In its capacity as a life-giving and life-sustaining fluid, blood features prominently in religious and mystical writings. For Christians, a healing flow of blood springs from the heart of the Son of God; for early Islamic writers, the soul resides in a few drops of blood at the centre of the heart; for the mystic Böhme, blood is the tincture of eternity.
A Y-shaped form with a central heart (e.g. King and Centre 1941), sometimes with eyes at the terminals (e.g. The Circulation of the Blood 1941) and sometimes in association with seed corn imagery (e.g. Heart of Corn c. 1941) can suggest the redemption that flows from Christ’s wounds on the cross but can also suggest the life force that exists throughout nature. Thoughts turn to the goddess of fertility who presides over generation and growth. She is familiar in many guises, appearing variously as Isis, Astarte, corn maiden and as Demeter in the Elusian mysteries. She is one of the personifications of Malkuth, the tenth Sephiroth, who Colquhoun had previously painted in 1934 in Design for a Painting on Silk.
The image of the heart dripping blood also occurs in Two Pierced Hearts (c. 1938) and the chalk sculpture Heart (1938). Both these works suggest the vulnerability as well as the passion of emotional attachment. Beau Gosse (1939) suggests blood letting ritual, such as the one described in Goose of Hermogenes, to secure the lover’s devotion:
I open my veins to the east I open the veins of my arm with the cut
of a sliver of silicon. Blood pours out … a ribbon of stain in the foam
unmixing like a rusty chain to bind him in binding his home so he never
can go. (p. 68)
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