THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF ALTHEA GYLES

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“A strange red-haired girl . . .”

Above: The only known photo of Althea Gyles, portrait of Aleister Crowley, and a caricature of W. B. Yeats

More than prepared to turn her back on her wealthy Irish family and endure – perhaps even enjoy – poverty and hardship for her art, Althea Gyles (1868-1949) was a talented artist, designer and poet who clearly made an impression on more than a few of the notorious magician-poets of her day . . .

Margaret Althea Gyles, to give her full name, did not start out as a starving bohemian. She was born in her family home, Kilmurry, County Waterford, in 1868 to the daughter of Edward Grey, Bishop of Hereford. According to the poet W. B. Yeats, her father was “mad, controlling”, and apparently the family were considered so haughty by their neighbors that they sarcastically referred to them as “The Royal Family.” Almost inevitably, Althea ran away from home to Dublin, after quarreling with her father, to study Art — barely managing to support herself by selling a watch and writing some stories for a newspaper.

Above: bookplate drawn by Althea Gyles c.1895 for Lady Colin Campbell (aka Bertrude Elizabeth Blood), a member of The Golden Dawn.

Yeats first met her living in a Theosophical commune in Dublin, alongside critic, poet, and Irish Nationalist George William Russell, who also wrote of his mystical experiences under the pen-name ‘Æ’ (short for ‘Aeon’.) The landlord, E. J. Dick, had come across Althea “starving somewhere in an unfurnished or half-furnished room” apparently living for many weeks “upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a penny a day.” Yeats described Gyles as “a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting and poetry, conceived as abstract images . . . and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic fanaticism.” 

After falling out with Dick and his wife, and writing a short novel which remained unpublished, The Woman Without A Soul (the plot of which concerned a black magician), Gyles moved to London in 1892 to continue her Fine Art studies, this time at the Slade. She befriended Oscar Wilde, and resumed her association with Yeats — later designing covers for volumes of his poetry, such as The Secret Rose (1897), inspired by Cabalistic iconography and his interest in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats heaped praise upon her, saying:

“Miss ALTHEA GYLES may come to be one of the most important of the little group of Irish poets who seek to express indirectly through myths and symbols, or directly in little lyrics full of prayers and lamentations, the desire of the soul for spiritual beauty and happiness.”

He likewise complimented “the beautiful lithe figures of her art half mortal traged, half immortal ecstasy” in an essay for The Dome magazine.

Inevitably, through the Golden Dawn and London Literary Circles, Gyles came into contact with the The Great Beast, with whom she had a short-lived affair (one commentator describing her as “the woman who dumped Aleister Crowley.”) Crowley caricatured her as ‘Hypatia Gay’ in his short story ‘At the Fork of the Roads’ (with her “steely virginal eyes”) in which he paints himself very much as the noble esoteric hero, opposing the ‘lank dishevelled demonologist’ Yeats (= ‘Will Bute’) over the very soul of the poor misled girl.

In 1899, Gyles illustrated Wilde’s The Harlot’s House, which was published by Leonard Smithers, a London publisher best known for his association with the Decadent movement, and later designed the covers for Ernest Dowson’s Decorations. Her subsequent relationship with Smithers, a bad-tempered alcoholic and drug-addict whom many considered as little better than a pornographer, alienated her from most of her friends, including the previously supportive Yeats. Only a year later, the poet Arthur Symons found her living in an empty room at 15 Granby Place, Hampstead Road, “without a thing in the place, except five books (one a presentation copy from Oscar Wilde) and one or two fantastic gold ornaments which she used to wear; chloral by her side, and the bed strewn with manuscripts.” In a bid to help her, he tried to arranged for Duckworth to publish a collection her poems, but they said they would do so only if she removed her dedication to “the beautiful memory of Oscar Wilde” (this was after the Trial and Scandal, of course.) Gyles refused, and this loyalty to a dead friend – “the kindest man she ever met” — meant the book was never published.

Above: illustration for The Harlot’s House, by Oscar Wilde.

Symons described Smithers as “a drunken brute whom no one could stand” who “left her as soon as he had alienated her other friends.” The breakdown of her relationship with Smithers led to a collapse in her health, from which Gyles never completely recovered. Although she continued to write and paint, taking an interest in casting horoscopes, Buddhism, anti-vivisection, and vegetarianism, she was beset with ill health and mostly drifted, moving from one cheap rented room to another. Around 1901 she was said to have suffered a breakdown, and refused to draw again. For a while she was supported by friends like the journalist and critic Clifford Bax — friend to Austin Osman Spare, with whom he collaborated on the artistic & literary magazine The Golden Hind  — but in the end Bax grew increasingly frustrated with Gyles, considering her little better than a parasite.  Her friend, Dublin-born artist & collector Cecil French, described Gyles as “a noble difficult being who invariably became the despair of those who had helped her.”

