The Goat-Foot God Read online

  DION FORTUNE

  MISTRESS OF RITUAL MAGIC

  THE GOAT-FOOT

  GOD

  The author’s knowledge and experience of psychology are indisputable, and her ability to expound the modus operandi of magic is second to none.’

  OCCULT REVIEW

  PRISONER OF THE OPAL

  ‘I saw the world as a vast opal in which I stood. An opal luminously opaque, so that I was dimly aware of another world outside mine.

  Obsessed and tormented by a desperate inner need, Hugh Paston strove to appease and fulfil his questing soul.

  But the course of action on which he embarked risked both mind and body. His invocations to the Great God Pan opened up his sub-conscious, revealed memories belonging to a former self. A self that slowly took control, compelling him to relive another’s emotions and to encounter their succuba in the utopian vales of Arcady.

  ‘Shoots with remarkable success at a most ambitious target.’

  GUARDIAN

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  Occult ISBN 0 352 39712 8

  THE GOAT-FOOT GOD

  ‘The mediaeval mind of the man returned from the dead knew no half-lights or compromise in the doctrines of sin and hell. According to all the standards of his world, he had sold his soul to the Devil and an eternity of hell-fire awaited him.

  ‘She gazed back at him. The minutes were slipping away one after the other. A town clock chimed the hour. How much longer were they going to stay like this? She dared not move lest God knew what should be let loose upon her. She could conceive of Hugh Paston falling dead if the occupant of his body withdrew suddenly. Come what might, the first move must not come from her.

  ‘Then the man, without taking his eyes off hers, slowly stretched out his hand and touched the back of hers with the tips of her fingers, as if feeling her pulse. The finger-tips were icy cold. It was indeed like the touch of the hand of the dead.’

  DION FORTUNE

  Perhaps no other occultist in the twentieth century has so fully combined a practical knowledge of magic with a thorough understanding of psychology as Dion Fortune. The first mass-market paperback editions of her famous novels are well overdue, marking as they do a peak of literary entertainment and a disturbingly authoritative introduction to the ancient teachings of the occult. The series includes:

  THE DEMON LOVER

  MOON MAGIC

  THE SEA PRIESTESS

  THE WINGED BULL

  THE GOAT-FOOT GOD

  A Star Book

  Published in 1976

  By Wyndham Publications Ltd.

  A Howard & Wyndham Company

  123 King Street, London W6 9JG

  First published in Great Britain by

  The Aquarian Press

  Copyright © Society of the Inner Light 1976

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk

  ISBN 0 352 39712 8

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  THE GOAT-FOOT GOD

  Came the voice of Destiny,

  Calling o’er the lonian Sea,

  ‘The Great God Pan is dead, is dead.

  Humbled is the horned head;

  Shut the door that bath no key —

  Waste the vales of Arcady.’

  Shackled by the Iron Age,

  Lost the woodland heritage,

  Heavy goes the heart of man,

  Parted from the light-foot Pan;

  Wearily he wears the chain

  Till the Goat-god comes again.

  Half a man and half a beast,

  Pan is greatest, Pan is least.

  Pan is all, and all is Pan;

  Look for him in every-man;

  Goat-hoof swift and shaggy thigh —

  Follow him to Arcady.

  He shall wake the living dead —

  Cloven hoof and horned head,

  Human heart and human brain,

  Pan the goat-god comes again!

  Haifa beast and haifa man —

  Pan is all, and all is Pan.

  Come, O Goat-god, come again!

  (From ‘The Rite of Pan’)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The double doors of 98 Pelham Street opened to the latchkey of their owner, who, to judge from his habiliments, had just returned from a funeral. The butler who advanced to meet him in the outer hall and take from him his neatly-rolled umbrella, his top-hat with the deep mourning band, and his close-fitting black overcoat, endeavoured to put into his expression the exactly right proportions of sympathy and deprecation.

  Hugh Paston passed through the wide inner hall and into his study, shut the door behind him, and helped himself to a drink from the cocktail cabinet. He needed it.

  He flung himself into an enormous arm-chair beside the hearth, and extended his feet to the electric fire. The soles of his shoes, wet with churchyard clay, began to steam, but he never heeded them.

  He had just returned from the funeral of his wife, who had been killed in a motoring accident. The car had gone up in flames; and the proprietor of the Red Lion Hotel, at whose gates the accident had occurred, had identified the bodies as those of a Mr and Mrs Thompson, well known to him as frequent visitors for several years. However, an inscription inside the watch found on the man had identified him as Trevor Wilmott, one of Hugh Paston’s most intimate friends, and an inscription inside the wedding-ring of the woman had identified her as Hugh Paston’s wife.

  What should be the attitude of a husband at once outraged and bereaved? Should it be grief and forgiveness or a disgusted repudiation? Hugh Paston did not know. The thing had indisputably been going on for a considerable period; it must, in fact, have been going on from the earliest days of the marriage, if the inn-keeper’s chronology were to be relied on. Had marriage with him been a disillusioning experience for Frida? He sighed. So far as he knew, he had left nothing undone that he could have done. But evidently he had not filled the bill. He compared Trevor and Frida to Tristram and Iseult, and left it at that.

