As artist, writer, and occultist, Colquhoun sought to enter and explore a consciousness beyond the personal, to transcend all divisions and to achieve a state of completion and harmony with the universe. She was at ease with a complicated mixture of esoteric traditions from the past and other cultures while remaining responsive to contemporary spiritualities. To the end, she described herself as a surrealist. The majority of her beliefs are rejected by established religions as deviant and by scientists as irrational. Nonetheless, she was part of a tradition that can be traced from the Neoplatonists through medieval hermetic philosophers and alchemists to theosophy and the teachings of the Golden Dawn. She was closer to the interpersonal world of Jung than to the materialist world of Freud. Hers was a pantheistic worldview in which the divine, the human, and the natural were all fused together in a unity that underlay its surface diversity.
1. 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.