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.
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.
