More from My Conversation with Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki

I’m slowly transcribing more and more of my conversation with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki  concerning Dion Fortune’s  Magical Battle of Britain.  The portion below picks up where I left off on April 21, 2018. (By the way, Diotima is listing these conversations, along with the weekly workings over at her blog.)`

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Me:  You know, there’s a lot of versions out there about what happened in England during WWII, and it’s almost sort of assumed this level of myth, at least over here, I think.  You know, there was Dion Fortune, there was Gerald Gardner, who claims that there were workings in the New Forest, and then certainly there’s a Katherine Kurtz novel about it, now.   Do you have a feeling for how much of that is myth and how much is maybe accurate?  There are times when I think myths matter as much, if not more than, accuracy but I just wonder if you have . . .

DAN:  You’re quite right because myth is a truth that didn’t happen.  Doesn’t mean to say it isn’t a truth.  She [Dion Fortune] certainly did organize things North to South, and East to West.  It wasn’t quite as romantic as Katherine sort of put it in Lammas Night.  But yes, it went by word mouth and it wasn’t just groups.  Even solitary magicians would work.  People, and again, it wasn’t just magical people.  There were many people in the churches.  Because one of the most surprising things is to find out is how many people of status in the churches are actually, well, you couldn’t exactly say they were on our side, but they acknowledge us.

Me:   And I think that’s a difference between you and us.  The churches here are very fundamentally evangelical, anti-magic, whereas I’ve always sort of seen the Church of England as happy to include Druids, at least.

DAN:   Absolutely. I mean the last Archbishop  of Cantebury was also a Druid, you know.

Me:  Was there any concern — I know in the book  [The Magical Battle of Britain], one of the things Gareth Knight, in the Introduction, talks about was how one of the things Dion Fortune did was, that how what had been a kind of secretive organization and you had to be let in and they only let in people they felt comfortable about, and you had to progress through the levels  —  and the war happened and it seems like she decided to open it up.  And as you say, maybe it spread through word of mouth, or whatever.  Do you think that was accurate or not?

DAN:  You see, in the 40s, the occult was still regarded as (a) crazy, (b) unethical, and (c) it was mixed up w demonology and what have you.  So, it was only the, shall we say, the family Pagan groups that answered the call.  But there had always been, in the Blessed Isles, people who worked in very small groups– two or three, solitary magi — and even solitary Witches, strange as that may seem.  And, of course, then you had the Druids, who would definitely not call themselves sort of magicians, you know, they are what they are, but here and there, and this I only know by hearsay, here and there, there were people who weren’t magical people, but who had an inner sense of connectedness.

“Whatever it takes,” became the watchword.  It didn’t matter who, what, or where you are, how many of there were of you.  “If it will help,” you know. This whole idea went on.

Me:  Was there any concern . . .  I’ll tell you that here in the U.S. a number of different groups immediately began thinking they needed to work magically.  I will also say people are also working on a “mundane” level, too; we have our whole Resistance.  But people would put things out on social media saying, “This Dark Moon, we’re going to try to bind Donald Trump so that he can’t . . . whatever.”  Immediately there was kind of some blowback about that, people saying,  “You can’t put stuff like that social media!  Now he knows about it; the Christians know about it.”  In fact, he had a group of Christians in to specifically pray over him and he said, “Thank you for protecting me from those Witches.”  Which, at least, lets me know that he’s worried.

DAN:  You see, one of the things you can’t do is interfere with people’s free will.  Going out on the web and things like that.  You are saying to people, “You’ve got to do this.”  NO, you cannot do that.   You cannot interfere with people’s free will.  What is done must be done from the heart and it’s no good trying to coerce people.  It is as simple as saying, “Do you believe that this man is good?  Or do you want to put up a barrier against what he is doing?” And you have to be specific about the barrier.

Me:  Can you say a little bit more about that?

DAN:  Yeah, basically, and I don’t know too much about [your] politics, but what is his basic idea?  His idea was to make, as far as I can see, to make America Great Again? Wasn’t it already great?

Me: Well, many of us thought that.  Hillary Clinton said that.  We think that what he means is that he wants to make America like some image he has of some time (that never really existed) of a time when white men were in control and everyone else knew their place, and that’s what we think “great again” means.

But when you talk being specific about the wall you build against him, if you could say a little bit more about that, that would be really helpful.

DAN:  I think you’ve got to separate the man from what he is trying to do.  Is he doing this for himself, or is he in, some twisted way, actually thinking he is doing it for the country?  You’ve got to kind of differentiate.  As an outsider, my take on the man, and this is very personal, is that he enjoys being “top boss.”  He enjoys being “the man,” “the “President,” and, in reality, it is all a game.  He is playing a game of chess where he is going to win every time, and he doesn’t really have an end in view.

Me:  I think a lot of us have come to that conclusion.

Let me ask you this.  Some of us are coming to feel that he, and perhaps some of the people around him — this Bannon creature and some of the others — are not acting entirely on their own.  That there may be something. . . .

DAN;  I get what you mean.  There’s something behind this.  That he’s being manipulated.

/To Be Continued

Picture found here.