Priestess: The life and magic of Dion Fortune

by Alan Richardson

In the meantime I had my dream of moon-magic and sea-palaces and day by day I lived more in another dimension where I had that which, I knew I should never have on earth, and I was very happy.Dion Fortune was the pen-name of Violet Firth, one of the most luminous and striking personalities of the twentieth century, Womanhood's answer to Aleister Crowley, and quite possibly the Shakti of the Age.This new, revised, expanded and beautifully-written edition tells the full story of a woman who hid behind a veil of secrecy and who became a cult figure in the years after her death in 1946. A brilliant writer and pioneer psychologist her whole life was devoted to living out an eternal Myth in a story that can be told in terms of Virgins and Dragons, Moons and Oceans, and the spirit of the land itself.As a powerful psychic and medium, obsessed with the study and practise of Magic, and a high-grade initiate within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, her career was never entirely in this world, and her companions not always human. In her own eyes at least she was a Priestess, a channel for the Great Goddess, an exponent of the time-lost Mysteries of Women long before the present generations of feminists and goddess-worshippers were even born.From her birth in Llandudno, through her years in the drowned lands of Somerset, Alan Richardson unfolds the luminous and very moving patterns of her her early career as a psychoanalyst, her nervous breakdown, her time as a Land Girl and her developing psychism; her memories of past lives on Atlantis and relationships with Inner Plane beings who have an evolutionary interest in our world; her romance with a man she believed to be non-human and her fraught marriage to a doctor whom everyone knew as Merlin; the foundation of her own group devoted to bringing through the Western Mysteries at a time when few people knew that there was such a thing; her occult battles against the Nazis and fellow magicians - and the start of her long, hard, and always stormy journey into the Otherworld, toward the heart of the Goddess that she saw as sleeping within the Earth itself, and who needed awakening ...

Genres: Nonfiction, Witchcraft

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

About the author

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

(1951-)

Reviews

[Katharine Kerr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I waffled over the rating for this book. Richardson has done a good, solid job of researching his subject -- which could not have been easy. After her death, members of Dion Fortune's occult group seem to have burned as many of her personal papers as they could get their hands on. Since she died in 1947, not many of the people who knew her well were still alive when Richardson started his project.

Why only three stars? The "mansplaining", to use a trendy term, that rears its ugly head in the last few chapters. Richardson is absolutely sure, on very little evidence, that Fortune had a "thwarted" sex life and this "thwarting" somehow ruined her existence. He assumes that she had a terrible menopause because -- and here's where the mansplaining comes in -- don't all women?* And her husband had left her! Oh, the worst thing! Fortune herself seems to have been rather relieved that Penry Evans had gone on his way. By all accounts, they fought constantly when they were together. Richardson has had his attitude toward all of this questioned, in print by at least one writer**, because he pulls out the standard Mansplainer defense: several woman have agreed with him.

However, if you can ignore this vein of condescending assumptions, the book is well worth reading for the solid information it holds about Fortune's family, intellectual life, and associates.

*No, actually.

**Janine Chapman in her THE SEARCH FOR DION FORTUNE

[Sasha Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched and beautifully written. Speculative in places, so reader beware!

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was more interested in the last couple of chapter, dealing with between the wars and WWII. But it does name names and places, which is very nice. The book has a sycophantic tone, that I just accept.

A fair bit of interesting occult anecdotes.