Monday, September 19, 2005
PSYCHIC MURDER
A reader sent in this odd tale of an unexplained death on the Island of Iona. From The Scotsman:
A WOMAN is found dead on the island of Iona near the Fairy Mound, a place associated locally with magic and dark deeds. She is naked, but for a strange cloak and her feet are bloodied and swollen. In her hands is a knife and her body lies atop a crude cross carved out of the peat. There is a look of terror on her face.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this is the start of a newly discovered Sherlock Holmes story, but these events describe the death in 1929 of Norah Fornario, a clever, but slightly eccentric student of the occult.
Fornario was a member of the Alpha and Omega, an offshoot of the esoteric and theosophical Golden Dawn. These late-19th century societies set up by the occultist Samuel Liddell Mathers promoted western and eastern mysticism. The infamous black magician Aleister Crowley was one of the novices attracted by the colourful rites and promise of power.
Aleister Crowley, known at the time as 'the wickedest man in the world'
Fornario believed she could heal telepathically and was striving to converse with other worlds. One of her friends, Dion Fortune, a high-ranking member of Alpha and Omega, worried that Fornario had become too involved in her craft.
"I do not object to reasonable risks," Fortune wrote in her book Psychic Self Defence, "but it appeared to me that 'mac' as we called her, was going into very deep waters … and there was certain to be trouble sooner or later."
Iona is known today as the "The Cradle of Christianity", but in the 1920s it was popular with occultists and spiritualist. St Columba himself revealed that he had spoken with spirits on the island and it has long been regarded as a place where this world and others are close.
In August 1929, Fornario packed her belongings and travelled to the island for what was clearly to be a long stay. No one knows for certain why she left her London home, but what is known is that she was experimenting with "flight" between worlds. Her former housekeeper was quoted in The Scotsman in 1929 as saying, "Several times she said she had been to the 'far beyond' and had come back to life after spending some time in another world."
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