Ithell Colquhoun

Nearly 40 nearly forgotten essays on magic and esotericism by Ithell Colquhoun. Writer, artist, and wilfully dissident surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) invested her unique works with magical learning, esoteric lore, and a palpable sense of mystery. Despite having published widely on esoteric and occult topics during her lifetime, Colquhoun was never to produce a single book length edition of her magical writings. As a result, many of her essays were lost or neglected. A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings Of Ithell Colquhoun gathers nearly 40 texts by this unique artist and magical practitioner, and displays cohesively, and for the first time, the impressive breadth of Colquhoun's magical interests and expertise, and how these came to inform her singular works. Ranging from early encounters with the Kabbalah and esoteric color theory, to Celtic mysticism and alchemy, this volume, edited by Colquhoun scholar and folklorist Amy Hale, promises to shed a necessary light on an integral body of Colquhoun's thought that has remained occluded for too long.

'A rare and beautiful book' TLS 'Original and stimulating' Irish Times Into the world of 1950s Ireland - a lushly green, windswept landscape studded with holy wells and the decaying country houses of a vanished ruling class - arrives Ithell Colquhoun. An occultist and a surrealist painter, Colquhoun's travels around the island are guided by her artist's eye and her feeling for the world beyond our own, as well as her spikily humorous view of the people she meets. We encounter faeries and pagan rituals, ruined churches and Celtic splendour, rowdy bohemians and Anglo-Irish landowners fallen on hard times, as the author carouses through Dublin and tramps the hills of Connemara in this classic travelogue. Richly visual and full of sly wit, this is an account of Ireland as only Colquhoun could see it, a land where myth and magic meet wind and rain, and the song of the secret kingdom is heard on city streets. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, she is the author of The Living Stones: Cornwall and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, also available from Pushkin Press.

'An extraordinary book... Part Gothic fantasy, part emblematic progress through a dream world... It has a gripping hallucinogenic clarity' - Snoo Wilson A trancelike feminist fable by Britain's foremost surrealist painter Calcination. Putrefaction. Exaltation. Trapped on an enchanted island ruled by her uncle, a young woman must pass through the stages of alchemical transformation to escape. He wants to conquer death by magic - and she may pay the price for his ambition. Lushly visual, rife with symbols and cries from the unconscious, Colquhoun's first novel is a surreal feminist fable, and a supreme artistic vision. Includes 'Hexentanz', a lost chapter from the original manuscript. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. With a new introduction by Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side: A Journey Into Women, Art and the Spirit World. Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as her novel Goose of Hermogenes, she is the author of two travelogues, The Living Stones: Cornwall and The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

'Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history' - Art UK 'Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you' - Stewart Lee Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of Ghostland and The Listeners Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

Along with the likes of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, the British writer and painter Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) is one of a small number of previously overlooked Surrealist women artists, whose stock today is on the rise. Colquhoun's paintings have recently featured in touring exhibitions around the UK, command ever-increasing prices at auction, and her occult travelogues of Ireland (The Crying of the Wind) and Cornwall (The Living Stones), first published in the '50s and reissued with introductions by Stewart Lee in 2016, have quickly sold through four print runs.In Medea's Charms Colquhoun's shorter writings are anthologised for the first time, and reveal the scope and sophistication of her interest in both the occult and surrealism. Poetry and short stories are complimented by her essays, the subjects of which range from hermetic texts for both the novice and the advanced practitioner, to writings on art and folklore. Colquhoun scholar Richard Shillitoe unlocks the secrets of her work, guiding the reader through the extraordinary imagination that lies at the heart of Colquhoun's genius. The book also demonstrates the extent to which Colquhoun used painting to illuminate her writing. The interplay between word and image is brought home by the inclusion of a striking selection of her paintings, some of which are reproduced here for the first time.

Ithell Colquhoun was a leading British surrealist artist and writer whose love of the esoteric and the occult had a profound influence on her work. No where is this more apparent than in the weird and wonderful alchemical novel "Goose of Hermogenes".An unnamed woman must escape her uncle's island when his sinister attentions fall upon an heirloom - a priceless jewel in her possession - that may help in his tireless efforts to conquer death.Gothic, erotic and dreamlike, "Goose of Hermogenes" is a dizzying work of surrealist imagination. This new edition features five of Colquhoun's watercolour paintings originally painted to illustrate the novel. However one wants to approach this obscure tale, it remains today as vividly unforgettable and disturbing as when it was first published by Peter Owen in 1961.

In The Living Stones, the British surrealist painter and writer Ithell Colquhoun drifts through Cornwall in search of an artist s studio and sanctuary from the modern world. Her finely wrought and learned observations of festivals, fairs and druidic rituals, quickly establish her as the reader s gnostic guide to the county. She paints a land of ghosts, pedlars, borrowed saints and holy sites, charmed wells and crumbling megaliths, and finds in the city emigrants a prefiguring of hippie culture. Above all, Colquhoun connects us with the eerie, numinous beauty of the Cornish countryside, quietly insisting that we see the Cornwall she sees: an ancient land of myth and legend.

Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) is remembered today as a surrealist artist, writer, and occultist. Although her paintings hang in a number of public collections and her gothic novel Goose of Hermogenes (1961) remains in print, critical responses to her work have been severely constrained by the limited availability of her art and writings. The publication of her second novel, I Saw Water—presented here for the first time, together with a selection of her other writings and images, many also previously unpublished—marks a significant step in expanding our knowledge of Colquhoun’s work. Composed almost entirely of material assembled from the author’s dreams, I Saw Water challenges such fundamental distinctions as those between sleeping and waking, the two separated genders, and life and death. It is set in a convent on the Island of the Dead, but its spiritual context derives from sources as varied as Roman Catholicism, the teachings of the Theosophical Society, Goddess spirituality, Druidism, the mystical Qabalah, and Neoplatonism.The editors have provided both an introduction and explanatory notes. The introductory essay places the novel in the context of Colquhoun’s other works and the cultural and spiritual environment in which she lived. The extensive notes will help the reader with any concepts that may be unfamiliar.