Moon Magic

by Dion Fortune

  “This is my temple,” I said.

  “What do you do here? said he.

  “Contact the moon,” I said.

  “I understand,” said he, though I don't suppose he did.

  He stared about him. Never in his wildest dreams had Rupert Malcolm, F.R.C.P., seen anything like it, and they see a good many queer things before they get the F.R.C.P.

  “This is a diagram of the universe,” said I. “Those symbols round the seven sides represent the seven planets and indicate where their influence comes in. The side by which we entered represents the way back to earth. The four sides of the cubical altar represent the four elements—those are their symbols, those triangles. Go up to the altar. How high is it on you?”

  “Waist high to me, and I am five foot seven.”

  “It is the height of the navel of a six foot man, and it is a double cube, meaning “As above, so below.” It is the cubical altar of the universe. Double the cubes again, and it is the height of a man. That other tablealtar, or couch according to which way you look at it, which forms a T with the cubical altar, is the altar of sacrifice. That big mirror is the doorway to the higher planes. We hang on it the symbol of whatever force we are working with, and shift the other symbols round accordingly. That light hanging overhead is the spirit-light. It represents the Creator. The floating wick in the lotus-shaped vase on the altar represents the power of the Creator brought through into the universe—God made manifest in Nature. That light in the opalescent bowl in front of the mirror represents the Moon-power. There are coloured bowls with floating wicks under all the symbols of the planets, but only the Moonbowl is lit tonight because it is only the Moon-power with which we are working. Those two pillars, black and silver, represent positive and negative force, and they stand on either side of the sacrificial altar at present because that is the focus of power in the work we are going to do. The two lights on their tops bring the number of lights in the temple up to five, which is the number of man. Four of those get reflected in the mirror, but not the fifth, the spirit-light up in the roof; that brings the number of lights up to nine, the number of the Moon.”

  Malcolm's eyes followed my pointing hand.

  “I understand,” he said, and I think he did, for his mind was diamond clear and diamond keen, a delight to work with.

  “But there is more than that,” I said. “That is only the physical temple; there is also the astral temple which we build in the imagination, and what we build in the imagination is real on its own plane. I shall take you through into that astral temple tonight if all goes well.”

  “How do we go through into the astral temple?”

  “Through the mirror.”

  “I see. So that's what that big mirror is for, is it?”

  “Yes, this is what we call the mirror-working. It is much easier to see psychically in a mirror than in the actual room, and one can build the astral images in the mirror and the crystalline structure of the glass will hold the magnetism. Look in the mirror. Do you see my face appearing just over your shoulder?”

  I drew close behind him, and the light from the floating wick on the altar fell on my face. Light shining upwards brings out the modelling of a face in an unaccustomed manner and makes it look quite different. Even I, seeing my own face in the glass over Malcolm's shoulder, hardly knew it. Our eyes met in the mirror.

  “Who is that? said I.

  “The woman of the dissecting-room,” said he, and I felt him shudder. This was not the answer I either expected or wanted.

  “Look again,” said I, “and tell me who she is. Tell me frankly.”

  “Well—you know,” said he.

  “Yes, I know,” I said, “but I want to know if you know.”

  “As far as I know, at any rate as far as I could make out from my dream, she was a priestess of one of those old temples where I was a priest, and I desecrated her dead body, and got into trouble over it.”

  “Did you desecrate her for the sake of magic?”

  “No,” said Malcolm, and I felt the man's mind close down like a shutter: he would tell me no more, I knew that, however much I pressed him. But that did not matter. He knew, and that sufficed. For my part, I could make a fairly good guess, knowing the ways of the ancient Egyptians.

  “You say you got into trouble. Do you know what your punishment was?”

  “Stoned to death, of course.”

  There was no “of course” about it. I had seen Malcolm working out another punishment, and I wondered why, since he knew so much, he did not know it.