In later years a publisher encouraged Gyles to write her memoirs of the 1890s, as a result she wrote a novel, Pilgrimage, but it was rejected. She continued to publish verse occasionally in a variety of journals, and there was talk of another collection of her work, but it remained in transcript due to her inability to proof it, claiming “the effort would kill her” — but nobody else was allowed to correct it either. By the 1930s, Gyles was living in awful conditions with a big mongrel dog in a basement in Brixton, apparently, and the last address recorded for her was 19 Tredown Road, Lewisham — described as a bare room, but for a chaise longue on which she slept, a few ‘antiques’ of doubtful value, and her manuscripts.

Althea Gyles died in a nursing home in Kent on the 23rd of January, 1949.

Above: the only known photo of Althea Gyles, with her friend Countess Constance Markievicz, née Gore-Booth (Irish Nationalist, Sinn Féin politician, and Suffragette.)

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WORMWOOD STAR : MARJORIE CAMERON

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Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron Parsons Kimmel

(23rd April, 1922 – 24th June, 1995)

better known simply as

‘Cameron’

‘We are Stars and herald alien laws outside the Solar Wheel invading natural systems of the Earth.’

‘Mockery is the punishment of of the Gods. What fiendish laughter.’

‘Mine eyes are terrible and strange but thou knowest me.’

‘We dance a geometry of wizardry and wind the threads about our prey.’

‘We traveled Stellar webs to darker Worlds within the Lunar mirrors of Suicide.’

‘Death has been thy lover. Is there else to fear?’

‘Up the swirling scarf of smoke rise our invocations.’

‘In this hour I decide between nothingness and creation.’

‘And the hag with lizard eyes embraces shadows . . .’

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Prior to the recent Cameron: Songs For The Witch Woman exhibition at MOCA Pacific Design Center (October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015), the largest survey of Marjorie Cameron’s artwork was The Pearl of Reprisal, a retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1989. The exhibition spanned thirty years, from the notorious Untitled “Peyote Vision” of 1955 to later pen-and-ink drawings that lent insight to the artist’s psychic state at the time.

Before the opening reception, Hedy Sontag introduced a program titled An Evening With Cameron: The Pearl of Reprisal. Sontag screened two films that feature Cameron: Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Curtis Harrington’s lyrical documentary The Wormwood Star (1955). After the screening, Cameron emerged barefoot to give a dramatic reading of her poetry by candlelight.

This rare footage, courtesy of the Cameron Parsons Foundation, has been made available by MOCA on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKHALUlObgQ

Curtis Harrington’s The Wormwood Star (from which all the quotations above were drawn) can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlmQxOw__yk 

Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron by Spencer Kansa is still available in a revised & enlarged edition from Mandrake of Oxford: http://mandrake.uk.net/wormwood-star/

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“I met a dreamer from the land of Albion . . .”

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I met a dreamer from the land of Albion and this was what he told me:

“I saw a shaven-headed, robed priest standing over a shallow, wide bowl of some lustrous beaten metal, spread low in front of him, filled with water, glinting by torchlight. He spread his hands, making fulsome incantations as he passed them back-and-forth across the brazen vessel – his voice likewise, as the Words of Power ascended and descended the scale from sonorous to guttural and back again. Somehow, with an almost imperceptible turn of the wrist he managed to prick the thumb of his left hand and, as he did so, squeezed out thick, heavy drops of dark blood that he scattered across the surface of the water. At the same time – and with his other hand, the right – he drizzled a thin stream of green-golden oil¹ from a delicate alabaster vessel that he had produced from deep within the folds of his robe . . .

“The two fluids overlap, intersect and collide as they trace strange diagrams across the surface of the water, and then sink slowly below. In his attempts to read them, he pictures to himself with some other sense-that-is-not-sight the veins and arteries coursing through the body of The Great Dragon. In doing so, he knows that he has scried the Life Lines of the Land, and also how they must be marked and honoured. The stones will be laid in such formation as to honour the waxing and waning of the Great Moon Mother – marker of the mysteries of woman’s cycles of fertility, also echoing the horns of the cattle² sacred to Her – as we do when we raise our arms in salute of these Powers . . .”

Then the Dream was gone, buried with the Rising of the Sun.

Footnotes:

1. At this time, olive oil would have been presumably a rare and precious commodity – having to come all the way from the Mediterranean – thereby making its sacrifice all the more valuable (along with the priest’s own blood) in the hope of receiving the gift of Vision by exchange.
2. A species of wild cattle called aurochs roamed Britain more than 7,500 years ago. Fully grown, they stood 6ft at the shoulder and became extinct in the UK around 4,000 years ago.

