I think I first encountered the work of the visionary artist, author, poet and antiquarian Ithell Colquhoun in the ancient mysteries journals I subscribed to in the Nineteen Eighties, such as Wood & Water. I then ordered her Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket (1973), a book of mythic poetry, from Eric Ratcliffe’s Ore imprint, which arrived accompanied by an enthusiastic letter about her work from the publisher.
Later I found her prose fantasy Goose of Hermogenes (1961) second-hand, but her study Sword Of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn (1975) eluded me, indeed I don’t think I’ve ever seen a copy while browsing.
It also took a while to find her wonderful book of landscape, folklore and art, The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), a highly personal account of her home in the far west of Cornwall and her explorations of the prehistoric and legend-haunted places such as standing stones, carns, wells, coves and hill forts. This places her in similar terrain to other authors who celebrated this domain such as Mary Butts and Frank Baker. She has more recently been rediscovered as a highly original surrealist and mystic artist, including of her own abstract tarot forms.
I was therefore interested to learn that her occult novel Destination Limbo (Antenna Publications) is soon to be reissued, and pre-orders are available now from Stone Club. It is described as ‘derived from her dream diaries . . . a strange and mysterious journey to a Greek Island where two occult societies reign. There are vampires, werewolves and initiations a plenty. It is wild and very weird but in the best way!’
It must be said that the ithell colquhoun website is unpersuaded by the novel, which it says was ‘in progress by 1966 and was still being worked on ten years later’, and notes that it appears to be unfinished, although that is not entirely clear. It comments: ‘It is little more than a flat, and sometimes clumsy, narrative of events with none of the richness of writing, descriptive powers or charged psychological atmosphere that characterized Goose of Hermogenes . . .’
Even so, as they explain, the author herself saw it as part of a set of underlying themes integral to all her fiction, and linked it to her own interpretation of the Tarot (or Taro, her preferred term).
Stone Club, devoted to ancient stones in their landscape, has been ‘founded by artists Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw . . . as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones.’ It offers the magazine The Folk Review, booklets of fieldnotes, second-hand books in the field, a set of four horse brass badges, and much else.
(Mark Valentine)
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