Amy Hale

From the years of 1939 to 1942 British occultist and Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun created a groundbreaking series of explicit erotic drawings and paintings that suggest the design of a sex magic system for the Western initiate drawing on Tantric, alchemical and Kabbalistic imagery and systems.  While her work shares some features with sex magic technologies of the early twentieth century, her imagery integrates same sex desire, multiple partners and a focus on women’s sexual pleasure as a path to divine union.  Colquhoun’s work challenges standard narratives of sex magic that essentialize gender, privilege male sexuality and that scientize ideas such as gender polarity.  This illustrated lecture will share some of this material and start the discussion about how we can rethink what we have learned about sex magic.

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic. She has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA and has written about topics as diverse as psychogeography, occult performance art, Pagan religious tourism, color theory, and extremist politics in modern Paganism. She has written widely on artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, notably the biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently editing a selection of Colquhoun’s esoteric essays and an edition of Colquhoun’s erotic art and sex magic. She is the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022) and has contributed essays for Tate, Ignota Press, Burlington Contemporary, Correspondences Journal, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and Spike Island, Bristol. She is currently a curator and host for the internationally loved Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society lecture series.