The appeal of such ideas for Colquhoun is not hard to fathom. During her youth, she had developed a lasting interest in magic, acquiring a wide range and depth of occult knowledge. This was ably demonstrated by her first publication, an article entitled “The Prose of Alchemy,” which was written while she was still a student and published in 1930 in G. R. S. Mead’s influential journal of Gnosticism and esotericism, The Quest.2 Mead had been part of Theosophical Society founder H. P. Blavatsky’s inner circle in the 1880s, even editing the key theosophical publication Lucifer with Annie Besant after Blavatsky’s death. But internal scandals that tore rifts in the Theosophical Society led Mead to resign from it in 1909. He then founded the Quest Society, whose lectures at Kensington Town Hall were attended by, among others, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Martin Buber, Jessie Weston (author of From Ritual to Romance, a major influence on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land), and the young Ithell Colquhoun. Mead published works by several of these authors in The Quest. So, while many of Colquhoun’s subsequent publications would appear in journals tied to surrealism, she was equally engaged in the circles and journals of occult London.
To the continental surrealists, the link between the surreal and the hermetic was clear and uncontentious. In the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929), Breton made the bond between alchemy and surrealism explicit.3 His “union of opposites” would have been a familiar idea to a woman steeped in alchemy; indeed, an important alchemical motto is conjunctio oppositorum (the conjunction of opposites).4 The impact of occult ideas and alchemical imagery on the work of visual artists associated with surrealism has long been recognized, and recent scholarship, such as the work of Urszula Szulakowska (2011) and Camelia Darie (2012), continually redraws and extends these boundaries.5
In England, however, the situation was very different. When, in 1940, Colquhoun refused to curtail her magical activities, she was expelled from the London surrealist group. The group’s leader, E. L. T. Mesens, undoubtedly had a strong and unwavering personal mistrust of the occult. His motives, however, may have been mixed: it is said that his antipathy to Colquhoun was heightened by a powerful sexual jealousy.6 The consequences for Colquhoun were profound. On the cover of the June 15, 1939, issue of the London Bulletin, one of the most progressive British art publications of its day, she had shared the bill with such figures as René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and the Marquis de Sade.7 Her photograph had been taken by Man Ray (fig. 1).8 She had recently visited Breton in Paris, exchanging horoscopes with him (both had Neptune in the House of Death), before spending time in Chemillieu with a number of other artists engaged in reevaluating the role of automatism in surrealist painting. To all appearances, her star was rising. In fact, it had reached its zenith. World War II was about to change the intellectual climate of Europe and the United Kingdom. Surrealism, whose promise of intellectual and personal freedom had clearly failed, became the voice of the discredited past. Colquhoun’s exclusion from the London group, the bitterness surrounding her disastrous and short-lived marriage to surrealist artist and writer Toni del Renzio, her failure to find a publisher for her alchemical novel Goose of Hermogenes, and two commercially unsuccessful shows at the prestigious Mayor Gallery in Mayfair all made the 1940s a testing decade for her.
Colquhoun spent increasing periods of time away from London, in Cornwall, moving there permanently in 1956. For the last three decades of her life, she lived in a village near Penzance on the Land’s End peninsula. Eventually, in physical isolation from the London-based art world and the capital’s magical societies, she achieved a measure of recognition, more from her writing than from her painting. Goose of Hermogenes finally appeared in print in 1961, following the publication of Colquhoun’s idiosyncratic and highly imaginative travel books on Ireland and Cornwall.9 It was here in Cornwall, with its rich traditions of myth and folklore, as well as its profusion of prehistoric monuments, that she spent much of her time developing and diversifying her occult knowledge and skills. Her final prose book, Sword of Wisdom,10 remains the authoritative account of MacGregor Mathers, a key figure in late nineteenth-century magic and a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society whose teachings and rituals are still influential today. It was also in Cornwall that Colquhoun wrote I Saw Water.
THE SPIRITUAL FRAMEWORK OF I SAW WATER
In this book, we use the words “occult,” “magical,” “hermetic,” and “esoteric” to indicate aspects of a worldview that has its roots in antiquity and which, in today’s world, offers a description of the universe that differs markedly from those proposed by materialist sciences and monotheistic religions. It numbers among its diverse sources Egyptian and Greek mystery texts, as well as writings by pre-Socratic philosophers, Gnostics, and medieval Jewish mystics. It is sufficiently flexible to incorporate aspects of Eastern religion within a generally Christian framework. It includes the practical arts of alchemy, divination, and the casting of spells. It frequently claims that all things are related through a series of correspondences and regards the cosmos not only as living but as perpetually regenerating and reconstituting itself.11 As a serious explanation of how the universe works, occultism suffered major reversals at the hands of the Enlightenment but never received a knockout blow. In fact, Colquhoun came of age when Britain, Western Europe, and the United States were experiencing a decades-long resurgence of interest in magic that has loosely been styled the “occult revival.” As a result of spiritualist séances, magical orders (such as the Golden Dawn), explorations of Eastern and Western esoteric traditions by the Theosophical Society, alchemical experiments, and a broad popular interest in subjects ranging from poltergeists to the Gothic, Britain witnessed a proliferation of print culture (books, periodicals, posters, and artwork) and what might now be termed “new religious movements.” These offered alternative spiritualities, together with social and cultural opportunities for participation.
Colquhoun herself was as completely at home with the Qabalah, the system of magical study derived from medieval Jewish mysticism,12 as she was with Eastern traditions such as Tantra. She would, in her maturity, be drawn to contemporary developments such as Wicca, neo-Druidism, and Goddess religions. At various times in her adult life, she was a member of two Golden Dawn–inspired organizations (the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Order of the Pyramid and the Sphinx), the somewhat similar Order of the Keltic Cross, several Co-Masonic lodges, English and French Druidical orders, the Theosophical Society of England, and the Fellowship of Isis, this last being an association dedicated to honoring the divine mother Goddess.
As a magician, then, Colquhoun adopted a highly syncretic approach. That is, she valued diversity and attempted to make a harmonious whole out of fragments taken from different spiritual traditions, each of which, she believed, contained hidden aspects of the greater truth.13 Among these influences, Colquhoun’s roots in her own Christian background remain readily apparent. Hers, however, was a heterodox Christianity. Her lasting