Missing Witches - Missing Witches - Pixie Colman Smith： “Look for the Door Into The Unknown Country.”

00:00:00.880 Warning. The podcast you are about to hear contains coarse language and tells stories of witches.

00:00:07.880 Unfortunately, this history occasionally involves oppression, victimization, physical and sexual violence, and even torture.

00:00:16.520 We at Missing Witches will always concentrate on these women's power, legacies, victories, and magic,

00:00:23.180 but we can't overlook their struggles or shelter ourselves from reality.

00:00:27.380 we promise never to dwell or be graphic email us at missingwitches at gmail.com if you want to be

00:00:34.280 heard and blessed be you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 0.53

00:00:38.900 you must be a witch welcome to the missing witches podcast where we tell stories of 1.00

00:00:47.640 badass women who have practiced magic in this podcast we go looking for the witches we've 1.00

00:00:53.600 been missing. We is myself, Risa, and my co-producer and sound designer, Amy. This is a feminist

00:01:01.080 history storytelling podcast where we try to fill in the gaps in our mental maps of what a witch is 1.00

00:01:07.680 and where are they and what have they been doing? It'll necessarily be a mix of history,

00:01:15.040 gossip, and maybe some magic to fill in the blanks. Our focus is stretching our perspective

00:01:21.760 to find witches from all kinds of cultures our goals are to learn something to do justice to

00:01:28.460 people we admire if we can give love research curiosity respect and voice to some witches

00:01:35.480 whose stories we've been missing and just you know not fuck it up too much with that in mind

00:01:42.340 we want to start with a witch whose identity and contributions have been multiply erased

00:01:46.920 but whose work guides the mind and practices of pretty much everyone who touches anything

00:01:52.140 remotely mystical. The maybe mixed race, probably queer woman artist behind the world's most famous

00:02:00.100 tarot deck, Pamela Coleman-Smith. Some accounts claim Coleman-Smith's mother was Jamaican.

00:02:07.140 Some suggest she was adopted. Stuart R. Kaplan, who started to import the tarot to the U.S. in 1968,

00:02:13.460 gives the first real history of the deck and kind of acknowledges for the first time Coleman Smith's

00:02:19.480 contribution. He writes, Corrine Pamela Coleman Smith, known as Pam to her family, was born on

00:02:26.980 February 16, 1878 at 28 Belgrave Road, Pimlico, Middlesex, England. Her father, Charles Edward 0.74

00:02:35.540 Smith, an American merchant, and her mother, Corrine Coleman Smith, are believed to have been

00:02:40.400 from Brooklyn. He goes on to say, the ancestry of her mother foreshadows Smith's interest in

00:02:46.120 mysticism and the occult. The Colemans had been for several generations followers of the mystic

00:02:51.260 philosopher and visionary Swedenborg. Artistic roots also lay with Smith's ancestors. Her great

00:02:57.040 grandfather and his wife both wrote children's books, and her grandfather was a painter of the

00:03:01.820 Hudson River School. The most thorough storytelling and research on Pamela Coleman Smith that I found

00:03:07.360 is on a website created by a guy named Phil Northleet.

00:03:10.740 He finds some wonderful and bizarre tidbits.

00:03:13.780 One of my favorites is that in this genealogy

00:03:17.160 that he traces of Coleman Smith's family lines,

00:03:21.340 he finds an ancestor of hers on the Smith side

00:03:24.200 who was, quote,

00:03:26.100 murdered with a hideous witchcraft in the winter of 1684.

00:03:31.040 This ancestor, Philip Smith, 1.00

00:03:33.720 concerned about relieving the indigences 0.62

00:03:36.060 of a wretched woman in the town, who, being dissatisfied that some of his just cares about

00:03:41.520 her, expressed herself unto him in such a manner that he declared himself thenceforth apprehensive 0.93

00:03:47.320 of receiving mischief at her hands. He became sick, delirious in various languages. Some of

00:03:54.160 the young men in town went to give disturbance unto the woman, and all the while they were

00:03:59.980 disturbing her, he was at ease and slept as a weary man. These were the only times they perceived

00:04:06.760 him to take sleep in all his illness. Mr. Smith dies, and the jury that viewed his corpse found

00:04:12.660 a swelling on one breast, his back full of bruises, and several holes that seemed made with awls.

