The War Work, and the Novels That Are Textbooks

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.