Dion Fortune - Psychic Self-Defense

After lunch Miss L. experienced the reaction from her excitement and went to her room completely prostrated with exhaustion. I was somewhat perturbed. Although used to mental cases, and therefore not as disturbed by the recent fracas as anyone else might have been, I did not relish the prospect of being the housemate of a dangerous lunatic who was under no sort of control. The head of the community, however, said there was no cause for alarm, he would soon have the case in hand. He went up to the bath room, filled a soap-dish with water from the tap, made certain passes over it, and dipping his finger in the water, proceeded to draw a five-pointed star upon the threshold of Miss L.'s room.

Miss L. made no attempt to leave her room until forty-eight hours later when he fetched her out himself.

As he had promised, he soon had her in hand. He had several long talks with her, at which I was not present, and at the end of a few days a very chastened Miss L. began to go about her household duties again. There were relapses, and there were struggles, but in the course of a few weeks she became comparatively normal, and when I met her again some eighteen months later there had been no relapse.

Two curious incidents occurred during the period of her treatment at the hands of this man, an adept if ever there was one. The house in which she had a room was a very old one, and the front door exceedingly massive. It was secured at night by two enormous bolts that extended right across it, a chain that could have moored a barge, and a huge lock with a key the size of a trowel. When the door was opened in the morning it acted as an alarm clock for the entire village. It creaked, it groaned, and it clanged. Yet night after night we came down in the morning to find this door standing ajar. We all slept with our doors open on to the small landing. To go down the ancient, creaking stairs was like walking on organ-stops. The back door was a modern affair, which could have been opened easily. The windows were modern casements of the most gimcrack description. Who opened the heavy front door, and why?

We exchanged recriminations several mornings at break fast as to who had left the door open the night before, but no one could ever be convicted of the blame. Finally the matter came to the knowledge of the head of the group.

"I will soon put a stop to that," he said, and each night he re-sealed Miss L.'s room with the pentagram. We had no more trouble with the front door coming open after that.

While he was dealing with Miss L. he made a practice of sealing the threshold of his own room in the same way, only in this case he drew the pentagram point outwards, to prevent Miss D. from coming in; whereas when he sealed her room, he put its point inwards, to prevent her coming out. She did not know this, nor was it likely to reach her ears indirectly, for he was very uncommunicative, I only knew that he was sealing his room because I chanced to see him doing it.

Nevertheless, one day I heard a knock at my door, and there was Miss L. with her arms full of clean linen. She asked me if I would be good enough to take it into the room of the head of the community, and put it away. I asked her why she did not do so herself, for I knew he was out, and it was her work to put away the linen. She replied that she had been to his room for that purpose, but there was a psychic barrier across the threshold that prevented her entering.

She also asked me, on several occasions, to put inside my frock out of sight a little silver cross that I habitually wore, as she said she could not bear the sight of it. This cross I had purchased just before coming to this occult college, and had taken it to a priest of my acquaintance to be blessed, for I had not been altogether easy in my mind concerning the nature of the group I was joining, and during the early days of my association with it was poised on tiptoe, as it were, ready for instant flight. Naturally I had kept my own council concerning the psychic precautions I had taken against my new friends, and no one was aware that the cross had been specially magnetised against psychic attack. Nevertheless, the woman who would have attacked if she could, felt its influence and feared it.

Auto-suggestion and imagination play so large a part in so-called psychic impressions that one is chary of accepting confirmatory testimony from a psychic who knows what is expected of him, but a spontaneous reaction is in my opinion evidential.

When the treatment of Miss L. had progressed some way towards her final recovery, much interesting information was elicited. She told us that she had distinct memories of dealings with black magic in her previous lives. This, she said, had been confirmed by several independent psychics, and I would certainly have been willing to add my testimony to theirs had I been asked. As a child, she used to day dream that she was a witch, willing the death or misfortune of those who annoyed her, and she also averred, though whether this was true or not I cannot say, that her wishes were so effectual that she was frightened and tried to abandon the practice. She also volunteered that she was in the habit of visualising herself standing before people she was angry with, scolding them, and projecting malignant force at them. This, of course, would explain our nightmares. She also said that she had been in the habit of attacking her mother and sister in this way, and had made her sister very ill, so that they now refused to have her in the house. This statement was later confirmed by the mother.

She told us that she felt as if she were two distinct persons, her normal self being spiritually-minded, intensely compassionate and idealistic. Her other, and lower self, which came to the surface when she was crossed, upset, or over tired, being intensely malicious and subject to paroxysms of hate and cruelty.

These characteristics had been particularly marked when she was little. But as she grew older she recognised the wrongfulness of them, and her lofty idealism represented her endeavour to rise above them. This endeavour was, I am convinced, an honest one; unfortunately it was not always successful.

She referred to the incident in which she told me to lock my door, and said she had done so in the hope of affording me some measure of protection against the astral projection in which she knew she was tempted to indulge.

At first sight her case had looked like one, of obsession, and had been so diagnosed by one or two members of the community, but wise handling revealed otherwise.

This case reveals another interesting point in that, true to the witch-tradition, she had a horror of sacred symbols. She would not occupy a room where there was a picture of a religious subject. Nothing would induce her to wear any piece of jewelry in the form of a cross, and it was impossible for her to enter a church.

This case has many points of interest, especially in the fact that what was apparently a case of well-marked insanity was cleared up by occult methods.

BEFORE we can leave the subject of attack by incarnate human beings, we must consider the subject of etheric projection. In this case not only is the mind at work, but also something which is pretty nearly physical; sufficiently physical, at any rate, to leave bruises on the flesh of the victim, throw the furniture about, or at least make a considerable amount of noise.

Where such manifestations take place, it is obvious that we are dealing with something more substantial than the mind, for although mind can influence mind, and through it the body to an extent to which in the present state of our knowledge it is difficult to set limits, mind cannot manipulate matter directly: that is to say, you cannot smash a window by means of a thought. There must be some physical vehicle that can be manipulated by the mind if effects are to be wrought on the physical plane. The living body is such an instrument; it is manipulated by the mind every time a voluntary movement takes place, and the operations of spiritual healing are simply an extension of this principle to the involuntary muscles and physiological processes not ordinarily directed by the conscious mind. Occultists maintain that mind affects body by means of the etheric double, as it is called, the "mortal mind" of the Christian Scientists. We may not unreasonably conclude that when physical action is produced at a distance by occult means, it is done by employing this etheric double.