Full Details
Dion Fortune
| Full Name: | Violet Mary Firth |
| Born: | December 6, 1890 Bryn-y-Bia, Llandudno, Wales |
| Died: | January 8, 1946 Middlesex, London, England |
| Occupation: | Occultist, Author |
| Nationality: | Welsh |
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Biography
Dion Fortune born Violet Mary Firth, was a prominent British occultist, author, psychologist, teacher, artist, and mystic. Schooled in Western Esotericism, she was influential in the modern revival of the magical arts. She was also a prolific writer of the supernatural and the occult in both novels and non-fiction works. As a psychologist, she approached magic and hermetic concepts from the perspectives of Jung and Freud.
Fortune grew up in a household where Christian Science was rigorously practiced. She reported visions of Atlantis at age four and developing psychic abilities at age 20. She joined the Theosophical Society and attended courses in psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London, and became a lay psychotherapist at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square. Her first magical mentor was the Irish occultist and Freemason Theodore Moriarty (1873-1923). In 1919 she was initiated into the London Temple of the Alpha et Omega before transferring to the Stella Matutina order. With her husband, Penry Evans, she formed the Fraternity of the Inner Light as an offshoot of the Alpha et Omega. Fortune's group was later renamed "The Society of the Inner Light", and was the focus of her work for the rest of her life.
Beginning in 1919, Fortune wrote a number of novels and short stories that explored various aspects of magic and mysticism. Two of her novels, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, became influential within the Goddess Movement and Wicca. Fortune's novels demonstrate the extent to which she is influenced by the Qabalistic Tree of Life, in that the themes of the novels correlate to the different Sephiroth on the Tree of Life.
Author Diana Paxson, in a letter to Random House regarding her sister-in-law Marion Zimmer Bradley, credits Dion Fortune's Avalon of the Heart and novels as the inspiration for The Mists of Avalon.
Known to those in her inner circle as DF, her pseudonym was inspired by her family motto "Deo, non-fortuna" (Latin for "by God, not fate"), originally the ancient motto of the Barons and Earls Digby. Fortune died in 1946 from leukemia in Middlesex, London, at the age of 55.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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