A Magical Theory of Art is now a reader-supported series. My intention is to keep the theoretical and philosophical portions of these essays available to all, with more practical content for paid subscribers at the end of the article.

If these essays have sparked something in you, I invite you to consider becoming a paid supporter. Your support makes this research possible and allows me to continue writing, painting, and sharing these ideas with you. You can also you can support my work by purchasing a print or original artwork.

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Dreaming: the Original Altered State

Dreaming is the original altered state. Whoever you are, whatever your orientation to reality may be—materialist, panpsychist, idealist, or otherwise—we are all witnesses to this weird mode of consciousness. Every night, ready or not, the unknown seeps in, and we find ourselves in a mirror land, meeting our mirror self. Dreaming is everyone’s innate point of contact with the other side of things.

As per ancient symbolism, if waking consciousness is the bright light of the sun, then dreaming belongs to the moon, whose reflected light illuminates an autosymbolic landscape spontaneously woven from images, memories, and associations. But there are also dawn and dusk, the liminal hours where one world flows into the other, reminding us that consciousness is also a continuum. What might happen, or be revealed, if we learned to linger in crepuscular consciousness a little longer? This is where the practice of liminal dreaming begins.

Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep

“The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.” — Novalis

In Liminal Dreaming1 (2019), Jennifer Dumpert invites the reader to explore consciousness at the edge of sleep and offers a wealth of useful practices for doing so. Dumpert is the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization dedicated to exploring the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with the mind, which I think is really cool.

Liminal dreaming is the transition state between wakefulness and sleep. It bookends both ends of sleep: hypnagogia, as we descend into sleep, and hypnopompia, as we return to daylight consciousness. It’s a wild, unstable space where the body-mind unloads sensory data and the self loosens its grip. Space and time become distorted; thoughts and memory trigger multi-layered chains of association. Most people experience hypnagogic hallucinations. It’s not uncommon to see faces turn our way and dissolve, or to perceive geometric patterns, lights, and colours, or to hear distant voices and humming sounds, or sometimes an odd sentence reverberates. Body jerks and twitches are common too.

Liminal dreaming is weird, psychedelic, and easy to access. As a practice, Dumpert argues that it can serve as a channel for creativity, problem-solving, metacognition, healing, and the playful exploration of consciousness. As I discussed in a previous installment of A Magical Theory of Art, ancient dream mystery traditions understood the potency of this in-between state, and hypnagogia was integral to dream incubation practices throughout antiquity. To me, though, the real appeal is in the cultivation of a liminal mind.

Liminal Mind: Seeing Double

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anais Nin

A liminal mind is the capacity to perceive the material world and the imaginal overlay that interpenetrates it simultaneously. We all experience material reality through the gate of our human senses, which, as points of access between the external and internal world, are liminal apparatuses in themselves. Reality is always in some way mediated—by our senses and also our imagination. To see is to interpret what we see, meaning that “the mind does as much work as the eye” (Dumpert, p. 81). As such, the imagination is a core faculty of perception. A developed liminal mind can hold both orientations at once, like looking through a bifocal lens.

Not only is our experience of reality entangled with memory and symbolic association, but selective attention also filters the overwhelming flood of sensory information we swim through at all times. While this keeps us sane, it also creates frustrating blind spots. Anyone who has tried drawing from life will be familiar with how difficult it is to unlearn the visual shortcuts that underpin perception. As we attempt to draw what we see on the page, most are surprised by how little of the objective world we actually see, and how much the imagination is constantly filling in the blanks. When I teach students to draw, I am really teaching them to see more accurately.

Similarly, foundational magical practices often include practices for cleansing the lens of perception and deconditioning the habits of selective attention that narrow our experience of reality. Developing “supernatural powers” has a lot to do with learning to notice what ordinarily escapes awareness while becoming sensitive to increasingly subtle stimuli. Attention is a spell we can cast (and also our Achilles’ heel in predatory digital spaces designed around its capture and extraction).

So when we turn our attention toward liminal mind, our metacognition becomes heightened, enabling us to observe the unconscious layers that filter perception. New impressions can then penetrate our now loosened mental barriers, allowing us to perceive the imaginal more clearly. As a result, cultivating a liminal mind may open the floodgates to a wide array of unusual, thrilling, and sometimes uncanny experiences.

