The Order of the Sun & Moon and Atlantis.
Sometimes you drop a stone into a deep pool of water and you get splashed. Other times, the stone fades from sight whilst concentric ripples expand from the point of entry, taking their time to wash ashore at new places.
Is the magic in the act of dropping the stone or in the impact the ripples have when they settle? Perhaps both. Well, one of those ripples from the opening and closing of the Order of the Sun and Moon’s latest iteration at the Crypt Gallery in St Ives washed ashore in the Atlantis Bookshop in London’s Museum Street.
On a recent visit, conversation was struck up with Geraldine Beskin triggered by the portrait of MacGregor Mathers that hangs on one of the shop’s walls and that used to hang in Vow Cave, the studio of Ithell Colquhoun, she the initial initiate of the Order of the Sun and Moon, in the Lamorna Valley in West Cornwall.
The fine portrait opened up a delight-full exchange and it very quickly became evident that one of the Order’s ripples had washed right through the doors of the Atlantis Bookshop.
Geraldine was already planning a parallel event to coincide with the opening of the remarkable Ithell Colquhoun exhibition when it moves from St Ives to Tate Britain in June. She was already in touch with some of the speakers from the Crypt installation and was very interested in hosting a performance of Colquhoun’s Decads of Intelligence’ in a similar vein to that enacted in the Crypt in February. If so, it is believed that this will be only the fourth time it has been performed.
Delighted to connect, to support, to share. And to lend the two original Colquhoun paintings that hung either side of the alter in the Crypt.
A ripple had come ashore.
And a few days after the encounter, Geraldine travelled to St Ives to experience the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition in the Tate.
Ripples travel in all directions.
All of the time.
Neil Scott
My art practice has long been a form of living cosmology; an unfolding, interconnected web of painting, drawing, alchemy, ritual, and symbolic exploration. This way of working, rooted in co-creation with veiled beings, liminality, and the weaving of conscious, unconscious and subtle realms, shapes my relationship with the Otherworlds we inhabit. The Order of the Sun and Moon co-emerged with Julian Vayne, Greg Humphries and Neil Scott, as an evolving presence; continually shapeshifting through our shared conversations, experiences, and explorations.
A significant influence in the formation of our Order was the artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, particularly her essay The Order of the Sun and Moon, Nicaragua. In it, she describes “an occult centre used by an eponymous order which existed in the past or still exists, either in that state of being commonly recognized as reality today or else in regions variously called the Higher Worlds or The Inner Planes.” Her visionary approach to knowledge transmission, rooted in intuition, liminality, and messages from the unseen, resonates deeply with my own. “For some reason I obtained a glimpse of this mysterious centre, and now if I receive an idea or perception which does not seem to be a direct result of anything I have read, heard or thought,” she writes, “I take it to be a message from the order.”
Colquhoun’s use of automatic techniques, such as parsemage, decalcomania, fumage, and frottage, offered her a means of accessing unconscious and otherworldly realms. Through these processes, she allowed forms to emerge without conscious intervention, opening portals to the Inner Planes. I, too, work with receptive techniques, including automatic drawing, planchette work, active imagination, and dream-based enquiry. These methods form part of an ongoing communion with the unseen, often supported by herbs like mugwort, angelica, yarrow, and rosemary; each acting as companion, teacher, and threshold. Through these practices, symbolic figures and threads arise, shaping the central motifs of my cosmology: the Witness and the Threaded House.
At the heart of my work stands the Witness, a liminal presence who inhabits the thresholds between inner and outer, psyche and matter, known and unknown. The Witness does not act through force or intention, but through presence: holding, listening, and allowing unconscious material to surface and weave into visibility. The Threaded House forms a symbolic and structural form for this weaving; a non-linear, open system of interconnected elements: paintings, rituals, spells, writings, herbs, and drawings. These elements co-exist in fragile, co-creative relation to each other – forming a mutable net that resists fixed categorisation, embracing instability and transformation as generative forces.
