The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER XXXII

  LUCKILY for all concerned, the next day was a Saturday. The Great Goddess, true to tradition, had come upon the day sacred to her--Friday--so called after Freya, the northern Venus. There not being much doing at the office on a Saturday, I stopped at home and nursed my asthma, which had not been improved by breathing sea-fog in bulk. The day was sparkling and sunny after the fog, and the bay was full of little dancing waves, very blue. I thought, as we strolled over the level sands left bare by the tide, what a magnificent place it would be to raise kids, if we ever had any. I did not like to voice my thoughts to Molly for fear of hurting her feelings, but I had a feeling, from the way she was looking out to sea, that she was thinking of the same thing. I looked at Molly, as she wasn't looking at me, and it struck me as odd that I should have known her all this time and never seen in her what I saw now, and wondered whether the change was in her or me--perhaps a bit of both, if the truth were known. The Priest of the Moon had done his work well; what he had taught was certainly putting Molly and me on our feet. It struck me that it would put a good many other folk on their feet, too, if they knew what we knew. We climbed slowly, for I was rather breathless, up to the vine-terraces, and sat there in the sun on the seat under the breast of the down, for sun does me more good than anything else when my asthma is bothering me. The little vines had long since shed their winter wrappings, and their funny little woolly buds had developed into pretty, yellowish leaves on their long whipcord stems. All the same, they looked to me melancholious little plants, but Molly had hopes of them, and she and the tweeny nursed them as if they were kids. We looked out over the hollow land of the marshes. It was barely above the level of the spring tides, and only the dykes prevented the sea flooding it when there was an on-shore gale. But to-day there was no gale, only a soft breeze, and we watched the uncut hay rippling like water as it passed. The place was stiff with larks, and their songs came up to us as we sat under the breast of the cliff. I told Molly how I had seen as a boy the footings of the ancient quays, left behind by the receding sea. The marshes had changed but little since those days, and the ancient life seemed all about us in the warm breathing air and sparkling sun. I became very conscious of the continuity of life in the land, passing down from father to son in the slow ways of husbandry that never change at heart. Life goes on, the life of the race, and we arc but parts of a larger whole. For the life of the race itself is a part of the life of Isis. And I thought of the days when men worshipped Her as giver of life to the race and warden of its continuity, naming even their seaport after Her, and wondered what things they had known that we had forgotten, to which Morgan had given the clues and then left us to puzzle out. There was a lot in the old pagan worship, I was convinced. The vicar" could never have steered Molly and me through our difficulties in the way that the Priest of the Moon had done. I could picture his face if he had been consulted on the subject! He would have gone out through the roof of his confessional like a scalded cat. It was very pleasant up there under the shelter of the warm grey rock. The heat of the sun made the herbs smell, and it was like incense. Far below the little waves broke whispering and silvery on the shingle and the song of the larks rose through them. I took off my coat and rolled up my shirt-sleeves, and the sun cooked me to a crisp, and I felt very lazy and very amiable. Out across the marshes we could see the new road, with the cars sliding backwards and forwards on it like beads on a string. Down below us was the thatched roof of our home, with blue smoke rising from the chimney, and a waft of the wind brought up to us the smell of baking bread. Set in the masonry beside the hearth in the living-room was an oldfashioned bread-oven in which you lit a fire of peats, and when it had burnt out, raked out the ash and put in your loaves. Molly insisted on using it, and I must say it baked champion bread. In some odd way we seemed very much a part of the life of the marsh because we burnt its peats and thatched with its reeds. As soon as I found myself among the water-cuts and willows I felt at home, long before I got to the farm. Bell Knowie and Bell Head were our two watchmen, keeping the land and the sea-ways that led to us. Then we went down and had lunch in the garden, the cupressus hedges, that grew like Jonah's gourd in that sandy soil, being already big enough to break the breeze off the sea the blows on even the hottest day across that neck of land. We were glad of it, for all afternoon the farm baked in the shimmering heat that danced on the levels, till towards evening the shadow of the down fell across it as the sun sank in the sea. I ran Molly out to the fort to watch the sunset, and it was very fine that night. The sea was one sheet of palest gold; along the horizon lay low masses of purple cloud looking like a mountain range, and behind them was a rose-pink sky. As the sun sank, curious green beams of after-glow shot up from below the sea-line and the sea turned violet-purple. I drove back as the dusk closed in, and as we came up over the crest of the down and all the levels lay spread out beneath us, we saw a wonderful second sunset like dawn in the eastern sky, reflected from the sun below the sea. Then down the steep way along the cliff in bottom gear, and so to our home. We built a small Fire of Azrael, June though it was, for