Quest Magazine

VOLUME 90, NUMBER 3

Contents

Viewpoint: Brotherhood
By John Algeo

Theosophy and the Emergence of Modern Abstract Art
By Kathleen Hall

Coloring in the Lines around My Think
By Don Kruse

Jean Delville: Painting, Spirituality, and the Esoteric
By Lynda Harris

Our Lady of the Dark Forest: The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln
By Karen McCormick

The Symbolic Art of Charles Rennie Mackintosh
By Alan Senior

Originally printed in the May - June 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kruse, Don. "Coloring in the Lines around My Think." Quest  90.3 (MAY - JUNE 2002):

By Don Kruse

[Artist and teacher Don Kruse has recently donated three of his painting to the permanent collection of the Theosophical Society in America. At our invitation, he writes here about those paintings and about the process of producing them and the meaning of art.]

When artists are asked to discuss their own work, they will often talk about technique and content. Technique is how they "style" their chosen media, shaped by their education and knowledge, personal biases and idiosyncrasies, emotions, psychology, beliefs, and life experiences' in short, all of those determinants that make a unique personality. Craftsmanship is styling that is skillful, disciplined, controlled, and "well and truly made." Art is often contrasted with craft, but I think that most artists want to be considered creative in both craft and artistry. Creativity should not be limited to the artistry side of the work.

Content is the subject matter or what the image is all about  a landscape, portrait or still life, for example. The content of art includes many great themes drawn from religion, philosophy, mythology, and other symbolic systems. A society's most profound metaphysical beliefs and attitudes about God, Truth, and Reality are often the greatest concerns of its artists. Content provides meaning to a work of art, whereas technique is the process of expressing that meaning. Because the content or iconography is where meaning resides, it is crucial when the completed form is first imagined in the mind's eye and the creative act occurs. Such considerations as geography, nationality, historical era, and culture influence both content and style. They are some aspects of a work of art that an artist may choose to talk about.

Margaret Mead once asked a young child how she made a picture. The child replied, "I get a think. I draw a line around my think and then color it in." I try to do approximately the same thing'simply, clearly, and honestly. The real distinctions lie in my images or "thinks." How and where did I get them? Are they from nature or from my imagination, maybe even from the world of art itself? What do they signify? I try to communicate to viewers a complex iconography, an esoteric world of Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, and Jungian psychology. Does a child care if another person sees the line she has around her think and colored in? My images come from my wandering through museums and galleries, sitting in lectures and seminars, reading books, looking at comic strips and movies . . . and meditating'just being a silent witness. Perhaps both the child and I get our visions from the same place, a most marvelous and wonderful gallery called by the Tibetans the Great Matrix of the Mystery.

The design, composition, or structural putting together of parts to make a harmonious whole can be learned in classes, or to some artists it may come naturally. I taught Graphic Design for many years, so I draw on commercial art as well as art history for the design of my own pictures. I just try to draw what I have seen, as beautifully, elegantly, descriptively, and expressively as a Zen calligrapher would. I try to use a simple pencil as they use their brushes. I think one's personality can be revealed by handwriting. Every slant, loop, pressure, twist, and turn reveals meaning to a trained eye.

For an artist, the marks, lines, dots, dashes, shadings, shadows, and light of drawing reveal the soul. They suggest confidence, sensitivity, depth of understanding, and maturity of spiritual development'or so the Zen sumi brush painters say. After once being given a beautiful set of sumi brushes, I learned that my native tools, pencils, pastels, crayons, and occasionally watercolor are best for my efforts. It's interesting that soft bristle brushes and ink (soft, moist, receptive, feminine) seem to typify the introverted contemplative yin East, while pencils, pastels and steel pens (hard, dry, masculine) may be extroverted Western yang traits. But, of course, I still admire and respect the great variety of materials and techniques used by artists around the world and throughout history.

Having drawn a line around my think, next I color it in. I try to stay between the lines.

