Leonora Carrington: Alchemy, the Underworld, and the Goddess

Abstract

Leonora Carrington’s novels—Down Below, The Hearing Trumpet, and The Stone Door—offer extraordinary revisionings of the myth most central to the modernist movement of the 20th century: that of the nekyia, or descent to the underworld. In her surrealist memoir, Down Below, the descent to the underworld catalyzes the revelation of alchemical configurations of mythical archetypes. This little surrealist classic of 1943 has much in common with late works of modernism produced during the Second World War, such as Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, or Trilogy by H. D. In all of these works, the descent to the underworld leads to the revelation of those archetypal forms of the imagination that give them “shape and significance.” For Carrington, the forms revealed by the psychotic breakdown recorded in the novel are alchemical as well as mythical.

Notes

1 There is a connection between the eye cult and the goddesses of death and rebirth in Mesopotamia. The association is found in the earliest cuneiform clay tablets of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.

2 Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) bases a profound study of the psychology of women at midlife on the story of Inanna.

3 For a collection of images of the androgyne as a symbol of the reconciliation of male and female in alchemy, religion, literature, and myth, see Elémire Zolla (1981).

4 For these archetypal themes, see my Figuring Poeisis: A Mythical Geometry of Postmodernism (Smith, 1997).

5 See Mary Haskins (1995) for a fine overview of the myth of Mary Magdalen, which, however, neglects both Carrington and H. D.

6 The cup, the Grail, and the cauldron are universal archetypes of world mythology. The Chinese sacrificial vessels are splendid if terrifying examples (see Campbell, 1974, p. 124, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). A wide range of images can be found in The Grail, by John Matthews (1981).

7 John Matthews (1981) notes the affiliation between the cups of the classical mysteries, Celtic cauldrons, Christian grails, and three types of alchemical vessel: the crucible, the flask, and the still.

8 Though the symbolism usually involves the circle, the square, and the triangle, more elaborate figures like interlocking spirals (Godwin, 1979, Figure 75) and vortices inscribed with a numerical system of “simple numbers, their squares and cubes” derived from Pythagoras, Plato, and Pico della Mirandola are also common (Godwin, 1979, p. 21). Dürer also drew from this line of hermetic speculation, linking melancholy, Masonic mysteries, and the understanding of the artistic temperament with the help of his reading of Marsilio Ficino’s De Vita Triplici, translated into German in 1505 (Schoch, 1986, p. 312).

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Notes on contributors

Evans Lansing Smith

Dr. Evans Lansing Smith served as chair for 12 years and is currently a core faculty member of the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. In the 1970s, he traveled with Joseph Campbell in northern France, Egypt, and Kenya. He has taught at colleges and institutes in Switzerland, Italy, France, Maryland, Texas, and California, and is the recipient of awards for distinguished teaching from Midwestern State University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is the author of two books of poems, two novels, and a novella, as well as 10 books and numerous articles on comparative literature and myth.