7^th September 2015 – Breaking News:

“Stone monoliths found buried near Stonehenge could have been part of the largest Neolithic monument built in Britain, archaeologists believe.

“The 4,500-year-old stones, some measuring 15ft (4.5m) in length, were discovered under 3ft of earth at Durrington Walls ‘superhenge’.

“The monument was on ‘an extraordinary scale’ and unique, researchers said.”

Curiously, whereas most of the well-known monolithic sites (such as Avebury, Callanish, and Stonehenge) are clearly arranged in circles, it would appear that, before being deliberately toppled and buried, the stones at this newly-discovered site were arranged in a crescent . . .

For the full story, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-34156673

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MAYA DEREN (29th April, 1917 – 13th October, 1961)

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“I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.”

– Maya Deren (29th April, 1917 – 13th October, 1961)

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“I am not greedy. I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days. I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will, perhaps, recall an image, even only the aura of my films.”

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Maya Deren was in born 29th of April, 1917, as Eleanora Derenkowskaia, in Kiev, Ukraine. Her family were Jewish, and in 1922, they fled the country because of anti-Semitic pogroms, settling in Syracuse, New York, where the family surname was typically shortened to “Deren” but at least her father was able to pursue his work as a psychiatrist.

After earning a Master’s Degree in English, and having married the Czech photographer and film-maker Alexander Hammid – himself better known as ‘Sasha’ – under his influence and inspiration, Deren began to make the transition from would-be poet to film-maker. She also felt that another change was in order, as Hammid would later explain:

“Maya wasn’t always Maya. She used to be called Eleanora. Her mother used to call her Elinka, in Russian.  She confided in me that she was unhappy about her name, and she asked me once to find a name for her. So I just went to the library and looked through a lot of books, mainly books on mythology. I came across the name ‘Maya’ in different connections, for instance with water – but Maya also was the name of the Mother of Buddha. In Hinduism, Maya was the name of the goddess who wove the veil over our eyes – a veil of illusion that prevents us from seeing spiritual reality behind it . . .”

Maya with Sasha and cat

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Maya became personal assistant to Katherine Dunham, an African-American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist, whose fieldwork was largely concerned with Afro-Caribbean culture. Deren traveled with Dunham’s dance troupe as they toured around segregated America, and the racism she witnessed during those trips left a deep impression on her. It was during this time that she was also introduced to the interwoven relationships between dance, ritual, iconography, and metaphysical transcendence in Haitian culture, which would become such a major influence in her later life and work.

Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe

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Speaking of the transition from poet to film-maker, Deren wrote in 1953:

“It was like finally finding a glove that fits. When I was writing poetry, I had, constantly, to transcribe my essentially visual image . . . into verbal form. In motion pictures, I no longer had to translate . . . and I could move directly from my imagination into film.”

Dance also had always been an integral part of Deren’s sensibility, long before she came to film.

“My reason for creating [films] is almost as if I would dance, except this is a much more marvellous dance. It’s because in film, I can make the world dance!”

Speaking of dancers, a close friend and collaborator was the African-American actress Rita Christiani, who as well as appearing in such Hollywood fodder as Road to Morocco alongside Bob Hope & Bing Crosby, and the 1943 shlock-horror I Walked With A Zombie, featured in Deren’s Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946), along with dancer Frank Westbrook and a somewhat desultory Anaïs Nin.

Rita Christiani in Ritual in Transfigured Time, with Frank Westbrook in the background

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Years later, interviewed about her friendship with Deren, Christiani remarked:

“I came from Trinidad at five years of age, and later on I found out that Maya had come from her country at five years of age, and on a boat also – so that was a commonality that might not have been expressed, but was felt by some psychic mean between the two of us . . . Because coming here, at that young age, unless you’ve experienced it you don’t know what it is: everything is new to you, and everything is so frightening to you – the people, the places, the way people talk, the way they act – and then you had to speak English, to become an American, and that was the goal: that you become American, you know?”

Another expat who had made America into her adopted home was the born-to-Cuban parents French bohemian Anaïs Nin, an erotic adventuress who had poured out her encounters, fantasies, and observations in short stories, novels, and essays – but it was the many volumes of journals [kept over 60 years, and at least 15 volumes published within her lifetime] in which she gave detailed accounts of her friendships and often intimate relations with writers such as Antonin Artaud, Lawrence Durrell, Henry (and June) Miller, and Gore Vidal, as well as her therapist, Otto Rank, and very probably her own estranged father – that had really made her into the notorious celebrity she had always wanted to be.

