Dion Fortune

She was born Violet Mary Firth in Llandudno in 1890, worked as a lay psychotherapist in London before her occult career, and took her magical name from her family motto, Deo, non fortuna. The psychological training is the key to her.

Fortune's achievement was expository. The Golden Dawn material had been secret, then leaked, and was written in a private idiom that assumed its own cosmology. She restated it, most durably in The Mystical Qabalah (1935), as a psychology of the whole personality, in ordinary English, for readers who had not been initiated into anything. Psychic Self-Defence (1930) did the same for a subject that had previously been either sensational or silent. She founded the Fraternity of the Inner Light, later the Society of the Inner Light, in the 1920s.

Her occult novels, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic in particular, carried a doctrine of magical polarity between the sexes that has aged into her most contested legacy; it is essentialist in a way most later practitioners have had to rework or discard, and it should be read as of its period rather than quietly modernised.

The claim she made about her own experience, a psychic attack in 1911 that left her incapacitated for years, at the hands of a former employer, is her account and there is no independent test of it. It is also the origin of her most useful book, which is a fair illustration of how this tradition works: an unverifiable private experience produces a body of practical instruction that thousands of people have then found usable.

Two locations frame Fortune's mature work: Glastonbury Tor and a Sunday letter. Avalon of the Heart, her love letter to Glastonbury, records the pull the place exercised on her from the early 1920s, when she established a hostel and sanctuary at the foot of the Tor; she read the landscape as a meeting of currents Christian, Arthurian and elemental, and her community kept the site as a place of retreat and vision work.

The Society of the Inner Light, the order she founded in London, alternated between the two poles, temple work in Bayswater and the green mysteries of Somerset. When the war came, she turned the society's method to national defence. From October 1939 into 1942 she circulated weekly letters to members scattered by the emergency, setting a common meditation for a fixed hour each Sunday: visualisations of angelic patrols along the coasts, of the rose upon the cross, of Arthur and the company of Avalon standing guard over Britain.

The letters, later published as The Magical Battle of Britain, are the fullest surviving record of an occult order operating as a civilian morale institution, and they are strikingly practical documents, concerned with fear, fatigue and continuity of work under bombing; her own house was damaged in the Blitz. She did not live long past the emergency, dying in 1946, and her society continues, but the wartime letters remain the clearest window into what she thought trained imagination was actually for.