Dr. Amy Hale is a writer and anthropologist who specialises in the emerging fields of Esoteric studies and Pagan studies. She has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA. From a young age, Dr. Hale has been obsessed with The Celts, or as she told me, what “people love about the idea of ‘The Celts’, much of which, as it turns out, is far more romance than reality.” Her research and writing interests span Druidry, Paganism, the earth mysteries movement and spiritual tourism in Cornwall, “in addition to slightly darker research into radical right-wing Paganism.” Her book Ithell Colquhoun: The Genius of the Fern loved Gully, a biography of the British surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun, will be published in November 2020. I spoke with her in August 2020.
Nicolette Clara Iles What is your experience of being an academic within studies of the occult? How does being both academic and practitioner affect your work—or life?
Amy Hale I haven't exactly had a traditional academic career, so honestly, it hasn't impacted me much. The fact is, it is a relevant phenomenon in the modern world that impacts identities, populations and economies, and that has been the focus of my work. I am not an apologist or theologian. Even when I was a Lecturer at the University of Exeter, looking at modern Paganism in Cornwall was always part of my research, and no one took any issue with it, because the occult and Paganism has had a material impact on Cornwall that is very worth looking at. For most of my career I have taught online, so that perhaps kept me out of the line of fire of colleagues and departments who might have taken issue, but even when I worked in a corporate environment, helping build curricula for Christian schools, my area of research was never an area of concern. The bottom line is that even with a slightly odd area of expertise I conduct myself like a professional and my personal beliefs or practice is no one's business. When people find out they are mostly just fascinated by it.
NCI How can magic and occult studies become a more accessible territory?
AH I think in a lot of ways we are in a Golden Age of esoteric thought. There is more open access to ideas, resources, texts and systems than we have ever had. The possibilities to network and exchange thoughts, ideas and information on occult topics is historically unparalleled. I think the access is there and I believe that esoteric cultures are thriving. I think the big question is more about the ways in which magic and the occult changes wider cultural conversations. I hope that one thing to come out of this esoteric flowering is the realisation that regardless of what people may tell themselves or others about their own spirituality or lack thereof, we are actually complex beings with a range of creative responses to our environments. The idea that the world has been disenchanted by rational thought is starting to slip away, because people have always had remarkably complicated, and sometimes contradictory worldviews. You can be rational, even an atheist as I was raised, and still experience the world around you with awe and mystery. I think it’s in those liminal moments that the space of magic emerges.
NCI So what led you to write a biography about Ithell Colquhoun?
AH From the moment I first encountered Colquhoun's archives at the Tate in 2000 I knew I was encountering a very special person. She seemed to know everyone in the occult world and even her scribbles and doodles showed such an incredible command of esoteric thought. As I write in the book, I believe that Colquhoun was arguably the most engaged woman occultist of the 20th century. She spent every day painting and writing about her esoteric life, and in this book we get just a taste of what it must have been like to life a life that was so influenced by occult thought over seven decades. She provides a unique case study, but the fact that she was a woman makes her historically even more rare. The other thing the book does, and this was really my primary intention, was to show how her life and art reflected the historical and cultural currents in Britain at the time, and how occult practice intersects with wider cultural movements.
NCI How long did you spend researching Ithell Colquhoun? Can you tell me more about that process? I imagine there’s such a full history to go through that condensing to one book must have been a feat!
AH My journey with Colquhoun has been quite a ride! My initial research for that book started about 20 years ago, and the bulk of it has taken a decade to research and write. The research was mostly self-funded, and involved trips to London to work in the Tate archives for weeks at a time while still working my day job as an online professor. It literally took quitting my job to finish the book because the material is just so complex. I’m not sure I will ever feel done with researching Colquhoun, and I don’t think I ever will be. Her work was remarkably complicated and every day I feel like I am learning something new, or have a new insight into what she might have been doing. Her reading and experimentation was incredibly vast. I have more Colquhoun based projects in the works as well! One book won’t be enough.
NCI What can we expect from "Genius of the Fern Loved Gully"? Were there any surprises you encountered while creating this book?
AH I think there may be a couple of surprises for readers. First, I am hoping that people will be blown away by the sheer force of her intellect and creativity and her astonishing command of various magical traditions. The woman never stopped moving, thinking, writing and doing. We are really getting to see an amazing case study of a woman who incorporated her occult interests into every facet of her life and as a result saw the world in such an unusual way. I frequently try to imagine, given her love of colour theory and correspondences, what the world looked like through her eyes, when each colour maps to wider abstract ideas and concepts. Every colour, every shape was a code waiting to be revealed, and I think she probably unraveled quite a bit of that.
Then there’s the sex stuff! Her explicit sex magic images from the early 1940s are unlike anything we have ever seen, to my knowledge anyway, created by a woman magician. It wasn’t just heterosexual couples either. She painted women with women, men with male angels, she was clearly looking beyond traditional magical conceptions of gendered polarity. Colquhoun was never afraid to be in your face about sexual images anyway. Many of her early botanical images were just lightly masked close ups of genitalia, but the sex magic series is utterly fascinating to me. I think people will also be surprised at the fact that she had an affair with a woman and experienced same sex attraction. For me, this really put another interpretive spin of some of the pieces in her archives that were either implicitly or explicitly vulvic in character.
I think for me the biggest realisation was, that despite her love of nature, solitude and general anti-modernism, Colquhoun came from a privileged background and that impacted how she saw the world as well. She had a modest trust, traveled frequently, had domestic help, sometimes owned more than one property, and didn’t have to have a job for most of her life. I think that people have envisioned her as being earthy and gritty with her magic, but she believed that magic wasn’t for everyone, it was for those who were ready to receive the messages of the universe.
NCI How do the Occult and Art link for you?
AH As long as humans have been creating, we have expressed spiritual ideas through art, whether through performance, symbol, or representation. I think all art is meant to take both the artist and the viewer on a journey, and the study of occult and esoteric art raises interesting questions about process and practice that, for me, as a scholar, move between art history and ethnography.
I think in the past scholars who have studied the relationship between art and the occult have focused on the symbolic aspect of “occult art” rather than the process or practice of the artist. Occult practice has not been taken as seriously because it was seen to potentially delegitimise the artist by making them seem, well, nutty, and the same aspersions were also then cast on the researcher. It has been difficult to talk about actual occult practice by artists and writers until I think quite recently. I am not an art historian, though, and because of my academic interests in performance and ritual, my own writings on this topic have been focused on the intersections of art and practice, where the art is part of the magic or the ritual. There are such interesting questions to be asked about how artists experience making art (including ritual, theatre or other performance) as a way of connecting with the numinous, or with ecstasy, and how they communicate that process to the audience. For artists like Barry William Hale, where ritual and performance are so entwined, I am utterly fascinated by his ability to transport the audience using a skilled combination of image and somatic methods. For Ithell Colquhoun, I believe her art was meant to help the viewer cultivate different ways of seeing so that they could penetrate spiritual dimensions. It was clear that she was trying to achieve that with the processes she worked with in her visual arts and in her writing, which were intensely magical. ◉