In the summer of 1944, when she and her friends were taking a walk on the beach of Amagansett, New York, Anaïs Nin encountered a strange scene. A woman was lying on the shore, letting herself be pummeled by the waves while two people filmed it. Later, Nin found out the woman was Maya Deren, already making a name for herself as an avant-garde filmmaker, who was filming the opening scene of At Land (1945). Nin was naturally attracted to Deren, and eventually got so involved with her films that Deren wrote a part specifically for her in Rituals in Transfigured Time (1946).

Typically, Nin – who can be seen positively pouting in her one-or-two brief appearances in the finished film (not perhaps realising, as with her comparable misadventures with Kenneth Anger and Marjorie Cameron, that her time had simply been and gone) – would characteristically attempt to have the last word, as usual, grumbling in one of her indeterminable diaries for May 1946:

“We gave (Deren) our time, our energy, and even our money . . . We believed in her as a filmmaker, we had faith in her, but we began to feel that she was not human . . . We were influenced, dominated by her, and did not know how to free ourselves.”

Anaïs Nin, as she appears in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

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One wonders if Nin had ever been aware of this unpublished poem that Maya wrote before the filming even began:

For Anaïs Before the Glass

The mirror, like a cannibal, consumed, carnivorous, blood-silvered, all the life fed it.

You too have known this merciless transfusion along the arm by which we each have held it.

In the illusion was pursued the vision through the reflection to the revelation.

The miracle has come to pass.

Your pale face, Anaïs, before the glass at last is not returned to you reversed.

This is no longer mirrors, but an open wound through which we face each other framed in blood.

(By Maya Deren, August 19, 1945)

“Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.”

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The Point of Departure:

“Myth is the twilight speech of an old man to a boy. All the old men begin at the beginning. Their recitals always speak first of the origin of life . . .”

Her anthropological field-work broke all the rules, but with her film and book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, she left behind an important document of direct encounter with the Voodoo mysteries:

“All ceremonials begin with the salute to the guardian of the Crossroads, the Loa principle of Crossing, of Communications with the Divine World . . . but that World of Les Invisibles is also the cosmic cemetery of the souls of all the Dead.”

She was actually welcomed, invited in, so to speak, when she went to Haiti to make her film – and was permitted to become an authentic initiate, because the Voodoo Community recognised her sincerity – and, more to the point, they felt she had been called by the loa.

Although it may not have been Babalon in so many words, in her experience of possession by the loa Erzulie, Deren surely had a direct and empowering experience of the Female Divine:

“What I do in my films is very – oh, I think very distinctively – I think they are the films of a woman, and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great strength of immediacy, they are a ‘Now’ creature, and a woman has strength to wait – because she’s had to wait: she has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of Becomingness – and she sees everything in terms of it Being in the stage of Becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will Become . . .”

The lovely though fierce Maya Deren was not only capable of being a personification of Erzulie, but was also told by her mambo that she had a warrior spirit in her as well. Once, she was invited to administer Voodoo Rites and lay on a Reception for the Wedding of a Haitian dancer, but as the day progressed Deren became increasingly angry that the loa were not being properly honoured. Jane Brakhage Wodening – at the time the wife of Deren’s fellow experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage – describes what happened:

“And so, when all the people were gathered at the Recepetion, Maya Deren became possessed by the voodoo god Papa Loco. She went into the kitchen and she started to roar and she picked up the refrigerator that weighed several hundred pounds and she threw it across the kitchen.”

Luckily, some members of the Wedding party who understood voodoo carried Maya upstairs to her room and stayed with her, where she sat rolling her head from side to side and roaring:

“She asked for rum to be brought and set aflame . . .

“Stan went up to Maya’s room and she was sitting up in her bed and rolling her head and roaring. The other people there, Haitians, were caring for her and not afraid because they knew it was Papa Loco. And the rum was burning with blue flames in a bowl beside the bed and Maya put her hands into the bowl of blue flames and flung them all over Stan . . . and blessed him in the name of Papa Loco.”

Arguably, this tremendous drive helped her to get her work done – often against the odds – but undoubtedly contributed to her early burn-out.

Maya Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain haemorrhage.

According to Mark Alice Durant, writing in a special feature for the film & photography magazine, Aperture, No. 195, in Summer 2009, Deren might not have adjusted very well to the changing times of newly-emerging underground film that she herself had unwittingly helped to create:

“As the 1950s wore on, the taste for Deren’s careful, literary, Old World aesthetic was overshadowed by less formal approaches to experimental film, such as the irreverent Pull My Daisy (1959) by Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Jack Kerouac. Such films were anathema to Deren’s work. In both words and pictures, she did not indulge in casual spontaneity; it is as if, to borrow her phrase, she choreographed her life for camera.”