Perhaps it is a state of mind that unleashes psychic phenomena and invites run-ins with otherworldly intelligences. Or, maybe it’s just an opportunity to witness the spontaneous, absurd drama of the unconscious, and none of it means anything. Thankfully, cultivating a liminal mind doesn't require belief to trigger worthwile experiences. It is how we choose to engage with and act on the content revealed by our liminal experiences that determines their creative potential.

So let’s talk about how this.

The Creative Sweet Spot

“Creativity is not the sole domain of artists, nor is the need to generate ideas confined to academics or inventors. We all hold the potential to make things, to ponder things, and to generate ideas.” — Jennifer Dumpert

Once we learn to bask in the liminal dreaming state with greater conscious awareness, we can begin to turn the bifocal lens of liminal mind toward whatever we fancy. Whether we're seeking inspiration, a creative solution to a problem, or pondering a philosophical question, this mode of consciousness often reveals novel associations and possibilities that our ordinary habits of thought tend to overlook. Imagination informs perception; creativity and problem-solving require that we perceive things differently.

Historically, we know of many visionaries who have deliberately cultivated the hypnagogic state to unlock their creativity. Salvador Dalí is perhaps the most famous since dreamscapes were the core focus of his work. Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka both drew on the liminal dream state as a source of imagery for their writing. We also know that Beethoven, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Edison practiced it when they needed to solve a difficult problem2.

Recent research on dreams corroborates liminal dreaming’s creative application, referring to hypnagogia as the “creative sweet spot.” In one study, participants who spent as little as fifteen seconds in this state were three times more likely to solve creative problems than those who remained awake or those who fell into deep sleep3.

While our culture tends to uphold reason as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, it often neglects the value of the imagination as a legitimate way of knowing. I'm not suggesting that imagination should replace reason, but it might do us good to see them as complementary functions that “together produce a fuller understanding of existence” (Dumpert, p. 102). Liminal mind is great at perceiving unexpected patterns, symbols, and relationships while the analytical mind evaluates, refines, and gives them concrete form. They are meant to work in concert, with one opening new unforeseen possibilities and the other testing and developing them.

Dear reader, A Magical Theory of Art is now a reader-supported series. My intention is to keep the theoretical and philosophical portions of these essays available to all, with more practical content for paid subscribers. Below, I share five tips that have helped me cultivate a liminal dreaming practice, inviting you to experiment with liminal mind for yourself.

If these essays have sparked something in you, I invite you to consider becoming a paid supporter. Your support makes this research possible and allows me to continue writing, painting, and sharing these ideas with you. You can also you can support my work by purchasing a print or original artwork.

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22. Full Moon - June 2026

The 16th-century mystic, Teresa of Ávila, is perhaps best known for her rapturous ecstasies. A Spanish Carmelite nun, she preached the virtues of contemplative life and salvation through divine love. She was sharp-witted and unusually determined for a woman of her time, and she spearheaded a reform of the Carmelite Order, restoring it to its original austerity and devotional rigour. She was, like mystics tend to be, a yearner.

I cannot say that I espouse Christian notions of sin, purity, and chastity, nor do I feel called to a more ascetic path, but I’m also a yearner, and this is some of what draws me to St. Teresa. I often crave a more contemplative life, and am inspired by the tenacity of her desire and the unwavering one-pointedness of her aim: the union of the soul with the Beloved. Her well-documented mystical ecstasies were all-consuming and erotically charged. In her autobiography, The Book of Her Life (1565), she writes:

“I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. […] He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim.

[…] I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one.”1

This encounter, known as the Transverberation, began a series of rapturous divine union experiences and occurred later in life, when she was already in her mid-forties. It was immortalized by the Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who exquisitely captured Teresa as she dissolved into waves of convulsive pleasure, adrift somewhere between bliss and agony. Surely, there is nothing sweeter than a God-given Orgasm.

Teresa wasn’t the only Christian mystic to romanticize sacred union with the divine. At the heart of Christian mystical tradition is a burning eroticism—a passionate longing for the soul’s utter dissolution into the sublime embrace of the Beloved. Nuns and sisters are known as Brides of Christ; consacrated virgins who feel called to redirect their inherent erotic longing and surrender to higher grace.

This conceptualization of God or Christ as lover or bride is not unique to Christianity but permeates mystical traditions across cultures and faiths. This longing for sacred, ecstatic union with Spirit—or a spirit—is a lot older than Christianity. The concept of hieros gamos, ancient Greek for “sacred marriage”, can be traced to the beginning of recorded history, appearing in ancient mystery cults, pagan religious rites, and shamanic practices, where ecstasy, possession, and communion with non-human intelligences were central features of spiritual life. This is a topic I hope to explore in greater depth in a forthcoming instalment of A Magical Theory of Art, for relationships with deities and spirits have long been understood as essentially co-creative, a technology capable of bestowing visions and revelations that inspire works of art, and even change the course of human evolution.

