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'...In All the Greater Temples'

Long ago, the Horned God was worshiped “in all the greater temples”, to use Gardner's pungent phrase.

(Well, maybe not all, but why pass up a snazzy quote like that?)

Then came the Great Forgetting. When he wasn't forgotten, he was reviled. Oh, our lives were the worse for it.

A few of us remembered, though. Always we missed him. In the consoling darkness, we whispered to one another prophecies of his Return.

Well, guess what, folks: the prophecies were true.

In a traditional society, now, remembering, we would make a lament for all those Lost Years.

Get Out Your Sieve

In terms of structure and realized characters, Goat Foot God (1936) is Dion Fortune's best novel: better, really, than either Sea Priestess or Moon Magic.

Which, of course, is not to say that it's a good novel, mind you. (As a friend once put it, “Dion Fortune couldn't write her way out of a chalk circle.”) But—unlike her turgid and (frankly) unreadable non-fiction—it has at least characters and a story to embody her ideas. The casual (and gratuitous) racism and unquestioned class prejudice of one who presumably regarded herself as enlightened should stand as a warning to the reader to judge her ideas on intrinsic merit, not on authority. Caveat lector.

Still, it's her novel about the Horned God and his Return. That you've got to love and, indeed, on that topic she has much to impart. As for the bugs in the flour...well, sift carefully. The sieve is a traditional witch's tool for a reason.

The Great God Pan she describes, in Christian idiom, as “God made manifest in Nature.” The novel tells two stories simultaneously: one of an early 20^th century Englishman with a serious Vitamin P deficiency (talk about a pungent phrase), and a 15th-century English monk who rediscovers Pan via some Greek manuscripts.

Well, we need our stories from the Lost Years, too: so we remember “...or, failing that, invent” (Monique Wittig).

A Lament for the Horned

As epigraph to the book, Fortune cites four stanzas from her Rite of Pan. Rereading them recently, I found myself thinking: Well, there's our Lament for the Horned.

The Goat-Foot God

Considering Dion Fortune's outsized impact on generations of modern witches and their magical practice, it's a little surprising that, throughout her oeuvre, she makes very few direct references to witches or their craft.

When she does, though, what she says is bang on.

In her 1956 novel Moon Magic, Rupert Malcom, the magical partner of the protagonist, über-adept, and DF-stand-in Lilith LeFay has gone willful-missing, and she wants him back.

Then an idea struck me, and I began to sew at Malcolm's robes. It was witch-magic, of course, but I did not see any reason to be ashamed of it (174).

I'm no Dion Fortune scholar (frankly, I find her non-fiction unreadable), but the distinction that she's drawing here seems pretty clear: the difference between “High” and “Low” Magic. The former works, on the astral, with symbols and psychic forces, the latter with actual (gasp) things on the physical plane, where Laws of Magic like Sympathy and Contagion pertain. It's the difference between mental magic and physical magic. It's the difference between Seeking Enlightenment and Cultural Transformation and (as poet T. S. Eliot once put it) “getting a cow out of bog.”

Witches screw. Magickians (“Who put the 'icky' in 'magickian'?” a playful friend of mine always used to ask) have “magickal” congress on the astral, joining essences. Fortune's novels are filled with characters working with sexual forces who never actually have sex. At the risk of being catty, I have to wonder just how much autobiography and compensatory justification we're seeing here for Fortune's failed marriage to the philandering Penry Evans.

Howler, n. a glaring blunder, clumsy mistake, or embarrassing misjudgment, typically one which evokes laughter

Ah, The Sea Priestess: arguably Dion Fortune's most influential novel, in pagan circles at least.

So, DF: what's with the River Dick, already?

While imbibing the antediluvian wisdom that Morgan, the eponymous Sea Priestess, imparts to Wilfred, clueless West Country Mama's boy, concerning relations between the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine, generations of serious students of the occult have had to choke back the guffaws when it comes to some of her fictional place-names.

Hey, SP readers: remember the River Dick? Of course you do. Technically, of course, it's the “Narrow Dick.” “Where the Broad Dick is, I have never been able to discover,” says Wilfred. “There is no Broad Dick,” Morgan helpfully explains. “The original name of this river was the River Naradek. 'Narrow Dick' is only a corruption of it”.

(Naradek is named after a river back in ye olde Atlantis, but of course, you already knew that.)

And of course you remember the town in the novel named Dickmouth, don't you? Come on, don't pretend that you don't.

The Sea Priestess was first published in 1938. “Dick” has meant “penis” in English since the 19^th century at least, if not longer. It's hard to believe that Fortune could have been so utterly clueless as to be unaware of this.

