Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune: What It Teaches

Written by Thalira Research Team

Last Updated: February 2026

The Origin Story: Fortune's Personal Experience

Psychic Self-Defense is, at its core, a book born from personal suffering. Dion Fortune opens it with an account of what she describes as a genuine psychic attack that occurred during her youth and shaped the entire direction of her subsequent career in occultism.

As a young woman in her early twenties, Fortune worked at a school or educational institution run by a woman she refers to by a pseudonym in the text. Researchers have identified this person as Lilias Hamilton, a woman with an interest in Indian occultism and, according to Fortune, a trained practitioner of mental domination techniques. Fortune describes how Hamilton subjected her to sustained psychological and psychic pressure, using what Fortune later understood to be telepathic suggestion and willpower to break down her resistance and dominate her personality.

Fortune describes the experience in vivid terms. Called into Hamilton's office, she was subjected to a barrage of accusations and commands. Hamilton told her she was incompetent, that she had no confidence, that she was incapable of independent thought. Fortune found herself unable to resist these suggestions. She felt her will dissolving, her sense of self fragmenting. She walked out of the encounter in a state of collapse and spent the following months in what she describes as a nervous breakdown: unable to eat, unable to sleep, subject to sudden tremors and involuntary movements, her weight dropping from over 150 pounds to under 100.

The recovery took years. Fortune studied psychology, partly to understand what had happened to her and partly to find defences against it happening again. She encountered the works of Freud and the early psychoanalysts, and she trained as a lay analyst. But she found that orthodox psychology could not fully explain her experience. The speed and totality of her breakdown, the specific quality of the attack (which she perceived as a directed assault on her aura rather than merely a verbal bullying), and the nature of her recovery convinced her that something beyond ordinary psychology was involved.

This conviction led her to the occult tradition, where she found frameworks for understanding phenomena that psychology could name but not fully explain. The concept of the aura, the idea of psychic energy that could be drained or directed, the notion of thought-forms that could be created and sent against a target: these provided Fortune with an explanatory framework that made sense of her experience. Psychic Self-Defense is her attempt to organize this framework into a practical manual for others who might face similar experiences.

It is worth noting that Fortune's account of the Hamilton incident cannot be independently verified in all its details. She changed names and altered circumstances to protect privacy. Some aspects of her narrative fit patterns familiar from clinical descriptions of psychological manipulation and coercive control. Whether one interprets the experience as a genuinely psychic event or as a case of extreme psychological manipulation depends on one's prior commitments about the nature of reality. Fortune herself would have insisted that the distinction is less clear than either materialists or occultists typically assume.

The Book in Context: 1930 British Occultism

Psychic Self-Defense was published in 1930 by Rider and Company, a London publisher that specialized in occult and esoteric titles. The book appeared five years before The Mystical Qabalah, and it established Fortune's reputation as a practical occultist who could write clearly and convincingly about experiences that most people found either unbelievable or terrifying.

The British occult scene of the 1920s and 1930s was a small but active world. The original Golden Dawn had fragmented, but its successor organizations continued to operate. Aleister Crowley, the most famous (or infamous) figure in British occultism, was publishing prolifically but had been largely marginalized by polite society. The Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, continued to attract members, and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical movement was gaining followers. Spiritualism, with its seances and mediums, remained popular across class lines.

Into this context, Fortune brought something distinctive: a combination of occult knowledge and psychological training. Most occultists of her era had no background in psychology. Most psychologists had no interest in the occult. Fortune occupied a unique intersection, and Psychic Self-Defense reflects this dual perspective throughout. She takes psychic phenomena seriously while insisting on the importance of ruling out psychological explanations first. She provides occult techniques for defence while acknowledging that many cases of supposed psychic attack are actually cases of mental illness, paranoia, or suggestion.

The book was also written during a period of significant cultural anxiety about the power of suggestion and mental influence. The aftermath of World War I, with its shell-shocked soldiers and traumatized populations, had made the British public acutely aware of the mind's vulnerability. Hypnosis and suggestion were subjects of both scientific study and popular fascination. Fortune's claim that psychic attack was a real phenomenon resonated with a culture that was already grappling with questions about the boundaries of mental influence.

