Mysteries of Isis 9 – the Hearth-Fire and the Sea

Mother Isis of the Moon, 2015

..

In esoteric work for the healing of nations, there are at least two main streams – the path of the Lineages and the path of the Hearth-fire. Through occult Lineage traditions, an octave of initiations is handed down to practitioners. This way of discipline and group work enjoys a living contact with the Inner Plane guides and their wisdom.

Dion Fortune in 1927

In the 1920s, Dion Fortune founded a Society of the Inner Light in Avalon, Glastonbury.  She became its trance medium (based on her training in psychoanalysis).  She also wrote novels and books on the theory of The Mystic Qabalah, and did astral-plane police work.

Among  core themes in her work, was regeneration of the natural spiritual and physical energy between men and women, which had become atrophied.  (“Dion Fortune and the Inner Light” – a biography by Gareth Knight)

..

..

Mudras – builders of Avalon 2003

..

Dion Fortune taught also the path of the Hearth-Fire. Reaching back to the Corn goddess and the human network in Gaia, mother Earth, the Hearth-Fire complements the path of the Lineages by bringing the divine essence into our daily life and practice – our relationships, our workplace, and the way we learn our parenting.

We may visualise – as if from an aeroplane at night – a pattern of sacred fires placed here and there on earth, where the Companions of the Light are gathered and keep watch.  We may approach and join them.  It is said that they are most numerous over the middle east where the need for them is acute.  They are gathered there in the darkness, the way  antibodies travel to a wound.  We need to gain a high altitude vision, to realise that because the issues show as yet no signs of resolution, that does not mean they never will.

We need to dive within.  For some of us, our job is to assist the Companions by facing our own shadow projections at home – as we journey in the soul law to the source – through Self-enquiry in psychology, philosophy, family life and feelings.  Time in the lap of the gods is not as our time;  it all must come up and out, becoming conscious.  Healing is the whole.

Here –  shortened to just the main images for meditation – is Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as she appeared to Wilfred and Molly at the end of “The Sea Priestess” (published by Society of the Inner Light):

..

hearth fire, salamanders

..

“Night by night, as the wood smoke rose from the Fire of Azrael, we built up the form of the Priest of the Moon in the drifting shadows till he was as real to us as we were to each other;  and though we knew his form was such stuff as dreams are made of, there came through that form, the touch of mind on mind, and that was the thing that counted … and so we felt the touch of mind on mind where no man was, and heard the words where no one spoke, for the thing came across the gulf on the wings of fantasy;  for fantasy is the ass that carries the ark, as they said in the ancient Mysteries.

“Now it is a very odd thing, that I, who could visualise the Priest of the Moon at will till he seemed to stand out like an image in a stereoscope, always felt him to be a shadow thrown by some other reality;  whereas Molly who couldn’t visualise him at all, was perfectly sure of his presence and actuality, and seemed to commune with him interiorly with as much certainty as if he were on the telephone.  He taught me and I learnt all manner of things from him about Atlantis and the ancient ways of Britain.  But he didn’t so much teach Molly as change her.

 

“… There was a sea fog that night that wrapped all round the narrow neck of land where stood the farm between the salt marsh and the tide water … only the sea remained open to us as an occasional shift of the drift of the wind opened long sea-lanes in the fog down which the moon shone, for she was low and near her setting.

“It was strange to see a sea-lane open thus, with the water all silver in the moonlight and the fog standing up in walls on either hand, like the cliffs of a phantom fiord.  It was such a sea path as this down which the oldest gods might travel, coming from the moon and that which is behind the moon – most ancient time and space when earth and moon were both etheric, not yet solidified into dense matter and not yet parted from one another.

“The tide was coming in.  I had begun to notice that with the rising tide Molly always seemed to wake up, unlike Morgan who came to her power when the tide was at uttermost ebb.  But then she was a sea-priestess, and Molly was a priestess of corn and hearth and garth, which is another aspect of the Great Goddess whom they both served after their different ways.

..

 

..

“… Presently the first shallow, spreading wash of a breaking wave ran up to the edge of the weed, and Molly put a match to her Fire of Azrael and we watched it take the flame, the dry and resinous woods rapidly turning into a pyramid of fire after their year long storage out at the fort.  The seaweed burned too, with an odd iodine smell that seemed to have the ancient essence of all sea-beaches embalmed in it, and I thought of the far-travelled mariners with their gold ear-rings and curled beards, who had drawn their highbrowed sea-ships up on Ishtar’s Beere.

“Then the cold drifting-draught that is in every fog opened a sea-lane that led right out to the moon, and we saw the slow heave of the sea running all black and shadowy as the tide made up-channel.  But even as we watched, the sea felt the call of the moon, and the water became flickering silver as the turn of the tide broke the rhythm of the waves, and we watched the water that had come far up the land turn again to the great deep.  The waves had respected Molly’s fire, and just lipped it and made it hiss before they turned again, sinking slowly back, leaving a belt of wet sand and fresh weed to mark their path.

“Molly raised her arms in the sign of the horns of the moon, and invoked the Great Goddess as I had seen Morgan do.  The moon was low in the west towards her setting, and at Molly’s feet was the red-lit Fire of Azrael, and beyond it the silver pathway stretched out over the sea toward lost Atlantis.  And it seemed to me that at her call came the gods of the past and their priests and worshippers, for she was waking the old worship once again.

..

..

… The moon sank lower;  the sea cut her disk and the mist of the sea banked about her in a golden nimbus.  Then Something seemed to formulate in the darkness and come over the sea towards us through the mist, moving by the pathway of silver light upon the water; and it was vast, so that Its head met the stars, and It was all veiled and swathed and shrouded.  Only we saw the silver Feet upon the sea, and they were like moonlight over water.

“And so She came, She of the Sea, to the place where sea meets land, and we awaited Her coming.  She paused at the edge of the line of the breaking foam, Her feet and Her head among the stars, star-crowned.  There was no Face to see for She is forever veiled, but there came to us the great exalted awe which some say is the gods and none other.

“This tingling fear took me by the heart and by the throat and by the eyes, gripping like a hand.  And my hands began to burn and tingle with a pulsating force, and from behind my eyes it seemed to come out like a beam.  And I broke out in that heavy sweat of the heat of  the gods, which Morgan had told me always heralds their passing;  and my breath was taken short, but not with the asthma, and I grew rigid and shook like a man in a fever fit.  I looked towards Molly, and saw that she stood on tiptoe, reaching up towards her Goddess as if floating between earth and air like a frozen figure of dance, immobile, tense and effortless.

“Then slowly Great Isis turned, and drew Her veil closer about Her, and She went down the long sea-lane out towards the west, the fog closing in behind Her.

“The sea drew back with the falling tide and bared the place of Her passing, and on the sand we saw silvery pools that might have been the marks of eddies, but that we knew were Her footprints.  And so She passed away as silently as She had come, but the place where She passed was holy, being filled with power.  Something had touched our souls to awe, and we chose to call it the passing of the Goddess.”

..

Harbour, 1987

..

..

..

**

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2014. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

 

..

..

**