15

Dialogues in Ithell Colquhoun's Oeuvre

Victoria Ferentinou

363-96

"In 1929, the leader of the surrealist movement, French theorist and poet Andre' Breton (1896-1966), called 'for the profound, the veritable occultation of surrealism' ... . ... Breton himself and his comrades in Paris showed an intrest in the "occult sciences" in the 1920s, but it was from the mid-1930s and particularly from the 1940s and beyond that occultism and more generally esotericism informed surrealism ... ."

[fn. 5 "On the relationship between surrealism and esotericism see Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred; ... Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult."]

p. 364

"The marriage of esotericism and art is particularly evident in the work of the British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, an artist, writer and occultist who was born in India in 1906 and died in Cornwall in 1988."

[fn. 7 "On Colquhoun see ... Ratcliffe, Ithell Colquhoun; Shillitoe, Ithell Colquhoun ... ."]

p. 365, fn. 10

"In 1928 she became a member of Mead's Quest Society. ... In the 1950s ... she joined Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (1952) and was admitted to Kenneth Grant's New Isis Lodge (1955) ... ."

p. 369

"she joined the British surrealist group 1939. ... She was expelled from the surrealist group in Britain the next year because she refused to conform

p. 370

to the strict directives set up ... that no surrealist should participate in any other groups, including secret societies."

"'Myth is a volcanic force', she notes, and one cannot have liberty 'without repeated explosions'."

"Colquhoun also used colours symbolically in the set of Tarot cards she designed in 1977, following the instructions given by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ... .

However in other cases, she freely adapted the standard colour symbolism of alchemy ... and most specifically the colour-scales of ... Garstin's coloured diagram of Kirchweger's chain in the Aurea Catena ... ."

"A spiritualized version of the alchemical marriage is also given by Garstin in Secret Fire, Ch. VII, n.p. where he mentions 'the Mystical Marriage of the Philosophers' as a sort of unity of oneself with

his/her Divine Self."

{"Oversoul", in Rosicrucian jargon}

p. 377

"In Diagrams of Love : The Tree of Venus 1 (c. 1940-41) ... Colquhoun offers ... visually ... a tree crowned with a red heart on top and growing blue heart-shaped roots at the bottom ... .

{Herein are repraesented "charms that move Venus' [Aphrodite's] heart" (O:M 10 -- Th"AL:Ad").} {"Therefore, when laughter-loving Aphrodite ... loved him [Ankhises], ... terribly desire seized her in her heart." (HH5A 45 sq -- Th"AL:An")}

p. 378

Its branches also bear red hearts which are connected through golden rays with the uppermost heart." {Golden heart-rays indicate aptitude for being "golden-hearted" (kindly, generous) through means of the golden nectar flowing from the saffron goddess.}

{"In the painting, the connection can be seen between the pulses from the heart, which pass up the Twelve-Storeyed Pagoda to the Heavenly Pool, and the thread of the Maiden, ending in the Celestial Jade City. Connecting these two pulses is the channel from the occiput (the Moon) through which the Golden nectar flows." ("DE--MO":"H. The Weaving Maiden")}

{"The seventeenth homage is to ... the "Unfathomable Suppressor", who ... is orange like saffron, ... and ... radiating seed syllables from ... her heart, she shakes all the abodes of the great gods" ("21 HT", stanza 17).}

"The frontpiece to the 1682 edition of Boehme's On the Testaments of Christ (1623) provides ... two hearts, an upright and a reversed ...,

{This diagram is apparently repraesentative of Jakob Boehme's idiosyncratic version of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Union of the Two Hearts (viz., the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart : U2H).}

{"Zoharists or Leb (Heart) Khasidim ... who became Catholic Jews with their Rebbe Jacob Leib ben Judah Leib (aka Jacob Leibowitz Frank), ... symbolized ... Jesus and Mary in Eternity ... through these two Cherubic Hearts. ...

