Dion Fortune - Dion Fortunes Book of the Dead

Machinery of the Mind

The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage

Psychology of the Servant Problem

The Soya Bean

Esoteric Orders and their Work

The Problem of Purity

Sane Occultism

Training and Work of an Initiate

Mystical Meditations on the Collects

Spiritualism in the Light of Occult Science

Psychic Self-Defense

GlastonburyAvalon of the Heart

The Mystical Qabalah

Practical Occultism in Daily Life

The Cosmic Doctrine

Applied Magic

Aspects of Occultism

The Magical Battle of Britain

The Demon Lover

The Secrets of Dr Taverner

Goat-Foot God

The Winged Bull

The Sea Priestess

Moon Magic

This edition first published in 2005 by

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

York Beach, ME

With offices at:

368 Congress Street

Boston, MA 02210

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 1995, 2000 Society of Inner Light, London

Introduction to the 2005 edition 2005 Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. First published as Through the Gates of Death in 1930. Revised edition first published in 1995 by SIL Trading Ltd., London.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the original paperback edition as follows: 99-053446

ISBN 1-57863-336-2

Typeset in AGaramond 12/15 by Garrett Brown

Printed in Canada

TCP

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

D ion Fortune originally published this book as Through the Gates of Death, in 1930. In the seventy odd years since Fortune's book first came out, attitudes toward death have changed considerably and not at all. Much has been written about the meaning and ritual practices of death. We tend to know more medically and spiritually about it. But by in large, we still leave death up to the expertsthe death of loved ones as well as our own.

In her 1963 expos, The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford charged the North American death-care industry with preying on the grief, guilt, remorse, and confusion of the newly bereaved through the production of lavish sham rituals where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying. Coffins become sleep chambers, hearses are coaches, flowers are floral tributes, corpses are loved ones, cremated ashes are cremains, grief therapy is provided for, and the psychological importance of the memory picturethe last glimpse of the deceased in an open casketis stressed. No law requires embalming.... The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container.

Mitford found the American funeral to be in the service of nothing so much as the death-care industry's limitless drive for profit. That drive has gone largely unimpeded because of our tendency to approach the reality of death by mostly wishing it would go away. By remaining ignorant of what to do and how to behave, of what's expected, what's appropriate, what's even legal and/or necessary when someone we love dies, we leave ourselves wide open to the sweettalking fraud and final bill of the so-called expert.

We let them handle it because we do not want to face it.

Mitford's book resulted in legislation getting passed and certain practices being shaved back by funeral sellers, but thirty-five years later, in The American Way of Death Revisited, Mitford reported that a simple cremation can now cost you $1000 and that the death-care industry is securely in the hands of multinational corporations.

Because we still do not want to face it.

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross took on the death taboo with a book she wrote in defiance of what she recognized as our widespread denial of death. In On Death and Dying, she interviewed hundreds of patients diagnosed with terminal diseases. This was in the sixties, when the truth about patient diagnoses was still routinely being kept from both patients and their families. She asked why this was so. Was it for the mental well-being of the patient? Of the family? Or because some doctors had problems of their own with the realities of death?

We're all terminal; it's just a matter of timing, goes the joke. Life ends. We know that. But what happens next? Theories vary. Western religions teach of an afterlifeheaven, purgatory, hell. Eastern religions have another take. Near the end of the seventies, when KublerRoss got interested in mysticism and spirituality, she came to wonder out loud if death existed at all, if maybe the dying didn't simply pass from one world into another.

At about the same time, Raymond Moody, Jr. published Life After Life, an exploration of the similarities he found in the stories of those who died and came back. According to Moody, the accounts of Near Death Experiences all share at least twelve out of fifteen elementsthe noise, the tunnel, the others, a being of light, a life review, the crossing of a border/line/limit/door/ditch, after which there can be no turning back. The commonality of these and nine other features led to the coinage of a New Age acronym NDE, which, mistakenly or not, has come to stand for the promise of a continuity of consciousness from life into death.

So, we've come some distance in our understanding of life and death, but still most of us will end up dying isolated in hospital beds, too doped up on medication to notice when our consciousness shifts from this world into the next, if that's what happens. We'll never know.

Why? Because we still leave death up to the so-called experts. Why? Because we are afraid. Is there anything to be afraid of?

Dion Fortune says no.

In fact, she says that to become aware of what happens at death is not only an opportunity to improve the transition for ourselves and for our loved ones, it is the responsibility of the living to the dying at the time of death to understand the process the soul is going through in order to help. How can we know how to help if we don't know what they are going through? Why, if we know what they are going through, would we not want to help?

There is nothing to be afraid of. It's that simple. Dion Fortune's Book of the Dead is a guidebook as surely as is The Egyptian Book of the Dead or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's purpose is the same. In these pages you'll discover what happens at the time of death, what you can do, what you needn't/shouldn't do. In simple steps, Fortune teaches us how best to help facilitate the changes that the soul goes through at death. Our job as the living is to help the soul of the dying make a smooth transition.

Fortune shows how certain traditional customs connected with the passing of a soul have their roots in what she calls psychic fact. The custom of placing candles and fresh flowers in the death chamber as soon as the soul has departed, for instance, is based on the fact that there is a brief interregnum between the disanimation of the physical body and the withdrawal of the soul from the etheric double during which the soul remains close to the physical body, gradually disentangling itself from the meshes of matter and reorienting itself to its new state.

Thus cut off from its supply of prana or etheric vitality, the etheric body will draw this vitality from whatever source is availableincluding grievers. Loved ones in particular are susceptible to this form of depletion and can be drained dry in their ignorance. But the unguarded flame of a burning candle and a vase of fresh flowers in the room will supply enough etheric emanations to meet the needs of the etheric double.