Goose of Hermogenes
The novel was published in 1961 although it had been written twenty or so years earlier. (1) It is narrated in the first person and set in a timeless present. Ostensibly, it is about the heroine’s relationship with her uncle who lives on an island retreat and engages in esoteric experimentation, the ultimate aim of which is to conquer death. He attempts to acquire ancient jewels in the heroine’s possession which may hold the key to the elixir of life. In one sense, therefore, the book falls within the tradition of magic enchanted islands that dates back to Plato’s description of Atlantis. It also belongs to the traditions of the Gothik novel and the roman noir with precursors who include Walpole and Poe. It is a dark narrative of psychological horror that explores the hidden and unseen aspects of the place where the events take place. Expressed in erotically charged language, it is about searching; about overwhelming love; hidden fears and psychic probing. It is about possession, both physical and spiritual.
In contrast with other sustained surrealist texts, there is no sense of finding the marvellous in the commonplace or the everyday, no spark of revelation that comes from an unexpected image, no lightening flash that illuminates the unexpected juxtaposition of actions or events. Instead, freed from the temporal and spatial constraints of a conventional novel, a series of dream-like episodes are played out against a background of corruption, paranoia and brooding sexual tension.
The epigraph to the book is by Eirenaeus Philalethes, a pseudonym for Thomas Vaughn, the Seventeenth Century alchemist. It is an extract from a lengthy and poetical description of Mercury, ‘the true Key’ of the alchemist’s art. (2) The novel uses the alchemical quest as its structure and the work is full of hermetic references and symbols as the heroine struggles to discover the truth behind her predicament and her uncle’s behaviour. Each chapter is named after a step leading to the accomplishment of the Great Work. (3)
The heroine, in her psychological journey, passes through stages of change and transformation just as the alchemist’s Prima Materia are processed and refined. Starting in a state of disorientated confusion, a state that emphasises the casual over the causal, this soon deepens into isolation, fear and helplessness. She is in a state of sexual tension and vulnerability. She is aware that she possesses something precious and desirable, but feels dreadfully exposed. As she wanders through her Uncle’s house she realises that many of the rooms, in their décor and content, are recreations of the engravings in the alchemical treatise The Book of Lambspring. Eventually, she finds an ancient manuscript in her Uncle’s study which tells the story of a romance between a young man and woman whose courtship proceeds as they fly through the air, arm in arm. The lovers represent the coming together of the animus and the anima, of sol and lunar, Mercury and Sulphur, Shiva and Shakti, and the beginning of the coming together of the spirit in matter. The heroine later explores a landscape of strange plants and creatures as the breakdown of opposites and boundaries continues. At the climax, in a chapter that, in its title, refers to the alchemical stage of Exaltation, she is magically transported into a garden where, naked, embracing a herm surmounted with the head of a faun, she is lashed into a state of sexual ecstasy by her Uncle. This episode, with its nudity, scourging and horned god is reminiscent of the purification ceremonies that formed part of the initiation into a Gardnerian Wicca Coven. (4) Following this, she is gradually reinstated with her family as she liberates them from their imprisonment on the island and is then reunited with her dead father. There is so sense of resolution, however, as she departs again to continue her journey.
Fantasy, ‘that vehicle of hope, healer of trauma, concealer of truth, fixer of identity, restorer of tranquillity, enemy of fear and sadness, cleanser of the soul and creator of perversion’ generally has embedded within its fabric remnants of the authors’ experiences with real people in the real world. (5) Inevitably, the reader will identify the unnamed narrator with Colquhoun herself. At least one passage – one suspects more - is autobiographical. This is the passage that describes an episode of psychic invasion. (6) One wonders, too, whether the heroine’s vulnerability on a strange island has its roots in the authors’ sense of vulnerability as a child journeying to England. Tellingly, the heroine travels to the island in a coracle, the type of craft that transported Saint Warna from Ireland to the Scilly Isles. I comment elsewhere upon Colquhoun’s identification with the saint. If the book is a mask for the authors’ own psychological quest, a projection of her own psychological predicament onto that of the narrator, we may note that at the beginning of the book we meet her in a state of incomprehension. She finds herself in an environment that is psychologically and physically unsafe. Although she is surrounded by the trappings of a rich mental life, she is emotionally adrift, requiring a sense of control over her life. There is little sense, however, at the conclusion of the novel that she is very much closer to achieving this than she was at the start.
Notes
1. Short extracts had appeared earlier as follows: ‘The Volcano’ London Bulletin, 1939, No. 17 pp. 15-16; this passage appears on pp. 64-65 in the published novel; ‘The Echoing Bruise’ London Bulletin, 1939, No. 17 pp. 17-18; this passage appears on pp. 66-68 in the published novel with the name Ildebrando changed to Innocencio; ‘The Double-Village’ London Bulletin, 1938/39, No. 7 p. 23; this passage appears on pp. 20-21 in the published novel. 'Everything Found on the Land is Found in the Sea’ first appeared in New Road 1943 pp. 196-98. It appears on p. 80-84 in the published work. It was later reprinted as ‘Sublimation’ in TRANSFORMAcTION 1971 No. 4, pp. 916-18. Chapter 4 and part of chapter 5 also appeared in Springtime Two. London, Peter Owen, 1958, pp. 36-50.
Earlier commentators have tended to assume that these extracts are independent short prose pieces, rather than extracts from the novel.
2. The source of the quotation is The Metamorphosis of Metals, not A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby as given by Colquhoun.
3. Different authors give a different numbers of steps for the achievement of the Great Work, ranging from four to as many as twenty two. For Goose of Hermogenes, Colquhoun adopted the most usual number of twelve, using as her guide The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine.
4. Gardner’s first factual publication regarding Wicca, Witchcraft Today, did not appear until 1954, a number of years after Colquhoun’s manuscript had probably been completed. However, his ideas, which leant heavily on those of Crowley, would have been current in occult circles and he claimed to have been initiated into a Coven in September 1939 – see Davis, P.G. Goddess Unmasked. The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality. Spence Publishing Co, Dallas, 1998. p.336.
5. Stoller, R.J. Perversion. The Erotic Form of Hatred. Maresfield Books, London, 1986. The quotation is from page 55.
6. The passage occurs on page 27 in the novel. See The Sword of Wisdom, p. 23 for details.
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