There are a few scenes in Dion Fortune's occult novels that have particular relevance to some of the material on here.
These scenes contain familiar elements; they provide supporting evidence for some key theories about certain metaphysical influences and phenomena; they enable people to put similar experiences into a wider context and learn some useful lessons.
This post features one of these scenes. It caught my attention when I was skimming through Dion Fortune's novel The Demon Lover (1927). It describes the negative effect that a girl who is being controlled by an evil entity has on someone she encounters.
A mediumistic young girl called Veronica Mainwaring is a major character in The Demon Lover. While she is harmless in herself, everything changes when she comes under the hypnotic influence of a black magician called Justin Lucas.
After his death, he uses her to help him drain children of their vital energy so that he can materialise; some of the children die.
Possessed by the spirit of Lucas, a huge mastiff goes crazy and kills the doctor's son; this man had hoped to marry Veronica, so Lucas saw him as a rival.
Veronica is taking her morning walk when the doctor drives past in his dog cart:
“He gave her one glance, and shaking the reins, drove swiftly past without any other sign of recognition than was conveyed by that look of hate and repulsion.”
The doctor knows nothing but senses everything:
“...there was something about the girl which did not fall within the laws of his three-dimensional universe. What it was, he could not define, even to himself, but he hated and dreaded her as children and dogs hate and fear, without reason assigned, yet with an unerring instinct.“
The doctor senses that Veronica is overshadowed by Lucas's malign influence, he is repelled by the negative energy around her, and his intuition rightly tells him that she was somehow involved in his son's death. No wonder that he hates and fears and hurries away from her.
Veronica behaves in a similar way towards the huge killer dog that she has inherited from Lucas. She is a dog lover and at first she quite likes the friendly old thing, but this changes after he comes under the evil influence of the dead Lucas:
“...to Veronica...the whole ‘feel’ of dog, kennel, and surroundings was so repellent that she drew hastily back and hurried away from the yard and its sinister occupant.”
This scene has a disturbing implication with a wider application. The message it gives is that while it is not pleasant to be met with fear, loathing, hatred, repulsion, avoidance and rejection, a recipient of such reactions should understand and accept that they may sometimes be justified.
After all, the doctor has good reason to feel the way he does about Veronica considering what has been happening through and around her.
Anyone who has experienced similar hostile reactions should make it a top-priority task to discover why. They need to ask themselves what it is about them that elicits such behaviour; they need to consider the possibility that in one way or another they have brought this trouble on themselves.
There are many possible causes; the only reasons relevant here are that mediumistic people may have attracted and been influenced or even possessed by unpleasant entities, and people who practice who practice energy vampirism or various forms of black magic, ritual or psychological, conscious or unconscious, may be saturated with negative energy – as may their victims.
A lot more could be said on this topic, but for now it is enough to just outline some possibilities.
Another possibility is that someone who has done nothing apart from having been briefly in the company of a certain type of person may experience similar unwelcome reactions, finding hostility where formerly there was friendliness for example; this is because negative energy has rubbed off on them and others sense it.
The Demon Lover scene has reminded me of a time when this happened to me.
One of the articles about energy vampires tells how a colleague who was fascinated by what I was telling him and hated it when the demands of his work took precedence over our discussion, behaved very differently the next day when I approached him and tried to continue our conversation:
“He recoiled at the sight of me and said that he was very busy. He treated me like an unpleasant, unwelcome intruder and brushed me off.”
Why the 180 degree turn? What had I done to be treated in this way? His behaviour towards me seemed inexplicable and uncalled for.
As that article explains, I had been in the company of an energy vampire neighbour not long after the first conversation.
My colleague's behaviour was disconcerting at the time, but I later realised that he must have sensed the psychic contagion and his negative reaction was actually an unconscious attempt to protect himself by driving me away.
The lesson to be learned here is that things are not always what they seem: someone who feels victimised may actually be the victimiser, and an apparent victimiser may really be the victim.
This cover art is not very good quality, but it depicts the relationship between Veronica Mainwaring and Justin Lucas very well:
