382pp. Octavo [22 cm] Brownish-orange cloth over boards. Some wear to the

382pp. Octavo [22 cm] Brownish-orange cloth over boards. Some wear to the cloth at the extremities (a bit more so to the cloth at the head of the spine). Bookseller's ticket on the front pastedown. The dust jacket is torn in half. Reginald 05528 (the 1936 edition). The fifteenth and twentieth centuries come together with bizarre results when wealthy and skeptical Hugh Paston, stunned by the death of his wife and her lover in a car crash, strikes up a friendship with a bookseller who lends him volumes of occult literature. The books spark Hugh's interest in the Eleusinian Mysteries and, with the hope of evoking Pan, the goat foot god, he purchases Monks Farm, formerly a monastery. There, he is possessed by the spirit of Ambrosius, a fifteenth-century prior, who was confined to the cellar for practicing pagan rituals that he had come across in Greek manuscripts. Prominent British writer, occultist, and trance medium Dion Fortune (1890-1946), whose real name was Violet Mary Firth, studied psychology at the University of London before working as a counselor in a psychotherapy clinic. She was very fascinated by the esoteric, which led her to become a member of the Golden Dawn, and the Theosophical Society. Eventually she left these groups and formed her own-The Society of the Inner Light (originally founded as the Fraternity of the Inner Light). Firth wrote a number of books both fiction and non-fiction under the name Dion Fortune. These became the main texts used by the society. During the Second World War she assembled a widespread resistance to the Third Reich, through a program of visualization and meditation, undertaken by people across the United Kingdom. (Information from the Society of the Inner Light website.).