Expressing the artist's personality or emotions has been the criteria for measuring much art during the past century. Every nuance of uniqueness, every personal idiosyncrasy, is scrutinized and praised as revealing meaning through the personality and artistic technique. Much of this preoccupation with drawing-room psychology came about after Freud and the birth of modern psychology. This is not a criticism, as I have been deeply influenced by the writing of Carl Jung and his followers. Still, I have chosen to try to move my center of attention from my personality 'or self to my Buddha Nature or Self. Through the practice of yoga, Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, Jungian Psychology, and other minor efforts, for over thirty years I have tried to deemphasize my ego inflating obsessions. I don't sign my pictures; I've tried to make them anonymous, free of personality quirks. In short, I try to eliminate anything to brag about, inflate my ego, or cause more hubris.

Demon Queller

In "Demon Queller," the central figure is Shoki, the Japanese hero, who strikes a dramatic pose threatening the mischievous demon, Oni. In many Japanese myths, demons are quelled, not killed. They are vanquished and made an ally or an assistant in the hero's continuing struggle to conquer his remaining internal demons, those personality impediments or obstructions that retard or make impossible his psycho-spiritual quest for enlightenment. Below this scene, in a rectangle (the material plane), are a variety of demons. Some are taken from Eskimo drawings'childlike, charming, but still pretty scary, I think. They are hairy, screaming, wild-eyed, and, all things considered, pretty good graphic representations of elemental demons. I was interested in a primitive or fundamentalist's literal depiction of evil (low in the picture, on the physical material plane). Next to these random free-floating images is a shaman's healing trance from the Bushmen of the Kalahari. In a kind of procession or dance, spirits or healing energies come into the top of his head in broken lines of short dashes. Later, enveloped in his trance, he casts out demons and takes in healing forces with the aid of other celebrants.

The picture is constructed in layers, the lowest is the primitive, physical, literal or fundamentalist stage. The middle section with Shoki and Oni is the psychological and mythic level. The highest plane is a triangle separated from the rest of the picture by a loose bouquet of flowers. I use flowers often as a symbol of life energies like the Tree of Life. The angel is, of course, the devic kingdom or the invisible realm of helpers, ancestors, gods, heroes, and all other spiritual forces. Buddhists call those three stages vestures or bodies or incarnations of the Buddha. Nirmanakaya is the physical incarnation. Sambhogakaya is the bliss vesture, the archetypal or mythic body. Dharmakaya is the spirit or Truth realm. Art can reflect or contain by analogy the human condition or constitution: "As above so below". Just as we humans are a reflection of a higher and more complete reality, art stands to us as we stand to God.

If you have good art history recognition, you will have guessed the angel to be taken from Albert Darer's set of woodcuts entitled "The Apocalypse." I often browse my mental file of art, as well as other sources, looking for just the correct character or symbol to tell my myth. The telling of that myth is often a collage of art images that I've collected and rearranged into a new design, altering the color, and binding it all together with drawing.

Toys

"Toys" is a rather simple composition, constructed of almost symmetrically stacked toys, three high, like a totem pole. The toys symbolize heaven and earth, with humanity dancing precariously between. Earth is symbolized, as it often is, by a four-legged creature and his rider, in this case the hobbyhorse and uniformed soldier. They rock backward, creating tension and imbalance. You almost want to reach out and help hold them or straighten up the entire column. The puppet in the middle has unseen forces tugging at his arms and leg. Perhaps those invisible influences can maintain balance through humanity's efforts. The top toy is a beautiful little Japanese tin toy. The round drum represents heaven and supports a lovely lady repeating the soldier and his mount at the lower level. Some stability is achieved by the small almost square stage to the left and its puppet performer, Punch, remembered from the very old European street entertainment for children,"Punch and Judy" shows. The picture is just a gentle reminder of how toys, puppets, games, even comic strips influence a child's development with archetypal symbols. Perhaps somewhere in our adult psyche, there may still be a deep identification with and satisfaction from recognizing these images.

I use words and phrases in my pictures for the same reasons that a medieval monk in his small cell or scriptorium wrote out a prayer book or the Bible in calligraphy. The sacredness of language, the magic of the written and spoken word, and the love and admiration of each and every letter became his prayer, as it is mine.

