The Magical Battle of Britain (UK, RPG All, Bookhounds, Dreamhounds, Trail)

 Cometh the hour, cometh the woman.

When war breaks out and the Phoney War becomes all too real, as the Germans push through Belgium in May 1940, as the Battle of France begins and ends in a heartbeat, Dion Fortune does her bit to save England from the Germans.

She organizes the Magical Battle of Britain, with a cycle of rites beginning July 1940.

Bear in mind, that’s a busy month. You’ve got bombing raids on mainland Britain, the Cardiff Blitz; the Germans are chewing up the RAF in the Kanalkampf in preparation for Unternehmen Seelöwe; Vichy is the new French government, allied with its conqueror Germany; the country’s plunging into debt to fight a war in which it seems it will soon be the sole Allied combatant, with Churchill telling the country they’d fight on alone, seeking no terms or parley; the buying and selling of new cars is banned, the first of a series of stringency measures; everyone thinks the German invasion is imminent, including the Germans. It’s one of those times when you daren’t read the newspaper because you know what the headlines will be. It’s enough to scare someone into spiraling depression.

In all this, Fortune marshals the occultists of Britain to … actually, it isn’t entirely clear what the point is.

With a title like ‘Battle of Britain’ you expect, well, combat. Of some kind. Lonely duels high in the sky, where life and death is seen as a scattering of contrails punctuated by crashing aircraft. Explosions. Derring-do, that kind of thing.

What actually happens is a little less exciting.

Fortune gathers together a number of people, not all of them occultists but all known to her personally. She persuades them to meditate on a particular subject at a particular time and write to her with the results of their meditations. She then wrote back, instructing her correspondents that they weren’t to open or read the letters until just before the next session, at which point the cycle begins anew.

Fortune openly admits that what she’s attempting is more about morale building than anything practical. Victory, if it is to be had, must be fought for and won in the physical realm. What she’s after is more of a spiritual victory.

You know what that reminds me of?

ITV News

Again, bear in mind when this is happening. This is the bleakest point in the war, for the English. The news isn’t going to get better any time soon; the actual Battle of Britain is about to see some of the heaviest casualties, the most significant engagements. The Hardest Day is coming in August. Everyone knows a family where someone’s died, or is that family mourning a loss. Food is running short. Meanwhile Charles Lindberg the celebrated American aviator is telling his fellow Americans not to get involved; that so long as America is strong, none will dare invade her, and she need not intervene on another’s behalf.

People need to feel as though they’re doing something, even if it’s a gesture of defiance.

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Hitchock)

I have to wonder whether Fortune was drawing on her own war experiences in the Women's Land Army during the First World War. That was all about rallying round and doing your bit, even if it was less than spectacular and didn’t require a lot of derring-do. It’s also where she allegedly had her first serious spiritual experience and began her communications with the Ascended Masters. Was she intending some kind of mass recruitment to the esoteric cause? Introducing her followers to the Ascended Masters that first intrigued her so long ago, during another war?

As the war news improves, Fortune loses interest in the effort. It becomes more about what will happen after the war, when peace returns to the green and pleasant land. She begins developing ‘the Arthurian Formula’ where Arthur and his knights become dim and distant reflections of Atlantean forebears. Not that she has long; leukemia will claim her by 1946.

OK, that’s what actually happens.

How to gamify?

Probably the simplest method is to assume that Fortune embarks on the Arthurian/Atlantaen bit a good deal earlier than she does. The occultists she recruits - the player characters - are all Knights in her Arthurian army, and there are dragons on the horizon attacking the very soul of Britain itself. Their job is to use scavenged Atlantaen rituals (and later, technology) to establish a perimeter - castles, in her vernacular - first on the coast and, later, when those are bombed in the Battle of Britain alongside the coastal airfields, further within. From these castles the Knights defend the realm against foreign psychic incursion. The intent is to provide aid at first, when the country's need is greatest, and later, when the tide turns, a base for assault across the Channel against those same foreign dragons who were ravaging the countryside a few short months prior.

All Arthurian stories need a Mordred figure and in this instance there's one ready-made: occultist Aleister Crowley. He seems friendly enough to Fortune, but his smiles hide evil intent. He may present as an ally at first, but someone's working with the dragons, and it may well be the wickedest man alive. 

