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Lot Essay
A modern-day Renaissance woman, Carrington grew up in the waning years of Britain’s Occult Revival, which had stirred interest in esoterica across a long nineteenth century from the Romantics through the fin-de-siècle. Nurtured on fairy tales and Celtic lore as a child by her Irish mother and nanny, she explored themes of enchantment and transformation across a venerable career, her paintings inculcating a reality at once magical and miraculous. Finding a parallel between the hybrid Celtic Catholicism of her youth and the syncretic religious practices of Mexico, her adopted home beginning in 1942, Carrington evolved a multivalent and pan-cultural religious symbolism across her work, informed by her study of world religions from medieval Christianity to Gnosticism and the Cabbala. “Ireland was viewed by the Surrealists as quintessentially Surrealist, not unlike Mexico,” notes art historian Alyce Mahon. “In keeping with the group’s fascination with Ireland, Carrington embraced her Irish roots, and the stories of Celtic myths, with passion” (“She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013, p. 133). The persistence of Celtic mythology in her work, well into her Mexican years, is seen in such works as Samain (1951), Sidhe, The White People of the Tuatha dé Danann (1954), and the present Faet Fiada (The Appearance of a Wild Beast).
Faet Fiada is an Old Irish prayer of protection, or lorica, attributed to Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. “The tale runs that Patrick and King Lóegaire met at Tara Hill, when the latter was presiding at a heathen festival, which was to begin with the extinction of all fires throughout the country,” according to The Irish Liber Hymnorum. “But Patrick disregarded this regulation and defiantly lighted his paschal fire on the Hill of Slane in full view of the king and his druids. Then followed a contest between the saint and the druids, in which Patrick triumphed, as Moses of old triumphed over the magicians of Egypt. The king thereupon purposed to kill Patrick by a treacherous assault; but he and his companions escaped, being miraculously transformed into deer. And the hymn or charm which he recited in his flight was the Lorica S. Patricii, commonly called Faeth Fiada, or ‘The Deer’s Cry.’ The end of the story tells of the conversion of the king to the Christian faith.” Since its composition in the early fifth century, the hymn has become “a lorica of faith for the protection of body and soul against demons and men and vices…it shall be a protection to him against all poison and envy, it shall be a guard to him against sudden death, it shall be a lorica for his soul after his decease” (J. H. Bernard and R. Atkinson, eds., The Irish Liber Hymnorum, London, 1898, pp. 49, 208-9).
In her Faet Fiada, Carrington reimagines the magic of concealment through a rich, Celtic iconography. Patrick and his acolytes wear sumptuous fur coats modeled on the white deer that inhabit the moonlit background; a diminutive, fairy-like figure, possibly one of the ancient Sidhe, materializes in the foreground, seeming almost to preside over the transfiguration. “The power of Celtic myth as green symbolizes the essential primal matter that will lead to the philosopher’s stone,” Mahon explains, citing the greenish palette of Crookey Hall (1947), a painting of Carrington’s childhood home (op. cit., p. 135). The luminous, emerald-green ground of the present work is far more saturated and heightens the sense of alchemy and even divine illumination, drawing from sundry Celtic and Catholic sources. For Carrington painting was itself a form of alchemy—a kind of lorica—and in this sense Faet Fiada not only reinstantiates the transformation of St. Patrick but also renews in Carrington the apotropaic powers associated with her Irish inheritance. “I think every country has a magical tradition,” she allowed, “but our approach to the unknown is peculiar to our ancestry. It is something that has to do with birth, your blood, flesh, and bones” (in M.-P. Colle, “Leonora Carrington,” Latin American Artists in their Studios, New York, 1994, p. 84).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Faet Fiada is an Old Irish prayer of protection, or lorica, attributed to Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. “The tale runs that Patrick and King Lóegaire met at Tara Hill, when the latter was presiding at a heathen festival, which was to begin with the extinction of all fires throughout the country,” according to The Irish Liber Hymnorum. “But Patrick disregarded this regulation and defiantly lighted his paschal fire on the Hill of Slane in full view of the king and his druids. Then followed a contest between the saint and the druids, in which Patrick triumphed, as Moses of old triumphed over the magicians of Egypt. The king thereupon purposed to kill Patrick by a treacherous assault; but he and his companions escaped, being miraculously transformed into deer. And the hymn or charm which he recited in his flight was the Lorica S. Patricii, commonly called Faeth Fiada, or ‘The Deer’s Cry.’ The end of the story tells of the conversion of the king to the Christian faith.” Since its composition in the early fifth century, the hymn has become “a lorica of faith for the protection of body and soul against demons and men and vices…it shall be a protection to him against all poison and envy, it shall be a guard to him against sudden death, it shall be a lorica for his soul after his decease” (J. H. Bernard and R. Atkinson, eds., The Irish Liber Hymnorum, London, 1898, pp. 49, 208-9).
In her Faet Fiada, Carrington reimagines the magic of concealment through a rich, Celtic iconography. Patrick and his acolytes wear sumptuous fur coats modeled on the white deer that inhabit the moonlit background; a diminutive, fairy-like figure, possibly one of the ancient Sidhe, materializes in the foreground, seeming almost to preside over the transfiguration. “The power of Celtic myth as green symbolizes the essential primal matter that will lead to the philosopher’s stone,” Mahon explains, citing the greenish palette of Crookey Hall (1947), a painting of Carrington’s childhood home (op. cit., p. 135). The luminous, emerald-green ground of the present work is far more saturated and heightens the sense of alchemy and even divine illumination, drawing from sundry Celtic and Catholic sources. For Carrington painting was itself a form of alchemy—a kind of lorica—and in this sense Faet Fiada not only reinstantiates the transformation of St. Patrick but also renews in Carrington the apotropaic powers associated with her Irish inheritance. “I think every country has a magical tradition,” she allowed, “but our approach to the unknown is peculiar to our ancestry. It is something that has to do with birth, your blood, flesh, and bones” (in M.-P. Colle, “Leonora Carrington,” Latin American Artists in their Studios, New York, 1994, p. 84).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park