00:04:20.360 Mary Webster, the woman who disturbed Philip Smith, was sent to Boston, tried for witchcraft,

00:04:27.600 and acquitted. But the young men of Hadley tried their own experiment upon her. They dragged her

00:04:33.840 out of the house, hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the 0.93

00:04:39.980 snow, and at last buried her in it and there left her. But she survived, and still she persisted.

00:04:48.900 With the benefit of some perspective here, it sure sounds a lot like Philip Smith tried to 0.94

00:04:53.860 rape a woman who told him where he could stick it. He, in the course of sticking it places, 0.95

00:04:59.100 got syphilis, which was definitely raging in the new world since Columbus's arrival,

00:05:04.500 thanks colonialism. And then Philip Smith died blaming a woman who wouldn't tolerate him,

00:05:10.200 only resting well when he knew she was being tortured.

00:05:15.100 I gotta warn you, a lot of witch history is gonna sound like this. 0.57

00:05:19.100 By the time we get to Pamela Coleman-Smith, her family tree has generations of children's

00:05:24.320 book authors, artists, and passionate advocates of emancipation.

00:05:29.140 Her early years were spent in Brooklyn and then in Jamaica just before the turn of the

00:05:32.860 century, with the Holocaust of the European witch hunts and the slave trade just a little

00:05:37.960 behind them, and the World War is not yet in sight.

00:05:44.000 Swedenborg, the influential spiritualist who the family followed, was an early voice

00:05:48.980 for equality and social reform. In The Last Judgment from 1758, Swedenborg wrote,

00:05:55.080 the African people are more capable of enlightenment than all other peoples on this earth

00:05:59.480 because they are of such a character as to think interiorly and thus to accept truths

00:06:05.420 and acknowledge them. Ideas like this directly fueled the anti-slavery movement, inspiring

00:06:11.060 writer and anti-slavery activist Lydia Maria Child and poet Elizabeth Browning.

00:06:17.020 Even Swedenborgians who were non-religious took inspiration from his descriptions of

00:06:21.160 heaven to try and create social utopias on earth.

00:06:24.700 Charles Fourier, early socialist philosopher, credited with the first use of the word feminism,

00:06:30.480 though shout out to Eugénie Potini-Piard, who independently coined the term and founded

00:06:34.960 the Federation of French Feminists and the Union des Femmes. 0.63

00:06:39.980 Fourier was inspired by Swedenborg to advance the idea of an ideal earthly society that

00:06:45.100 echoed Swedenberg's order of the universe, where all people had equal standing, regardless of

00:06:50.920 gender, race, or sexual orientation. At the tail end of the 19th century, heck, even now in a lot

00:06:59.600 of places, these are some pretty enlightened ideas for a young woman artist to get to grow up in.

00:07:07.100 And to return quickly to the question of this missing witch's race, because it is an open

00:07:12.080 question on the internet and among people who cared or know, here are a couple more clues we

00:07:17.160 can guess from in a past that may have been obscured. There are many references to her from

00:07:23.420 society writing at that time that try to wrap their head around her race and background and

00:07:28.020 enjoy exoticizing her in the process. In Bohemia in London, this kind of famous scandalous gossipy 0.72

00:07:35.900 description of the scene she found a family in, the author Ransom described her as a strange

00:07:41.820 little creature, goddaughter of a witch and sister to a fairy, very dark and not thin. And when she

00:07:48.920 smiled with a smile that was peculiarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes seemed to vanish 1.00

00:07:55.040 altogether. John Butler Yeats, portrait artist and father of that Yeats, William Butler Yeats, 1.00

00:08:02.760 who was a friend and magical cohort of Pamela Coleman Smith's, said she looked Japanese,

00:08:08.000 and Irene Cooper Willis, author and badass barrister, described her as dear, funny, 0.88

00:08:14.900 Chinese-looking little artist and painter. So she definitely had color and played with 0.79

00:08:20.820 cultural references in her dress and self-representation. And she wrote and

00:08:25.000 illustrated and performed these awesome, rebellious Jamaican folk stories and owned

00:08:30.400 her personal difference and diversity as she made her way around the turn-of-the-century world.