In Teresa's case, the fruits of her sacred union live on beyond the Carmelite Order’s monastic reforms and find lasting expression in her influence on Christian mysticism through writings celebrated as masterpieces of both Christian theology and Spanish literature. Among these, The Interior Castle (1577) remains the most widely studied. Divinely inspired by a vision of the soul as a crystalline, iridescent castle within, she guides the spiritual seeker through its seven chambers, each representing a stage of spiritual development, until the soul's final union with the Divine in the innermost chamber of the heart.

In the introduction to a modern translation of The Interior Castle, Mirabai Starr notes how Teresa’s “life was characterized by the struggle to balance the radical nature of her personal truth with the political discretion required to prevent her from being condemned as a heretic”2. Despite being an overarching theme within the Christian canon, ecstatic rapture associated with spirit marriage was regarded as dangerously suspicious throughout Europe.

During the Spanish Inquisition, when accusations of heresy could be rather fatal, claims of mystical union were often scrutinized as potential evidence of diabolical influence. Throughout Medieval and early modern Europe, the crime of congressus cum daemonibus—intercourse with spirits—was considered way worse than mere heresy, and was seen as a serious moral crime of unredeemable bestiality.

What separates sacred, God-given ecstasy from profane, bestial possession is not always the phenomenological ground of the experience, but the interpretive frame imposed on it. Comparable ecstatic and visionary states could easily slip into accusations of witchcraft and be read as demonic.

Around the time Teresa was getting it on with the cherub, one of Europe’s largest witch hunts was raging in the Basque Country and the Pyreneés, the border region overlapping Spain and France. Here, a different type of ecstasy was on trial: the akelarre, the Basque word for the infamous Witches’ Sabbat, where all sorts of bestiality allegedly happened between so-called witches and the black he-Goat or Akerbeltz. Witch hunts are a complex topic, one that has often more to do with deep-seated fears of otherness than with actual witchcraft.3

Carl Jung’s concept of amplificatory interpretation comes in handy when trying to parse the meaning individuals and societies project onto ecstatic or otherwise unexplainable experiences. According to Jung, the unconscious amplifies the symbolic associations connected to an image and weaves everything into a meaningful framework for understanding these extraordinary experiences. Faced with the ineffable, the psyche instinctively reaches for familiar narratives and images to make sense of what it cannot otherwise explain. These narratives are often sourced from popular culture, which in Teresa’s time, and during the era of the witch hunts, was suffused with Catholic iconography of angels and demons, as well as rich folklore filled with beasts, witches, and maleficium.

In American Cosmic (2019)4, religious scholar Diana W. Pasulka draws on Jung’s concept to shed new light on Teresa’s ecstasies and to illustrate the relationship between cultural representation and framing. She writes that, at first, Teresa does not recognize the entity but eventually identifies it as a cherub based on the Catholic angelology she is already familiar with:

“Our Lord was pleased that I should have at times a vision of this kind: I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. This I am not accustomed to see, unless very rarely. Though I have visions of angels frequently, yet I see them only by an intellectual vision, such as I have spoken of before. It was our Lord’s will that in this vision I should see the angel in this wise. He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim.5”

However, Pasulka highlights that Bernini’s representation of the event does not tell the whole story, yet it continues to shape how we frame Teresa’s ecstasy. The entity is neither depicted as fiery nor illuminated, nor is it small. Instead, Bernini’s image reinforces familiar cultural conceptions of angels, framing Teresa’s experience as distinctly Christian and God-given.

Pasulka, whose initial area of study focused on the Catholic and Orthodox doctrine of purgatory, came across an overwhelming number of unexplained accounts while conducting her research: reports of orbs of light, unidentified flying objects, and apparitions preserved in the Vatican archives. These findings eventually led her to turn her lens as a religious scholar toward modern conceptions of the UFO phenomenon, resulting in pioneering work in this field of study6. Pasulka notes how Teresa’s Transverberation and encounter with the small being looks an awful lot like some contemporary accounts of alien encounters, which are framed as such because of the media ecosystem and technological narratives of our times.

