The biggest and most complete exhibition ever of the English Surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun’s work, including her Decad of Intelligence, based on the ten sephiroth, and the 78 cards of her surrealist TARO, has opened at Tate St. Ives, Cornwall since 1st February. Later in the year the exhibition will move to Tate Britain in London. Colquhoun was a member of various occult groups throughout her life, including Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order and later, the Golden Dawn. She also spent a great deal of her life living and working in Cornwall, England. The exhibition coincides with what amounts to a massive campaign by the art establishment, involving various exhibitions and publications, to make magick and the occult respectable. This means opening the ways for academics to claim the field as their own, and naturally includes psychologisation and reductionism. Even worse than that,  the artists, especially women, are being dragged posthumously into the gender politics currently fashionable in certain academic and literary circles. We will make no further comment on that but will point out the total failure of profane commentators to even understand the difference between meditation and dissociation of the mind—two things that are completely opposite in reality.

Of the Surrealists, Ithell Colquhoun is unique in that she followed the Hermetic discipline, as filtered through the neo-spiritualism of the Golden Dawn, as well as that of drawing and painting. Ithell Colquhoun’s TARO is based on her ingenious interpretation of the Order of the Golden Dawn’s correspondences, which include scales of colour.[1] Colquhoun was a member of several occult schools or fraternities at different times in her life.

Colquhoun TARO

When explaining her own unique Tarot, or TARO, Colquhoun eschewed the possibility of using them for divination, which she associated with fortune telling. Her non-figurative Surrealist TARO was designed purely for meditation. The cards were to be used as yantras, and the Golden Dawn’s esoteric titles of the cards, for example, The Magus of Power, were used as mantras to induce vision and altered states of consciousness—it was therefore integral that the card’s images should emerge from and clearly reflect that.[2] This raises an important question as to what is really meant by ‘meditation’ here; trance or hypnogogic states have nothing to do with meditation as understood within the Yoga-Sutras. There appears to be some confusion so we will return to that later. The set of ten paintings called the Decad of Intelligence is based on the ten sephiroth or emanations of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The Order of the Golden Dawn’s use of this was Hermetic, which it to say, it is a separate development from the traditional Rabbinical Kabbalah, though there are elements drawn from that by MacGregor Mathers, the Order’s co-founder. These ten sephiroth, ‘numbers’ or ‘emanations’, are different names of the Lord of the Universe as according to the degree of manifestation from the principial source, which is formless and wholly spiritual.

Colquhoun chose the Sanskrit term yantra, which usually refers to a sacred or traditional image used in the spiritual practice of knowing God or the Absolute through various means such as ritual, yoga and meditation. One may then wonder as to why use the term for a sacred image as descriptive of something that is the product of personal invention? There is no author ascribed to the Vedas. All spiritual tradition is, according to the authorities within those traditions, derived from a supra-human source.[3] It is not about being ‘creative’. To express oneself in a personal way is the whole purpose of modern art. A truly traditional artist regards ‘originality’ as an insult, yet modernity uses that as an important part of the table of values. Colquhoun, as with most fine artists, placed her signature in the form of a monogram on every painting, including her Decad and all 78 cards of the TARO. Notably however, she formed the signature from her assumed magical name, Splendidior Vitro, taken from the Odes of Horace (3: 13), beginning,

Oh Bandusian fountain, brighter than crystal…

Colquhoun and Psychology

In this way, Colquhoun sought to make a bridge between Surrealism and the discipline of occultism, and between the personal and the impersonal. One must understand however that the occultists of the time and the surrealists tended to accept what were then the new psychological theories, which relegate sacred symbolism to something called the ‘subconscious’, removing God or any absolute principle from the equation and attempting to replace that with the human mind, which is no more than a set of contingent determinations upon the true Self.[4] Colquhoun no doubt had a strong spiritual inclination but accepted the anti-traditionalism of the time, which meant she would seek the spiritual exclusively in nature and body. This is everywhere shown in her paintings and writings.

Even from the traditional point of view, the seeking of God or the Absolute within oneself is not deemed wholly wrong but it is seen as a starting point only, not something that promises a satisfaction or ultimate goal for the need of the human heart to find a supreme and lasting truth. Everything in nature is subject to change, impermanence, whereas the true Self as it is described in the sacred trexts of India, from where the word yantra is taken, is not subject to birth, decay or death. It is immutable and one without a second (Advaita). The lack of a metaphysical supreme principle may be the reason why Colquhoun passed through many occult fraternities, including the fraternity of Surrealism, and worked alone for most of her life. In that way, occultists of the time and at the present seek a return to a lost tradition while at the same time rejecting all carriers of such knowledge unless they take on a heterodox form. The search for the lost word or Holy Grail thus continues without a word or a chalice to guide it.

