Secrets of Dr Taverner

In his nursing home, Dr. Taverner reaches the parts that physicians and psychiatrists cannot reach. A shaman in country tweeds and a psychic Sherlock Holmes, Taverner deals with complaints that result from psychic attack, soul theft, energy vampires and diseases of the group mind. His creator, Dion Fortune (born Violet Firth) knew her stuff.     
 

  The founder of her own esoteric school, which came to be known as the Society of the Inner Light, Dion Fortune (1890-1946) modeled the hero of the stories collected in The Secrets of Dr Taverner on one of her own early mentors, an extraordinary Anglo-Irish magus named Theodore Moriarty. Some of the stories were first published in the Royal Magazine in 1922, a year before Moriarty's death. Remarkably, the illustrator made the fictional Dr Taverner look very much like Moriarty, though the artist had never seen a picture of Moriarty or even heard a description.
     Jelkes, the bookseller in Dion Fortune's novel The Goat-Foot God, says that "writers will put things into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose." Dion herself said that while books of hers like The Mystical Qabalah give the theory of high magic and spiritual reality, "the novels give the practice."
   There are five of those novels, and some of them have left a profound mark on esoteric and neo-pagan practice. The Sea Priestess contains a ritual for Drawing Down the Moon that has been much-borrowed in ceremonial work, not always with attribution. But of all her fiction, it is the stories of Dr Taverner to which I return again and again. I have asked some of my advanced classes to read several of these stories as the basis for focused discussion and investigation of such phenomena as the nature of the energy bodies, past-life connections, psychic defense and astral repercussion.
    Fortune is rather direct about what she is doing in The Secrets of Dr Taverner. She describes her tales as "studies in little-known aspects of psychology put in the form of fiction because, if published as a serious contribution to science, they would have no chance of a hearing." She wants it understood that her stories are based on fact. Her characters are mostly composites, but they are based on actual people and situations. She states that the first of the stories she completed, the tale of a hungry ghost attached to a living person that she titled "Blood-Lust", is "literally true". Noting that she was one of the first British students of psychoanalysis, she expressed the hope that the Taverner stories would be received as "a serious study in the psychology of ultra-consciousness."
     In my opinion, she succeeded beyond her ambition. The Taverner stories are both gripping and entertaining, and a valuable source of practical guidance on psychic protection and spiritual cleansing and many other facets of psychic well-being that are missed in our standard approach to healthcare and therapy. In its fictional wrapping, The Secrets of Dr Taverner is a practitioner's casebook, of the greatest value to subsequent practitioners. It is perhaps the most accessible of all Dion Fortune's works for the contemporary reader.
     Her narrator is a medical doctor named Rhodes, a supposed ingénu in regard to psychic phenomena and esoteric techniques. This makes it easy for Fortune to draw the veil over certain procedures. But enough shows through to make the story collection a kind of manual, especially when read together with Fortune's well-known later (nonfiction) work Psychic Self-Defence.

Dr Taverner releases a soldier from a hungry ghost

Dion Fortune said that she told the story titled "Blood-Lust" exactly as it was played out in physical and psychic reality.
    Captain Craigie, back from war, starts killing for blood. He starts by raiding chicken coops and works his way up to sheep. Along the way, he can't help trying to sink his teeth into his fiancee's neck. He tells Dr Taverner,that he suffered "shell-shock" in the trenches. This was a familiar term in the World War I era; today we are more likely to speak of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). But in this case, "shell-shock" seems an exact description. Captain Craigie was blown out of a trench.
    The source of the problem becomes literally visible when people start seeing the apparition of a German soldier in a flat cap and field-gray uniform. This, we learn, is the etheric or dense energy body of a dead enemy soldier who has attached himself to the unfortunate Craigie, seeking to feed his "vitality hunger" (as Taverner diagnoses his condition) through his living host.
    Dr Taverner's solution involves baiting a trap, by nicking the neck of the captain's girlfriend. While Craigie is physically restrained, the hungry ghost of the German soldier leaves his body to seek the fresh blood. Taverner stands between the ghost and its host and forces it into "a psychic killing-pen" in the form of a triangle.
    Dion Fortune is discreet about what happens next. Taverner makes "a Sign and a Sound". The gray etheric form spins into a whirling spiral and disintegrates. Captain Craigie is released from the hungry ghost that was riding him,
    Dr Taverner pronounces that the source of the problem was "a corpse who was insufficiently dead."

While some parts of the plot summary may sound like the script for one of those old Hammer horror flicks, the story touches on themes of perennial importance, including the plight of veterans of foreign wars yesterday, today and tomorrow, who may be carrying unwanted energies of the dead.
     One of Dr Taverner's lessons, in this story, is that we have more than one physical body. To be specific: 

We have two physical bodies...the dense material one...and the subtle etheric one, which inhabits it, and acts as the medium of the life forces, whose functioning would explain a great deal if science would only condescend to investigate it.


