{occult} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Kingdom of the Gods

Looking for more Theosophist art turned up The Kingdom of the Gods (1952), a book by Geoffrey Hodson with illustrations by Ethelwynne M. Quail. Hodson was a Theosophist scholar with a predilection for the clairvoyant visualising of transcendent beings. Several of his books are descriptions of encounters made on his travels, commencing at a modest level in 1925 with Fairies at Work and Play. Fairies are a somewhat trivial subject for Theosophical students, which may explain why Hodson’s later books move on to accounts of angels in their various forms, before arriving at descriptions of fully-fledged gods, a type of divine life which in Hodson’s telling is more populous than we realise. A note at the beginning of The Kingdom of the Gods states that Ethelwynne Quail’s paintings were made originally for slide projections which Hodson used in his lectures.

Most of Hodson’s gods are lower-order beings of a kind that the Romans termed genius loci, the spirit of a place, while their depictions are nebulous, bird-like renderings like some of the “thought-forms” depicted in the 1905 book of that name by Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant. The determination of the Theosophists to make the invisible manifest on paper or canvas may explain the attraction of the religion for so many artists. One of the illustrations in Thought-Forms shows Gounod’s music forming over a cathedral tower like a polychrome mushroom cloud; a decade later, the Theosophy-inspired Luigi Russolo was doing something similar with his Futurist painting, La Musica. Geoffrey Hodson would have been delighted by the mystical artists of the 1970s, especially Gilbert Williams and Robert Venosa. Some of Ethelwynne Quail’s spirits might be sketches for Venosa paintings, his early works in particular, which have the same sweeping lines but rendered in a meticulous, crystalline manner.

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Christian Waller’s The Great Breath

In last week’s anniversary post I threw some barbs at social media to which this piece might act as a riposte; the poisoned waterholes still have their uses. A link on Bluesky to a book by James Hume-Cook, Australian Fairy Tales (1925), had me looking for more information about the book’s illustrator, Christian Yandell (1894–1954), an Australian artist whose illustrations are as good as those being produced in Britain or America at the height of the boom in illustrated books. Ms Yandell is better known today under her married name, Christian Waller. In addition to working as an illustrator she was a printmaker and stained-glass artist. She was also another early 20th-century artist whose work reflects an interest in Theosophy, most notably in a print series from 1932 which she titled The Great Breath.

The production of The Great Breath was entirely undertaken by Waller; all aspects from the cutting and printing of the linoblocks to the manufacture of the distinctive gold-painted emerald green cover was done by hand. She printed the blocks on her 1849 hand-press in her studio at Ivanhoe, each book taking about four days to make, hand-bound with green cord. Although it was intended to produce an edition of 150, it seems only about 30 were made, with some unbound impressions extant, usually untrimmed. Each consisted of a title page, colophon, contents page and seven linocut designs. The images were printed in solid black on white translucent tracing paper, trimmed and tipped onto the cream pages. The books were not numbered sequentially, but rather in relation to the numerology of the buyer.

The bound collection comprises seven prints plus an eighth plate presenting vague clues about the meaning of the series and some of the symbolism in the imagery. The prints themselves are in a bolder style than Waller’s storybook illustrations, resembling templates for stained-glass designs. What “The Great Breath” refers to isn’t explained at all, I’d guess you had to be a reader of Madame Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, to be sufficiently enlightened. The explanatory plate features Blavatsky-derived concepts such as “Root Races” and “the World Cycle”, along with references to Atlantis, Hyperborea and Lemuria. The Secret Doctrine incorporates the alleged histories of these lost continents into its collage of myth, religion and mysticism, as a result of which Madame Blavatsky is almost solely responsible for the legend of Atlantis migrating from books of archaeological speculation and pseudo-history to the more rarified realms of occultism. You can trace a thread of Atlantis references from Theosophy to The Golden Dawn, and on into the 20th century, through weird fiction to the crank shelves, where the submerged continent may be found among all the flying saucers, pyramidology and “ancient astronauts”. Since Theosophy has few adherents today it might be said that the elevation of Atlantis to a mystical plane was Blavatsky’s most substantial legacy, if it wasn’t for all the artists who fed off the soup of borrowed ideas in The Secret Doctrine to elevate work of their own. I continue to believe, semi-mischievously, that Theosophy ought to be recognised as the primary force behind the development of abstract art, so many important artists (Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, Mondrian) were inspired by Blavatsky’s writings. “Inspire” is apt in this context, being derived from Latin and Greek words meaning “to breathe”. Maybe the significance of Waller’s title isn’t so hard to divine after all.

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Weekend links 816

The Creative Power of the Spirit, No. 31 of A Goodly Company series, 1920–1933 by Ethel le Rossignol.

• “One moment it was a little blip. The next, our friends are dying”: the gay porn soundtrack composers lost to the Aids crisis. More gay porn: Pink Narcissus, James Bidgood’s micro-budget homoerotic fantasy, will receive a UK blu-ray release later this year.

• Old music: Thirst by Clock DVA gets a very welcome reissue later this year, having been unavailable in any form since 1992. I’m not so happy about the changes to Neville Brody’s original cover design but the album itself is a major post-punk statement.

• “Graphic design was thought to be a man’s discipline,” she says. “So I think it was quite a surprise for people to find me there.” A profile of Margaret Calvert, designer of (among other things) Britain’s road signs.

• At Colossal: A major survey in Paris chronicles Leonora Carrington’s esoteric Surrealism.

• At Public Domain Review: Sara Weiss’ Journeys to the Planet Mars (1903).

