Glacial Errata, No. 38

One: Ithell Colquhoun

A few months ago I was sent a pile of newly reissued books by Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced “Eye-thell Col-hoon”), an unjustly neglected writer who traversed the realms of Surrealism, and esotericism. Born in 1906, she was an occultist and artist, but also produced two travelogues—one on Ireland in 1954, and one on Cornwall in 1957, followed by several novels, including The Goose of Hermogenes in 1961.

There’s a lot out there about her and by her, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface here, so by no means am I any kind of expert on Colquhoun or her legacy. Rather than try to do justice to the vastness, the strangeness, and the complexity of her work in such a short space, here are just a few passages, chosen perhaps to be slightly, deliberately obtuse, to give you a sense of the general hermetic vibe of her prose, and to entice you to seek it out yourself.

Two: The Crying of the Wind: Ireland

“There are skies in Ireland as nowhere else; clouds that seem full of ink, the clear spaces beyond them appallingly metallic; masses of vapour stretching themselves for miles, half detached from the cloud’s main body; or an impenetrable weight, heavy as a castle with an edge of ‘terrible crystal.’ There is always an alienating contrast, as the misty and the dazzling, the massive and the slight, the dense and the transparent. The character of the heavens is due, I suppose, to an intense clearness, coming from the comparative absence of industrial pollution, and to the great humidity, so that the atmosphere, already free of the worst grimes, is yet continually washed in a medium that veils any strident glare. There is only one thing better than a fine day in England and that is a fine day in Ireland—and not only because of its rarity. Perhaps a fine day in Kerry is best of all, when the air is like a diamond yet the dews are never far away.”

Three: The Living Stones: Cornwall

“It was the place of deluge. It was in that place of mountains, jungle and six-months-long torrents where the people, at nodal points of the solar or the lunar year, still sustain their stone rites by wreathing pillar and circle. My origin was there, and there I would return, other than in dreams. I would see that country with eyelashes untangled by the tendrils of sleep, hear the forgotten but re-echoing sounds, savour again that smell now only remembered from half-open trunks, savour again the taste, the different touch even of the air. I should be among the wild Nagas of the snake-like name, who might once have been at home in Avebury, the serpent town, with their ivory and spears, feathers and bangles; whose women have all the mates they choose. But how to get there? Oh, for a strong heart, a bloodstream not predisposed to fear, a stomach immune to enteritis, respiration resistant to damp and dust! To be taken there in a clear breath.”

Four: The Goose of Hermogenes

“Was my room haunted? As an infant has difficulty in believing that it has left the womb, so a new ghost has difficulty in believing that it has left the world. Sometimes the ghost feels, acts, decides as though it were still blown-through by the breath of life. It has to remind itself constantly, and concentrate its attention upon the fact that it is no longer alive: otherwise hauntings occur. Those ghosts return most persistently who have never known that they were dead; others come back fitfully when they have known, and then again forgotten. When they fully realize it at last, their haunting ceases. A ghost must keep always before it a vision of that end which it has reached, and only allow itself to be worked on by the breath of death.”

Five: Diagrams of Love

I was still working through these small, and delightful volumes when I happened upon a catalog of a show at the Tate St. Ives of her sex magic art. Delightfully obscure, enigmatically erotic, they consisted of a largely private archive only discovered after her death.

As the curator of the show, Amy Hale, notes in her introduction to the catalog, we tend to think of sex magic primarily through the lens of men like Aleister Crowley, but in Colquhoun’s work, for “the first time—maybe the only time—we have an explicit, visually driven model of sex magic and esoteric sexuality that incorporates queer desires and even theorises multiple participants. Another groundbreaking feature of this corpus is subversion of the male gaze and the centering of women’s sexual pleasure as a vehicle for connection with the divine.”