Structure and Overview

The book is organized into two broad sections, though Fortune does not label them as such. The first half describes the phenomenon of psychic attack: what it is, how it manifests, and how to recognize it. The second half describes methods of defence and protection.

Throughout both halves, Fortune intersperses case studies drawn from her own experience and from the experiences of colleagues and students. These case studies serve as illustrations of the principles she is teaching, giving concrete examples of abstract concepts. Some are brief anecdotes; others are detailed narratives spanning several pages.

Fortune's writing style in Psychic Self-Defense is direct and practical. She avoids the ornate language that characterizes much occult writing of her era. She writes as a practitioner addressing other practitioners (or potential practitioners), not as a mystic addressing disciples. The tone is closer to a clinical manual than to a spiritual text, which is consistent with her psychological training.

The book assumes no prior knowledge of occultism. Fortune defines her terms as she introduces them and explains the theoretical framework as she goes. This makes the book accessible to general readers while still providing enough substance for experienced practitioners. It is this accessibility that has kept the book in print for nearly a century.

Types of Psychic Attack

Fortune identifies five main categories of psychic attack. These are not rigid classifications; she acknowledges that real-world cases often involve combinations of multiple types. But the categories provide a useful framework for understanding the different mechanisms by which one person can harm another through non-physical means.

The five categories are: telepathic suggestion, auric vampirism, thought-form projection, entity attachment, and ritual magical attack. Each operates through a different mechanism and requires a different approach to defence.

Telepathic Suggestion

The most common and, in Fortune's view, the most underestimated form of psychic attack is telepathic suggestion. This involves the projection of thoughts, emotions, or mental images from one person to another without the target's conscious awareness or consent.

Fortune distinguishes between deliberate and unconscious telepathic suggestion. In deliberate suggestion, the attacker consciously directs thoughts toward the target with the intention of influencing their behavior, emotions, or physical state. Fortune's account of her experience with Lilias Hamilton falls into this category. Hamilton, according to Fortune, deliberately used concentrated willpower and verbal technique to implant suggestions of helplessness and worthlessness in Fortune's mind.

Unconscious suggestion is more common and less dramatic. Fortune describes cases in which a person's intense negative emotions, hatred, jealousy, fear, or rage, are unconsciously projected toward the object of those emotions. The sender is not deliberately attacking; they are simply feeling intensely, and the intensity of their feeling creates a psychic pressure that the sensitive recipient can perceive and be affected by.

The symptoms of telepathic suggestion, according to Fortune, include sudden changes in mood that do not correspond to the person's actual circumstances, intrusive thoughts that feel alien or imposed, irrational fears or compulsions that appear suddenly and without clear cause, and dreams featuring the suspected attacker in threatening or dominating roles.

Fortune's treatment of telepathic suggestion is the aspect of the book that resonates most strongly with modern psychology. The phenomena she describes closely parallel what contemporary psychology calls "emotional contagion," "projective identification," and the dynamics of coercive control. Whether one explains these phenomena in psychic or psychological terms, the underlying observations about interpersonal influence are grounded in real human experience.

Auric Vampirism

Auric vampirism, in Fortune's framework, is the draining of vital energy from one person by another. The concept assumes the existence of the aura, a field of subtle energy surrounding the physical body that sustains health and vitality. When this energy is depleted, the person experiences fatigue, depression, susceptibility to illness, and a general sense of being drained.

Fortune describes two types of auric vampirism. The first is unconscious: a person whose own vital energy is depleted, whether through illness, depression, or other causes, unconsciously draws energy from those around them. This person is not malicious; they are simply operating under a deficit, and their energy system compensates by absorbing energy from others. The classic symptom is the experience of feeling exhausted after spending time with a particular person, even when the interaction itself was not stressful.

The second type is deliberate: a trained practitioner who consciously draws on another person's vital energy for their own purposes. Fortune considers this rarer but more dangerous, because the deliberate vampire can target specific individuals and drain them more efficiently than an unconscious vampire.

