In the early years of the last century, a woman emerged from the Golden Dawn tradition, destined to become one of the most famous and accomplished magicians of her time. Her name was Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946), later to be known as Dion Fortune.
Dion Fortune received her earliest esoteric training under the physician and occultist Theodore Moriarty, whose work combined elements of Theosophy, esoteric Freemasonry, mesmerism, psychic diagnosis, and practical occult psychology; his influence later found literary expression in her fictional character Dr Taverner.
For a while, in the early 1920s, she was involved in the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society, but seeking a more formal initiatory structure, she was subsequently admitted to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in its later manifestation, of the Alpha et Omega temple in London, where she underwent graded ceremonial training grounded in Qabalah, ritual magic, and symbolic initiation. Although she did not remain within the order for an extended period, eventually parting over differences in direction, the combined influence of Moriarty’s practical occult therapeutics and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s structured initiatory system profoundly shaped the synthesis evident in her later teachings and writings.
She was also a trance medium and had links with Spiritualist teachings and methods throughout her esoteric teaching career. In the 1920s, she served as the medium for a small circle that sometimes gathered in Glastonbury for her trance mediumship. The pattern of her work evolved working in polarity between London and Glastonbury. Charles Thomas Loveday, one of her lifelong co-workers, was also in the circle. Contact was made with an inner-plane group of spirit people called The Watchers of Avalon, who presented teachings along with a group identified as “The Masters.” Later, her better-known contacts (also called guides) influenced her teaching, heralded by David Carstairs, who presented as a WWI soldier.
Taking what she had been taught in the Golden Dawn and melding it with her own deeply Celtic soul, she claimed memories of the Drowned Lands of Atlantis. She built around herself a school that still exists today: the Society of Inner Light. She was a pioneer of early psychoanalytic thought and studied the human mind and the soul in innovative ways. She said to those who asked to know how to discern the best Mystery School in which to enrol, ‘Look at the men and women who come out from its door: they are living proof of that school’s ideals and principles’.
From the Society of Inner Light came many highly trained occultists and magicians, mystics and sensitives, some to be famous, others to exercise and teach their craft in near secrecy. Dr. Penry-Evans, Dion Fortune’s husband; Colonel C. R. F. Seymour, a uniquely talented magician and a High Priest of rare ability; Christine Hartley, Seymour’s Priestess and Seer; Margaret Lumley-Brown, unknown outside the Society of Inner Light, yet one of the first Cosmic Mediators of this century; W. G. Gray; Gareth Knight; and the man who cycled from Southampton to Glastonbury one summer’s day and became one of her right-hand men – W. E. Butler. She greeted him with the words, ‘I’ve been waiting for you’, and presented him with a rose from her garden. He had been told in India some months before to ‘go to the sacred hill, to the Lady with the Roses’.
W. E. Butler, noted for his highly readable books on magical training, had worked with his own Inner Level contact and teacher since the days when he worked with his first teacher, Robert King (1869-1954); King was a medium who worked in W.T. Stead’s Julias’ Bureau as a pioneer Spiritualist, a Theosophist, occultist and Liberal Catholic Church Bishop, he was an esoteric teacher of repute.
With Dion Fortune’s permission, Ernest Butler set up a satellite Lodge of the Society of the Inner Light in the Guildford area during the years preceding the Second World War. The Lodge disbanded during WWII. Following Dion Fortune’s death on January 8th 1946, W.E. Butler remained a member of the Society of the Inner Light but worked mostly in the outer circle of the group. He had been most active as one of the teachers and organisers in the Inner Light in the 1930s.
In the early 1960s, Ernest was approached by Gareth Knight and John Hall of the Helios Book Service, near Cheltenham, to help develop a correspondence course called The Helios Course in the Practical Qabalah, of which six preliminary lessons had been written by Gareth Knight. Butler wrote the remaining 44 lessons of the Course in alignment with the guidance of his Inner Teacher that he had worked with for many years.
In 1972, Gareth Knight bowed out, and the simple correspondence course became the Servants of the Light School of Occult Science under the Directorship of W E Butler. A group of five supervisors became the core of the Group under W.E. Butler’s guidance as Director of Studies; they included: Tom Oloman, Olive Ashcroft, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and her then-husband, Michael, and Mariton Geikie. Dolores and Michael had trained in the Society of Inner Light in the 1960s and taken Initiation there some years before. Now, under the guidance of W E Butler, they set about the building of a true School of the Mysteries.
Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki led the SOL school as Director of Studies from Samhain 1976, when W.E. Butler retired some two years before his death at Lamas (August 1st) in 1978, until 11th June 2018, when she retired and handed over the leadership of the SOL to her successor, Dr Steven Critchley.
The SOL is now in its third phase of work under Steven’s direction.
The original Helios Course on the Practical Qabalah used to have the image at the foot of this page on the front cover of the lessons that were printed on a Cyclostyle machine and posted out, and the image remained in the SOL Practical Course on the Mystical Qabalah. It is full of Qabalistic meaning.
The Latin, “Qui expansis in cruce manibus, traxisti omnia ad te saecula”, can be translated:
“You who, with outstretched hands on the cross, have drawn all ages (or all things through time) to yourself.”
or as:
“You who, with arms outstretched upon the cross, have drawn all things across the ages unto yourself.”
There’s a strong Johannine / mystical theology here; John is shown in the image contemplating Christ as a cosmic attractor, drawing all existence (not just people, but time itself: saecula) back into unity. This is reflected in the mystical Tree of Life.
This image expresses a complete spiritual movement: “In principio erat Verbum” — in the beginning, the divine Word, the Logos, stands as the source of all manifestation; and “Qui expansis in cruce manibus, traxisti omnia ad te saecula” and that same Logos, extended upon the cross, draws all things, and beings, across time and beingness, back into itself.
It is a vision of emanation and return: from unity into multiplicity, and from multiplicity back into unity again. The cross here not only represents sacrifice, but the great axis of balance and reintegration, the point through which the many are gathered back into the One.
There is an inner light in each being that has been variously called the Christ, the Atman, the Buddha nature, the Osiris, and the risen Horus, and by many other names. It has also been known in Kabbalistic tradition as the Shekinah, the indwelling Divine Presence that abides with and within creation, along with other feminine expressions of the sacred that emphasise its nearness, receptivity, and living immanence. The Shikinah is the glory of the presence in the temple of nature.
Human beings have often imagined ‘God’ in their own image. Yet the Divine transcends gender and human traits; anthropomorphic or binary language is therefore symbolic, not literal.
In the Hindu tradition, the chant Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya encapsulates this idea beautifully. It means: “I bow to the Divine Lord Vāsudeva,” which we can paraphrase as: “I bow in reverence to the sacred Presence that pervades all things and dwells within the heart of every being.”
This Presence is both the transcendent source beyond all form and the intimate indwelling consciousness known in some traditions as the Divine Mother or the abiding Presence—that quietly sustains, witnesses, and guides from within. It is the healing presence.
Growing an awareness of this light of the spirit incarnate in all matter is the aim of our work, and learning how to work with the eternal presence within each of us is core to our school’s work. We work with many ancient symbols from mythology and sacred teachings to expand our consciousness of the light that shines in the darkness that is a part of our lives, too.
The Mandorla, or Vesica Pisces, is a central part of the image and represents the sacred space of encounter and relationship, where apparent opposites can be held in the unitive and reparative field of paradox.
