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...

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, War...

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 h...

London. The year is 1977 and the Sex Pistols, Damned and The Clash are taking on the disco, pop and rock establishment. Bowie is across the Channel in Berlin recording Heroes with Brian Eno. One person seems fairly much oblivious to the noise in the bedsits, pubs and clubs. Zachary Cox is frustrated. His love of good poetry has taken him on a quest for more published works from Swinburne yet he becomes increasingly dismayed at what he finds some 70 years after the poet's death. His thinking at the time is summarised in his own words within the foreward of “Swinburne 77,” a little book he subsequently publishes that year:- “It is a sobering fact that ….there is no complete edition of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne in print nor even an edition of any one of his complete volumes of verse. All that can be found are 'selections' – selections made by lesser and later poets, who appear to be determined to select only those works which match up to the em...