All Souls' Day

El Otro Reloj (The Other Timepiece) - 1957, Remedios Varos. Note that the figure's
head is a pentagram. The strange spirals are her own.

(I apologize for missing Halloween this year, but the powers-that-be were working against me. Specifically, that power known as Wi-Fi. I haven't had enough of it in the past 2 weeks to accomplish much of anything. And, upon WiFi's return, although I scrambled to put up several unfinished posts in the past 48 hours, more and more information distracted me as well as an onslaught of my usual daily distractions.

But, in my favor, although Halloween (Samhain) has passed, along with the first day of the Celtic New Year, the first Day of the Dead and the (Catholic) All Saints Day, this sequence of holidays has not, yet, come to an end. Today is All Souls' Day, or the final Day of the Dead.

That being said, when it comes to this blog and the witching season, my go-to artists have often been my two favorite Patron Saints: surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varos. And why not? When it came to painting, each was a sorceress conjuring up some of the weirdest images the world has ever known; images that in many respects were so similar, they seemed as if they emerged like branches from a single tree.)

Inset right is El Encuentro (The Encounter), 1962, by Remedios Varo.

"The dream world and the real world are the same.” - Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), found in this article.

"To the ancient Celts, the year had two 'hinges'. These were Beltaine (the first of May) and Samhain, or Samhuinn, (the first of November), which is also the traditional Celtic New Year. And these two days were the most magical, and often frightening times of the whole year."

- An excerpt from the Samhain page at Druidry.org. The photograph of Remedios inset left was found in this excellent series of articles about her life beginning here.

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All Souls' Day, when intoned, has a dolorous ring to it... reminding me of "for whom the bell tolls," an often quoted line by the English poet, John Donne.

"Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

For Whom the Bell Tolls was, of course, also the title of the 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway which was based on his experiences as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War.

Coincidentally, Remedios Varo, born in Catalonia - as was her fellow Surrealist, Salvador Dali and architect Antoni Gaudí - fled  Barcelona during that war and moved to Paris with her lover, French poet, Benjamin Péret.

Three years later, France, along with Great Britain, entered WWII. The good news is that Varo, after stopping off in New York, emigrated to Mexico, where her alchemical relationship with Surrealist Leonora Carrington would intensify, and "the two women would collaborate in attempting to develop a new pictorial language that spoke more directly to their own needs."

María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born in the province of Girona with its medieval, walled towns. It was place she loathed to leave and she carried it for the rest of her life in the form of a small black and white photograph. Sometimes Girona appears in her images. (Inset right is a photo of Girona.) 

The province of Girona borders France and has a very interesting history and an important Jewish heritage. In the 12th century one of the most important Kabbalistic schools in Europe was built there. The unique Santa Maria de Girona was featured in the television series Game of Thrones.

One noteworthy element found in Varo's Wiki biography is that she was given the named of Remedios in honor of the Virgen de los Remedios ("Virgin of Remedies"). Varo became the 'remedy' for her (Basque) mother's grief after the loss of a first daughter. This gave Varo her first ghost... the older sister she never knew but remained unconsciously tied to.

Remedios Varo, herself, died in 1963. She may have become Leonora Carrington's first ghost... and as Carrington lived till 2011; they may have had a lot of strange years together. Inset left is a photograph of Carrington and her cat seated in front of her painting The Temptation of St. Anthony, (1945). Both photo and painting were sourced from the wonderful article The Surrealist Magical Mystery of Leonora Carrington by Cecile Paul.

But, while they both lived, the two friends were no strangers to the occult world and it's many esoteric  subdivisions, and this includes some innovations of their own. In Part 1 of Mara Marietta's Women Surrealists and the Hermetic Tradition, she mentions that the two women shared "dreams, stories, and magic potions." Certainly they were also well-versed in myth and folklore. I don't doubt they were psychic. I don't doubt they had their "magic" rituals... practices that all makers and all dreamers can, in some way, (secretly) relate to.  But, I really believe that both Carrington and Varo were right on the threshold of a unique knowledge or understanding. A knowledge scientists strive for but which is unlikely to be found in the expected places or in the traditional ways.

Inset right is a photo of Varo with one of her many cats found here.

I suspect it is this unique, hermetically sealed knowledge Varo was referring to with her enigmatic owl hybrids; a deeper wisdom... so deeply embedded it may as well be an alien thought process of a different species.

