A Walking Flame

A Walking Flame

by Ithell Colquhoun and Amy Hale
Publication Date: 05/08/2025

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Nearly 40 nearly forgotten essays on magic and esotericism by Ithell Colquhoun.


Writer, artist, and wilfully dissident surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) invested her unique works with magical learning, esoteric lore, and a palpable sense of mystery. Despite having published widely on esoteric and occult topics during her lifetime, Colquhoun was never to produce a single book-length edition of her magical writings. As a result, many of her essays were lost or neglected.


A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings Of Ithell Colquhoun gathers nearly 40 texts by this unique artist and magical practitioner, and displays cohesively, and for the first time, the impressive breadth of Colquhoun’s magical interests and expertise, and how these came to inform her singular works. Ranging from early encounters with the Kabbalah and esoteric color theory, to Celtic mysticism and alchemy, this volume, edited by Colquhoun scholar and folklorist Amy Hale, promises to shed a necessary light on an integral body of Colquhoun’s thought that has remained occluded for too long.

ISBN:
9781913689780
9781913689780
Category:
The arts: general issues
Publication Date:
05-08-2025
Language:
English
Publisher:
MIT Press
Ithell Colquhoun

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism.

She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

Available for download after 05/08/2025

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