The Magic of Ithell Colquhoun

By Amy Hale

© Guy Carrard — Pompidou Center, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP Man Ray Trust / Adagp, Paris.

Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) was a radical magician and Surrealist artist who gave no fucks. She wrote about parthenogenetic nuns and sacred sadomasochism, and she was rejected from more than one magical order for asking too many questions. In 1941 she had a male full-frontal nude pulled from exhibition, for which she was in no way apologetic. She painted beach caves as giant, gaping vaginas, and she claimed to have eaten human flesh. That last bit may have been for dramatic fictitious effect, but maybe not. It’s hard to tell.

Ideally, she would have wanted to cultivate the elements in balance, but everything about her simply blazed.

Colquhoun was perhaps the most committed and engaged female occultist of the twentieth century. She was the embodiment of elemental fire: doggedly driven, relentless and uncompromising. Ideally, she would have wanted to cultivate the elements in balance, but everything about her simply blazed. She pursued the mysteries with every breath and used that passion to fuel an incredible output of art and writing. Throughout her life, she created thousands of pieces of visual art, wrote, published and performed hundreds of poems, wrote several novels and three travel guides, wrote a history of the Golden Dawn magical order, drafted radio dramas, produced philosophical commentaries and quite a large number of articles on thick occult theory. But her art was always in service to her magic. Through Colquhoun’s work, we have the rare privilege to be witness to one woman’s intensive, lifelong magical practice.

6. The Lord of Victory

She appeared topless in a Surrealist publication and painted shocking images of barely concealed castrated torsos and tree trunks that were overtly and lushly vulvic.

Colquhoun is generally identified with the Surrealist movement, but her formal associations with British Surrealism were quite short lived. She was an accomplished artist even before joining the Surrealist movement, having been trained at the Slade, London’s preeminent art school. This was a legacy she shared with Moina Mathers, one of the most important members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the wife of its founder Samuel “MacGregor” Mathers. Colquhoun first encountered Surrealism when she studied in Paris from 1931–33. This must have been when she first met Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who imagined her as a sultry earth goddess, photographing her with the length of her thigh beautifully exposed as she cradled a sheaf of wheat. She later visited the International Surrealist Exposition in London in 1936, and was captivated by the spectacle, especially the dreamlike images of Dalí. By the late 1930s, she was exhibiting in prominent Surrealist spaces. Even among the world of the bold and brash Surrealists, Colquhoun was no shrinking violet and continually smacked convention in the face. She appeared topless in a Surrealist publication and painted shocking images of barely concealed castrated torsos and tree trunks that were overtly and lushly vulvic. She was dismissed from the British Surrealist movement in 1940 when she refused to practice exclusive devotion to the movement at the expense of her occult interests. Still, she considered herself to be a Surrealist for the entirety of her life.

13. The Spirit of the Mighty Waters

Yet Colquhoun became a Surrealist only because she was an occultist first, having developed an early interest in alchemy and the Hermetic magic of the Golden Dawn in her early 20s. She was involved with a staggering amount of occult and esoteric orders including the O.T.O., The Society for Inner Light, Co-Masonry, Martinism, the Ancient Druid Order and The Temple of the Pyramid and Sphinx (a Golden Dawn influenced order focused on Enochian magic) — this isn’t even the complete list! She also believed that she had Celtic blood in her veins, and that as a Celt she was more inclined to visionary states. In her mind this made her well suited for the dreamy world of Surrealism which focused on techniques for accessing the symbolic world of the collective unconscious. Yet even among the Surrealists’ who often fetishized the occult, particularly alchemy, tarot cards and folk magic, Colquhoun was unconventional in her commitment to occult, and specifically Hermetic, practice.

[Her taro deck] was not meant for divination but for contemplation and to help the viewer make a connection with the deep forces that structure reality.

