Part 3: Dion Fortune: Sea Priestess of Avalon
Astro-Biographical Details.
Her actual name was Violet Mary Firth. She was born in Llandudno in North Wales, but the Frith family were from Sheffield. They were involved in Hydrotherapy and her mother was a Christian Scientist so already adept at using thought forms and spiritual healing. Her parents would attend her meditation groups.
While she radiated practical wisdom- that of a Pallas Athene -which for her is in Sagittarius conjunct her Mercury which is very apt since she wrote so much. Pallas is the strategist and independent woman who has a way with words. She said “Experience is a very good teacher even though her lessons are very expensive.” It’s not Jupiter that ranks as the final dispositor of her chart, but it is Venus, which is also her chart ruler as Libra is on the Ascendant. Here it is best to view to Vivien Le Fay Morgan, the character in her novels based on Arthurian legend, as the mouthpiece for Fortune and this mysterious woman she claims as an adept has ‘ageless beauty.’ She gives away many clues as to her real life personality in the novels which make good reading for that purpose alone.
With the Sagittarian sun sign, there is a lot of plain speaking about tricky subjects in her non-fiction work. The reason she is so valued today is that she could write about highly complex topics and make them easy to understand; she brought higher knowledge down to earth. In the novels she revealed in practice what is theoretical only in books such as ‘The Mystical Qabbalah’. She could however be bombastic and did not tolerate mystification for its own sake, but advocated for revealing the secrets of the ages. This garnered her several enemies whose cover was blown by this resolute attitude.
Furthermore, she did not indulge of the tricky rhetoric that Crowley- the Libran- was famous for- she just revealed her knowledge as if talking to a friend and taking you into her confidence. His Mercury was in Scorpio, so more twisted with satire; and hers was in Sagittarius more uplifted yet to the point. Still while reading her she seems coy and could have said more. But the hints even at sex magic are all there, but they are still ‘hints’ and you have to read through the lines of the novels carefully. That’s part of the appeal of a Sagittarian sun sign- you are getting the unvarnished truth, but with a wise old owl nodding and winking at you. Their ability to connect all the strands of wisdom together into a synthesis is remarkable.
Her books are still in high demand and for those who don’t like tomes full of technical vocabulary, her novels can trigger the very altered states she utilised to see visions. This may have been intentional. The reader can be subtly lead into a trance quite easily. She transitions from the concrete 3D reality, into dream imagery, and to conscious thought forms on the astral and etheric levels as she does in the opening chapters of Moon Magic (1938). She does this as if casually switching gears in a high speed car. She knew her stuff and this comes through in her work. The novels may not be regarded as having literary qualities, but they are not without merit, and in tone, similar in tone to the work of Iris Murdoch.
What set her apart was that she claimed an ‘inborn’ knowledge. She had inner intuition and heightened states of mind. She advocated that everyone should find their own inner ascended masters. She didn’t need any ‘lodge’ to validate her level or to ‘initiate’ her. Her South Node was conjunct the Sun. This points to the fact that she came in to this incarnation with prior experience of being a priestess of the old gods. This same degree is that of the Great Attractor. This gave her the impetus in 1919 to join what was then remnants of the original Golden Dawn. This was no longer the Golden Dawn of 20 years previously. This was in the early 1920 so not the same lodge to which Crowley and W.B. Yeats had belonged. That one disbanded but it was still being run by Moina Mathers, a Swiss-Irish artist and astrologer and the wife of MacGregor Mathers. She founded the Alpha and Omega order. It used the same material drawn from Hermetic mysteries as the Golden Dawn so it was a continuation.
In the Sea Priestess she states plainly also that “all women are Isis” in the highest sense, if they are aware of that, but that Fortune herself is the representative of “the cult of the black Isis” and a whole lot darker than people realise having rule over death as well as birth and similar to the worship of Kali in India. Isis reassembled her partner Osiris including the missing genital part cut off by his brother Seth. The original temple for the Golden Dawn was that of Isis-Urania. Isis of the depths of nature and Urania the muse of astronomy-astrology.
Why the Moon is so important for her was that her Lot of Spirit – her Daemon if you will- was at 26° of Cancer, ruled by the Moon. So her many promptings to make moves in her life come from the tidal shifts of lunar inspiration.
“I am that soundless, boundless, bitter sea. All tides are mine, and answer unto me. Tides of the airs, tides of the inner earth; The secret, silent tides of death and birth. Tides of men’s souls, and dreams, and destiny – Isis Veiled, and Ea, Binah, Ge.”
Fortune exemplified the themes of a Libra Ascendant by marrying a man she involved in her rituals and taking that marriage seriously although some commented that the husband, Penry Evans, allowed her to do all the talking. But also that she wrote a book called The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage. Here it is achieving balance between inner masculine and feminine and she said that a man and a woman, when doing astral work together become soul mates as they would have synthesised their anima/animus.
Her Moon is also in Libra, and normally this is the pacifier, the people pleaser, good at settling disputes in marriage and in love, or in business contracts, and though it was noted by Israel Regardie that she ‘henpecked’ her husband in group sessions, she probably appeased and compromised with him as she did not find relationships very easy. She apparently allowed him to cheat, though it is not known if she also did that. Perhaps that it was at 0° Libra that meant she was an ingenue in relationships with such a lot to learn and put into practice. But the search is always for perfect equilibrium. This degree is also significant because it is one of the four world axis points so it is powerful in its own right as it represents the Equinox- hours of equal day and night.
