Signs and Wonders - 2

The other book that I managed finally to take down from the shelf and read - mainly in Paris - is Gareth Knight's Dion Fortune and the Inner Light. Having bought some book or other about holy wells many years ago, for some time I was regularly sent a catalogue from an esoteric bookseller in Glastonbury (almost inevitably) and must have bought it from that.

Dion Fortune - or Violet Firth to use her birth name - was, like Agnes Sanford, a sceptical and questioning presence within the tradition in which she stood. Violet came from a Christian Science background, significantly in view of her later opinions. She originally pursued a career in agricultural science, researching the properties and qualities of soya during World War One (and remaining something of an evangelist for its virtues), before moving into psychotherapy. It was a growing awareness in her mid-20s of the apparent inability of psychotherapeutic techniques actually to help people that propelled her towards occultism, as a more holistic way of looking at psychological and spiritual problems.

She joined, not the original Order of the Golden Dawn, but the Alpha Et Omega, its 'official' offshoot headed by Moina Mathers, widow of the Golden Dawn's founder. She and Mrs Mathers later fell out, and Fortune was expelled for having 'incorrect inner sigils in her aura' - an accusation she confessed she didn't even understand. Heavily influenced by the somewhat mysterious occultist and exorcist Theodore Moriarty, Fortune eventually set up her own organisation, which eventually became the Society of the Inner Light. It made use of the Golden Dawn's symbolic system but moved away from its customs of secrecy and hierarchy. Dion Fortune was, in general, a remarkably affable and pacific person, which may help to explain why the Society still survives. It doesn't talk much these days about contacting the Secret Masters on the Higher Planes, though some of that may well go on, and majors instead on teaching meditation techniques.

Dion Fortune's Christian Science upbringing - which was, after all, Christian, albeit of a heretical variety - lingered in her occult work. She headed the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society for a time, and in fact left the T.S. over its promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti as the coming World Teacher - 'for us in the West', she insisted, 'the Master of Masters is Jesus of Nazareth'; the Inner Light maintained for years a Guild of the Master Jesus which held services on Sunday mornings to cater for members of the Society who regarded themselves as Christians. Notwithstanding the very clear Biblical warnings against consulting spirits, the Secret Masters who guided the Society through Dion Fortune's mediumship tended to strengthen the Christian allegiance of the group, especially the Master who identified himself as the 18th- and 19th-century lawyer Lord Erskine (and who was rather stern about the matter) and even, strange though it might seem, Socrates. On her death in 1946, Dion Fortune was buried in an Anglican funeral service conducted by that other rather odd character, the then Vicar of Glastonbury, Lionel Smithett Lewis.

Dion Fortune and the Inner Light has bits which are, as reading, hard to take, mainly the lengthy transcripts of trance communications from the Masters, but it gave me an interesting insight into the development and practice of an occult society. I will talk about this on future occasions, as well as the similarities with and differences from the more thoroughly Christian charismatic tradition represented by Agnes Sanford.