Now, some options:

Option One: Yithian Malice Fortune isn't a free agent. She's been corrupted by the Yithians, who see the outbreak of war as their last chance to scoop up as much Pnakotic material and lost technology as they can before the war ravages what's left of their network. The Yithians intend to gather all this at their Oxford Camelot, a secret base where they'll hide all of their secrets until some future date when they can re-establish their network. The Yithians see this as a rescue mission - shades of Three Damsels of the Fountain - but the player characters may disagree, particularly since the Yithians follow an old human maxim: no witnesses. In this version, Crowley is Mordred, but Mordred isn't the real enemy of mankind.

Option Two: Dragons of Dream Fortune is facing real threats, but these are threats to the English Dream. The Dragons ravage the nightmares of all who listen to Haw-Haw's broadcasts and it's up to the player characters to perform miracles of resistance. They may be assisted in this effort by whatever's left of the Dreamhounds of Paris who may be trying similar methods of resistance in occupied France. In time the characters may become a kind of psychic Special Operations Executive; entirely unofficial, but there were many such unofficial, undocumented operations. A supernatural Small Back Room, with Fortune as the lead brain and Crowley as the greasy politico.

Small Back Room

Option Three: Accidental Arthur This borrows from Pagan Publishing's Golden Dawn and Pelgrane's Dracula Dossier, but neither are required reading. In the dying days of the last century Golden Dawn occultist Randolph Northcote attempted to bring back King Arthur to save Britain, but his attempts ended in disaster and Arthur's plans to reestablish his Shub-Niggurath cult were thwarted. Temporarily, at least, though some of Arthur's ideas and forbidden texts he and Northcote consulted found their way into the archives of a secretive supernaturalist organization within Military Intelligence. Now that same obscure branch of Military Intelligence is drawing on those old ideas to create a new Arthurian cycle, and in the process bringing back Arthur's Shub-Niggurath cult. Fortune the Golden Dawn inheritor, in this version, may be the heroic resistance, or may be a willing catspaw of British Intelligence; if the latter, then Crowley/Mordred is what little's left of the heroic resistance. The ultimate goal is to bring back Arthur the same way Northcote did, but Northcote didn't realize what he was bringing back, and neither does Military Intelligence. 

That's all for this week! Next week, something completely different.  

Violet Firth aka Dion Fortune

 Last week I talked about ritual magic and this week it's Dion Fortune. Some of the material I'm going to discuss comes from Francis King's The Rites of Modern Occult Magic. 

Violet Firth (born 6 December 1890 died 6 or 8 January 1946) was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1919, when she would have been in her late 20s. MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Golden Dawn, had died the year before during the influenza epidemic and the Golden Dawn was under the occasionally shaky leadership of his widow Moina Mathers, working in partnership with an ageing J.W. Brodie-Innes. Brodie-Innes was himself not long for this world and would pass in 1923. 

Firth came from a wealthy background and was well educated. Her father, anxious not to be seen as a money-grubbing parvenu, adopted the motto God, not Luck - Deo, non Fortuna - from which she would derive the pseudonym by which she is best known. Though in her view Dion Fortune wasn't so much a pseudonym as Violet Firth was her deadname. 

Fortune had a long-standing interest in occultism before being introduced as a neophyte in Alpha et Omega in 1919. She was well versed in psychotherapy, the works of Freud and Jung, and had experience as a medium and psychic sensitive. She'd also served in the War in the Woman's Land Army but had never been posted overseas. 

King says something interesting, though it's a bit of a non sequitur. He describes Fortune as a 'slim young girl' in 1919 and goes on to add that 'later she was to become very fat; for some reason most mediums seem to do this - probably there is some relationship between mediumship and the glandular balance of the metabolism.' Which, frankly, sounds like utter garbage, but in a game world where Y'Golonac exists there is something to be said for a fictional universe where mediums become enormous under psychic influences.

Fortune soon becomes disenchanted with the Golden Dawn's mismanagement and its lack of a rigorous training program. It doesn't help that Mathers is milking it for every spare dollar, pushing Alpha et Omega as if mystical learning is a self-help experience. Initially Fortune counters this by trying to bring in new blood, with Mathers' blessing. New recruits were a good thing for Mathers the Empire-builder. This creates the Fraternity of the Inner Light, a sub-group within Alpha et Omega, in which Fortune is a leading player. Mathers hates that idea; in Alpha et Omega, Mathers is Imperatrix, the only leading player.

