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Divine Femininity and Everyday Womanhood in the Work of Dion Fortune Georgia Van Raalte

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Divine Femininity and Everyday Womanhood in the Work of Dion Fortune Georgia Van Raalte Pomegranates and Crescent Honey-Cakes: Divine Femininity and Everyday Womanhood in the Work of Dion Fortune Georgia van Raalte Dion Fortune was born Violet Mary Firth on December 6th, 1890 in Llan- dudno, Wales. She attended Studley Agricultural College from 1911 until 1913, when she left after suffering a severe mental breakdown. As a result of this ex- perience Fortune grew interested in occultism, and after the First World War ended she became involved with the occultist Theodor Moriarty. In 1919 she was initiated into Alpha et Omega, one of the splinter groups of the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In the early 1920s Fortune established the Fraternity of the Inner Light,1 originally as an ‘outer court’ of the Golden Dawn, intended to attract new members to the group. In 1925 Fortune’s Society purchased headquarters at 3 Queensborough Terrace in London and Fortune began to publish occult work under the name Dion Fortune. In 1927 Fortune was expelled from Alpha et Omega, ostensibly because “certain symbols had not appeared in my aura – a perfectly unanswerable charge.”2 In the same year she married Dr. Penry Evans (1892-1956), who was both a practicing physician and a member of her Society. Throughout the 1930s Fortune saw to the development of her Society and its work. She delivered public lectures, initiated new members and published an array of occult essays, books and novels.3 During the Second World War Fortune suspended her publishing and led her Society in an attempt to assist the war effort through group meditation. Fortune died of Leukemia on January 8th, 1946, and was buried at Glastonbury.4 1 The name was later changed to the more egalitarian Society of the Inner Light. 2 Dion Fortune, “Ceremonial Magic Unveiled,” The Occult Review, January 1933, reproduced in Gareth Knight, Rites of Isis and of Pan (Cheltenham: Skylight Press, 2013), 91. 3 Of her novels, The Goat-foot God (1936) and The Sea Priestess (1938) have proven the most enduringly popular; The Mystical Qabalah (1935) is widely seen as one of the finest and most accessible occult works of the 20th century, while Psychic Self-Defense (1931) is still widely avail- able today; Fortune’s articles in the Inner Light Journal have had a narrower readership, however those of 1939-40 have been republished in Knight’s Circuit of Force (1998) and offer a fascinating glimpse into the Society’s work. 4 To this date four bibliographies have been written on Fortune: Knight (2000), Richardson (1991), Chapman (1993) and Fielding and Collins (1985). Selby’s 2008 dissertation also contains plethora of biographical notes, and he claims to have access to texts held exclusively by the Society of the Inner Light. Each of these biographies varies both in dating events in Fortune’s life and in naming La Rosa di Paracelso 1/2017 La Rosa di Paracelso Barely explored in an academic context, Fortune’s work is hugely important because it represents the first (modern, western) attempt to bring esotericism to women and the middle classes, to make it available in a pragmatic, everyday con- text. For this alone Fortune can rightfully be considered the grandmother of the New Age, however her books have also been highly influential on the development of the metaphysics, symbolism and popular imagery of a number of New Religious Movements. This chapter will explore the metaphysics of the Divine Feminine as they unfold within Fortune’s work. I will consider the way Fortune’s concept of the divine feminine developed as her understanding of the Hermetic Qabalah advanced, and the way that this work was underpinned by Fortune’s belief in the doctrines of duality and universalism. I will then explore the way this divine femi- ninity interacts with the realities of womanhood in the 20th century, examining how Fortune balanced adepthood with the everyday responsibilities that characterised the life of a middle-class woman in interwar Britain. Because of the lack of academic study of Fortune’s work, and of any reliable biographical material pertaining to her life, this article necessarily takes the form of an extended piece of literary criticism; however this should not be seen as a limit, but as an opportunity, for Fortune’s corpus offers a vast wealth of sources for this topic. I have chosen to focus this study on Fortune’s two most influen- tial books, The Mystical Qabalah (1935) and The Sea Priestess (1938). The Sea Priestess, Fortune’s third occult novel, was her most popular, and has been a seminal text for the development of New Age and modern Pagan forms of spi- rituality. In particular, the form of universalism portrayed within this text, and the connection Fortune draws between the