Colquhoun’s choice of personal names reflects Breton history. Several of the characters, such as Sister Gildas, are named after historical figures, frequently saints, who have connections with Brittany. Colquhoun chose names with one eye to the saint’s feast day in the Breton religious calendar and the other to the internal chronology of the novel, thereby linking the two. Some characters, such as Mother Ste. Barbe, have names taken from local place names, thus locking the individuals into the fabric of the locality.
NATURE-BASED SPIRITUALITY IN I SAW WATER
Shortly after Charlotte arrives unexpectedly on Ménec, Sister Brigid offers some surprising advice to her troubled cousin: “Springs, trees and rocks have a self-acting power: they’re not interested in your faith. Just follow the rites, and the virtue will come through” (page 54). These words, coming from the mouth of a Catholic nun, are heretical. By claiming that natural objects—including those normally regarded as inanimate—contain a life force that can be engaged through the observance of ritual, she is placing her personal experience above doctrine and gnosis above faith.
However, had Brigid not been a nun but, say, a New Age neo-pagan or Druid, her words would have been entirely uncontentious. To followers of such spiritualities as these, a belief in the healing powers of natural objects and places is fundamental. Repeatedly in I Saw Water, Brigid and her mentor, Sister Paracelsus, are portrayed as practically and spiritually in tune with Nature in a manner that places them at odds with conventional Catholic doctrine. In fact, there are times when the rituals and beliefs of nature worship—carried out at such places as the Shrine of the Triple Well and the Well-Meadow—seem just as important as Catholic liturgy and dogma.
Today’s pagan spiritualities exhibit a postmodern attitude toward truth, authority, and objectivity. They are characterized by an openness to personal interpretation and development in ways that dogmatic (in the literal sense of based on officially sanctioned belief) theologies are not. It is instructive in this regard to compare the Celtic figure of Brigid, in her emerging twentieth-century form, with the Roman Catholic figure of the Virgin Mary to see how the main models of female spirituality in I Saw Water differ. Mary, of course, is not a goddess, but she is the nearest thing that Christianity has to a female deity. As an intercessor for women and for the weak and powerless, she takes a subservient role to the all-powerful male deity (not to mention an authoritative all-male clergy). The Celtic Brigid, however, does not carry this burden of oppression by a male deity. Her “pre-Christian status allows her to function within the guiding mythology of neo-pagan ritual as representative of an ancient earth-centred and woman-centred spirituality.”18 Just as the increasing importance of women in occult societies had mirrored the increasing independence of women in Victorian society, so too did the development of pagan and goddess spiritualities in the mid-twentieth century reflect the increased secularization of Western society, coupled with a suspicion of institutional religions and a steady decline in their authority. The Druid Order, for example, encouraged its members (including Colquhoun) to discover their own individual relationship with the divine, however it was revealed—through God, Goddess, Great Spirit, or some other source. The Fellowship of Isis (of which Colquhoun was also a member) has always simply required members to love the Goddess, irrespective of any other beliefs or affiliations they might hold.19
We have already noted the importance of personal and place names in establishing the spiritual context of the novel. Sister Paracelsus, the novice mistress, is particularly important in this regard, because one of the ways in which Colquhoun distinguishes the spirituality of the Ianua Vitae Convent from that of Catholic orthodoxy is through her name. Sister Paracelsus is known in the vicinity of the convent as “La Druidesse.” Through her name, ancient knowledge, and practical skills, she maintains a link between pagan beliefs and Christianity. The religion of the Gauls (and ancient Britons) is said to have been Druidism. Meeting in sacred groves, the Druids forged a close partnership with the powers of the earth and developed a deep understanding of the healing properties of herbs, trees, and plants. The extent to which this picture is historically accurate is open to doubt. Where apologists see an unbroken tradition, scholars see a fantasy construction originating with eighteenth-century antiquarians that has little connection to historical reality.20 In its mid-twentieth-century form, Druidism owed a good deal of its popularity to Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess (1948) proposed the existence of a tripartite deity, the White Goddess, who presided over Birth, Love, and Death.21 Colquhoun’s own indebtedness to Graves is clear throughout I Saw Water, not least in the person of Brigid.
Several years after the completion of I Saw Water, the influence of Graves remained strong. Colquhoun explicitly expressed her debt to him when, in 1972, she dedicated her illustrated poetry volume Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket to “The White Goddess.” In the title, Colquhoun couples “grimoire,” an archaic word for a textbook of magical practice, with “the entangled thicket,” a phrase from the Hanes Taliesin, a traditional Welsh poem about a shape-shifting hero named Taliesin. Deciphering the meaning of this poem (at least to his own satisfaction) was central to Graves’s understanding of Celtic mythology. In The White Goddess, Graves also wrote about the Celtic tree calendar and the tree alphabet, in which the name of each letter in the Ogham alphabet (an early script used in parts of Ireland and Britain and, allegedly, for secret communications by the Druids) is also the name of a tree or plant, linked through the flow of its sap to a month of the lunar year. One drawing from the Grimoire, entitled Beth-Luis-Nion on Trilithon (fig. 4), shows how the Ogham letters can be nicked on the stones that form the classic Stonehenge trilithon. This allowed Graves to relate each letter to its appropriate tree and to construct the complete Beth-Luis-Nion (Birch, Rowan, Ash) calendar. Each poem in Colquhoun’s collection was inspired by one of the months or festivals of the pagan calendar. So, for example, the poem “Muin” relates to September, the month of the vine tree.
Colquhoun, whose interest in covert forms of communication is evident in a number of passages in I Saw Water, returned to the tree alphabets in an unpublished essay written in 1966, “The Tree Alphabets and the Tree of Life.” The Barddas referred to in the essay is a collection of Welsh writings, ostensibly medieval but largely written by Edward Williams (1747–1826) and published posthumously under his bardic name, Iolo Morganwg. It contains a mixture of mystical Christianity, Arthurian legend, and an entirely invented system of writing, the “Coelbren y Beirdd,” or “bardic alphabet,” supposedly the alphabet of the ancient Druids. It also proposes a cosmic system of emanations, or rings of existence, that has similarities with the Qabalistic Tree of Life and which was of particular interest to Colquhoun. She undoubtedly knew of the false provenance of the writings but must have felt that they contained authentic insights into ancient lore and scripts, important enough for her to tease out their meanings and associations.22
As a member of both English and French Druidical orders, Colquhoun’s engagement with Druidry was practical as well as theoretical. In 1961 she traveled to France with Ross Nichols, one of the leading lights of British Druidry. They were joined there by Robert MacGregor-Reid, the chief of the Druid Order.23 Modern Druidry has close associations with heterodox Christianity, and during the visit Colquhoun was ordained a deaconess in the Saint Église Celtique en Bretagne—the Ancient Celtic Church.24 After the celebrations, she and Nichols toured Brittany visiting churches, holy wells, and prehistoric sites. Some of the material she collected at this