Letter from Cressida Pryor
April 29, 2025

Dear FOI Friends,

Wishing you all a wonderful and fulfilling Beltane season…the Earth in her bounty is excelling in colour, growth and beauty. I have just returned from a weekend at the very tip of Cornwall, near Land’s End…as part of this trip I had the privilege to get to the Tate, St Ives gallery…one of our national treasure houses of modern and contemporary nationally acclaimed art. I especially wanted to see the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition that will soon finish.

Colquhoun’s prolific work, as many of you will probably know, spans across seven decades of the last century and often through the process of her art-making she developed her spirituality with the aim of union with the divine. This process occurred in the context of what is sometimes called the ‘Western esoteric tradition’.

As is common with a large and important curated exhibition with art pieces, books and letters gathered over a lifetime…we were led through chronologically ordered rooms and spaces that corresponded with different eras of her life. I was hugely excited and delighted to see a large interpretation board entitled ‘Earth Energies’ which contained the information that she had joined, at this time, the Ancient Order of Druids and the FOI!

So my question is, dear friends, how many of you, in those early days, might have met, corresponded with or in other ways come across Ithel Colquhoun? Please share here any of these meetings. As with so many women artists, her ‘fame’ light faded after her death in 1988…but now in the last ten or so years her amazing ability to create powerful images, to write and express the interconnections that are part of our amazing world is being recognised and she is being, quite rightly, seen as the great polymath and artist that she was…and her message is still really necessary in this world.

She wrote in a 1930 article on the principal of correspondences as expressed in ‘as above so below’ and described the subtle linking and communion between all things thus: ‘one could not indeed stir a flower without the troubling of a star’…

This reminds me of all our individual responsibilities to express ourselves and to interact with the following provisos: ‘Is it true? Is it loving? Is it necessary?’

Divine Mystery guide our lives to be lived out in your light and service;
May we seek truth and be peace makers in this troubled world
Knowing we have the support and courage from those who have gone before.
So may it be, amen, shalom.

With love and blessings,
Cressida, FOI Steward