  He rose suddenly to his feet. One thing he knew for certain, he couldn’t stop in the house. He would go out for a walk, and when he was tired, turn in at some hotel and phone his man to bring along his things. He went hastily out into the hall, closed the big doors silently behind him and set out at a brisk pace northward. But by the time he had crossed Oxford Street, and was making his way through the modified version of Mayfair that lies beyond it, he had Slackened his pace. He had had precious little food or sleep since the inquest and that is a thing which takes it out of a man.

  Tired of going north, and finding that the district was beginning to get sordid, he turned sharp right, and in another moment found himself in a narrow and winding street of shabby aspect, given up chiefly to second-hand furniture-dealing and cheap eating-houses.

  He sauntered on, dislodged from his contemplation of early Victorian mantel-piece ornaments and Oriental Brummagem by the reek of the eating-house next door, and paused in front of a second-hand bookshop across the front of which the words: ‘T. Jelkes, Antiquarian Book-seller’ showed faintly on the faded paint. The usual outside tables had been withdrawn owing to the heavy rain, but a kind of bin stood just inside the narrow entry that gave access to a half-glass door painted a faded green.

  He began to pick over the contents of the bin idly. The assortment consisted chiefly of ant
iquated piousness and flyblown fiction. A reasonably clean blue binding heaved up from the welter like a log in rapids, and he fished for it hopefully. It proved to be a battered library edition of a popular novel. He knew by the name on the binding that it would be readable, and the title intrigued him. ‘The Prisoner in the Opal’—. It raised visions.

  He soon found the paragraph that gave the book its title. ‘The affair gave me quite a new vision of the world,’ he read.

  ‘I saw it as a vast opal inside which I stood. An opal luminously opaque, so that I was dimly aware of another world outside mine.’ There was a curious fascination in the rhythm of the prose, and he read on, startled and absorbed by an account of the Black Mass celebrated by a renegade priest and a dissolute woman. Here was something that would certainly both hold the attention and intrigue the intellect.

  He opened the dingy green door and entered, his discovery in his hand. The shop was in darkness, save for such light from the street-lamp as made its way between the volumes ranged in ranks in the window. The characteristic smell of ancient books was heavy on the air; but through that smell came faint wafts of another smell; aromatic, pungent, sweet. It was not incense; at least, it was not church incense; and it was not joss-sticks or pastilles. It contained something of all three, and something else beside, which he could not place. It was very faint, as if the draft of the opening door had disturbed vague wafts of it where they lay hidden in crevices among the books. Coming as it did immediately upon his reading of the Black Mass and its stinking incense, and coming in darkness, it affected him to a degree that startled him, and he felt with A. B. W. Mason’s hero, as if ‘the shell of the world might crack and some streak of light come through’.

  He heard someone stirring in an inner room. Then a dim warm radiance shone across the floor in a broad streak, coming from under a curtain slung across a doorless gap between the books, and in another moment he saw the figure of a tall stooping man in a dressing-gown, or some such voluminous garment, thrusting aside the curtain and coming through into the front shop. The proprietor of the bookshop, if that were what he was, revealed himself as a great gaunt framework of a man, his loose clothes hanging slackly upon him. His ungirt dressing-gown with its trailing cords made him look like a huge bat hung up by its hooked wings in sleep.

  Hugh held out towards him the grubby blue volume in his hand. ‘I got this out of your cheap bin,’ he said.

  The bookseller peered at it. ‘Now how did that get in there?’ he demanded, as if inquiring of the book itself. ‘If it was in the bin, I’ll charge you accordingly. But I wouldn’t have exposed it to that indignity willingly. I have a regard for books.’ He looked up suddenly and transfixed his interlocutor with a piercing glance. ‘I have a feeling for them that some people have for horses. Shall I wrap it up for you?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ll take it as it is. By the way, have you got anything else in the same line?’

  It was as if an iron shutter came down over the bookseller’s face. ‘You mean something else by A. E. W. Mason?’

  ‘No, I mean something else about the — er — Black Mass.’ The bookseller eyed him suspiciously, not to be drawn. ‘I have got Huysmans’ Là-Bas in French. There are no books in English on the subject of the Black Mass, no books worth having, that is. I do not call sheer sensationalism a book. There is nothing, so far as I know, strictly on the subject of the Black Mass, but one or two interesting books on cognate subjects. The Devil’s Mistress, for instance; and The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Perhaps you would like to look at them. I have got them here, if you would be so good as to step this way.’ He drew back the tattered curtain that hung in the doorless gap between the bookcases, and Paston followed him.

  He found himself in a Smallish room, too lofty for its size. Such light as there was came from a green-shaded lamp that stood on a small table beside an ancient leather-covered arm-chair drawn up to the hearth. The lamp threw a small circle of gentle light on to the chair; the rest of the room was in a dim, warm gloom, for the fire in the old-fashioned grate was low.