In its three manifestations, the Order of the Sun and Moon became a living context: a shared symbolic and experiential field where artworks, ritual, and expanded states of consciousness could meet. Two exhibitions at The Crypt Gallery in St Ives and one at the College of Psychic Studies in London provided settings in which the Order found provisional form. My threads explored solar, lunar, and mercurial transformations through symbolic languages, calendrical cycles, and alchemical processes—painting as ritual, ritual as enquiry, each movement aligned with an evolving, subtle process of becoming.
As my encounters with the Order dissolve, my practice continues its evolution as a weave of presences and absences, symbols and rituals. I return to the Witness—now as a figure co-creating layered temporalities, opening portals to unseen realms and the knowledges they offer. Time reveals itself as non-linear, polyphonic, porous. The Threaded House reshapes into a net-like archive—gathering fragments of painting, writing, and ritual in a living structure that welcomes instability, misalignment, and reimagining.
Herbs have become central companions within this unfolding: mugwort, angelica, borage, yarrow, and rosemary co-emerge as presences within ritual, painting, and seasonal alignment. Each carries a subtle agency, offering insight, protection, and perception. These vegetal intelligences shape not only what is made, but how I listen and how I see.
Looking ahead, I follow the threads between alchemical practice and contemporary spiritual-political concerns; seeking new ways to hold transformation within fragile, linked, relations. My work continues to invite non-knowing, receptivity, and the tensions of liminal space as fertile conditions for emergence.
The Order of the Sun and Moon offered a provisional constellation in which my practice could find resonance with others across symbolic, magical, and painterly forms. As I continue to develop this cosmology, through the Witness, the Threaded House, and the interweaving of painting, herbs, ritual, and writing, I follow the signs and threads that appear, however faintly. The work remains in process: receptive, interconnected, and co-created with the seen and unseen worlds it touches.
Kate Southworth
Where Do Ideas Come from?
It’s been a couple of months since we decided to dissolve The Order Of The Sun and Moon in its present incarnation so I have the privilege of hindsight when discussing how it came about?, why it came about? And what we did for The Order in that time.
It started in 2023 when Tate announced the prospect of an Ithell Colquhoun retrospective at Tate St Ives in Spring 2025. For me this was a really exciting prospect, not simply because it was high time Colquhoun’s work reached a wider audience, but also because my feeling was this was going to be a high water mark; where Occult Art could come out of the dark and mouldy closet to find more acceptance, and a voice, within wider culture.
The confluence of Art and Magick has been a subject close to my heart ever since early 2000’s when I wrote ‘Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick: Vol I & II’ with my dear friend Julian Vayne. That book, and all the artwork that emerged from it was a move from seeing magick as something historical and fixed to seeing it as an alive entity with a Will of it’s own, constantly evolving, changing and morphing to weave its’ own path in this reality. Every fibre of my being was telling me I had a part to play in this unfolding, and 2025 was going to be the time to express it.
It was during some research I was doing for Tate as a precursor to the show in 2023 with Emma Sharples, that I came across Colquhoun’s prose poem ‘The Order Of The Sun and Moon, Nicaragua’ which she wrote in the late 1940’s. In which she has a dream of a frescoed grotto in Nicaragua which, she assumes…
“…was an occult centre used by an eponymous order which existed in the past or still exists, either in that state of being commonly recognised as reality today or else in regions variously called the Higher Worlds or The Inner Planes. For some reason I obtained a glimpse of this mysterious centre, and now if I receive an idea or perception which does not seem to be a direct result of anything I have read, heard or thought, I take it to be a message from the order.”
So, when I say I had the idea to begin The Order Of The Sun and Moon in 2023, what I mean is I received a message from The Order to instigate a new chapter in its development. This iteration of the Order would coalesce around the idea of Magick and Art leading to an exhibition to coincide with the opening of the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition at Tate St Ives in Spring 2025. This was not going to be a solo project and I invited Kate Southworth and Julian Vayne (and also for the St Ives 2025 show Neil Scott) to join me on the journey with Ithell Colquhoun looking over us as a guide, or patron Saint.