  “Did you ever belong to a cult that performed blood sacrifices?” I asked. I felt Malcolm shudder again. It was a strange thing to see that hardboiled, stocky, case-hardened man shiver like that.

  “I think I must have,” he said quietly, “and that's probably at the bottom of my horror of blood.”

  “I think you must have, too,” I said. “But it was not a blood cult, you know. It was part of the innermost worship of Isis, the most ancient worship, predynastic, where at long intervals they killed a man in Her honour. The priests who were made to do that were high up in the cult and did it as an expiation for some wrong-doing. I expect that was your punishment for desecrating the body of the priestess.”

  “No, it wasn't,” said Malcolm quickly, “or at least that wasn't the story as I imagined it. My idea was that I got into the priesthood under false pretences. I believe I really came from one of the outcast classes who disposed of the dead, and they wouldn't have had me at any price if they had known. I had been exchanged as a child for a child that had died in order to safeguard an inheritance. I knew the secret of my birth, though no one else did, and I ought not to have tried for the priesthood, but I couldn't resist it; and they found me out, and made me do the blood sacrifices and kind of outcasted me, though they couldn't turn me out of the priesthood because I knew too much. Then, to make matters worse, I got fond of one of the priestesses. Then there was all sorts of trouble. They didn't give me a second chance after that, but put an end to me, and quite rightly. At any rate that's the story I used to put myself to sleep with as a child.”

  “What a story for a child!”

  “Oh, I was that sort of child. Brought up by my father's housekeeper—my mother died when I was born. Odd, isn't it, how these obstetric calamities seem to haunt me? That was the end of the priestess, too.”

  “Did you fantasy that too as a child?”

  “Yes, the whole story, just as I've told it to you. Of course I had the death of my own mother to put it into my head. Still, it was a queer thing for a lad to imagine. I wasn't so frightfully young, though, about thirteen.”

  I could see how the stirrings of puberty had brought through the memory.

  “Was the girl you married of the same type as the priestess?” I asked.

  “No, the exact opposite in every way—and I knew even at the time that I ought to wait for my priestess.”

  His hands gripped the edge of the altar and the lamp-flame quivered. “But my nature was too strong for me. That always has been my problem. Then her people pressed the marriage, too. She didn't really want it. She was scared of me, and I don't blame her. But I was too headstrong to pay any attention to that. So you can see why I feel I owe her a debt, can't you? She was offered up as a sacrifice, if anyone ever was. It's the old story over again. Still sacrificing and still outcast.” The altar shook under his convulsive grip, making the flame flicker till the shadows danced all over the walls and I feared we should have an extinguished lamp.

  What could one say? Malcolm, staring into the mirror, was finding out the nature of the mirror-working for himself.

  “Do you know why I went in for medicine? Reparation. Work off my sense of sin, don't you know. Hang it all, I was to have been a medical missionary!”

  I began to wonder what I was going to do with Malcolm, for he seemed to have taken root at the cubical altar, with his two hands laid thereon. I wanted him at the other altar, however, the sacrificial one. I k
new what I had to do—I had to sacrifice this man, even as he had sacrificed others—not his physical life or his physical blood, but his magnetic vitality and everything that makes up life for a man. I had to do this, and I had to chance his coming through to the rebirth. He had divined rightly when he had compared himself to a vivisected animal.

  “I want you to lie down on this couch,” I said. “Will you?”

  “Certainly.” He walked round the altar—widdershins, God help him—and stretched himself on the long, low couch that is tomb and altar in one. I fetched a stool and placed it behind his head and sat down there. Our eyes met in the mirror. I bent over him, and the long ends of my silver head-dress fell to his shoulders, framing his face. I took his head in my hands. He stiffened and drew away, but I kept my hold on him.

  “Aren't you in the habit of handling patients when you treat them?”

  “Sorry,” said he, and relaxed.

  “Look in the mirror,” said I.

  Our eyes met again. I began the temple-building.

