Mysterious People 

Dion Fortune - Occult Pioneer

The daughter of a solicitor, Dion Fortune was born Violet Mary Firth, on 6th December 1890, in Bryn-y-Bia, Llandudno, North Wales. The family moved to Somerset when Violet was twelve and by the time she was fourteen they had converted to Christian Science. Subsequently they lived in various parts of London (where Violet's mother Sarah Jane practised as a Christian Science healer), then moved to Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Violet was highly imaginative as a child and had some literary talent, as is shown by the publication of one of her poems, along with her portrait, in a national magazine called 'The Girl's Realm' in 1906.
In the summer of 1911, when Violet was twenty, her parents decided to enrol her at a residential college. Although Studley Horticultural College in Warwickshire offered places to young ladies with slight emotional problems, its primary purpose was practical vocational training in commercial horticulture. The Warden of the college was the formidable Dr. Lillias Hamilton,
who had qualified as a doctor in 1890 (in itself an achievement for a woman at that time) and subsequently travelled to India where she set up a successful private practice in Calcutta. In 1894, in a rare moment of peace between Britain and Afghanistan, she was appointed court physician to the Amir of Afghanistan. This was a job fraught with dangers and complicated plotting at court meant that her food had to be tested for poison. Three years later Afghan tribes began to rebel and Dr. Hamilton was forced to leave the country. She returned to England and had a successful consultancy practice in London, then journeyed to South Africa where she started a farm in the Transvaal, later continued by her brother.

Violet's two years at Studley College were on the whole happy, she learnt the craft of horticulture and also had a chance to develop her literary talents, contributing to plays celebrating the Warden's birthday. However, one traumatic incident involving the redoubtable Warden was to shape the rest of her life. Soon after her promotion to the staff of the college, she clashed with the Warden over plans to ease the financial problems of the college by drawing on the wealth of some of the students.

A 'Psychic Attack'

Violet decided to leave the establishment and went to the Warden's office one morning to announce her departure. Though the Warden was obviously angry, she decided to let Violet leave, saying: 'Very well, leave if you must, but first you must admit that you are incompetent.' She stared hard at the girl, telling her repeatedly that she lacked self-confidence and was incompetent. This continued for hours, always with the same phrase: 'You are incompetent and you know it. You have no self-confidence, and you have got to admit it.' Dr. Hamilton gradually wore Violet down until the she grew so distraught that she finally admitted defeat. Writing years later as Dion Fortune in Psychic Self-Defence, she maintained that Dr. Hamilton had conveyed a 'psychic attack' on her using yoga techniques (possibly learned in India) and hypnotism, which left her a 'mental and physical wreck' for three years. How real this psychic attack was (we only have Dion Fortune's version of events) and how much was imagined by the young Violet Firth will never be known, but It was certainly bizarre and particularly vindictive behaviour for a woman in charge of a college for young girls.

After the incident Violet's parents took her away from Studley College. It would take her a long time to recover from having her will broken in such a merciless and draining way. She searched for ways to regain control of her mind, studying psychology and eventually enrolling as a student at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London. Rather than use the student kitchen there, she chose to spend lunch time at the canteen at a centre run by the Theosophical Society, close to her college. One day out of sheer curiosity and loaded with scientific scepticism she attended a lecture on mental telepathy at the centre. To Violet's amazement, by means of a series of simple experiments involving projected thought-forms, she was able to read the images the lecturer was mentally sending out.

Violet's curiosity now aroused, things were to get even stranger. One of her student's patients was apparently being plagued by unusual physical phenomena. These were akin to poltergeist disturbances - doors would fly open of their own accord whilst the neighbouring dogs barked. Violet was unable to help and instead called in the assistance of a charismatic and mysterious Irishman named Moriarty, recently back from South Africa. He was reputed to have a deep knowledge of occult matters.

All together in the young man's flat they witnessed the same phenomena - barking dogs and the doors opening. Moriarty detected that an invisible presence was in the room. As the lights were lowered they noticed a faint glow in a corner, which produced a 'tingling sensation' when anyone put their hand near. Moriarty pursued the 'entity' and forced in into the bathroom, where he trapped it inside a magic circle and destroyed it by absorption into his own aura, the result of which knocked him unconscious. The phenomena however, had been dealt with and the young man's health improved immediately.

