Society of the Inner Light

The Society of the Inner Light is among the most influential currents in modern British esotericism, and its character is set by the effort of its founder to hold ceremonial magic and Christianity together.

A Christian mystery school

Founded in London in the 1920s by the occultist and author Dion Fortune, whose given name was Violet Mary Firth, the society teaches a system of the Western mystery tradition drawing on the Kabbalah, ritual magic and meditation, framed in a distinctly Christian register. It began within the wider Golden Dawn tradition and then became independent. Fortune set out its working ideas in a series of books, among them The Mystical Qabalah and the novels, that remain in print and continue to shape the field.

Continuation and reputation

The society carries on after the death of Fortune in 1946, having passed through changes of direction and produced offshoots founded by former members, which is the ordinary pattern of such orders. Its lasting importance lies less in its numbers than in the influence of its founder on the vocabulary and practice of twentieth-century British occultism, so that a great deal of later magical writing works within terms she set.

Between 1939 and 1942 Dion Fortune circulated weekly letters to members and associates of the Society of the Inner Light, setting a meditation to be performed at the same hour each Sunday. The images were deliberately national: the Round Table, guardian angels over the country, a wall of protection. Whatever one concludes about the intended effect, the letters are a remarkable document of a wartime civilian population organised around a contemplative practice, and they were published together decades later.

Fortune also taught through fiction. The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic are novels, and they are also instruction: the ritual sequences in them are workable, the polarity theory that the society taught is set out through the narrative, and generations of practitioners have used them as source material. Publishing technique as a novel put it in bookshops at a time when the society itself admitted very few.

The society continues in London and has done so without interruption since Fortune's death in 1946, which in this field is itself notable. Its position has always been that magical training is compatible with Christian practice, and Fortune's own writing keeps that frame. Readers who arrive at her through modern paganism, where she is heavily cited, often do not realise how much of the structure is a Christian one.