  “Don't think of me. Never mind the human woman. Think of the priestess in the mirror. You are going to use me as the channel of the force you want to contact. My personality plays no part in it. It will fade right out as soon as the force begins to come through. All women are Isis and Isis is all women. Watch the mirror.”

  “Now I am going to take you on a journey. We are in Egypt, beside the Nile. It is moonlight, the full moon. There is a mist rising from the water, and it is cold. The cold river-mist. The cold moon-mist. The cold astral mist. Now we are out on the astral.”

  Malcolm shivered. He had felt the astral cold.

  “There is a great pylon gate in front of us. Its shadow lies black upon the sand. We enter its shadow.” Malcolm shuddered and the couch shook under him.

  “We pass under the dark arch of the pylon and are in the Court of the Lotus-pool. The moonlight falls on the water where the lotuses float sleeping. We pass beside it, up some steps across a wide terrace and in at a door—a great door that stands open. Now we are in a dark and lofty hall, lit only by a hanging lamp. It is the Hall of the Sphinxes.”

  Malcolm started.

  “Facing us is a dark curtain veiling the Holy of Holies.”

  Malcolm drew a shuddering breath and his hands came and caught hold of my wrists. He was seeing it all in the mirror.

  “The curtain parts. The Goddess appears! Worship Her. Pray to Her. Ask Her for what you need.”

  Malcolm rose to a sitting position, dragging my arms after him. I had to place one knee on the couch to save myself from overbalancing. Now I was kneeling on the couch behind him, my elbows on his shoulders, my hands crushed against his breast. I could feel it heaving, and the pounding of his heart. His nails were cutting my skin. I thought I should be lucky if no bones were broken. Rigid, motionless, under intense strain, we both looked in the mirror. There was the man's haggard face, the eyes almost mad; and above it a woman's face, perfectly calm, floating apparently in space, for my black robe was invisible in the darkness. The silver head-dress caught the light. The black pools of the eyes held no expression. It did not seem like my face even to me.

  Then behind me, there began to be a warmth and a power. Isis was formulating. Above my head I saw Hers. I was no longer conscious of the agony in my hands or the strain on my body. All I felt was the power flowing through me in electric heat. I no longer tensed my hands to protect them against Malcolm's crushing grip; I let them go limp and felt the bones slide one over the other as the hands crumpled. But they were numb now, I felt nothing, for the power was coming through.

  Over the man and myself there formed a cloud, a silvery cloud of palest moon-mist, slowly glowing to gold and growing warm as it glowed. It was the aura of Isis emanating from us, from our united magnetism. It is the thing that is behind marriage. It held for a while, and then it slowly dissolved. Magnetism had gone off from both of us, and Isis had absorbed it. Malcolm dropped back against my breast, and I thought he had fainted till I heard him give a prolonged sigh. I laid him back on the pillows, but he still kept hold of my hands. I could feel his hands sweating. Mine were cold as ice, so I knew which way the power had flowed. He rolled over onto his elbows, seizing again my hands, and staring up into my face.

  “But you are Isis!” he said. “You are Isis!”

  Then he pressed his face into my hands and lay still.

  How long he lay like that I do not know—a considerable length of time, little short of an hour, I should think. Finally he roused, sat up, swung his legs off the couch and turned and looked at me. He lifted my hand to his lips.

  “Thank you very much,” he said.

  He looked sharply at the hand he held. The nails were blue; the fingers swollen.

  “What's the matter with your hand?” he exclaimed. “My God, did I do that?”

  Questing, impersonal fingers, so gentle they caused no pain to the bruises, went over every sinew and bone and joint. Then he laid that aside and took up the other. Malcolm, the man, might have his problems over women, but Malcolm the doctor had none—the hands that tested mine were utterly clean. Then he took up the first hand again, and compared the two.

  “I'll reduce that œdema for you,” he said. “Sit down.”