And even the degree of her Sun seems to indicate she came from some lofty goddess realm -Diana of the hunt- with that Venus in Sagittarius- having an authority that comes from roaming the wild forests. At 13° of Sagittarius the Sabian symbol for her Sun reads Sphinx and Pyramids stand, remains of a glorious past. This is on her South Node when she talked a lot about past lives. For her to be Sphinx and revive the worship of black Isis was a natural position for her to adopt.
She was one of the Pluto-Neptune conjunction generation. These two planets only come together every 500 years but early that decade they were dancing together in Gemini. The previous time Pluto and Neptune were in Gemini was at the beginning of the Renaissance- itself a resurgence and rediscovery of hidden knowledge. Others born in this decade were Osbert Sitwell (1892) and Robert Graves (1895) who wrote ‘the White Goddess’ a tribute to moon rites in ancient Greece. It was also known as the ‘mauve’ decade where Symbolist artists incorporated decadent and taboo themes such as demon possession in their work, and the turn-of-the- century madness where cult-like behaviour comes to the fore. coming to the fore. It was the decade in which Oscar Wilde had his heady rise and fall from grace, and it was the decade in which dark themes of split personality and self transformation appeared in literature – very appropriate for the conjunction appearing in Gemini- such as Picture of Dorian Gray, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and of course at the end of the decade Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. We get a sense of these psychic transformations Fortune’s novels written mostly in the 1930s.
So to have this conjunction in the natal chart exerts a powerful influence towards the combination of spiritual and therapeutic modalities of any kind. These profound levels of psychism continued even after her death when her amanuensis Margret Lumley Brown who worked aside Fortune while she was alive, was said to have still been in communication with her to complete unfinished works especially Moon Magic. This was said partially to have come through automatic writing. Lumley was a fellow Sagittarian born December 7th, 1886.
4: Mars and Jupiter in Aquarius in the 5th
There are no planets in water signs, they are mainly in Air, Fire and Earth signs. There is a grand trine in Air from Jupiter in Aquarius, Pluto-Neptune-North Node in Gemini and the Ascendant in Libra. This points to her intellectual gifts and the ability to play with ideas with ease. She tried hard to understand feelings but her primary interest was in psychology was well known as she became a lay psychiatrist. She made the mind her number one subject but quickly saw that even Freud’s delineation of the subconscious pulling the strings of the conscious mind was not enough to explain how two minds can converge, so she focussed on the western mystery tradition. But even then when discussing occult practices she gave them a psychological flavour by using terms from psychology.
Jupiter would give full flight to creative ideas in Aquarius in the fifth underlining her ability to communicate and join groups. Mars there would give a lot of drive to become the leader, but also make her a tad contentious in any group. She was not averse to any dispute and could fight like the best- Sagittarians have a fiery nature- about what was right according to her. One such fight was in the Christian Mystic branch of the Theosophical Society around 1930 where the members ganged against her for her insistence on Western practices when they preferred ideas sourced from the Vedas as per Blavatsky. So she was obliged to branch out on her own, something she often did. Another was her famous fight with Moina Mathers ousting from the lodge of the Alpha and Omega of the Stella Matutina pushing her to found her own group which was the Society of Inner Light- still in existence. Mathers claimed that Fortune had revealed too many of the inner secrets of the order. But Fortune said she could not possibly have known since she had not been initiated to that high a grade- she just knew it anyway. So they parted ways. Mathers’ Saturn was at 29° of Libra exactly on Fortune’s Uranus- so the fight was a clash of epic proportions with flashes of heightened electricity. Fated elements were also involved as Mathers’ North Node is close by at 2°of Scorpio adding to the intensity of that clash. To add to the mix Fortune’s North Node in at 14° Gemini is conjunct Mathers’ Mars at 15° Gemini.
With both Mars and Jupiter are in the 5th House of Aquarius she had that drive to create running numerous projects simultaneously with business-like precision, but always insisting on high standards. She loathed idle volunteers who whimsically floated in and out of her group meetings and expected equal respect. She sent them packing. And Jupiter probably gave each of her pet projects total lift off. Even an early book of poems she wrote garnered attention and her early novels received reviews in the mainstream press at a time when no one was obliged to pay her any attention as she was an unknown. She wrote them couched in ordinary romance terms- almost genre style yet they are much more than that.
What also lifts these energies towards the creative side are these supportive sextiles she has from the Sagittarian placements in the third house of communication. Venus-the Sun in Sagittarius are sextile to Jupiter at 9° of Aquarius; and Mercury at 24° of Sagittarius is sextile to Mars at 21° of Aquarius so in any war of words with Fortune, we might pity the opponents. Fire and Air go well together as air feeds fire. She could proselytise for her unusual ideas with ease and people said they followed her because she imposed her will, but because she had an authority that people naturally believed. But she had the skill to put all this into words. The most forceful expression of this martial style persuasion is contained in Psychic Self Defence which is a manual of the Kung Fu/Ju Jitsu of the mind.