Suffering Fools

"Suffering Fools" is an attempt at a humorous representation of psychic poisons. In Tibetan Buddhism, three human character flaws are seen to be the core reasons for humanity's constant suffering. The Tibetans call them poisons, each with its own antidote or medicine. The moneylender at the far right represents greed or desire. He seems happy enough with his wealth, but it is never enough'he will soon be craving more. Generosity is his cure. The silly king toward the left, with his passion for power and control, is only a moment away from fierce rage at not being obeyed. Equanimity is his salvation. The foolish clown, between the other two, dances on and on in his ignorance. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know. Wisdom is his antidote. On the far left is Punch again, this time being bitten by his own dog because of something really stupid he must have done . . . or not done. All of us must suffer these fools in others and in ourselves.

Ananda Coomaraswamy suggests that "all art is a support for contemplation." He means that art is a meditation tool and that it can inspire an experience of the transcendent. Most artists hope that their pictures provide, at least to some extent, such an experience.

Don Kruse, who has a Bachelor of Science in Education from Indiana University, is Associate Professor of Fine Art Emeritus at Indiana University at Fort Wayne. His paintings draw on mythological images, popular art such as comic strips, and the works of master artists'all blended into a united whole, imbued with inner meaning. Don can be reached by e-mail at dskruse@wi.com or by phone at 260-744-5949.

Originally printed in the May - June 2002  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: McCormick, Karen. "Our Lady of the Dark Forest: The Black Modonna of Einsiedein." Quest  90.3 (MAY - JUNE 2002):

 by Karen McCormick

DARKNESS is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and DARKNESS pure Spirit.

H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:70

A MILLION PILGRIMS journey each year into northern Switzerland to see "her." "She" is carved of wood in late Gothic style, is painted coal black, and is not quite four feet tall. She is perhaps some five hundred years old, but her spiritual history reaches back another 600 years. Who is she?

Arrayed in elegant brocades embroidered with golden floral accents with beaten gold clouds and lightning exploding all around her, the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, Switzerland, resides at the center of one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in Europe. She holds the Christ child on her left arm, and he in turn holds a black bird. Both mother and child have golden hair and golden crowns. Her right hand clasps a majestic and powerful scepter, while a chain with a Sacred Heart hangs from her arm.

This Black Madonna holds sacred court in her black marble Lady Chapel, which is completely enclosed within the nave of the larger basilica of the massive Benedictine abbey at Einsiedeln. Small painted plaques grace the dark walls of the chapel—votive offerings from devotees who wish to memorialize their deep gratitude to Our Lady for her healing or intervention in their lives. Crutches and braces have been discarded to the side of the chapel, with the heartfelt devotion of the healed supplicant. In confirmation, the official "miracle books" of the Monastery record many reports of the Black Madonna's interventions.

"Einsiedeln has evolved into a healing shrine, where for many centuries people have come and found relief from their mental and physical ailments," writes Fred Gustafson in his Jungian treatise The Black Madonna. "Like the other black goddesses of Europe, she is associated with healing ability and miracle working. This is usually more common among the Black Virgins than among their white counterparts."

The Story of St. Meinrad

Recorded history of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln begins with the story of St. Meinrad. He was born in the family castle at Sulchen during the last years of the eighth century, during the reign of Charlemagne. Having taken the vows of a Benedictine monk at the age of twenty-five, Meinrad sought a more complete solitude as the years passed, and so entered the Finsterwald—the Dark Forest—of northern Switzerland as he neared the age of forty.

One day in the forest, Meinrad noticed that hawks were threatening two young ravens nesting in a tall fir tree. He rescued the ravens, fed them, and raised them. Meinrad also built a single cell for himself, with an adjacent chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, whose statue had been presented to him by Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich. The two ravens, as the legend goes, stayed on as his familiars or allies. "The entry of Meinrad into the Finsterwald and the rescue of the ravens is indeed the starting point of a great work that developed into the Cult of Mary, which later emphasized her blackness," reflects Fred Gustafson.

Meinrad spent twenty-five years at this site until his death in the year 861. One morning, while celebrating Mass, he foresaw his own murder, which occurred later that day. The two ravens screeched as the saint was martyred, pursued the fleeing murderers, and revealed to the nearby villagers the miscreants' hideout at a local inn. To this day, the monastery flag features the images of those two ravens.