00:08:39.000 Age 15, back in Brooklyn, Coleman Smith enrolls at Pratt in Clinton Hill, a brand new college just blocks away from Bed-Stuy.

00:08:48.240 The college, only about a decade old, opened by one of these self-made millionaire oil barons, was one of the first in the country to be open to all people, regardless of class, color, or gender.

00:09:00.800 The school's motto was, be true to your work, and your work will be true to you,

00:09:05.120 which could be a useful motto for the work of virtual magic, if you're into that kind of thing.

00:09:10.920 At Pratt, she studied art with Arthur Wesley Dow,

00:09:14.820 who was this revolutionary thinker in his approach to art.

00:09:19.040 It's like 1910 or something, and he rejects the idea of just copying nature.

00:09:24.180 He didn't believe that art should be relegated to the drawing rooms of rich people.

00:09:28.120 he was an illustrator, painter, poster artist who shifted the artist's focus to the decision-making

00:09:33.560 process of composition. He emphasized the independent instinct and will of the maker.

00:09:41.360 The artist's work was to build harmonies. He considered space art to be visual music

00:09:47.740 and taught his students, including Georgia O'Keeffe and the Overbeck sisters of the arts

00:09:53.360 and crafts movement, Japanese design concepts like notan, the play of light and dark, to create

00:10:00.260 dimension. For what it's worth, the idea that both light and dark are required to give life,

00:10:08.380 that our shadows give strength and dimension, is a pretty fundamental magical principle.

00:10:15.380 Coleman Smith didn't graduate from Pratt. Her mother died in Jamaica and she missed a lot of

00:10:21.040 school. Maybe because of butts of illness, I read somewhere that this was migraine and that Dow helped

00:10:26.900 her understand her synesthesia, a cross-firing of the senses that allows the synesthete to taste

00:10:32.420 numbers, hear colors, or in Coleman Smith's case, to see music. It does feel like there's something

00:10:38.120 here about how chronic pain and illness are experienced, especially by women. Maybe that's 1.00

00:10:44.020 just because in my experience, pain, and especially the way migraine affects perception, can definitely

00:10:49.620 bring a person closer to an understanding of how thin our lived and constructed realities

00:10:54.660 are. We know for sure that we are only seeing our brain's best attempt to summarize our

00:11:00.560 senses when pain knocks sense realities sideways. Coleman Smith writes and illustrates the Anansi

00:11:09.840 stories at this time. Anansi is a spider spirit, keeper of all knowledge in stories. In the

00:11:19.020 Caribbean, especially in Jamaica, this spirit from Ghanian folk religion is an essential icon of

00:11:25.320 resistance. Her father takes her to London to promote the Anansi stories and to look for work

00:11:33.140 for her. And he finds a way to introduce her to Bram Stoker, currently manager of the Lyceum

00:11:40.220 Theater, who has just published a hit horror novel called Dracula. This seems like such a weird choice

00:11:47.860 for a 19th century dad of a daughter, but it works out. And Bram Stoker hires Pamela Coleman Smith

00:11:54.240 to illustrate an 18-page souvenir brochure that he was writing for performances of the upcoming

00:12:00.020 Lyceum Theater tour. In New York, in October 1899, she meets Bram Stoker again, as well as Henry

00:12:07.840 Irving and Ellen Terry, just heroes and icons of the London Theater at the time. And she talks them

00:12:14.620 to letting her join the tour as one of the minor cast members, and Ellen Terry sort of adopts her

00:12:20.100 and gives her the nickname Pixie, which she embraces for the rest of her life.

00:12:25.960 Ellen Terry is kind of magic in and of herself. She writes of mesmerizing audiences, of entering

00:12:34.040 into a mutual transformative trance with them. And there is so much to be said about magic in

00:12:41.380 the theater, but let's leave it behind the fourth wall and the red curtains for now and keep

00:12:46.480 following our Pixie Witch. Because in December 1899, Pixie's father dies unexpectedly in New York.

00:12:56.180 She's an orphan now, but she's abroad with this theater family, the only family she has now.

00:13:01.620 So she continues the tour and then returns with them to London when it's done.

