Pythoness: The Life and Work of Margaret Lumbly Brown

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