05

Pathways in
Modern Western Magic
Edited by Nevill Drury

S
cholars
Concrescent Scholars
06 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

Pathways in Modern Western Magic © 2012 Concrescent LLC

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, the book, or
parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any work without permission
in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of the authors have been
asserted.

The right of authors as listed in the table of contents to be identified as

the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Concrescent Scholars
an imprint of Concrescent LLC
Richmond CA 94805
info@concrescent.net

ISBN: 978-0-9843729-9-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012947222

Cover illustration: Jean Delville, Parsifal, 1890

 07

Contents
Introduction 1
Nevill Drury

1 Lifting the Veil: An Emic Approach to Magical Practice 19

Lynne Hume

2 The Visual and the Numinous:

Material Expressions of the Sacred in Contemporary Paganism 37
Dominique Beth Wilson

3 Encountering the Universal Triple Goddess in Wicca 65

Nikki Bado

4 Away from the Light: Dark Aspects of the Goddess 87

Marguerite Johnson

5 Neo-Shamanism in the United States 105

Andrei A. Znamenski

6 Neo-Shamanisms in Europe 127

Robert J. Wallis

7 Seiðr Oracles 159

Jenny Blain

8 Magical Practices in The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn 181

Nevill Drury

9 The Thelemic Sex Magick of Aleister Crowley 205

Nevill Drury
08 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

10 The Draconian Tradition:

Dragon Rouge and the Left-Hand Path 247
Thomas Karlsson

11 Claiming Hellish Hegemony:

Anton La Vey, The Church of Satan & The Satanic Bible 261
James R. Lewis

12 Modern Black Magic:

Initiation, Sorcery and The Temple of Set 281
Don Webb

13 The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 307

Amy Hale

14 Two Chthonic Magical Artists:

Austin Osman Spare & Rosaleen Norton 323
Nevill Drury

15 Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted:

Chaos Magics in Britain 379
Dave Evans

16 The Computer-Mediated ­Religious Life

of Technoshamans and Cybershamans 409
Libuše Martínková

17 The Magic Wonderland of the Senses:

Reflections on a ­Hybridised Tantra Practice 425
Phil Hine

Contributors 437

Index 443
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Publisher’s Preface

Welcome to
Concrescent Scholars
Pathways in Modern Western Magic launches a new imprint in the
Concrescent family of books. This imprint specializes in peer-reviewed
works of scholarship in the fields of Esotericism, Pagan religion and
culture, Magic, and the Occult. Concrescent Scholars present their views
from within and without the Academy. Here will be heard the Voice of the
Academic, and also the Voice of the Practitioner, the native of the some-
times alien, sometimes intimate, spaces of the Esoteric.

Paraphrasing the Buddhologist Stephan Beyer, we are mindful that

Scholars of the Esoteric do not deal with Esotericism so much as they
deal with Esotericists. Real lives are behind these words and each one has
a voice to contribute.

Concrescent Scholars is dedicated to bringing together all who work,

learn, and live in the Esoteric that they may flourish materially, intellectu-
ally, and spiritually.

And so it begins…
10 Pathways in Modern Western Magic
306 Pathways in Modern Western Magic
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 307

13
The Magical Life
of Ithell Colquhoun

Amy Hale

Ithell Colquhoun is becoming recognized as one of the most interest-

ing and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century, and
although she was known in her day, it is only in the 20 or so years after
her death that her innovative spirit is being acknowledged. Although she
gained her early reputation as a member of the British Surrealist move-
ment, she has become better known as an occult artist, writer and theorist.
Throughout each decade of her life, she engaged with various movements
and individuals who shaped and also complemented the development of
her worldview and the goal which drove nearly all of her projects: becom-
ing enlightened. Colquhoun presents an amazing case study of a primar-
ily Hermetically focused magician. Every area of her life and all of her
achievements were ultimately driven by her spiritual pursuits. Through
her work we can see an interplay of themes and movements which char-
acterizes the trajectory of certain British subcultures ranging from Surre-
alism to the Earth Mysteries movement and also gives us a rare insight
into the thoughts and processes of a working magician.
308 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

