Dion Fortune (1890–1946)

I had previously found cause to compare the fiction of Dion Fortune to that of Charles Williams, and Fortune's first novel The Demon Lover certainly supports that case. Unlike the occult sensibility of her more lauded book The Sea Priestess, that of The Demon Lover is not neopagan, but rather Christian. Needless to say, it is not a bigoted anti-magical Christianity, but an esoteric perspective that values the Christian tradition, and gives some credit to the possible benefits of a naive show more piety. Like The Sea Priestess, however, this book amplifies and explains the action of its main characters in terms of their reincarnations through history. Where The Sea Priestess had Atlantean and Celtic pagan backdrops, The Demon Lover offers the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. The story is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, and even more than The Sea Priestess does, it gives the impression of occult instruction illustrated by a tale.

My very worn used softcover has some curious jacket copy describing the state of affairs some 75% of the way through the book as if it were the inception of the plot. A more conventional supernatural thriller might have begun there in fact, gradually disclosing earlier events as they became clear to some less-involved protagonist. But Fortune tells the whole story chronologically, beginning with a conflict internal to an esoteric order in London, and only gradually reaching the country setting where the alarming phenomena occur. The climax of the book is very much engaged with an occultist rationalization of folkloric monsters: both vampires and werewolves.

The characters are composed quite vividly, although they do draw somewhat on stereotypes. There is a short but substantial denouement that completes the redemptive action of the plot, and also addresses its consequences for the secret fraternity and for humanity as a whole. In that passage, Fortune has one of her fictional initiates offer a tacit quote from the ethics lecture of the Neophyte grade in the actual Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Fortune herself had been initiated into its successor orders the Alpha et Omega and the Stella Matutina, but the "Fraternity" of The Demon Lover is clearly no mere mask for any of those, in part because one of its defining characteristics is the exclusion of women, and all three of those hermetic orders from their respective inceptions admitted both men and women. The story is implicitly contemporary, i.e. set in the 1920s, when it was written and first published, but it would probably have made more historical sense if it had been set in the mid-nineteenth century, before the precedent of the Theosophical Society inclined almost all significant occult organizations to afford women equal standing with men.

Although this book is a little clumsier than Fortune's later fiction, it is still a worthwhile read. show less

Published in 1935, this straddles the territory between popular and serious fiction (or an attempt at it at least). It is best given its rating as the former because this is not great literature but rather a fascinating insight into the sexual attitudes of a long-gone era.

Put to one side the casual racism and sexism and the very binary view of what it is to be a man and a woman and enjoy a romantic adventure, albeit one built on the somewhat simple sub-Lawrentian and post-Freudian theories show more of its occultist psychologist author.

There is an erotic charge in at least the first third of the book and, although the romance does not quite ring true, it contains nuggets of well observed psychology some of which applies today as much to the 1930s. But it is the down-at-heel soldier Murchison who interests most.

This is a picture of a thirty-something who has been given a taste of life as a berserker soldier in the Great War and been disappointed ever since, finding not a 'land fit for heroes' but submission to harsh economic reality and a culture of sexual repression.

This is the sort of man who would have swelled the ranks of national socialism if he had been born a German but he is born a Briton instead and so into a very different set of class, emotional and sexual constraints.

The characters of Murchison, his slightly effeminate and manipulative boss Alick Brangwyn and the confused and passive half-sister Ursula Brangwyn create a sexual dynamic offset against the manipulations of darker forces.

The criminal is always just below the surface. Murchison could turn to crime out of economic desperation. He makes clear that he would do so to survive but his opponents are criminal by their very nature. Love redeems, of course, but he has to have the basic character for it.

Murchison is saved (rather too obviously in the final symbolism) by a form of gnostic Christanity rather than the socially dominant Christianity of (his) contemporary culture because he is taken in hand by Brangwyn the manipulative occultist and therapist.

