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...

Two key shadowy figures skirt fleetingly and mysteriously around the history of the Society of the Inner Light. The level of influence the two had on the Society’s development is unlikely to ever come fully into the light of day. However, there have been some chinks in the curtains over the past few years which have let enough light through to enable us to have a clearer picture of both characters. I shall take a look at the first and perhaps most influential of these figures before moving on to the Hibernian Adept in my next blog entry. The industrious Alan Richardson has written a little about Maiya Tranchell Hayes, the first of these initiates, in his 2009 book “Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune – the Logos and the Shakti of the Age” (Llewellyn Worldwide).   Alan suggests that Maiya may have been the inspiration for the main heroine in Dion Fortune's classic novel, "The Sea Priestess," based around Brean Down pictured below.   The first photograph taken on a trip t...