Moina Mathers, the artist and occultist whose husband MacGregor Mathers was the subject of a biography by Colquhoun, summarised the view of woman as a spiritually pure channel of love connected intuitively to nature:
Women is the magician born of nature by reason of
her great natural sensibility, and of her instinctive
sympathy with such subtle energies as these
intelligent inhabitants of the air, the earth, fire and
water. (1)
This idea is alive today and has gained widespread currency. It has become the basis of so called Goddess spirituality, an inspirational metaphor for feminists, neo-pagans and natural healers. The Goddess is the bond between animal fertility and plant fruitfulness. She regulates the seasons and the courses of the planets. She is the mistress of life and death, representing a unifying, cosmic, nurturing whole. She is to be found within the landscape, the very ground beneath our feet, a numinous figure, infused with the earth itself.
It is, of course, a common conceit that the hills and valleys of the natural landscape mirror the mounds and hollows of the female body. Colquhoun’s most literal interpretation of body/landscape fusion is found in the ink drawing Interior Landscape (1947) in which sweeping curves are strongly suggestive of the contours of both the landscape and of buttocks and genitalia. Within this feminised landscape Colquhoun has placed objects that traditionally symbolise the female. These include pitchers, symbols of oral nourishment which form the breasts but can also be read as eyes, and a well, a symbol of the vagina which can also be read as a mouth.
Stalactite (1962) contains both male and female genital forms from the natural world. Because of their vulva-like entrances into mother earth, and the link that they make between the surface and the womb-like underworld, caves occupy a special place in myth and legend. Here, the viewer is situated in the deep recesses of a cave and looks out, along the passageway, past the phallic stalactite, over the mysterious rockpools to the sea and clitoris-shaped island beyond.
Body/landscape imagery plays a central role in the novel Goose of Hermogenes. (2) The female narrator, in attempting to capture her lover, does so by uniting with nature:
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 from the left flows out till it reaches the sea goes
on flowing pours inexhaustible through the inexhaustible
sea without chafe or pause till it surrounds the island
a line veining marble a red line in the green sea taut
from my arm making a long arm to his home circling
the island 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)
Later, searching for the statue-woman, the narrator finds her residing “in the land’s own long memory”
Her navel is a pool of water lilies; from her armpit
evening-primroses sprout…From her left side juts one
of her ribs, a headed stone; on the front is sketched a
cross, on the back an indecipherable poem in ogham is
inscribed. (p. 77)
The sexualised landscape of the Santa Warna series is referred to elsewhere in these notes.
Notes
1. Quoted by Davis, P.G. Goddess Unmasked. The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality. Spence Publishing Co, Dallas, 1998. p.250.
2. Colquhoun, I. Goose of Hermogenes. Peter Owen, London, 1961.
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