Luckily, we at least have the legacy she left behind of films, field recordings, and her marvellous book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.

The Voodoo Gods – Paladin paperback edition (1975, U.K.) of Deren’s The Divine Horsemen

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THE LEGACY OF MAYA DEREN :

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – with Alexander Hammid.

At Land (1944) – with Hella Heyman, Parker Tyler, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Bateson, John Cage, Alvin Lustig, and Alexander Hammid.

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) – with Talley Beatty.

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – with Rita Christiani, Frank Westbrook, Hell, and Gore Vidal.

Meditation on Violence (1948) – with Chao-Li Chi, music by Teijo Itō.

The Very Eye of Night (1958) – in collaboration with Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, music by Teijo Itō.

Stills from various films by Maya Deren

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Among the archives of the New York Film-Maker’s Co-Op, lovingly preserved by Jonas Mekas, there are also a number of short, unfinished works, such as Witch’s Cradle made with Marcel Duchamp in 1943, the touching 1947 home-movie with Sasha Hammid, The Private Life of a Cat, as well as lost and unfinished fragments such as Medusa (1949), Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951), as well as something called “Lascivious Folk Ballet” – apparently the only surviving sequence from a project entitled Ritual & Ordeal, which is notable if only for the fact we get to hear Maya sing, in her smokey, late-night, husky voice, a kind of proto-Blues Rock, whose lyrics run:

“I got stones in my head,

I got pebbles in my bed,

In my head they rattle,

In my head they pound,

Cant ya hear ’em ?

Stones . . .

Stones.”

In addition, she also released an LP of the wire-recordings she had made during various ceremonials while travelling in Haiti, and of course there were the many, many hours of footage she had recorded during her numerous visits over 18 months – mostly funded by the Guggenheim Foundation. These were eventually edited together from Deren’s extensive notes by her former husband, the composer Teijo Itō and his new wife, Cherel Winett Itō, with considerable financial assistance from Deren’s close friend, the wealthy philanthropist and poet, James Merrill.

NB: A free and legal version of both sides of this album, converted to mp3 form, and with the excerpted liner-notes from the cover, is currently available as part of the excellent U B U W E B : S O U N D online archive here :
http://www.ubu.com/sound/deren.html

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Maya Deren’s sleeping quarters in Haiti, c.1947-1952

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Leonora as Hierodule

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Leonora Carrington, at age nineteen, while still studying at the Amédée Ozenfant Academy in London, had already started to explore the inner world of her imagination and its ‘hypnagogic’ vision – that state where consciousness and unconsciousness merge. When she met Max Ernst, 26 years her senior, and came into contact with Surrealism, she felt, not surprisingly, an immediate kinship.

Max Ernst & Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller in the foreground – photo by Man Ray.

In her Introduction to Leonora Carrington’s collection of short stories, The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, Marina Warner writes that the predominantly male Surrealists were enchanted by the combination of youth and aura of ‘knowingness’ Carrington carried about her. Warner then provocatively states that they – Breton, Eluard, Ernst, and others – cast her as “a kind of hierodule – a holy and erotic nymph who uniquely knew by instinct certain delinquent mysteries which old men – or older men – could not reach without her  help.” Warner goes on to say that, in spite of its ‘exactions’ (which are reflected in the stories of 1937 to 1940), its calling was not unappealing to her. With her background – had she not, for instance, like a Henry James heroine, been ‘finished’ at Miss Penrose’s Academy in Florence? – was she not already practiced playing the role? How much was she playing along? It is a somewhat troubling question, and the photo above illustrates this.

 Max Ernst ‘Leonora in the morning light’ (1940)

After Carrington’s ordeal in Spain (which she writes about in Down Below), she made her way to Lisbon and married Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, who had also been one of Picasso’s bullfighting cronies. At the time Peggy Guggenheim came to the rescue of many of the Surrealists who were stranded in Marseilles. Included among them was Max Ernst, with whom Guggenheim had fallen in love and would marry. She later wrote how, after her terrifying adventure in Spain, Renato Leduc looked after Carrington “like a father,” unlike Ernst who “was always like a baby and couldn’t be anyone’s father” – even when “carrying out his genital responsibilities elsewhere” (Leonora’s words.) By then Carrington was no longer susceptible to Ernst’s charms. It is difficult not to notice the subtle ironies in these words, when looking back to the days when Leonora played the child-like erotic nymph to the ‘mature man’ Max Ernst was at the time.

The young Leonora Carrington

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A Cautionary Tale of Conjuration . . .

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 A cautionary tale about the need to banish and put down spirits and demons after conjuring them . . .