Colquhoun and Surrealism

Colquhoun was born in India in 1906, as her father was serving in the
military there, and from her own account she had an unusual childhood
marked by freedom, exploration and unconventional spiritual leanings.
When she was 13 she began study at Cheltenham Ladies School, and
later studied art at the Slade. She took a very early interest in biology, and
many of her early notebooks were filled with highly detailed representa-
tions of flowers and plants. The study of plants and flowers was a theme
to which she returned many times during her life, in her painting and
drawing and in her writing, frequently using plants as visual metaphors
for eroticism. Her exceptionally representational visual style formed the
basis for her early artistic work and also her segue into Surrealism in the
mid 1930s.
Colquhoun is generally identified with the Surrealist movement, and
while she claimed artistic identity as a Surrealist for the entirety of her
life, her formal associations with British Surrealism were quite short-
lived. Ithell first encountered Surrealism when she studied in Paris from
1931-33. She later visited the International Surrealist Exposition in
London in 1936, and it was clear within the next two years that Surreal-
ism was starting to impact her work more directly, primarily influenced
by her exposure to Salvador Dalí. In 1939 she visited André Breton in
Paris, and started working with automatic techniques in her writing and
painting. By the late 1930s she was exhibiting with other Surrealists
in Britain in prominent Surrealist spaces such as the Mayor Gallery in
1939, and she self-identified as a Surrealist for the rest of her life. In
1940 there was a rift in the British Surrealist movement. The Belgian
Surrealist Edouard Mesens, who promoted the career of René Magritte
and who published a feature on Ithell in his London Bulletin magazine,
took over as figurehead and organizer of the British Surrealists, and
decreed that no one involved with the British Surrealist movement would
publish or belong to any group that was not in service of Surrealism, nor
would they hold opposing political positions (Levy 2003). Ithell refused
to sever her occult ties and relinquish her interests, and as a result she
publicly separated from British Surrealism. Unlike many of her Surrealist
counterparts in Britain, Ithell did not view Surrealism as part of a wider
political or socialist agenda, although she clearly believed in its revolu-
tionary capacity, specifically in her portrayals of sex and gender.
In 1943 Colquhoun married the charismatic artist Toni Del Renzio.
Very little is known about their marriage, aside from the fact that it was
rather short-lived, but it seems from their efforts at the time that Del
Renzio was the publically dominant partner. Together the couple set out
to promote Surrealism in Britain in opposition to Mesens’ group through
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 309

a series of poetry readings and publications, featuring their own original

works and also those of founding Surrealists such as Breton. Their perfor-
mances attracted the attention of Mesens and his cohort, however, which
came to their performances to mock them. This incident had a devastat-
ing effect on Ithell (Levy 2005, 22). Her marriage with Del Renzio came
to an end in 1947 under circumstances which are not exactly clear, but
which may have been the result of an affair by Del Renzio. Although
Colquhoun had romantic liaisons following her divorce, in many ways
she never fully recovered from that relationship, and it also marked the
end of her public engagement with the wider Surrealist movement.
Despite the short length of her engagement with the British Surreal-
ists, Colquhoun’s Surrealist body of work was wide-ranging and exten-
sive. Although Surrealism tends to be associated most frequently with
the visual arts, particularly those of a type which are highly representa-
tional and fantastic, it is important to stress that Surrealism was initially a
movement expressed through writing. Surrealism was and is not a style,
it is a philosophy, and a worldview. Most Surrealists enacted their experi-
ments in poetry, prose, visual arts, and performance. As such, to consider
Colquhoun primarily as a visual artist, would be to diminish her own
personal Surrealist project. She was prolific with just about everything
she did. She created thousands of pieces of visual art, wrote, published
and performed hundreds of poems, wrote several novels (two of which
were unpublished), three travel guides (one of which was unpublished),
radio dramas, commentaries, and quite a large number of esoteric-related
essays. Although not all of her work would be identified as explicitly
Surrealist, she would have identified that as a primary current within her
life, and most important to her was the link between the Surreal and the
Fantastic.
Colquhoun frequently claimed throughout her life that she was the
only true Surrealist left working in Britain (Colquhoun, “Autobiographi-
cal Notes”). She may have made this claim because the ways in which
her own work reflected the automatism and the preeminent position of the
unconscious that was key to the works of André Breton and many other
Surrealists, notably Dalí. However, much of her visual and written work
diverged from the Surrealists and should be considered primarily esoteric
art, because she does not emphasize chance and open interpretation to
the same degree. Colquhoun used both automatic methods and Hermetic
methods to create works which simultaneously drew on subconscious
elements and dream imagery, yet also were primed with specific intent,
coded by the artist according to Hermetic principles.
The degree to which genuine occultism was an influence in the wider
Surrealist movement is debatable. There is a difference between employ-
310 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

ing occult tropes and symbols in artistic creation and having a commit-
ment to a sustained esoteric practice. The primary connection between
Surrealism in general and occult processes is to be found in automa-
tism, which was a key feature of Ithell’s work, and according to André
Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto the defining feature of Surrealism itself
(Polizzotti 1995, 209). Automatism was somewhat inspired by, yet differ-
ent from, mediumistic automatism. The source of automatic images in
Surrealism was not believed to be spirits, but the psyche itself releasing
repressed desires and impulses. Automatic writing was in many ways
close to stream-of-consciousness, while automatic art techniques were
based on seemingly random applications of paint to canvas or paper to
see what emerged. Other forms of automatism included collage, found
objects or found poems, frottage or rubbings, and a number of other
techniques designed to incorporate elements of chance and play into the
creative process. Surrealists also embraced the works of Freud, dream
states, hysteria, games of chance and madness. They looked for freedom
from logical processes and direct, unmediated access to the unconscious.
Surrealists believed that automatic processes would generate a sense of
randomness out of which one could explore the workings of the subcon-
scious. In 1941, Breton noted that the two primary visual forms of Surre-
alist expression were based either in automatism or the recording of
dream like images, but said that automatism was closer to true Surrealist
method.
Additionally, Surrealists drew on a variety of occult symbols. André
Breton’s references to alchemy in the 1929 Second Surrealist Manifesto
and also to the ‘occultation’ of Surrealism are sometimes interpreted by
art historians as examples of the adoption of a Hermetic position, and
Colquhoun herself believed this to be the case according to an unpub-
lished article she wrote on Surrealism and Hermeticism (Polizzotti 1995,
325, Colquhoun, Surrealism and Hermetic Poetry n/d, 6). It is evident
that a number of individual artists had occult, mystical and mythological
themes in their works. Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, for example,
frequently used alchemical symbolism such as eggs and alembics in their
paintings and written work, while the image of the hermaphrodite was
seen as a Surrealist ideal, as well as an occult ideal (Warlick 2001). For
the core of male surrealists in the movement the hermaphroditic ideal
was to be gained through the channel of the Muse, or conjunction with
the female creative principle. We can hypothesize that women associ-
ated with Surrealism had their own interpretation of the hermaphrodite,
and the work of Claude Cahun might be of interest in this regard (Ades,
Surrealism, Male-Female 2001). We also know that Surrealists were
reading writers of the French occult revival, notably Eliphas Lévi, and of
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 311

