On Sunday mornings during the height of the Battle of Britain, several people could be found huddled together in 3 Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater, engaged in an activity most Londoners wouldn’t have recognized as part of the war effort. Imagining themselves part of the “group soul of the race,” these otherwise respectable citizens visualized “angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth of our land.” Further meditations had them patrolling mine fields off the coast of Norway and performing astral commando raids on high-ranking Nazis. This magical effort against Hitler and Co. continued throughout the war, and although its effect on the dark forces of National Socialism may be doubted, the earnestness of those participating was unquestionable. The fact that during the Blitz not one but two German bombs fell on the headquarters of the Fraternity of Light—the group behind this spiritual resistance movement—might suggest that the Führer recognized the threat and tried to eradicate it. The further fact that those engaged in these etheric expeditions spoke of astral dogfights and mystical punch-ups might also suggest that there was more behind them than just patriotic wishful thinking.
The leader of this occult National Guard was at any rate very familiar with magical battles. In fact, it was through one such row itself that she first became involved in the occult. Having learned early on how to defend herself from psychic attack, and having devoted many years to mastering the mystic arts, by the time Hitler made a bid to annex Britain she undoubtedly felt capable of defending not only herself, but her nation. The name of this remarkable character was Dion Fortune, and she was one of the most brilliant figures of twentieth-century esotericism.
This, however, was not her name at birth, or at least not at her first one. The individual who took the name “Dion Fortune” at her second, magical birth was christened Violet Mary Firth and was born in Llandudno, North Wales, on December 6, 1890. As is true of many esoteric figures, little is known of Violet’s early years; as one writer remarks, she “obscured the details of her life and the true nature of her personality behind a cloak of glamour and illusion,” something that could be said of other occult figures, like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. Her father came from the prosperous steelmaking Firth family of Sheffield. Arthur Firth didn’t follow this line, becoming a solicitor, although by the time of Violet’s birth, he was running the Craigside Hydropathic Establishment in Llandudno, having already run a similar spa-hotel in Bath—an apt career, perhaps, for the father of someone for whom the sea would be a central symbol of mystery, magic, and power.
Violet’s mother, Sarah, was a Christian Scientist, and in her early years Violet, too, felt the impact of Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas. But there were other, stranger experiences that presaged Violet’s life to come. At the age of four, she began to have visions of a past life in Atlantis. She saw, she said, “pictures that formed themselves unbidden in the mind in that interval between the putting out of the nursery light and the oncoming of sleep”—what we would call hypnagogic hallucinations. She speaks of a “sandy foreshore” and a level plain, with great mountains rising sharply in the distance, of a river and strange trees that it wasn’t safe to go near, of dangerous beasts in the river and equally dangerous people, of grassy vegetation, an indigo sky and a copper-colored sun. Were these images of an actual past life, or psychic postcards from the Jungian collective unconscious? Or were they the kind of fantasies an imaginative and lonely little girl might entertain herself with? Whatever the nature of these strange visions, they stayed with Violet throughout her life and led her to believe that her true home wasn’t in a sleepy seaside resort, but in some lost world that she could return to only through her imagination. In later years, although she claimed that she wasn’t “naturally psychic,” Fortune would channel a remarkable work of occult metaphysics, The Cosmic Doctrine, which was “received” in 1923 but not published until 1949, after her death. This was her attempt at doing what Madame Blavatsky had done in The Secret Doctrine: reveal the hidden structure of the cosmos. Although The Cosmic Doctrine remains a difficult work and is generally read by serious devotees only, it suggests that the visions of some other life that haunted the young Violet were not mere preschool make-believe, but an early expression of her strange ability to enter and make herself at home in other worlds.
But although the young Violet had visions of prehistoric Atlantis, and at fourteen was writing poems about the sea, her real introduction to the mystic path came in her early twenties and in a drearily mundane context. When Violet turned twenty, her parents decided to enroll her in a residential college. The Studley Horticultural and Agricultural College is said to have offered places to “young ladies with slight emotional problems.” From the little we know about Violet’s teens, we get the impression of an imaginative, withdrawn, somewhat snobbish (“I have a constitutional repulsion for ‘crushes,’” she wrote, “and give them scant politeness”), highly intelligent, and creative woman who, like many others, had to find a place for herself in the world. Violet would find her path at Studley, but not in the way she, or anyone else, might have imagined.
The Warden of Studley College was a pioneering female doctor named Lilias Anna Hamilton. She had traveled in Afghanistan—where she had been court physician to the emir—and India, where she had learned techniques of mental domination that made her a terror to the students. Violet had been at the school only a short time when the Warden asked her to give false evidence against an employee she had illegally fired. Violet was reluctant, but Hamilton’s insistence and powers of persuasion overcame her scruples. Her method was to stare at Violet and simply repeat her commands; after the interview, Violet felt dazed and exhausted and slept for fifteen hours. Other incidents occurred, with Violet reluctantly complying, until the Warden turned her sights on an elderly woman, seeking control over her finances. Violet informed the woman of the scheme and hastily got her away and into the safekeeping of her relatives.