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Benvenuto Cellini, creator of ‘Perseus with the Head of the Medusa’ (see below), writes in his autobiography of how he became acquainted with a ‘curious’ Sicilian priest who knew Latin and Greek, and possessed knowledge of necromancy and evocation (one might well ask what business a priest had to know these occult arts!) Cellini confessed an enduring interest in necromancy and tells the priest about this. Well, the priest tells him, if you dare and your heart is stout, we shall go to the  Colosseum and conjure the spirits. Cellini, who is nothing if not brave and boastful, jumps at the chance. He has long hoped to find someone or something to “reunite me with my Sicilian Angelica.”

They go to the Colosseum in the evening – it being thought auspicious to perform the ceremony in “a place where someone was killed in old times” – and the Colosseum, site of raw and often unspeakable  cruelty and bloodshed, certainly fits the bill! Cellini has brought a comrade, Vincenzio Romoli, a friend; the priest is accompanied by a native from Pistoja. A protective circle is drawn, a fire lit, expensive ‘perfumes’, most likely incense, are burned. The priest begins his incantations. The Colosseum fills up with apparitions of devils and the spirits of the dead. ‘Ask them something,’ the priest, who can barely contain them, urges Cellini. Cellini inquires about his love, Angelica, but there’s no answer. We have to come back some other time, says the priest; and next time bring a little boy, unsullied, of pure virginity.

 

 

When the time has come, Cellini brings one of his shop lads, 12 years of age. He is also accompanied by his friends, Vincenzio Romoli and Agnolino Gaddi. They make preparations, draw the circle – the necromancer had “reconstructed with art more admirable and yet more wondrous ceremonies” – and then the priest places a pentacle in Cellini’s hand, and invites him to place the boy beneath it. Next he proceeds with his ‘awful invocations’ and they come: “multitudes of demons who are captains of their legions.” Cellini wants to ask about Angelica, and is told that ‘they’ said that in a month you will be where she is.

 

 

Now it is time to dismiss the ghosts – back to Hell – but there are so many more than intended. The necromancer does what he can, burning copious amounts of the pungent-smelling asafoetida, but has a hard time of it. The boy is terrified, hiding his head between his legs, and so are the others. The priest finally takes off his robe, picks up his books and, leaving the circle prematurely, they all hasten home. But on the way the company is followed by two demons, “gamboling in front of us, skipping now along the roofs and now upon the ground. The necromancer assured me that, often as he had entered magic circles, he had never met with such a serious affair as this.” Perhaps not surprisingly, “each one of us dreamed all that night of devils,” Cellini records . . .

“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.” – H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

 

 Detail of Cellini’s ‘Perseus with the Head of the Medusa’  (finished 1545)

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Jodorowsky meets Leonora

LEONORA CARRINGTON

(6th April 1917 – 25th May 2011)

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[1.]

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Typically, in The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, when the author writes about his meeting with Leonora Carrington, whom he rightfully calls “A Surrealist Master,” he obfuscates the time that this takes place … There is confusion about chronology: but then, mere linear time does not really count for much in what he wants to communicate about his encounter with Leonora. It breaks the rules and conventions of time. There is, however, one significant factor: she is an older woman.

It is his friend and Zen Master, Ejo Takata, who suggests to him that he visits the artist:

“She is the being appropriate for you. Let her give you the inner woman who is so lacking in you.”

Jodorowsky’s grounds to respond are what matters here, even though he puts the words in his friend’s mouth, instead of his own. He reveals a painful truth about his life and consequently himself. The sins of the father were visited upon the seven-year-old child Alejandro in an appalling way: his mother was raped, by her jealous husband – after seeing her flirt with another man (or at least so he thought) – the rape making her pregnant, resulting in Alejandro. She has hated his father ever since, and cannot love the son she bears. The meaning of the age difference between Carrington and the much younger Alejandro begins to disclose itself. Feeling deprived of motherly tenderness, “the archetype of the cosmic father has dominated his actions.”

The little that Jodorowsky knows about Carrington has come from reading André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir. She is richly eccentric and likes to break moral rules and codes, actively rebelling against her wealthy upper class family background (she is the daughter of a Lancashire textile magnate and his Irish Catholic wife.)

Witness the almost legendary story (and there are others!) of her covering her feet with mustard during a dinner in a prestigious restaurant, while keeping up a conversation. She has been the mistress of Max Ernst, who was 26 years her senior. After he was imprisoned in Spain by the Franco regime, she suffered severe psychosis, and afterwards wrote an account of it (on the instigation of the anthropologist and writer, Pierre Mabille.) It is known as ‘Down Below.’

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[2.]