course had a love of Tarot cards, of which Surrealists created a variety of

decks over the years.
A primary question then would be the degree to which Colquhoun’s
interest in the occult and her use of occult symbols and techniques in
her Surrealism was similar to other Surrealists, and the ways in which it
was different. Because she considered herself to be engaging in magical
acts, and because she believed in the objective reality of the figures and
concepts with which she was working, her use of them was both divina-
tory and ritualistic. She was consistently working with otherworldly
realms, and although she was using automatic processes, she was also
directing the symbolism and the colours for specific ends. Dawn Ades
has argued that Colquhoun’s primary method of Surrealist working was
the highly representational dream image, mostly inspired by her interest
in Salvador Dalí, but Colquhoun would most likely argue that automatic
processes were at the basis of her Surrealist practice, and for that reason
she remained consistent with the directives and programs of the early
continental Surrealists (Ades, Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters:
Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun 1980) (Colquhoun, Letter to the Editor
1981). This is not to suggest that Colquhoun did not derive an exception-
al amount of inspiration for her art from her dream states. Dreams were a
very important source of imagery for her, but most of her visual art was
simply not highly representational.
What seems to be a primary difference in Colquhoun’s use of Surre-
alist techniques is that her conception of the spaces one would contact
using automatic processes would be inhabited by specific beings, and
reached using a variety of esoteric languages. She did not just use these
techniques to see what came of them with her mind in a state unfettered
by logic and rationality, or to explore subconscious desires. These other
planes had things to communicate to her and as such her art was part of her
road to enlightenment and served as invocation and ritual. For instance,
she interpreted the four major automatic processes as corresponding to
the four elements: Fire to fumage (which is developing figures from a
canvas or paper which has been previously smoked), Water to parsemage
(which is when charcoal or pastel are floated on water and then gently
apply to paper), Air to techniques where things are blown on paper, such
as charcoal, paint or pastel, and decalcomania, where prints are either
transferred or superimposed from one surface to another, to Earth. There-
fore, when she chose which process she would use, she was in some
way prescribing intent or focus into the artistic outcome (Colquhoun, The
Mantic Stain 1949).
Although many of the early Surrealists promoted the idea that their works
were created by chance, randomness, and pure access to the unconscious,
312 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

of course that is not completely true. Any of Breton’s works which may
have been guided by automatic principles were also guided by aesthetics
and, in the end, editing. Words went together because they sounded good,
or the imagery was intriguing. The automatic process may have started
off a painting, but it was later shaped by the creator to bring out more of
a recognizable meaning for both artist and audience. Colquhoun worked
the same way, but she frequently would use as her starting point colours
from a palette with specific magical associations or a text which already
had some sort of personal esoteric meaning to her, and would be useful
for further contemplation for invocation. For instance, she developed a
set of ‘found poems’ from Sir E.A. Wallace Budge’s translation of the
Egyptian Book of the Dead (Colquhoun, “Gods of the Cardinal Points”
n.d.). On reading them, they are not so much found poems as invocations
and rituals to be done at cardinal points using Egyptian symbolism, and
reflected her love and abiding interest in the Golden Dawn system of
magical practice. These poems were not random—nothing ever is—but
what she was doing was using her conception of the mental and psychic
space one opens up to create something sacred from the profane. Similar-
ly, she wrote a series of poems designed to reflect the polarities of male
and female and to emphasize duality. They were titled ‘Poems of He and
She’, and they were lists of masculine and feminine nouns taken from a
Gaelic grammar (Colquhoun, “Poems of He and She” n.d.). The idea of
her automatic poetry was to bring the order from the random, but order
that was ultimately instructive about the nature of the universe and, in
this case, alchemical duality.

