Ithell Colquhoun, Moina Mathers and Irish Magic

ISIS by Moina Mathers © National Library of Ireland

It’s really been a triumphant year for Ithell Colquhoun with several new books about her life and work and two major exhibitions in Tate Cornwall and Tate Britain. The latter is still running (until the 19^th of October) and on our recent visit we were hugely impressed at the range of work exhibited, the exhibition space, and the sensitive curatorship of  her fearlessly innovative and original work.

Ithell was interested in earth energies and mysteries and visited many of the significant sites in Cornwall, she painted them too. She visited Ireland in the early 1950s and travelled extensively to ancient sites like Tara, Kells, Glendalough, Cashel and Loughcrew.

But to my delight she also visited Newgrange – not unusual in itself – but her guide was none other than Art O’Murnaghan, who we wrote extensively about in A History of Irish Magic. In his private notebook Art writes about taking visitors to important sites in Ireland, but none have written about him except Ithell.

There is another magical aspect to Ithell’s relationship to Ireland. On her death she made a bequest to the National Library of Ireland of several notebooks in the hand of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, erstwhile head of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric secret society to which W. B. Yeats belonged for many years. Her will stated “To the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin manuscripts in four copy books by S. L. MacGregor Mathers on Celtic subjects”. Ithell also donated something even rarer than Golden Dawn rituals – four paintings by Moina Mathers of Egyptian deities: “four canvasses representing Egyptian Deities by Moina MacGregor Mathers”.

The paintings are fragile and have never been on public display. But thanks to modern technology and a huge ongoing digitisation program at the NLI they can now be seen for the first time here: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Collection/vtls000899621.

How did Ithell, who was refused initiation into the Golden Dawn, acquire these exceptionally rare works? She gives the answer herself in her entertaining autobiographical work The Sword of Wisdom – MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. Ithell’s cousin, Edward Garstin, was a member of the Golden Dawn, in the successor line known as the Alpha et Omega. He was a Chief of the London temple along with Isabel Boyd and her daughter Esme. Garstin had been an army officer (and a war poet of World War I) who became a businessman after his military career, though most of his endeavours in that area seem to have been unsuccessful. He lived with his mother who was also a member of the temple and they were both described as being devoted to esoteric subjects. Garstin wrote two well-regarded books, Theurgy and Secret Fire.

According to Ithell “Moina’s four large canvases representing Egyptian deities— Nephthys, Osiris, Horus Hawk-head and Horus the Younger - used to decorate an ante-room through which devotees passed on their way to the Temple itself. It seems to me that this ante-room or hall may have seen the performance of the Rites of Isis, which were always distinct from the GD rituals though there has been confusion on the point with some writers. The resuscitation of an Isis-cult was one of the many activities into which the Mathers’s plunged in addition to their already full programme of commitments.”

Elsewhere she suggests that the same paintings were used in the public performances of the Rites of Isis, from her reading of a press article and review of the Rites, which appeared in The Sunday Chronicle in 1899. “This article also refers to ‘coloured drawings of Isis, Horus, Nephthys and Anubis’ as forming part of the stage-decor…The names should read Osiris, Horus, Nephthys and Harpocrates unless two of them are different works but there is little doubt about the identity of the set. While none is signed or dated, Edward told me when he gave them to me that they were Moina’s work and were hung in an anteroom to the Ahathoor Temple, to build up the atmosphere of Egyptian tradition.

A label on the back of one of them belongs to the Garde-Meuble Du Colisee, 5, Rue du Colisee, where no doubt they were stored during one of the Mathers’s many house-moves. The panels are painted in oil on canvas with the regalia of the gods emphasised by strips of coloured paper gummed on.”

According to Ithell, all the temple furnishings, texts, robes and regalia were deliberately destroyed in a bonfire at the home of Esme Boyd in 1939 (though I have been informed that several other items survived). It is a interesting coincidence that these paintings, generously donated by Ithell Colquhoun to the National Library of Ireland have become available to view for the first time in the same year that she herself is undergoing a necessary and long- overdue reappraisal of her life and work.

Thanks to Adrienne Murphy for finding the Art O'Murnaghan connection