The Demon Lover

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Demon Lover by Dion Fortune.

I had previously found cause to compare the fiction of Dion Fortune to that of Charles Williams, and Fortune’s first novel The Demon Lover certainly supports that case. Unlike the occult sensibility of her more lauded book The Sea Priestess, that of The Demon Lover is not neopagan, but rather Christian. Needless to say, it is not a bigoted anti-magical Christianity, but an esoteric perspective that values the Christian tradition, and gives some credit to the possible benefits of a naive piety. Like The Sea Priestess, however, this book amplifies and explains the action of its main characters in terms of their reincarnations through history. Where The Sea Priestess had Atlantean and Celtic pagan backdrops, The Demon Lover offers the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. The story is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, and even more than The Sea Priestess does, it gives the impression of occult instruction illustrated by a tale.

My very worn used softcover has some curious jacket copy describing the state of affairs some 75% of the way through the book as if it were the inception of the plot. A more conventional supernatural thriller might have begun there in fact, gradually disclosing earlier events as they became clear to some less-involved protagonist. But Fortune tells the whole story chronologically, beginning with a conflict internal to an esoteric order in London, and only gradually reaching the country setting where the alarming phenomena occur. The climax of the book is very much engaged with an occultist rationalization of folkloric monsters: both vampires and werewolves.

The characters are composed quite vividly, although they do draw somewhat on stereotypes. There is a short but substantial denouement that completes the redemptive action of the plot, and also addresses its consequences for the secret fraternity and for humanity as a whole. In that passage, Fortune has one of her fictional initiates offer a tacit quote from the ethics lecture of the Neophyte grade in the actual Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Fortune herself had been initiated into its successor orders the Alpha et Omega and the Stella Matutina, but the “Fraternity” of The Demon Lover is clearly no mere mask for any of those, in part because one of its defining characteristics is the exclusion of women, and all three of those hermetic orders from their respective inceptions admitted both men and women. The story is implicitly contemporary, i.e. set in the 1920s, when it was written and first published, but it would probably have made more historical sense if it had been set in the mid-nineteenth century, before the precedent of the Theosophical Society inclined almost all significant occult organizations to afford women equal standing with men.

Although this book is a little clumsier than Fortune’s later fiction, it is still a worthwhile read. [via]

Consider also:

  1. My publisher told me that when I wasn’t there, Hilal played an imaginary violin, as if she were practicing. I know that chess players do the same, playing entire games in their head, without the need of a board. “Yes, she’s playing silent music for invisible beings. Perhaps they need it.”
  2. The Eight
  3. “For know that I am proud and revengeful and lascivious, and I prate even as thou. For even as I walked among the Sons of God, I heard it said that P. . . . could both will and know, and might learn at length to dare, but that to keep silence he should never learn. O thou that art so ready to speak, so slow to watch, thou art delivered over unto my power for this. And now one word was necessary unto me, and I could not speak it. I behold the beauty of the earth in her desolation, and greater far is mine, who sought to be my naked self. Knowest thou that in my soul is utmost fear? And such is my force and my cunning, that a hundred times have I been ready to leap, and for fear have missed. And a thousand times am I baulked by them of the City of the Pyramids, that set snares for my feet. More knowledge have I than the Most High, but my will is broken, and my fierceness is marred by fear, and I must speak, speak, speak, millions of mad voices in my brain. With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am Commander, With a burning spear And a horse of Air To the wilderness I wander.”
  4. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
  5. Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, Part 3 of 3