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The Leonora Carrington Jodorowsky writes about is mostly a figure of his own imagination. He gives “the inner woman so lacking in himself” a voice through the woman he meets, who becomes a mouthpiece for his own inner female self, the ‘inner woman’ who was there all along.

She gives him her blood to drink, obtained from a wound on her calf after removing a scab. Granted, it is not done the ‘vampire way’ – she mixes a teaspoon of it through his tea, and obtains a lock of his hair and some of his finger nail clippings, so he will return. She then gives him the key to her house and he departs as she sends him off with another of her sorcerer’s statements:

“I am nine doors. I shall open the one on which you knock.”

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[3.]

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Later that night, unable to sleep, he penetrates her dwelling and finds her seated on a wooden throne, whose back is carved with the bust of an angel, “naked  except for a Jewish prayer shawl.” She stares, fixed of gaze, unblinking, but continues reciting – “the words poured out of her mouth like an endless river of invisible insects.” And here comes the clinch:

“She had left the world of the rational … there was little left of any individuality in her. She seemed possessed simultaneously by all women who had ever existed.”

This is Jodorowsky’s fantasy speaking – but at least the words he attributes to her have an authentic invocatory power :

“I, the eye that sees nine different worlds and tells the tale of each.
I, Anuba who saw the guts of the pharaoh, embalmer, outcast.
I, the lion goddess who ate the ancestors and churned them to gold in her belly.
I, the lunatic and fool, meat for worse fools than I.
I, the bitch of Sirius, landed here from the terrible hyperbole to howl at the moon.
I, the bamboo in the hand of Huang Po.
I, the queen bee in the entrails of Samson’s dead lion.
I, the tears of the archangel that melted it again.
I, the solitary joke made by the snow queen in higher mathematics.
I, the gypsy who brought the first greasy tarot from Venus.
I, the tree of wisdom whose thirteen branches lead eternally back again.
I, the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt despise no being.”

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[4.]

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We will never know how much is true of what is written about Carrington in Jodorowsky’s vivid account. It may well be very little, and mostly a projection, of the ‘anima’ variety.

Leonora Carrington once said she “didn’t have time to be anybody’s Muse.”

She was “too busy learning to be an artist.”

Nevertheless, she did continue to inspire other artists, such as Jodorowsky, unwittingly acting in a muse-like fashion to their creativity (and, quite possibly, psychological issues.)

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[5.]

*UPDATE*

Further trawling through our archives, as well as other online resources, we have come across the following . . .

Firstly, a COLOUR photo from Jodorowsky’s production :

And, lastly – at least for now ! – one of Leonora’s own original designs for ‘Penelope’ a delightful water-colour :

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The Photos:

[1.] Leonora Carrington, portrait by Alejandro Jodorowsky

[2.] Painting by Leonora Carrington, The Giantess, also known as The Guardian of the Egg (c.1947)

[3.] Sculpture by Leonora Carrington, Nigromante (2008)

[4.] Painting by Leonora Carrington, The Chair, Daghda Tuatha dé Danaan (1955)

[5.] Alejandro Jodorowsky production, Penelope (1957), costumes & design by Leonora Carrington

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Surrealism & The Tarot

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Although this is only a first introductory look, we’ve been thinking a lot recently about how a number of the artists labelled “Surrealist” – either self-declared, fellow travellers, or otherwise claimed – had more than a passing engagement with Magic & the Occult. One particular manifestation of this that has caught our eye has been The Tarot:
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In 1940-1, in an extensive collaboration between Victor Brauner, Andre Breton, Rene Char, Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Herold, Wilfredo Lam, Andre Masson, and Benjamin Peret, an “official” Surrealist Tarot, Le Jeu de Marseille, was created …
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Further, the Romanian-Jewish Surrealist painter & sculptor Victor Brauner clearly used the traditional Marseilles Tarot image of Le Bateleur (“the juggler”, an earlier form of The Magician) as the basis for his 1947 painting, The Surrealist …

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In the last decade of her life, the British Surrealist, Ithell Colquhoun, created her own personal Tarot, which had a much more abstract, elemental simplicity …
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But for now I want to concentrate for a moment on the legendary “Salvador Dali Tarot” – which although it was almost certainly created by Dali’s protégé, the French singer model and artist of uncertain age (was she born 1939, 1942, 1946 or 1950? And even her gender was called into question, apocryphal gossip suggesting “she” had been born a boy, and that Dali had paid for a sex change!) Amanda Lear, with the maestro most likely coming in at the end to add a flourish here and a signature there, is still an exquisite thing of rare beauty.

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So, here are just a few examples to whet your appetite – and, intriguingly enough, Atu XV El Diablo (“The Devil”) is, of course, a woman …

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Women Artists, Surrealism, & The Occult

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Published by Mandrake of Oxford, the ideas in Nadia Choucha’s thought-provoking book, Surrealism & the Occult, are many and rich and strange, not least the proposal that Surrealism and the Occult are bedfellows, inextricably linked.