Like other Surrealists, Colquhoun used automatic techniques in her writing and painting, but she used automatism to go deeper, to make contact not only with her own subconscious, but also to open herself as a channel to other planes and entities who would reveal themselves through her art. She ascribed different automatic techniques to the four elements, and she believed that these artistic processes could serve as a form of divination, connecting her to cosmic forces that she would invoke through her process. Her commitment to automatic processes influenced her work throughout her life. Her “taro” deck (taro was her preferred spelling), completed in 1977 when she was 71, was the first abstract tarot deck designed through automatic processes focused entirely around the colour scheme of the Kabbalistic tree of life. It was not meant for divination but for contemplation and to help the viewer make a connection with the deep forces that structure reality.

Colquhoun was preoccupied with the idea of the magical hermaphrodite and believed that transcending gender was the key to individual and wider social enlightenment.

Colquhoun was also compelled by the erotic from early in her career, and she used erotic images to express important occult theories and archetypal concepts. Colquhoun was preoccupied with the idea of the magical hermaphrodite and believed that transcending gender was the key to individual and wider social enlightenment. In 1940 and 1941, she started a very intensive visual project around sex magic, combining alchemy with Kabbalah into a series of pieces that were so explicit and provocative that none of them have been shown. Although we don’t know the exact motivation for Colquhoun’s sex magic project at this stage in her life, it was clearly focused on representing the union of “male” and “female” energetic currents resulting in a new enlightened state beyond gender. This project was an obsession. She completed dozens, if not hundreds, of wildly explicit drawings and watercolours with red and blue hued bodies penetrating each other in all sorts of magical configurations in great detail. There were also homoerotic couplings, suggesting that her theories about the union of energy polarities may not have necessitated the embodiment of two different sexes for completion. Even if she would not have claimed a queer identity for herself, Colquhoun had fallen in love with a woman at least once, so the possibilities would have had a personal resonance. This body of work, which also included esoterically coded poetry, was nothing short of radical, certainly for a woman artist during this or any other period.

7. The Lord of Success Unfulfilled

The scope of Colquhoun’s magical interests was vast and ranged from visions of megalithic monuments as extradimensional portals, to magical colour theory and conjurations of angels, to representing the fourth dimension through experiments with sacred geometry. Her Surrealist writings, exemplified by her novel The Goose of Hermogenes, were even more complex, constructed with images drawn from her own dreams and woven through metaphors of alchemy and Kabbalah. Because her command of Hermetic magic was so thorough, and because her expressions of the Divine Feminine were at times shocking and unconventional, it was difficult for her to find audiences that would fully resonate with her work during her lifetime. Yet in recent years the brilliance of her work is being rediscovered and she is inspiring a new group of artists and practitioners. She has become an inspirational figure in her own beloved Cornwall, her home for nearly half her life, where local Witches now pay homage to her as an ancestor, celebrating her life with altars and conducting art experiments undertaken with loving reverence. Feminist punk artist Linder Sterling has used Colquhoun’s work as a springboard for her own explorations into textile arts and ballet. After struggling to be fully understood in her lifetime, a new generation of women is eager to connect with Colquhoun’s legacy as a boundary breaker and powerful force of nature. The works of this pioneering woman built a bridge between this world and others, and they are now themselves the channel for her to inspire new voices.

7. The Children of the Voice: the Oracle of the Mighty Gods

Ithell Colquhoun’s Taro As Colour, co-edited by Amy Hale and Robert Ansell, is a rich and lushly presented visual exploration of Colquhoun’s groundbreaking 1977, entirely abstract,“Taro” deck. Colquhoun combined magical colour theory and Surrealist techniques to produce a unique deck designed to inspire access to spiritual dimensions through the power of pure colour. All 78 cards have been faithfully reproduced to retain the brilliance of the original enamels, and they are presented along with an introduction to the history, context and symbolism of the deck. Colquhoun’s original accompanying essay, Taro as Colour, provides the artist’s context for the organization of the deck. A thumbnail image index is included along with correspondences to traditional tarot to help guide the reader. Copies are available from Fulgur Ltd.

Amy Hale is an Anthropologist and Folklorist who specializes in contemporary occult cultures in the US and the UK. She has been researching Ithell Colquhoun for nearly two decades and is working on a series of projects about her life and magic.