The defence against auric vampirism, according to Fortune, begins with awareness. Once the pattern is recognized, the victim can take steps to protect their energy field. These steps include limiting contact with the suspected vampire, strengthening the aura through visualization and willpower exercises, and maintaining physical health and vitality through proper nutrition, exercise, and rest. Fortune also recommends specific visualizations for sealing the aura against unwanted energy drains.

The concept of auric vampirism has been widely adopted in contemporary energy healing and spiritual practice, often under the label "energy vampire." While the theoretical framework is contested, the underlying observation, that some people seem to leave those around them feeling drained, is widely recognized across cultures and therapeutic traditions.

Thought-Form Projection

Thought-form projection is a more technical form of psychic attack that requires some degree of occult training. In the occult tradition that Fortune inherited from the Golden Dawn, a thought-form is a construct of mental and astral energy created by concentrated visualization and willpower. The thought-form takes on a quasi-independent existence on the astral plane and can be directed to perform specific tasks.

In the context of psychic attack, a thought-form is created to embody hostile intent and is directed at a specific target. Fortune describes thought-forms as varying in sophistication from crude blasts of negative energy to carefully constructed astral entities with specific instructions. The more skilled the creator, the more coherent and persistent the thought-form.

Symptoms of thought-form attack, according to Fortune, include a persistent sense of being watched or threatened, nightmares featuring specific threatening figures, localized sensations of pressure or cold at specific points on the body (particularly the solar plexus and the back of the neck), and visible or semi-visible shadows or shapes perceived in peripheral vision.

Fortune's treatment of thought-forms reflects the Golden Dawn's understanding of astral mechanics. The underlying theory is that the astral plane is a medium of subtle substance that can be shaped by concentrated thought. A thought held with sufficient intensity and clarity creates a temporary structure in this medium, and that structure can interact with other astral structures, including the auras of other people.

The defence against thought-forms, in Fortune's system, involves recognizing the thought-form for what it is (a construct, not an independent being), refusing to feed it with fear or attention (which sustains it), and using banishing rituals or visualizations to dissipate it. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, a Golden Dawn practice, is one of the primary tools she recommends for clearing thought-forms from one's immediate psychic environment.

Entity Attachment

Entity attachment, in Fortune's framework, involves the interference of non-physical beings with a living person. Fortune's cosmology, derived from the Golden Dawn and the wider Western esoteric tradition, includes various classes of non-physical entities: elementals (beings associated with the four elements), astral shells (remnants of deceased persons), and more complex intelligences of various kinds.

Fortune describes entity attachment as occurring when a person's aura is weakened, whether by illness, emotional distress, substance use, or careless occult practice, and a non-physical entity takes advantage of the breach. The entity may attach itself to the person's aura, drawing on their energy and influencing their thoughts and behavior. In extreme cases, Fortune describes what she terms "obsession," a condition in which the entity gains significant control over the person's actions.

Fortune is careful to distinguish this from the claims of medieval demonology. She does not present entity attachment as a moral judgment or a punishment for sin. She treats it as a natural hazard, comparable to an infection. Just as physical hygiene reduces the risk of physical infection, psychic hygiene reduces the risk of entity attachment.

The defence methods for entity attachment include strengthening the aura, performing banishing rituals, avoiding states of consciousness that weaken the aura's integrity (Fortune specifically mentions excessive alcohol use, recreational drug use, and poorly conducted mediumship), and maintaining a positive and purposeful mental attitude. Fortune also describes more advanced techniques for removing attached entities, but she advises that these should only be attempted by experienced practitioners.

This is one of the more controversial sections of the book. The concept of entity attachment strains the credulity of readers who do not share Fortune's metaphysical assumptions. Even within the occult community, opinions differ about whether the phenomena Fortune describes are best understood as interactions with genuinely independent beings or as projections of the unconscious mind that take on apparent autonomy. Fortune herself recognized this ambiguity but maintained that the practical methods of defence work regardless of the theoretical explanation one prefers.

Ritual Magical Attack

Ritual magical attack is the rarest form of psychic aggression that Fortune describes. It involves a trained practitioner using ceremonial magic, often including specific rituals, sigils, incantations, and sometimes physical objects, to direct harmful forces against a specific target.

