Then one day Molly told me a strange thing; she said that there was something else as well as the Priest of the Moon; that just as we had made the Priest of the Moon real to ourselves by thinking about him, so he was making a goddess real to her by visualising her, and the goddess was Great Isis in whom all womanhood is gathered up. Then I sat back and left Molly alone and watched her, for it was her turn now. And just as she had confidence in the Priest of the Moon, though she did not understand the psychology of him, so she had confidence in Great Isis, though she did not understand the metaphysics of Her; and it was this confidence that made Her real and brought Her through, as my enlightened mysticism never could have done. For Molly, in her own eyes at any rate, was becoming something; and the result of it was that she was becoming something in mine also. She liked to think of herself as a priestess of Great Isis, and presently I found that I was thinking of her as a priestess of Great Isis too, for her feelings affected me more than I realised. And I began to understand what Morgan had said about my belief in her as a priestess making her a priestess. But hang it all, it wasn't just belief, for Molly was functioning as a priestess and bringing through the power! As the days went on she became more and more sure of herself as she saw my reactions, and began to feel that she as priestess had the right to invoke the goddess, and finally she dared to do it. There was a sea-fog that night that wrapped all round the narrow neck of land where stood the farm between the salt marsh and the tide-water. Save for the shadowy bulk of Bell Knowie the land had disappeared and the high sea-down had vanished like lost Atlantis. All that remained of it was a hollow echo verberating and re-verberating as the melancholy two-tone call of Starber lightship struck the hollow rock. We were cut off from the land and only the sea remained open to us as an occasional shift of the drift of the wind opened long sea-lanes in the fog down which the moon shone, for she was low and neai her setting. It was strange to see a sea-lane open thus, with the water all silver in the moonlight and the fog standing up in walls on either hand, like the cliffs of a phantom fiord. It was such a sea-path as this down which the oldest gods might travel, coming from the moon and that which is behind the moon--most ancient time and space when earth and moon were both etheric, not yet solidified into dense matter and not yet parted one from another. The tide was coming in. I had begun to notice that with tin- rising tide Molly always seemed to wake up, unlike Morgan, who came to her power when the tide was at uttermost ebb. But then she was a sca-priestess, and Molly was a priestess of corn and hearth and garth, which is another aspect of the Great Goddess whom they both served after their different ways. With the rising tide to-night Molly grew restless, and was constantly looking out of the window into the fog, and opening the window and letting the fog into the room till I protested, for I was wheezy. Then she went out into the porch and shut the door behind her so that the fog should not inconvenience me. She was gone so long that I got uneasy and went after her. She was not in the porch, nor in the narrow front garden, marked off by its low loose wall from the wide marsh, and I had a sudden panic lest she had answered the call of the seagods as had Morgan, and I dashed out of the gate and down through the fog to the beach, calling her frantically. Then I heard her answering call in the fog, and the tremendous sense of relief taught me something that it was very good for me to know. I found her down there in the grey half-light where the waves were breaking, and she put her little warm hand in mine and I was most frightfully glad to feel it there; and I put my arm round her and wanted to march her back to the house to make sure of her. For I was taking no more chances with the sea-gods. Morgan had never in any sense been mine, and I had no right to protest when they called her, but had to bear it as best I could; but Molly was mine, and no mistake about it, and I was standing no nonsense from sea-gods or anybody. I was prepared to fight for Molly, and defy high heaven if necessary; which was a very great surprise to me, just as great a surprise as it was when I realised the hold the Bon-bon Boxer had got over me. I do not pretend to understand these things. They are very odd. But Molly wasn't having any. She kept tight hold of me and made me stop there where the water was breaking, asthma or no asthma, for she had got something afoot that was bigger than my temporary well-being, and like Morgan, she could harden her heart. I saw that upon the line of dry seaweed that marked high water she had built a little Fire of Azrael, pyramidal, according to tradition, and was awaiting the approach of the water to light it. I saw too that she was dressed in shadowy drapery, and that Morgan's sapphires gleamed on breast and wrist. Molly was doing the thing properly. And because it was real to her it became real to me and infected me with its emotion. I forgot my asthma and became absorbed in what was afoot, watching the slow creep of the oncoming waves up the sand and the line of foam at their lip coming further and further up the beach as the tide rose, pushing the languid, fogbound rollers ir front of it, for they seemed too flattened and stifled by the thickness of the air to move of their own volition. Presently the first shallow, spreading wash of a breaking wave ran up to the edge of the weed, and Molly put a match to her Fire of Azrael and we watched it take the flame, the dry and resinous woods rapidly turning into a pyramid of fire after their year-long storage out at the fort. The seaweed burned too, with an odd iodine smell that seemed to have the ancient essence of all sea-beaches embalmed in it, and I thought of the far-travelled mariners with their gold car-rings and curled beards, who had drawn their high-prowcd sea-ships up on Ishtar's Beere. Then the cold drifting draught that is in every fog opened a sea-lane that led right out to the moon, and we saw the slow heave of the sea running all black and shadowy as the tide made up-channel. But even as we watched, the sea felt the call of the moon, and the water became flickering silver as the turn of the tide broke the rhythm of the waves, and we watched the water that had come far up the land turn again to the great deep. The waves had respected Molly's fire, and just lipped it and made it hiss before they turned again, sinking slowly back, leaving a belt of wet sand and fresh weed to mark their path. Molly raised her arms in the sign of the horns of the moon and invoked the Great Goddess as I had seen Morgan do. The moon was low in the west towards her setting, and at Molly's feet was the red-lit Fire of Azrael, and beyond it the silver pathway stretched out over the sea toward lost Atlantis. And it seemed to me that at her call came the gods of the past and their priests and worshippers, for she was waking the old worship once again. I could see them come in a long procession over the sea, an army with banners, called by her from the Great Atlantic Deep where their land was sunk. I saw them come as they had come of old, winding up the processional way to the temple on the crest of the sacred mountain, for a priestess of the true lineage called them to the worship. They passed around us, di
