The Riddle of Netta Fornario

On a bleak November morning in 1929, the body of a woman was discovered on a hillside on Iona in the Inner Hebrides. It soon became a gothic mystery. The woman was Norah Fornario, who called herself Netta or used her magical name of Mac Tyler. She had been on the island conjuring the Green Ray in order to contact the Sidhe, the human-sized fairies that she believed lived in the hillside. This is the first full-length academic biography of the supernatural world of female occultism in the 1920s and the many strange connections related to Fornario’s death, including her work with Dion Fortune, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Fairy Investigation Society, psychic vampires, the creation of the early counterculture of Glastonbury and the ‘discovery’ of the Holy Grail. Garbled versions of her life abound on YouTube, and Fornario has now become a central figure for alternative lifestyles. This is her story recreated through careful investigation of her magical reading and ceremonial practices, and of her family and her journey to Scotland. She was the only person who is known to have died through a magic ceremony.