The definition of images as ‘emblems’ is expanded in the De augmentis scientiarum: Emblems bring down intellectual to sensible things; for what is sensible always strikes the memory stronger, and sooner impresses itself than the intellectual…And therefore it is easier to retain the image of a sportsman hunting the hare, of an apothecary ranging his boxes, an orator making his speech, a boy repeating verses, or a player acting his part, than the corresponding notions of invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and action.
(Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 358, quoting Francis Bacon)
Dion Fortune was an early twentieth century poet, novelist, and occultist originally affiliated with the Theosophical Society, then trained in the Golden Dawn, whose writings were both popular and formative for many later new religious movements. In her influential work, The Mystical Qabalah (1934), Fortune presents the Tree of Life (here I follow Fortune’s capitalization mores) as a glyph and reflects at length upon the value symbols possess for the student of otherwise inaccessible forms of knowledge. In her presentation of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, Dion Fortune highlights many aspects of the Tree—from the method by which it is to be used by the 20th century initiate, to its historical roots, to its presentation by her contemporaries, especially MacGregor Mathers and his rebellious student, Aleister Crowley. She distinguishes multiple ways in which the Tree functions as a tool for engendering both mundane knowing and exalted gnosis in the traveler of its mysteries. In this paper, I comment upon three particularly striking passages, each of which convey a different manner of knowledge which the Tree helps the initiate to access. In the first, Fortune discusses how the initiate may use known quantities to solve for unknowns through a governing metaphor of algebraic problem-solving. In the second passage, Fortune describes the Tree as an index-filing system which enables a careful calibration between several different, but related, knowns. In the third, Fortune employs metaphors of sperm and ova in her discussion of the fecundating power of Qabalistic images for the human psyche. In my commentary upon these passages, I draw from Mary Carruthers’ The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (1998).
Before proceeding to my main argument, I note that though Carruthers and Fortune might seem an odd pairing, I have found Carruthers’ discussion of the visual and visionary imagination in the orthopraxis of monastic meditation and memory work to be an important key for illuminating my understanding of both the kinds of knowledge Fortune claims the Tree of Life is able to help the initiate achieve, as well as understanding the rhetorical methods by which Fortune herself presents and organizes her material in The Mystical Qabalah. The capacity for disciplined visual imagination which Fortune cites as essential for meaningful and effective practice of ceremonial magic has a long history, and Carruthers as well as her predecessor, Francis Yates, have much that is helpful to say about this history, and to challenge Fortune’s statement that “It is concerning the power of the visual imagination that we are so lamentably ignorant in the West” (306).
But, to return to The Mystical Qabalah, Fortune begins her discussion of algebraic gnosis first by setting up the concretizing, symbol-based system of the Qabalist in opposition to a non-specific Indian Yoga, which she characterizes as profoundly preoccupied with philosophical inquiry into metaphysical abstracts. [This next section added in 2023:] She writes:
The Indian schools of metaphysics have most elaborate and intricate systems of philosophy which attempt to define these ideas and render them thinkable; and though generations of seers have given their lives to the task, the concepts still remain so abstract that it is only after a long course of discipline, called Yoga in the East, that the mind is able to apprehend them at all. (14)
It is unclear here, as elsewhere, exactly which schools of Indian philosophy Fortune is referencing or on which English language works, authors, or lectures she bases such statements. Fortune is deeply interested in those philosophies or systems of contemplative and or/magical development she views as “Eastern” in contrast to what she constructs as “Western.” However, she often overgeneralizes to such an extent (especially to my eye as a present researcher in Buddhist studies) that these statements not only routinely fail to be particularly convincing but weaken the foundations of her arguments for the unique suitableness of her magical techniques for “modern” people who for her are almost in every case (and I say in almost every case here, because I have not read all of her works) also “Western.” Fortune also has a tendency to pair these constructions of “East” and “West” with racially essentialist ideas about what is or is not appropriate—or, indeed, possible—for those of different phenotypes, cultures, and geographical origins to achieve through particular means and methods of spiritual cultivation. This is an aspect of Fortune’s work that still awaits substantial and particulate critique and that has had an unfortunate legacy in the way many of these issues continue to be discussed in contemporary Neo-Pagan communities. [End section added in 2023 and here returning to the primary argument of this paper as it was originally given:]
“The Qabalist,” on the other hand, Fortune remarks,
goes to work in a different way. He does not attempt to make the mind rise up on the wings of metaphysics into the rarefied air of abstract reality; he formulates a concrete symbol that the eye can see, and lets it represent the abstract reality that no untrained human mind can grasp. (14)
What “the eye can see” becomes a representation of what is invisible not only to the eyes, but to the understanding. Representation is a mode by which one makes what was before not visible, and therefore absent, visible and present in the mind. Once that presence and visibility is achieved, then the problem concerning that particular set of factors becomes workable. “It is exactly the same principle as algebra[,]” Fortune continues to explain, saying:
Let X represent the unknown quantity, let Y represent the half of X, and let Z represent something we know. If we begin to experiment with Y, to find out its relation to Z, and in what proportions, it soon ceases to be entirely unknown; we have learnt something at any rate about it; and if we are sufficiently skillful we may in the end be able to express Y in terms of Z, and then we shall be able to understand X. (15)
It is intriguing that in talking about concretes, Fortune turns to the abstract proportions and relations of algebra. Rather than pointing to X, Y, and Z as symbols in themselves, she emphasizes the kind of knowledge that working with partially known factors in relationship to each other helps one to gain. The process of assigning relationships and working with them to solve for an unknown is the kind of process she argues is enabled by an acquaintance with the general scheme and relations of the individual parts of the tree to each other and to the glyph as a whole. Such proportional problem-solving enables a more precise understanding of the compositional factors of the unknown.