00:13:05.760 in london she makes her way as an artist she's making a living as an illustrator and a set

00:13:13.340 designer she's working closely with william butler yates and bram stoker and the lyceum

00:13:19.520 theater while also writing and illustrating books of her own her style just resonated with

00:13:26.020 a visionary romantic modern seam and contemporary artistic practice and these big names of big men

00:13:33.420 whose stories we are much more likely to know

00:13:35.860 recognized her as one of their own.

00:13:39.380 She independently publishes an artistic journal

00:13:42.080 called The Green Sheaf,

00:13:44.080 with lots of writing on dreams,

00:13:46.020 including new work by Yeats.

00:13:49.200 As a member of the Suffrage Atelier,

00:13:51.840 a collective of professional illustrators,

00:13:54.280 she contributes art to fight for women's right to the vote

00:13:57.180 in Great Britain,

00:13:57.900 and she also donates work to the Red Cross.

00:14:03.420 In 1907, she has this major show in New York of 72 drawings and watercolors.

00:14:10.060 She's actually the first painter to exhibit in Alfred Stieglitz's Little Galleries of the Photo Secession.

00:14:16.980 Her show marks a turning point in the fame of this gallery.

00:14:20.800 It was the first non-photographic success in this space,

00:14:24.060 which would shortly after become famous for introducing the most avant-garde European artists of the time to America,

00:14:30.840 including Henri Matzis, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp.

00:14:38.920 Well-known music and art critic at the time, James Gibbons-Huniger, reviewing the show,

00:14:45.240 wrote, Pamela Coleman-Smith is a young woman with that quality rare in either sex, imagination.

00:14:53.440 He called her painting entitled Death in the House absolutely nerve-shattering,

00:14:58.820 and said that not even Edward Munch could have succeeded better

00:15:02.800 in arousing a profound disquiet.

00:15:06.120 He wrote that the artist belonged to the favored choir

00:15:08.860 of William Blake and his mystics.

00:15:12.620 Back in London, Pixie hosts a weekly at-home for artists

00:15:16.560 performing stories from the Jamaican oral tradition

00:15:19.560 and from Yeats and others.

00:15:22.820 This young woman living alone becomes a connector

00:15:26.400 and a focal point for artists and thinkers.

00:15:31.440 Throughout this time, she's living parallel lives.

00:15:36.000 She's a working artist who is also becoming immersed in magical ceremony

00:15:42.560 as a member of the secret group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

00:15:47.540 Coleman Smith was a member of the Golden Dawn

00:15:49.640 and then of the independent and rectified rite of the Golden Dawn for about a decade.

00:15:56.400 The Golden Dawn are an influential magical order that shares some origins with other European, hermetic, and heretical societies and philosophers.

00:16:09.100 The Freemasons and Rosicrucians, for example.

00:16:12.060 But they differed in some pretty key ways for Pixie Coleman Smith and modern Bohemians.

00:16:18.200 Most especially in that they welcomed women in perfect equality with men.

00:16:22.840 As this author, Denisoff, writes in this great history, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1888-1901,

00:16:31.340 Golden Dawn members were primarily interested in magical philosophy and traditional ritual practice for the advancement of the individual's spirit.

00:16:40.620 Influences included ancient Egyptian religion, the Kabbalah, Christianity, Freemasonry, Paganism,

00:16:51.940 Theurgy, Alchemy, early modern grimoires, and Enochian magic, such as that recorded

00:16:58.800 by the early modern occultist John Dee.

00:17:02.680 Magic, for the order, was the use of methodological practices to cause changes in consciousness.

00:17:10.620 or the material world, in accord with the universal will.

00:17:17.260 The collective members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

00:17:20.840 made the 19th century's most serious and sustained effort

00:17:24.680 to reimagine and re-engage with a prehistoric occult tradition.

