Colquhoun Goose of Hermogenes

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-147-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

'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.

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colquhoun, Ithell

Leseproben

Introduction

Islands in the Mist

Ithell Colquhoun’s wonderfully strange novel Goose of Hermogenes opens with a cryptic dedication: ‘To the Azores – unvisited islands’. I wonder if this was a lightly veiled dig at her friend, Peter Owen, who had published her first book, the idiosyncratic travelogue The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, in 1955. Colquhoun – writer, artist and mystic – had wanted to follow it up with an account of a journey to the wild and beautiful Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic, but it wasn’t to be, as Owen couldn’t raise the funds. Instead, in 1957, he commissioned her to write The Living Stones: Cornwall – a highly charged evocation of the county she lived in, in which every stone, stream, bird and tree throbs with preternatural energy and mystic significance. Four years later, brushing aside his reservations about its brevity – it’s just over 100 pages long – Owen published Goose of Hermogenes. A modern fairytale inspired by alchemy, at every curious twist and turn, the novel resists any semblance of a straightforward narrative. As Colquhoun wrote, years later: ‘One cannot understand an alchemical text by trying to translate it into everyday language … it needs some faculty analogous to poetic appreciation’.*

Enchanted islands, journeys across water, myth, magic and mystery are the warp and weft of Goose of Hermogenes. The novel’s title is an antiquated name for the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a legendary substance searched for by alchemists that could apparently transmute base metals into ‘noble metals’, such as gold, and was the vital ingredient for the elixir of life. Each of the 12 chapters – Calcination, Solution, Separation, Conjunction, and so on – is named after the stages deemed necessary for finding the stone, as outlined by the 15th-century English alchemist Sir George Ripley in his book The Compound of Alchemy; or, the Twelve Gates leading to the Discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.

Narrated in the first person, instability reigns. For reasons which remain unexplained, Goose of Hermogenes’ unnamed protagonist travels to her uncle’s island – a place where monks have wings, a nightingale could be a ‘bird or hero or demon’ and there are ‘the footprints of dinosaur and mastodon’ in the garden. In the opening paragraph she arrives at ‘misty bay’, ‘choked with a growth of half-submerged trees’; the landscape is ‘faint’ and then ‘hidden’. After commandeering a horse and cart which she is forced to abandon because the track is impassable, frightening things happen: a stranger guides her on the way but falls, is injured and becomes disorientated. They visit a monastery where the young narrator is attacked by a ‘rosy-faced youth’ who she pushes out of a window onto the ‘terrible rocks’ and sea below; in his descent he becomes ‘an empty shirt falling through the air’. Rituals are evoked but never named. She witnesses women playing cards and praying in front of ‘cult objects’ and comes across a ‘creature like certain parasitic orchids’ that is ‘becalmed in the soil like a boat on an oval pond’. Arriving at her uncle’s house, she ‘could not be sure of the location’. Her uncle is sinister; her first view of him is through a door, but she can only see his hands, holding ‘a few leaves from some rare booklet, embossed and illuminated with half-perceived designs’. The next morning she meets him; he has a ‘skeletal head’, is dressed in a purple dressing gown with a Celtic design and warns her:

Do not be misled for a moment […] Do not be deceived by the port, the strand, the square; nor cafés, hotels, cavernous shops, houses gaunt or gay; nor by the churches, soaring or sequestered. The real village is not there.

The narrator realises that her uncle is after her jewels, which he ‘probably fancied to be possessed of alchemystic [sic] powers’. As the story progresses, the niece, ever brave and uncomplaining, attempts to escape, but cannot: ‘I knew,’ she explains, ‘with a sickening sense of futility that my greatest efforts would be unequal to the power which imprisoned me. The open gates were a mockery; invisible barriers more powerful than any bolts of theirs restrained me from going through.’ By the end of the novel, she has passed through numerous stages of transformation, discovered sexual ecstasy, spoken with the dead, and returned to where she began – her family home.

Colquhoun had been mining the themes of Goose of Hermogenes for decades before its publication. In 1926, she had written a short story and a one-act play about an alchemical quest, Bird of Hermes, and extracts of the final novel had been published in 1939; in 1955, she painted a suite of five watercolours illustrating scenes from the book. However, alchemy was just one of her interests: for Colquhoun, a polymath, the air and earth throbbed with primordial energies and decoding their significance was her lifelong work.

Born in India in 1906 to a British colonial family, from an early age, Ithell Colquhoun saw fairies, believed in spirits and was enchanted by magic, myth and astrology and the magical properties of perfumes, plants and birds. Financially supported by a trust fund, in 1926, she became a student at Cheltenham School of Arts and Crafts (where she starred in her one-act play Bird of Hermes) and, in 1928, she joined the Quest Society, which was founded in 1909 by George Robert Stow Mead – scholar and theosophist – to study spiritual and esoteric traditions, ancient religions and philosophies. In the same year, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London. Its legendary professor, Henry Tonks, recognised Colquhoun’s brilliance, describing her as ‘an artist of rare ability with a very original and quick mind’.† In one of his many letters to her, he observed: ‘You go out to gather strawberries and come back with two strange beetles and a spider instead.’‡ Her first piece of published writing, ‘The Prose of Alchemy’, appeared in the Quest Society’s quarterly journal in 1930. As inventive with language as she was with paint, words were to become as central to Colquhoun’s thinking as making art. By the end of her life, she had penned so many poems, esoteric essays, novels, autobiographies, biographies and cosmic travelogues – all in a style that is consistently vivid, wildly original and scholarly – it might take a diligent reader a lifetime to absorb all that she had to offer.

After graduating from the Slade, Colquhoun lived in France, Italy and Greece; she regularly exhibited her paintings, many of which include biomorphic forms that merge with imaginary landscapes, self-portraits, sensual bodies and references to ancient myths and symbols. In 1936, she visited the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, a show so popular it stopped the traffic on Piccadilly. Enthralled, she witnessed Salvador Dali´ – in a diving suit, holding a billiard cue and two wolfhounds on a lead – attempt to give a lecture on ‘Some Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms’. Although his performance was incomplete – he began to suffocate and was saved by an artist with a wrench – Colquhoun was converted: Surrealism’s questioning of reality chimed with her own and, under its influence, she employed a variety of techniques, such as automatic writing and free association, in order to access her subconscious. She briefly joined the British Surrealists and, despite comparing horoscopes with the movement’s founder, André Breton, and being photographed by Man Ray with a sheaf of wheat as Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, in a matter of months she was expelled when she refused to give up her membership of occult societies. Over the following decades, alongside drawing and painting, she carved her own path as a mystical Christian, a practitioner of hermeticism and a student of Eastern and Western religions, Druidry, goddess worship, freemasonry, theosophy and the Kabbalah; she also designed an abstract tarot pack. Colquhoun reflected on sexuality and gender in the human, natural and celestial realms in her unpublished story Lesbian Shore; her 1943 essay The Water-stone of the Wise; and a series of erotic paintings, drawings and poems titled ‘Diagrams of Love’. While she believed in the existence of the ‘divine feminine’, she held that at some time in the distant past masculine and feminine energies...