Sex and Gender

Ithell Colquhoun’s treatment of sex and gender was nothing short of radi-
cal and these were important themes in the first stages of her career as an
artist. Some of her earliest pieces explore Biblical and classical stories
featuring powerful women, and there is good reason to believe that she
may have found inspiration in the Italian Renaissance artist Artemisia
Gentileschi, a student of Caravaggio, who depicted scenes of female
violence and also violence against women. In 1929, Ithell tied for first
place in the Slade Summer Composition with Judith Showing the Head
of Holofernes, which may have been an homage to a similarly titled piece
by Gentileschi, as most likely was her 1930 composition entitled Susanna
and the Elders. By the late 1930s, however, Ithell progressed into much
bolder depictions of the male form, some so bold that one gallery refused
to display Gouffres Amers (1939) (Moore April, 1941). Several of her
pieces from the 1930s deal both metaphorically and quite literally with
male genitalia, such as Double Coconut (1936) and Sardine and Eggs
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 313

(1940/41). Castration and male impotence was also an early theme in a

number of important works, such as Gouffres Amers, Cucumber (1939)
and The Pine Family (1940). These may have a reference to the myth
of the fallen and resurrected god made so popular by the work of the
religious scholar Sir James Frazer, but it was most likely not an overall
comment on her view of men; it may represent studies of an archetype. In
fact, The Pine Family depicts a castrated male, female and hermaphrodite
where all genitalia have been removed. Art historian Dawn Ades once
suggested that Colquhoun’s explicit portrayals of the male body could be
read as a parody of the ways in which the men of the Surrealist movement
objectified women. Colquhoun responded directly to Ades’ comments by
stating that her work in this regard needed to be taken at face value and
that she was not satirizing, or commenting on the works of male surreal-
ists. In this way, Colquhoun states very directly that her work is not to
be seen as derivative, but that it stands on its own, and that she was not
afraid to confront the societal expectations of women artists and their
relationship with the male body (Ades, Notes on Two Women Surrealist
Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun 1980) (Colquhoun, Letter to
the Editor 1981).
Often, though, Ithell’s early depictions of sex were positive and invit-
ing. Visual metaphors of sexuality inundate her work, and even the
simplest sketch of a cake or a spoon in a glass can easily take on a very
explicit character. Colquhouns’ celebrated piece Scylla (1938) features
a view of a woman’s knees in the bath with a small boat gliding not
so innocently between them. These works date from the height of her
public involvement with Surrealism. Sketches from her archives include
other lighthearted watercolours of bathing women, and also more explicit
depictions of a woman birthing a variety of complex esoteric symbols.
Some of her decalcomania pieces such as Alcove (1946) appear to repre-
sent the folds of a vulva. As discussed below, in some cases Colquhoun’s
focus on gender was emblematic of her preoccupations with the integra-
tion of duality as a magical act, and the symbolism involved worked on a
number of levels for the viewer. Although Colquhoun explored issues of
sex and gender throughout her life, her more challenging and celebrated
visual works on this theme came from the earliest stages of her career. She
did, however, produce some quite radical essays and poems ranging from
diatribes on the restrictions caused by women’s clothing in the 1960s to
poems about condoms in the decade before her death (Colquhoun, “My
Ideas About Clothes” c. 1961).
314 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

The Hermetic and Alchemical Current

Colquhoun demonstrated a very early interest in the occult and in
alchemy, and it was probably this that made her interest in Surrealism
a very natural match. Her cousin was Edward Langford Garstin, who
was Cancellarius of the Alpha Omega chapter of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn, wrote extensively on alchemy and theurgy, and was
friends with MacGregor and Moina Mathers. Garstin was also the secre-
tary of G.R.S. Mead’s Quest Society that Colquhoun joined in 1928
(Colquhoun, “Sword of Wisdom Draft Notes” n.d.). Although Colquhoun
only developed her friendship with her cousin as an adult through their
membership in the Quest Society, Garstin had a remarkable impact on
her occult development, and it was through him that she was introduced
to the Golden Dawn. It would be no underestimation to argue for the
pre-eminence of the occult in Ithell’s body of work. It was very clearly
an overriding preoccupation from a relatively young age and her earli-
est writings on alchemy, Kabbalah and Enochian magic, dated from
the 1920s. In 1926 she completed and performed a play called Bird of
Hermes based on alchemical themes, some of which may have formed
the basis for her alchemical novel Goose of Hermogenes (Colquhoun,
“Bird of Hermes draft script” 1926). In 1936 she painted a watercolour
of Allan Bennett, a Golden Dawn adept and magical teacher of Aleister
Crowley and she was experimenting with alchemical themes in art from
the late 1930s .
Although Ithell clearly showed Hermetic and alchemical influences
in her art from a very early age, her involvement in occult organizations
really emerges in the 1950s, after her divorce from Toni Del Renzio in
1947. Until this time, Ithell was much more integrated into both Modern-
ist and Surrealist art and literature communities in London, but by the
1950s her focus had shifted. Not only did she begin joining occult and
magical organizations, but her investigations into witchcraft began in
earnest, and she relocated permanently to the west of Cornwall. From the
beginning of the 1950s, Colquhoun’s visual work seems to take on more
of a private and contemplative nature and her painting output decreased
for nearly a decade, while the public focus of her art switched more to
poetry and essay writing. Her strictly magical essays proliferated and she
also had success in publishing her spiritual and mystical travel guides,
Crying of the Wind (1955) an experiential guide to Ireland, and also The
Living Stones (1957), which is probably one of the first Earth Mysteries
guides to Cornwall. A third travel guide to Egypt was drafted in the 1960s
but was never completed. Some of her earliest work in occult journalism
was completed for a local London paper called The London Broadsheet,
where she wrote profiles of Gerald Gardner (1954) and Austin Osman
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 315

