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Оглавление1. See André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 14.
2. Ithell Colquhoun, “The Prose of Alchemy,” The Quest 21, no. 3 (April 1930): 294–303.
3. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 173–79.
4. There are obvious parallels, too, with Carl Jung’s theory of “individuation”: that through psychotherapy people can learn to recognize the polar opposites inherent in their personality and bring them into balance and harmony. Jung was only the best known among other early twentieth-century psychoanalysts who explored alchemy’s contributions to psychotherapy. They included Herbert Silberer, who influenced Max Ernst; Elizabeth Severn; and, slightly later, Israel Regardie, who published the papers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
5. Urszula Szulakowska, Alchemy in Contemporary Art (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011), esp. chaps. 2 and 8; Camelia Darie, “Victor Brauner and the Surrealist Interest in the Occult” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2012). See also M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), and Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art (Aldershot, U.K.: Lund Humphries, 2004). For more broadly focused accounts, see Nadia Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1992), and Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004).
6. See Silvano Levy, “The Del Renzio Affair: A Leadership Struggle in Wartime Surrealism,” Papers of Surrealism 3 (Spring 2005), http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal3/.
7. Michel Remy explains that, after its sixth issue, the London Bulletin became a prominent locus of the international art world, connecting the British group to the international surrealist movement. See Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999), 155–56.
8. The negative is located at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Though dated ca. 1932, correspondence and chronology suggest that the photo was likely taken in 1939.
9. Ithell Colquhoun, The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (London: Peter Owen, 1955); The Living Stones: Cornwall (London: Peter Owen, 1957); Goose of Hermogenes (London: Peter Owen, 1961).
10. Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and “The Golden Dawn” (London: Spearman, 1975). Colquhoun’s known publications include some fifty poems in magazines; almost seventy articles, essays, and short prose works; and translations of writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, André Breton, Romain Weingarten, and Édouard Glissant. Her unpublished texts include many other poems, essays, and short stories; work on other travel books; one additional unpublished novel (perhaps not complete) entitled Destination Limbo; many dream diaries; occult notes and diagrams; and a voluminous correspondence. Colquhoun’s visual artwork was more substantial than her literary efforts and certainly exceeds the 928 works catalogued to date. See Richard Shillitoe, Ithell Colquhoun: Magician Born of Nature, 2nd ed. (Raleigh, N.C.: Lulu, 2010), for a comprehensive catalogue of the currently known artworks.
11. Scholarly and detailed accounts of these components may be found in Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
12. “Qabalah” is Colquhoun’s preferred spelling, being more consistent, in her view, with the Hebrew writing of the word than common alternatives such as “Kabbalah,” “Kabala,” or “Cabbala.”
13. Colquhoun’s syncretic project owed a debt to the nineteenth-century French occult writings of Eliphas Lévi and to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which based itself in part upon Levi’s work. It evokes the perennialism popularized by H. P. Blavatsky’s and Annie Besant’s theosophical writings as the “Ancient Wisdom,” and by Aldous Huxley’s highly influential book The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945).
14. Each figure is also linked with one of the traditional elements—air, water, fire, and earth—each of which has an associated color. This is why Colquhoun intended each chapter to be printed on the appropriately colored paper.
15. Israel Regardie, A Practical Guide to Geomantic Divination (London: Aquarian Press, 1972).
16. This is a simplified account of a complex doctrine. Those who wish to discover more can turn to Charles W. Leadbeater’s nontechnical book The Life After Death, first published in 1912, available at http://www.archive.org/details/lifeafterdeathan020962mbp.
17. One exception might be Cornwall. Like Brittany, it is an isolated peninsula with its own folklore and religious traditions. Cornish, the language of old Cornwall, is closely related to Breton, the language of old Brittany. The district of West Penwith, where Colquhoun lived, has the greatest concentration of prehistoric funerary monuments in mainland United Kingdom.
18. Geoffrey Samuel, “The Effectiveness of Goddesses, or How Ritual Works,” Anthropological Forum 11, no. 1 (2001): 87.
19. “The Fellowship of Isis Manifesto,” http://www.fellowshipofisis.com/manifesto.html. For recent scholarship on the fellowship, see Catherine Maignant, “Irish Base, Global Religion: The Fellowship of Isis,” in Ireland’s New Religious Movements, ed. Olivia Cosgrove, Laurence Cox, Carmen Kuhling, and Peter Mulholland (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2011): 262–80.
20. For details, see Ronald Hutton, The Druids (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). See also Adam Stout, Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters, and Archaeologists in Pre-war Britain (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008).
21. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), esp. chap. 22.
22. Though Morganwg had essentially made up many of these texts and histories of the “ancient” bards and druids, his achievements resonated with Romanticism and the Celtic revival. As Ronald Hutton puts it, Morganwg “revealed to the world a ceremony, a liturgy and a body of moral and religious teachings that had been handed down to the medieval Welsh poets and scholars by the ancient Druids, and a history to explain and support these. A central feature of this system was that it perfectly reconciled the figures of the bard and the Druid.” Hutton, Druids, 22.
23. Also known as the British Circle of the Universal Bond and as An Druidh Uileach Braithrearchas.
24. Druidry’s links with occult societies are explored by Colquhoun in Sword of Wisdom, 125–30. MacGregor-Reid’s father, a previous chief Druid, adopted the name MacGregor to honor MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Golden Dawn.
25. Colquhoun kept a diary of this trip, now in a private collection. Some of the details have been published by Eric Ratcliffe in Ithell Colquhoun: Pioneer Surrealist Artist, Occultist, Writer, and Poet (Oxford: Mandrake, 2007), 125–26.
26. Though it made a foundational distinction between animate and inanimate nature, the not unrelated modern concept of vitalism was seriously entertained by mainstream scientists from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Only after the first quarter of the twentieth century was it finally consistently abandoned by most scientists.
