Dion Fortune

Violet Mary Firth, known as Dion Fortune, was a British occultist, ceremonial magician and writer, born in Wales in 1890 and dying in England in 1946. She worked in English during the early twentieth century, at the meeting point of psychotherapy, Theosophy and Hermetic traditions. She is now regarded as one of the most significant occultists and ceremonial magicians of her era.

Born in Llandudno into a wealthy upper middle-class English family whose fortune came from Sheffield steel, she took her pen name from the family motto "Deo, non Fortuna". She later said she had visions of Atlantis from the age of four, but little is known about her early life, partly because she was reticent about her past. After a breakdown, she trained in psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London and worked as a counsellor in a psychotherapy clinic.

During the First World War she served in the Women's Land Army and experimented with soy milk. Her interest in the esoteric grew through the Theosophical Society and her first magical mentor, Theodore Moriarty, and later through the Alpha et Omega order. In 1922 she and her husband founded the Fraternity of the Inner Light, which became the centre of her work for the rest of her life.

She wrote novels, stories and nonfiction on magic. Her Dr. Taverner stories, based on Moriarty, and her novels The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic influenced modern witchcraft, especially Doreen Valiente. Her writing is notable for its clarity at a time when many occult authors deliberately obscured their meaning.

Her legacy lives on in the Society of the Inner Light and related groups such as Servants of the Light, and in her influence on contemporary Paganism.