• At the BFI: The mystery music video for The Beatles’ Penny Lane.

• Winners and entrants for Close-up Photographer of the Year 7.

• “Cats to blame for octopus deity enshrinement delay.”

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Cattivo.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Jack Arnold’s Day.

• Pink Noir (1996) by David Toop | Pink Dust (2013) by Sqürl | The Pink Room 2 (2024) by Seigen Ono

Weekend links 808

Comets from Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885–90).

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller reviews A Life in Ink, a new monograph about the art of Ralph Steadman. Heller is full of praise for Steadman, and discusses commissioning his work for The New York Times. But in his bewilderment at Steadman’s lack of a knighthood he seems unaware of the degree to which state honours are frequently refused by Britons, especially those who position themselves in opposition to the established order. Americans are obsessed with awards and “halls of fame”, and appear to regard Britain’s state honours as something like the Oscars with a royal seal, rather than what JG Ballard once described as “a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up the top-heavy monarchy.” If Steadman has deliberately shunned the honours list he’d be joining a venerable company.

• “In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style. Iván Moure Pazos tours the psychedelic chambers of Rochetta Mattei, optimised for electrohomeopathic healing, and Castello di Sammezzano, an immersive, orientalist fever dream.”

• New music: Ithaqua by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Analog 2025 by Various Artists; and Flux (music for a performance by still still / Marta & Kim) by Rutger Zuydervelt and Lucija Gregov.

For all their bravura and maximalism, Powell and Pressburger understood the power of leaving things out, building into their films chasms that the mind must leap, gaps that the imagination must fill. Like Joan Webster, we discover that we don’t want things to be made too easy. We want to catch our own fish rather than have them delivered, to swim in the ocean rather than in a pool.

Imogen Sara Smith on I Know Where I’m Going, one of the films from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s golden decade, the 1940s

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: In the Days of the Comet by HG Wells.

• At the BFI: David Parkinson selects 10 great Sherlock Holmes films and TV adaptations.

• Winning entries for the Capture The Atlas Northern Lights Photographer of the Year.

• Books and original drawings by Austin Osman Spare on sale at Gerrish Fine Art.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Chie Yoshii.

• Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie (1973) by Kraftwerk | Cometary Wailing (1981) by Bernard Xolotl | Kometenmelodie Part 1 (1994) by 300,000 VK

Tsathoggua rising

I said last week that I’d almost finished reworking my portrait of Tsathoggua for the Lovecraft book, and here it is. Tsathoggua first came into the world in a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, before being incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft who refers to the god-creature in several of his stories. Where Smith describes a hideous toad-like being, Lovecraft avoids being too closely bound by material specifics, referring to an “amorphous” entity which suggests a range of possibilities for illustration. To be fair to Smith, there is an amorphous and very deadly creature lurking in the temple of Tsathoggua in The Tale of Satampra Zeiros but we never learn whether this is Tsathoggua itself or some other being.

The amorphousness of Lovecraftian entities is a factor which is too often ignored in the world of weird illustration. Cosmic horror thrives on the fluidity of physics and physical matter but many illustrators seem content to copy one another instead of inventing new teratisms, a process that results in the accretion of stereotypes. Cthulhu, as I’m always reminding people, explodes into pieces after being struck by a ship at the end of The Call of Cthulhu, the remnants then recombining when the ship sails away from the scene. Lovecraft never intended his “spawn from the stars” to resemble the accreted stereotype we see today, a kind of Jolly Green Giant with squid mask and bat wings, reaching a brawny and very human arm towards the viewer. The ultimate expression of cosmic amorphousness may be found in the Shoggoths, those alien entities whose default condition is a mass of shapeless, iridescent protoplasm.

It was the amorphous nature of Tsathoggua that I wanted to honour with my original Photoshop creation in 1999. The starting point was a photograph of a cephalopod (I forget now whether it was an octopus or a squid) torn from an old issue of National Geographic. My initial experiments with the picture weren’t intended to develop into Tsathoggua; I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started but at some point during the production of The Great Old Ones I decided to turn the picture into Smith’s entity with the addition of a toad-like head. Rather than mould the rest of the picture into more recognisable organic shapes it was left in a largely amorphous state. The eye-like shape at the top is a complete mystery to me now, I can’t say why it was there but it felt right so there it stayed. Alan Moore’s text for Tsathoggua identifies the creature with the Kabbalistic sphere of Geburah, “Strength”, a zone imbued with the martial qualities of the planet Mars. This is one of the more arbitrary assignations in The Great Old Ones—there’s nothing especially warlike about the toad-god—but something had to occupy the space, and I’d already finished the picture before Alan started writing his pieces. For the new version I’ve redrawn some areas of the original, but most of the work has been a case of sharpening edges and improving the contrast and modelling. The spiky, crown-like upper half has been emphasised a little in order to complement the martial aspect. And the bulging, convex appearance of the original has been slightly enhanced, giving the impression that the creature’s gravitational mass is of a sufficient density to bend the light around it. None of this should be taken as a negation of Smith’s description of a squatting, pot-bellied toad-god. The icons of the Great Old Ones created by human beings are exactly this: human attempts to represent alien monstrosity. Some acolyte who happens to envision the real Tsathoggua might stammer that “It looked like…a giant toad!” thereby giving a form to the subsequent iconography. But the map is not the territory. Cthulhu doesn’t, and shouldn’t look like the statues either. The Jolly Green Giant needs to ditch the mask and wings and get back to selling canned vegetables.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• H.P.L.
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth