‘Some say she was a fallen angel’: The Initiatory Power of Lilith Le Fay
摘要
In The Sea Priestess the adept Le Fay helps the protagonist Wilfred to achieve initiatory contact with a Master called the Priest of the Moon. In Moon Magic, the same ageless priestess helps her male partner achieve initiatory contact with a primordial deity named Black Isis. Le Fay is explicitly presented in this latter process as an anima. The ‘anima’ is a Jungian term that describes the feminine aspect of a person’s psyche, and the counterpart to the (masculine) animus. The anima is often associated with the subconscious and ideas of divine femininity. Throughout Moon Magic Fortune developed Jung’s concept along her own occult lines, presenting the anima as a site of feminine re-empowerment through the figure of the Priestess. Fortune uses the term to refer to the spiritual role of a woman in relation to a man, specifically that of drawing him into the inner places (both of the subconscious and the occult world) through her erotic and imaginal potency. Susan Greenwood claims that Fortune ‘was the first magician to incorporate Jungian psychology into magical ideas and to interpret it in such a way as to give women magical power.’ In this chapter I will explore Fortune’s interpretation of the anima as a foundational aspect of initiation in Moon Magic. I will consider the role of the anima in literary initiation, and the self-conscious way Lilith Le Fay is constructed by Fortune in order to highlight this process. I will discuss Fortune’s Psychoanalytical adaptation of the Lilith mythos, and the way her use of the Lilith-anima figure was distinct from her contemporaries by remaining both empowered and unpunished. I will explore the significance of masculine sacrifice within Fortune’s initiations, and the integral part monstrosity plays in her vision of divine femininity. I will also discuss the use of glamour as a consciously wielded art of esoteric suggestion, and the way that Fortune offered a new vision of feminine adept-hood for a modern world.