Until the first self-declared occultist Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant) wrote about the Tarot and published one or two of his illustrations of the cards, it was not held in high esteem by the intelligentsia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[5]  Indeed, it is only in the present time that the art establishment has deemed occultism respectable and thus worthy of its profane attention.[6] How then did the Order of Golden Dawn in their secret book called ‘T’ associate the Tarot with a sacred symbolism as typified by the Hermetic Qabalah? The first printed Tarot deck, the Tarot of Marseille, laid down the structure providing the basis for the Hermetic and Qabalistic attributions. There are twenty-two major arcana, which are easily corresponded to the twenty-two connecting paths of the Tree of Life. There are sixteen court cards for the subdivisions of the four classical elements of fire, water, air and earth. The four Aces as the roots of the elements correspond to Kether and the spirit or akasha of each element, and the thirty-six cards numbered two to ten correspond to the sephiroth in the four worlds of Qabalah, as according to the suit: The Wands correspond to Atziluth, the principial formless essence, the Cups to Briah, the basis for manifestation, the Swords to Yetzirah, the foundation of the universe, and the Discs or Pentacles to Assiah, the world of visible nature. Mathers and Westcott of the Golden Dawn furthermore systematised the astrological and other correspondences found in Westcott’s translation of the Sepher Yetzirah so that the seventy-eight cards in all form a complete symbol of the Universe.

To understand the following it is necessary to know that the Hermetic model of the Tree of Life is composed of ten numbers (sephiroth) arranged in the form of a Lightning Flash or Sword of Wisdom emanating from the formless essence of all. This schema is ‘hung’, as it were, upon two pillars of Force and Form, left and right, and a central ‘trunk’ or middle pillar called Equilibrium. It is needful also to know that this forms a symbol of both God and Man.[7] The four worlds of the Qabalah are to show that manifest existence comes about through division, or quaternity, while at the same time depending from a principial source, as typified by the trinity as the perfect expression of unity—something that was made much use of by the Pythagoreans.

In her writings Colquhoun drew comparisons between visual art and the medieval art of alchemy. Her aim was to achieve a union of natural and spiritual forces as well as a union of the disciplines of art and the occult. She suggested that the four traditional elements of Hermetic magick (as given by Cornelius Agrippa, for example) might each have corresponding methods.

The colour scheme adopted by Colquhoun begins with the Aces as these all correspond to Kether, the Crown of the Supreme Being in the four worlds: Atziluth (Wands), Briah (Cups), Yetzirah (Swords) and Assiah (Discs). Next come the Tarots of the paths, commencing with Aleph, the Spirit of Aethyr, traditionally named the Fool 0. Aleph reflects something of the Ace of Swords and is the root of the Air element through the rest of the cards. Next come the Princes, as we work down the middle pillar of the Tree of Life. The Princes all reflect something of the Aces. The Sixes and Nines follow on to complete the middle pillar. After that we move to the left hand pillar, and commence, in the case of the suit of Swords, with the Queen of the Thrones of Air (Queen of Swords) as the Queens all correspond to Binah. We complete the pillar with the Threes, Fives and Eights (Binah, Geburah and Hod). After that we deal similarly with the right hand pillar. First come the Kings, then the Twos, Fours and Sevens in each suit. Then come the Princesses in each element, as these are Assiah, the Kingdom of Earth. The Princesses are the Thrones of the Aces according to the Golden Dawn. The Tens follow on from the Princess in each suit, completing that suit in Malkuth, or the visible universe.

Left: Magus of Power.

The method Colquhoun used to paint the TARO and Decad is inseparable from the method of psychic automatism, which was developed by spiritists in the nineteenth century before it was taken up by the surrealists. She would pour enamel paint onto a horizontal support of paper or card, wet paint on wet paint, tilting, stirring and conjuring the layers of colour to react and interact. The strength or degree of dilution of the paint would be carefully decided beforehand to reflect the colour scales previously described. She might use the wooden end of a paintbrush to manipulate or introduce additional colours or highlight a feature, always being careful to retain the ‘integrity’ of the automatic state, which she described as a light trance. Essentially, the idea is that forces that are not under our control influence the forms and images. This is in accordance with the general practices of the spiritists, who were somewhat different from the later occultists in that they made themselves open to any wandering psychic influence indiscriminately. This naturally carries serious dangers, but which were not suspected at all by the spiritists, who possessed no real knowledge. The occultists usually applied strict measures to safeguard their operations and to ensure that only an invoked force would appear to them. All the same, this does not seem to have been too rigorously adhered to in some Orders of the Golden Dawn including the first 1888 foundation as Mathers and his companions, while outwardly forbidding passive mediumship, are known to have used spiritist techniques.[8]

It then remains to address the question as to how it might be possible to know something of the spiritual through meditation on non-figurative, abstract images composed purely of colour based on the Golden Dawn system of correspondences? The methods of spiritism, called automatism by the surrealists, are incapable of supporting any spiritual knowledge as they strictly limit the person not only to the realm of the human psyche but also to an extremely inferior degree of that. Colquhoun supplied at least a partial answer to this when she said that not only the yantra but also the mantra was to be used. Each card has its esoteric title attached, for example the card for the twelfth path of the Tree of Life, usually called the Magician I, is named Magus of Power by the Golden Dawn. This is the Lord of the Universe in double aspect; his shadow or inverse reflection is the human mind and reason. It is needful to have a more than ordinary (or academic) knowledge of the Hermetic basis of the Tarot and Tree of Life to take any of this to an operational level, as has certainly been admitted by some modern commentators.[9]

This brings us once again to the confusion between ‘altered states’ or trances, and real meditation, which are not in any way the same thing. Spiritist trances disperse the mind and open the unwary practitioner to psychic influences they would not want to be open to if they could truly see them for what they are. Real meditation is not about sitting quietly and musing on a swirl of nice colours, nor is it about entering what is called a hypnogogic or altered state.