“It is necessary to admit,” said the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, “that a common denominator unites the sorcerer, the artist and the madman, which is none other than Magic.”

Practitioners noted the analogy between surrealist art and philosophy, and alchemy: after centuries of “domestication and insane resignation”  the imagination was being liberated by a “long, immense, reasoned derangement of the senses” (André Breton, quoting poetic prodigy Arthur Rimbaud.)

Max Ernst notes his first contact with the occult, magic and witchcraft and writes in his diary after WWI, how he died at the start of the war and “resuscitated” when the war ends “a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time.”

The author also introduces women surrealists, usually overlooked or ignored in other books on the subject, quoting Whitney Chadwick:

“The male definition of woman as a muse or intermediary is not an appropriate image for the creative woman.”

As Leonora Carrington remarked in 1983, looking back over her long life:

“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse . . . I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

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The territory Nadia Choucha explores is almost too large for its 126 pages. Nevertheless it’s a must-read for all those interested in the subject and the often hidden connection between Surrealism and the Occult. Despite its apparent accessibility and popularity (or perhaps because of . . . ?), historically the book – and, by extension, the author herself – have come in for a lot of pretty full-on criticism, from academics and self-appointed experts in both the territories of Occultism and Surrealism . . .

Of course, the way we see it the problem is one of what exactly is meant when we attempt to talk about “surrealism?”

According to that fount of all online wisdom, Wikipedia:

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.”

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That prime-mover and self-appointed Pope of Surrealism, André Breton, had been inspired  initially after the coining of the term ‘surrealist’ by his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Breton made an attempt to define what he meant in the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924:

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

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It could be argued that Surrealist with a capital ‘S’ refers specifically to members of a formal group, or its acknowledged descendants and offshoots, most of which are limited to or bound by an historical, chronological, context. It is to be remembered that from this point of view, numerous exemplars, such as those arch-Surrealists Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali (and, to a lesser extent, figures like the very young Brion Gysin) ceased to be Surrealists the minute they were expelled – one is tempted to say excommunicated – by Breton.

The Other possibility is that we think of surrealists – with a small ‘s’ – as those artists and writers who are attempting to apply such principles as were being set forth in the Surrealist Manifestos all those years ago . . .

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As well as the many-and-varied selection of books about individual artist-practitioners – such as Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington, and even Eileen Agar – without doubt one of the definitive texts has got to be Professor Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Thames & Hudson.) It was originally published in 1985 as a large-format hardback, just right for coffee table adornment, with one of Kay Sage’s brooding images on the cover; then there was a second edition in 1991, both in hardback and paperback, only this time with one of Frida Kahlo’s distinctive self-portraits on the cover.

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Also worth mentioning is The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies, by Patrick Lepetit (new out from Inner Traditions/Bear & Co), and we are reliably informed that Dr. Leon Marvell has an excellent piece on Alchemy and Surrealism in the anthology Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (edited by Aaron Cheak, and published by our friends at Numen Books, whose other titles include the anthology Occult Traditions.)

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Catwoman – Leonor Fini and her cats

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Leonor Fini

(August 30, 1907 – January 18, 1996)

There are now many cat-lovers in the world – even more so perhaps since YouTube has released their so-called ‘funny’ and ‘cute’ side – but it doesn’t take away from the cat’s dark, mysterious legacy. And there are still people with an aversion to cats, in spite of their beauty, prowess and elegance. Unlike dogs, who slavishly want to please their owners, cats are solitary and independent. They love to prowl at night, and for them cruelty and play are one. They get off on fear and love to spook themselves. They have a unique connection with the occult, the hidden. Most of us have been at the receiving end of the cat’s uncanny stare. Their eye-intensity – whether they are weighing up their prey, or doing that thing of staring into a seemingly blank corner, ‘seeing’ something only they can see – can be unsettling.

The cat we know today is a descendant of Felis lybica, a North African wildcat. The remains of thousands of their ritually mummified bodies have been found in Egypt.

Leonor Fini acquired seventeen Persian cats, and even though she loved companionship, she was also fiercely independent and didn’t shy away from depicting certain ‘perverse’ sexual themes. Female sexuality for her was always located within the adult realm.

She declined invitations to join the group of Surrealists and even denied being a ‘surrealist.’ The group, headed by Andre Breton, was obsessed with treatises and theories (a precursor of word-obsessed Post-Structuralism soon to come), which they thought of as radical, though it may have been a disguise for a bigoted and ‘bourgeois’ attitude.

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