February, 2008

Leonora Carrington: Reclaimed Spirituality

“The Bible, like any other history, is full of gaps and peculiarites that only begin to make sense if understood as a covering-up for a very different kind of civilization which had been eliminated.” - Leonora Carrington

Woman-centered spiritual practices predate male centered religions by thousands of years. The three Abrahamic religions, Judahism, Christianity, and Islam evolved into inherently misogynistic institutions, stripping existing pagan female spiritual leaders of their power (see The Chalice and the Blade, Raine Eisler, A History of God, Karen Armstrong, and The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins). In her paintings, Leonora Carrington reclaims this female spiritual power by portraying Catholic rituals as fused with or upended by female centered occult, pre-Christian, or anti-Christian practices. Resistant to the conformist rules of her upper-class Catholic upbringing, Carrington used her vivid imagination to fuel playful, satirical, and sometimes blasphemous paintings that redefined these oppressive forces by combining references to Catholic beliefs and practices with a range of pagan, magical, occult, mystical and folk traditions. This paper will explore Carrington’s subversion of male-centered Catholic traditions in favor of a new, personalized and feminized spirituality.

As a child, Carrington’s imagination and unique vision of the metaphysical were stimulated by the commingling of her Catholic education with tales of Irish folklore, Celtic mythology, and fairy-like ancestors told to her by female family members. Her mother’s Irish heritage gave her insight into a peculiar melding of pagan traditions and Irish Catholic mysticism that effected her adult work. Her strict religious education instilled in her a lifelong distrust of the Catholic church, yet it also lead her to develop fascination with saints, particularly those to whom miracles of extraordinarily paranormal nature are attributed (15, 18). Later in life, Carrington’s immersion into Mexico’s spiritual culture, with its unique hybrid of Spanish Catholicism, pre-Conquest spiritual practices, folk healing wisdom, and witchcraft would also inform her eclectic spiritual vision (62). As a feminist committed to the goal of reclaiming the central role of women within occult traditions, it is no surprise that Carrington would reference female centered spiritual acts in her work (9). The five works analyzed below, demonstrate Carrington’s efforts to supplant patriarchal Christian rituals and beliefs with matriarchal practices of the occult, witchcraft, alchemy, and various folk spiritual customs.

In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1947, Carrington combines her interests in the power of pre-Christian feminine spiritual practices with her lifelong fascination with saints and miracles. Inspired by a work of the same title by Hieronymous Bosch, Carrington infused the tale of the hermit saint with mysterious feminine figures who perform obscure ritual acts that bear no relation to the original story of the saint. A pale, withered and inexplicably three-headed Anthony is flanked on one side by an androgynous cloaked woman, a priestess of sorts, tending to a bubbling concoction in a large cauldron, itself a symbol of fertility and abundance (76). On his other side, a queen and her attendants perform an enigmatic ritual dance. Her tent-like circular cape, held in the hands of her maidens, becomes an inverted (and thus rejected) umbrella. Rushing past him is a life-giving river that has poured miraculously from a ceramic vessel held by another witch-like feminine form. Anthony, dressed in rags and pale from his self-deprivations, would benefit from the gifts of protection and nourishment offered by these powerful women, but in his righteousness, he is determined to abstain. Here, Carrington mocks Saint Anthony’s self imposed impoverishment as a commentary on Catholic ascetic practices (77).

Carrington’s antipathy for the rites of the Catholic church is perhaps no more evident than in The Meal of Lord Candlestick, 1938. In this disturbing portrayal of a sacramental feast, she lashes out at Catholic ritual and authority in a scenario that is nothing short of blasphemous. Here she merges the Christian Eucharist with cannibalism, blood sacrifice, and witchcraft. She is at her most subversive here, inverting the established order of things and redefining conventions of class, gender, and religion (41).

Five grotesque female figures preside over an altar-like table, teeming with platters full of unlikely foodstuffs. One platter holds a live human baby which a priestess spears with a fork, releasing drops of sacrificial blood. Here Carrington cleverly satirizes the stories of the nativity and the crucifixion into a single grotesque gesture (39, 41). She portrays the symbolic act of consuming the body and blood of Christ as ridiculously cannibalistic and violent, questioning a “civilized” religion might partake in such savage ritual acts. Christian sacrificial rites are connected to those of more “primitive” religions as the High Priestess is momentarily distracted from her slaughter of the child to receive a sacrificial goat. The women in this scene reclaim their spiritual authority over men. Large, phallic, and witch-like, they tower over diminutive male servants and Lord Candlestick himself, a stand-in for Carrington’s father and possibly also the male authority of the Catholic church. Reduced to an amorphous blob, he is stripped of his power, unable to do more than silently observe as the women indulge themselves.

