Violet Firth - Further Fragments

In Summer Term 1911, a young Violet Firth joined Studley Horticultural College For Women in Warwickshire. Gareth Knight's book, Dion Fortune and the Inner Light, dedicates a whole chapter to this part of Violet's life. Alan Adams (writing as Charles Fielding), Janine Chapman and Alan Richardson all touch upon aspects of this time with varying degrees of success and accuracy. With the recent improvements in records accessibility and research capabilities, Knight's telling seems by far the most accurate. However, the other works remain of interest and use. A photograph of the College from the turn of the last century is pictured below, giving a sense of some grandeur. 

It was at Studely College that Violet allegedly met Evelyn Heathfield who would become a lifelong friend and stalwart. However, there is also some suggestion that the two may have been family friends before Studely. It was also here that she would meet the allegedly overbearing Dr Lillias Hamilton, Warden of the College, who would become infamous from a tale retold in Dion Fortune's Psychic Self Defence. A picture of a formidable and rather stern looking Dr Hamilton is shown below.

It was her experiences with Dr Hamilton which led Violet to take up the study of analytical psychology, and subsequently the path of occultism. While the recounted psychic battle with Dr Hamilton clearly represented a critical point in the development of the person we would come to know as Dion Fortune, her time at Studley was also a time of embryonic creativity and emerging literary talent. The former element is usually the focus of attention, while the latter often remains ignored or at best played down. I think this is a shame, and have written in earlier blog posts about Violet's early writing and how, at times, this shows the early foreshadowings of a style and approach we would come to recognise later in Dion Fortune's work. I'd love to see someone with the time and skills doing a more detailed and expansive analysis of the early influences and burgeoning style of the young Violet. Maybe that will happen one day!

Some of Violet's early poetry and writing is available in the rare library copies Violets, or to buy in More Violets: A Child's Thoughts on Nature in Verse and Prose. It is worth checking out. Gareth Knight kindly published the manuscript of Poultry Department, a poem written while she was a student at Studley. Below is another poem from that time for your consideration, The Professor's  Farewell to his Favourite Blight. As far as I am aware it has not yet been published anywhere. The poem gives a further insight into Violet's formative time at Studely and will most certainly bring a smile to your face and some warmth to your soul. Enjoy...

“Vocatus atques non vocatus, Deus aderit”

Toni Sussmann, the erudite Jungian practitioner and psychotherapist, remains relatively unknown outside Jungian circles. I think that’s rather a shame. 

Arriving in England with her husband in 1938, Toni was one of many refugees fleeing the rising tide of Nazism, who settled and managed to thrive in the bubbling cauldron of London. Importantly, to anyone with an interest in the esoteric history of England, Toni undoubtedly had a quiet and unassuming influence on the thinking and practice of some of the players at the time.

For those interested in the wider story of Dion Fortune, Toni Sussman was on record as a colleague of Dion’s student Helah Fox. Helah had been a member of the Inner Light’s community for a number of years, having lived at both Chalice Orchard and 3 Queensborough Terrace. Helah told the late Janine Chapman in 1973 that Dion Fortune had consulted Toni Sussmann in about 1943 or 1944 as “the best Jung practitioner who there was in London”. That would have been a fascinating consultation to have been a fly on the wall. Helah herself became a relatively a well-respected Jungian.

For those interested in the influences of another magical order, the Aurum Solis, Toni was also a teacher and colleague of the greatly loved London psychotherapist Buntie Wills. Now Buntie Wills also worked closely with Helah Fox in running a Monday night study group for “all things mind and spirit”. Functioning out of Studio H in 10A Cunningham Place, the Monday group’s activity included a fascinating smorgasbord of sessions on psychotherapy, dream work, qabalah and mythology.

One particularly interesting person studied under this group for six years– a young Vivian White (aka Godfrey). Vivian would later become known to the world as the last Presider of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), up until her death in 1997. She also was one of the public faces of the Aurum Solis, one half of the prolific writers publishing under the nom de plumes of Melita Denning and Osbourne Phillips.  I doubt that three of their most important books - Entrance To The Magical Qabalah, The Sword and Serpent and The Triumph of Light – all hugely influential on modern magical thinking and practice, would have been written in quite the helpful form that they are, without the influences of Toni Sussman, Buntie Wills, and Helah Fox. I also suspect that Dion Fortune’s teachings played a significant part too through Helah’s influence.

Interestingly, Toni Sussmann was also a colleague of Dr E Graham Howe, a Druid and founding member of the Tavistock Clinic, where the young Dion Fortune worked in 1920. While Howe’s writing is sometime challenging, gems like The Mind of the Druid, have influenced many esoteric students. I remember being captivated by his writing in the late ‘80s when Caroline Wise gave me a copy of this to review for the Green Circular occult magazine. Some 28 years later I still dip into its depths for sustenance.

One thing that has always struck me about the little I know about Toni Sussmann is the story she tells of arriving at Carl Jung’s house at Kussnacht, at the start of her working relationship with him. She writes that she was profoundly affected by the words carved into the stone over Jung’s doorway and included in this blog’s title. A translation of these words could be, “Called and not called, God is present.” Many years later Toni wrote that this sentence entered the very centre of her being. She continued by saying, “I carried it – or it carried me – during all these years of my work.” The words are certainly well worth personal contemplation.

