ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that Dion Fortune's "pagan outlook" in The Winged Bull is not only very different from the frankly outspoken sexual dissidence synonymous with Aleister Crowley or vanguard European aesthetic modernism. The Winged Bull is a deeply inhospitable narrative in the way it renders and polices a dividing-line between the untarnished and the corrupt, the true mage and the cynical huckster. Fortune's occultist cosmology – asserting "hygienic living as the only basis for efficiency" – intersects with, and is complicit in the refinement of, eugenic tropes and discriminatory notions of heredity and ethnicity. Fortune's opening gambit, evoking the long echoing galleries of the British Museum, prepares the ground not only for Murchison's regimen of mystic instruction under Colonel Brangwyn. Brangwyn's exclusionary notion of "hygienic living" forms the basis of what Fortune portrays as a socially sensitive occultist philosophy.
