This is a wonderful and powerful book, first published in 1985 but still available on Amazon, regarding the life and work of occultist and founder of The Society of Inner Light, Dion Fortune.

Dion Fortune, born Violet Mary Firth in Wales, was the pen name for a very unusual woman who was born in 1890, died in 1980 at the age of 90, and whose life had deep meaning for not only the group of followers whom she mentored and trained to develop spiritually and psychically, but to all of Western civilization since she brought forward much hidden knowledge about the inner path to illumination through the Hermetic Mystery Teachings of western occultism. Her life spanned the two world wars, and was particularly significant during WWII when her establishment in London underwent the Blitz, whereupon she worked diligently with her followers to put a cone of protection around Britain and neutralize occult forces that were arrayed against the Allies in the form of Nazi black magic.

She was a prolific writer and left behind non-fiction in the form of books such as Psychic Defense, and also occult fiction with books including The Winged Bull, The Goat-foot God, and culminating in The Sea Priestess. This is one of the many ways that she is known and famed.

This book, however, is so much more. In telling the story of Dion Fortune, it is entwined with the story of the rise of Theosophy, and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn during her formative years, but she also had her own mystical experiences in which she was shown and tasked with the job of portraying the spiritual path as a path of love, power and wisdom, always lit with spiritual awareness, in contrast to the dark use of power and magic for self-aggrandizement. The book explains how she saw herself and her society as the end-point of an otherworldly effort on the inner planes to train and prepare adepts for world service.

She concerned herself with three Rays (emanations, qualities) from the Western tradition, i.e., the Hermetic Ray of ritual magic, the Elemental Ray of natural contact, and the Devotional Ray of the spirit. The book outlines her efforts to build a society and found an organization that would facilitate this inner work. It explains some of the rituals. Dion Fortune worked strongly with imagery and the Kabala. She met other people who became her disciples, and in some cases her colleagues, such as Colonel Seymour, Arthur O'Mulligan, and Margaret Lumley-Browne, who were later able to continue her work. The book specifies exercises, myths, rituals, missions, training methods, and the revelation of much hidden knowledge, especially pertinent to that part of the world, the Celts. It could only have been written by those who were close to her or knew her closely-held secrets and perspective.

I know I encountered this book for the first time in the beginning of my psychic development and spiritual path; I know this for two reasons: 1) it popped off my bookshelf when I was looking for something to read; and 2) I found that I had underlined sentences. But it was so early on my path, and so forgotten, that it was like rediscovering powerful and resonant concepts. I was particularly excited to read about the channeling experience, so much like that which I had discovered in myself but was then still 24 years away from encountering it. Or, when I read a passage about the inner planes adepti who have been previously conditioned to train for world service, having had an extraordinary experience myself of the exact same technique that (I later learned through the Dion Fortune books) was called An Initiation on the Inner Planes. Now, later in life, and completing my second book project (which to me is the wrap-up or fruition of the many years that I've spent on the path, and the task to which I was assigned), re-encountering this book was as though I had come full-circle on my own inner journey as an occultist.

So extraordinary was this re-encounter with this material that in writing this book review I can't even say comfortably that the book is "highly recommended" - which of course I feel it is - because it is so essential and so resonant with my innermost being that it would be almost like giving a shout-out to my own higher self, and in a sense, embarrassingly self-congratulatory to rate it. Suffice it to say that Dion Fortune feels like an aspect of myself that, once reawakened, could never be laid to rest, and that, once recognized, would always stay deep within as a mirror or echo of my own (much more modest) work. I can identify my inner being as an inner plane adept, and my own major task as the goal of world service to which my life has been committed.

So, if you want to understand people like myself, like Dion Fortune, like any true occultist on the path of light, yes, read this book.