A Natural Psychic

The mystical knowledge and practices of Moriarty had awakened something inside the young Violet Firth. Working in the boredom and isolation of her laboratory she began to develop her own natural psychic facilities. In the solitude of the vast building she began to have a series of astral visions. This experience led her back to the Theosophical Society library where she discovered the writings of Annie Besant, formerly Madame Blavatsky's assistant and by then the Theosophical Society's President. It was in The Ancient Wisdom that she found reference to the 'Brotherhood of the Great White Lodge' and to a hierarchy of adepts who keep watch over the evolution of humanity. The work stated that these Masters could still be contacted 'by all who seek them.' This idea struck a vital cord in Violet.

She became obsessed with the need to contact the Masters, even her dreams were affected by the same desire. In one particularly memorable and vivid dream (or perhaps vision) she found herself in the Himalayas in the presence of two of the Masters; the message she got from this experience was that she had been accepted as a pupil and must begin her quest for deeper knowledge.

This she did and in 1919 joined an occult order run by Theodore Moriarty. He became her first esoteric teacher and a man whose occult methods and ideas were to have a profound influence on her, as she acknowledged when she based the character of Dr. Taverner in a series of short stories called The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, on Moriarty. Later that year she was initiated into the Alpha et Omega Temple of the Stella Matutina - formerly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The head of the Temple was the novelist J.W. Brodie-Innes, author of several extremely knowledgeable novels on witchcraft and magic, and from whom Violet learned how to utilize her natural psychic abilities.

The Golden Dawn and The Inner Light

It was now that Violet Firth adopted the motto Deo Non Fortuna (also the Firth family motto) - God not luck - as her magical name of Dion Fortune. However she soon grew disillusioned with the Golden Dawn, finding that it consisted mainly of widows and 'squabbling greybeards'. Though within the Order she found help and support from an old family friend Maiya Curtis-Webb, who was present during Dion Fortune's early experiments in trance mediumship, an ability she maintained until she died.

Present at similar occult work at Glastonbury, Somerset, was architect and antiquary Frederick Bligh Bond. In 1907 Bond had been employed to excavate the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and had secretly recruited a medium called John Allen Bartlett to help show him where to dig. Guided by automatic writing they assembled plans which led to the discovery of both the St. Mary's Chapel and the Edgar Chapel. However, when Bond revealed the means he had used, in his 1918 book The Gate of Remembrance, he was banned from any further connection with the by now Church of England-owned abbey.

One moonlit night in 1922, at Chalice Well, Glastonbury, Dion Fortune met Charles Thomas Loveday, an executive in London Tramways. Though he was around sixteen years her senior, there was an instant bond between them and their lives became closely connected in occult work from then on. That they first met at Glastonbury is only natural, this ancient and holy place had always been somewhere with which Dion Fortune had a deep spiritual connection. In 1924 her own esoteric group erected an old army officers' hut at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, naming the site Chalice Orchard. This became the first headquarters of 'The Fraternity of the Inner Light' (later re-named the Society of the Inner Light).

1927 was a mixed year for Dion Fortune. On 6 April that year, she married Dr. Thomas Penry Evans at Paddington Register Office. During the same period she was having trouble within the Alpha et Omega Order, with its chief adept Moina Mathers, a gifted occultist and wife of MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn. Part of the problem stemmed from Fortune's establishment of her own ritual group within the Alpha et Omega, Moina Mathers realising that this posed a serious threat to the Order itself. Further problems arose with the publication of Fortune's occult short stories (The Secrets of Dr. Taverner) and, more importantly, a series of articles for the Occult Review (which were later published as Sane Occultism) which Moina Mathers, who believed strongly in the necessity for secrecy, felt were betraying the secrets of the Order. However, it was pointed out that a junior initiate would not have advanced to a sufficiently high grade to access such 'secrets'. Mathers subsequently expelled Fortune because the correct symbols had not appeared in her aura, 'a perfectly unanswerable charge' as Dion fortune said later. In July the following year Moina Mathers was dead, aged 63.

At the Winter Solstice of 1928, the 'Lesser Mysteries of the Fraternity of the Inner Light' were created, hence the Fraternity was ritually established. 1927 was also the year that Dion Fortune had her first 'occult' novel published The Demon Lover. In 1928 the first of her non-fiction occult textbooks appeared The Esoteric Orders and their Work and shortly afterwards The Training and Work of an Initiate. In 1930 perhaps her best known-work Psychic Self-Defence was published.