Teresa died in 1584, and nine months after her death, her body was exhumed and reportedly found intact. Parts of her body were divided into relics and dispersed throughout Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. Still, she is buried at the Convent of the Annunciation in Alba de Tormes, Spain. She was officially canonized as a saint in 1622 and was the first woman to receive the title of Doctor of the Church in 19707. The Feast of the Transverberation of St. Teresa of Avila is celebrated on August 26.

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From the alphabet’s overlooked influence on Plato’s Theory of Forms, to the West’s mystical obsession with recovering the Divine Language, to Austin Osman Spare’s hacking of this symbolic system, I invite you into the occult corners of media theory.

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In Techgnosis,1 Erik Davis offers a captivating account of the interdependence of culture and technology, focusing especially on how communication media have shaped the religious imagination. More than any other invention, the introduction of new information technologies invariably transforms conceptions of self and reality, as each enables new ways of communicating the incorporeal realm of mind and meaning. This has been the case from the earliest writing prototypes, be they pictograms, hieroglyphs, and later, alphabets. Now fully internalized, writing has altered humanity in profound yet subtle ways. More specifically, this essay will explore the alphabet’s legacy on the Western occult imagination.

A core thread weaving this piece is the notion that writing is a machine. Not only that, but media technologies generate entire material ecologies around themselves, all entangled within an essentially cyborgish feedback loop. From ink and papyrus to parchment, the printing press, the typewriter, the personal computer, and now AI language models, each new medium extends the reach of symbolic thought while simultaneously reshaping the conditions of human experience. Davis points out that “the material history of writing is an utterly technological tale” (p.16), and considering how technology is a double-edged sword, one that simultaneously amplifies certain modes of consciousness while amputating others, humans have long wrestled with this magical, god-like power to manipulate reality through signs and symbols.

This tricksterish power is anthropomorphized in mythic figures such as Hermes in Greece and Thoth in Egypt. Associated with language and communication, both are credited with the invention of writing systems, whether hieroglyphic or alphabetic, as well as numbers and mathematics. Therefore, their long-standing association with magic underscores how symbolic representation is a mysterious world-binding, world-shaping force, one that reconfigures the world in its attempts to describe and inscribe it.

The Lasting Impact of Plato’s Bias

“More than any single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.” — Walter Ong

Thoth makes an apparition in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates recounts an instructive tale on the cost of technological progress. Legend has it that upon visiting King Thamus, ruler of a great city in Upper Egypt, the Divine Scribe attempts to persuade him to make writing widely available to the Egyptians, promising that it will enhance memory and wisdom among the people. Weighing the pros and cons, King Thamus declines, concluding that Thoth’s invention would instead destroy memory, outsourcing this important faculty onto external markings. By eroding the oral context of learning, the king foresaw that writing would produce only the appearance of knowledge. Filled with the conceit of wisdom, literate people would become a burden to society.2

In Technopoly3, media theorist Neil Postman comments on the tale, highlighting that “Thamus is concerned not with what people will write; he is concerned that people will write” (p. 7). The ruler appears to understand that writing is not a neutral technology, but one whose effects are shaped by the structure of the medium itself.

As mentioned, writing is a tool, an engineered machine, and like any technology, it carries within it inherent bias, meaning a predisposition “to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another” (Postman, p. 13). Socrates, famous for his penchant for dialogue and orality, sides with King Thamus, yet ironically, Plato’s own legacy could not better exemplify writing’s inherent bias, for little did he know that his perspective of the world had itself been shaped by one of the most revolutionary media technologies: the alphabet.

Derived from the Phoenician script, the Greek alphabet emerged around 800-700 BCE4 and was the first writing system to capture both vowels and consonants, thus “completing the technological colonization of the spoken word” (Davis, p. 19). While hieroglyphs kept meaning-making tethered to the animist matrix of the sensory world, with this new system, signs could now be fully abstracted from their referents, and “the Greeks began to associate truth with what was eternal, incorporeal, and inscribed” (Davis, p. 20). The alphabet, and the literate rationalism it engendered, may very well be at the heart of ancient Greece’s philosophical turn.

Born in 428 BCE, Plato lived at the precise moment this new technology began to saturate elite Greek society, and belonged to one of the earliest generations systematically educated in reading and writing. It is perhaps no coincidence that Plato would go on to formulate one of the most abstracted and disembodied ontologies in Western thought, one that irrevocably shaped religion, mysticism, and rationalism alike: the Theory of Forms. For Plato, the “real world” was the abstract realm of transcendent Ideas, of which the sensory human world is only a pale, fallen, and shadowy reflection5.