By my observation, this is exactly correct. Failure to understand the nature of the etheric body and its survival of physical death confuses our relations with the dead and delays or prevents recognition of the need for spiritual cleansing and releasing in healing cases of PTSD, addiction and other disorders.
     Dr Taverner instructs that "it is possible to keep the etheric body together almost indefinitely if a supply of vitality is available". In "Blood-Lust", the supply of vital energy comes through "a human feeding bottle" that feeds on others in an effort to replenish itself.
     How common is the problem? Well, literal vampirism and blood-drinking may be rare (despite the contemporary vampire fad) but energy vampirism has never been uncommon, alas. Dr Taverner, the magician, alludes to dark side magical practices by those who seek to avoid the second death (of the etheric body) by forming "a connection with the subconscious mind of some other soul that still has a body." He cautions that "the lower type of medium" is especially vulnerable to this type of parasitism. But "higher" types can be vulnerable if in a weakened or absent condition, as when Captain Craigie was blown out of his trench, and (for a period) out of his body.
     Who ya gonna call, if you don't have a Dr Taverner down the street? Well, there is rather specific guidance on spiritual release, including staging a "second burial" for an etheric body that does not belong with the living, in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. And we have Dion Fortune's classic Psychic Self-Defence. 

Dr Taverner reunites lovers from ancient Egypt

Dr Taverner is guided by dreams and coincidence in his work with an airman named Arnold Black, who spends his nights driving around the country at crazy speed, feeling that he is on his way to an encounter with a woman he loves but has yet to meet.
    In his first session with the wild driver, Taverner says, "If chance brought you to me, you are probably in my line." In his effort to solve the mystery of what is driving Black, Taverner asks him about his dreams, and finds that they glow with an "oriental light." He is inspired to show the airman paintings of Egypt, and Black recognizes scenes from his dreams in the ancient images.
    Taverner is encouraged to follow one of his basic procedures. When confronted with behaviors and mental states that have no adequate cause in the current life of the subject, he probes for a possible past life context, "getting the record of the previous lives of his patient by those secret means of which he was master."
    Black was in a recent airplane crash. Dr Taverner concludes that the trauma "had the effect of hypnotizing him, and he got into that particular part of his memory where the pictures of previous lives are stored."
    The woman Black is seeking may have shared a past life with him in ancient Egypt. The question now is whether she can be found - and what will happen if she is. The violent urgency of the airman's need to find his love from a previous life cannot be contained. He is in imminent danger of killing himself on the road if nothing can be done.
    "These attractions that come from the past," Taverner observes, referring here to past lives, "know no barriers. Black would drive that car through the Ten Commandments and the British Constitution to get at her. He will go till he drops."
    Coincidence comes into play again. A listless young woman is brought to see Taverner in his consulting rooms in London. He prescribes rest at his nursing home in the country, where she encounters a ghost of the living: the etheric body of the man who has been seeking her.
    Black is discovered in a car wreck close to the nursing home. The extrusion of his etheric double has left him close to death; so much of his vital energy has left his body. Taverner saves Black by leading the girl into the emergency room. At this point, the airman's etheric body rejoins the physical one. As the girl stays with him, holding his hands, he begins to revive. He eventually recovers, and the lovers who knew each other in Egypt are able to marry, reunited in their current lives.


This is a summary of a story titled "The Man Who Sought", in The Secrets of Dr Taverner.
   It raises many interesting questions. I have no doubt that our current dramas and relationships are connected to stories that played out - and may still be playing out - in the life experiences of personalities in other times. What triggers memories of those other lives, other than something like the airman's trauma?
   How do we balance, and help others to balance, the legacy of a past life with the needs and obligations of the present one? Can karma and past-life connections be mediated a different way, perhaps by taking all of this up to the level of a Greater Self? How can we be sure that the past life is truly that of a contemporary individual, as opposed to the obsessive memory of an obsessing entity?
     These questions are central to my own work and are addressed, in part, in my book Dreamgates, in Dreaming the Soul Back Home and in my spiritual memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Releasing ancestral karma

She stands before the fire, straight and tall as a flame, her fierce green eyes blazing. Irene stoops for a moment to make an offering to the fire, a pinch of tobacco, a sprig of sage. Then she carefully unfolds the first piece of paper. She reads aloud the following statement she has written: “I give to the fire all deep, encrusted feelings of powerlessness that drove my ancestors, our beloved men, into alcohol dependency.”

She consigns the paper to the fire, and the fire takes it hungrily.

She unfolds the second message and reads it in a clear, ringing voice so that even the people on the edge of the circle can hear her without leaning in. “I give to the fire the great sadness of my ancestors, the abandoned men, who never knew love and felt less than honored by their women, mothers and sisters, daughters and lovers.”