The theme of a ritual meal recurs throughout much of Carrington’s work. Her emphasis on the preparation, presentation, and consumption of food connects the feminine domestic sphere with magical practices of diverse cultures (9). Carrington herself engaged in pseudoscientific experiments in her kitchen, fusing cooking with alchemy and the occult. She saw cooking as a metaphor for hermetic pursuits and associated women’s traditional roles with magical acts of transformation (60). The domestic realm supplants patriarchal spiritual authority with feminine spiritual power in The House Opposite, 1945. The title suggests the feminine domicile as an alternative to the Catholic church, where conventional practices and structures are reversed in favor of a return to female centered spirituality. Here Carrington removes hierarchical structures and patriarchal control in favor of a sacred space that promotes interconnectedness, egalitarianism, and the transformative powers of food.

The exterior walls of a large house are cut away to reveal a number of rooms connected by passageways, ladders, and permeable walls. Figures pass freely from room to room, seemingly linked to one another in a sisterly community. Within these chambers, women engage in gentle occult acts that replace Catholic sacramental rituals. By partaking of food from a bowl, a woman seated at the central table magically summons spiritual figures from below. A blue robed figure, reminiscent of the Virgin Mary assumes occult authority with her magic wand and feline familiar. Standing in for the Holy Trinity, the Three Fates of Destiny brew a potion from a magic cauldron. Egg shaped cooking vessels refer to the transformative powers of alchemy. Carrington unites magical and transformative food references with the woman’s traditional occupation as nourisher of the species. In this work, mundane activities become sacred substitutes for the Christian practice of the sacrament (68, 69).

The transformative powers of a sacramental meal are also explored in AB EO QUOD, 1956. Here, the grapes, bread anwine of the Catholic communion ritual share the table with a large egg that receives a stream of water poured from a white rose that grows from the ceiling. As the water hits the egg it is converted to steam, symbolizing both alchemical transformation and the transubstantiation in the Catholic mass in which the bread and wine of the Eucharist are transformed into the blood and body of Christ. Fairy-like moths that flit around the room after emerging from cocoons suggest enchantment and metamorphosis (82). Clearly Carrington sees magical transformation as key to all spiritual events.

This work fuses Alchemy and fairy magic with references to Graeco-Roman mythology. Whereas the wine and grapes on the table obviously signify the Eucharist, they may refer to a Dionysian rite as well. The walls behind the table are decorated in a red painted style that calls to mind the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, where a female initiate is portrayed in a mural cycle that includes a ritual meal, flagellation, and symbolic marriage to the god of the intoxicating and therefore transformative power of wine. That Dionysus also presided over communication between living and dead souls, leaves us to wonder to where the ritual participants have disappeared. Could they be visiting the underworld, as suggested by a pomegranate that alludes to Persephone? Might they have undergone their own magical transubstantiation? The wise smile
of the mysterious, root-like creature who peeks out at us from beneath the table suggests she knows where they are.

Descent into a mysterious underworld also plays out in the puzzling triptych, Took My Way Down, Like A Messenger, To the Deep, 1977. Offering an alternative to Christian beliefs about the afterlife, Carrington references spiritualism, nocturnal travel, and a multiplicity of belief systems in Mexico. The work is complex and enigmatic but taken as a whole it suggests an ethereal downward journey to an alternative realm.

The vertical arrangement of the three panels contradicts the arrangement of a typical Christian altarpiece, inviting a top to bottom reading that inverts the usual hierarchical ascension implicit in many Christian works of art. In the top panel, a female psychic or curandera sits at a magic table so black that it appears to be an elliptical hole through which one may pass to an alternate realm. Water flows from a ceramic vessel similar to the one seen in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, turning the center panel into an aquatic underworld. A number of mysterious figures, accompanied by psychic cats, file downward through this transitory space. The black-cloaked figure of death looks on as a cauldron-toting crone descends a pyramidal structure stacked with rows of skulls. Triangular in shape, it supplants the Holy Trinity with an ancient Mexican pyramid or Day of the Dead altar (126). The watery realm of the center panel serves as a liminal space that separates two distinctly different states of being. In the third panel, the water gives way to a dark, cavernous space that seems to exist below earth, sea, and human consciousness. A cloaked calavera meets our gaze to serves as our spiritual guide in this unfamiliar space. A full moon, crossed by a procession of wild dogs, sets on a red triangle that mirrors the pyramidal form above. An ancient symbol of femininity, this triangle a the final inversion of Christian orthodoxy. Here, as in so many of her works, Carrington reclaims the ancient feminine spirituality that has been repressed for millennia by male-centered religions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberth, Susan L. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Burlington, Vermont, Lund Humphries Publishers. 2004.