Fortune and Mathers soon fall out, and Fortune alleges that Mathers engages her in psychic assault. This takes the form of a plague of cats. "I suddenly saw, coming down the stairs towards me, a gigantic tabby cat, twice the size of a tiger. It appeared absolutely solid and tangible. I stared at it petrified for a second, and then it vanished. I instantly realized that it was a simulacrum, or thought-form that was being projected by someone with occult powers." Fortune beats off this attack with her own occult powers but not without cost; when she goes to bed, she sees she has been scored as if by claws. 

Again, going back to gaming, this can be significant in a game world in which dreams, mystic cats, and Bast worship exist. Was Mathers secretly a worshipper of the cat god, or had she, by chance, discovered a means of using Bast's powers? Was Mathers a Dreamer?

This becomes even more important later, when Ms. Netta Fornario, a member of Alpha et Omega, dies under very mysterious circumstances. She travelled to Scotland in 1929, evidently engaged in some kind of ritual exercise on the Isle of Iona, and was later found dead there. Possibly her death was the result of exposure to the elements, but there were deep score marks on the body and, before her death, Netta claimed she was being attacked psychically. Fornario and Fortune were friends. Fortune believed Mathers was responsible for Fornario's death.  

By this time Mathers was dead; in fact, she died the year before Fornario's trip to Iona. Any further breach between Fortune and Mathers was irrelevant, at least in the physical realm, though Mathers' psychic influences may have remained.

Again, going back to gaming, this could also become in-game relevant if Mathers was a Dreamer, and if her Dream-self survived. Particularly if you, as Keeper, intend this to run contemporaneously with Dreamhounds of Paris, since Mathers will be in the Dream fomenting occult dissent just at the time the Dreamhounds are sculpting the Dreamlands in their own image. What would Mathers do if her Egyptian, Bast-centric artistic vision is interrupted by French Surrealists while she, at the same time, is continuing her feud with Fortune?  

By this point Fortune is utterly disenchanted with Alpha et Omega. Fortune has effective control over her own Fraternity, and she's more interested in personal development than getting bogged down in psychic attacks and the day-to-day bother of running an esoteric society. She begins corresponding with other occultists across Europe, expanding her horizons and generally making a name for herself. Not just living occultists either; through meditation she contacts Madame Blavatsky, and more esoteric entities. Her career as a writer begins to flourish, and her most well-regarded book, The Mystical Qabalah, is published in 1935. 

Ultimately, she approaches paganism, abandoning her former Christian beliefs. She begins to develop a mystical practice entirely her own, based on rituals of her own devising.

War approaches. The mystical Battle of Britain is about to begin ...

Ritual Magic (RPG All)

In the old year (feh! Fooey!) someone asked if I would write about Dion Fortune and the magical Battle of Britain. 

Happy to oblige. Before I do, let's set the scene a little and talk about ritual magic. 

Ritual magic, in Western traditions, is all about the big favors. You use it when you want to achieve a major result. In fiction this is sometimes with machines and modern (or at least modernist) technology. The Electric Pentacle and peculiar devices of Thomas Carnacki are an example of this type. You never know exactly what makes those devices hum. That isn't the point; the point is that they work. 

Same with rituals. If you really want to, you can find out how they're supposed to work. I have proof of this: academic tome after academic tome, Histories of Magic, long lists of names and attributes. All wordy, windy, esoteric. Filled with forbidden knowledge and tempting illustrations. 

However, from the point of view of the observer, how ritual magic works isn't the point. How impressive rituals are, is the point. 

Faust 1926, Murnau

The peculiar technology used by Doctor Frankenstein in the early films (and later, in Young Frankenstein) are in this tradition. Again, the desired result is something spectacular: the creation of new life, from dead clay. To achieve it an appeal is made to the heavens, and peculiar technology is used to make that appeal heard.

 Frankenstein, 1932

Early cinema, and plays like Marlowe's Faustus, latch on to this scene-play. They have those central dramatic moments when someone goes out to the crossroads on a dark night and evokes the weird. There's a suggestion that Faust and the rest are completing an esoteric ritual, but the details of that ritual are, at best, sketched in. So long as the visual is suggestive the means of getting there can slide a little bit. 

