Dion Fortune


Dion Fortune was a British occultist, ceremonial magician, and writer. She was a co-founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, an occult organisation that promoted philosophies which she claimed had been taught to her by spiritual entities known as the Ascended Masters. A prolific writer, she produced a large number of articles and books on her occult ideas and also authored seven novels, several of which expound occult themes.
Fortune was born in Llandudno, Caernarfonshire, North Wales, to a wealthy upper middle-class English family, although little is known of her early life. By her teenage years she was living in England's West Country, where she wrote two books of poetry. After time spent at a horticultural college she began studying psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London before working as a counsellor in a psychotherapy clinic. During the First World War she joined the Women's Land Army and established a company selling soy milk products. She became interested in esotericism through the teachings of the Theosophical Society, before joining an occult lodge led by Theodore Moriarty and then the Alpha et Omega occult organisation.
She came to believe that she was being contacted by two Ascended Masters, the Master Rakoczi and the Master Jesus, and underwent trance mediumship to channel the Masters' messages. In 1922 Fortune and Charles Loveday claimed that during one of these ceremonies they were contacted by Masters who provided them with a text, The Cosmic Doctrine. Although she became the president of the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society, she believed the society to be uninterested in Christianity, and split from it to form the Community of the Inner Light, a group later renamed the Fraternity of the Inner Light. With Loveday she established bases in both Glastonbury and Bayswater, London, began issuing a magazine, gave public lectures, and promoted the growth of their society. During the Second World War she organised a project of meditations and visualisations designed to protect Britain. She began planning for what she believed was a coming post-war Age of Aquarius, although she died of leukemia shortly after the war's end.
Fortune is considered one of the most significant occultists and ceremonial magicians of the early 20th century. The Fraternity she founded survived her and in later decades spawned a variety of related groups based upon her teachings. Her novels in particular proved an influence on later occult and modern Pagan groups such as Wicca.

Biography

Early life: 1890–1913

Fortune was born Violet Mary Firth on 6 December 1890 at her family home on Bryn-y-Bia Road in Llandudno, North Wales. Her background was upper middle-class; the Firths were a wealthy English family who had gained their money through the steel industry in Sheffield, Yorkshire, where they had specialised in the production of guns. Fortune's paternal grandfather John Firth had devised a family motto, "Deo, non Fortuna", to mark out their nouveau riche status; she would later make use of it in creating her pseudonym.
One of John's sons - and Fortune's uncle - was the historian Charles Harding Firth, while her father, Arthur, had run a Sheffield law firm prior to establishing a hydropathic establishment in Limpley Stoke, Wiltshire. In August 1886 Arthur Firth married Sarah Jane Smith, before they relocated to Llandudno where Arthur established the new Craigside Hydrotherapeutic Establishment. Sarah was keenly interested in Christian Science, and Gareth Knight notes that both of Firth's parents were active practitioners of the religion, while fellow biographer Alan Richardson expresses doubt that there was sufficient evidence as to the seriousness with which Fortune herself regarded it.
Little is known about Fortune's time in Wales, in part because throughout her life she was deliberately elusive when providing biographical details about herself. In later life she reported that from the age of four she had experienced visions of Atlantis, something which she believed were past life memories. The Firths were still in Llandudno in 1900, although by 1904 Fortune was living in Somerset, south-west England. That year, she authored a book of poetry, titled Violets, which was likely published by her family. It was reviewed in the May 1905 volume of The Girls' Room, in which it was accompanied by the only known photograph of Fortune as a girl. In 1906, her second book of poetry, More Violets, was published.
After John Firth's death, Arthur moved with his family to London. According to Richardson they lived in the area around Liverpool Street in the east of the city, although Knight gives a different account, stating that they lived first in Bedford Park and then Kensington, both in the west of the city. From January 1911 to December 1912 Fortune studied at Studley Agricultural College in Warwickshire, a horticultural institution which advertised itself as being ideal for girls with psychological problems. Her proficiency with poultry led her to become a staff member at the college from January to April 1913. She later claimed that at the college she was the victim of mental manipulation from her employer, the college warden Lillias Hamilton, resulting in a mental breakdown that made her abandon the institution and return to her parental home.

