There’s a scene in Dion Fortune’s occult novel The Sea Priestess that has always puzzled me. The two protagonists, Wilfred Maxwell and Vivien Le Fay Morgan (alternatively: Morgan Le Fay), are engaged in constructing a sea temple where Morgan is to conduct a lunar ritual in honor of the Goddess Isis. Halfway through the book, though, they pause building the temple in order to perform a divinatory ritual called the Fire of Azrael. The Fire of Azrael has always seemed odd to me, out of place with the rest of the novel’s events, and the purpose of this passage in the book—lovely though it is—has never been clear to me.

In the ritual, Wilfred and Morgan build a bonfire and gaze into it to receive a vision of the mythic past: “She asked me if one day I would like to look in the coals of the fire of Azrael, and I asked her what it meant; and she said that one made a fire of certain woods, and gazed into the embers as it died down and saw therein the past that was dead.”^[1] According to Morgan, the Fire of Azrael must be built from three types of wood: Cedar, sandalwood, and juniper. The ritual itself is named after the angel Azrael, the Jewish angel of death, whom Aleister Crowley associates with the Path of Nun (Death) on the Qabalistic Tree of Life.^[2]

The odd thing about this ritual is that it’s unclear why those woods, specifically, should be required. Fortune was careful with the placement of esoteric symbolism in her novels, intending them to be used as a training guide for students in her Fraternity of Inner Light. She wrote that

It is because my novels are packed with such things as these (symbolism directed to the subconscious) that I want my students to take them seriously. The `Mystical Qabalah’ gives the theory, but the novels give the practice  . . .  those who study the ‘Mystical Qabalah’ with the help of the novels get the keys of the Temple put into their hands.^[3]

However, she is curiously silent on the significance and magical properties of the three woods in the Fire of Azrael. She gives no explanation for the cedar and sandalwood, and of the juniper she says only that “It is the tree of the old gods, more ancient than oak or ash, the Nordic hawthorn or the Keltic mistletoe, for it was a sacred tree to the people of the river-drift  . . .  they it was who worshipped the Mother Goddess.”^[4] Beyond this vague association of juniper with the Goddess, though, Fortune offers no insight into the woods being used in the ritual or why they were chosen.

This is quite uncharacteristic of her. As almost all of the imagery in the novel is overtly Qabalistic, we might be tempted to think that the three woods in the Fire of Azrael are chosen for Qabalistic reasons, but that line of thinking proves unfruitful. There is no mention of juniper anywhere in Fortune’s own The Mystical Qabalah, nor in Crowley’s Liber 777. Crowley does identify sandalwood and cedar as Qabalistic perfumes, but not in any way that meaningfully corresponds to the magical work being done in the Fire of Azrael ritual: Sandalwood is assigned to the Path of Daleth (associated with Venus and the Empress card from the Tarot), and cedar to Chesed (the Sephirah of mercy).^[5] Neither of these has a magical association with death, the past, or scrying. In The Mystical Qabalah, Fortune herself mentions cedar and sandalwood only once, writing that they are examples of “Dionysiac odours of the aromatic, spicy type” that “awaken the subconscious mind.”^[6] While this could plausibly make them useful for a divinatory ritual, it seems that any spicy-scented wood would meet the criteria; there is not a clear reason why it would have to be these two, in particular, used in the Fire of Azrael.

It turns out—or at least, I’m going to allege—that this combination of woods is Biblical in origin. Cedar, juniper, and sandalwood are the three woods used in the construction of King Solomon’s temple, as described in the books I Kings and II Chronicles:

Solomon sent this message to Hiram king of Tyre: “Send me cedar logs as you did for my father David when you sent him cedar to build a palace to live in. Now I am about to build a temple for the name of the LORD my God  . . .  Send me also cedar, juniper and algum logs from Lebanon, for I know that your servants are skilled with cutting timber there. My servants will work with yours to provide me with plenty of lumber, because the temple I build must be large and magnificent.^[7]

The “algum” mentioned here is a Hebrew word, םימוגלא, which has no clear English translation, and Biblical scholars are at odds as to what plant it refers to. However, a number of scholars have suggested that algum is the red sandalwood, and this view is widespread to this day.^[8] The identification of algum with sandalwood was certainly already popular by the time of The Sea Priestess’s writing: An 1898 article in The Expository Times comments on “the opinion of ‘the majority of scholars,’ which inclines to identify ‘almug’ [sic] with red sandalwood.”^[9] While the exact identity of algum in its original context is still open to lively debate, we can confidently assert that Dion Fortune would have known the three building materials used in Solomon’s temple as cedar, juniper, and sandalwood.

