Goose of Hermogenes
The novel was not published until 1961 although it had been written much earlier: extracts appeared in print as early as 1939. (1) It is narrated in the first person and set on an unnamed island in a timeless present. On the surface, it is about the heroine’s relationship with her uncle who lives in his island retreat and engages in esoteric experimentation, the ultimate aim of which is to conquer death. He attempts to acquire ancient jewels in her possession in the hope that they 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 Gothic novel and the roman noir. Starting with a journey across water, through wondrous landscapes and exotic vegetation, the mood is set by erotically charged language. The heroine undergoes trials involving separation and purification. She discovers the transforming power of sexual ecstasy. Through imprisonment and psychic probing, she learns about possession, both physical and spiritual. Her original disorientated confusion soon deepens into isolation, fear and helplessness. Eventually she returns to her point of departure, to the house where her parents had separated, and achieves reconciliation with her father, now dead.
Alchemy
Alchemy forms the structure of the book and informs much of the imagery. The title is a little used name for the philosopher’s stone, the object of the alchemist’s search. The epigraph is a quotation from a lengthy and poetical description of Mercury, ‘the true Key’ of the alchemist’s art. (2) To emphasis the point, Colquhoun named each of her twelve chapters after a step leading to the accomplishment of the Great Work. (3) The heroine’s trials are clearly a metaphor for the quest of the alchemists. In her physical and psychological journey, she passes through stages of change and transformation just as the alchemist’s Prima Materia are processed and refined. The events in each chapter record the heroine’s spiritual progress and can be linked with the appropriate phase of the physical process.
It would be a mistake, however, to attempt an episode-by-episode translation of the events into specific alchemical phases and to find covert meaning in every description. Colquhoun’s use of allegory, personification, metaphor and symbolism makes this a constant temptation but as she herself wrote: “One cannot understand an alchemical text by trying to translate it into everyday language…it needs some faculty analogous to poetic appreciation” (4) In full knowledge of this warning, however, some examples of Colquhoun’s use of alchemical imagery and processes will make her method clear.
In spiritual alchemy, the phase of Conjunction (Chapter 4) introduces the higher realms of existence, beyond the mundane world. In alchemical texts, the spirit of the alchemist is frequently symbolised by a bird which soars upwards, free of its earth-bound limits and returns with new-found knowledge and awareness. In the novel, Colquhoun tells the story of two lovers who discover that they have the ability to fly. In their aerial journeying they begin to experience the unity of nature and to sense that the whole cosmos is infused with life: ‘their blood, always a single stream, now pulsed back and forth along the rays of the sun, as from some magnetic heart’ (p. 45).
During the phase of Congelation (Chapter 6) heat is applied to the matter which begins to vapourise before condensing and solidifying on the walls of the alembic. Colquhoun represents this instability and change of state by contrasting the fluidity of the sea with the solidity of the land. As the relationship between the heroine and the young fisherman develops, the lovers swim, read the Bible (she selects passages from the Song of Songs), and bury each other up to the neck in the healing sands. He performs an unprecedented feat of rowing and acquires a trophy from his elder sister ‘whose name is future and present and past’ (p. 67). This is the manifest content. The latent content is the continuing purification and strengthening of the matter and the spirit, and a growing awareness of life outside time.
Just as the processes of alchemy provide the structure of the novel, they are also embedded in the décor and furnishings of the uncle’s home. He has, for example, laid out a series of fifteen chambers as three-dimensional translations of the fifteen engraving that illustrate the alchemical text The Book of Lambspring. A journey down the corridor is a journey through the alchemical process.
The Female Principle
One theme, which becomes stronger as the story develops, is specifically associated with powers that are reserved for women. In so far as the female principle comes to assume greater importance than that of the male, the theme introduces a departure from the alchemical objective of balanced wholeness, which otherwise permeates the book. It is developed by exploring the heroine’s links with nature and elemental water. She is increasing located within a mythic past in which she, as a female, is the inheritor and possessor of certain traditions and natural powers. The landscape, increasingly exotic and luxuriant, becomes the setting for the exercise of woman’s creative energies.
There are indications of the privileging of the female throughout. For example, the mother of Corolla, who represents the separated female aspect of the androgyne, is named Countess Astarte, thereby forming a link with Astarte, goddess of fertility. Later, in a compound of alchemical and Catholic imagery, the heroine appeals for help from:
… my true ancestor, the alchemist’s white woman, lunar progenitrix – it seems that some ritual is wanting. What can I do? Mother of good
counsel, help me; ark of the covenant, gate of heaven. It were not
right ever to cease lamenting. (p.54)
Similarly, when she ‘opens a vein to the sea’, encircling and capturing Innocencio with her blood, she is performing a magical ritual of bonding by blood-letting in which the sea, standing for the water of life, the universal solvent, is conjoined with her menstrual blood, a traditional source of occult powers.
