Psychic Self-Defence

Fortune opens not with ghosts but with a claim about how the world is built. Atoms, she says, do not arrange themselves into living tissue by their own nature. Something organises them, and that something is not physical. "We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive."

She calls this the mind-side of nature, and she sees three kinds of traffic in it. Some beings live there "as fish live in the sea". Trained people can enter it the way a diver goes down to the ocean-bed. And sometimes, like a low country when the sea-dykes break, it floods in on ordinary lives.

Normally none of this touches you, and the reason is almost comic: our very incapacity to perceive is the protection. The dyke is our own dullness, and most of the time it holds.

If the dyke usually holds, when does it give? Fortune names four conditions in which the veil may be rent. You find yourself in a place where these forces are concentrated. You meet people who handle them. You go out to meet the Unseen out of interest and get out of your depth before you know it. Or a pathological condition tears the veil from inside.

The first is the quietest. A person who is sensitive but not psychic moves into a charged house. She sees nothing and hears nothing. She simply feels oppressed and unwell, and the feeling lifts whenever she goes somewhere else.

Because she never names it, Fortune warns, the condition may never be detected and can lead to "years of ill-health and misery".

None of this makes the Unseen wicked. Fortune is firm about it: its forces are no more hostile than water or fire. They are simply potent. Run against them and you get hurt, the way you get burned, because you broke a natural law, not because anything was out to get you.

Her own image does the work. "The Threshold of the Unseen is a treacherous coast", full of potholes, currents and quicksands. A strong swimmer who knows the coast can bathe there in comparative safety. Someone who cannot swim, trusting nothing but his own impulses, may pay for it with his life.

So where does real malice come in? Only through people. The Unseen turns hostile, she says, when it has been corrupted by those initiates call adepts of the Left-hand Path.

In Fortune's view, when does the Unseen become evil and hostile to humanity?

• When unscrupulous people have corrupted and perverted it✓Correct answer
• Whenever an untrained person happens to perceive it
• Whenever someone breaks one of its natural laws
• Always, because its forces are opposed to us by nature

Fortune says the Unseen is only hostile once adepts of the Left-hand Path have corrupted it. Breaking its laws does bring harm, but in the way fire burns a careless hand, with no hostility behind it.

Fortune's rule for everything that follows comes straight from medicine: diagnosis must precede treatment. There are many kinds of psychic attack, and the method that disposes of one will be useless against another. Reach for the wrong remedy and you waste the thing a frightened person has least of, which is time.

Diagnosis also means asking whether anyone meant it at all. Not every attack is deliberately motived. Some harm is closer to an injury inflicted by a skidding car: real, damaging, and nobody's intention.

That changes the first question. Before anyone is cast as a persecutor, the job is to find out what is actually happening, what kind of thing it is, and where it seems to come from.

The first sign is rarely an event. It is a mood. Fortune calls a sense of fear and oppression "one of the surest signs" that an attack is coming, and she says it almost never arrives out of the blue. You are not living normally one day and in the middle of an invisible battle the next.

Her explanation is psychological, and it is the most modern sentence in the chapter: we perceive subconsciously before we realise consciously. The influence reaches the deep mind first. What you notice is a line of creeping shade rising from below, a dread with no object.

An approaching influence, as she puts it, casts its shadow on consciousness before it shows itself in any way an ordinary person would recognise.