In The Secret Doctrine (1:443), H. P. Blavatsky records the presence of ravens and blackbirds in a number of mythic cosmogonies: "What is the real meaning of all of those black birds? They are all connected with the primeval wisdom, which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of All."

The present Black Madonna chapel is said to be located over Meinrad's original hermitage. The name of the town "Einsiedeln" means "The Hermitage." After Meinrad's death, other priests and monks came to live in cells that were built around Meinrad's original chapel. St. Eberhard, a French nobleman, arrived in Einsiedeln in 934 and became the first abbot of the Benedictine community that had gathered there. He placed the monks under the protection of "Our Lady of the Hermits." Lay devotees were beginning to make pilgrimages to Einsiedeln about this time, as well.

Schwartzmuttergottes, the Black Mother of God

The lineage of the present Black Madonna statue at Einsiedeln is not entirely clear. Today's holy figure is not Meinrad's original Virgin from the ninth century. It is likely that the reigning Black Madonna is a statue carved in the fifteenth century and restored in the eighteenth.

The greatest mystery is when, how, and why she became black? In 1799, Johann Adam Fuetscher, the statue's restorer, supposedly wrote: "The carved wooden face was thoroughly black. This color is not attributable to a painter, but to the smoke of the lights of the hanging lamps which for so many centuries always burned in the Holy Chapel at Einsiedeln. It was very clear to me that the face had been initially entirely flesh-colored."

When Fuetscher restored the statue, the common people demanded that he paint the entire Madonna black. Perhaps the original was indeed flesh-colored in the beginning, yet the "blackened" Madonna had grown precious to her devotees over the centuries. Some researchers believe that the Catholic Church may have circulated the theory of the "Smoke-Blackened Madonna" to help discredit the mysterious origins of some four hundred Black Virgins found throughout Europe.

"The Virgin Mary is one side of the life principle, a light feminine side of the psyche, but the Black Madonna picks up another side of this life principle, in relatively isolated places such as Einsiedeln and Czestochowa in Poland," Gustafson observes. "Here can be seen, in incarnate form, the 'black aspect' of life and its right to exist."

In Isis Unveiled (2:94 -5), Blavatsky quotes from The Gnostics and Their Remains on the subject of the Black Virgins of France:

"Immaculate is Our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving of Serapis and Isis, described by King, . . . the very terms applied afterwards to that personage [the Virgin Mary] who succeeded to her form, titles, symbols, rites, and ceremonies. . . . Thus her devotees carried into the new priesthood the former badges of their profession, the obligation to celibacy, the tonsure, and the surplice. . . . The"Black Virgins," so highly reverenced in certain French cathedrals . . . proved, when at last critically examined, [to be] basalt figures of Isis.

Carl Jung apparently believed that the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln was also a manifestation of Isis, representing the cult that migrated from southern Egypt to the Mediterranean, and then spread throughout much of Europe. Many observers, including the mythologist Joseph Campbell, have noted the similarities between statues of the Madonna and Child, and Isis and Horus, with Isis often depicted as black in her original representations. "Like the Madonna of Einsiedeln, Isis too is considered a Virgin, the Mother of God, and . . . the 'black healer,'" writes Gustafson.

China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, had these feelings after her visit to Our Lady of the Dark Forest:

Seeing the Madonna at Einsiedeln gives me the sense that she is a Western remnant of the ancient Dark God[dess]—be she the Indian Kali, Durga, lesser known forms of the Tibetan Tara, the African-Egyptian Isis, the Roman Cybele, or the Greek Artemis or Demeter (Ishtar or Inanna)—all contain aspects or have manifestations of the Black Mother. . . . this is the darkness of ancient wisdom, of people of color, of space, of the womb, of the earth, of the unknown, of sorrow, of the imagination, the darkness of death, of the human heart, of the unconscious, of the darkness beyond light, of matter, of the descent, of the body, of the shadow of the Most High.