When Violet realized the Warden knew of her part in this rescue, she decided to leave the school before she herself fell victim to her powers. A fellow student who had felt Hamilton’s wrath advised her to leave without seeing the Warden again. “You will not get away if you don’t. I have tried several times and I cannot,” she said. Violet was troubled by this advice but was determined to tell the Warden what she thought of her. When she did, Hamilton agreed to her leaving, but then adopted her Svengali pose and insisted: “You are incompetent and you know it. You have no self-confidence and you have to admit it.” She repeated this mantra for the next four hours, with Violet transfixed and unable to break away. She knew that if she agreed with the Warden, her “nerve would be broken” and she would be useless in life. “By the time one realizes it that something abnormal” is going on, she wrote, one is more or less “glamoured” and “one cannot move or turn away.” Eventually Violet heard a voice suggesting she pretend to accept the Warden’s terms, otherwise she would end up like the girl who had warned her. She did, even going down on her knees to ask forgiveness. This satisfied the Warden, who let her go. Violet had entered the room a “strong and healthy girl” and left it a “mental and physical wreck.” She stayed that way for three years.
Determined to understand what had happened, Violet began to study psychology. By this time she had moved to London and was taking classes in psychoanalysis at the University of London and had joined the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square; she may also have worked at the Tavistock Clinic. The Theosophical Society had recently started a club near Brunswick Square, and Violet started visiting, not because of a real interest in Theosophy, but because they offered cheap meals. As a Freudian, she dismissed Theosophists as cranks, but when, for fun, she attended a meditation class, something odd happened. She saw a distinct image of a garden with blue flowers right before her eyes, rather like the hypnagogic images of Atlantis she saw as a child. When the instructor remarked that she had been trying to project the mental image of delphiniums, Violet realized that some kind of thought transference had happened. Earlier she had noticed that some of her patients seem to “drain” her of energy and that they even seemed to suck power out of electronic equipment. They acted, she thought, as some kind of vampire, something Freudian theory couldn’t explain. She attended more lectures at the Theosophical Society and realized that Freud’s ideas were too narrow. Something else was needed, and she soon found it.
Although Fortune’s later work drew on psychoanalysis, producing what some have called a psychologized occultism, she dropped out of the clinic and, as World War I had begun, joined the Women’s Land Army. Her time at Studley served her well, and she was put to work for the Food Production Department of the Ministry of Agriculture. Here she discovered a means of making milk from soybeans and even wrote a book about it, The Soya Bean (1925), but failed to capitalize on a discovery that could have made her rich. Her job for the Land Army required long hours of observing bacteria, and in the quiet stretches her vision turned inward. Again, something strange happened: her “astral sight” had opened, and the experience was disturbing. At the Theosophical Society she read Annie Besant’s The Ancient Wisdom (1897). Much as Besant, a Fabian Socialist, had been converted after meeting Madame Blavatsky, Fortune was suddenly convinced of the reality of the Masters, superhuman beings who guided humanity in its evolution. For the next ten days, she entered a weird “astral” dimension, the experience culminating in a visitation by Jesus. Other Masters appeared—Melchizedek, “Lord of Flame and Mind”; Thomas Erskine, a Lord Chancellor in Dr. Johnson’s time; Sir Thomas More—and in one vision they accepted her as a student.
With the end of the war, Violet left the Land Army. It was around this time that she met the Irish Freemason and occultist Theodore William Moriarty, the model for her psychic detective in The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926), her collection of occult short stories. Violet joined the group of students, mostly women, who belonged to Moriarty’s Science, Arts, and Crafts Society, and in the introduction to her Dr. Taverner stories, she writes that he was “the greatest mind I ever met” and that she owed “the greatest debt of my life” to him. “Without ‘Dr. Taverner,’” she writes, “there would have been no Dion Fortune.” Her Cosmic Doctrine is based on Moriarty’s rare book Aphorisms of Creation and Cosmic Principles (1923). Moriarty himself died of angina pectoris under mysterious circumstances in a hotel in King’s Lynn in August 1923, and Fortune was supposed to have received the messages from the inner planes that make up her book not long after his death. Some have suggested that Fortune simply took Moriarty’s work and, after his death, “improved” on it. Whatever the truth, The Cosmic Doctrine remains a controversial work in several ways. The occult historian Francis King thought it had much value, while the occult artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun thought it was rubbish.
