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.