It is likely that many of the Black Virgins in Europe were located at natural energy centers that had been the foci for the celebration of Earth Mysteries for hundreds or even thousands of years previously. Perhaps St. Meinrad was intuitively attracted to some potent electromagnetic fields in the Dark Forest and celebrated the site with devotions to Our Lady. It may have been a location for some ancient worship that preceded him. In any case, the Dark Forest was probably a strong geomantic area of the kind described in the I Ching: "Heaven and Earth determine the place. The holy sages fulfill the possibilities of those places. Through the thoughts of men and the thoughts of spirits the people are enabled to participate in these possibilities." St. Meinrad may well have been just one of those "holy sages" in his "holy place," preparing the Dark Forest for the installation of one of the most powerful and compassionate Mother Goddesses of all time.

Whatever the exact origins of this highly venerated Black Madonna at Einsiedeln, the dispenser of miraculous graces, she is praised each day at 4:30 PM, just as she has been for the past four hundred years, when the Benedictine monks sing the "Salve Regina":

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our Life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning, and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, our advocate, your eyes of Mercy toward us. And after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy Womb, Jesus. O Clement, O Loving, O Sweet Virgin Mary.

References

Karen McCormick is the author of A Theosophical Guide for Parents and The Essence of Healing: A Theosophical Handbook. Her current activities are enjoying her five grandchildren and exploring sacred sites in the American West.

Originally printed in the May - June 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Senior, Alan. "The Symbolic Art of Charles Rennie MacKintosh." Quest  90.3 (MAY - JUNE 2002):

By Alan Senior

While serving his apprenticeship in Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) attended evening classes in architecture at Glasgow School of Art. The School, under the remarkable direction of Francis(Fra) Newbery (1855-1946), was recognized as one of Europe's leading design schools, its main function being to educate industrial artists and ornamentalists.

In 1891 Mackintosh won a traveling scholarship, visiting France, Italy, and Belgium, where he produced masses of line drawings and many watercolor sketches of buildings. The artist Sir James Guthrie was much impressed by the drawings and, when told they were by an architectural student, he turned to the School's Director, saying: "Hang it, Newbery, this fellow Mackintosh ought to be an artist!"

But Guthrie echoed Newbery's feelings that Mackintosh should design the new School of Art on a steep hill in the heart of Glasgow. Mackintosh was twenty-eight when he produced the initial design and in his early forties when the second phase was completed. It was his first important commission, the most celebrated of his architectural designs, and (some would say) the beginning of modern architecture.

In 1892 Newbery introduced Mackintosh to the Macdonald sisters, Margaret and Frances, who had registered as art students in 1890. Newbery had noticed similarities in their style of work and encouraged them to collaborate and to exhibit together. With Herbert MacNair, Mackintosh's friend and fellow architectural student, they were to form a group known as the Glasgow Four, the most original and internationally influential artists that Scotland has produced.

Symbolism was crucial to their art, together with those intangible, indefinable and mystical qualities found in the group's watercolor sketches up to 1900. Indeed, Herbert MacNair, late in life, confided that in the group's early works "not a line was drawn without purpose, and rarely was a single motif employed that had not some allegorical meaning" (Howarth 19).

Like Kandinsky, Mackintosh was searching in his work for "the soul that lies beneath appearances" and, also like Kandinsky, he found that this soul was best expressed through a poetic mood of symbolic illumination. In the 1890s and early 1900s a spiritual atmosphere pervaded Scotland's cultural life, and many influential artists and writers were either group members or followers of Rosicrucian, Theosophical, or Spiritualist thought. There are many indications that the Glasgow Four's ideas and inspirations were deeply affected by such movements. As Timothy Neat (23) puts it, "There was a revival of the belief in the 'cosmic character' of art: a belief that the making of art and the viewing of art should be, above all, a spiritual quest."

Connected with Rosicrucianism was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, based in London from 1887 with the poet William Butler Yeats as its best-known member from 1893. Jack Yeats, the poet's painter-brother, was also a member and closely connected with the Glasgow Four. Their ideas and lifestyle seemed to follow the spirit of the Rosicrucians, if not those of the Order of the Golden Dawn, with its secret writings, ambiguous words, images, and acronymic names. As Neat (130) cautions, "Rosicrucian beliefs should not mechanically be sought in the work of the Four; but an awareness of Rosicrucian and Symbolist values can undoubtedly help illumine many of the objects these artists created for their fellow men and the heart of mankind."

