Occultist and novelist Dion Fortune had been in the Stella Matutina, a Golden Dawn offshoot, and she went on to found her own Fraternity of the Inner Light; like Blavatsky with her hidden ‘Masters’ and the Golden Dawn with its ‘Secret Chiefs’, Fortune was in touch with her ‘Ascended Masters’. Her magical thinking combined the Golden Dawn tradition with more psychoanalytic ideas, and she reformulated Crowley's definition of magick (“the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will”) as “the art of causing changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will.”
Fortune lived in a converted Presbyterian chapel named The Belfry at 11 West Halkin Street, Belgravia (it has subsequently been Anton Mosimann's private restaurant and dining club of the same name). On 30 March 1939 she gave a public talk there, and Crowley went along. “Public Bat No.1 at the Belfry”, he thought. “Like a hippo with false teeth. Talk – bubbling of tinned tomato soup.”
Crowley's relationships with other professional occultists were generally critical or adversarial. In his 1934 diary he encounters a “Dolores del Castro” 77 Holland Park (PAD9343) and notes she is “Crazier than ever – pure pathological lying.” It sounds like the glamorous pseudonym of a prostitute, but it was a name used by the more ‘popular’ occultist Madeline Montalban, later to be known as The Witch of St.Giles.1
As for Dion Fortune, he was on more cordial terms than his ‘bat’ comment might suggest, and as “Mr and Mrs Evans” (her original name was Violet Firth, and she married Tom Evans, a physician) Crowley had Fortune and her husband round to Chester Terrace for chili con carne on the evening of her talk.