it is always cool out there on the coast as soon as the sun has set; and we sat over it and gossiped very happily, quite forgetting what Fires of Azrael are for, till a curious sense of the gathering of power in the room reminded us. I had thought we had had enough excitement for one full moon, but apparently the gods thought otherwise. Nothing came of it, however, but perhaps that was because high tide would be an hour later that night, and Molly chased me off to bed, saying the gods could call us if they wanted us. So we went to bed, Molly to her quarters and I to mine, for no one in his senses wants to share its kennel with a bulldog, faithful and affectionate animal though it is. My nocturnal habits were too much even for Molly. Upstairs the faint sweet smell of the juniper, cedar and sandal was very noticeable; I even saw a faint haze of blue smoke drifting along the passage, and concluded chat there must be some cracks in the old chimneys and that Bindling had not done his work too well. My room was at the seaward end of the house, and as the moon got towards its setting, its light came streaming on to the bed. I would not have it shut out, though Molly thought it helped to make me sleep badly, and I lay and watched the moon pass slowly across the window and thought of the other moon-sets I had seen out at the fort; and the silver pathway that led to the gods of the sea; and my trip to Atlantis in the company of the Priest of the Moon, and what it had meant when I was told that my dedication was accepted, and what was going to come of it. And then and there, in my heart, I renewed the dedication. But somehow it seemed vague and ineffectual. And so I sat up in bed and raised my arms in the sign of the horns of the moon and renewed it again out loud, and the outward and visible sign felt as if it were effectual, though the unspoken one had not. The smell of the aromatic smoke from the Fire of Azrael was coming upstairs very strongly now, and I began to get rather worried, and wondered whether the defective chimney was going to set the house on fire; but then I remembered we had only left a handful of ash behind us when we had gone to bed, and there was something about that smoke that no terrestrial fire could account for. I began to wonder what was going to happen. I held out my hands to feel the air, and see whether it was developing that slippery coldness that had come at the fort when Morgan worked her rite, but on the contrary it felt surprisingly warm for that hour of the night, and with a curious dry heat, like the hot room of a Turkish bath, and the temperature was rapidly rising. I began to wonder whether the house had gone on fire in good earnest, and what in the world was going to happen next, and whether I had better get up and see. Then the door opened soundlessly and Molly entered. She had never come to my room of her own accord before unless she had heard me moving about and knew I was seedy, and I wondered whether she had come to rouse me with the news that the house was on fire. But she did not speak, though she could see me sitting up in bed in the moonlight and knew that I was awake. She took up her stand at the foot of my bed with the window behind her and the moonlight str
eaming through it. Molly always wears flowered voile nighties which she makes herself, and very pretty they are, too, but no use when the light is behind her. She looked )ust like an antique statue, a pocket Venus, and she held out her arms towards me in the strange stiff attitude of the ancient gods, like Hathor when she is a hawk, and I saw that about her neck and on her wrists were Morgan's sapphires. Then she began to sing. She used Morgan's tune, but the song she sang was not one that Morgan had ever sung to me. "I am the Star that riseth from the sea, The twilight sea. All tides are mine, and answer unto me-- Tides of men's souls and dreams and destiny-- Isis Veiled and Ea, Binah, Ge. "Lo, I receive the gifts thou bringest me-- Life and more life--in fullest ecstasy 1 I am the Moon, the Moon that draweth thee. I am the waiting Earth that calleth thee. Come unto me. Great Pan, come unto me! Come unto me. Great Pan, come unto me!" The low room faded under the magic of the singing, opening out into a vast and moonlit plain of bare black basalt, barren and volcanic, and I thought of lost Atlantis after the cataclysm, and the mountains of the moon. In the centre of the plain was a moon-temple of open black columns set in a circle like a slender and graceful Stonehenge of Doric pillars. Silhouetted against it were the lovely lines of Molly like a Tanagra figurine in her shadowy shift, and I knew that she was exercising her ancient right and giving me the mating-call in the name of the moon, far truer to Nature than any convention of duty and modesty. And I knew why Morgan had said that on the inner planes the woman is positive and should take the initiative, for the Astral Plane is ruled by the moon and woman is her priestess; and when she comes in her ancient right, representing the moon, the moon-power is hers and she can fertilise the male with vitalising magnetic force. And the answering power awoke in me from the very deeps of my being, far deeper than the overflow of desire that comes from a physical pressure; for she called up from me the reserves of vital force and brought them into action--the reserves that the law of our nature guards against the great crises when we fight for life itself--the things that give the madman his strength and the poet his creative frenzy. Not until these things are called up by the call of the beloved can we be said to have mated to the depths of our being. They are not called forth when the man wooes the woman because