But, then again...

(GIF source: Tenor.)

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(Continued below the jump...)

November 5-9, 2026

sorry for the delay, but, due to the sheer magnitude of the results of the midterm elections here in the States, there was work to be accomplished on the other blog! See: The Face of America.)

Originally this post was intended to be a Halloween post featuring images by Remedios Varo, and some photos of she and Leonora Carrington and their cats! Alas, I became absorbed in further research and realized that Varo and Carrington's biographies were leading me back to WWII again; specifically to the plight of an artist during that time period but, ultimately, to the understanding that war is as much a threat to our cultural heritage as it is to our physical lives.

In the case of Varo and Carrington, however, who survived and rebuilt their lives in Mexico, war was the catalyst that produced art that might never have existed otherwise.

From an article I found today, written by Leonora Carrington's cousin,  Joanna Moorhead in 2010 (for the Guardian), a year before Carrington's death, we learn:

"As I got to know my cousin, who is now 93, I discovered an artist who had eschewed fame to concentrate on the essence of the surreal experience – her inner life. And far from being moulded primarily by Ernst, she had found inspiration in other women artists, in particular the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. These two, who are both now dead, were also strong, independent-minded women, who had fled war-torn Europe for Mexico, a country that opened its doors to refugees in the 30s and 40s."

Earlier in the article, Moorhead  describes Carrington as being "at the heart of a unique, and until now largely unknown, strand of surrealism, brewed up in the 40s and 50s, in the bustle and hum of a Mexico City kitchen."

But, now we are made aware of a third woman in that "kitchen": photographer, Kati Horna. Born in Budapest to an upper-middle-class Jewish family, she lived in both Berlin and Paris, photographed two wars and, like Carrington and Varo, survived two world wars.  Inset right is her portrait (from 1963) found here.

From her Wiki entry: "Most of her work was considered lost during the Spanish Civil War. She was one of the influential women photographers of her time. Through her photographs she was able to change the way that people viewed war. One way that Horna was able to do this was through the utilization of a strategy called "gendered witnessing". Gendered witnessing consisted of putting a feminist view on the notion that war was a predominantly masculine thing."

As it happened, the lost photographs were eventually found in a crate in Amsterdam! Inset left is one of her more surrealist photographs. It's a portrait of Remedios Varo wearing a wide, triangular hood with a long, frightening mask attached the side like a Janus face. The woman beneath the hood isw Varo. The woman who designed and created the strange hood and mask was Carrington.. Note the mask is surrounded by black lace. It appears to be the face of a woman. Was it meant to symbolize the presence of Varo's mother or the sister she never met? It's a theory. And, it would indicate that the women - at least Varo and Carrington - had a very intimate friendship. They knew each other's secrets... and this is rare. Theirs was a special relationship which was cut short by Varo's death... or was it?

"Michelet, who so beautifully did justice to the Witch, highlights among her gifts two that are invaluable, because granted only to women: ‘the illuminism of lucid madness’ and ‘the sublime power of solitary conception.’ He also defends her against the Christian-motivated reputation she has acquired of being old and ugly. ‘At the word Witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.’

Who today could answer that description better than Leonora Carrington? The respectable persons who invited her to dine in an elegant restaurant a dozen or so years ago have still not gotten over their embarrassment at noticing that, all the while taking part in the conversation, she had removed her shoes and was patiently slathering her feet with mustard."

The quote above was really quite a find, and It was discovered in an unusual book - Anthology of Black Humour (1966) - written by Surrealist André Breton! The book was a compilation of numerous stories by numerous authors; this came from Breton's introduction to Leonora Carrington's short story The Debutante. Jules Michelet (1798 - 1874), quoted in the introduction was a French writer, historian, and philosopher who wrote the first "sympathetic history of witchcraft," Satanism & Witchcraft.

"Originally published in Paris as La Sorcière in 1862, the first English translation appeared in London a year later. Michelet portrays the life of witches and trials held for witchcraft, and argues that medieval witchcraft was a righteous act of rebellion by the lower classes against feudalism and the Roman Catholic Church."

Hmmm... political genocide masked as a "witch-hunt"; it sounds vaguely familiar...

Inset right is a 1942 photograph of Leonora Carrington channelling her inner sorceress... and/or the "illuminism of lucid madness" and "the sublime power of solitary conception."

(Sigh... but it's never over...

and it's brought to you live!)