Psychotherapy and esotericism: 1913–22

To recover from her experience at Studley, Fortune began studying psychotherapy. Her initial interest was in the work of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, though she later moved on to that of Carl Jung. She studied psychology and psychoanalysis under John Flügel at the University of London, before gaining employment at a psychology clinic in London's Brunswick Square, which was likely run under the jurisdiction of the London School of Medicine for Women. Working as a counsellor from 1914 until 1916, she found that most of those she dealt with were coming to terms with sexual urges that were considered taboo in British society. Through her affiliation with the Society for the Study of Orthopsychics, she gave a series of lectures that were later published in 1922 as The Machinery of the Mind. While working at the clinic, she developed her interest in esotericism by attending lunchtime lectures organised by the Theosophical Society and reading some of the organisation's literature. With her interest in occultism increasing, Fortune became increasingly dissatisfied with the effectiveness of psychotherapy.
After the United Kingdom entered the First World War, Fortune joined the Women's Land Army. She was initially stationed on a farm near to Bishop's Stortford on the borders between Essex and Hertfordshire, before later being relocated to an experimental base for the Food Production Department. There she carried out experiments in the production of soy milk, subsequently founding the Letchworth-based Garden City Pure Food Company to sell her products and publishing The Soya Bean: An Appeal to Humanitarians in 1925. It was while working at the base that she underwent a spiritual experience and subsequently further immersed herself in Theosophical literature. After doing so, she became preoccupied by the idea of the 'Ascended Masters' or 'Secret Chiefs', claiming to have had visions of two such entities, the Master Jesus and the Master Rakoczi.
Her first magical mentor was the Irish occultist and Freemason Theodore Moriarty. She had befriended him while still involved in psychotherapy, believing that he could help one of her patients, a young man who had been fighting on the Western Front and claimed to be plagued by unexplained physical phenomena. Moriarty performed an exorcism, claiming that the young man was the victim of the soul of a deceased East European soldier which had latched onto him as a parasite. Fortune became an acolyte of Moriarty's Masonic-influenced lodge, which was based in Hammersmith, and joined his community of followers living at Gwen Stafford-Allen's home in Bishop's Stortford. Moriarty spent much time talking about the lost city of Atlantis, a topic that would also come to be embraced by Fortune. Fortune later fictionalised Moriarty as the character Dr. Taverner, who appeared in a number of short stories first published in 1922, later assembled in a collected volume as The Secrets of Dr. Taverner in 1926. Like Moriarty, Dr. Taverner was portrayed as carrying out exorcisms to protect humans from the attacks of etheric vampires.
In tandem with her studies under Moriarty, in 1919 Fortune had been initiated into the London Temple of the Alpha et Omega, an occult group that had developed from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Here, her primary teacher was Maiya Curtis-Webb, a longstanding friend of the Firth family. Fortune later claimed that in the period after the First World War, the Order had been "manned mainly by widows and grey-bearded ancients". She was not enamoured with the ceremonial magic system that had been developed by the Golden Dawn, however it did provide her with the grounding in the study of the Hermetic Qabalah which would exert a great influence over her esoteric world-view. It was also through her involvement in the group that she embraced her family's "Deo, non Fortuna" as her personal magical motto. In January and March 1921 Fortune and Curtis-Webb embarked on a series of experiments in trance mediumship. This culminated in an act of trance mediumship that Fortune conducted in the Somerset town of Glastonbury with her mother and Frederick Bligh Bond. She claimed that in doing so, she had contacted spirit-entities known as "the Watchers of Avalon" who informed her that Glastonbury had once been the site of an ancient druidic college. Bond subsequently commissioned Fortune to write an article, "Psychology and Occultism", which was published in the transactions of the College of Psychic Science in 1922.