Dion Fortune: Moon Priestess

[icymist]

Dion Fortune was the pen-name of Violet Mary Firth, one of the most striking, enigmatic, and least known women of the twentieth century, whose strange life and beliefs anticipated many of those passions which so concern us today. She was born in Llandudno in 1890 and died in London in 1946, though her life and career was never entirely in this world, or even in this time.

She was above all else a magician who spent her entire existence communing with entities from other dimensions, and who believed that (with their assistance) her peculiar powers and practices would one day bring the world new wisdom, and bring about our own raised awareness along the way. In this sense her whole life can be seen in terms of prophecy: of woman’s equality and her spiritual potential; of the Earth’s own consciousness and our responsibility toward it; of the transforming powers of love and sex and psychism; of the energies to be found within dreams and the imagination—as well the intense and explorable reality of that Otherworld which impinges upon our own.

Today when ponderous clerics within orthodox and established churches still debate on the desirability (if any) of women priests and agonize over the consequences of such, it is worth noting that Dion Fortune was functioning as a true and potent priestess from the 1920s onward. And at a time when the fastest growing religion in the world is Wicca, with Pagan sentiments almost becoming mainstream, it is possible to trace these exotic and vital flowerings back to the seeds she planted as a young woman, and nurtured for the rest of her extraordinary life.

To get to the essence of her for the new reader, how can we sum her up? In an era when witches and magicians vie with each other for air-time, soundbites, and weekend workshops on what might be called “hobby mysticism,” there is a curious purity about the life of DF—as those in the know think of her. She wrote about magic beautifully, directly, and with obvious power. You only have to read her novels The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic—utterly beautiful in their prose and almost hypnotic in their effect upon the reader—to realize that here was real magician. And once you study her classic texts The Mystical Qabalah, Applied Magic, and that very curious autobiography Psychic Self Defence—all written in the 1930s—you become aware of how much modern writers on occult topics have stolen from her.
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