While King Thamus was concerned with what would be lost through the spread of writing and literacy, technology gives as much as it takes, bringing with it both the boons of progress and the banes of unforeseen consequences. By facilitating the interiorization of the writing machine, the alphabet enabled the spread of rational literalism, unleashing new forms of power and knowledge that would eventually pave the way for the techno-scientific mindset that shaped the Western world.

The alphabet’s inherent bias leans toward categorization, linear logic, analysis, and separation, which shaped the user as much as it shaped civilization. For interiorized, the writing machine enabled sharper introspection, giving rise to a more separate, rational self who could now reach towards the divine and formless, propelled by reason. Davis writes:

“For Plato, literate introspection may have catalyzed something far more mystical: his revolutionary belief that an incorporeal spirit lurks within the self, and that this immortal spark of intelligence is independent of the speaking, breathing body” (p.20).

Of course, Davis admits, the idea of an immortal, reincarnating essence beyond the mortal body is ancient, having existed for millennia within the mystery cults and shamanic lore of the region. The Orphic and Pythagorean traditions were influential to Plato, but he redirected these currents toward his rationalist project. Where earlier shamanic streams sought mystical knowledge through descent, going deep into the belly of the Earth as an entry point into the cosmos, the seeker of Truth now sought it through ascent. What scholar Ioan P. Couliano called the “Platonic Space Shuttle” launched the rational spark beyond the pull of the body so it might glimpse its own divinity in the noetic light.

While the alphabet cannot be the sole culprit for the long-standing chasm between spirit and body, immanence vs. transcendence, Plato’s metaphysics would come to exert a profound influence on the Western psyche, seeping into the Abrahamic religions of the written word that followed, and later into the Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, and Hermetic currents that shaped the Renaissance and beyond.

Mystical Alphabets: The Quest for the Divine Language

“The limits of my language define the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

While the Greek alphabet helped abstract thought from the natural world, the Hebrew tradition sacralized the alphabet as a divine, god-given creative code. Meanwhile, this abstraction proved especially compatible with the religious innovation of the monotheistic God: invisible yet omnipresent, disembodied yet absolute, capable of governing a People across territories through codified law rather than coaxed or petitioned locally, through ritual (Davis, p. 23).

This is a God who now bestows inscribed tablets of commandments, laws, and instructions that media technologies such as the scroll and, later, the codex would crystallize and canonize to great political effect. The writing machine made Judaism and Christianity into religions of the Book, a book increasingly understood as the literal Word of God.

But nestled within this very Book is a paradox. The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 hints at the fact that humanity is no longer in possession of the Original Tongue. While Adam names all living creatures in Eden, he does not invent language. His word is the Word. In the Abrahamic imagination, language, in its primordial state, is ontologically at-one with reality. Yet, after the construction of the Tower of Babel, humanity finds itself scattered under the “Confusion of Tongues,” severed from linguistic unity, and plunged into the chaotic multiplicity of fractured, fallen languages.

Noting that we are reminded of Plato’s metaphysics. In a sense, the lost original tongue is an Ideal Form, the luminous source from which all imperfect linguistic reflections descend. It is the language of Creation, untouched by distortion or noise, a pure signal clear from interference.

This paradox gave rise to one of the great obsessions of Western mysticism: the recovery of the Adamic tongue, a pure and Divine Language untouched by the distortions of the mundane world with its sticky commerce, politics, hubris, and inherent ambiguity. Streams of Christian mystics, Kabbalists, Neoplatonists, and Renaissance occult philosophers increasingly treated letters as the operative codes underlying reality, like “Cosmic DNA Codes” (Davis, p. 23) capable of revealing the path back to the source, back to Eden, and toward alignment with the Will of God. To speak this language was to redeem one’s participation in God’s plan and to be a pure, co-creative agent as Adam once was before the fall.

The Hebrew alphabet, in particular, took on unparalleled cosmological significance. In texts like the mystical Sefer Yetzirah (ca. 3rd–6th century CE), Creation unfolds through the combinations of sacred letters and numbers, each representing a living force within the divine architecture of the cosmos (Davis, p. 23). Its opening passage reads:

“In two and thirty most occult and wonderful paths of wisdom did JAH the Lord of Hosts engrave his name[…]. He created this universe by the three Sepharim: Number, Writing, and Speech. Ten are the numbers, as are the Sephiroth, and twenty-two the letters, these are the Foundation of all things [emphasis added].”6

Within these esoteric currents, the generative power of the Word is exalted, becoming a direct link to the enspiriting matrix animating all levels of the Great Chain of Being. The mystical alphabet seeks to recover the Word of God and access to the operative forces that shape reality—here lies the inherent bias. This orientation towards the technology of text and sign reveals a thirst for greater agency within a universe that, despite the widening chasm of abstraction, remains essentially alive and animistic.

