Some things are known through the exercise of reason. Others are known intuitively. Colquhoun’s knowledge of the sexual duality of Jesus was of the latter sort. Her insight came early in life:
If I say that at ten years old I imagined Christ as a hermaphrodite, I
shall not be believed. Yet it was so…I fused the red-hearted Jesus
with the blue-cloaked Mary and made a god with breasts. I did not
know the word El Shaddai, nor any word to express this image. I
simply made this image and worshipped it. (1)
By contrast, she used intellectual arguments when giving her views on the creation stories contained in the Book of Genesis. She argued that the true meaning of the passage “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1.27) is that of
…a hermaphrodite creator extending and reflecting himself in his
creature, Man, also hermaphrodite… male and female are co-equal
and co-existent and reflect equally the manifest aspect of the
Divine.
One of her supporting arguments for this interpretation is that the Qabalistic meaning of the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton is, respectively, Father, Mother, Son and Daughter. (2)
In a third essay, in what is certainly the most abstruse of her publications, Colquhoun struggled to decide how many openings the human body contained (whether, for example, sweat glands should be included in the count) before deciding that the male body has twelve and the female thirteen. She suggested, on this basis, that the female body is more specialised and evolved than that of the male. (3) By referring to these openings as ‘gates’, she acknowledged her indebtedness to Helene Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society.
Ever since Blavatsky had expounded her theory of root races, theosophists had argued about the evolution of sexual function. Some believed that a new human type – the Uranian – double-sexed and a perfect blend of masculine and feminine qualities as well as spiritually highly advanced, would emerge. Others argued that woman was the pinnacle of spiritual and physical evolution. For them, there was only one sex: men were simply imperfect women. (4)
Hermetically, the unity which magicians seek is not only represented by androgyny but also by the healing of the split between mind and body. In a response to a questionnaire, published in 1953, in which she affirmed her acceptance of the axiom of the Smaragdine Tablet: ‘as above, so below’, she described dualistic thinking as ‘the worst, perhaps the only, heresy’, going on to say that ‘it comes from artificially separating the body from the mind (or spirit) and dividing the body itself into two parts, one above the waist and one below, rather than looking at it as a whole.’ (5)
Elsewhere she explained this in the following terms:
The division into male and female represents ‘a split in the psyche’.
The task is to replace this unresolved duality by a genuinely
androgynous whole, the fruitful relation of man and daimon,
conjunctio. (6)
These examples, which encompass the Son of God, Biblical creation myths, duality and human evolution, demonstrate the diversity of Colquhoun’s interest in occult aspects of gender. One further aspect, her use of Siamese twins, the hermaphrodite whole as a metaphor for the realization of the alchemical Great Work, has already been noted.
Colquhoun’s exploration of male and female was not limited to her writings. It is also to be found in her artworks, in particular a large number of watercolours that date to the early 1940s. The majority of these works form a number of interconnected series. There are over 30 works of the period with Alchemical Figure; Androgyne; Diagrams of Love; Christian Marriage; Monogamy and Homunculus, either in their titles or inscriptions. Diagrams of Love is a particularly important phrase, being the title of three verse sequences as well as at least 16 art works. (7)
The paintings are mostly in ink and watercolour. They possess a dazzling iridescence and luminosity. Some have an automatic element but the main image is almost invariably deliberately and precisely drawn. Qabalistic and Golden Dawn associations are common. Taken together they form a serious and systematic exploration of love and sexuality, physical and spiritual, Christian and pantheistic. Only a few were exhibited in her lifetime: she may, therefore, have regarded them primarily as personal and exploratory, perhaps even devotional, rather than public and commercial.
Notes
1. Undated typescript TGA 929/2/1/68/1. El Shaddai is generally translated as ‘the god with breasts’. If Adam, the first man, was androgynous, so too must have been the God who created him.
2. Undated typescript TGA 929/2/1/67/1.
3. Colquhoun, I. ‘The Openings of the Body,’ Quest, no. 4, December,
1970, pp. 26-27. First offered for publication c.1951: see
TGA 929/1/162
4. Dixon, J. Divine Feminine. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
2001. See in particular chapter 6. See also Owen, A. The Place of
Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.
5. Colquhoun, I. 1953 The Glass. No.9. Unpaginated.
6. Colquhoun, I. 1953. 'The Night Side of Nature' The Glass No.8.
Unpaginated.
7. Typescripts for the unpublished sequences are at TGA 929/2/2/6/1 and
TGA 929/2/2/6/2. The published sequence can be found at:
Colquhoun, I. 1953. The Glass No.8. Unpaginated.
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