Then, concentrating on the man she desires, she begins to intone the words of the spell. The poem “Love-Charm II” is based on the words of invocation that Colquhoun composed to be spoken at the climax of the rite. Whether she created the ritual for purely educational purposes or with one eye to its practical application is unknown, but why not? Why waste a perfectly good spell?
Magic is, at heart, a practical, experiential, and therefore sensory activity. Although some theoretical knowledge is required, occult advancement is largely acquired through initiation, ritual, and meditation. Colquhoun’s own personal experiences of ritual clearly inform several episodes in I Saw Water. She was undoubtedly expressing her personal view when, during the healing service at the chapel in the Well-Meadow, Sister Brigid remarks that the effect of the music in a religious service is that “the discursive mind is lulled or entranced while ‘the high dream’ takes over.” Although the bishop conducting the service would be unlikely to express it in the following terms, to the ceremonial magician sound is important because the vibrations of the voice are felt on the astral plane and facilitate contact with hidden powers. Similarly, at the height of the ceremony of the Snake Dance (page 57), when Brigid and Charlotte “obtained the Light,” the transforming effect is dependent upon a combination of sound and rhythm.
The importance of sound is further illustrated by the poem “Red Stone.” It is one of a series of eleven poems composed circa 1971 that together make up Colquhoun’s “Anthology of Incantations.” The sequence as a whole is a celebration of the richness of alchemical language and imagery. Each poem consists entirely of synonyms—which may be descriptive, poetical, or allegorical—that have been assigned to a substance or process used in the creation of the philosopher’s stone, the objective of the alchemist’s quest.65 “Red Stone” is a verbatim transcription of a section of the eighteenth-century alchemical text Treatise on the Great Art, with the line lengths adjusted.66 As such, it is a found poem, which Colquhoun regarded as another form of automatism. As the name of the series indicates, the poems are surely intended to be declaimed aloud in order to achieve maximum potency.
The importance that Colquhoun gives to another sensory modality—vision, and especially color—is evident throughout her writings and artwork. Where possible, she chose colors for their magical associations as much as for their descriptive qualities. In I Saw Water, for example, during her stay on Ménec, Charlotte has an affair with her physician. At one point his wife, Gertrud, hands her some letters. Charlotte “saw that there was an enclosure in one of them which was written in red ink on yellowish paper, the rest being in blue on white” (page 80). These colors are not chosen fortuitously. In alchemical usage they signify the two genders. Red (elemental fire) combined with yellow (its spiritual equivalent, philosophical sulfur) indicates the male principle. Blue (elemental water) combined with white (philosophical mercury) indicates the female principle. Using these color combinations, Gertrud signals that she knows exactly what Charlotte and her husband are up to.
Colquhoun frequently used the written word and the visual image in tandem, to illuminate or explicate each other. We have already given the example of the oil painting Dance of the Nine Opals and its accompanying explanatory essay, and referred to the poetic suite “The Myth of Santa Warna” in relation to the painting Linked Islands II. Another example is the watercolor The Thirteen Streams of Magnificent Oil (ca. 1940; fig. 12) and its associated text “The Openings of the Body” (1970).67 The inspiration of this pairing is part Qabalistic and part theosophical. Colquhoun drew upon The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), a volume of translations by MacGregor Mathers of a number of books in the Zohar, key works of Jewish mysticism.68 It deals at length with the nature and attributes of the Supreme Being, also known by many other names, including Macroprosopus. Of particular significance is the beard, divided into thirteen parts, from which there is a continuous stream of divine light (represented by oil) that illuminates the manifest world below. The Supreme Being is androgynous, but the recipient of the divine light, Microprosopus, is separated into male and female components. The Kabbalah Unveiled does not specify how the divine light enters Microprosopus, simply stating that it “pours forth” or “flows down” via “gateways.” Colquhoun depicts it as entering a female body through apertures, which include the eyes, nostrils, mouth, nipples, navel, anus, and genitals.69 These orifices reflect Colquhoun’s understanding of the gateways alluded to by Mathers and which, according to Blavatsky, correspond to the thirteen openings in the female body. Colquhoun expands on this in “The Openings of the Body,” which includes her own unique reason for suggesting that women are more evolved than men.
Of great importance to Qabalah-inspired magicians—indeed, to the teachings of the majority of Western hermetic societies since the Victorian period—is the glyph known as the Tree of Life. It consists of ten spheres, the sephiroth, and twenty-two connecting paths. The spheres symbolize levels of existence and, taken with the paths, cosmic relationships. The Tree of Life is frequently used as a focus for meditation and as a source when devising ceremonies.70 It was also the inspiration for a further example of the alliance between word and image in Colquhoun’s work. “The Decad of Intelligence” (1979) is a series of ten poems, each one focusing on one of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life, that accompanies a corresponding series of images of the ten sephiroth.
The poem we have selected from the “Decad,” entitled “Sanctifying Intelligence,” evokes some of the attributions of Binah, the third sephirah. These include, among others, the path to wisdom, element, mineral, perfume, geometrical figures, and angelic order. Taken together, these correspondences build a picture of the nature of the sphere, for use in personal meditation. The image Binah (1979; fig. 13) serves a similar and complimentary function. Each sephirah is said to exist in four worlds, or stages of manifestation, and each is associated with its own color. Colquhoun’s simultaneous depiction of the worlds through broadly concentric bands of color is unique to her. As she explained in her essay “The Zodiac and the Flashing Colours,” appropriately colored magical images, when meditated upon, can have perceptual consequences that might be, by implication, magical as well as physiological.
The culmination of Colquhoun’s use of color to explore magical relationships was undoubtedly the full set of seventy-eight Taro cards that she painted in 1977. In her designs, an example of which is shown in fig. 14, she applied Golden Dawn color theory in order to explore the magical relationships between the cards. Once again she published an accompanying essay, “The Taro as Colour,” in which she explained the principles underlying her color combinations. Although her vocabulary may be initially unfamiliar, her explanations are coherent and her method logical.71 It is only necessary to compare Colquhoun’s designs with other prominent twentieth-century packs to gauge the extent of her originality. The best-known pack with Golden Dawn affinities is the one illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the instruction of A. E. Waite. Colquhoun regarded Waite’s pack as corrupt. In particular, she accused him of introducing a gender imbalance into the court cards by substituting Knaves for Princesses.72 As was her practice by this time, the cards in her series were not signed with her name but with a glyph derived from her magical motto: the initials S and V superimposed and contained within an encircling oval. The motto, chosen to indicate her personal magical purpose, was “Splendidior Vitro,” meaning “more sparkling than crystal”