Dion Fortune
Born Violet Mary Firth in North Wales during the late nineteenth century, Dion Fortune established herself as a prominent British occultist, ceremonial magician, and author. Growing up within an affluent English family in the upper middle classes, her early life remains largely undocumented. Before dedicating her life to esotericism, her background included writing poetry in the West Country, studying psychoanalysis and psychology at the University of London, and working as a psychotherapist's counsellor. During the First World War, she engaged in agricultural labor with the Women's Land Army and ran a business offering soy milk products.
Her path into esotericism began through the Theosophical Society, followed by memberships in Theodore Moriarty's occult lodge and the Alpha et Omega organisation. She eventually came to believe that spiritual entities known as the Ascended Masters—specifically the Master Rakoczi and the Master Jesus—were communicating with her. Through trance mediumship, she channelled their teachings, claiming alongside Charles Loveday that these entities provided the text titled The Cosmic Doctrine. Discontented with the Theosophical Society's lack of focus on Christianity despite her role leading its Christian Mystic Lodge, she departed to establish her own community.
Alongside Loveday, she founded the group that became the Fraternity of the Inner Light, setting up centers in Bayswater, London, and Glastonbury. She promoted their philosophy by publishing a magazine, delivering public lectures, and organizing visualisations and meditations intended to defend Britain during the Second World War. As the conflict ended, she began planning for the coming Age of Aquarius, though her life was cut short by leukemia shortly after the war concluded.
Today, readers discovering esoteric books encounter Fortune as one of the leading ceremonial magicians and occultists of the early twentieth century. The Fraternity she created outlived her, inspiring numerous offshoots grounded in her doctrines. Additionally, her novels exerted a notable influence on subsequent modern Pagan movements and occult groups such as Wicca.
The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed.
We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them.
The true nature of the gods is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind's thought, and influenced by the mind.
Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand—an extended application of its powers.
All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator.