female body, the oceanic tides and the cosmic tides of metaphysical birth and rebirth, have been foundational to the development of goddess-centric spirituality in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Mystical Qabalah is one of the most accessible books on the Qabalah and its relationship to esotericism to have come out of the 20th century, and is still widely read today. The Qabalah5 is a system of mysticism that has grown from the Hebrew symbol Etz haChayim, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is a compo- site symbol made from the ten Sephiroth, or spheres, and the 22 paths between them, arranged on three pillars (see Appendix 1). Originally used as a mystical hermeneutic tool, the Qabalah was appropriated by scholars such as Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) in the 15th century, who placed the symbols of Christianity upon the tree, assigning the Christ to Tiphareth. These developments became known as the Hermetic Qabalah, a sy- stem that was hugely influential on the development of occultism across the 18th and 19th centuries. In the Western Esoteric tradition the secrets of the Qabalah were monopolized by occult brotherhoods, the most famous of which being the the people she worked with and places she stayed. This state of affairs is due to the scarcity of per- sonal papers that survived the Society’s inner power struggle in the years following Fortune’s death. 5 Modern texts tend to use the spelling Kabalah for Qabalah, Sefirah for Sephirah, and Sefirot for Sephiroth; however I have chosen to retain Fortune’s spellings throughout this article. 184 Pomegranates and Crescent Honey-Cakes Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. However with the arrival of the 20th Cen- tury this secrecy was to end, as Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah was published in the wake of similar texts by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), whose 777 was publi- shed in 1909, and Israel Regardie (1907-1985). In her 1933 review of latter’s two books, The Tree of Life (1932) and The Garden of Pomegranates (1932), in which Regardie claimed to reveal the Golden Dawn’s magical system, Fortune expli- citly aligned herself with both Regardie and Crowley in this revelatory purpose. I see from an article in the November number of this magazine that Foyle’s are issuing Crowley’s Magick in a cheap edition… The third person of this unholy trinity of reve- alers of the Mysteries is my humble self, who have been doing much the same thing as Mr. Regardie in a series of articles on the Cabbala which has been running in my own magazine, The Inner Light.6 The articles she is referring to were published in The Inner Light Magazine between 1931 and 1935, before being collected in a book by Williams and Nor- gate in 1935 under the name The Mystical Qabalah. The Mystical Qabalah is a catalogue of correspondences that places the cosmological systems of ancient Greece, modern Christianity and Hinduism onto the glyph of the tree. Accor- ding to Fortune this book revealed to the public, if in a less iconoclastic manner than Regardie’s work, many pieces of occult knowledge that had previously been the reserve of initiatic societies. With this text Fortune aimed to catalyze initia- tion in her readers, an aim shared by her occult novels.7 The Law of Polarity Polarity is one of the most distinct and original ideas that Fortune develo- ped. “Polarity means the function of flow and return of force;”8 nobody and nothing can operate in a vacuum, for any force expended necessitates some form of return. In any given relationship, one aspect will be active, and one passive. The two aspects act as “the positive and negative poles of a battery, generating current,” 9 and force will flow between them according to this polarization. As long as the balance is maintained the force will be part of a circuit, and the re- lationship will be reciprocal. On the Tree of Life, the pillar of Mercy and that of Severity are held in balance in the central pillar, but this balance is not inert. 6 Ceremonial Magic Unveiled,” 86. 7 Initiation is central both to the Golden Dawn system and to Fortune’s thought, however For- tune’s approach to initiation is innovative and egalitarian; she argues that it can take place in the mind of the individual through the stimulation of the emotions and imagination, rendering the exclusivity of the Golden Dawn ritual structure obsolete. 8 “Inner Plane Teaching on Polarity,” a trance address given via Fortune to the senior members of the Society of the Inner Light, December 16th 1940, reproduced in Rites of Isis and of Pan, 130. 9 Dion Fortune, The Winged Bull (Np: Aziloth Books, 2014), 41. 185 La Rosa di Paracelso Fortune argued, “The weakness of Christianity lies in the fact that it ignores rhythm… its dualisms are antagonistic instead of equilibrating,” 10 for polarity is the function of a dynamic duality.
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