Or was she?

So what's with the River Dick?

Given the novel's central metaphor of the Sea as Primal Mother, I suppose that Fortune could conceivably be setting up some sort of equivalency here along the lines of Sea : Feminine :: River : Masculine. If so—even considering the fact that Fortune's writing is by no means lacking in vulgarity (gods know, the lower classes are always good for a laugh), and that, as a writer, she is not always in full control of her medium—somehow, giving a slang name for “penis” to the Great Masculine seems, well, uncharacteristically crude, even for her.

This post is an excerpt from the keynote address that I'll be giving next Sunday at the 18th Current Pagan Studies Conference.

The ancient world knew numerous horned gods. It comes as something of a surprise to contemporary pagans to realize that few, if any, of them were “Dying Gods.” This surprises us because, for us, the Horned has become perhaps the foremost Dying God of modern Paganry.

Due, no doubt, to his preeminence in Wicca, that most successful of New Pagan religions, a case could be made for claiming that the Horned God is one of the most important, if not the single most important, of contemporary (male) pagan divinities; indeed, for the same reason, one might well be justified in viewing Him as the divine patron, perhaps even the embodiment—one might even say, the Incarnation—of the Pagan Revival.

But it must be admitted that, down the millennia, he has changed his character. With the unique exception of Pan, who is said, in a single story, to have died, but not risen, there is no evidence that any of the horned gods of antiquity fit into the Frazerian category of Dying-and-Rising gods. Certainly this is true of the Gaulish Cernunnos, one of the primary ancestors of the modern Horned God, who—to judge from iconographic and epigraphic remains—was himself something of a pan-Celtic god. But a Dying God—so far as we can tell—he was not.

This realization invariably comes as something of a shock to modern pagans, to whom it seems utterly intuitive that a God of the Hunt should himself be a, quote-unquote, Dying-and-Rising-God. But, to judge from the evidence, for the ancestors it just plain wasn't so.

In part, here, we may regard this change as a product of the Christian centuries. The Christian god of the Underworld—if I may put it this way—being, of course, the Devil, if, then, the Devil-cum-Horned God is God of Witches, then He too must be Lord of the Dead. Certainly Gardner regarded Him as such. It only makes sense that a god of the dead—the ancestors' god, himself the Great Ancestor—should himself be thought to have died.

In part, perhaps, we see here the destructive legacy of Dion Fortune's pernicious dictum, “All gods are one god, all goddesses are one goddess,” which collapses the rich and varied pantheons of antiquity into a single misty, amorphous, gender-based bitheism. (As one who has habitually, if humorously, defined himself as a polyatheist, my own feeling here is that—to misquote another of Fortune's sayings—a bitheistic religion is halfway to monotheism.) That Fortune's reductionist paradigm has become an unofficial dogma—or, to use less inflammatory language, a central hermeneutic principle—for much of modern Wicca, only exacerbates the problem. I myself would contend that Fortune's infamous dictum has, in fact, served to inhibit theological creativity, and in particular, to retard the development of much in the way of new Wiccan mythology. Why, after all, bother to come up with something of your own when you can just steal from someone else?

So, the Horned God has changed his character. He did not used to be a Dying God; now he is. In this, perhaps, we in the modern pagan world, for whom The Golden Bough is not so much a work of anthropology as it is one of theology—one could, perhaps, even regard it as a how-to manual—are all children of Frazer. Speaking as a historian of religion—even if, admittedly, an amateur one—it does not seem to me unreasonable to claim that, modern pagan sensibilities notwithstanding, the Horned has assumed his Dying God mantel from the shoulders of Christ.

In the dream, the whole coven is over for New Moon. We're discussing the writings of occultist Dion Fortune: in particular, a passage in which she writes that, after disincarnation, she will return as a golden serpent. We discuss whether or not this could actually be so.

It so happens that the long-time partner of one of us, a magician who sometimes attends our rituals, is himself conversant in the Language of Serpents.

As one, we turn toward the temple's snake-hole. (Since the days of Knossos, every good temple has had a snake-hole.) In the Language of Serpents, with his arms extended and palms turned down, M— delivers the invocation.

Isaiah Berlin begins his famous essay The Fox and the Hedgehog by quoting the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin uses this saying to contrast two different intellectual styles: Hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system,” while foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory ... seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves.” (Isaiah Berlin, The Fox and the Hedgehog: An essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, (Guernsey: Phoenix, 1992) 3)

In Pagan terms, Berlin’s approach presents an interesting way to think about what we mean by “eclectic,”  what it is that we’re contrasting eclecticism with, and the benefits and potential downfalls of both approaches.