The Glasgow Four used the rose so often as an iconic symbol that it was characteristic of them. H. P.Blavatsky ("Traces" 292) calls the rose the grandest and noblest of nature's symbols, adding: "To theRosicrucian, the 'Rose' was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis, the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as a virgin woman by the EgyptianInitiates."

There are echoes of Mondrian in the work of all four artists, particularly the Dutchman's Theosophically inspired Evolution Triptych (1910-11). And his oval-shaped compositions seem to relate to the "World Egg" discussed by H. P. Blavatsky in relation to cosmic birth and evolution. There is a high degree of feminist thinking in many of the works of the Four. The return of the goddess or the feminine principle, which has found expression over the last few decades in art and ecology, occurred much earlier in the art of the Glasgow Four. Mackintosh's interiors have a perfect unity of the feminine and the masculine (yin and yang), deriving naturally from his partnership with his wife. In 1927, he wrote her, "You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not three-quarters of them." He believed that Margaret had genius, whereas he had only talent.

The meaning of Mackintosh's stylized abstract concepts seems to have eluded many commentators, but they are more ethereal and less eerie or melancholic than the images of the sisters and MacNair. Mackintosh said, "You must be independent, shaking off all the props tradition and authority offer you, and go on alone. The artist's motto should be, 'I care not the least for theories or for this or that dogma so far as the practice of art is concerned—but take my stand on what I consider my personal ideal.'"

That ideal may have contained a great deal of Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, and works reproduced in The Magazine (a hand-made "scrapbook" intended for circulation among the Glasgow Art students), to which Mackintosh contributed drawings, throw a little more light on these esoteric concepts.

For instance, The Harvest Moon of 1892 -3 is the earliest of a group of symbolic watercolors and is almost certainly influenced by Rosicrucian and Theosophical thought. Timothy Neat (52) proposes a symbolic interpretation: "The clouds which lie horizontally across the moon, rather like two bars, can be read as levels, as stratifications, of spiritual being. . . . The bars of cloud that cross Mackintosh's moon give symbolic expression to just those values Kandinsky believed important. The naked woman in the cloud . . . clearly exists in a lower, more physical zone than the moon-maiden above her."

In another painting by Mackintosh called Winter, certain ideas of Blavatsky's are expressed, using the analogy of a seed called "Hiranyagarbha" or the "golden egg" or "golden womb," from which a universe is born, like an oak from an acorn by self-becoming or self-unfoldment. "To the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom," Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine 2:588) asserts, "every atom of Nature . . . contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits give life eternal and not physical life alone." And Winter depicts the universe, vegetation, and humanity coming into being.

The twin females figures in this painting may represent our dual nature, spiritual and physical. In their ceaseless striving towards perfection they are flawless, their form set to become Divine Humanity, and one feels that Mackintosh is illustrating the power of human beings to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent matter by asserting their superiority over all perishable forms. At the top of the design is a veiled image of the sun (which will change winter into spring), and a third of the way up a plant stem is a vivid heart-shaped green leaf of life. Above it, stylized buds symbolize the "flower of art" to come. The stem terminates within a ring, an emblem of wholeness and potentiality, which then spreads out to enclose the two women, becoming their hair.

Mackintosh's attention was directed to soul-growth; what interested him was the Force that directs growth, the ever mysterious and ever unknown. As Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine 2:589) wrote, "For this vital Force, that makes the seed germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form the trunk and branches, which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of the Aswattha, the holy Tree of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and procreate other trees—this is the only FORCE that has reality . . . as it is the never-dying breath of life."

Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary (337) comments, "From the highest antiquity trees were connected with the gods and mystical forces in nature. Every nation had its sacred tree, with its peculiar characteristics and attributes based on natural, and also occasionally on occult properties, as expounded in the esoteric teachings." The symbol for sacred and secret knowledge in antiquity was a tree; hence dragons (symbols of wisdom) guard the Trees of Knowledge. Among the many representations of the rose, the cross, the square, and the circle, it is the tree, in various stylized forms, that dominates Mackintosh's art and architecture. In his architectural lectures, Mackintosh quoted from W. R. Lethaby's Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, which propounded a cosmic symbolism whereby a tree is both a symbol of the universe and a basic form of building construction; so the Tree of Life now becomes a symbol for inspired architecture.