When Toni got involved in the Taena Community in Gloucestershire, close to Prinknash Abbey, she felt she could see the truth of the words at actively at work in the community. In a note to her own students, Toni recalled how at the time, the experience also brought to her mind the words of Brother Lawrence quoted below.

“The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer, 
and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, 
while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, 
I possess God as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”

I regularly come back to Toni Sussmann and her reflections on Brother Lawrence’s words and hope you also find some insight and illumination from them.

Some Further reading:

Toni Sussmann - a Tribute, Helah Fox/Buntie Wills, Phonapress, UK (1974)

The Quest for Dion Fortune, Janine Chapman, Weiser, USA (1993) 

The Tree of Life: Talks, Buntie Wills,  Buntie Wills Foundation, UK (1990)

Buntie Wills Therapist: A Mosaic, Buntie Wills Foundation, UK (1990)

Some thoughts on the month of August

Song for Lughnasadh

                   [He:]    O beauty's blossom, most cruel maid,

                             A grievous foe have you been to me:

                             My heart you took and my trust betrayed

                                       And smiled as I sank in the dark sea.

                             But why, why did you turn away

                             And why so faithless when I was true?

                             O, summer love has its shining day,

                                       But winter love watches the night through!

                   [She:]   'Twas you, O golden my lord, confessed

                             To my loving ear your immortal race,

                             And if I tricked you I did but jest

                                       Yet perish now lacking your kind grace.

                             O, blame be to the wind that drives

                             My fainting steps where the first leaves fly!

                             For winter love with the pine-tree thrives

                                       But summer love will with its bloom die.

                   [He:]    My sweet and fairest one, live to seal

                             Our bond of love in my light anew!

                             O turn to me as the heavens wheel,

                                       For I am returned to seek you:

                             So turn again to me now at last

                             And we shall fear for no wind that blows:

                             For winter love through the storm holds fast,

                                       And summer love laughs with the red rose!

                  [Both:]    The year declines from its summer height

                             In burning glory of autumn gold,

                             Yet pales already the early light

                                       And stubble stands in the mists cold:

                             But leads winter to spring's new birth

                             While love and wonder their treasures pour,

                             Still bringing down to this mortal earth

                                                 The beams of a deathless splendour.

-         Vivian Godfrey

I fondly remember as a child magical and seemingly endless summer holidays through the months of July and August. Irish troubadour Van Morrison nicely captures many of the related sentiments of endless summers in two of his wonderful songs, “On Hyndford Street” and “These are the days.”

Now each summer we always spent a fortnight to a month out of the city, up on the Antrim coast, where some of our extended family lived. Inevitably this took us on tours of the Giant’s Causeway, Dunluce Castle and “the auld Lammas fair” in Ballycastle (albeit that that latter is always in the last weekend of August). All generations to this day are still able to sing along to the old song about the fair of the same name.  

The fair was a wondrous experience as a child – fun fair games, livestock, people watching, dulse, and Yellow Man to eat and rot your teeth. Typically happening on the last Monday and Tuesday in August, it remains one of the oldest fairs in Ireland, held continuously for at least three centuries.

Lammas is the name given to the August festival on the Wheel of the Year. The word may derive from the Celtic name Lughnasadh, which meant “the commemoration of Luqh”. Lugh is of course the name for the Irish sun god, known variously as Lugh of the Long Arm, the Shining One, the Fierce Striker and the Lightning Flash. Another explanation on the etymology is that the word is obtained from the Anglo-Saxon “hlaf-mass” or “loaf-mass”, for this festival marks the beginning of the grain harvest.

At this point on the Wheel of the Year it is plain for most of us in the Northern Hemisphere to see that the Sun god is indeed losing the battle; the days are beginning to get shorter and the light receding. Lugh uses his remaining power to ripen the golden wheat before the long and barren winter months. This was often seen by many as Lugh’s sacrifice to humanity who in turn “served” him.

At this time in Celtic lands, corn dollies are still traditionally made. These are rough female figures made from sheaves of wheat. These represent the Goddess, the Earth Mother, keeping the seed safe until the Spring. Families keep a corn dolly in the house, near the hearth, throughout the winter. When the spring finally comes, the grain incorporated in this figure can be mixed with the other seed just before it is sown in the fields, to symbolically increase fertility.

 Again, emphasizing the perennial nature of many of the old ways, in parts of modern day Ireland, environmental education officers are paid to teach school children how to make corn dollies. One of my old friends who is employed in such as role says that the children are clearly fascinated by their experience, no doubt finding themselves connected to something of a deeper and more enduring nature than much of the rest of their modern-day childhood.

At a time of global troubles, ecological disaster and strife, it is one of my deepest wishes that more of these old ways continue to find their ways back into schools, families and wider community life. The world would be a far better place for it. Our personal and global harvests would be healthier for it!

This August we were truly honoured to be invited by a local OBOD grove to participate in a beautiful Lughnasadh ceremony. The ceremony’s purpose was to celebrate Lughnasadh and bless an apple orchard. What an event it was too. The ceremony was beautifully crafted with richly poetic and symbolic language which really resonated with both my Aurum Solis and Dion Fortune initiatic heritage. Perhaps most interesting was the wide attendance -- families with their children, neighbours, druids, wiccans, rune devotees, qabalists and ceremonial magicians – all coming together in harmony to honour the spirit of life which is Lughnasadh and the start of the harvest season.

We need more common ground like this if we are to make the world a better place.

All hail!