The chapter Cibation, which marks the stage of feeding the crucible with fresh material in order to strengthen it, deals with the eclipse of the mother goddess: her historical loss of supremacy and her subsequent refuge in the contours of the landscape. As is the case elsewhere in the novel when Colquhoun is describing the magic of the female principle, the narrative slows and the language becomes more poetic; part lyric and part lament.(5) Images of women emerging from a drowned cathedral identify women with the sea, a realm where matters are arranged very differently to land based patriarchal society:
…here is the end of the land and a beginning of a country under the
sea… it is said that our starvation is their plenty; that in time of war
here, down there reigns the deepest peace (p. 71-72)
Ferentinou (6) reads the chapter as an extended lament for this shift of power and loss of respect for the goddess: ‘deposed by God the father, degraded, robbed from her life/creation associations and solely connected with sin and death in the Bible’ (p. 251).
In what is surely a reworking of those myths in which male warrior heroes lie under the earth awaiting the call to rescue their country from danger, Vellanserga, the pagan goddess, mother and warrior, also returns to the earth. In contrast, however, to heroes such as Charlemagne, Arthur and Drake who merely occupy the earth whilst awaiting their summons, Colquhoun’s goddess becomes the very earth and every part of her is identified with a specific landscape feature. She has become at one with nature, sleeping, and waiting for the time when her powers will one more be recognised and valued.
Other influences
In addition to alchemical and neo-platonic elements, chapter five, Putrefaction has a markedly Christian current running through it, As the chapter unfolds, traditional Catholic imagery and symbols, including the orchard of Eden, the gates of heaven, the magi and the Pièta indicate that the chapter concerns birth, life, death and the transitional states (dying in life and living in death) in between. The Christian context is underlined by the repeated refrain ‘it were not right ever to cease lamenting’ taken from an old Irish lament for the death of Jesus. Alchemically, the stage of putrefaction sees the start of the process of unification, bringing the pneuma, or spirit, into the altered material.
Colquhoun’s life-long preoccupation with transitional places and intermediate states is demonstrated in the lengthy explanation she gives of the mechanisms of haunting and how ghosts choose whom to haunt among the living. It relies heavily on Plato’s account of how the fractured halves of the divided androgyne each seek reunification with its soul mate. When the heroine later realizes that her sisters are working in a brothel and their clients are ghosts, the mundane question of how the phantoms pay for their pleasures arises. Perhaps, she muses, the madame has made a pact with the spirits and, in return for the girls’ favours, she gains free passage into hidden regions.
Ritual is never far away. It emerges, for example, in the voodoo episode (p. 58-9) but is most vividly seen in the chapter Exaltation when the heroine, in a state of sexual tension is magically transported into a garden where, naked and embracing a herm surmounted with the head of a faun, she is lashed into a state of 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. (7)
Autobiography
Fantasy generally has embedded within it remnants of the authors’ experiences with real people in the real world. 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 experience of psychic invasion. (8) The episode with the young fisherman may also derive from Colquhoun’s own experience. Although the location and identity of the island are not formally revealed, there are hints that it is Corsica. Colquhoun visited Corsica in 1936 and 1938, and is known to have had an affair with a local fisherman.
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. 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, caught 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. At the conclusion of the novel and once again wearing her opulent jewels, she passes through luxuriant vegetation, where warm fountains fertilize the volcanic soil and sees, in the East, mountain tops ‘touched by the first aural glow’ – a Golden Dawn, indeed!
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. Echoes of Voodoo. Jazz Forum. 1: 21, is a short passage that appears on pp. 58-59 in the published novel. An extract (pp 71-77) in the published novel, was pulished in The Glass, 1951, No.7, unpaginated. 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. A usually reliable commentator, Michel Remy, makes a rather different error. In his entry on Colquhoun in the Dictionary of National Biography he incorrectly identifies the extracts published in 1943 as being from The Living Stones and The Crying of the Wind.
2. Colquhoun’s memory has let her down. The source of the quotation is The Metamorphosis of Metals, not A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby, as she states. Both works are by Eirenaeus Philalethes, the pseudonym of Thomas Vaughn, a Seventeenth Century alchemist.
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 used as her model The Twelve Keys by Basil Valentine (1599) in which he described twelve stages. The names of the stages in the chapter headings probably derives from George Ripley’s The Compound of Alchymy (1591) as they do not appear in Valentine’s work.
4. Colquhoun, I. 1975. The Sword of Wisdom. MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. London: Spearman. p.279
5. It also becomes difficult to comprehend. The episode in the ‘sea Valhalla’ is particularly obscure. Colquhoun appears to be describing decaying wooden figure heads of the sort that used to adorn the prow of sailing ships. The image of a woman leading a ship crewed by male mariners through elemental water must have been a potent one for her; figure heads are the subject of a short text (Colquhoun, 1979. Mr Test and the Strawberry Blondes. Southwest Review, No. 6: 68. ) whilst, in another, unpublished, work, each contestant in a beauty contest is tied half-naked to the prow of a boat before judging can take place (TGA 929/2/1/20/4, p. 28).
6. Ferentinou, V. 2007. Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery. PhD thesis. University of Essex.
7. 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.
8. The passage occurs on page 27 in the novel. See The Sword of Wisdom, p. 23 for details.
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