Fortune treats this category with particular seriousness. She notes that genuine ritual attack requires significant occult training and knowledge, which limits its frequency. But she also notes that the effectiveness of ritual attack is enhanced by the target's fear of it. A person who believes they have been cursed may suffer genuine physical and psychological consequences from that belief alone, regardless of whether any actual ritual was performed.

The defence against ritual attack, according to Fortune, involves both practical and psychological elements. On the practical side, Fortune recommends banishing rituals, protective wards, and the invocation of protective spiritual forces. On the psychological side, she emphasises that fear is the primary weapon of the ritual attacker. Refusing to be afraid, maintaining confidence in one's own spiritual protection, and denying the attacker the satisfaction of a fearful response are as important as any technical defence.

Fortune also discusses the ethics of counter-attack. She advises against returning aggression to the attacker, arguing that this perpetuates the cycle of psychic warfare and risks lowering the defender to the attacker's level. Instead, she recommends what might be called "spiritual judo": using the attacker's own force against them by redirecting it back through defensive rather than offensive means.

Defence Methods

The second half of Psychic Self-Defense provides practical methods for protection and defence. Fortune organizes these from the simplest to the most advanced.

Psychic Hygiene: The foundation of defence is maintaining good psychic hygiene. Fortune compares this to physical hygiene: just as regular washing prevents infection, regular psychic cleansing prevents the accumulation of negative influences. Practices include grounding (connecting one's energy to the earth through visualization), cleansing (visualizing negative energy being washed away), and maintaining physical health through proper nutrition, rest, and exercise.

Auric Strengthening: Fortune teaches several visualizations for strengthening the aura. The most well-known is the blue egg of light: the practitioner imagines a luminous blue ovoid surrounding their entire body, extending about eighteen inches in every direction. This visualization is performed daily as a preventive measure and reinforced whenever the practitioner feels vulnerable or threatened.

The Banishing Ritual: Fortune recommends the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, a Golden Dawn practice, as a primary tool for clearing one's psychic space. The ritual involves tracing pentagrams in the four cardinal directions while vibrating divine names and visualizing protective archangels at each quarter. Fortune describes this as both a psychological tool (it focuses the mind and asserts the practitioner's sovereignty over their own space) and an operative magical tool (it actually clears the astral atmosphere).

Breaking Contact: When a specific person is identified as the source of psychic attack, Fortune recommends breaking all contact, both physical and psychic. This includes avoiding the person's physical presence, refusing to think about them, and removing objects associated with them from one's environment. Fortune notes that psychic links operate partly through association, and anything that reminds the victim of the attacker can serve as a channel for continued influence.

Invoking Protection: For more severe cases, Fortune recommends invoking protective spiritual forces. This can range from simple prayer to formal ceremonial invocations. Fortune is nonsectarian in her approach, noting that the practitioner should invoke whatever spiritual power they have the strongest relationship with. A Christian might invoke Christ or the archangel Michael. A practitioner of the Qabalistic tradition might invoke the Sephirotic divine names. The key is genuine faith and sincere invocation, not the specific tradition.

Environmental Measures: Fortune also discusses physical and environmental measures. She recommends clearing one's living space with incense (particularly frankincense), ensuring good ventilation and natural light, removing clutter and objects with negative associations, and using salt and water in traditional purification patterns. These measures are presented as both symbolic acts that reinforce the practitioner's intent and practical techniques with genuine effect on the subtle environment.

Distinguishing Attack from Illness

One of the most valuable aspects of Psychic Self-Defense is Fortune's insistence on distinguishing genuine psychic attack from mental illness. This distinction is stated firmly in the book's opening chapters and reinforced throughout.

Fortune writes that the vast majority of people who believe they are under psychic attack are not. They are suffering from psychological conditions that produce symptoms resembling psychic attack: paranoia, anxiety disorders, depression, dissociative states, or the effects of substance use. Fortune insists that anyone suspecting psychic attack should first consult a physician and a psychologist. Only after ordinary medical and psychological explanations have been thoroughly explored should psychic explanations be considered.