Spare (1955), as well as more theoretical material on Thelema and divina-

tion. Later in her life she wrote a number of esoteric articles for Predic-
tion and Quest as well as several other publications.
Colquhoun then emerges as a nexus of all of the major occult currents
of the 20th century. What follows is a very short resume of her esoteric
interests: she was very firmly entrenched in the Western esoteric tradi-
tion, but was also well read in Asian traditions, including Buddhism and
yoga. Kabbalah and alchemy were probably the most consistent refer-
ences throughout her body of work, followed by her interest in Druidry
and Nature religion. She was an initiate of a wide variety of different
orders representing Hermetic and Pagan traditions, including the Ordo
Templi Orientis, Co-Masonry, the British Circle of the Universal Bond,
the Golden Section Society, and in later years the Fellowship of Isis.
Although she was unsuccessful at her attempts to become an initiate
of Golden Dawn at an early stage, the Golden Dawn system of magic
was clearly one of her guiding principles, and she wrote the influential
account of the Golden Dawn magicians, The Sword of Wisdom, published
in 1975. She was also a key member of a Golden Dawn-type organiza-
tion, The Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx, founded by Tamara Bourk-
houn in the 1960s with a heavy emphasis on Enochian magic. It remains
unclear to what degree this order was established in its initiatory process,
but it is very clear from her notes and the art work which remains in
her archives that she was working on Second Order-level Golden Dawn
material (Colquhoun, Magical drawings and diagrams 1950s-1970s).
She was also affiliated briefly with Dion Fortune’s group, the Society for
Inner Light, but the organization did not suit her and she did not continue
on with them (Colquhoun, “Sword of Wisdom Draft Notes” n.d.). She
had deep interests in and knowledge of both traditional and contemporary
witchcraft, met with Gerald Gardner more than once, yet did not become
a member of any Wiccan organization. Although she was not a spiritual-
ist, she had knowledge of and correspondence with folk healers around
Britain and Ireland, and made extensive use of remote healing services
(Castle 1971).

Ithell’s Magical Art Experiments

Throughout her life, Colquhoun produced an extensive and impressive
body of esoteric visual art in addition to her poems and essays. But while
it is no stretch to say that many of the works which she created with the
intent to display or sell throughout her life were based on esoteric prin-
ciples, there is a large collection of her esoteric work dating from the
1930s onward which clearly formed the basis for personal experiments
regarding colour and shape which were most likely never intended for
316 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

display. These works were obviously created to progress her own theo-
ries and personal magical work. It is also obvious that some of the visual
experiments which remain in her archives were actually much larger
projects, sometimes to be coupled with text. Sadly, many of these had
little commercial value for the time, and some of these projects would
have simply been too radical for public consumption.
Despite Colquhoun’s fortunes with various Hermetic organizations, it
is very clear from studying her entire corpus of material that it was the
Golden Dawn system which held the most interest for her and under-
pinned the symbolism of her work until a very late stage of her life.
Colour was a very important aspect of her work. She took a very precise
interest in ensuring that the colours she used for invocations were correct,
and she theorized about the magical use of colour in a number of essays
throughout her life. Her interest in the precise use of colour and her affin-
ity for the Golden Dawn system may well have been supported by her
work with Amédeé Ozenfant in the mid 1930s. Ozenfant was responsible
for progressing colour theory in Britain and his influence can most likely
be seen in Colquhoun’s focus on scientific blending of colour and the
effects of colours in proximity to one another.
For Colquhoun, the Golden Dawn’s ‘Complete Symbol of the Rose
Cross’ was a very detailed colour wheel, and in her notes and poems
there were frequent references to colour formulas and colour mixing. The
more perfect the colours, the more one could be assured of success in
creating ‘flashing tablets’, visual invocations of angels, deities and intel-
ligences, and of course Tarot cards. Within the final decade of her life,
she worked on enamel colour fields inspired by various Golden Dawn
and Kabbalistic colour systems. In 1977, she developed a pack of Tarot
cards. She had used Tarot images previously as stand-alone works, but
this was her own set of divinatory materials. They are based purely on
Golden Dawn systems of colouring, and in the accompanying essay she
states that they were created using the ‘psycho morphological’ technique
of colour placement used by other Surrealists. It is clear that Colquhoun
believed in the power of colour as sufficient communicators with other-
worldly interlocutors. In her deck one does not require images to create
stories—the colours alone provide the necessary psychic link and shape
the narrative for the reader. Another colour-based project, the Decad of
Intelligence, was created in 1978 and 1979 featured a series of poetic
sephirotic Kabbalistic meditations paired with abstract enamel colour
studies of each sephirah. However, Colquhoun did not limit herself to
Golden Dawn or Kabbalistic colour schemes; she also experimented with
a number of palettes including ones with Asian and Sufi attributions.
Like many esoteric practitioners, Ithell had a near obsession with
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 317