he feels like it, but they are called forth when she comes to him in the name of Great Isis and bids him worship the goddess with her and through her. The dark plain with its pillared temple grew clearer and clearer as if I saw it at the moon-rise; the low-ceilinged room of the farm-house had disappeared, and overhead was a high clear sky; Molly remained, however, a silvery figure in the silver moonlight--Isis Unveiled, come down from heaven to me, for she was made one with Her. We had passed out into another dimension--the dimension of the things of the mind, and that which was between us had taken on a significance which was no longer personal but part of Life itself--of Life going on in the eternal becoming. Molly was to me not a woman, but the thing which is woman. And because I saw not her, but what was behind her, life came in with such a rush that we were whirled away like leaves in the wind. The barriers of personality went down, and we were made one with the cosmic life--not one with each other, for that, I think, can never be, and we miss the turning when we seek it--but one with a larger whole; and as things which are equal to a third are equal to either, losing ourselves in the larger life we found each other. It is a thing difficult to explain, and a matter of experience. I have put it as clearly as I can. I do not pretend to understand it. There is something beyond comradeship to be found in marriage; something that the personality of the beloved cannot give; it is this magnetic something that begins to flow when we reach out beyond the personality of the woman towards her essential womanhood; it is, I think, this essence, this vital principle that creates the form through function, which was what the ancients personified as the Great Goddess Isis, veiled in heaven and unveiled in love. And through all the ecstasy of the experience, like the muted orchestra accompanying great singing, went the sound of a voice as clear as a bell, and I knew that the Priest of the Moon was presiding over the rite as they did in ancient Atlantis when the Virgins of the Sun were brought into the great temple. It was an ordered rite, corresponding to processes in Great Nature herself. "Learn now the mystery of the ebbing and flowing tides. Isis of Nature awaiteth the coming of Her Lord the Sun. She calls Him; She draws Him from the place of the dead, the kingdom of Amenti, where all things are forgotten. And He comes to Her in His boat called Millions of Years, and the earth grows green with springing grain. For the desire of Osiris answers unto the call of Isis, and so will it ever be in the hearts of men, for thus the gods have formed them. Whoso denieth this is abhorred of the gods. "But in the heavens our Lady Isis is the Moon, and the moonpowers are Hers. She is also the priestess of the silver star that rises from the twilight sea. Hers are the magnetic moon-tides, ruling the hearts of men. In the Inner She is all-potent. She is queen of the kingdoms of sleep. All the invisible workings are Hers, and She rules all things ere they come to birth. Even as through Osiris Her mate the earth grows green, so the mind of man conceives through Her power. This secret concerns the inner nature of the Goddess, which is dynamic." As the sound of the voice went on I seemed to find myself inside the circle of slender black pillars that formed the temple of the moon in the midst of the burnt-up, barren plain, and in it the moonlight was concentrated, leaving all else in darkness; and there was silence for a while, and I heard the great tides of the skies come up and go by in their rhythm of musical colours. Each had its beat and its note and its periodicity. They were like the notes of an organ, and they were like wheeling beams of light. One could conceive them as forces, or one could personify them as angels and see the great Forms go by on strong wings, singing as they went, and glimpse the halfseen Faces. We were alone now, were Molly and I, in the open temple in the empty plain, with only the moon above us and the whirling earth beneath, for all sacraments end in silence. Even the Priest of the Moon withdrew and left us alone with the Moon and the Earth and Space. And then we heard far off the sound of a rising tide, the soft silvery beat of light surf on shingle; and we knew that the waters were spreading over the earth at the end of the aeon. And the voice of the Priest of the Moon came again as the sea drew nearer. "Consummatum est. Those who have received the Touch of Isis have received the opening of the gates of the inner life. For them the tides of the moon shall flow and ebb and flow and never cease in their cosmic rhythm." Then the moon-temple and the wide plain faded, and through the open window we heard the surf of an earthly tide upon the shingle as the moon passed to her setting. We were back in the low ceilinged room of the farm, but still the voice of the Priest of the Moon went on. "The great sun, moving in the heavenly houses, has left the House of the Fishes for the House of the Water-bearer. In the coming age shall humanity be holy, and in the perfection of the human shall we find the humane. Take up the manhood into Godhead, and bring down the Godhead into manhood, and this shall be the day of God with us; for God is made manifest in Nature, and Nature is the self-expression of God." The Society of the Inner Light, founded by the late Dion Fortune, has courses for those who wish seriously to pursue the study of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Information about the society may be obtained by writing to the address below. Please enclose British stamps or international postal coupons in your letter if you wish a response.