Abstract
Dion Fortune (1890-1946) was one of the most prolific British occult authors of the interwar period. This thesis will evaluate Fortune’s claim in her 1936 article ‘The Novels of Dion Fortune’ that her occult novels—The Winged Bull (1935), The Goat-Foot God (1936), The Sea Priestess (1938) and Moon Magic (published posthumously in 1956)—had an initiatory quality and that reading them, and meditating on their contents, could produce a lasting change in consciousness, which in turn could lead to lasting changes in an individual’s life. This thesis will argue that Fortune’s self-proclaimed initiatory novels both describe changes in consciousness and have the potential to cause them in the reader. Further, this thesis will explore the argument made across Fortune’s novels as well as her non-fiction that individual changes in consciousness would stimulate a larger movement, or evolution, of the ‘group-soul’ towards a consciousness befitting the Aquarian ‘New Age’.
A significant portion of the value of this thesis will be in rehabilitating a figure largely forgotten by both the fields of literature and of esotericism. In order to do this, this thesis proposes a framework for analysing initiatory fiction and the experience of fictional initiation. This thesis will thus present a new avenue for research and theoretical perspective on literary texts from the Occult Revival, on famed modernist texts, and on more contemporary occult fiction, presenting all of these as sites of occult praxis and initiatory transformation. It will illuminate the hidden, individual yet co-creative process of fictional initiation which lies behind the development of occultism, both in practice and in culture, from the nineteenth century to today. Further, it will reveal the way that the rejuvenating project of occult modernism continues to influence the development of new age spiritualities to this day.