Radford, A. (2016) What lies below the horizon of life: the occult fiction of Dion Fortune. In: Anderson, E., Radford, A. and Walton, H. (eds.) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness. Palgrave Macmillan: London, pp. 201-218. ISBN 9781137530356 (doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_12)
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Publisher's URL: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137530356
Abstract
In this essay, Radford proposes that the ceremonial magician Dion Fortune’s occultism, far from offering a coherent world view, is distinguished by complexly contradictory pressures. The potentially communal and egalitarian facets of her cosmology—underlining shared spiritual exertions—chafes against literary tropes which are culturally elitist, exclusionary and punitive towards a range of class or ethnic interlopers. While Fortune’s fiction and mystical tracts display a wide knowledge of different numinous traditions, she is no ardent campaigner for the colonial syncretic. Unlike experimental interwar women writers such as H.D., whose mysticism is marked by a heterodox hybridity, Fortune promotes occult cliques that are steeped in, and fiercely protective of, local pre-Christian tenets and systems of initiation. Ultimately, she warns against translating foreign metaphysical precepts into occidental cognitive habits. In short, her recondite spirituality dramatizes a return to the nativist.
| Item Type: | Book Sections |
|---|---|
| Status: | Published |
| Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: | Radford, Dr Andrew |
| Authors: | Radford, A. |
| College/School: | College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature |
| Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan |
| ISBN: | 9781137530356 |
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