Mysticism in print

Amid the tension between science and traditional religion in the 19th century, alternative forms of spirituality appeared.

Klytie Pate’s Daughters of the Sun plaques. The Daughters of the Sun exhibition is on display at Bendigo Art Gallery until February 10.

One of the most fascinating and yet disconcerting things about the world of Renaissance philosophy to modern eyes is not only the way it combines what we now tend to distinguish as science and philosophy, but especially the way it alternates so easily between these and what we think of as magic or occult practices. The separation of astronomy from astrology, or of chemistry from alchemy and so on, was not clearly made until what we call the scientific revolution in the 17th century.

Not that magic ever disappeared completely, and it was rediscovered — we only need to think of the colossal figure of Goethe’s Faust — as part of the romantic movement’s revaluation of all that was dark, mysterious and irrational in human experience. The 19th century, however, was on the face of it the age of a growing materialistic and scientific outlook, coinciding as best it could with the persistence of widespread Christian belief.

Perhaps as the result of the tension between science and traditional religion, the crisis of faith and anxiety about the existence of God, which seemed to reach a climax in the last quarter of the century, alternative forms of spirituality appeared. The most important of these was theosophy, founded in New York City in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), a Russian woman who had travelled extensively in the East before moving to America in 1873.

Readers may recall first encountering Blavatsky, as I did, ironically cited in TS Eliot’s poem A Cooking Egg (1919). Pipit, in the first line, is the speaker’s rather dull girlfriend or wife, and Piccarda is the first soul, other than Beatrice, that Dante encounters in the Paradiso:

I shall not want Pipit in heaven:

Madame Blavatsky will instruct me

In the seven sacred trances;

Piccarda de Donati will conduct me …

Although Blavatsky was undoubtedly guilty of some outrageous spiritualist frauds, the movement was enormously influential in modern culture, especially in inspiring the birth of abstract painting, for both Kandinsky and Mondrian were theosophists. And it also played an important role in bringing the spiritual traditions of the East to Europe and America, including such works as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

If readers are interested in learning more about this remarkable episode in the exchange between East and West, each of these texts — among many others — is discussed in a separate volume of Princeton University’s outstanding series The Lives of Great Religious Books. As we learn from these concise and illuminating studies, Western interest often stimulated the rediscovery of these books in their own lands, and even — especially in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead — the choice of the texts that have become canonical.

Theosophy is inherently an eclectic and syncretistic system of belief, which could easily become undisciplined, indulgent and incoherent, as we see in the jumble-sale approach to spirituality of the new-age shops that sell sacred texts, self-help books, incense, tarot cards and crystals. Its core, however, lay in late antique occultist and hermetic texts, like the Corpus Hermeticum, and the Neoplatonic spirituality that fascinated the early Renaissance in Florence; and to this theosophy added the spiritual traditions of India and Tibet.

Klytie Pate’s green-glazed earthenware.

In the art of Christian Waller, the subject of this fine exhibition — accompanied by a handsome catalogue — we can see how theosophical ideas could also be combined with the northern traditions of Celtic and Nordic mythology that had been rediscovered in the romantic period and then popularised in the painting of the pre-raphaelites. Knights and ladies, and especially fairies and other northern spirit beings take their place beside angels and figures from classical mythology.

The first impression of Waller’s work, indeed, is of finding oneself in that world of northern mythology, of knights and fairies, which was so popular in the arts-and-crafts aftermath of the pre-raphaelite period, but overlaid with spiritualist symbolism.

Her largest and most impressive work in the exhibition is The Robe of Glory, a mural painted in oil on canvas for Fawkner crematorium in Melbourne in 1937. This is really an extraordinarily unusual work to paint for a public commission and the fact that it was obviously acceptable at the time demonstrates how far the nebulous spirituality of the theosophists had become normalised between the wars.

Oak bench with inlaid painting by Christian Yandell (artist) and Napier Waller (designer) c. 1925.

The subject is drawn from the most obscure source imaginable, a late antique author of Syriac or Persian origin who lived in the cultural borderlands of the Roman and Persian empires, the latter then under Parthian rule. Bardesanes (or Bardesain) apparently adopted Christianity, but he was a gnostic, part of a movement considered heretical by the church because of its occult doctrines and because it held the body to be evil, so that ultimately the gnostics were led to deny the crucial doctrines of the incarnation of God and the two natures of Christ.

