EHB and Her Children

No, not that sort of children...

I had occasion today to say what I've been thinking for some time, which is that it's impossible to imagine someone like Dion Fortune without also imagining a strong precursor like Emma. What Fortune found so easy -- that is to say, profiting from the commercialization of all things Spiritual and Occult -- Emma found damned hard: so hard she had to get out on the road and engineer the market she wished to serve, and experience all the setbacks, mistakes and disappointments of a market maker.

It isn't going to far to say that Emma would have written Psychic Self-Defense, if she could have done so. Her job was different, and, it seems to me, an order of magnitude or more harder, that Dion Fortune's. Both the popularizers of the occult -- Fortune, and others -- and the second-generation mediums (I always think of Mina Crandon here) -- owed much of their success to the blockade-busting and concept-sowing that Emma (not exclusively, mind you) did.

And the same can be said for Emma's other children -- occult and New Age practitioners from 1900 onwards.

With that idea in mind, a tangent this evening: the death of Nora Fornario, as told by Dion Fortune:

Fornario's death was covered by the UP wire, the London Times and other major newspapers -- not, as one might imagine, with sympathy, or because Fornario was well-known (she was not), but also not with the ridicule with which EHB and her contemporaries regularly experienced. Fornario's death was a matter of...curiosity, of the same secular sort that motivates our interest in a mysterious death today. The people who rented her a room on Iona didn't think she was a witch, or a sex fiend, or a Satanist come to corrupt their local morals and institutions -- they thought she was odd.

And the people who read the UP press report or the Times article knew how to categorize Fornario, as they knew how to categorize Fortune: mystic, occultist.

Fortune's book, and Fornario's death, have been in the back of my mind throughout the chase thusfar -- both women are Emma's children, and we cannot understand the currents of thought that held them up, and let them down, without understanding our Emma and her work.

(For anyone with the bandwidth and the inclination, Fornario's life and death deserve some serious work.)