Each article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's five occult novels seemed like the last one at the time, but, even though the returns diminish, a further trawl always produces a little more material to comment on.
This article contains a few more particularly striking expressions and propositions, many of which speak for themselves.
The Winged Bull mentions a 'psychological car crash', and that the victim is in need of a human 'breakdown lorry'.
This is a very neat way of describing a major internal disaster. It is spot on: people do sometimes feel as though they have been hit by a truck, and they may well need some assistance to get going again.
The crash victim is called Ursula. She is in a bad way because she has been in the power of an energy vampire. Dion Fortune comes up with some very good images here: Ursula is described as being like a run-down battery and a sucked-out orange, while her vampiric victimiser swells up like a bullfrog!
This cover picture by Bruce Pennington shows Ursula the psychological car crash victim and the breakdown lorry:
These very true words are from Moon Magic:
“...there are no anaesthetics in psychology.”
Dion Fortune got that one right. Some people will have no idea what she is talking about; they are the lucky ones. Others will know only too well how excruciatingly painful dealing with the inner world can be; they will have learned the hard way that there is no pain relief so their agony just has to be endured.
The Winged Bull neatly summarises the approach to living of two people in very different circumstances :
“...Brangwyn...had evidently brought the art of living up to the level of an applied science. Murchison approved with a sigh of envy. That, beyond all question, was the right way to live ; but it needed cash, and plenty of it, for the development of its fine flower, and he, for his part, had had to bring the art of doing without to the level of a science.“
This seems both ironic and slightly bitter. Luckily for Murchison, his financial situation greatly improves when he accepts the job of breakdown lorry!
Dion Fortune herself appreciated expressions and summaries that go straight to the heart of the matter. There are a few examples of this in the quotations that she makes from Rudyard Kipling's works.
In the following extract from The Sea Priestess, she for once not only attributes this quotation – which incidentally comes from The Female of the Species – to Kipling but also quotes it as it was originally written:
“Kipling speaks of "Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw", and this was it!”
Some people do indeed hammer away at the same sore point or painful subject until the victim can't take any more.
Moon Magic contains this very profound and very true statement:
“...people will accept as inevitable anything they are used to, never dreaming that it is due to ignorance and bad management.”
People do indeed often become imprinted with whatever is going on around them and, no matter how awful it is, assume that this is just the way that things are. This particularly applies to children, who think that whatever their parents do and whatever life they are given is the norm; even when something is very wrong, they may have no idea that it doesn't have to be like this.
There may be a future article on this topic. For now, here is a relevant extract from an article about Rudyard Kipling's childhood:
“He later gave two reasons for his not telling anyone how he was being treated. He said that children accept everything that happens to them as inevitable and eternal...”
Another edition of Moon Magic:
