Today is the Feast of St Hilary of Poitiers, born into a wealthy polytheistic pagan family in France who read the scriptures and was converted to Christianity, becoming a bishop of the early church in 353 or so. He argued against Arianism but was also a great lover of the strange theologian and philosopher Origen who was excommunicated a century after his death. St Hilary is the saint to call on cases of snakebite.
About 25 years ago on the Feast of St Hilary of Poitiers I entered the Roman Catholic Church as an unbaptised convert. Although I knew I would not make an orthodox Catholic, I also knew I was in good company with some of the crazier saints and mystics. And the Mass introduced me to the beauties as well as the pettifogging tedium of ritual and liturgy along with the difficulties and rewards of meditation.
My path has changed but I do not regret that conversion process and decision. Our spiritual journeys take each of us down many strange and unforeseen byways and twisty paths through dark woods.
Last night I had a dream about Dion Fortune and Wales. I woke up and could not remember much except for the images of a smoky train grinding through a shadowed valley and a woman standing next to a hedgerow with a mulishly stubborn look on her face. In the dream I knew her at once, saying to myself that this was Dion Fortune.
Violet Mary Firth was born 6 January 1890 in Llandudno, Wales. Her parents were Christian Scientists and ran a hydrotherapeutic business. She took her pseudonym Dion Fortine from the family motto, Deo non fortuna, ‘God not fate’. At the age of four, she had visions of Atlantis. As a young woman she had a nervous breakdown and began studying the very new ’science’ of psychoanlysis, then began to explore the occult, joining first the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and then the Stella Matutina Lodge of the Golden Dawn.
She formed the Society of the Inner Light at Glastonbury and then established a branch in London. In 1924 she and her freinds bought an old officers’ hut from the army and set it at the foot of Glstonbury Tor in what she called ‘Chalice Orchard’. Arthurian folk lore appealed very deeply to Dion Fortune. To make her teachings — as written out in the Mystical Qabalah — more accessible she wrote a number of novels including Avalon of the Heart, The Sea Priestess and The Goat-Foot God. She took part in the ‘magical Battle of Britain’ and knew both Crowley and Gardner. Much of her work focused on psychic self-defence. She died of leukaemia in London on 8 January 1946.
That I should dream of somebody I know so little about is curious and I suppose it is the Welsh connection that appealed to my Unconscious. I have tried to read Dion Fortune at various points but found the writings very much part of that problematic esoteric tradition embracing Madame Blavatsky and other eccentric and obscure mediums and table-turners. I should perhaps read more and put aside my distrust and prejudices.
The ancient Welsh legends of the Mabinogian was a source she drew on all her life. She was a priestess of Isis, believing ‘All women are Isis and Isis is all women.’ In her novels she was able to tell the secrets she dared not openly publish, relating to the Mysteries of Isis. Her last novel was called Moon Magic and was unfinished at her death. She channeled a last chapter through a friend after her death so that it could be published. Aleister Crowley deicated a copy of the Book of Thoth to her and thought highly of her as an adept. Her reputation after her death has waxed and waned.
The transformation is always fascinating, the putting on of a mystical identity, so misunderstood and so carefully concealed from post-Edwardian England. Violet Mary Firth of Llandudno become a priestess of the Great Isis.
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