page_title: Dion Fortune
section_title: The Theosophical Society and the Community of the Inner Light: 1927–30
hierarchical_section_title: Dion Fortune / Biography / The Theosophical Society and the Community of the Inner Light: 1927–30
caption_attribution_description: Adyar Емблема на Интернационалното Теософско Общества (Adyar)
context_page_description: Dion Fortune was a British occultist, ceremonial magician, novelist and author. She was a co-founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, an occult organisation that promoted philosophies which she claimed had been taught to her by spiritual entities known as the Ascended Masters. A prolific writer, she produced a large number of articles and books on her occult ideas and also authored seven novels, several of which expound occult themes.
  Fortune was born in Llandudno, Caernarfonshire, North Wales, to a wealthy upper middle-class English family, although little is known of her early life. By her teenage years she was living in England's West Country, where she wrote two books of poetry. After time spent at a horticultural college she began studying psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London before working as a counsellor in a psychotherapy clinic. During the First World War she joined the Women's Land Army and established a company selling soy milk products. She became interested in esotericism through the teachings of the Theosophical Society, before joining an occult lodge led by Theodore Moriarty and then the Alpha et Omega occult organisation.
context_section_description: Later claiming that she was acting under instruction from the Ascended Masters, Fortune and Loveday joined the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society, which was run by Daisy M. Grove. Fortune soon became its president, and under her leadership the group's membership expanded and the readership of its published Transactions also grew. Throughout this period, she foregrounded the need for a Christian perspective within the Theosophical movement, emphasising the centrality and importance of the 'Master Jesus' in her various articles. She publicly criticised another Theosophical group, the Liberal Catholic Church founded by J. I. Wedgwood and Charles Webster Leadbeater, alleging that it was not concerned with the Master Jesus and was instead preoccupied with the Master Maitreya. One of the prominent figures in the Church, Bishop Piggott, accused her of attributing false claims to him in The Occult Review.
  Amid these arguments with other sectors of the Theosophical movement, she resigned from the Theosophical Society in October. Her Christian Mystic Lodge abandoned its affiliation with the Society and renamed itself the Community of the Inner Light. Within this Community was established a group called the Guild of the Master Jesus, which held regular church services on Sundays at their Queensborough Terrace base from 1928 until 1939; in 1936 this group renamed itself the Church of the Graal. Fortune directed many seekers who lacked the self-discipline for ceremonial magical activity to the Guild, whose members were known by one senior Community member as the "teeny-weenies".
  When Jiddu Krishnamurti abandoned Theosophy, causing problems for the Theosophical movement, Fortune endorsed the 'Back to Blavatsky' faction, attacking Leadbeater in print by accusing him of being a practitioner of black magic. She then involved herself with Bomanji Wadia and his United Lodge of Theosophists, through which she claimed to have contacted the Himalayan Masters. She nevertheless was cautious about these Himalayan adepts, relating that although she felt that they were "not evil", she thought them "alien and unsympathetic" and "hostile to my race". Unhappy with the concept of promoting Indian religious beliefs in Britain, she left the group. Subsequently, she claimed that Wadia had begun to psychically attack her.
  In April 1927, Fortune married Tom Penry Evans—a Welsh medical doctor from a working-class background—at Paddington Registry Office, before the couple embarked on a honeymoon in Glastonbury. Their marriage was initially happy, although Evans may have been perturbed at having to immerse himself in occultism to a greater extent than he had planned. He was present throughout a program of trance mediumship in which Fortune claimed to be channelling the messages of a "Master of Medicine". Beginning in August 1927, the channelled messages focused around issues of alternative medicine and diagnostics and were later assembled as The Principles of Esoteric Medicine, which was privately circulated among Fortune's senior students. Some members of Fortune's group believed that the "Master of Medicine" was actually Paracelsus, although a later channelled message claimed that this Master's earthly identity had been Ignaz Semmelweis.
  In 1927 Fortune published her first occult novel, The Demon Lover, which received a brief but positive review in The Times Literary Supplement.
  The following year she published The Problem of Purity, her final book to appear under the name of "Violet Firth". In 1928 she published a textbook on her esoteric beliefs, The Esoteric Orders and their Work, which she followed with a companion work in 1930, The Training and Work of an Initiate.
  In 1930 this was followed by Psychic Self-Defense, which contained many autobiographical elements and which was probably her most commercially popular book. According to the historian Claire Fanger, this book was "part anecdotal evidence, part do-it-yourself exorcism manual, part autobiography, and some part no doubt fiction."
  Fortune and her group focused on 'Outer Court' w
caption: Fortune joined the Theosophical Society (logo pictured) but split from them on believing that they undermined the importance of Jesus as an Ascended Master
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