00:17:30.100 In this sense, the Order can be seen as the major Victorian author

00:17:34.860 of the often fictional but no less influential history of occultism and natural magic. Coleman

00:17:43.820 Smith was a member at a time after secret documents of the order had been left in a cab and publicized 0.99

00:17:49.860 and the order had fractured into pieces and Alistair Crowley, that queer sex magic beast of 0.82

00:17:56.100 the hermetic schools at the time, was actively making fun of the leader of the group that Pixie 0.95

00:18:00.960 stuck with. A.E. Waite. Waite has some of my sympathy. He brought incredible translations

00:18:09.240 and studies of hidden wisdom into the world, books on the Rosicrucians, the ancient Arthurian

00:18:14.200 legends, and more. But I guess maybe he didn't put it all together and light it all on fire

00:18:19.940 in the way Crowley wanted to do. Waite was kind of tentative, and his interpretations of the

00:18:26.420 amazing texts he brought to light feel almost intentionally dense and convoluted, like he

00:18:32.740 wasn't ready to see something that was there and winking at him. I think if you've ever woken up

00:18:39.320 at night and felt a spirit something close to you and chosen to turn on the TV or music to tune out

00:18:48.320 that creepy feeling, then you and I can perhaps relate to what weight might have been feeling.

00:18:58.960 What he did do, though, was recognize the importance of the tarot and the talent of his

00:19:04.820 pixie artist friend. He made notes from his research on the symbolism of the suits and of

00:19:10.320 the Major Arcana and commissioned pixie a big job for very little cash, as she called it,

00:19:15.580 to complete the pieces of art for the deck. He's also pretty fucking dismissive of her at times, 0.92

00:19:20.400 and snide about her contributions, and doesn't even mention her name in a bunch of his writing 0.96

00:19:25.740 about this new tarot deck. And her name gets left off the deck for years. But at other points,

00:19:34.580 he does say, I have embraced an opportunity which has been somewhat of the unexpected kind,

00:19:40.160 and have interested a very skillful and original artist in the proposal to design a set.

00:19:46.760 Miss Pamela Coleman-Smith, in addition to her obvious gifts, has some knowledge of tarot values.

00:19:53.100 She has lent a sympathetic ear to my proposal to rectify the symbolism by reference to channels

00:19:58.760 of knowledge which are not in the open day. Norfleet notes that Waite had some very strong

00:20:05.400 ideas about the design of the 22 trump cards of the major arcana, but he was relatively unconcerned

00:20:11.140 with the 56 cards of the minor. Pamela Coleman-Smith had almost full creative reign with respect to

00:20:17.800 those cards. Each card in the deck was to receive a unique illustration, almost unheard of at the

00:20:25.280 time, and in all a total of 80 unique images would need to be created. 78 tarot cards, plus the

00:20:33.160 designs for the card back and the nameplate. Prior to this time, tarot decks had never been

00:20:38.060 manufactured in the English-speaking world. The origins of tarot are unknown. It seems to pop up

00:20:44.100 first in Europe around the 14th century as a deck of cards used in games of chance and divination.

00:20:49.860 It's sometimes called the Book of Divination of the Gypsies, as the Roma people were its main 0.98

00:20:55.140 keepers for centuries. There's a great story about the Egyptian origin of the tarot from a French 0.98

00:21:02.060 occult philosopher, Dr. Papu, recounted in Ralph Metzner's 1971 history, Maps of Consciousness.

00:21:10.800 Metzner, as an interesting aside, is the Harvard-educated psychologist who participated

00:21:15.460 in psychedelic research at Harvard University in the 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard

00:21:22.560 Alpert, who came to be known as Ram Dass. Metzner's been into consciousness research,

00:21:27.300 including psychedelics, yoga, meditation, and shamanism for over 45 years.

00:21:34.300 And I feel like he takes pleasure in the fact that this story comes to us with its source

00:21:38.880 mysteriously concealed by Pepu, as he puts it.

00:21:42.940 The story goes like this.

00:21:46.320 Egyptian priests, when faced with the imminent destruction of their temples and orders,

00:21:52.400 held a council to decide how to transmit their teachings.

00:21:55.300 At first, they thought of confiding these secrets to virtuous men, recruited by the initiates, who would transmit them from generation to generation.

00:22:06.840 But one priest, observing that virtue is a most fragile thing, proposed to confide scientific traditions to vice.

00:22:16.620 vice he said would never fail completely and through it we are sure of a long and durable

00:22:25.060 preservation of our principles i love this sourceless story too and especially the idea

00:22:33.500 that you can trust vice better than virtue to survive and pass things on

00:22:40.060 Metzner continues

00:22:44.200 It has been proposed that the 22 cards

00:22:47.920 which make up the major arcana of the tarot

00:22:50.300 were in the Egyptian mystery schools

00:22:53.120 hung on the walls of a gallery

00:22:54.840 in the form of tablets for paintings

00:22:57.380 along with hieroglyphs and other symbols

00:22:59.900 The initiate had to pass through the gallery

00:23:03.240 elucidating the meaning of the symbols as a kind of test

00:23:06.480 And in the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, a version of the life of Jesus supposedly transcribed from the Akashic Record,

00:23:16.700 Jesus is described as passing through such a series of tests in an Egyptian school.