On the other side is a sinister and evil character, Astley, no more nor less than a satirised Aleister Crowley. The attempt at a Black Mass ritual is the seedy ancestor of Dennis Wheatley's horrors - not true esotericism but mere psychic and physical thuggery.

For Fortune, the occult was just hidden spirituality of a gnostic type in which magic was a matter of the manipulation of the psychological dynamic in a sexual situation. The cause of change would be spiritual in the classic sense. Evil magicians could use that same dynamic.

The underlying theme is one of sex magick and, though never explicit and clearly undertaken within the bounds of matrimony, there is an ambiguity about whether the matrimony may actually require a church service if it is a magically charged spiritual encounter.

As you would expect in a published book of the era, the sexual magick is ritualised in the abstract and largely alluded to rather than directly presented but it is there. The theme is clear - sex is a positive force for spiritual change.

The theory is not going to persuade many twenty-first century readers - too much intellectual and social change took place in the intervening eight or so decades but it remains an interesting contribution to the occult thriller genre and still reads well. show less

The Sea Priestess is probably the chief of Dion Fortune's novels. It furnishes occult instruction from one of the most significant authors on ceremonial magic from the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of a story about a Mary Sue named "Morgan Le Fay," the reincarnation of a priestess of Atlantis. But that sort of synopsis really doesn't do justice to what is actually a tremendously entertaining book.

Nor would the original readers have been likely to identify Fortune with show more Morgan. For one thing, Violet Firth's pen name "Dion" left her gender uncertain. As she writes amusingly in her foreword, "It has often been said of me that I am no lady, and I have myself had to tell the secretary of a well-known club which craved my membership that I am no gentleman." Also, the book is written in the first person from the perspective of Wlifred Maxwell, an asthmatic "mother's boy" in early middle age, a fairly prosperous estate agent, enmeshed in a terminally staid English bourgeois culture. Wilfred's voice was so distinctive, so unaffectedly droll and engaging, that it was the highlight of the book for me, and a reader without other knowledge of the author would surely conclude that if there were a character with autobiographical traits, it was Wilfred.

There are a couple of fine pieces of ceremony in this story, but it is more focused on the visionary aspects of magical practice, as well as their effects on artistic creativity and interaction with libidinal expression. I have read other reviewers take the book to task for an overlong denouement, but when the essential plot of the book is viewed as a magical operation, it would hardly do to give any briefer treatment to what is, at least from Wilfred's perspective, the real result of the work.

I didn't expect to enjoy this book half as much as I actually did, and I think it makes an admirable sort of pagan alternative to the occult novels of Charles Williams. In fact, it could probably be said without too much distortion, that The Sea Priestess is to Fortune's Hermetic outlook what Descent into Hell is to Williams' Christian spiritual reflection. show less

I like this series - it's fluff, but just deep enough that the characters are distinct and vivid in my mind. Michelle has an odd power (like each woman in this series) - she gets a stock tip once a week, and _must_ tell someone. She's an orphan, with her stepfather as guardian - but he's come under the control of a man who (at the beginning of the book) she learns is a werewolf (or at least, she learns his teeth get big). She runs, with her small stepbrothers, trying to escape the power of show more the werewolf Blake. And then she's trapped, caught by Blake's agents - until a man comes out of nowhere, deals with them, and gets her and her brothers away. He offers safety, but Michelle has learned all too well that letting a man have power over her is a bad idea. And then she discovers he is also a werewolf... The somewhat sketchy world limned in Hope(less) gets filled out a bit more, the werewolves learn more about what the Forlorn really are, and Michelle and Emmitt build a solid relationship on some very shaky ground. One funny thing, for this read - I just finished a Heyer about two brothers, with the more serious one having a romance and his more flighty brother interfering. So watching Jim mess with Emmitt was extra amusing (though I don't think I'd have found him amusing in real life). Jim was also exactly what the boys needed. Watching the three of them begin to recover from the abuse they've suffered is excellent. Enjoyable, and I think rereadable. show less