Book excerpt: Dion Fortune used her occult novels as a vehicle to introduce newcomers into a world of magical beliefs, scattering information and ritual instruction throughout their pages. 'The Goat-Foot God' is one of her most ambitious novels, describing the spiritual awakening of Hugh Paston, a wealthy, bored, boring, and desperately unhappy man. Following his wife's death in a car crash with her lover, Hugh Paston wanders disconsolately into a seedy bookshop, where a phrase in a second-hand book, and an apparently chance meeting with the proprietor, leads him on a quest to discover the true meaning of the Great God Pan. It is a journey that brings him into painful contact with Mona, the bookseller's adopted niece, who helps to awaken memories of past lives that stimulate long-repressed aspects of his psyche. On this journey Paston (and the reader) learn much of the deeper well-springs of Nature, and of the equality of male and female in completing those magical circuits that sustain all aspects of Life.