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“There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as masks. There are times when life puts off the mask and deep answers unto deep.”
Dion Fortune, The Goat-Foot God
“We take spiritual initiation when we become conscious of the Divine within us, and thereby contact the Divine without us.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism.”
Dion Fortune
“The difference between magic and meditation methods is the difference between drugs and diet—medicines will do swiftly what diet can only effect slowly, and in critical cases there is no time to wait for the slow processes of dietetics, so it must be either medicines or nothing. Nevertheless, drugs are no substitute for right diet and wholesome regime, and although magic enables a speedy and potent result to be attained, is is only by means of right understanding and right ethics that the position which has been won can be held.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“There are two Paths to the Innermost: the Way of the Mystic, which is the way of devotion and meditation, a solitary and subjective path; and the way of the occultist, which is the way of the intellect, of concentration, and of trained will; upon this path the co-operation of fellow workers is required, firstly for the exchange of knowledge, and secondly because ritual magic plays an important part in this work, and for this the assistance of several is needed in most of the greater operations. The mystic derives his knowledge through the direct communion of his higher self with the Higher Powers; to him the wisdom of the occultist is foolishness, for his mind does not work in that way; but, on the other hand, to a more intellectual and extrovert type, the method of the mystic is impossible until long training has enabled him to transcend the planes of form. We must therefore recognize these two distinct types among those who seek the Way of Initiation, and remember that there is a path for each.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.”
Dion Fortune, Principles of Esoteric Healing
“When we speak of the Path we mean much more than a course of study. The Path is a way of life and on it the whole being must co-operate if the heights are to be won.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“Those without the gate frequently question the wisdom and right of the occultist to guard his knowledge by the imposition of oaths of secrecy. We are so accustomed to see the scientist give his beneficent discoveries freely to all mankind that we feel that humanity is wronged and defrauded if any knowledge be kept secret by its discoverers and not at once made available for all who desire to share in it.
The knowledge is reserved in order that humanity may be protected from its abuse at the hands of the unscrupulous.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“No enunciation of the Truth will ever be complete, no method of training will ever be suitable for all temperaments, no one can do more than mark out the little plot of infinity which he intends to cultivate, and thrust in the spade, trusting that the soil may eventually be fruitful and free from weeds so far as the bounds he has set himself extend....”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“In brief, the Tree of Life is a compendium of science, psychology, philosophy and theology.”
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah
“The body is the vehicle of the mind.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“...the neurotic is very often psychic, and the psychic is very often neurotic.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“It is one of the strictest conditions of initiation that occult knowledge may never be sold or used for gain.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“...spirituality alone will not take a man far in the Mysteries; he must have intellectual powers as well.”
Dion Fortune, What Is Occultism?
“There is something very intimate and personal about one's books. They reveal so much of one's private soul.”
Dion Fortune, The Sea Priestess
“...unless men work at occultism as they work for the prizes of their professions they will not achieve.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“Now vampirism is contagious; the person who is vampirised, being depleted of vitality, is a psychic vacuum, himself absorbing form anyone he comes across in order to refill his depleted resources of vitality.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“The critic of the Adepts would form a truer opinion of their attitude if he did not look upon them as guardians of a treasure, grudgingly doling it out to applicants whose rights it was impossible to ignore or defy, but rather as trainers of racehorses, patiently trying beast after beast in the hope that one may ultimately be found that will win the Grand National. The Adept who accepts an unsuitable pupil is guilty of cruelty just as much as the rider who sends a horse at a fence it cannot take.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“...a trained occultist, especially if of high grade, has an exceedingly magnetic personality, and this is apt to prove disturbing to those who are unaccustomed to high- tension psychic forces. For whereas the person who is ripe for development will unfold the higher consciousness rapidly in the atmosphere of a high-grade initiate, the person who is not ready may find these influences profoundly disturbing.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“One cannot blame an organization that picks up an occasional black sheep, one only takes exception if it retains an accumulation of them.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“A school of esotericism usually arises in connection with some special realization of the Truth, which it sometimes stresses beyond its due proportion to life as a whole, but there will never be found any teaching which has the power to hold together a body of earnest seekers which has not a spark of the divine fire at its heart; therefore respect should be given to all how seek in sincerity, however far from the goal they may appear to be, and all who are engaged in the great Quest should rather try to see the vision which a brother has glimpsed than the special errors to which he has fallen victim.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“Never trust the occultist who tells you that he is the head of a tradition, because if he were, in the first place, he would not tell the fact to the uninitiated, and in the second place he would in all probability be living in great seclusion and inaccessible to all but his immediate subordinates. If a man is a great artist he does not need to inform us of the fact; we shall know him by his pictures that are hung in the galleries of the nation, and we shall, moreover, find that he guards himself from casual acquaintances because of the inroads on his time to which his fame renders him liable. The more eminent a person, the harder he is to approach, not out of any spirit of pride and exclusiveness, but because so many people want to see him that discrimination has to be used in admitting them.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“The man who is an initiate of one of the great Mystery Schools never fears to let his pupils outdistance him, because he knows that it stands him in good stead with his superiors if he is constantly sending up to them aspirants who 'make good.' He therefore never tries to hold back a promising pupil, because he has no need to fear that pupil, if allowed to penetrate into the Mysteries, would spy out the nakedness of the land; he will rather bring back a report of its exceeding richness, and thereby confirm the statements of his teacher and spur his fellow pupils to yet greater eagerness.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“Superstition has been defined as the use of a form whose significance has been forgotten.”
Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate
“The initiate, however, uses a symbol-system differently; he uses it as an algebra by means of which he will read the secrets of unknown potencies; in other words, he uses the symbol as a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.”
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah
“12. Each symbol, moreover, admits of interpretation upon the different planes, and through its astrological associations can be related to the gods of any pantheon, thus opening up vast new fields of implication in which the mind ranges endlessly, symbol leading on to symbol in an unbroken chain of associations; symbol confirming symbol as the many-branching threads gather themselves together into a synthetic glyph once more, and each symbol capable of interpretation in terms of whatever plane the mind may be functioning upon. 13. This mighty, all-embracing glyph of the soul of man and of the universe, by virtue of its logical association of symbols, evokes images in the mind; but these images are not randomly evolved, but follow along well-defined association-tracks in the Universal Mind. The symbol of the Tree is to the Universal Mind what the dream is to the individual ego; it is a glyph synthesized from subconsciousness to represent the hidden forces.”
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah
“We all know that, when caught off our guard, there comes a dark temptation from the depths of our lower selves, something atavistic stirs, and we think thoughts, or even do deeds, of which we would never have believed ourselves capable.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“The commonest form of psychic attack is that which proceeds from the ignorant or malignant mind of our fellow human beings. We say ignorant as well as malignant, for all attacks are not deliberately motived; the injury may be as
accidental as that inflicted by a skidding car. This must always be borne in mind, and we should not impute malice or wickedness as a matter of course when we feel we are being victimised. Our persecutor may himself be a victim. We should not accuse a man of malice if we had linked hands with him and he had stepped on a live rail. Nevertheless, we should receive at his hands a severe shock. So it may be with many an occult attack. The person from whom it emanates may not have originated it. Therefore we should never respond to attack by attack, thus bringing ourselves down to the moral level of our attackers, but rely upon more humane methods, which are, in reality, equally effectual and far less dangerous to handle.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense
“The occultist does not try to dominate Nature, but to bring himself into harmony with these great Cosmic Forces, and work with them.”
Dion Fortune, Applied Magic
“I well remember it being said to me by an occultist of great experience that two things are necessary for safety in occultism, right motives and right associates.”
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense

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