{One heart is being transported downwards towards a 2nd heart (CBM, p. 44).}

... linking the lower world of corrosive fire with the upper realm of divine light."

{"The tree is covered with hearts consecrated to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The tree is so bright." (JHJ, Dec 6 1996)}

These Roses are the wonderful mystical insights that would find their full blossoming when the Jewish mystical tradition would be united with the Catholic mystical tradition" ("JF&ZST").}

{A red-bud tree is growing out of the 2nd heart, that of goddess Chalchihuitl-icue (CBM, p. 44).}

"In Diagrams of Love : The Bird or the Egg?

{Puzzle : "Which came first -- the bird or the egg?"}

p. 380

(c. 1940-41) ..., Colquhoun vividly depicts ... a multicoloured feathery oval-shaped being with open wings. The being's ovoid body resembles an egg and its spine ... . ...

{"Conaire had gone to the bull-feast but had left early and had pursued a flock of great white speckled birds along Merrion Strand ... . One of the birds changed shape ..., and warned him ... this was one of his geasa. ... When he returned he saw ... severed Conaire’s head. ... Mac Cecht lifted a pillar and drove it through a ... spine." (BM"CM") This may allude to (Apokalupsis of Ioannes 3:12) : "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God."}

p. 381

Interestingly, her ... egg/bird with the colourful dotted speckles also recalls the imagery of ... some alchemical treatises ... ."

"Colquhoun uses the term 'Bird of Hermes' as a title of a play she wrote in the 1920s and well as in the epigraph of her later novel Goose of Hermogenes. ... Her source is Philalethes 'Metamorphosis of Metals', 243. Another likely source is the homonymous "hermetic" poem included in Elias Ashmole's collection Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), 213-226."

p. 381

"the imagery of the peacock's tail, which ... integrates all colours ... ."

{According to Basilides, "As an egg of some ... peacock ... contains in itself numerous forms of manifold substances; so ... the ... seed of the world ... constitutes a multitude of forms and a multitude of substances ... . The motif of the Basilidean cosmic egg probably derives from Orphism." ("ThL&ID", p. 22)}

p. 381, fn. 69

"Heinrich Khunrath in Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1595; 1609) reserves a significant role for the peacock ... . Identified by an inscription as the bird of Hermes, the bird is depicted as rising from the head of the ... rebis ...; see Klossowski De Rola, The Golden Game, 29-30, 40, 44."

{The peafowl is identified as "the bird of Hermes" because the peafowl is "charmed asleep by [Hermes's] playing the flute" (GM @56.a). Colquhoun's bird's eye-like markings ("colourful dotted speckles") are surely intended as referential to the myth of Argos Pan-optes, whose "hundred eyes ... Hera ... placed ... in the tail of a peacock" (GM @56.a).}

p. 382

"Colquhoun provides an abstract ... work which she labels Diagrams of Love : Androgyne II (c. 1940-41)".

{The illustration is a depiction of a scarlet (i.e., erotically excited) vulva being approached from below by a blue-winged (i.e., energetic) flesh-colored phallos.}

p. 384

"the phallic form is blue, while the vulva-shaped is red/orange ... ."

"A blue-coloured aura connotes a spiritual being. ...

It is almost certain that she [Colquhoun] was aware of the theosophical theories of the "etheric double" and its bluish colour through Besant, The Ancient Wisdom, whose 1922 edition is found in her private book collection."

"Colquhoun acquired books on Yoga, explored yogic practices and amassed materials on both Yoga and Tantra particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1975, in the biography she wrote for Mathers, she focused on Tantra and discussed its likely employment by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ... ."

"her esoteric novel Goose of Hermogenes ... was published in 1961 but was written from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

The story revolves around the ordeals of an unnamed heroine who visits her uncleon a desolate island, only to discover that he is an alchemist versed in witchcraft ..., and she is imprisoned in his mansion because of her ... alchemical powers.

