Marriage, traditionally, embodies a lasting and loving relationship between man and woman, sanctified by God. It implies both carnal and spiritual dimensions. In Gnostic texts the union of man and wife can is the actualization of divine love.
Within the Christian tradition, nuptial imagery is often used to describe the union of the soul with God. Similarly, the description of Christ as a bridegroom can refer to both the ‘marriage’ of Christ and the soul and the marriage of Christ with humanity in a mystical redemptive union. The joining together of the faithful with God and Christ is the most perfect of all marriages, against which human marriages are a poor reflection. In a lecture, The Connection between Mysticicm and Blasphemy, delivered to the Search Society in the early 1930s, Colquhoun pointed out that many saints have claimed spiritual union with God and that one, St Thérèse of Lisceux even invited the other nuns in her convent to attend her spiritual wedding with Christ. (1)
Allegorical relationships that culminate in a wedding are common in hermetic and spiritual writings. In the literature of alchemy the most famous is that of Christian Rosencreutz whose Chymical Wedding took the form of a journey culminating in the witness of a marriage and the creation of an alchemical bird, the Bird of Hermes. Alchemically speaking, the Bird of Hermes is the fruit of a chemical marriage between mercury (the female, lunar principle) and sulphur, (the male, solar principle). Its achievement signifies conjunctio, the unity that surmounts difference. Similarly, in the world of the Qabalists, emanations from the divine consciousness are gendered as either masculine or feminine and communication between the two constitutes a sacred marriage.
The Diagrams of Love poetic sequences are addressed to a specific, if unnamed, lover. They are hymns to the physical and spiritual aspects of desire and unity:
In phantasmagoric dark
Before sleep instead of folding
Into myself as I was taught to do
I plunge in another being
And touched by tendrils of forest
Or foam of ocean’s tongue
At one with you then
I sink into the abyss
The language is often that of alchemy. In the following stanza, the references are to the masculine world of fire and wand, and the female world of water and container:
Every voyage to the realm of fire
Adds a flame to the wand
To the worlds of water each journey
A drop to the cup
All the paintings in the Christian Marriage series, as well as many of the Diagrams of Love and the Alchemical Figures contain the ‘lips’ motif. In Diagrams of Love (c.1940) vertical lips extend, like an emission, through the midline of the torso from the tip of the erect penis to the head. In three watercolours, each titled Christian Marriage, (1942), pairs of lips are crossed at right angles. In Homunculus I and Homunculus II (both 1940), the motif is also associated with the symbolism of the cardinal points, whilst the vertical lips contain the idea of the female vagina. Many of the openings of the body – eyes, lips, mouth, nipples, genital and anal orifices are also indicated.
The ‘lips’ motif often occurs in conjunction with the dotted circle symbol. By the time these works were executed, thanks to her contacts with her cousin Edward Garstin, Colquhoun was aware of the writings of the Austrian alchemist Joseph Kirchweger, thinking highly of his book Aurea Catena Homeri (1722), later writing an article about its sexual and colour symbolism. In his book, Kirchweger described the cycle of nature as an eternal flow and return of the universal spirit, signified by the dot within the circle. This reaches the earth as dew or rain where it condenses into the male, nitre, signified by a vertical line, and the female, salt, signified by a horizontal line. Together they produce an androgynous substance, signified by crossed lines within the circle. In time, all natural things decompose, resolve into their component parts, and return to the universal spirit.
Other works also explore the relationship between male and female. In Alchemical Figure, Androgyne (1941) two overlapping torsos, one red, one blue, the latter clearly female, are in the process of merging to produce a bi-coloured figure. In some works, the generative role of the male is directly acknowledged. The phallus and its emissions feature explicitly in The Bird or the Egg (1940, which has a rejected title In Search of the Androgyne inscribed on the reverse); Diagrams of Love (1940); The Tree of Veins I (1941) and The Tree of Veins II (1941). In Homunculus I and Homunculus II (both 1940), the titles refer to the magical entity traditionally manufactured from the magician’s semen. The red and blue overlapping triangles at the heart of the figures indicate masculine and feminine in the process of conjunction.
Notes
1. Manuscript at TGA 929/2/3/2. The Search Society was started by
Edward Garstin in 1930 after the closure of G.R.S. Mead’s Quest
Society and continued until 1934. See Colquhoun, I. 1979. Memoir of
E.J.L. Garstin. Hermetic Journal, No. 6: 11.
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