The picture is based on a mystical hymn attributed to this author, the allegory of a spiritual quest in which the King and Queen of the East send their son on a mission among the Egyptians, long associated with occult knowledge but here assumed to be a debased people, to retrieve a magical pearl that is being guarded by a serpent. After many adventures, the boy returns with the pearl, is welcomed by his parents and clothed in the robe of glory.

Here, with the inscription in capitals below “to the way that I came I betook me”, we see the figure of Bardesanes on the left, with a saintly halo despite his heretical reputation, then the boy climbing a couple of steps and holding the pearl in his hand, while another figure with a halo prepares to drape the robe of glory around his shoulders. His parents, the King and Queen of the East, are enthroned on the right: it is the image of the soul after its mystical quest in the land of darkness, returning to the light from which it arose.

Presumably visitors to the Fawkner crematorium recognised this image as some kind of reassuring allegory of the afterlife, without troubling themselves over the specific details. They would probably have been none the wiser if they had read Waller’s earlier attempt to present her theosophical vision in a series of allegorical prints, published as The Great Breath in 1932; a combination of classical, Indian and northern symbolic figures is used to convey the central Neoplatonic and gnostic ideas of the spirit’s emanation, descent into matter and return to itself.

The most memorable work in the exhibition was painted in the same year that Christian Waller published The Great Breath: it is a portrait of her by her husband Mervyn Napier Waller, the leading muralist of his time. They had been fellow students, and shortly after their marriage in 1915 Napier enlisted in the army. He was badly wounded in early 1917, losing his right arm, but later learning to paint and draw — equally well, as we can see from this picture and its preparatory pencil study — with his left hand.

The painting, in a still and hieratic style akin to that of his murals, shows Christian seated on the ground in their garden, surrounded by three airedale terriers, all with names from Norse mythology. She is a handsome and distinguished woman with strong features and her manner is somewhat aloof, perhaps sorrowful. The mood of the picture is tantalisingly ambiguous: specialists disagree about whether or not husband and wife, painter and subject, were already estranged by this time, or whether this occurred some years later, closer to the date of her mural.

In any case, a clue to the origins of this estrangement may lie in the enigmatic bookplate Christian had made for her husband around 1925. It shows a young man holding a bow and looking up at a statue of a female archer, who appears to have just let fly an arrow. The female deity with a bow must be Artemis, known in Latin as Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt and of youth. And the young man can only be Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta.

Pate’s Youth and Girl, (1932–36).

In his play Hippolytus, Euripides tells how the young boy devoted himself to Artemis, and thus to virginity, incurring the murderous wrath of Aphrodite, who deemed that no mortal should be free of her universal reign. Here, the imagery seems to suggest that Christian is expecting her husband to remain chaste, presumably as part of a joint quest to overcome the base demands of the body. But this very myth, and several others, should have reminded her of the Greek view that it is hubristic for humans to aspire to virginity and that such ambitions usually do not end well.

This would explain why the couple had no children, but also why, apparently in 1937, Napier began a relationship with a former student and assistant, Lorna Reyburn, whom he would marry four years after Christian’s death; and why she, although continuing to share the same house, descended further into idiosyncratic hermeticism, surrounding herself with some young homosexual friends such as Harry Tatlock Miller, the companion of Loudon Sainthill, and the no doubt similarly inclined John Tallis, a composer and son of the head of JC Williamsons, the theatre entrepreneurs.

Pate earthenware.

But the beautiful house that they built together, and which still exists, was not entirely childless, for they virtually adopted Christian’s niece Klytie Pate, abandoned by her mother when she was only two years old. The girl was raised by her father for a decade, but when he eventually remarried, she moved in with Christian and Napier at the age of 13; Christian changed the spelling of her name from Clytie to Klytie, apparently for numerological reasons.

Klytie grew up to be a fine ceramist, and she is the other “daughter of the sun” whose work is displayed in this exhibition. Her very name is significant in this regard, for the mythological Clytie was a girl who fell in love with Apollo and spent all day watching the course of the chariot of the sun until she was finally turned into a sunflower; and the sunflower, Klytie’s emblem, appears as a pattern on several of these pieces.

A Chinese inspired ginger jar with woven waterlily motif (1950).

One of the most important studio potters in Melbourne in her generation, Klytie adapted classic Chinese forms like the ginger jar with considerable skill, adapting art deco forms at other times and carving openwork designs as well. She too married a fellow artist but similarly had no children. Her work, however, was collected by John Tallis in his mansion on the Mornington Peninsula, Beleura, which is today a house museum. The house of Christian and Napier Waller is apparently also intact and contains many of their original possessions and collections, but is not yet open to the public.

Daughters of the Sun

Bendigo Art Gallery. Until February 10.