00:23:24.140 The earliest known deck to use the structure of 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana is the deck of the Sulibuska family,

00:23:33.580 created by an unknown artist in Venice around 1490.

00:23:38.360 While other decks float around,

00:23:40.380 this is really the only one with an illustration for every card,

00:23:43.840 until Pixie, instead of just a number and a suit for the minor arcana.

00:23:48.360 And this layering of imagery makes them feel full of magic.

00:23:52.760 There are references to alchemical philosophy in the cards.

00:23:56.740 Not just the greedy secrets of turning lead into gold,

00:23:59.640 but the actual alchemy of the transmutation of the soul,

00:24:04.140 the magic of becoming one with the divine,

00:24:07.580 or the universe,

00:24:09.340 of dreaming the god dream.

00:24:12.500 These tarot aren't just for fortune-telling.

00:24:16.020 They contain, as Metzner puts it,

00:24:18.860 symbols representing the actual tools and methods of psychic transformation.

00:24:24.820 Images of the Solobuska deck were acquired by the British Museum

00:24:27.980 just a few years before Coleman Smith began her project with Waite,

00:24:31.660 and there are some very clear references and influences.

00:24:35.120 And also clear points of departure.

00:24:37.100 If you check out the Ten of Swords in the Solibuska versus the Waite-Smith,

00:24:40.960 and then check out the Ten of Wands in Waite-Smith,

00:24:43.540 it's almost as though Waite and Smith intentionally said no.

00:24:47.020 That imagery of hoarding away belongs in the path of the wands.

00:24:52.960 At this same stage in the path of swords,

00:24:55.760 the image is defeated in another way and is much more violent the ten swords pierce the body dead

00:25:03.440 on the floor but in the sky a storm hovers on the edge of sunshine it is hopelessness with a golden

00:25:12.460 dawn on the horizon this deck made in london just a breath before the world tumbles into the darkness

00:25:20.540 and tragedy of a world war is a whole new map made in direct reference to a palimpsest of

00:25:28.060 symbols that came before. And while we can see from Waite's studies and notes that he provided

00:25:33.880 some clear direction, especially for the major arcana, Pixie had all the power of an artist

00:25:40.460 creator. She drew her friends into the cards and her own vision of the world beyond this one,

00:25:48.440 a world she accessed through art.

00:25:53.220 In 1908, for Strand Magazine, Pixie discussed her experience of synesthesia.

00:26:01.020 You asked me how these pictures are evolved, said Miss Coleman Smith.

00:26:07.260 They are not pictures of the music theme, pictures of the flying notes,

00:26:12.360 not conscious illustrations of the name given to a piece of music,

00:26:16.600 But just what I see when I hear music

00:26:21.340 Thoughts loosened and set free by the spell of sound

00:26:26.720 When I take a brush in hand and the music begins

00:26:32.280 It is like unlocking the door into a beautiful country

00:26:36.080 There, stretched far away, are plains and mountains and the billowy sea

00:26:43.100 And as the music forms a net of sound

00:26:47.200 The people who dwell there enter the scene

00:26:49.880 Tall, slow-moving, stately queens 1.00

00:26:54.900 With jeweled crowns and garments gay or sad 0.99

00:26:59.200 Who walk on mountaintops or stand beside the shore 0.79

00:27:03.500 Watching the water people

00:27:05.780 These water folk are passionless 0.86

00:27:09.620 And sway or fall with little heed of time

00:27:13.560 They toss the spray and bending down

00:27:16.540 Dive headlong through the deep

00:27:18.540 There are the dwellers too of the great plain

00:27:22.620 Who sit and brood

00:27:24.780 Made of stone and motionless

00:27:27.600 The trees which slumber till some elf goes by

00:27:32.180 With magic spear and wakes the green to life

00:27:35.520 Towers white and tall

00:27:37.560 standing against the darkening sky.