To know what real meditation is requires study and practice of Ashtanga Yoga or some comparable discipline that involves considerable effort at the outset in learning concentration of the mind. Given what has been said by the artist, her biographers and others, there exists a real confusion as to what meditation is. Meditation was not taught in the Orders of the Golden Dawn, for example. In the occultism of today, there does not seem to be much improvement in this state of affairs, since neo-spiritualism, which is more or less the same as occultism, tends to be anti-traditional in every way. That means it tends to be anti-spiritual but that is not realised by its advocates, who have produced a counterfeit spirituality by following out the theories of the psychologists.

This is not to reject the use of Ithell Colquhoun’s TARO and Decad for the purpose of meditation, which, if we use that word, means that spiritual knowledge is our goal. We have already pointed out a remedy, which is the one put forward by Colquhoun herself—the mantras must be used with the yantras. We do not know how the artist might have practiced this but what we can be sure of is that it is no use getting into a light trance and then repeating ‘Magus of Power, Magus of Power…’ without any notion of the meaning of that.

The path of the Magus corresponds to Mercury but in this case it is not a human ego that one seeks contact with, it is the Lord of the Universe, sometimes called the Universal Man. Furthermore, the path runs between the supreme Crown, the first positive expression veiling the Infinite, and the sphere of cosmic Mind, figured by divine Intelligence. The word of Kether, the Crown, was that heard by Moses and recounted in the book of Exodus, corresponding to pure Being, supra-human, pristine and omniscient.[10] When Moses came down from the mountain he had to cover his face lest those who saw him might be blasted by the light.

We are full of admiration for Colquhoun’s work and indeed, we share certain fraternal affiliations.[11] Her approach to the disciplines of art and the occult was learned and very thorough—in fact her reach probably went far beyond many of her contemporaries in these fields. It is right that her work, along with that of others associated with the surrealist movement, should be rediscovered and given the high profile it always deserved. However, as with all neo-spiritualists there are metaphysical confusions. For example, we are not actually ‘part of nature’ anymore than we are part of body and mind. The Self is not a part of anything; it is in reality infinite, absolute, deathless and immortal. Academics, far from being qualified in the special knowledge it takes to correct such errors, are only adding further layers of obfuscation— and all the more so when they impose their political ideologies on the artists and others they are presenting to the public. We thus hope to have put the populist notion of trances, visions and pretended spirituality into some kind of sensible perspective.

Notes

1. See TARO as Colour, Ithell Colquhoun [Fulgar, 2018].

2. See the Richard Shillitoe biography of the artist, Ithell Colquhoun—Magician Born of Nature (2009), p. 124.

3. See Brahma-Sutra I.i.2.

4. See Advaita Vedanta—Question of the Real [Ordo Astri].

5. Alphonse Louis Constant (8 February 1810—31 May 1875) is better known through his books as Éliphas Lévi.

6. That is to say, in order to respect the occult movement the art establishment has sought to identify it with its own idealism, much of which is political and that would not have been agreeable with many of the occultists now being misrepresented.

7. See our Hermetic Qabalah Foundation—Complete Course [Ordo Astri]. For a more advanced study, including the paths as described in the Sepher Yetzirah, see Thirty-two paths of Wisdom [Ordo Astri].

8. It is not in any way possible to go deeply into this subject here. See Part One, Metamorphosis—Hermetic Science and Yoga Power [Ordo Astri].

9. Victoria Jenkins and Emma Sharples, writing in the lavishly produced Tate St. Ives catalogue for the 2025 Colquhoun exhibition, World of Ithell Colquhoun. It should be noted that some of these writings abound in factual inaccuracies quite apart from any metaphysical incomprehension. For example, Kenneth Grant did not found any ‘hermetic society’, and neither did he found Ordo Templi Orientis—from which he was expelled!

10. Exodus 3: 14. This is usually translated ‘I am that I am’ (AHIH AShR AHIH) but it really implies Pure Being. It is therefore completely incorrect to translate it as ‘I will be’, as is sometimes done; Pure Being, as first expression of the infinite, is now and forever and does not refer to a future state, implying limitation.

11. Colquhoun was admitted into Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order (at that time known as the Typhonian OTO) then later became a leading member of the Golden Dawn Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx (Order of the Phoenix in the Outer). She was also ordained as a priestess of Isis in Olivia Robertson’s Fellowship of Isis.

© Oliver St. John 2025

Photograph of Ithell Colquhoun and Magus of Power from her TARO are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Ithell Colquhoun Estate.

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