Pythoness

Margaret Lumley Brown was a leading member of

Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, taking over many of Dion

Fortune’s functions after the latter’s death in 1946. She raised the arts

of seership to an entirely new level and has been hailed with some

justification as the finest medium and psychic of the twentieth century.

Although she generally sought anonymity in her lifetime her work was

the source of much of the inner teachings of the Society from

1946 to 1961 and provided much of the material for

Gareth Knight’s The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend

and A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism.

Gathered here is a four part record of the life and work of this

remarkable woman. Part One presents the main biographical details

largely as revealed by herself in an early work Both Sides of the Door

an account of the frightening way in which her natural psychism

developed as a consequence of experimenting with an ouija board in

a haunted house. Part Two consists of articles written by her on

such subjects as Dreams, Elementals, the Faery Kingdom, Healing

and Atlantis, most of them commissioned for the legendary but short

lived magazine New Dimensions. Part Th ree provides examples of

her mediumship as Archpythoness of her occult fraternity with trance

addresses on topics as diverse as Elemental Contacts, Angels and

Archangels, Greek and Egyptian gods, and the Holy Grail.

Part Four is devoted to the occult side of poetry, with some

examples of her own work which was widely published in her day.

Gareth Knight was a colleague and friend of Margaret Lumley Brown in their

days in the Society of the Inner Light together, to whom in later years she

vouchsafed her literary remains, some esoteric memorabilia, and the privilege of

being her literary executor