Organized according to the twelve-stage subdivision of the alchemical opus,

[fn. 83 "Colquhoun herself reveals her reliance upon Basil Valentine's Twelve Keys; see Sword of Wisdom, 282."]

the heroine's journey parallels the alchemists' quests for the philosopher's stone.

In the course of the novel she is compelled to explore not only her uncle's ... secret life, but also her own psyche and potentials through dreams, visions and inexplicable events until her escape ... .

... the story may be read as an allegorical account of ... Colquhoun's lifelong pursuit of personal transformation and spirituality ... ."

[fn. 84 "This interpretation was first propounded and elaborated at length in Ferentinou, Women Surrealists ..., Chapter 5 ... ."]

"Regardie equated ... with the esoteric principle of awareness of one's higher self, in other words of the existence of the divinity within oneself, ... the Golden Dawn's highest self, the theosophical "God within us" ... ."

{Such a divinity ever-praesent with each mortal is one's personal spirit-guide or guardian-angel, aequivalent to the daimon accompanying Sokrates.}

"her divorce from del Renzio in 1947 and her marginalisation within surrealism by leading members of the English surrealist group throughout the 1940s, perhaps awakened her interest in analytical psychology ... ."

"a fictional union of lovers

(conjunction);

the heroine's nightmarish decomposition and fusion with an unknown male in the graveyard

(putrefaction);

her fantasized erotic union with her beloved ...

(congelation);

her sisters' possession by demonic beings

(fermentation);

her unwilling participation in a magical sex-act conducted by her alchemist uncle

(exaltation);

her quarrel with her half-brother and encounter with the ghostly figure of her dead father

(projection)."

"in 1953 she writes that 'the division into male and female represents "a split in the psyche".

{The psukhe (\Psukhe\ 'soul' being the feminine substantive of the adjective \psukh[r]o/e\ 'chill, cool') is a female for males; and its correlative is a male for females : Carl Jung distinguished these as "anima" and as "animus", respectively.}

The task is to replace this unresolved duality by ... the fruitful relation of man and daimon, conjunctio'."

{Concord between oneself and one's personal daimon (Sokratic-Platonic), guardian-angel (Roman Catholic), or fravas.i (Zarathustrian), is regarded its the respective religion as the very essence of private piety.}

p. 389

"Colquhoun's ... pronouncement ... reveals her debt to W. B. Yeats's A Vision (1937) ... ."

p. 389, fn. 96

"Colquhoun admired the work of Yeats ..., since he was also involved in both occultism and art. In her Sword of Wisdom, 296, she mentions his prose A Vision,

a product of automatic writing,

{"Automatic writing" is the event wherein one's bodily limb for writing is temporarily occupied by a litterary type of daimon, for the occasion of transmitting handwritten (or typed) information from praeternatural worlds into the material world.}

and also quotes a few lines that describe the passionate love between daimons who seek union with each other to resolve their antinomies and reconstruct their own true nature."

{It is, of course, very appropriate that daimones should, via "automatic writing", transmit information concerning their own daimonic selves (abiding in their particular praeternatural worlds) to mortals (abiding in the material world); mortals could employ such information for aequivalently directing their own conduct.}

"Colquhoun's utopian vision could ... be seen through ... what Petteri Pietikainen [2007, p. 16] termed "psychological utopianism", ... in which inner transformation {of each individual person} is deemed indispensable for the ensuing change in society or culture."

p. 391

"her ... metaphysics ... can be situated wthin the surrealist project [Donald LaCoss : "Introduction", p. vii. In :- Lo:wy 2009] 'of

{This "revolt" is directed against public hypocrisy; the "subversion" is directed to undermine the sources of private impiety, which can be a cause of hypocrisy in private actions.}

p. 392

psychical revolt and the subversive re-enchantment of the world', ...

to provide a fruitful, benevolentand egalitarian ... future, ... a viable solution to ... Western modernity ... ."