From his earliest 1894 pencil and color wash drawings Mackintosh depicted the Tree of Life. The sculpted relief carving above the entrance to the Glasgow School of Art portrays two maidens guarding a central tree, which is an emblem, both of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Mackintosh also sets another Tree of Life within the oval glass insets on the doors of the ground floor, while the library is closely linked with the Tree of Knowledge in a series of visual puns (leaves on balusters, leaves in books). In Queen's Cross Church Hall, Mackintosh ornamented the composite trusses with a Tree of Life emblem and the church's east window with a T-shaped Tree of Knowledge or Cross; even the apple in relief on the internal doors can be associated with the Biblical Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil.

Mackintosh did not commit himself as strongly to the fairytale world as did his wife and her sister, but when he did so, his fairies are more substantial than their depictions. There are two surviving fairy paintings, so perhaps the Devas were another source of inspiration in the late 1890s. The Devic Kingdom—life from the lowest elemental to the highest archangel—was often spoken of in the faerie lore of Celticism and in the current occult literature. It might also account for some of the extreme distortion of organic forms and elongated figures by the other group members.

All these influences permeated Charles Rennie Mackintosh's watercolors, with the exception of his later flower studies and landscapes, and no one else produced such symbolist paintings while designing buildings that became milestones in the development of twentieth century architecture. Mackintosh wrote: "You ask how you are to judge architecture? Just as you judge painting or sculpture form, color, proportion, all visible qualities—and the one great invisible quality in all art, soul."

Yet another connection between the Mackintoshes and Theosophy involves their close friendship with Anna and Patrick Geddes and provides some insight into their artwork. The Geddeses, who were at the forefront of the Celtic Revival in Scotland, had personal connections with Annie Besant and Theosophy. Patrick Geddes had tutored Besant in natural science in London from 1874 to 1878, after she was refused admittance to the University because she was female.

Geddes also spent some time with Besant in India, and they often shared their vision for a better world. "A knowledge of Theosophy . . . as well as the Geddeses' utopianism might well have become part of the Mackintoshes' life," writes Janice Helland (175), who continues:

There is no evidence to suggest they actually became theosophists but considering their other interests (the Celtic Revival, Maeterlinck, symbolism) a philosophy that blended Eastern thought with Western (emphasizing the inter-connectedness of all living things) would surely have attracted their attention. Given the interest aroused in Glasgow by Max Muller's lectures during the 1890s, and the possibility that "The Four" were exposed to ideas about Eastern thought and philosophy at that time, Geddes's personal relationship with one of theosophy's most important figures would certainly have interested the Mackintoshes.

When Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1914 with his wife, he was perhaps very careful about becoming labeled a Theosophist, or a member of any other esoteric group. The Glasgow Style was never accepted or understood in Britain (though it was influential in Vienna and Germany). Perhaps Mackintosh, like Gustav Holst, was diffident about telling people that he was interested in Theosophy, as that interest might affect his career, as happened to the composer Cyril Scott.

Mackintosh never painted another symbolic watercolor after 1898, when the creative partnership of the Four was nearing its end. By 1910 he was undergoing personal problems, and artistic fashions were changing. Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism replaced European Symbolist art, and on the approach of World War I, idealistic communism ushered out religious mysticism. In 1889 the Theosophist Edouard Schure had been firmly convinced that the world was on the threshold of a great spiritual era and that the time was ripe for a spiritual art. But "the epoch of the great spiritual" failed to arrive on schedule, and by 1914 the ideals of the Glasgow Four had disappeared from public consciousness. Mackintosh became an almost forgotten man of genius, while the other group members were relegated to near oblivion in the art world. All had to wait half a century before the true value of their art and the breadth of their achievements were finally understood.

References

Alan Senior, a native of Yorkshire, has lived in Scotland since 1971. An international lecturer for theTheosophical Society, he edited the Scottish Theosophical magazine Circles for many years. A painter, as well as a writer, he exhibits throughout Scotland and lectures at Aberdeen and St. Andrews Universities.