  I sat beside him on the couch. This was an utterly different man from the one who, partly from shyness, partly from principle, shrank from any near contact with me. Resting my hand on his knee, he began to work with it as if he were putting on a glove. From nail-tip to knuckle, and down the channels between the bones, his fingers felt gently, so gently, again and again and again. I watched his face. He was not looking at what he was doing. His eyes were gazing into space with a blank, intent expression. It was as if he were listening to my hand. I remembered his saying that he depended on his fingers more than on his eyes. Then the first hand was laid aside as if it were an inanimate object, and the other was taken up and the process repeated. The relief was enormous; the hands felt almost normal. He compared them again. Save for some scarlet abrasions on the ice-cold pallor of the skin, there was nothing to tell of the rough treatment they had received, and I had certainly thought there was a dislocation in one hand.

  “I'll massage them again for you tomorrow,” he said.

  “They feel cold. Are you cold?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It is the psychic cold. Power has gone out of me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Difficult to say. Has power gone out of you, too?”

  “Yes, definitely. It has dropped my blood pressure, I think. I feel strangely at peace.”

  “Then it has gone into the Goddess. Did you feel Her formulate.”

  He looked up and met my eyes.

  “I saw you as the Goddess,” he said in a low voice.

  “I am Her priestess.”

  “What is the difference?”

  “You do not see me as the Goddess now, do you?”

  “I see you as I have always seen you.”

  “And how is that?”

  He bent over my hands till I could not see his face.

  “As the Goddess, my dear, as the Goddess!”

  I sat rigid. Too taken aback to make any reply. Who was this man and what secrets had he penetrated?

  “Have you been through the curtain?” said I.

  “What curtain?”

  “In the House of the Net.”

  “I am afraid I don't know what you mean.”

  “Dr. Malcolm, how much do you know?”

  “I don't know a thing, I've told you that already.”

  “You don't know these things as you know anatomy or physiology. You know them in dream and day-dream and imagination. They are the representations of the invisible reality.”

  Malcolm sat rigid for a moment.

  “My God, what a reality! Do you really mean, Miss Le Fay, that my—imaginings—have some sort of correspondence in an invisible reality?”

  “That is so.”

  “Well—God help us
, that is all I can say.”

  “Can you tell me what they are?”

  “Is it necessary? You won't like them.”

  “Never mind that. I can deal with you as impersonally as a surgeon.”

  He sat silent for some minutes. At length he spoke.

  “I did not take you altogether seriously when you stressed the difficulties of this work. I do now. I wonder, however, if you realise exactly where you are taking me? Or perhaps it would be truer to say where I am taking you if you push me down this path.”

  “Yes, I realise it.”

  “Very well, I will take you at your word. You are acquainted, I take it, with the language of psychoanalysis?”

  “I am.”

  “I had my dissecting-room dream psychoanalysed when I went for that consultation recently; it was supposed to have a sadistic basis. I do not consider that to be correct, for, believe it or not, Miss Le Fay, sadistic tendencies are exactly what I haven't got. I make a martyr of myself—that's my tendency. I grant you my temper is vile, but that is because I am so beastly irritable. I've got no malice in me.”

  “There was another dream, however, that has occurred at intervals throughout my life. That one has not been analysed; I have never told it to a living soul. It always comes before some important event in my life. I don't mean that it is prophetic. No such nonsense. But it comes when I am under stress—the night before an examination, for instance. It is this—I knife a man in a garden by moonlight. Any quantity of blood, as you can imagine. I enter a temple by a side door—it is an Egyptian scene, I may tell you—and I impersonate the man I knifed, who was the priest of the temple. A woman comes in at the main door—the place is empty and lit by a hanging lamp like this place—she comes up to me and gives a start when she finds I am not the man she expected. I take her by the hand and pull her through the curtains—by God, you asked me if I had been through the curtain—is that the curtain you mean?”

  “It is.”

  Malcolm sat petrified.

  “You enter the Holy of Holies,” prompted I. “What do you find there?”

  “Nothing. An empty room.”

  “You install the priestess as the goddess.”