sacred geometry, but there were several themes that she explored most
often over a 40 year period. Colquhoun worked quite frequently with
cubes, and grids within cubes, envisioning figures and temples within
three-dimensional and four-dimensional spaces. It is clear that she was
influenced by Charles Hinton’s theorizing on the tesseract and the gener-
al dimensionality of the Platonic solids, about which she wrote an essay
which is currently not precisely dated (Colquhoun, “Dimensional Inter-
relation: a Meditation on the Platonic Solids” c.1950s). These ideas were
current in the esoteric network of the early 20th century, but it is hard to
know exactly at what point these entered her visual repertoire because
she does not cite her influences. Internal references from sketches suggest
that she was working with the idea of fourth-dimensional space as early
as the 1940s. In 1978 she constructed a very simple piece called Towards
the Tesseract, which featured colour schemes that were similar to those
she was using in her sketches of cubes 30 years earlier.
Some of her geometric studies were clearly done in service of Enochian
experimentation and other aspects of Golden Dawn work including the
‘cube of space’ which the tesseract material probably illustrates. There
are some very highly polished pieces using sacred geometry which were
clearly to be used within a Golden Dawn temple as they reflect aspects of
the grade curricula, but in her archives there are also notes and cuttings
where she would take these same geometric forms, crosses, pyramids
and swastikas, build them up into a three-dimensional figure, and then
reduce them once again to a two-dimensional space. It was her belief
that the more times she could build up and reduce the figures, the more
potential they would have for opening up a fourth-dimensional portal
(Colquhoun, “Dimensional Interrelation: a Meditation on the Platonic
Solids” c.1950s). In the end, she concluded that the cube and the cross
are the most stable forms for fourth-dimensional reflection. Colquhoun
was not the only artist to work with these ideas—the same exact princi-
ples are found in Salvador Dalí’s 1954 Corpus Hypercubus, which was
constructed on the principle of a crucifix extending into the fourth dimen-
sion based on its spiritual power. While critical discussion of Dalí’s work
frequently focuses on his relationship to the science of the period, he
attributes the principles behind the painting to the alchemist Raymond
Lully, which reinforces the concept of the extra-dimensional potential
of solid forms which was being played with by the esotericists of the
mid 19th century. Colquhoun never references Dalí within her own work,
although she would obviously have known of this piece.
Colquhoun also used a technique of crosses and grids to serve as
invocations of angels or elements. They seem to be a combination of
automatic techniques, and highly controlled artistic invocations. She
318 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

would start the process with colour schemes drawn from either alchemi-
cal works, or from Golden Dawn texts. She frequently applied grids to
her figure drawings, starting from the base using Kabbalistic attributions
and correspondences for the body and times of day working up through
the figure. She would then overlay the designs with colours taken from
particular schema. She also describes gridded images very similar to this
in a section of Goose of Hermogenes. Some of her gridded drawings from
the 1950s were inspired by sections from Francis Barrett’s 1801 magical
instruction guide, The Magus.
She also used colour in capturing alchemical processes. Meditations
on the creation of the hermaphrodite through the union of polarities were
an important theme in both her private studies and also in her more public
works, although in those the couplings were somewhat more disguised.
She created numerous studies in watercolour of the hermaphrodite, using
red and blue on conjoined figures seen from the side. For the most part
her colour imagery in these exercises was drawn from the King scale for
Chokmah and Binah on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, representing the
most evolved of the two polarities before their unification into a philoso-
pher’s stone. It frequently appeared as though the paint was applied using
what would be considered an automatic technique, but in other instances
the paint was more carefully applied, accompanying sketches of both
human and angelic lovers. Red and blue also appear in her poetry as
continuing themes, showing the hermaphrodite being generated through
an alchemical process (Colquhoun, “Union Pacific” n.d.). Many of these
sketches were very explicit and were almost certainly inspired direct-
ly by Japanese erotica (shunga). Interestingly, there were homoerotic
couplings among these studies, suggesting that her theories about the
union of energy polarities may not have necessitated the embodiment of
two different genders for completion. One sketch, Grand Union Canal,
simply depicts what appears to be kundalini energy rising in the body of
the woman during intercourse, but all Colquhoun represented was the
energy itself without the supporting bodies.
A number of her experiments fused the themes of sacred geometry and
energy polarities with studies of the human body. From the 1930s onward,
Colquhoun created a number of sketches of the human form with the
internal organs displayed in different colours. Some of these were titled
Alchemical Figure, and the colours of the organs correspond to various
classical and Kabbalistic attributions. A 1940 piece titled the Thirteen
Streams of Magnificent Oil relates to the theosophical notion of various
openings in the body into which divine energy can flow, and in this case,
the work is centered around a woman, as Colquhoun argued that women
have one more opening than men, who have twelve. Colquhoun frequent-
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 319