00:27:42.440 For a long time, the land I saw when hearing Beethoven was unpeopled.

00:27:48.660 Hills, plains, ruined towers, churches by the sea. 0.96

00:27:54.800 After a time, I saw far off, a little company of spearmen

00:27:59.340 ride away across the plain.

00:28:02.580 But now the clanging sea is strong with the salt of the lashing spray

00:28:07.220 and full of elemental life the riders of the waves the queen of tides who carries in her hand

00:28:14.400 the pearl-like moon and bubbles gleaming on the inky wave often when hearing back i hear bells

00:28:23.520 ringing in the sky rung by whirling cords held in the hands of maidens dressed in brown

00:28:30.800 There is a rare freshness in the air like morning on a mountaintop with opal-colored mists that chase each other fast across the scene.

00:28:42.160 Chopin brings night.

00:28:45.180 Gardens where mystery and dread lurk under every bush, but joy and passion throb within the air, and the cold moon bewitches all the scene.

00:28:56.060 There is a garden that I often see, with moonlight glistening on the vine leaves, and drooping

00:29:04.280 roses with pale petals fluttering down, tall misty trees and purple sky, and lovers wandering

00:29:11.900 there. A drawing of that garden I have shown to several people, and asked them if they could play

00:29:19.400 the music that I heard when I drew it. They have all, without any hesitation, played the

00:29:26.280 same. I do not know the name, but, well, I know the music of that place.

00:29:37.120 In 1911, Pixie left the Golden Dawn behind. She converted to Roman Catholicism, and although

00:29:46.040 she claimed it was such fun with its rites and rituals, it was certainly not an easy choice in

00:29:51.860 Protestant England, and it might also have been lonely. She withdrew from most of her former

00:29:59.660 friends at this time, and her artistic output slowed. In 1913, she illustrated Ellen Terry's

00:30:06.620 book, The Russian Ballet, and she published the illustrated book entitled Bluebeard,

00:30:11.880 And in 1914, she illustrated Eunice Fuller's work called The Book of Friendly Giants, which, if you are a fan of Roald Dahl's The BFG, you must check out.

00:30:24.480 Norfleet writes that in late 1918, Pamela received a legacy from a deceased uncle, and this money gave her the freedom to set up her life in Cornwall, in southwest England.

00:30:35.000 North Fleet is of the opinion that she chose that area because pixies were believed to be

00:30:41.260 particularly concentrated in the region around Devon and Cornwall. She always thought herself

00:30:46.820 a pixie who really didn't fit in well among ordinary humans. She once told WB Yeats that

00:30:53.580 she'd been able to see fairies in Ireland. An article in Fairy Magazine from 2017 gives a

00:31:00.940 little more insight into what those years for her might have been like. They write that Coleman

00:31:06.460 Smith died in 1951 in Butte, Cornwall, where she lived in a home bought with an inheritance from

00:31:12.100 an uncle. The occupation listed on her death certificate reads, a spinster of independent

00:31:17.860 means. Though just a decade earlier she'd been recognized by the Royal Society for the

00:31:23.060 Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce, she was no longer listed as an artist and was

00:31:28.500 making a meager living running a home for vacationing Catholic priests.

00:31:33.860 Her estate was willed to her flatmate, Nora Lake, a reputed spiritualist.

00:31:41.400 Nora Lake was likely Coleman Smith's lover.

00:31:44.180 The two had been companions for 40 years.

00:31:47.820 And although nothing definitive is written about the artist's sexual predilections,

00:31:51.260 she never married and was linked to no men and spent her time in a company of women,

00:31:56.760 many of them known queers, such as the handsome Edith Edie Craig, a bisexual suffragist who

00:32:02.940 famously lived in a menage a trois with a straight couple until her death. 0.57

00:32:08.480 Craig was the model for the Queen of Wands in Coleman Smith's Tarot.

00:32:14.760 I was telling my beautiful witch friend Sue about Coleman Smith's story, and I got to this part

00:32:19.720 about Cornwall and fairies, and she said, oh, I live there. It's heavy witchy. It's almost encircled 0.99

00:32:25.860 by water, cliffs, and beaches, and then in the middle it's the moors. You can just walk around

00:32:32.880 and find ancient stone circles. I was up there at night one night to see the stars, and a fox

00:32:38.960 walked right up to me, stood and stared at me for way too long. So I love to imagine Pixie there.

