Practical Occultism in Daily Life
Dion Fortune is the pen name of Violet Firth, one of the most mysterious and significant figures of the British esoteric tradition of the early twentieth century. Born in Llandudno, Wales, in 1890, she exhibited strong psychic tendencies even as a child. She decided at an early age to pursue a career in nursing, which led her to an interest in human psychology. She became an early Freudian, but soon saw the limitations of psychoanalysis and pursued the deeper implications of human psychology in occult and magical traditions.  Raised on Christian Science, she gravitated first toward Theosophy and then to the Order of the Golden Dawn, where she became an initiate and received the hieratic name of Deo Non Fortuna, which eventually became her pen name, Dion Fortune. In 1922, she formed her own esoteric society, The Society of the Inner Light. Dion Fortune s legacy is her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. In nonfiction, her books Psychic Self-Defence, The Mystical Qabalah, Through the Gates of Death, and Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage still stand, 75 years later, as the premier statements on their respective subjects. But it is in her fiction that she made her greatest contribution, probing depths of the human mind and character that conventional psychology still has not discovered or understood.  She was married to, and divorced from, T. Penry Evans, M.D. She died in London in January, 1946.