Looking back over the history of the magickal revival that began in England, that has been developing over the better part of the last 100 years and that has spread like a wildfire over much of the world since the late 1960s, one encounters two remarkable women who worked in different areas of the magickal spectrum but had some important qualities and experiences in common.
Doreen Valiente and Dion Fortune were women who were initially influenced by and somewhat subordinate to men in their magickal development. Through their continuing involvement with magick, however, both developed into strong, independent and creative leaders and prolific writers. These were pioneering women in the 20th century, and they were both magickal pioneers, period. Any individual working in magick in 2003 owes a debt of gratitude to these two women, in my opinion. Their stories are an important part of our history, illuminating aspects of our own individual magickal histories and development.
I hope that these brief introductions will pique the curiosity of folks who may not yet have explored these life stories directly, and that they will also remind those more familiar with Doreen Valiente and Dion Fortune of the influence these pioneering women had on much of the 20th century into our own -- and the powerful legacy they created and left for us all. As we move into another springtime, a time of flowering and rebirth, it is a good time to think about our immediate forebears, who did so much to bring about the flowering and rebirth of a peaceful, earth-centered and Goddess-loving worship in our abused and strife-torn world.
Doreen Valiente, author of An ABC of Witchcraft (1973), Natural Magic (1975), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) and Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) will be remembered and revered among practitioners of the Wiccan Craft, if only for her astonishing version of "The Charge of the Goddess," which has become a standard liturgy in many Wiccan circles. She was one of the first witches to be initiated by Gerald Gardner, and she spent her life developing, perfecting and sharing various aspects of the Craft with the world -- sometimes in concert with Gardner, sometimes in opposition.
Doreen was born in South London on January 4, 1922. Her parents were devoutly religious, and she was sent to a Catholic school as a child. From an early age, however, Doreen was interested in occult knowledge and was rumored to have cast her first effective spell while still a teen. Her marriage to Casimiro Valiente in 1944 was reportedly a long and happy one, if a bit unorthodox.
Doreen was introduced to Gerald Gardner in the summer of 1952 and was initiated into the New Forest Coven by him one year later, on Midsummer's Eve, 1953. It was Doreen Valiente who found elements taken from Aleister Crowley in Gardner's Book of Shadows, and she who convinced him to replace or revise this material with fresh interpretations and original ideas -- many of them written by herself -- including by some accounts the beautiful and powerful "Charge of the Goddess."
It was in the early '70s, after the death of her beloved husband, that Doreen began to write in earnest under her own name. Following the publication of An ABC of Witchcraft in 1973, other pagan leaders began to seek her out, and she rose to major prominence in the magickal revival that was taking shape around the world. Her works should be considered essential reading by all aspiring Wiccans -- she was very serious about her work and was an extremely learned, intelligent and articulate person. At a time when the bookstore shelves are groaning with every kind of pulpy spell book and celebrity witch's advice to the lovelorn, the basic, no-nonsense information in Doreen Valiente's books provides a strong foundation for an understanding of the Craft and of the history of its astounding development over the last 50 years since she was initiated.
The magickal world felt a great loss when, on September 1, 1999, Doreen Valiente passed over to the Summer Lands from her home town of Brighton. She lead an exemplary life of devotion to the Craft.
Dion Fortune was perhaps a more complicated and certainly a more controversial figure. She was nevertheless a powerful magician and an excellent, inspiring writer. I find her works of fiction to be especially important. To a larger extent than many of her peers, Fortune attracted people to her occult programs, and to some degree educated them as well, through the use of plays and tales that both captured the audience or readers' interest and offered them clear narrative illustrations of a magickal worldview, and how the operations of magick work. Such immersion is a wonderful way to teach, as it can reach out on several different levels at once.
Born Violet Mary Firth in 1890 (her chosen name is based upon the Firth family motto, "Deo, non Fortuna"), Fortune was one of the first practicing psychoanalysts in England, attaining prominence in London in the years immediately before World War I. Her psychoanalytic perspective stayed with her throughout her career in magick and led her to coin a new definition for magickal practice: "Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will." Her books about magick were careful to admit to the possibility of internal causes for apparently external magickal phenomena, while never denying that the art of magick has great power to cause change in itself.
Fortune was a contemporary, and, in some ways, a rival of Aleister Crowley and may be seen as representing a studious and richly imaginative feminine answer to Crowley's concepts (and excesses) in the field of "high" or "ritual" magick. Like Crowley, she was influenced by Theosophy and was involved with the Order of the Golden Dawn, and like Crowley she eventually founded her own occult study groups, now collected under the umbrella of the Society of the Inner Light, which continues to offer courses in magickal studies today, long after Fortune's death from pneumonia in 1946.
Two examples of Fortune's "instructive fiction" that offer interest to Wiccans are The Goat Foot God and The Sea Priestess. These two works cover a lot of magickal territory in their respective descriptions of "the Horned God" and "the Great Goddess Isis." Fortune was a firm believer in the concept that "all goddesses are aspects of one great Goddess, and all gods are aspects of one great God," which is similar to the way many Wiccans understand the God and Goddess they worship. These books place the Goddess and God firmly in their natural setting, and the process of connecting to the sacred in nature is explained in very evocative and imaginative language.
Indeed, Fortune's startling imagery, her romantic use of language (which borders on the poetic at times) and her deep understanding of magickal principles and the capacities of the human mind make her books of fiction at once excellent entertainments and treasure houses of magickal lore. I would also recommend Fortune's The Secrets of Dr. Taverner for its entertaining Sherlock Holmes-style mystery stories... often the solution to the mystery is literally out of this world!
A good biography of Fortune is The Magical Life of Dion Fortune: Priestess of the 20th Century by Alan Richardson -- quite a tale, and well worth reading.
Dion Fortune was a prolific writer, and it is a pleasure to see so many of her works back in print and her ideas weighing in on the further development of the magickal arts in the 21st century.