Video games pull much the same tactic. Whether it's the Rite of Thorns in Baldur's Gate 3 or any one of a dozen summoning rites in World of Warcraft, the implication is that so long as you get enough people chanting faux Latin and standing in something approximating a circle, you've got yourself some ritual goodness and can expect great results. 

In the historical record this often causes religious qualms. Appealing to forces beyond reality? Clearly diabolic. Burn those books. However, even the religious are not beyond a little magical temptation, so up springs a series of tomes that promise power from angels instead. Know the right angel, make the right appeal (in the Lord's name, of course) and you too can have whatever it is you desire. Or, if you're into slightly less work for slightly less reward, you can practice simple bibliomancy. Take out your bible, flip to a random page, and take the advice offered.  A very simple ritual designed to produce a simple result. 

But the key to ritual, whether religious or otherwise, is to know your terminology. You need to know the proper name of the angel (or whatever it may be) you're appealing to. You need to know the offerings that being wants, or the tools you'll need to make the appeal. You need to be able to recite the prayers exactly right each time, in the right order each time, as often as the ritual requires. You need to be able to do this while fasting, or while only drinking or eating the right things, or by only consuming the holy spirit, or whatever it may be. You need to get everything exactly right, possibly over a period of several days or even weeks. 

Get one little thing wrong, and the whole effort is for naught. Or, in the case of devils, get one little thing wrong and put your body and soul in peril.

The interesting thing about a ritual, I think, is that it doesn't rely on the magician, or the magician's innate power. This is the magician asking for a favor. Commanding a favor, really. They know the cheat codes, they press the correct button sequence, and boom! Magical gifts. Angels, demons, deities of the hearth or saints in charge of who-knows-what, beings that have existed before Man and which will exist after him, beings that have seen the face of God and tasted the eternal joys, suddenly bow down to some clown from Croydon, so long as that clown pronounces their name correctly and chants in the appropriate tempo.

In RPG terms, naturally the Bookhounds (or whoever it may be) aren't really appealing to angelic or devilish forces. They're relying on the Mythos to power their Megapolisomancy, their Rough Magick, or whatever else it may be. The ritual found in that collection of scrolls may reference Thoth, but to those who know it's really talking about [insert Mythos here].

Which raises a question. Most Mythos forces aren't interested in humanity and certainly aren't interested in anything humanity wants. Cthulhu could care less. Nyarlathotep is probably interested to a degree but isn't about to fetch and carry for any mortal sorcerer.

There are at least two ways to answer that question. 

The first is manipulation. Humanity isn't drawing directly on Mythos forces. Rituals are ways of channeling power, leeching power that would otherwise go to waste or be used for something else. This may be deliberate manipulation, or it may be an accidental effect, something that's survived from the days of Mu and which some mortal lucked into. When a sorcerer uses a ritual to achieve an effect that sorcerer is accessing Mythos forces that exist around us all the time, in the same way that we might dam a river or redirect a stream to irrigate cropland. We didn't create the river. We merely adapted it to our use. 

The other is natural tendencies at work. Humanity is Mythos. There's some lurking corruption at the heart of us all, and when we manipulate forces to create a ritual result we're drawing on the Mythos inside us to do it. We bring ourselves closer to Cthulhu, or whichever Old One it may be. Perhaps that's what is meant by 'the stars are right' - not that some anticipated conjunction of heavenly bodies will bring about a result, but that we are the stars spoken of in prophesy, and when our devotions over however many millennia finally bear fruit, we will be the reason why Ry'leh rises and why the Old Ones return. Like ants building a mountain, we strive in our own cause, but build something beyond our scope or our ability to understand. 

Now, next time - Dion Fortune!   

 

Universal Aunts (Trail, Call of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents)

This post is inspired by Lucy Lethbridge's book Servants, which I'm reading for research purposes. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting period information on the Victorian era, the 1920s and 30s.

Lady-help is a catchall term for an unmarried woman without financial resources, who works as a kind of servant but isn't really from the same social class as a servant. Consequently they balance precariously between the group they feel they belong to, the middle classes, while at the same time not having the same claim to membership of that group as the people they work for. Lethbridge describes this as 'living on a social mezzanine floor, between one world and another.'