viding on either hand, and went on over the marsh to where Bell Knowie raised its mist-crowned head to the night and the stars. And Bell Knowie received them; they passed within to the great chambers of the caves where the worship was held, and Molly and I were left alone with the moon and the sea to do the greater worship that is held out there in the silence and darkness, close to nature. The Moon sank lower; the sea cut her disk and the mist of the sea banked about her in a golden nimbus. Then Something seemed to formulate in the darkness and come over the sea towards us through the mist, moving by the pathway of silver light upon the water; and It was vast, so that Its head met the stars, and It was all veiled and swathed and shrouded. Only we saw the silver Feet upon the sea, and they were like moonlight over water. And so She came, She of the Sea, to the place where sea meets land, and we awaited Her coming. She paused at the edge of the line of the breaking foam, Her feet in the water and Her head among the stars, star-crowned. There was no Face to sec, for She is for ever veiled, but there came to us the great exalted awe which some say is the gods and none other. This tingling fear took me by the heart and by the throat and by the eyes, gripping like a hand. And my hands began to burn and tingle with a pulsating force, and from behind my eyes it seemed to come out like a beam. And I broke out in that heavy sweat of the heat of the gods, which Morgan had told me always heralds their passing; and my breath was taken short, but not with the asthma, and I grew rigid and shook like a man in a fever-fit. I looked towards Molly, and saw that she stood on tiptoe, reaching up towards her Goddess as if floating between earth and air like a frozen figure of dance, immobile, tense and effortless. Then slowly Great Isis turned, and drew Her veil closer about Her; and She went down the long sea-lane out towards the west, the fog closing in behind Her. The sea drew back with the falling tide and bared the place of Her passing, and on the sand we saw silvery pools that might have been the marks of eddies but that we knew were Her footprints. And so She passed away as silently as She had come, but the place where She passed was holy, being filled with power. Something had touched our souls to awe, and we chose to call it the passing of the Goddess. Then we knew that what we called Great Isis had deigned to answer the invocation of Her priestess, and that the altar fire was lit in the sanctuary that Molly had swept and garnished and tended with such fidelity--the empty shrine of the loveless home to which I had brought her in my sorrow and loneliness and sickness, and to which she had come for the sake of the greater love that seeks not its own but is fulfilled in the good of the beloved. We had, perhaps, in these things the making of magical power; for in magic, as Morgan said, there is no power save there be sacrifice, just as the sea-gods had tried for me and got the poor moon-calf before they would accept the fort as their temple. So Great Isis had demanded of Molly that she should lay herself on the altar of sacrifice, and then, like the fierce tribal fetish that Abraham propitiated with the offer of Isaac, had kept the life but returned the form of flesh. So Isis had taken Molly, and Molly had let Her. A horrible pang of fear shot through me lest once again I should be called upon to sacrifice to the sea something that was becoming very dear to me. And I told the sea flat out that if it took Molly I should come after her. And it seemed to me that somewhere among the stars I heard faint laughter, silver laughter, and I knew that the Goddess was glad and this was the sound of Her joy, for I had offered the acceptable sacrifice without which no mating can be consecrated to the Great Goddess. For in every union the woman makes this offer, for she goes down to the gates of death to open them to the incoming life, and shall not the man, in common justice, match her giving? For without the shedding of blood there is no redemption whether in childbed or upon the field of battle, both crucifixions after their kind, and both of redeeming power when made sacramental by an ideal. Then we turned to go home; and the earth under our feet glowed and felt warm like the flesh of a living thing, as it surely is, for is it not the body of a goddess? The mist rolled back with the turning tide, for a breeze sprang up off the land and swept it out to sea. And the breeze freshened and veered, and as we walked up the steep sea-beach we heard the crisp crash of waves on shingle. The stars came out in the indigo night of the sky, for Great Isis had set, sinking below the waves on Her way to Atlantis, where maybe She took counsel with Her priests, sitting in circle in the deep- sea palaces, and told them concerning the coming to earth again of Her ancient wisdom by way of a man and a woman who in spite of many difficulties had come to love each other. The sea behind us sang like a choir, the waves of either bay beating against the narrow neck of land where our home stood, like the two parts of a choir calling and answering across a cathedral. The pyramidal height of Bell Knowie rose dark against the stars, a sentinel guarding the marshes, and the long bulk of Bell Head stretched out to sea. The lights of the ships going up to Bristol city moved slowly between sea and sky, and in the clearness following the fog a low glow hung on the horizon from the seaport towns of Wales. And there came to me the great tragedy of all these moving lights of toiling men and the glow of the crowded towns set on the narrow strip of land between the iron coast and the iron hills with their valleys of harsh toil, where Aphrodite Pandemos walks the sordid streets and the Little Bethels preach half a god to half a man.