Tuesday 12 May 2015

Signs and Wonders - 3

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Gareth Knight's book about Dion Fortune introduced me rather helpfully to the way an occult society operates. He refers repeatedly to the 'work' the Society of the Inner Light did, and one might wonder what that work actually consisted of. I was sufficiently intrigued to try to express it thus.


The initiative is held to come from the Masters (Hidden or Secret or something of that ilk) who have died but are keen to encourage the spiritual development of humankind. They reside above the wavy line on this diagram. The occult society draws inspiration from the broader occult tradition (the scroll) but also directly from the Masters via the medium - in this case, Dion Fortune herself. The Society's members meditate on the trance communications and the tradition, and together develop a system of imagery and practice (the Qabalah symbol on the right) which in turn feeds back into the meditative cycle, providing a means for the society's adepts to interpret and improve their lives. 

As far as the Inner Light was concerned, the communications with the Masters tended to take a back seat as time went on, even while Dion Fortune was still alive. There were three, in the main: Lord Erskine, as mentioned previously, Socrates, and a former First War officer called David Carstairs who had a disconcertingly chirpy manner and in latter years even dictated a rather well-received stage play. After Dion Fortune died, the Masters had less and less to say, or perhaps the adepts spoke to them less; at any rate, mediumship became of progressively dwindling importance and, as Gareth Knight says, under successive mediums 'the type of trance seemed very light, and a condition that was entered and left with considerable facility'. Am I right in detecting something of an edge to this statement?

Well, this is all somewhat extra vires to my main interest, but intriguing nonetheless. 

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