Spiritual entities may exist independently of physical form, consisting of energy, or may have different forms in different circumstances. In hermetic writings electricity is often regarded as a divine force. It is the instrument of God, introducing the animus mundi into matter at the very outset of creation. It is the ‘electrical fire’ which spreads out over chaos as a life giving principle.
Occultists have always speculated whether it could be harnessed. Could it be used to enhance the spiritual development of individuals, to link people who are separated by physical space and to communicate with spirits separated by astral planes?(1) Works such as The Serpent Power (c.1936) and Second Adam (nd) refer to these traditions.
Colquhoun was particularly interested in the electrical and magnetic forces present in the earth herself. In her writings she refers to the belief that lines of magnetic current girdle the earth, emerging at nodal points which the ancients were, in some way, able to identify and construct their ceremonial sites upon them. She placed great importance on such energy streams and the places where they might be detected. Further, at places where an earth-current meets a sea-current ‘a whirlpool develops which stimulates health and visionary capacity.’ (2)
In 1979 she wrote of the chthonic power centres that periodically erupt as geysers of energy. (3) Claiming that power centres are frequently associated with caves, underground streams and holy wells, she speculated that, just as there are centres where power seems to rise from subterranean sources, there are centres situated above the ground whose power showered down. She used Kenneth Grant’s phrase Fountains out of Hecate to describe these sources and claimed that “the earth is a being and that certain places on its surface and leading to its interior are conducive to different kinds of esoteric perception. These places are the mundane chakras of the earth itself.” (4) The holy well that appears in the Santa Warna series is clearly one such place.
Force fields are clearly evident in a number of paintings of megalithic sites that date from the early 1940s. The most complex of these is Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), in which energy wells up from a subterranean source and where the glowing stones are joined by an encircling force field. A similar work is The Sunset Birth (c.1942). The title of this work, in which the glowing stones are joined by curving lines of force, refers to the life-giving force commemorated in local Cornish folklore.
Notes
1. See, for example, Goodrick-Clarke, N. The Esoteric Uses of Electricity. Aries 2004 4, 69-90.
2. Colquhoun, I. The Living Stones: Cornwall. Peter Owen, London, 1957. See p.161.
3. Colquhoun, I. Pilgrimage. Sangreal, 1979, Vol 2, No.1
pp. 29-31.
4. Colquhoun, I. Unpublished manuscript.
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