In the 1930s, when Harris became one of the first Canadian artists to embrace abstraction, the transition was the smoothest in art history. For years, he’d been painting a world of heavenly forms free of the stubborn particulars of place, as if he couldn’t see the forest for the Tree. Without particulars to paint, however, art inevitably becomes more about the artist. Indeed, following the theosophical theory that cooler hues demonstrate a higher degree of enlightenment (pale azure, for example, indicates “self-renunciation and union with the divine”), Harris gradually migrated away from warm colours. In works such as Icebergs, Davis Strait, his subject rendered as a rhythm of triangular blue striations, it’s tempting to think that he wasn’t simply striving to channel the “psychic energy” seething within a block of ice — he was executing a self-portrait of the artist as a young god.
In the writings of mystics, it’s common for the line between self-surrender and self-divinization to become blurred. In such cases, it can be hard to tell whether the mystic is an egoless saint or a raging narcissist. Harris may have been both. One friend described the handsome, well-heeled heir of the Massey-Harris fortune as “self-centred, rather wanting to be courtiered, especially in his own studio.” Another wrote that he “carried his head as if he wore a crown.” But if Harris thought himself a god, he was a saint to Carr. Despite her new-found acceptance in Toronto and Ottawa, insecurity continued to dog her, and Harris took her under his wing, initiating a prolific correspondence that included a steady stream of theosophical philosophizing.

Over the next five years, Carr dabbled in the occult and wove its lessons into her paintings of the British Columbia landscape. With a renewed sense of purpose, she set to work by screwing up her eyes, which she felt brought “the spiritual into clearer focus,” and stripped her totem poles to bare geometries. “Seek ever,” she reminded herself in her journal, “to lift the painting above the paint.” But whereas Harris stressed stasis and serenity, Carr sought struggle and movement. Her trees and mountains became writhing demons, a dynamic spirit world lurking behind the phenomenal, manifestly ambivalent. In her 1929 work Indian Church, a primal pine forest rampages about the canvas, threatening to overwhelm a small white church in a tempest of greens and browns; yet the delicate structure, like a storm-tossed ship or a beleaguered lighthouse, remains unconquered, beating back Nature’s rawest rhythms with a steady inner light. Harris told her it was the best thing she’d ever done.

What he couldn’t have fully appreciated was that the ambivalent, restless energy in Carr’s new work had something to do with her uneasy relationship with Theosophy. While attracted to its syncretism, she bridled at the elitism and smugness it seemed to breed. She especially hated how her new friends in Toronto were constantly belittling Christianity. Their long-winded parsings of theosophical dogma bored her stiff; it seemed all head and no heart, and she found herself missing the warmth of a personal Jesus.

Then, in January 1934, she attended a lecture by Raja Singh, a Christian Hindu, and felt her heart leap in her chest. “Oh, this is live, vital religion,” she wrote. She wanted to see life “dipped in love” through communion with a personal divinity. “God as love,” she wrote, “is joyous.” Though she feared the disapproval of Harris and the rest, she was relieved by her decision to “go back sixty years to where I started.” In language reminiscent of Emerson’s assault on the “corpse-cold” rationalism of New England theology a century before, Carr attacked Theosophy as “bloodless,” a “cold storage of beautiful thoughts,” and heaved Blavatsky’s work into the fire.

To see Icebergs, Davis Strait in the National Gallery of Canada, visitors climb a long ramp that winds through the bowels of a glass mountain. At the summit is the light-filled Great Hall, a secular temple to Harris and his vision of Canada as the “replenishing North.” So it may surprise Canadians to hear that nationalism for Harris was but a lever of transcendence, a step on the path to “cosmic consciousness,” a phrase coined by the psychiatrist and Whitmanite Richard Bucke, whose Cosmic Consciousness Harris hailed as the greatest book ever written by a Canadian. As one Theosophist put it, “Internationalism follows nationalism — that stage must complete itself — before we can safely go on to the next.”

Cosmic consciousness might seem an awfully thin rod to hang a flag from, but given the checkered history of nationalist experiments in the twentieth century, that may have been a godsend. During the 1920s and ’30s, when Germans were falling for a myth of the mystical superiority of the Nordic race, Canadian Theosophists were promoting a quaint, aristocratic mysticism that privileged the wisdom of colonized peoples and taught the values of internationalism and universal brotherhood.

However, you’d be hard pressed to hear such ideas in a contemporary exhibit of the Group of Seven. Expanding Horizons, which devotes significant space to exploring the religious encounter with nature, includes only a brief mention of Harris’s “theosophically influenced beliefs.” Most would agree that it is hard to grasp the nuances of Shakespeare without at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Bible. Does it matter that visitors to the Great Hall come away thinking they’ve been looking at a painting of an iceberg and not a spiritual self-portrait?

No doubt there are worse crimes against historical memory. Still, there may never be a better moment to reflect on the wisdom and folly of modern attempts to marry nationalism, mysticism, and art. While current debates over the role of religion in public life are flush with hostile caricature and mutual mistrust, few realize that previous generations brought spiritual resources to bear on questions of national identity without succumbing to either the xenophobia of fundamentalism or the wan procedural pieties of the secular nation-state.

The beliefs of the Group of Seven seem strange to us in part because the artists straddled the ages of Victorian Christendom and modern multiculturalism. They spoke in a spiritual creole, a mishmash of East and West, old and new. The vocabulary was Vedic — nirvana instead of heaven, karma rather than sin — but the plot remained roughly Biblical. The millennial kingdom that Jonathan Edwards dreamed would descend upon the New World had simply retreated north, where it still twinkled like a shining beacon on a hill, inviting stronger souls to pursue their errand in what Housser called “that infinite unfathomable thing — the wilderness.” North was the new West. And artists like Lawren Harris and Emily Carr were Canada’s answer to Emerson — homegrown prophets who glimpsed in the country’s vast landscapes a faint evocation of Nature’s nation.