An orphan of Yorkshire descent, she was brought up in a house-
          hold of Christian Scientists. To earn a living she took a post in an
          institution~he does not particularise its nature nor that of her own
          duties-where the principal incapacitated her (or so she believed) by
          a combination of hypnotism and ill-wishing. She recounts the
          incident under suitable disguise in the Preface to Psychic Selfr
          Defrnce (i 930); I take it that the adept who rescued her and whom
          she refers to as Z was J. W. Brodie-Innes. She probably met him in
          the Theosophical circles she frequented.


           Having studied psychology and psych~analysis at London
          University, she worked as a lay-psychotherapist-that is, one with-
          out a medical degree-at a clinic.

           In 1919 she was initiated into the A .~. O.~. Lodge, a London
          daughter-Lodge led by Mrs. Maiya Tranchell-Hayes, of Brodie-
          Innes's Amen Ra in Edinburgh. Kenneth Grant identifies Vivian le
          Fay Morgan, the central character in Violet's novel The Sea Priestess
          (1938) and its sequel, Moon Magic (1956), with Maiya-though I
        -~                       ! I
        218               Organism

        assumed this Circean figure to be a narcissistic self-portrait of the
        author. However that may be, Violet soon became dissatisfied with
        Maiya and transferred her allegiance to the other A .~. O.~. Lodge in
        London, then recently established by Molna MacGregor Mathers. I
        have afready recounted her brief career with Moina and its con-
        sequences. Following the break, she also joined the Hermes Lodge
        of the SM and, as Regardie says in The Eye in the Triangle, was
        allowed by one of its Chiefs to found an Order of her own.

          Shortly after she married Dr. Penry Evans and they collaborated
        with some success in various methods of psychotherapy, some of
        which have not gained general acceptance in the medical profession.
        Later the partnership grew inharmonious and separation ensued.

          Dion Fortune was pre~minently a publicist for esoteric ideas
        and an organiser of esoteric studies; she wrote and lectured inde-
        fatigably while carrying on her Fraternity. As a novelist she relies on
        the intrinsic fascination of her themes and the occult information
        they convey, often in an entertaining manner; she is no literary
        artist, her style lacking distinction and sometimes even grammar.
        In characterisation, her assumption of toughness when her narrator
        is supposed to be a man is particularly unconvincing.

          All this is only to say that she did the best she could, starting from
        a somewhat deprived background and lacking an extended education.
        She had to scrounge what, had she been a man, would have been
        considered her right. While her courage and enterprise deserve
        salute, one has to admit that her scholarship is inadequate and her
        innaccuracies legion. Her earliest publication was a 'slim volume' of
        verse, Violets (1914); her latest, posthumous works such as the
        popular handbooks of 1962, Aspects of Occultism and Applied Magic
        -an example of her journalistic ability, though over-full of padding
        for the specialist taste. Her best-known treatise, The Mystical
        ~abalah, is a readable introduction to the subject as taught in the GD
        and should rank among the 'revelations' of that teaching which
        disregarded the oaths of secrecy under which it was given. It broke
        new ground when it first appeared in 1935 and several later authors
        are indebted to it.

          'Dion Fortune' used to give public lectures in a large drawing-
        room furnished as a meeting-hall on an upper floor of her Fratern-
        ity's headquarters; I remember going to one in 1934 when her