00:32:48.380 And I can see getting enough of busy London

00:32:51.840 and tiring of a heavily ritualized and performance-based magical scene

00:32:58.760 led by these men with their budding egos.

00:33:02.800 And I can see heading for the sea.

00:33:07.660 It seems like maybe she made up her own personal practice,

00:33:12.800 inspired by both Catholicism's mysteries

00:33:16.100 and by her love, with the beautiful name and the uncanny intuitions, Nora Lake.

00:33:25.240 I see a kind of beautiful life balanced there, between the moor and the waves.

00:33:32.860 Often, Pixie's characterized as dying penniless and unappreciated.

00:33:38.060 And though of course it's infuriating that she didn't earn the royalties she deserved

00:33:42.400 from the most popular tarot deck of all time,

00:33:46.100 I think she did live a kind of magical life right to the end.

00:33:52.160 After all, she lived 40 years with her love and best friend.

00:33:57.300 No small achievement in its own right for any of us.

00:34:01.460 She had independent means and a job where she was her own boss,

00:34:06.780 caring for and I imagine whispering sacred and profane secrets 0.97

00:34:12.200 with old Catholic priests.

00:34:14.280 and in her tarot cards she left images of her friends, of her visions, of her personal vast

00:34:24.000 understanding of the symbolism shared between cultures and linking our minds together through

00:34:30.400 ancient archetypes and to the spirit world. She left us a map that deepened our understanding

00:34:38.900 beyond words. Like she was hearing a distant music and translating it for millions of seers

00:34:48.100 to come. In 1908, Pixie Coleman Smith wrote an article for Craftsman magazine, the principal

00:34:57.160 voice of the arts and crafts movement in the United States, called Should the Art Student

00:35:01.900 think. So we'll end our first episode with this and try to take Pix's advice to heart

00:35:09.280 for all our practices of art and send it with love to all you witches and all the ways you're

00:35:16.300 out there trying to bring about your magic. Keep an open mind to all things.

00:35:23.480 Hear all the music you can, good music, for sound and form are more closely connected than we know.

00:35:32.540 Think good thoughts of beautiful things, colors, sounds, places, not mean thoughts.

00:35:41.940 When you see a lot of dirty people in a crowd, do not remember only the dirt of the great spirit that is in them all and the power that they represent.

00:35:53.940 Through ugliness is beauty sometimes found.

00:35:58.120 Banish fear.

00:36:00.360 Brace your courage.

00:36:01.900 place your ideal high up with the sun away from the dirt and squalor and ugliness around you

00:36:09.600 and let that power that makes the roar of the high power presses enter into your work

00:36:16.600 energy courage life love use your wits use your eyes perhaps you use your physical eyes too much

00:36:27.820 And only see the mask

00:36:29.920 Find eyes within

00:36:32.700 Look for the door

00:36:36.060 Into the unknown country 1.00

00:36:38.400 You must be a witch 1.00

00:36:45.460 Thanks for listening 1.00

00:36:46.640 And for being a part of the Missing Witches Coven

00:36:49.520 If you want to know more about Pixie

00:36:51.260 Check out our show notes at missingwitches.com

00:36:53.860 And join us on Wednesday

00:36:55.620 for Witches Found, the companion series to Missing Witches, where we talk to contemporary witches

00:37:02.240 about the themes that come up in this week's show. So this week, we'll be talking to energy

00:37:07.520 worker and tarot reader Rita about divination. So that's Missing Witches Sundays, Witches Found

00:37:15.000 Wednesdays, and as a new podcast, the best way that you can help us is by reviewing. We'll be

00:37:23.160 devoting our halloween episode of witches found to you yes you we'll be spotlighting some of the

00:37:30.860 badass witches we've met and found online and also reading some of our favorite podcast reviews

00:37:35.900 like i said reviews help us the most as a new podcast so thank you in advance

00:37:40.560 we can't wait to read them and of course the weirder and witchier the better blessed be

Missing Witches - September 23, 2018

Missing Witches - Pixie Colman Smith： “Look for the Door Into The Unknown Country.”

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