  Serge curtains were drawn carelessly across a long French window on the wall opposite the doorway by which they had entered, and beside them was a half-open door through which the corner of a sink was visible. Piles of dusty books filled the corners of the floor. A small kitchen table covered with a coarse blue and white checked table-cloth occupied the centre of the room, and was the only bit of furniture in the place that was not cumbered with books. The fire-place under its white marble mantel-piece was a beautiful bit of wrought-ironwork with high hobs at either side, on one of which a black earthenware tea-pot stood warming, and on the other a heavy, willow-pattern plate.

  Upon the opposite side of the hearth to the arm-chair was a big, broken-springed, leather-covered sofa.

  ‘If you will be so good as to take a seat—’ the bookseller said. Hugh Paston sat down and found it much better than the chairs in his own house. He sank back into its roomy depths and relaxed. ‘I am afraid I am keeping you from your supper,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all,’ said the bookseller, ‘I haven’t begun to cook it yet. I have only made the tea. Might I — er — offer you a cup, if you would honour me? It seems a pity to let it stew and be wasted.’

  Hugh Paston accepted, not wishing to hurt his feelings. Tea was not one of his beverages at the best of times.

  The bookseller produced two large white cups with narrow gold lines round them and an odd little gold flower at the bottom of each. Hugh remembered having seen similar ones in the potting-shed of his boyhood’s home. He believed they were used for measuring out weed-killer and insecticides. At any rate, no human being drank out of them. Into these roomy receptacles went some milk from a bottle. Soft sugar was shovelled in with what looked like a lead spoon, and then a stream of rich mahogany fluid was applied from the broken spout of the black tea-pot.

  ‘This—’ said the bookseller, handing him a cup, ‘is a man’s drink.’

  It was hot. It was Strong. And altogether it bore not the remotest likeness to tea as it was understood in his wife’s drawing-room.

  Hugh Paston had no means of knowing that shortly before his visit the vulturine bookseller had bought his usual evening paper, and had found an illustration in which the Press photographer had been lucky enough to catch one face clearly — the face of the chief mourner at a certain sensational funeral, and, staring at it, had murmured to himself:

  ‘Poor devil!’

  The old man had eyes of a very light bright blue, deep-set under superciliary ridges like a gorilla, and over-hung by eyebrows that would have Served most folk for a moustache. He was clean-shaven, and his tanned leathery skin hung about his chops in folds, after the manner of a blood hound.

  Hugh Paston, at first sight, had taken him to be somewhere in the eighties; but in actual fact he was a battered and dilapidated sixty-five, looking much older than he need on account of his dressing-gown, a garment usually associated with the infirm.

  He, for his part, looking at the man opposite him, judged him to be in the early thirties, but that whatever might be his actual age, he would never look a young man again. He wondered whether he had been deeply in love with the woman who had died with her lover, and surmised that he had not. There was a hungry and restless look about his face that is not seen on the face of men who have loved, even if they have been crossed in love. This was a man, he thought, who was unfulfilled. Life had given him everything he wanted and nothing he needed. Lack of spiritual vitamins and a rachitic soul, was his diagnosis. He judged that there was too much idealism in this man to start him drinking, but that he would prove rash and erratic in all his doings unless a steadying hand were laid on him at the present juncture. He was watching his visitor carefully, and observed that he was settling down and relaxing, and being not without experience in the ups and downs of life himself, knew that a reaction was on its way, and the fellow would soon feel more dead than alive. He wondered what could be done to tide him over his
bad patch.

  ‘I wonder if I might offer you some supper. It is getting late, and — I don’t know about you but I am getting hungry.’

  ‘Yes, now you mention it, so am I.’

  The old man moved off through the door beside the French window, and Paston saw a little built-on kitchenette, small as a ship’s galley. The pop of gas indicated a gas-stove behind the door, and in a few moments there was a noble Sputtering.

  The old man came in with a second plate and put it to warm beside the fire. The heavy black kettle was restored to the hob.

  ‘Eggs and bacon suit you?’ he inquired.

  ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  In a surprisingly short space of time the bookseller reappeared with a loaded tin tea-tray and began to shuffle a miscellaneous collection on to the table in the middle of the room. Hugh Paston thought he had never smelt anything so good in his life as that bacon, or seen anything that looked as attractive as the crisp edges of the fried eggs as the bookseller served them out of the frying-pan in which they had cooked.

  They fell to. The old man did not seem disposed to talk, and Hugh Paston, who felt as if he had not had a meal for a week, did not feel disposed to either. They ate in silence. At the conclusion of the meal his host put the black tea-pot back in its place on the hob and filled it up from the kettle. Then he shuffled everything on to the tray with a terrific clatter and deposited his load in the kitchen. Then he returned to the now blazing fire and began to fill his pipe.

  Hugh Paston was half asleep over his cigarette, his feet stretched out on the fireside stool and a cup of the well-stewed tea beside him. The events of the last painful days, even his married life with Frida, seemed to have slid into the remote backward and abyss of time. The old bookseller, looking at him, saw that he was more disposed to go to sleep than to do anything else. He rose, went to the window, drew back the curtain and peered out into the darkness. Nothing was to be seen. Rain ran in long streaks down the glass. A furious draught drove through the cracks and swayed the tassel on the cord of an undrawn blind.