ly depicted the flows of energy around and throughout the human body,
and sometimes featured figures in the center of a tesseract, or receiving
the energy from interaction with a sacred site.
Hermetic and alchemical themes were also features of her creative writing
and many of her poems mirror the visual themes she addressed. Colquhoun’s
Surrealist novel Goose of Hermogenes was published by London-based Peter
Owen in 1961, but was started several decades earlier and shows themes
which she depicts in her 1920s play Bird of Hermes. It is a difficult work, but
is a fine example of the ways in which she combined Surrealist and esoteric
art principles. Here, Colquhoun creates a narrative through highly coded
alchemical tracts, but even without that background the tale can be read on
a number of levels. It is loosely a story about a girl who has been lured by
her uncle to his strange island, to help him in some way in his pursuit of the
Philosopher’s Stone (Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes 1961). The book
is replete with alchemical imagery, each chapter of the book representing a
stage of alchemical processing. Much of the work is an amalgam of alchemi-
cal visual images set on paper. One of the chapters directs the narrative
through the images of the 1625 Book of Lambspring by Nicholas Barnaud.
It also features explicit passages of sado-masochistic practice between the
main character and her uncle, again demonstrating that Colquhoun was not
afraid to confront a number of sexual taboos. Colquhoun penned two other
pieces of magical fiction, I Saw Water and Destination Limbo which were
rejected by publishers as unmarketable.

Paganism and Celticism

Ithell’s love of the Celts started early with her own ancestral researches
and eventually caused her to settle in Cornwall in the late 1940s after her
divorce. Ithell believed that her Scottish ancestry predisposed her to the
type of second sight and ‘Celtic sensitivity’ that would make her Surre-
alism more successful (Colquhoun, Autobiographcal Notes n.d.). So in
tandem with her Hermetic pursuits, Ithell also investigated witchcraft,
Druidry, and other Celtic orders, culminating in her initiation into the
Fellowship of Isis towards the end of her life. There is a persistent theme
of the relationship between women and Nature in her work long before
there was anything like a cohesive or coherent Goddess movement. Her
interest in Celtic spirituality focused on the land itself and on sacred sites,
and also with the transmission of tradition embodied in a location.
The line separating Paganism and ceremonial magic is a difficult one
to discern, and in the 1950s and 1960s the cultures were not as separate
as some might think them to be in the 21st century, yet one can see in
Colquhoun’s magical life distinctive themes emerging from her magical
interests and associations which would eventually develop into modern
320 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

Paganism. Her interest in Paganism and her love of things Celtic were
inexorably intertwined. Although there were Celtic themes in her creative
work dating from the 1950s, the concentration increased dramatically in
the 1970s, coinciding with the second Celtic Revival of that period.
W.B. Yeats, who also combined the Hermetic and the Celtic, was a
primary influence on Colquhoun’s life and work, and although she met
Yeats in both Dublin and London toward the end of his life, the nature of
their interactions is not quite clear. She was interested in Yeats’ attempts
to create a Celtic Hermetic order similar to the Golden Dawn, and she
studied his correspondence and journals to try to understand the details
of this project. In the 1960s she elaborated on Yeats’ work, fusing the
Kabbalah and Celtic deities, and published two essays on this in Predic-
tion magazine in 1970. Colquhoun supported Yeats’ bold rejection of
Christianity, and was ultimately inspired by his Traditionalist views on
Celtic culture and the redemptive power of its Pagan past (Colquhoun,
“The Importance of Yeats’ ‘A Vision’” Draft c.1940s).
In pursuing her Celtic interests Ithell took initiations with, and studied
with, a number of organizations. However, she had a common pattern
of studying the curriculum earnestly, only to be frustrated by the lack of
knowledge displayed by senior members of the order in question. She
was frequently found to be difficult or argumentative, and too challeng-
ing in her questions on the curriculum. For instance, in the 1960s she was
a member of the Druidic order, The Circle of the Universal Bond, also
known as An Druidh Uileach Braithrearchas. Although she engaged in
a very vigorous discussion about the Order’s first level of work, she told
officials she was not interested in taking initiation beyond that (“Rebec-
ca” n.d.). She was an associate of Colin Murray from the 1950s, and a
very supportive member of his Celtic-based Golden Section Order until
very late in her life, being most active in the 1970s.
Within Celtic spirituality, her participation in Druidry probably had the
most significant impact on her work, but it was more of an influence on
her poetry and her essay writing than on her visual work, which continued
to be more significantly marked by her alchemical and hermetic symbol-
ism. One could theorize that this was so because of the emphasis on the
Bard and divine revelation within Celtic traditions, which would have
been consistent with her Surrealist practice. As a result, there are many
Celtic topics covered within Ithell’s so-called ‘found poems’. She visited
Brittany several times with her Druidic order and became a member of
the Breton Goursez, most likely due to a reciprocal arrangement between
these Druidic orders. However, despite her residence and commitment
to Cornwall, she was never made a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth, most
likely due to her esoteric leanings. Still, her interests in Celtic cultures
The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun 321