She provides several criteria for distinguishing genuine psychic attack from psychological illness. Genuine psychic attack, she suggests, is characterised by sudden onset (the symptoms appear abruptly, without gradual development), specific targeting (the symptoms are associated with a particular person or situation), and responsiveness to psychic defence methods (the symptoms diminish when protective measures are employed). Psychological illness, by contrast, typically develops gradually, is not associated with any specific external source, and does not respond to psychic treatment.

Fortune acknowledges that these criteria are not foolproof. Psychological conditions can appear suddenly, and psychic defence methods might produce a placebo effect that temporarily alleviates psychological symptoms. She maintains that the distinction requires experience, judgment, and intellectual honesty. The practitioner who sees psychic attack everywhere is as deluded as the materialist who denies its possibility entirely.

This balanced approach is one of the book's enduring strengths. It prevents the book from becoming a manual for paranoia, which is the risk that any text on psychic attack runs. By insisting on medical and psychological evaluation as the first step, Fortune anchors her occult teaching in practical responsibility.

The Case Studies: Strengths and Problems

Fortune illustrates her principles with numerous case studies drawn from her own experience and from reports by colleagues and students. These cases range from the relatively mundane (a person drained by a depressive acquaintance) to the extraordinary (an occultist attacked by a projected thought-form in animal shape).

The case studies serve an important pedagogical function. They make abstract principles concrete, showing the reader how psychic attack manifests in specific situations and how defence methods are applied in practice. Fortune's clinical training is evident in the way she presents these cases: she describes symptoms, identifies causes, prescribes treatment, and notes outcomes.

The problems with the case studies are equally significant. Many of them cannot be verified independently. Fortune changed names and details to protect privacy, which means that even in principle, verification is difficult. Some cases involve phenomena (visible astral entities, physical effects of magical ritual, poltergeist-like manifestations) that fall outside the boundaries of what mainstream science considers possible. Readers who do not share Fortune's metaphysical assumptions will find some cases difficult to accept at face value.

There is also a selection bias inherent in the case studies. Fortune presents cases that support her framework. Cases that were ambiguous, that did not resolve as expected, or that turned out to have purely psychological explanations are underrepresented. This is a common problem in practitioner-authored texts and is not unique to Fortune, but it means that the case studies should be read as illustrative rather than as evidence.

Scholar Alex Owen, in The Place of Enchantment (2004), has noted that Fortune's case studies need to be understood within the cultural context of early twentieth-century British occultism, where narratives of psychic attack served social functions within esoteric communities. Owen does not dismiss Fortune's experiences but reads them through a cultural lens, noting that the form these experiences took was shaped by the interpretive framework available to Fortune.

Modern Reception and Criticism

The reception of Psychic Self-Defense has been divided along predictable lines. Within the Western esoteric community, the book is regarded as a classic. It is widely recommended as essential reading for anyone beginning occult practice, and its practical techniques continue to be taught and used. Gareth Knight, who was trained in Fortune's Society of the Inner Light, has described it as a work of permanent value.

Outside the esoteric community, the book has been viewed with greater skepticism. Academic scholars of religion and occultism have treated it as a valuable primary source for understanding how early twentieth-century occultists thought about psychic phenomena, but have generally withheld judgment on the reality of the phenomena described. Owen's treatment in The Place of Enchantment is representative of this approach: respectful, contextualized, but agnostic about the ontological claims.

Some critics, both within and outside the esoteric community, have noted that the book's framework can encourage a paranoid worldview. If one takes Fortune's categories seriously, almost any negative experience, sudden depression, unexplained fatigue, nightmares, interpersonal conflict, could be interpreted as psychic attack. Fortune herself warned against this tendency, but the book's own structure makes it a risk. The ease with which everyday difficulties can be reframed as psychic attack is both the book's appeal and its danger.

From a feminist perspective, Fortune's account of the Hamilton incident has been reread as a narrative of coercive control and workplace abuse. The dynamics Fortune describes, an older woman in a position of authority systematically breaking down a younger woman's confidence and autonomy, are recognizable from contemporary accounts of psychological abuse, regardless of whether one adds a psychic dimension. This reading does not necessarily contradict Fortune's own interpretation but supplements it with a framework that was not available in 1930.

