Colquhoun’s own belief in an earth power that can be detected at a local level, such as the one that can be experienced at the Ianua Vitae Convent’s Well-Meadow or the nearby Hill of Tan, finds expression throughout her writings and in several paintings. Although the force is felt locally, she understood such manifestations not as separate, isolated, or self-contained, but as part of a global power that girdles the earth. Places where the earth force is particularly strong become places of worship: Neolithic stone circle; Druidic grove; holy well or Christian church. At these places, Colquhoun envisaged streams of energy, generated within the earth, emerging or erupting as geysers. She shows this clearly in the oil painting Dance of the Nine Opals (1942; fig. 5), which features the Nine Maidens, a stone circle in Cornwall. The energy stream wells up from a subterranean source, and glowing stones are joined by encircling lines of force. Colquhoun summarized the complexity of the painting’s symbolism in an explanatory note (pages 165–66).
In a much later text entitled “Pilgrimage,” published in 1979, she declares that this spiritual power spouts from the body of Hecate, the Great Earth Goddess. The identification of the earth force as specifically female is an ancient belief that can be traced back at least as far as the Chaldean Oracles. It was discouraged by patriarchal monotheistic religions for their own obvious reasons, but interest in Her was rekindled in the late eighteenth century by Romantic writers who initiated a nostalgia harking back to supposed goddess-worshipping and women-centered societies of the ancient Middle East. It became a popular trope in the nineteenth century among utopian social reformers and Victorian occult societies. It influenced twentieth-century occultists, in particular Colquhoun’s mentor in occult matters, Kenneth Grant, with whom she studied in the early 1950s. It is found in Gardnerian Wicca, Druidism, and feminist neo-paganism. In other contemporary manifestations, it has been incorporated into certain strands of radical environmentalism. At its most extreme, it is a theory of nature that not only casts divisions within the human world as false, but also seeks to blur or even deny distinctions between the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.
Such a belief in an animating force that is present throughout all nature is, of course, roundly rejected by mainstream scientists. But it has never been confined simply to minority spiritual groups. In the twentieth century, it attracted panpsychically inclined philosophers, psychoanalysts, and others who rejected post-Enlightenment materialism.26 Colquhoun tried to keep a foot in both camps and did not believe that the scientific and the spiritual were necessarily incompatible. In her essay “The Night Side of Nature” (1953), she attempted a reconciliation between contemporary sciences and the apparently discredited old worldview. Drawing on ideas derived from modern psychiatry and biology, she claimed that not only are all things in nature linked but, consequently, the forces that shape human nature are to be found throughout the natural world.27 The skeptic will point out that her psychiatry is outmoded, her biology is confused, and her argument that friable rocks exhibit the same process that accounts for the splitting of the human personality is merely fanciful. Yet her claim that human characteristics reflect universal processes is no more than a contemporary expression of the traditional occult dictum “as above, so below.” Similarly, her remarks about the importance of overcoming duality in nature, as evidenced by splits in the psyche, splintered rocks, and the divided genders, can be regarded as examples of the alchemical search for conjunctio.
OCCULT GENDER IN I SAW WATER
Through its name alone, the Parthenogenesist Order takes the reader not into the world of reproductive biology but into the very different world of hermetic gender. In biology, parthenogenesis refers to asexual reproduction, but Colquhoun is dealing with the route to spiritual perfection. This is not an inappropriate mission for a religious order, but in the hands of the nuns at the Ianua Vitae Convent, it cannot be said to represent mainstream theology.
In Western esoteric traditions, certain writings of many different groups, including Qabalists, Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Swedenborgians, and Theosophists, assert that male and female properties were originally contained within one and the same body.28 It is claimed that Adam was an androgynous being whose fall from grace in the Garden of Eden was signified by his splitting into the two separate genders that exist today. Redemption will occur when the duality of gender is transcended and male and female are reunited in wholeness and completion. Colquhoun further believed that, since Adam was originally hermaphrodite, then God, in whose image Adam was created, was also hermaphrodite. She nurtured a deeply held suspicion that the translators of the Bible deliberately suppressed God’s feminine aspects. For Colquhoun, as for other advocates of this viewpoint, spiritual advancement lies in overcoming the polarities of the separated genders and the achievement once again of the hermaphrodite or androgynous whole. (It is never entirely clear whether the united genders will have the secondary sexual characteristics of both or neither; ultimately, Colquhoun thinks, it does not matter, since we will evolve beyond materiality and exist only as thought-forms.)29
The use of gender-conflating names in I Saw Water reflects this pursuit of spiritual perfection through unification. Examples include Mary Fursey, Mary Paracelsus, and the place name Kervin-Brigitte. Widening the focus beyond I Saw Water, we might also consider Colquhoun’s painting Linked Islands II (1947; fig. 6). It is one of a series of works painted to elucidate the poetic sequence “The Myth of Santa Warna,” in which she also explored the theme of gender unification, together with the nature of a sexualized landscape.30 The watercolor was painted using an automatic technique known as decalcomania, which allows the artist to capitalize on apparently chance effects. Linked Islands II presents an aerial view of St. Agnes, one of the Scilly Isles that lie off the coast of Cornwall. It interprets St. Agnes, with two of its ancient monuments, as a sexualized landscape. Depending on the state of the tide, St. Agnes is two in one. At low tide it is one island, and at high tide it becomes separated into two smaller land masses, linked only by a slender sand bar. Each islet has its own gender identity. St. Agnes is the site of a holy well, shown on the left of the painting. Water, as always in Colquhoun’s work, symbolizes the female force. The islet of Gugh on the right, with its prehistoric phallic menhir known locally as the Old Man, is the male counterpart. When, at low tide, the two are united in conjunctio, they become the “hermaphrodite whole” of the alchemists.
Colquhoun’s interest in the byways of Christian mysticism led her to the writings of the seventeenth-century Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon. If the separation of the genders at the Fall is an idea shared by many writers, Bourignon’s account of the creation of Jesus appears to be unique to her. Her vision was illustrated by Colquhoun in the watercolor Second Adam (ca. 1942; fig. 7). According to Bourignon, before Eve was created, Adam wished for a companion to join with him in prayer and the glorification of God. He set out to make one. Inside his abdomen, in place of intestines, Colquhoun’s Adam has what looks suspiciously like an alchemist’s furnace and retort, in which he brews the second Adam.31 After he is born, God looks after the young Adam and, in due course, implants him in Mary. In this way, the firstborn of the androgynous Adam became Christ.
DREAMS AND I SAW WATER
Throughout her entire adult life, when she woke from dreaming sleep, it was Colquhoun’s practice to make an immediate written record of the dream and jot down other features that struck her as relevant, such as her mood on awakening.