27. Her comments concerning the relationship between the organic and the inorganic world must owe something to Roger Caillois. See his “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984): 16–32. First published in French, 1935.
28. Brian J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and Its Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). There is a vast scholarly literature on gender in esotericism and mysticism, but Alex Owen’s work on occultism in the Victorian occult revival and in the modernist period helps set the stage for some of the gender issues that informed Colquhoun’s early work and were developed more fully in her later occult and literary practices. See Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
29. A full discussion of these beliefs appears in Shillitoe, Ithell Colquhoun, chap. 7. Some aspects are discussed by Victoria Ferentinou in “Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism, and the Occult,” Papers of Surrealism 9 (Summer 2011), http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal9.
30. See “The Myth of Santa Warna,” The Glass 1 (1948): [21–22].
31. There was no such thing as waste matter in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden, so Adam had no need for bowels. For eye-watering details of how Adam actually delivered his progeny, see Milad Doueihi, Earthly Paradise: Myths and Philosophies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 21–22.
32. J. Donald Hughes, “Dream Interpretation in Ancient Civilizations,” Dreaming 10, no. 1 (2000): 7–18.
33. As, for example, Francis Barrett argued in chapter 8 of The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer (Leicester, U.K.: Lackington, Allen, 1970). This was a comprehensive work on ceremonial magic by a self-proclaimed practitioner that, after its initial publication in 1801, exerted influence on occultism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It remains in print today.
34. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 4.
35. H. P. Blavatsky, for example, in her seminal theosophical works Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), portrayed theosophy as ancient science. She grappled intermittently with Victorian evolutionary science, chemistry, and physics. Theosophical luminaries Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater attempted to explain the theosophical cosmos on the basis of clairvoyant explorations of a subatomic world in the decades of experiments they detailed in Occult Chemistry (based on an article originally published in Lucifer in 1895 and expanded in book form across three editions in 1908, 1919, and 1951). The occult revival of the period fostered a dynamic relationship between occult perspectives and the nascence of modern chemistry and particle physics. See Mark S. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
36. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 158.
37. Tate Archive, Tate Britain, London, TGA 929/5/21/2/39. The untitled manuscript is in note form. We have adjusted the grammar slightly in the interest of clarity.
38. Hughes, “Dream Interpretation.”
39. See Colquhoun’s unpublished essay, datable to 1979 based on internal evidence, in TGA 929/2/1/43.
40. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1991). First published in German, 1899; first English translation, 1913.
41. Sigmund Freud, “The Occult Meaning of Dreams,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1967). First published in German, 1925; first English translation, 1933.
42. Alice E. Buck and F. Claude Palmer, The Clothes of God: A Treatise on Neo-analytic Psychology (London: Peter Owen, 1956).
43. André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). First published in French, 1932.
44. Buck and Palmer, Clothes of God, chap. 8. For a detailed discussion of how artists have responded to physicists’ understanding of time, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
45. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 84. First published in French, 1937.
46. Breton, Mad Love, 64ff.
47. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 26.
48. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy, 134.
49. Ithell Colquhoun, “Notes on Automatism,” Melmoth 2 (1980): 31–32.
50. Max Ernst, “Inspiration to Order,” in Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn Schultz, 1948).
51. See Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
52. Nicolas Calas, “The Light of Words,” Arson: An Ardent Review, March 1942, 13–20.
53. Colquhoun, “Notes on Automatism.”
54. The authorship of occult automatic writing is always a complex problem. Colquhoun once wrote an essay about perhaps the most well-known example of her lifetime: William Butler Yeats’s A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1925; 2nd ed., 1937). A Vision was a collaboration involving W. B. Yeats, his wife George Yeats, and the source of George Yeats’s automatic writings—whether one understands it as the spirits of the dead communicating through her, George’s imagination, or something else entirely.
55. Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). See especially chapters 1 and 2.
56. Gordon Onslow Ford, Yves Tanguy and Automatism (Inverness, Calif.: Bishop Pine Press, 1983), 9.
57. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 293.
58. Ithell Colquhoun, responses to a questionnaire, The Glass 9 (1953): [24–25].
59. Quoted in Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality (Dallas: Spence, 1998), 250.
60. Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 190.
61. Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 164.
62. This description is based on one by Ben Fernee, the specialist occult bookseller who handled the sale of the mirror in 2011.
63. The source of Colquhoun’s information on correspondences was Aleister Crowley’s Liber 777 (1909), available online at http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/liber777.pdf. It contains the most comprehensive tables of attributions yet published. Crowley gathered his material from the writings of MacGregor Mathers, who, in turn, assembled his from a variety of nineteenth-century and earlier sources.
64. Untitled manuscript in TGA 929/5/21/2/104–107.
65. In many medieval and early modern alchemical texts, the philosopher’s stone is described as a fine, heavy powder the color of rubies.
66. Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Treatise on the Great Art (Boston: Occult Publishing, 1898). First published posthumously. Available online at http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/alchemy/The_Great_Art.pdf.
67. Although the essay was not published until 1970, there is documentary evidence that shows it to be contemporary with the painting.
68. Available online at http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Mathers_Kabbalah_Unveiled.pdf.
69. The coloring of the body may appear curious but corresponds with Golden Dawn teachings that link each body part with a specific color.
70. For the nonspecialist reader, Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2000) is a helpful explanatory text. It was first published in 1935.
71. In her writings, Colquhoun always employed the more unusual spelling of Taro without the final “t,” believing it to be more in keeping with the pack’s supposed Egyptian origin, and referred to the Suit of Disks rather than using its more usual name, Pentacles. She used the esoteric titles of the individual cards in preference to the everyday ones.
72. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 250.