Often they do not, or cannot, perform the same tasks as a servant, having not been taught the necessary skills. Nor did they want to be taught. That's the whole point of being a lady; you don't have to do manual or domestic labor. So in practice the lady-help is a paid companion or quasi-governess, someone who can be set administrative tasks, like managing a diary or arranging train tickets and hotel stays, but who has no practical function, like laundry or cooking. Agatha Christie often makes use of the lady-help. Hildegarde Schmidt and Mary Debenham, who appear in her novel Murder on the Orient Express, are examples of the type.

In the Victorian and early Edwardian period, the lady-help's a bit vulnerable, particularly since they lack the money and the opportunity to save that guarantees a modest comfort in retirement. Again, going back to Agatha Christie, this is why legacies gifted in the master or mistress' will are so important. However for those not lucky enough to get a legacy, the best they can hope for is to live on charity - or, more likely, slowly starve on charity.

Things change in the 1920s. There are fewer men, thus fewer opportunities for marriage. Moreover the declining economy means families need cash, however they can get it. Unmarried daughters must work. At the same time, there's an innate horror in letting social standards slip. The middle class must remain the middle class; there can be no question of blurring the line between servant and master. Then there is the war, which among other things taught a whole generation of middle class women new skills, and confidence.

Enter new temporary employment agencies, like Universal Aunts.

'Britain's first personal service bureau' opened in 1921, on Sloane Street. Its founder, Gertie Maclean, wanted to create a venture "which will, I hope, fulfil my search for an opportunity to use my time and intelligence. I would hope too, that other like-minded ladies can become involved." They did, and soon Universal Aunts had a full catalogue of women capable of performing any task. Women with Zoological Society certificates, expert researchers fluent in many languages, women who knew about physics, spiritualism and foreign missions, who were qualified car and boat mechanics, and pilots.

Women who would make excellent investigators in any period horror game, especially Trail and Call of Cthulhu.

These kinds of agencies turn up in fiction now and again. Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey owned and operated an agency like this, with Joan Murchison, former secretary with a background in stock broking, as its founder member. However it wasn't until Servants that I realized this was an actual, historical event, not some backstory invented by a mystery writer. It opens up a range of options for the Keeper, or even the Night's Black Agents director. Consider:

• The agency can be a source of information. You can justify any skill set you care to name - Archaeology, Accounting, History, Library Use, Bureaucracy, High Society, Surveillance - and the agency can meet that need. So if the investigators pick up an interesting doodad, and don't know what it is or what it does, ask Universal Aunts to look into the problem. Or need someone followed, or something looked into.
• The agency can be an employer or patron, for female investigators. That former Dilettante who lost all her family money in the great Crash can find a new sense of purpose, and employment, with Universal Aunts. It might work even better with a group of all female investigators.
• It can be a clue dispenser. Are the investigators getting bogged down in minutiae, or lost in the weeds? Universal Aunts might point them in the right direction, albeit indirectly. Say the investigators are having trouble tracking down Stanley Fentiman, or they want to know why he was kicked out of his old College, or what he's been up to recently. Universal Aunts may know, because one of its members knows Fentiman, or used to work with him, or has connections with the College that chucked him out. Or Universal Aunts may come to the investigators and ask their help with Fentiman, thus giving the investigators a clue as to his whereabouts or plans. 
• It can be a training facility. If the investigator needs to brush up on her Latin, History, Vampirology, or whatever it may be, there's bound to be an Aunt who knows all about it, and can help.
• It can be an occult investigative agency. This is similar to the employer or patron option, above, except that it exists to combat occult threats. It hides this mission under some discreet front, but imagine a Universal Aunts founded, not by Gertie Maclean, but by Wilhemina Murray. Or Dion Fortune, or anyone with occult interests. Universal Aunts wouldn't be up there with Delta Green, sending out hit squads to eliminate threats, but there's all kinds of trouble it could get up to. That mysterious Count, for example, with his business interests in Whitby - no doubt the Aunts have crossed swords with him before. 

The best thing about Universal Aunts, of course, is that it still exists. Anything For Anyone At Any Time is one heck of a motto to live up to for over a hundred years, but Universal Aunts has managed it. 'Universal Aunts still endeavors to rise to any challenge.' I bet it does! This means it can be a resource in Call, Trail, and Night's Black Agents; plausible in any era. 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!