Strangely enough, The Cosmic Doctrine got Violet into trouble with her next magical group. While still studying with Moriarty, Violet renewed an old friendship with Maiya Curtis-Webb (later Maiya Tranchell-Hayes), a friend of the family. Maiya, like Moriarty, was an occultist, and she introduced Violet to the occult novelist J. W. Brodie-Innes, who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s Amen Ra Temple. The original Golden Dawn numbered W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley among its members, but by this time it had split into competing groups. In 1919, Violet Firth was initiated into the Golden Dawn, taking “Deo, non fortuna” (“by God, not by luck”) as her magical motto; it was, as it happened, the Firth family motto as well. This soon morphed into Dion Fortune.
Another Golden Dawn temple was run by Moina Mathers, widow of S. L. MacGregor Mathers, one of the original group’s leaders. Although at first friendly to Dion, even agreeing with her idea to start a more public occult group to attract more members (what would become the Fraternity of the Inner Light), Moina soon developed a more critical attitude. What troubled her were the articles Dion had published in the Occult Review, which later became her book Sane Occultism (1929). Arguing that an “immense mass of verbiage has gathered around the Sacred Science since Madame Blavatsky drew back the curtain of the Sanctuary,” and asking why occultism had produced “such a crop of charlatans and few, if any, intellects of the first water,” Fortune’s articles didn’t win her many friends, and among those she angered was Moina Mathers. Mathers was also angry that in Fortune’s early work The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage (1924), a book that dealt, however mutely, with the question of sex and the occult, she had revealed certain magical secrets that she had no right to communicate. Fortune sidestepped this when she argued that as she had yet to be introduced to these secrets—she was not yet of that grade—she couldn’t very well reveal them. But the real reason behind the tension was that Fortune’s energy, drive, and superior attitude rubbed many people the wrong way, and Moina, an older woman, felt threatened by her. It also can’t have helped that Fortune had written that the Golden Dawn was being led by “widows and grey-bearded ancients.” When Moina saw a rough draft of The Cosmic Doctrine, she declared that it was inconsistent with Golden Dawn teachings and added the trenchant criticism that “certain symbols had not appeared” in Fortune’s aura. Moina gave Fortune an ultimatum: either forget her revelations and get back in line, or leave. Fortune left.
In Psychic Self-Defense (1930), Fortune describes an astral battle between herself and Moina Mathers. This time, however, she was no longer a “shy, vulnerable adolescent” but a “strong, magnetic leader.” After writing of the “abuses prevalent in occult fraternities,” Fortune received a letter warning her of the consequences if she continued her exposé. Believing her work was inspired by the Masters, Dion stuck to her guns. The result was a prolonged attack that only ended with an astral catfight between her and Moina.
Demon faces appeared, and Fortune and those around her suffered from a feline infestation: the headquarters of her Fraternity of Light and its neighbors were overrun by mobs of black cats. The place was filled with “the horrible stench of the brutes,” and at their day-job offices, members of the group found “the same penetrating reek of the tom-cat.” Astral cats appeared, too, and one morning after breakfast Fortune was confronted by “a giant tabby…twice the size of a tiger.” The invasion ended after Fortune performed an exorcism, but she was soon grappling with her enemy anew. During an essential astral journey, Fortune encountered Moina, dressed in the robes of her grade. She refused Fortune right of way, and a battle ensued. Moina won the first round, throwing Fortune back into her body, which somersaulted over her followers, who had gathered in a vigil. Remembering her lesson with the Warden, Fortune got back on the astral plane and this time won the tussle. But that night she discovered that her back was covered with the scratch of a “gigantic cat.” Later, Fortune also believed that Moina was responsible for the death of her friend Netta Fornario, an artist and occultist who was found dead on the Scottish isle of Iona. Her nude body was also found covered in scratches, lying in a ritual position on a cross cut into the turf. Moina, however, had been dead herself for eighteen months by the time Fornario, who seems to have been a depressed personality, apparently committed suicide. Fortune would no doubt have argued that committing murder from the afterlife would not have been beyond the powers or vindictiveness of her Hermetic nemesis.