This algebra is not being done with quantities, but with forces. “Each symbol upon the Tree,” Fortune later writes,
represents a cosmic force or factor. When the mind concentrates upon it, it comes in touch with that force; in other words, a surface channel in consciousness, has been made between the conscious mind of the individual and a particular factor in the world-soul, and through this channel the waters of the ocean pour into the lagoon […] Thus do we see in the Tree a glyph of the soul of man and of the universe, and in the legends associated with it the history of the evolution of the soul and the Way of Initiation.
The symbols, arranged in their places on the tree, when conjoined with the power of concentration, form a channel between micro and macrocosm, between what Fortune names the “world-soul” and the soul of the initiate. The Tree becomes a complex problem-solving mechanism, by which forces within the individual may come into tune, and by which an initiate may progress through extensive mental training, into deeper and higher orders of knowledge. Accompanying this influx of knowledge is also an influx of force, as indicated by Fortune’s watery imagery of the subterranean channel which links the apparently landlocked lagoon to the profound depths of a distant ocean.
Fortune argues again and again for the potent influence images have upon the human being, whether to disturb, balance, bestir, or persuade. In this she is as much an excellent writer and teacher as she is a practicing occultist. In laying out her history of rhetoric and image-making, Carruthers quotes a striking passage from Quintillian, who has much to say concerning the potency of images for the orator in court, as well as for the human mind in general. Quintillian writes,
There are phenomena which the Greeks call “phantasias” and we Romans judiciously call “visiones,” by means of which the images of absent things[…]are shown to our mind with with such vividness that they seem to be before our very eyes…it is a power that all may readily acquire if they will. When the mind is unoccupied or is absorbed by fantastic hopes or daydreams, we are haunted by these visions of which I am speaking to such an extent that we imagine we are traveling abroad, crossing the sea, fighting, addressing people…and seem to ourselves to be not dreaming but acting. Surely it is possible to turn this mental power to some use. (132-3)
He then describes the power such images have to “show” rather than tell the court, with visceral detail, precisely what is at stake in a murder case. Persuading others is a power granted first by the ability to convincingly persuade—and to some extent, emotionally arouse—one’s self through the use of those “images of absent things” which are so real that we seem “to be not dreaming but acting” (132-3). In an interesting concordance with Fortune’s language, Carruthers comments concerning Quintillian’s remarks,
Notice how Quintillian uses Latin visiones as a Latin equivalent for Greek phantasias, the images which our imagination (or fantasy) consciously crafts to to generate both the “way” and the emotions necessary for effective recollective and cognitive work, to rouse up and channel them, giving them both movement and direction (fearful, vexed, saddened, amused)—the elements of ductus within a work. (Carruthers 133)
In both cases, images are not stationary locations in the mind, but instigators for cognitive affect—a way to persuasively lead the mind from one point to another and to “rouse up and channel” the emotions. Fortune has a keen sense of the potency of images and the way in which they create openings, or “channels” for the movement of information as well as force between two previously unconnected bodies of knowledge. In many cases the climax of Fortune’s novels also involves an affectively transformative and balancing experience of vision for one of the main characters, engendered through the medium of occult work that creates a channel between the operator of the ritual and a larger sphere of memory, insight, or power. This is the case, for example, in both in The Sea Priestess and The Goat-foot God.
Fortune describes the second kind of knowledge conferred by study of the Tree of Life as an index-card system, borrowing the illustration from Crowley. This kind of knowledge grows out of a mapping of the relationship between pre-existing knowns. Fortune writes:
We have now completed our preliminary survey of the Tree of Life, and the arrangement of the Ten Holy Sephiroth thereon; we also have some clue to their significance and have been given a hint or two of the manner in which the mind works when it uses these cosmic symbols for its meditations. Consequently we are now in a position to assign each fresh bit of information to its correct position in our scheme; we are building up the jigsaw puzzle with the outlines of the picture. Crowley has aptly likened the Tree to a card-index file, in which each symbol is an envelope. This is a simile it would be difficult to improve upon. In the course of our studies we shall begin to fill out these filing-cases, and to find the cross-indexing among them indicated by the same symbol in other associations. (53-54)
In this case, the kind of knowledge gained through the use of the Tree is that of indexing and organization. Previously unrelated bits of information have the possibility of integration into a whole, and new information has a place. The basic “outline,” the over all picture of the Tree, is a tool not only for generating knowledge, but integrating it into the larger scheme of the world as well as into the individual psyche. Again, Fortune presents the scheme of the Tree as not only a visual description of cosmic forces, but an important cognitive tool for the initiate.