The flames leap higher as the second paper crackles and burns.

She bends to blow into the fire, adding soul, which travels on the breath, to her deep intentions.

When she stands again and turns to face the circle, there is a moment’s hush before we applaud her and celebrate what she has done, because we are amazed. In a fire ceremony like this, people bring many things they wish to release: old habits, fear or guilt, addiction or attachment. She has just sought to release a multigenerational history of stunted lives and toxic relations. Instead of casting out the men who blighted the lives of their women, she has asked to free them, back through the bloodlines, back through time immemorial. She has asked for deep ancestral healing, and she has asked as a woman of power with the right of the priestess to forgive and to intercede.

When we sat quietly together later that night, I asked where she had found those remarkable words. “Kate and Caroline,” she told me. “They were very clear. They had written everything out. They wanted to make sure I got it exactly right.”

She explained that Kate was her Irish great aunt, Caroline her German grandmother. Both were long deceased, but both had come through to her as spirit helpers in the soul recovery work we had been doing with the group. They had helped her recover a desperately sad and lonely six-year-old part of herself, who had been left in a foster home and cruelly separated from the father she loved, without explanation, and then beaten for mentioning him. Though she remembered Caroline as aloof and rigid, this grandmother now appeared as warm and loving, urgently concerned, wanting to assist in healing all the family, across the generations.

We were both filled with gratitude for the help that becomes available when we make ourselves available for soul work. Guided by strong women of her family reaching to her from the other side of death, Irene sought to free the generations of men in her bloodlines who were trapped in powerlessness, sorrow, and addiction. I believe she made a difference that night, bringing light into many lives across time and across dimensions. Her example may inspire us to seek similar healing for our ancestors.

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo of RM leading a ritual of fire releasing by Jeanne Campbell

I will lead a new depth workshop on ANCESTRAL HEALING AND DREAM ARCHAEOLOGY in Barcelona over the weekend of April 14-15

The Bhakti Checkout

A shaft goes hundreds of feet down into the earth, through masses of rock beneath the paving stones of a great square. Is this a jail for a very special prisoner? The way down is easy enough; the way up is fiendishly difficult, and there is no obvious way to call for help.
    I tell a friend who has died in the ordinary world that it is probably time to leave. Neither or us has been stuck here. We have been exploring together, in a breezy Indiana Jones spirit of adventure.
   Hmm. How to get up?
   It comes to me in a flash. We need to take the Bhakti Checkout.
   I know that in Sanskrit, bhakti means love and devotion, and that bhakti yoga is a way of devotion to a personal deity. recommended by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.
   But I don't tax my brain for references or hand-me-down texts.
   Fresh words that may also be ancient flower in my mind:

Blessed One, light giver, let me rise on your wings into your heart of light.

   Yes, this does the trick. I am rising now, as if weightless, carried up by wings of light. I will my friend to rise with me.

- from last night's dreams. 

Feelings: elation. 

Reality check: I know this works. I feel I have been given a way of release from places of confinement, in any world.
    I find these words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (chapter 12, verse 8): "Fix your mind and intelligence on me alone and ultimately you will come to me. Of this there is no doubt."

My intention for last night's dreams was to continue to explore ways to help people approach the afterlife. The intention was clearly answered.

    I ask myself: What is a Western song that carries this spirit? The answer comes at once. It is "Amazing Grace", the luminous creation of a penitent former slave trader.
   I ask again, what is the simplest way to practice the Bhakti Checkout, released from any specific religious language or tradition? It is something I have practiced and taught for many years:

Open your heart.
Find in your heart, your deep yearning for the beloved of your soul.
Feel that desire rising from your heart as a beam of light.
Feel and see an answering light from the highest reaching down like a finger of gentle fire, to meet the light ascending from your heart.
In the radiant place of encounter between your heart light and the fire from heaven, join in the embrace of the beloved of your soul, the one who never leaves you but seeks you everywhere.

Art: Marc Chagall, "Au dessus de Paris"

