SECOND ADAM, c.1942
Watercolour and pencil. 17¾ x 12½in. (45.7 x 32.4cm.)
Titled on the reverse
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
Tate Gallery Archive TGA 929/4/17/8.
Literature
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. b/w, pl. 55.
Surrounded by an aura of radiant fiery energy, this luminous being stands in an attitude of prayer. He is adopting the vrksasana posture, a classic one-legged yoga posture sometimes known as ‘the Tree’, with hands clasped in prayer above his head. Curling wires, like electrodes, emanate from the aether to the nostrils, heart, and testicles. The abdomen and chest cavities are transparent, revealing the internal organs. The viscera have the form of a retort and flask.
The history and numbering of the Adams in Biblical and occult teaching is confusing. Jesus is sometimes referred to in scriptures as the Second Adam. The First Adam, the Adam of the book of Genesis, and the Second Adam are the only two men created without sin. The First Adam was Earthly; the Second Adam was Heavenly. According to another reading, by Philo of Alexandria, the first Adam was an entirely spiritual being, whose non-corporeal existence was both male and female. The second Adam, who has a physical body, is the one from whose rib the female was constructed.
Alternatively, in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky refers to four distinct Adams, the fourth of which, the Fallen Adam, is the Adam of Genesis, the supposed forefather of the human race. The Second Adam is called the ‘protoplastic androgyne Adam’ (Blavatsky, 1988).
Colquhoun may also have been thinking of the Silesian mystic, Jacob Boehme, who ideas influenced William Blake and the Romantics. Boehme’s doctrine concerns the origin of sexual differences, and stated the belief that the First Adam – of the Garden of Eden – was an androgynous being, in whom the feminine part represented the divine. Adam fell from androgyny into gender and subsequently into sin. Christ, the Second Adam, reunited the male and the female; life can be full only when the duality of gender is transcended and male and female reunited in wholeness and completion.
In addition to these references to spiritual androgyny, other meanings can be sought. Is there a reference, perhaps, to the Manichean notion of Adam as the container of divine light? Blavatsky, too, believed in subtle ethereal energies which pervade the universe, in particular an ‘electrical vital power’ was said to be invisible and universally present. There is a clear reference to alchemical symbolism: stoked by fires from below, the viscera become an the alchemist’s athanor, a place of metamorphosis and transformation.
The body posture indicates the need for, and the relationship between, physical, sexual and spiritual balance. The maintenance of the yogic posture requires meditation, of which breath control is an important part. Control of physical processes is necessary for spiritual advancement. Reduced breathing reduces the level of oxygen in the brain with consequent effect on metabolic and electrical activity. It is known that this can create the sensation of lightening flashes.
Writing of a painting of a standing naked man that he had seen in her Bedford Park studio in the early 1940s, Derek Stanford wrote: ‘From every high point and opening of the figure radiated out in circling curves a line of circling astral force completely surrounding the man. The colouring was rainbow bright, and the effect of the picture as a whole was both extremely sensuous and ethereal.’ Was this that painting?
Reference
Blavatsky, H. The Secret Doctrine. Theosophical University Press,
Pasadena California, 1988
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Stanford, D. Inside the Forties. Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1977.