The battle with Moina Mathers seemed to mark a new beginning for Fortune. Along with the house in Bayswater, she set up occult camp in Glastonbury, in a spot near Chalice Well and the Tor, in a house that was later bought by the writer Geoffrey Ashe. She had already met and worked with Bligh Bond, who had excavated the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, supposedly with the help of the spirit of one of its deceased monks, and together they contacted inner entities she called “the Watchers of Avalon.” Glastonbury became a symbol of the “mystical nationalism” that fueled her later anti-Nazi activities and expressed her aim to resuscitate the Western esoteric tradition, as opposed to Theosophy’s very popular Eastern variants; it’s no surprise that she left the Theosophical Society in 1927. Fortune thought much about race—too much for our tastes these days. She believed that the Western soul was unsuited for Eastern esoteric disciplines, and she wanted to provide access to our own homegrown spiritual traditions. In the decade that followed, she produced an impressive body of work, which included at least two classics. One is The Mystical Qabalah (1935), to my mind the most readable and straightforward exposition of the West’s fundamental esoteric philosophy, in which she draws on the work of both MacGregor Mathers and Crowley. The other is perhaps her finest work in occult fiction, The Sea Priestess (1938), in which a humdrum estate agent’s life is transformed by an affair with a modern-day priestess of Isis. At the time, Fortune had to self-publish it because witchcraft laws were still on the books in England, and the novel was considered too controversial by mainstream publishers. Many have come to an appreciation of the Western inner path through reading Fortune’s fiction, and in novels like The Demon Lover (1927), The Winged Bull (1935), The Goat-Foot God (1936) and Moon Magic (1956)—her last book, whose final chapters were alleged to have been channeled—Fortune communicates in clear and evocative prose the essence of her spiritual vision.
The time also marked a change in her personal life. In 1927 she married Thomas Penry Evans, a Welsh physician, who had his own mystical path; Fortune called him “Merl” after Merlin. Although they shared magical pursuits, the two did not seem well matched. Fortune was a large, mannish, “Viking-like woman,” and, like so many occultists—Madame Blavatsky, Crowley, Gurdjieff, Manly P. Hall—she put on weight in her later years. Evans was a small, dark Celt. Sex was never a major part of the union, nor even a minor one; again, like Madame Blavatsky, Fortune seemed to disdain it, although it runs as a magical current through her novels, and the discerning reader can chart the fortunes of her marriage in them. Fortune was the dominant and older partner, and accounts are that she bossed Evans constantly; the occultists Kenneth Grant and Israel Regardie both report that she henpecked him “unmercifully.” Fortune seems to have overcompensated for her treatment at the Studley agricultural college; according to Grant, she grew “very partial to the idea of power” and “did not scruple to tell her followers how they should arrange their private lives.” In 1939, Evans left her for a younger woman. The divorce was amicable.
In later years Fortune’s work increasingly focused on trance mediumship and contacting the Masters on the inner planes. In the early 1930s, she leased a house near London’s Belgrave Square called the Belfry, where she performed the rites of Isis that would find fictional expression in Moon Magic. Her following in the Fraternity grew and would eventually include such later magical authorities as W. E. Butler, W. G. Gray, and Gareth Knight.
When World War II broke out, Fortune turned her powers toward protecting the Sceptered Isle, whose spiritual tradition she had spent decades promulgating; and from Bayswater, Glastonbury, and other points in besieged Britain, she had her students radiate psychic energies, hoping to keep the dark forces at bay. Whether it was this effort or the work of a black magician in Hitler’s inner circle who, she believed, directed baleful energies at her, the war years saw her health decline. Many who knew her in her last years said she was a “burnt out shell.” One of these was the late Kenneth Grant, who said that when he met her in 1945, she “was close to death and had lost much of her physical force and vigor.” Grant believed Fortune was “the magical Shakti of the New Age,” linking her to Crowley’s vision of a “new aeon”; and he describes some late meetings between Fortune and Crowley, a magician she had steered clear of in her early years. Apparently they corresponded, and Grant recalled a “stack of Crowley/Fortune letters” that allegedly met an unfortunate fate. After Crowley’s death in 1947, the letters were sent to Karl Germer, then head of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Germer later moved to California and made the mistake of living near some of Charles Manson’s Family. Some of the Family burgled his home and, among other items, took Crowley’s letters. These were then lost in a fire started at the Family home by a disgruntled junior member. Whatever the truth of this tale, my suspicion is that, if the letters existed, they were probably no great esoteric loss: Crowley’s letters are generally about himself, and his missives to Fortune would probably be of the same stamp. For researchers and biographers, of course, it’s a different matter.
Toward the end, Fortune visited a Jungian analyst; she felt she was moving toward some great crisis in her life and needed guidance. She was obese, unkempt, alone, and surrounded by students of a dubious quality—a common fate for esoteric teachers. The analyst found much darkness in her dreams. She contracted blood poisoning from a badly extracted tooth, and it is unclear if it was this, or the leukemia she was diagnosed with, that killed her. On January 8, 1946, Dion Fortune passed through “the gates of death,” as one of her posthumously published books is entitled. She was fifty-five and one of the last great occultists from the Golden Age of modern esotericism. Her influence continues today in various forms, inspiring Wicca, mystical feminism, and other movements. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s bestseller The Mists of Avalon owes much, it is said, to Fortune. And her fraternity—now known as the Society of the Inner Light—carries on.
If Fortune started out wondering why occultism had produced “few intellects of the first water,” a look at her career suggests that, in at least one instance, it had.