Exquisitely strange, British Celtic surrealist artist, literary writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun’s memoir of her travels in Ireland in the first half of the 1950s is now republished as a Pushkin Press Classic.
Colquhoun’s trove of art, writing and the fruit of a lifetime’s passionate research into a vast range of esoteric subjects were nearly lost after she died in Cornwall in 1988, aged 81. Fortunately her work was salvaged by a small group of devotees. The Crying of the Wind, The Living Stones: Cornwall, and the alchemical novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, have been republished by Pushkin to coincide with the UK Tate Gallery’s 2025 retrospective of Colquhoun’s visual work, which runs until October.
Colquhoun’s trained eye scans the Irish landscape. She visits prehistoric stone monuments, about whose ritualistic purposes – reflected in the still-living folk traditions of rural people she meets – she speculates evocatively.
Colquhoun’s erudition comes alive through her extrasensory perception. She was a druid, witch and magician. As with the work of WB Yeats, who she met and admired greatly, Colquhoun’s writing is lit from within by an incandescent glow that derives, I feel, from her deep sensing of the numinous everywhere.
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The linguistic beauty Colquhoun generates with her visionary artist’s eye, and her ability to describe what are generally unseen worlds, can carry the reader, for example, from the crumbling grandeur of Protestant Ascendancy culture to panoramic vistas of giant spirit beings who live alongside humans in the Irish landscape.
Colquhoun describes all-night partying with Dublin’s bohemians; hanging out in the studio of painter Jack B Yeats; and being brought to meditate inside Newgrange by the now almost forgotten Irish occult artist, Art O’Murnaghan, at a time when you could let yourself into the ancient mound by borrowing the caretaker’s key.
The joie-de-vivre of Colquhoun’s Cornwall travels is noticeably absent here. Perhaps it was the author’s recent divorce, alongside the menace of Catholic theocratic mind control – then reaching fever-pitch – that made the bleak Irish summers and ever-present poverty harder to bear. Nevertheless, the still-existing pagan spirituality of Ireland – the beauty of our skies, our precious extant Gaelic culture and its animistic worldview – seen through the eyes of a genius mystic polymath over 70 years ago, makes this book an enchanting read.