Anubis in the backyard

Thirty years ago, because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk, I moved to a farm in upstate New York on the edge of traditional Mohawk country. I brought with me my two beloved black dogs, "Sag Harbor mutts" - part Labrador, part German shepherd, larger than either breed. When Kipling's ears stood up, I joked that he looked like Anubis.
     On the night before Halloween that year, he got out on the road and was killed by a passing car. Shaking with grief, I wrapped his huge body in an old blanket, got him in the back of the battered Jeep - where he loved to ride - and drove, with a spade and mattock, up to the top of the hill on the north side of the house. I had often come here with Kipling to watch the rising of the moon. Sobbing, I dug a grave for my boy dog just outside the bounds of the human burial ground where the headstones of the first white settlers leaned at crazy angles.
   I felt that something had been cut out of my heart.
   However, I soon noticed that though Kipling's body was in the ground, he was very much still with us. Driving in the Jeep he loved, I once looked in the rearview mirror and saw him standing up, eager to see where we were. "Sit down, Kipling," I growled, before I realized that, in physical terms, my dog could not be there.
    Others saw him too. His presence was so palpable that when my elderly mother-in-law moved to a downtown street-level apartment, I asked Kipling to watch over her for the first few days, until we were able to get her a watchdog of her own. Late the first night, she heard people she considered to be ne'er-do-wells on the sidewalk in front of her door. Then she heard a dog's deep-chested growl, rising to booming barks. Someone outside said, "Forget it, there's a dog." The curious thing, according to Mary, was that the barking seemed to come from inside her apartment.
    My black dog's energy was with me in other ways, too, long after his death. I finally realized I needed to tell him it was okay to move on. I did this with an impromptu ceremony, barbecuing a steak for him on the deck, near the old loganberry tree. When I spoke words of love and releasing, the wind turned as quick as a kid on Rollerblades, and it sent the smoke skirring straight up the hill to Kipling's burial place.
    Then my black dog started coming in my dreams. He appeared to me, running and hunting as he loved to do, on a mysterious island across a river, When I called to him, he turned but appeared not to be able to see me, as if he and his world were covered by some kind of shrink-wrap that was translucent only from my side.
    Things moved along. His role in my dreams became one of a guide and ally, showing me things I needed to see but might not have noticed without his keen senses. Sometime he came out of a hollow tree, slicked with something sticky, like honey or amniotic fluid or liquid amber. He escorted me on journeys across perilous country, sometimes into realms of the human dead.
   I began to understand why the Egyptians chose a black dog or jackal as a psychopomp, or guide of the soul on the roads between the worlds. Garbed in black, he moves easily through the dark places. His keen senses make him an excellent tracker and enable him to sniff out, and dispose of, dead meat and dead energy that the spirit is meant to leave behind. And of all animals the canids are those that are friendliest to humans.
    After Kipling's sister Brandy died peacefully several years later, I dreamed that they were reunited in their spirit bodies and became one. When a black dog appears in my dreams and shamanic journeys now, I always pay very close attention, because I know I am dealing with Anubis in the Backyard. In the ordinary world, the appearance of a friendly back dog, especially under unusual circumstances, is a very good omen for me, road-tested over decades.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: with Kipling and his sister Brandy at the farm in 1986.

Rescuing my lightning-struck friend

He is quite alone, out in the midst of a choppy sea, on a moonless night. Great thunderheads roll over him. Forked lightning burns the waves. I see him turn ghost white, then he is gone, under the dark waters.

The man in this dream was my closest friend in my last year at high school and my first years as an undergraduate. I had lost contact with him decades before the dream. I woke from the dream with the grim certainty that my friend had died.

When I returned to Australia to speak at a Mind, Body, Spirit festival some months after the dream, I was approached by a middle-aged woman I did not recognize until she told me she was my friend's younger sister. She was eager to know whether I had heard anything from her brother. She explained that he had developed a serious drug addiction and had been in and out of halfway houses for years until he vanished altogether. The family feared he had died of an overdose.

When I shared my terrible dream, we agreed that being struck by lightning in a stormy sea could be a metaphor for the effects of a drug overdose on the brain.

Life went on, the years passed, and then I met my friend again, in a waking dream, during my workshop on death and dying last weekend.

I had invited members of our circle to make a journey to the Other Side for "timely and helpful" contact with a person who has passed on. While drumming for the group, I had the sense of a beautiful angelic presence that had guided me on similar expeditions in the past. Gently but firmly, this spiritual guide led me to a person and a place that had not been on my itinerary.

I saw a wild thing in a cage, with matted hair, frothing at the mouth, a bestial creature that barely seemed human. I was horrified to recognize something of my friend. I understood that he was still trapped in his drug addiction. I had no idea how to proceed. It would surely be imprudent to try to release this ravening, unreasoning creature from the cage.

The thought came to me, This is not your friend, only the body of desire that confines him. With this thought, I saw a second version of my friend. He was beautiful. He looked the way I remembered him from the nights when we stayed up until dawn writing poems that we read to each other, and talking about Pascal and Nietzsche, Camus and Rilke. This second, superior version of my friend was translucent; I realized I was looking at his body of light. Why was it here, with the thing in the cage?

I then saw the cord of attachment between the two energy bodies. I knew what to do, because I have often found it necessary to help the living to detach from unhealthy connections of this kind. I pulled the energy cord out of my friend's subtle body as you might unplug an electrical extension cord. I was moved to tears as I saw him rising into the Light. The thing in the cage could be left to disintegrate, as heavy energy is meant to do after death.