The book's influence on popular culture has been significant. The concept of the "psychic vampire" or "energy vampire" has entered mainstream language, and while Fortune did not coin the term, her treatment of auric vampirism is one of its most important sources. Self-help literature on dealing with "toxic people" and "emotional vampires" often draws, directly or indirectly, on frameworks that Fortune articulated.

Relation to The Mystical Qabalah

Psychic Self-Defense (1930) and The Mystical Qabalah (1935) represent two complementary aspects of Fortune's teaching. Together, they form a matched pair: one defensive, one constructive; one focused on protection, one focused on development.

Psychic Self-Defense addresses the question: what can go wrong in psychic and spiritual life, and how do you protect yourself? The Mystical Qabalah addresses the question: what is the structure of spiritual reality, and how do you grow within it? The first book clears the ground; the second builds the house.

There are direct connections between the two books. The concept of the aura, central to Psychic Self-Defense, corresponds to the Yesod/Malkuth boundary on the Tree of Life. The banishing rituals recommended in Psychic Self-Defense are Qabalistic in structure, employing the divine names and archangelic presences that The Mystical Qabalah explains in detail. The psychological interpretation that characterizes both books reflects Fortune's consistent integration of clinical and occult perspectives.

Fortune herself appears to have viewed the two books as stages in a student's development. One first learns to protect oneself. Then one learns the map of the territory one will be traveling. Then one sets out. Psychic Self-Defense is the safety briefing; The Mystical Qabalah is the guidebook.

Within the broader Hermetic tradition, Fortune's dual emphasis on protection and development reflects an ancient principle: the practitioner who seeks to ascend must first secure their foundation. The Hermetic axiom "as above, so below" implies that weakness at the lower levels of the self (the auric, emotional, and physical planes) will compromise work at the higher levels. Fortune's two books address the lower and higher levels respectively, and a serious student benefits from engaging with both.

For those seeking a structured approach to integrating these protective and developmental dimensions of practice, the Hermetic Synthesis Course provides a framework that draws on the same tradition Fortune worked within.

The Lasting Value of the Book

Nearly a century after its publication, Psychic Self-Defense continues to serve a function that no other book has quite replicated. Its enduring value lies in several features.

First, it takes seriously a class of human experience that is widespread but poorly served by mainstream discourse. Many people have had the experience of feeling drained by another person, of sensing hostility or threat from a non-physical source, of encountering phenomena that do not fit neatly into materialist categories. Fortune provides a framework for understanding these experiences that is neither dismissive (as strict materialism would be) nor credulous (as uncritical occultism would be).

Second, its practical advice is useful regardless of one's metaphysical commitments. The techniques Fortune describes for maintaining psychological integrity, setting energetic boundaries, clearing negative influences from one's environment, and recovering from interpersonal manipulation are effective whether understood as psychic techniques or as psychological self-care practices. A reader who thinks of the "aura" as a metaphor for personal energetic boundaries can still benefit from Fortune's advice on strengthening it.

Third, its insistence on the primacy of medical and psychological evaluation serves as a built-in safeguard against the paranoia that ungrounded occult practice can encourage. Fortune's book is not a tool for diagnosing psychic attack at every turn. It is a manual for maintaining balance and responding proportionately to genuine threats, whether those threats are understood in psychic or psychological terms.

Fourth, the book provides an honest and nuanced account of the risks involved in occult practice. Fortune does not romanticize the occult. She presents it as a domain with real hazards, requiring discipline, training, and common sense. This sober approach is a valuable counterweight to the more glamorous or sensationalist treatments of psychic phenomena that dominate popular culture.

The book's limitations are real. Some of its case studies strain credulity. Its theoretical framework assumes the reality of psychic phenomena that mainstream science does not recognize. Its cultural context, early twentieth-century British occultism, gives it a period flavor that modern readers may need to adjust for. But within its own frame of reference, Psychic Self-Defense is a serious, thoughtful, and practically useful work that has earned its place among the foundational texts of Western esotericism.