were not limited to the esoteric dimensions and she was also supportive
of Celtic political movements for cultural recognition. She wrote essays
on Cornish culture and took an interest in the history and survivals of
the Cornish language. Her small 1973 poetry collection, Grimoire of the
Entangled Thicket, contains images and works related to Celtic myth and
was clearly inspired by Robert Graves’ The White Goddess and the Celtic
tree alphabet which he popularized (Colquhoun, Grimoire of the Entan-
gled Thicket 1973).
Her visual art demonstrated a belief in ley-lines and Earth mysteries
before such concepts became more prevalent in British alternative spiri-
tuality. She had a number of depictions of sacred sites among both her
major display pieces and they were also frequently subjects of more casual
study. A couple of pieces in particular indicate very developed beliefs
about how megalithic sites functioned. Her 1942 oil painting, Dance of the
Nine Opals, shows the Merry Maidens stone circle near Penzance, where
each of the stones is revealed to be an opal—the stone of Mercury and the
alchemical process. Each stone is linked in a geometric pattern of energy,
fed from the ground, turning the site into a center of energy (Colquhoun,
“Dance of the Nine Opals” c.1942). Additionally, each stone contains red,
blue and yellow, which suggest that they function as alchemical crucibles
where the mingling of the polarities create the Philosophers’ Stone. Given
that the belief in magnetic earth currents was not a widely accepted feature
of British esoteric culture for over another two decades, this painting alone
demonstrates the degree to which Colquhoun was ahead of her time in
synthesizing diverse strands of occult belief. There might be an indica-
tion that Colquhoun believed sacred sites to also be dimensional portals, as
some of the colour sketches she did of the Merry Maidens and the Men an
Tol—an unusual stone site in West Cornwall—show the sites as existing
in a cubic space with a similar colour scheme to the tesseracts that were a
persistent source of interest.
Ithell Colquhoun died in Cornwall in 1988. Although she had always
been a solitary woman, toward the end of her life she suffered more from
depression and anxiety and found it difficult to find help and support.
Still, despite what many people would consider an isolated and lonely
existence in a hard-to-reach village in West Cornwall, Colquhoun
remained in close contact with artistic and esoteric colleagues and was
active and innovative until the end of her life. Even then she challenged
perceptions about the themes and activities proper for an older woman,
and continued to pursue an uncompromising vision. Colquhoun’s most
enduring commitment was to the principles of enlightenment, which she
pursued in her own idiosyncratic way throughout her life. What we have
left in her writings and art is the record of that journey.
322 Pathways in Modern Western Magic

References
“Rebecca”. “Letters from ADUB.” TGA929/1/618-619. Tate Gallery Archive.
Ades, Dawn. “Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and
Ithell Colquhoun.” Oxford Art Journal, 1980: 36-43.
Ades, Dawn. “Surrealism, Male-Female.” In Surrealism, Desire Unbound, by
Jennnifer (editor) Mundy, 171-201. London: Tate Publishing, 2001.
Castle, Jack. “Letter to Ithell Colquhoun.” TGA 929/5/36 . Tate Gallery
Archive, June 1, 1971.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Colquhoun, Ithell. “Bird of Hermes draft script.” TGA929/2/1/5. Tate Gallery
Archives, 1926.
—. “Dance of the Nine Opals.” TGA929/2/1/17. Tate Gallery Archive, c.1942.
—. “Gods of the Cardinal Points.” TGA 929/2/2/13 . Tate Gallery Archive.
—. “My Ideas About Clothes”. TGA 929/1/225. Tate Gallery Archive, c. 1961.
—. “Poems of He and She”. TGA 929/2/2/13 . Tate Gallery Archive.
—. “Sword of Wisdom Draft Notes.” TGA 920/2/1/68/3/4. Tate Gallery
Archive.
—. “The Importance of Yeats’ ‘A Vision’ Draft.” TGA929/2/2/14. Tate Gallery
Archive, c.1940s.
—. “Union Pacific.” TGA929/2/2/14. London: Tate Gallery Archives .
—. “Dimensional Interrelation: a Meditation on the Platonic Solids.”
TGA929/2/1/21 . Tate Gallery Archive, c.1950s.
—. Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket. Ore Publications, 1973.
—. “Autobiographcal Notes.” TGA/929/8/10/1. Tate Gallery Archives.
—. “Goose of Hermogenes.” London: Peter Owen, 1961.
Colquhoun, Ithell. “Letter to the Editor.” Oxford Art Journal, 1981: 65.
—. “Magical drawings and diagrams.” TGA 929/5/36 . Tate Gallery Archives,
1950s-1970s.
—. “Surrealism and Hermetic Poetry.” TGA 929/2/1/60. Tate Gallery Archives,
n/d.
Colquhoun, Ithell. “The Mantic Stain.” Enquiry, Volume 2 Number 4, 1949:
15-21.
Levy, Silvano. The Scandalous Eye: The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox. Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
Levy, Silvano. “The Del Renzio Affair: A Leadership Struggle in Wartime
Surrealism.” Papers of Surrealism Issue 3, 2005: 1-34.
Moore, Doris. “Letter to Ithell Colquhoun.” London: Tate Archive 929/1/850,
April, 1941.
Index 471

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474 Pathways in Modern Western Magic