View from the Big Hills

The London Group was formed by previous members of two esoteric groups strongly linked with Dion Fortune -- the  Society of the Inner Light and the Society of Western Mythologists.  The former of these groups had changed its direction, teachings and  practices, resulting in a number of members leaving to pursue avenues they believed were more appropriately aligned to serving the needs of the emerging Aquarian Age.  The latter had closed its temple in the early 1970s. It had been a working group founded by three previous members of the Society of the Inner Light, two of whom had lived in Queensborough Terrace.  They left the Society, feeling that new forms were needed for a New Age, and that the Society was running in contradiction to this need. Similarly, Basil Wilby, more well known as the author Gareth Knight, also left the Society shortly after them for the same reasons.  There was new work to be done, and new people were needed to do it.  To that e...

  “Modern life has developed the concrete mind to a high degree. It is a good servant but a very bad master and can provide one of the principal blockages to the manifestation of the true human. Its very nature tends towards formalisation and the precise pigeon-holing of all impressions and data received by it. What it cannot identify and label it will not admit exists, and, as the workings of the spiritual nature are rarely capable of such limitation, they are seldom admitted. So, in the majority of people the spiritual stimuli rarely come through to the physical brain and have little effect on the life.” -          Aquarian Occultism by Susan Rotcliff

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” The Cosmic Doctrine is perhaps Dion Fortune’s most overlooked and undervalued work. Next to The Mystical Qabalah , it is also possibly her most important. The text presents a near complete cosmogony stuffed full with enough images and concepts to keep the adventurous seeker busy for a lifetime. As a comprehensive philosophical and magical system, it presents a detailed interpretation of the origin of life, the Universe, Deity and Humankind. Like any cosmogony, it has some imperfections, interspersed with occasional annoyances and contradictions. This article is offered in the hope that it will whet readers’ proverbial whistles to further explore the depths of The Cosmic Doctrine. Before we go any further, it’s important for me to set out a key foundational premise – the honoured place of cosmogony in the occultist's toolbox. In any longer term esoteric endeav...