In Carruthers' description of the uses of another picture-tree, that of the liberal arts in Theodulph’s “On the Seven Liberal Arts Painted in a Certain Picture” (211), one finds likewise a sense that this tree painted in verbal imagery, one personified art on each branch, serves far more than a taste for flowery language. “The invitation to use the picture is clear,” Carruthers writes,
Not only does [Theodulph’s] schematic serve as a mnemonic for the liberal arts and their curricular relationships (the way modern diagrams are used to “accompany” information), but it is intended to be added to and used as a structure for further knowledge and further cogitation. This tree has “plura mystica”, rather like the “figura mystica” we examined in Prudentius’ Psychomachia…Theodulph considers his tree-picture to be a tool for further thinking, not just an illustration of concepts. (212)
Though the work Carruther’s describes precedes Dion Fortune’s presentation of the Qabalistic Tree of Life by many centuries, there is a shared sense that images are to be used as structures upon which to hang and distribute thoughts. Images have the uniquely empowering capability of enabling the mind of the student, whether of the liberal arts or of Fortune’s “Yoga of the West,” to place otherwise unconnected bodies of knowledge in communication and relationship with each other. This kind of organizational, wholistic knowledge enables a higher order of discrimination concerning the significance of that which is known.
Finally, I turn to the third metaphor Fortune uses to describe of the Tree of Life on the human psyche—that of fertilization. Through symbols, Fortune argues, one may not only compute what was before unknowable and train the mind to know it, but also be made cognitively fertile. It is almost as if the images themselves are agents, reaching out to touch and “impregnate” the mind, and concretize what was before “veiled” and formless. “In this way, therefore,” Fortune writes,
in the literature of esoteric science there are scattered seed ideas such as “God is pressure” and “Kether is the Malkuth of Negative Existence.” These images, whose content does not belong to our sphere at all, are as the male germs of thought which fecundate the ova of concrete realization. In themselves they are incapable of maintaining more than the most fugitive existence in consciousness as a flash of realization, but without them the ova of philosophical thought will be infertile. Impregnated by them, however, though their substance is absorbed and lost in the very act of impregnation, growth takes place within the formless germ of thought, and ultimately, after due gestation beyond the threshold of consciousness, the mind gives birth to an idea. (35-36)
This passage is ripe with imagery of fertilization, gestation, and of creative birth. A knowledge which is somehow more subtle, more fine than thought, fecundates the coarser medium through the power of images. These “seed ideas” which appear to be merely verbal formula, in the context of extended meditation based upon the Tree of Life, are “images” that enable the “concrete realization” of what was before unthinkable. But this process of inner gestation takes time; the result is not immediate. Fortune takes care to emphasize both the importance of the moment of initiation and the extended waiting period that precedes the fructification of its power. Her point is pedagogical and psychological. She explains:
If we want to get the best out of our minds, we must learn to allow this period of latency, this impregnation of our minds by something outside our plane of existence, and its gestation beyond the threshold of consciousness. The invocations of an initiation ceremony are designed to call down this impregnating influence upon the consciousness of the candidate. Hence it is that the Paths of the Tree, which are the stages of the illumination of the soul, are intimately associated with the symbolism of initiation ceremonies. (36)
The Paths of the Tree (that is, the lines which draw a relationship from each Sephirah to its neighbors on the Tree) are states of consciousness and levels of knowledge. In her words, they “are the stages of the illumination of the soul” (36). Gesturing back to the earlier discussion of the “channel” which is made by the image between the individual mind and the “world-soul,” it seems that this is a kind of knowledge that goes both ways. Influence, in Fortune’s view, may not only be passively felt between the land-locked lagoon and the ocean, but once such a connection is established, it can become an active and “impregnating influence upon the consciousness” of the candidate-initiate. For the trained mind, images have both potency and a fecundating agency.
In conclusion, I reflect that Fortune, who argues so well for the importance of images in cognition, herself puts this into practice in the manner in which she explains the importance, relevance, and gnostic possibilities of The Tree of Life, and in this way she is much in tune with the rhetoricians whose arts of persuasion long preceded hers. The ornaments of her style, her rich stores of verbal imagery and metaphor, serve to introduce and initiate the reader into some measure of the very power visiones have to entertain and provoke the mind.