One particularly remarkable incident detailed in the latter work shows that, like French mystic and traveller Alexandra David-Neel (see article on this site) Dion Fortune had the ability to create visible thought forms that could exist independently of their creator. At the time she had been thinking deeply about someone who had upset her, and 'formulated a werewolf accidentally'. She was lying in bed imagining Fenrir, the mythical Norse wolf-monster, when she sensed the presence of a large grey wolf. Although she 'knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time' she had inadvertently found the correct method for summoning them. Nudging the wolf she told it, 'If you can't behave yourself, you will have to go on the floor.' The beast then vanished through the wall. It later transpired that another member of the household had seen the wolf's eyes in the corner of her own room. Fortune called the animal back to her, at the same time noticing a thin cord connecting it to her. Visualizing herself drawing the essence from the wolf along the cord, she managed to dissolve it.

Dion Fortune's Writings

In her book The Mystical Qabalah, published in 1936 and still widely studied today, Dion Fortune pioneered the use of the Qabalah as a key to the Western Mystery Tradition. In this and most of her other non-fiction she presents and explains often extraordinary esoteric material in a realistic and down-to-earth way making the material accessible even to the untrained. Less easy to follow, mainly because it was written for initiates, is 'The Cosmic Doctrine'. This was received mediumistically and intended for meditation rather than as a straight-forward textbook. However, this book forms the basis of her occult work, which she once explained as 'the revival of the ancient Temple Mysteries'. In her wide-ranging and often outstanding occult novels, such as The Goat-Foot God (1936), The Winged Bull (1936), and The Sea Priestess, (1938), we again have the practical details of sometimes secret esoteric rituals and knowledge, presented in the form of fiction, her attempt to transmit esoteric and occult principles to as wide a public as possible.

By the early 1930s the Society of the Inner Light had acquired a house in Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater, London, which was not only an established magical lodge but also provided accommodation for some members, including Dion Fortune and her husband Dr. Penry Evans. Chalice Orchard was now established as a sanctuary for meditation. The Society was by now a high level initiatory school and provided fascinating and varied lectures on the occult, many by Dion Fortune herself. Aleister Crowley attended a couple of lectures in the late thirties and had a high opinion of Dion Fortune's abilities, sending her a signed copy of his The Book of Thoth. A few years later Dion went to Hastings to meet with Crowley, after which there was some correspondence between them, practically all of which is unfortunately lost.

During the Second World War the Society was bombed out of Queensborough Terrace, but as there was no serious structural damage they were able to move back in after a few weeks. At the end of 1945 Dion Fortune fell ill and, in early January 1946, was admitted to Middlesex Hospital, London, suffering from leukaemia. A few days later, on 6th January 1946, she died aged 55 and was buried at Glastonbury. The Society of the Inner Light continued after Dion Fortune's death and in 1960 the headquarters moved to Steele's Road, London. Today it continues as an initiatory school still offering techniques in the Western esoteric tradition.

Dion Fortune's pioneering influence is much in evidence amongst contemporary occultists, Wiccans, Pagans and Magicians. This influence is felt not only through the teachings of The Society of the Inner Light but also in her novels and occult text books, many of which are still popular today. The combination of profound esoteric knowledge and concepts of Jungian psychology, with a clear no-nonsense approach to writing and teaching have produced perhaps the most accessible and naturally talented occultist of the 20th century.

Sources and Further Reading

• Cavendish, Richard. Encyclopedia of the Unexplained. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. p88.
• Chapman, Janine. Quest for Dion Fortune. Maine, Samuel Weiser, Inc. 1993.
• Fielding, Charles, & Collins, Carr. The Story of Dion Fortune. Loughborough,
• Thoth Publications. 1998.
• Fortune, Dion. Psychic Self-Defence. London, S.I.L. (Trading) Ltd., 1997 (1930).
• Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. London, Ernest Benn Ltd., 1979 (1935).
• Greer, Mary K. Women of the Golden Dawn. Rochester, Park Street Press. 1995.
• Knight, Gareth. Dion Fortune and the Inner Light. Loughborough, Thoth Publications. 2000.
• Richardson, Alan. Priestess. The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune.
• Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, The Aquarian Press. 1987.

Author Brian A. Haughton www.mysteriouspeople.com