Priestess

Dion Fortune was the pen-name of Violet Firth, one of the most luminous

and striking personalities of the twentieth century, Womanhood's answer to Aleister

Crowley, and quite possibly the Shakti of the Age.

This new, revised, expanded and beautifully-written edition tells the full story of a

woman who hid behind a veil of secrecy and who became a cult figure in the years

after her death in 1946. A brilliant writer and pioneer psychologist her whole life

was devoted to living out an eternal Myth in a story that can be told in terms of

Virgins and Dragons, Moons and Oceans, and the spirit of the land itself.

As a powerful psychic and medium, obsessed with the study and practise of Magic,

and a high-grade initiate within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, her

career was never entirely in this world, and her companions not always human.

In her own eyes at least she was a Priestess, a channel for the Great Goddess, an

exponent of the time-lost Mysteries of Women long before the present generations

of feminists and goddess-worshippers were even born.

From her birth in Llandudno, through her years in the drowned lands of Somerset,

Alan Richardson unfolds the luminous and very moving patterns of her life: her

early career as a psychoanalyst, her nervous breakdown, her time as a Land Girl and

her developing psychism; her memories of past lives on Atlantis and relationships

with Inner Plane beings who have an evolutionary interest in our world; her

romance with a man she believed to be non-human and her fraught marriage to a

doctor whom everyone knew as Merlin; the foundation of her own group devoted

to bringing through the Western Mysteries at a time when few people knew that

there was such a thing; her occult battles against the Nazis and fellow magicians

- and the start of her long, hard, and always stormy journey into the Otherworld,

toward the heart of the Goddess that she saw as sleeping within the Earth itself, and

who needed awakening . . .