Fornario, is receiving the attention of the authorities at the present time.
Miss Fornario was found lying nude on the bleak hill-side in the lonely island of Iona Round her neck was a cross secured by a silver chain, and near at hand lay a large knife which had been used to cut a large cross in the turf.
On this cross her body was lying.
A resident of London, Miss Fornario seems to have made her way to lona for some purpose connected with occultism.
One of the servants at her house in London stating that a letter had been received saying she had a ‘terrible case of healing on.’ One newspaper report alludes to ‘mysterious stories on the island about blue lights having been seen in the vicinity of where her body was found, and there is also a story of a cloaked man.’ Occultists no less than the general public will await with interest any disclosures that may be forth coming concerning this occurrence.” No disclosures ever were forthcoming, however, and conjecture alone can work upon the case.
One detail only can I add to the brief but comprehensive report of the Occult Review.
The body bore marks of scratches.
I knew Miss Fornario intimately, and at one time we did a good deal of work together, but some three years before her death we went our separate ways and lost sight of each other.
She was half Italian and half English, of unusual intellectual calibre, and was especially interested in the Green Ray elemental contacts; too much interested in them for my peace of mind, and I became nervous and refused to co-operate with her.
I do not object to reasonable risks, in fact one cannot expect to achieve anything worth while in life if one will not take risks, but it appeared to me that “Mac,” as we called her, was going into very deep waters, even when I knew her, and that there was certain to be trouble sooner or later.
She had evidently been on an astral expedition from which she never returned.
She was not a good subject for such experiments, for she suffered from some defect of the pituitary body.
Whether she was the victim of a psychic attack, whether she merely stopped out on the astral too long and her body, of poor vitality in any case, became chilled lying thus exposed in mid-winter, or whether she slipped into one of the elemental kingdoms that she loved, even as Swinburne swam out to sea, who shall say?
The information at our disposal is insufficient for an opinion to be formed.
The facts, however, cannot be questioned, and remain to give sceptics food for thought.
It may be as well to say in concluding this chapter, that when I speak of the experiments of ceremonial magic, I do not mean ritual initiation.
Now a ritual initiation is of course ceremonial magic, and so, for the matter of that, are the sacraments of the Church.
But the occultist, using his terms perhaps somewhat loosely, does not include the initiatory rituals when he speaks of ceremonial magic.
There are many varieties of initiatory ceremonies, but these are all designed to work upon the soul of the candidate only.
Ceremonial magic, on the other hand, in the technical sense of the term, is designed to work upon the soul of nature.
The two operations, although there are innumerable forms of each, are entirely different in type, and aim at, and achieve, entirely different results.
There is a strong prejudice against ritual magic among those interested in popular occultism owing to the strictures passed upon it by Mme Blavatsky.
Now Mine Blavatsky was trained in the Eastern School and had very little, if any, practical acquaintance with the inner aspect of Western Occultism, nor was she a master of its methods.
The doctrine and practice by which the etheric or astral double separates from the physical body, at will or involuntarily, to act, travel, or encounter other entities on a plane subtler than the physical — remaining tethered to the body by a silver cord, and capable of returning physical injury (bruises, exhaustion) sustained while thus projected. Distinct from linga_sharira (the static doctrine that a subtle form persists as a template) in describing its active operative use, and from shamanic_journey (a trance-journey framed within a shamanic ritual complex, undertaken to return with knowledge, songs, or a recovered soul) in being a Western-esoteric technical practice with its own physiology of cord-attachment and reciprocal wounding.
The text mentions an 'astral expedition from which she never returned,' describing a separation of the astral body from the physical.
The ritual admission of an individual into esoteric knowledge or a sacred order through a formal rite of passage — testing, ordeal, or ceremony — marking a definite before/after threshold in the initiate's status and access. Distinct from hidden_sayings (the doctrine being concealed, not the rite of admission to it) and esoteric_lineage (the historical chain of transmission across generations, not a single individual's admission).
The passage explicitly contrasts ceremonial magic with ritual initiation, defining the latter as working upon the soul of the candidate.
The doctrine and practice of one person deliberately inflicting harm on another through trained will, mind-power, or occult technique alone, without physical contact — producing exhaustion, illness, breakdown, or death in the victim; recognised cross-culturally as witchcraft, hexing, or the evil eye, and treated in Western esotericism as a genuine occult hazard requiring diagnosis and defence rather than dismissed as superstition. Distinct from magical_will (the general doctrine that trained volition has causal power, of which this is one malevolent application) and from spirit_conjuration (which subordinates an already-existing summoned spirit, rather than directing the operator's own power at a person).
The author speculates whether Miss Fornario was the victim of a psychic attack as one possible cause of her death.