“We are not The Order of The Sun and Moon, that’s who we work for!”- Julian Vayne
For me, with all occult art, it is important that the work arises from an occult practice. To be contemporarily relevant it has to be rooted in practical occult activity, and attempt to change the consciousness of the audience in some way. In my artwork I tackle this with techniques from a variety of magical and artistic systems. Automatic drawing and painting techniques from Surrealism, colour theory from Theosophy, Abstraction and The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn (HOGD). In my attitude to Magic, in true Chaos Magick fashion, I do not root myself in one belief system: various influences include philosophical enquiries into Animism, plant medicine, Druidry, the Kabbalah and Discordianism. All these influences I found having relevance as the art developed during the time I was working for The Order.
For me, the most pressing question of our times is how to achieve a harmonious future where the Human World, the Technological World and the Natural World can coexist in balance. All the conversations I was hearing within the Environmental cultural sphere were people talking to people about how we could affect the Natural World in order to save ourselves. I wanted to produce work that could give Nature a way to join in that conversation.
Studying Colquhoun’s Taro (1977) I realised I could paint in Nature ‘en plein air’ using a palette derived from the HOGD Key Scales of Colour. Then utilising various magical practices to change my consciousness and invoke the Spirit of Nature in various locations in the UK I could use automatic painting techniques to let Nature communicate in a visual, non-verbal way. The paintings from this period are the result of those communications, the longer the viewer spends looking at the work, the more information is received from Nature. It is an interesting process for a painter to place work on the wall they don’t particularly like, usually such pieces get changed or thrown in the bin; but if I was to stay true to the premise of letting Nature say what it wanted to say, then I had to go to the expense of getting all the work framed and then hanging it.
In the end, The Order of The Sun and Moon produced one catalogue, a website, had three exhibitions in St ives and London from 2023 – 2025, and like all good Temporary Autonomous Zones quit while it was ahead. We dissolved the Order after the Spring 2025 show in St Ives after a glorious “Ithell Colquhoun Love In” with speakers Amy Hale, Emma Sharples and Marcus Williamson and Penny MacBeth. The ubiquitous Richard Shillitoe attending throughout.
Many thanks for them for coming along to add their own magic to the show, and a special thanks to Anne Barlow and Mel Stidolph at Tate St Ives for their continual support and help with the project.
Greg Humphries
Three iterations of the this phase of the Great Work. At our second exhibition in September 2024 at The College of Psychic Studies in London, I’d taken over a cabinet of esoteric books in order to show several smaller works.
For our outro, the third show from OSM and the second at St Ives in 2025 I wanted to go big and so created two large magical banners. These are similar to the large number of specially produced ritual artefacts that I hold in my collection, objects designed for deployment in various magical rituals.
The Holy Guardian Angel, The Horned Deity & Other Spirits
This image is tuned to the frequency of your Holy Guardian Angel, a central figure in the Western Magical Tradition. This being is understood in many ways including as a personal protective spirit or the embodiment of our fully realised future self.
The image invokes the primal horned deity as the spirit of wild nature. This being appears in our earliest art, in the temples of ancient Egypt, on the Gundestrup cauldron, and in Richard Carpenter’s reworking of the tale of the outlaw Robin Hood.
These artworks are magical portals. Feel free to come closer, to lay your hands gently on the banners, to come into relationship with these spirits.
Here’s me testing out the image of the Horned Deity
I also included a series of works on video at the 2025 St Ives show, some of these, along with both banners, remain available for purchase on my website.
Video – a selection of works
And so this chapter comes to it’s conclusion. Neil Scott summarizes this beautifully:
“The Order of the Sun and Moon opened a portal in the Crypt, St Ives for a few days in February – a portal for magick and art, talks and performances, dreamachines and deep conversations. It was a place of quiet reflection, noisy interruptions and, most importantly, a place of sharing. Magick and art are perhaps the two most useful tools we have to help us navigate these times of ecological, climate and societal collapse and the OSM provided new tools and new skills to use existing tools. This particular portal has now been ritually closed, but others will open.”
The Great Work continues
Julian Vayne
Heading image: Sven Berlin, John Wells and Peter Lanyon hanging their work for the first St Ives-based Crypt Group of Artists exhibition 1946
The Order of the Sun and Moon 
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