From Gandalf's Garden to the Rose of the Palace of the Earth:The Occult in British Art.

Tate Britain in Pimlico is a familiar sight to most Londoners. Its neoclassical architecture has long been associated with rationality and enlightenment values and with a move away from the myths and suspicions of the past yet even from the outside you can see decorative sphinxes adorning the building and sphinxes, spoiler alert, aren't real. They're mythological.

Once inside the building the home of British art reveals itself to be something of a repository for all manner of occult and magical interests. Alchemy, divination, witchcraft, tarot, magic stones, and sacred wells. Which all feature in Tate archivist Victoria Jenkins' new book Visions of the Occult:An Untold Story of Art and Magic.

Victoria was at Conway Hall, with the London Fortean Society, to give a speech, with the same title, about both that book and her findings and if that talk was more a guided tour of the galleries and archives than a richly storied narrative that didn't mean it was any less curious.

Occultism is clearly popular in London as the event was sold out and once I'd visited the Fryer's Delight on Theobald's Road for some chips and beans and a can of Coke (for probably the last time as their Wikipedia page informs me they use beef dripping instead of vegetable oil) I took my seat for a journey through the huge waterproof underground doors into the belly of the Tate Britain archives where a huge gallery of sketches and drawings provide not only great insight into British art and artists but also evidence of just how many of those artists have either flirted with, been inspired by, or fully immersed themselves into occult belief systems.

William Blake's works are, famously, symbolically rich (and you can read more about that here) and then there's John William Waterhouse's 1886 The Magic Circle (above) which showcases a goddess of the underworld. Betye Saar's work makes use of devotional and ceremonial items like candles, bones, and shells and, over in Tate Modern, you can see Leonora Carrington's 1860 Eluhim (below) which features seraphims, and birds that are sacred in Mesoamerican mythology and is informed by theories of the unconscious mind.

James Boswell made images of witch hunts (essentially manifestations of the era's societal misogyny) and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth designed costumes for a clairvoyant named Sosotris which later inspired her 1949 piece Bicentric Form (above)

There are hand prints by Oskar Kokoschka (which, for reasons I couldn't understand, are linked to horoscope charts) and Eileen Agar's photos of megaliths and rock formations from around the British Isles. Most famously those of Avebury.

One of the stars of the talk was an artist previously unknown to me. Ithel Colquhoun (1906-88) was, as well as being an artist, a genuine occultist and learned student of esoteric thought. It's her Santa Warner's Wishing Well that heads up this blog but it's also worth mentioning the fantastically titled The Princess of the Echoing Hills, The Rose of the Palace of the Earth (below) as Victoria has used it for the cover of her book.

Alongside documents relating to the new age spiritualists and countercultures of the 1960s (like John Hurford's cover of Gandalf's Garden - the Tate's copy once belonged to Edward Burra) you can study (and you can, you can book a visit) such curios as Paul Nash's Marsh Parsonage. A work that reflects on his interest in animism (the belief that rocks, rivers, mountains, etc; all have a living presence) and later showed up in his wonderful 1936 collage Swanage.

I love a bit of Paul Nash, me! But the funniest story of the evening referred to William Burrough's (yes, that one) photograph of the Moka Bar in Soho. Burroughs intended this, and other photos in the same series, as a psychoactive attack on the cafe for, among other perceived sins, serving "poisonous cheesecake".

It might have worked as the cafe closed down a few months after Burroughs' 'campaign'. It was a humorous note to end a fun night (and one that touched on, of course, Aleister Crowley and Paul Klee's theory of 'taking a line for a walk') on and for that I'd like to thank my Fortean chums Dewi, Tim, David, Michael, compere Scott Wood, and Victoria herself. All of whom joined me for a quick debrief over a couple of pints in the Dolphin Tavern afterwards. It was the last LFS event of 2022 and it seemed a very pleasant way to round off a year of interesting talks. Bring on the 2023 batch!