I Saw Water. Ithell Colquhoun
Clothes of God: A Treatise on Neo-analytic Psychology (London: Peter Owen, 1956).
43. André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). First published in French, 1932.
44. Buck and Palmer, Clothes of God, chap. 8. For a detailed discussion of how artists have responded to physicists’ understanding of time, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
45. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 84. First published in French, 1937.
46. Breton, Mad Love, 64ff.
47. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 26.
48. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy, 134.
49. Ithell Colquhoun, “Notes on Automatism,” Melmoth 2 (1980): 31–32.
50. Max Ernst, “Inspiration to Order,” in Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn Schultz, 1948).
51. See Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
52. Nicolas Calas, “The Light of Words,” Arson: An Ardent Review, March 1942, 13–20.
53. Colquhoun, “Notes on Automatism.”
54. The authorship of occult automatic writing is always a complex problem. Colquhoun once wrote an essay about perhaps the most well-known example of her lifetime: William Butler Yeats’s A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1925; 2nd ed., 1937). A Vision was a collaboration involving W. B. Yeats, his wife George Yeats, and the source of George Yeats’s automatic writings—whether one understands it as the spirits of the dead communicating through her, George’s imagination, or something else entirely.
55. Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). See especially chapters 1 and 2.
56. Gordon Onslow Ford, Yves Tanguy and Automatism (Inverness, Calif.: Bishop Pine Press, 1983), 9.
57. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 293.
58. Ithell Colquhoun, responses to a questionnaire, The Glass 9 (1953): [24–25].
59. Quoted in Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality (Dallas: Spence, 1998), 250.
60. Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 190.
61. Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 164.
62. This description is based on one by Ben Fernee, the specialist occult bookseller who handled the sale of the mirror in 2011.
63. The source of Colquhoun’s information on correspondences was Aleister Crowley’s Liber 777 (1909), available online at http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/liber777.pdf. It contains the most comprehensive tables of attributions yet published. Crowley gathered his material from the writings of MacGregor Mathers, who, in turn, assembled his from a variety of nineteenth-century and earlier sources.
64. Untitled manuscript in TGA 929/5/21/2/104–107.
65. In many medieval and early modern alchemical texts, the philosopher’s stone is described as a fine, heavy powder the color of rubies.
66. Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Treatise on the Great Art (Boston: Occult Publishing, 1898). First published posthumously. Available online at http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/alchemy/The_Great_Art.pdf.
67. Although the essay was not published until 1970, there is documentary evidence that shows it to be contemporary with the painting.
68. Available online at http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Mathers_Kabbalah_Unveiled.pdf.
69. The coloring of the body may appear curious but corresponds with Golden Dawn teachings that link each body part with a specific color.
70. For the nonspecialist reader, Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2000) is a helpful explanatory text. It was first published in 1935.
71. In her writings, Colquhoun always employed the more unusual spelling of Taro without the final “t,” believing it to be more in keeping with the pack’s supposed Egyptian origin, and referred to the Suit of Disks rather than using its more usual name, Pentacles. She used the esoteric titles of the individual cards in preference to the everyday ones.
72. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 250.
A NOVEL
VIDI AQUAM EGREDIENTEM DE TEMPLO A LATERE SINISTRA
ITHELL COLQUHOUN
CONTENTS