What’s more, we know that this is a passage of the Bible that Fortune was familiar with and that she found esoterically significant. She considered Solomon a member the same tradition of Western mysteries to which she belonged, and she identified Solomon’s temple with the temple spaces used by modern esoteric traditions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or her own Fraternity of Inner Light. In The Mystical Qabalah, she writes: “When we read of Solomon sending to Hiram, King of Tyre, for men and materials to aid in the building of the Temple we know that the famous Tyrian mysteries must have profoundly influenced the Hebrew esotericism.”^[10] Although she doesn’t mention the Fire of Azrael’s three woods by name in The Mystical Qabalah, she directly references the Biblical myth that they were drawn from. We know, then, both that Fortune was aware of the woods used in the building of Solomon’s temple and that this story informed her thinking about occultism and mystical experience. The inclusion of these woods in The Sea Priestess is no accident.

We have a link between the Fire of Azrael in The Sea Priestess and the occult theory of The Mystical Qabalah, the sort of link that Fortune had promised when she wrote that reading the two books side-by-side would give us “the keys of the Temple.” Still, the question remains: Why these woods? We’ve identified where they come from, why they’re in this particular combination, and that Fortune was aware of their origin. It’s still not clear, however, why she should put Solomon’s woods in the novel in the context of a divinatory ritual to see “the past that was dead.” What’s the connection there?

Here, I confess that I’m giving way to speculation, as I think there’s no exact way for us to know Fortune’s intentions. However, in The Mystical Qabalah, immediately before speaking of the construction of the temple, Fortune speaks of “The mysterious figure of a great priest-king, ‘born without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning of days nor end of life’  . . .  Generation by generation we trace the intercourse of the princes of Israel with the priest-kings of Egypt.”^[11] She suggests that initiates of the “Hebraic” mysteries (with whom she identifies herself) can only achieve their initiation through the aid of an outsider, a foreign priest-king who offers them exotic wisdom that they must then incorporate into their body of existing knowledge. According to Fortune, “So it is with a tradition: that which is not antagonistic will be assimilated  . . .  we shall equally judge the vitality of a tradition by its power to assimilate. It is only a dead faith which remains uninfluenced by contemporary thought.”^[12] For Solomon, she says, this figure was Hiram, who sent him the woods with which he built his temple; she likewise identifies the Egyptian Pharaoh as playing this role for Moses, and the Babylonian Magi for David.^[13]

We can, perhaps, view the Fire of Azrael in The Sea Priestess as symbolic of this process. Like Solomon sending away to Hiram, Wilfred Maxwell and Morgan Le Fay must seek esoteric wisdom from a foreign land in order to complete their own magical initiatory experience. Burning the three woods of Solomon’s temple in the Fire of Azrael connects them to the myth of Solomon. It allows them to solicit magical counsel from a spiritual contact beyond the sea, just as Solomon sought aid from King Hiram—and once they have received that help, they may complete the construction of their temple and the magical rites they intend to perform therein.

This spiritual contact is, in the novel, the Priest of the Moon: A political and religious leader from the lost continent of Atlantis, who had brought Morgan Le Fay to England in a past life when they fled the destruction of the continent. He is exactly the sort of shadow priest-king that Fortune describes in The Mystical Qabalah, an exotic initiatory guide for the seekers of the Western mysteries. To put an even finer point on the matter, we are told that the Priest of the Moon served at a temple in Atlantis that “was the prototype  . . .  of the Temple of Solomon the King, and all other temples of the Mysteries take after it.”^[14] In the novel, the Priest of the Moon guards the lost secrets of Atlantis, and it is only through the ritual of the Fire of Azrael—by collecting the materials of Solomon’s temple and seeking foreign aid as Solomon himself had done—that Wilfred and Morgan can obtain those secrets and complete their magical work. In short, he is their Hiram.

Though The Sea Priestess is most remembered for the extraordinary lunar ritual at the novel’s climax, most of the book is in fact dedicated to the building of the temple, creating a place that is fit for the mysteries to be performed. This process is both physical and psychic, not just a matter of erecting a building but also of refining Wilfred and Morgan’s souls so that they can do the magical work they have set out to perform. Understood in that context, the ritual of the Fire of Azrael (and the choice of woods burned for the rite) makes perfect sense. It establishes a symbolic and thematic affinity between Solomon’s temple and the sea temple of the novel, and between Solomon himself and the novel’s protagonists. Like Solomon, they are yearning for a deeper wisdom, and they can only attain that wisdom through the aid of a priest-king from a foreign land. And so they call to him, as Solomon did, with cedar, sandalwood, and juniper.

Footnotes