This quest to redeem the Divine Language leads to a series of fascinating semiotic artifacts. Among the earliest is the Lingua Ignota of the 12th-century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen, a fully constructed language revealed to the Benedictine abbess through ecstatic vision. Although its intended function remains enigmatic, scholars generally understand it as an experimental medium of divine communication and communion, an attempt to overcome the inherent limitations of the fallen language.7

Later in the 16th-century Renaissance, English occultist and mathematician John Dee and his associate Edward Kelley famously received, through scrying, a complete system of angelic magic (often referred to as Enochian), including a transmitted Angelic alphabet and an entire book written in the language, the Loagaeth. Dee’s angelic language is a fully articulated celestial tongue, which, despite never supplanting Hebrew’s mystical authority, would later become foundational to Western occultism.8

Hacking the Alphabet

“Look not so deeply into words and letters […] by playing child’s games with symbols thou shalt never understand.” — Aleister Crowley

Perhaps we owe the posterity of Dee’s Angelic alphabet in part to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which adopted and elaborated upon it in the late 19th century. Drawing, once again, on Neoplatonism, Hebrew mysticism, and Hermeticism—a body of texts attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (a syncretic blend of the aforementioned Thoth and Hermes) which significantly informed the worldview of Renaissance magi and alchemists such as John Dee—this British occult society became highly influential within Western esotericism, incubating figures such as Aleister Crowley and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and leaving a lasting impression on modern occult culture more broadly, notably through the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot.

But while the Golden Dawn was busy coming up with intricate systems of correspondences, sacred alphabets, theurgical liturgy, and ceremonial rites intended to reach a transcendent godhead, another, more enigmatic figure was developing a completely different metaphysics. If the “Platonic space shuttle,” bolstered by millennia of body-denying Christian doctrine, had produced what Davis describes as “a chasm between the timeless heaven of the transcendent godhead and the demon-hunted mud puddle where our bodies copulate, sicken, and die” (p. 22), then London artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare embraced the latter as an equally, if not more potent source of divine Creativity through a magical philosophy grounded in art, desire, and pleasure.

Harnessing the latent creative power of the subconscious was central to Spare’s ethos and creative practice. In a sense, literate rationalism, with its elevation of the conscious mind and drive toward abstraction and asceticism, hindered the activation of the generative drives buried within the psyche—forces that primarily spoke the felt, embodied language of desire. While he saw that conscious desire only intensified separation, unconscious desire could mobilize the organic process of natural selection.

It therefore makes sense that one of Spare’s main legacies would be a technique of sigilization based on the deconstruction of the alphabet. If letters and numbers had been understood as mystical signifiers of primordial, creative forces or codes regulating the universe, Spare just hacked the system. Instead of being access points to higher realms, his sigils embody the force of raw desire, becoming seeds that catalyze the subconscious towards its own fulfillment. In Visual Magick, Jan Fries explains the process as such: “Sigil magick is a form of feedback: the desire arises from the deep, is recognized, sigilized, cast into the deep again, and finds fulfilment from that agency.”9

Spare’s sigils are essentially designed through a deliberate dismantling of the writing machine. The method is quite simple: one writes a desire, removes repeated letters, and recombines the remaining shapes into an aesthetically pleasing glyph. The sigil is then transmitted and absorbed into the subconscious to be forgotten (there are various ways of doing so that you can Google). In a way, Spare’s sigil-making process subverts the rule of literate rationalism by dissolving language back into the instinctive and embodied field from which it emerged.

Like von Bingen and Dee, Spare also devised his own mystical alphabet. But instead of turning upward toward a transcendent source or Ideal Form, each letter in his “Atavistic Alphabet,” also known as the “Alphabet of Desire,” represents what Kenneth Grant described as a “sex-principle potent to awaken remote atavistic strata of the psyche.” As such, Spare’s “graphic symbology represents a definite language designed to facilitate communication with the psychic and subliminal world10.” It is the organic and biological drives of the psyche that this language seeks to articulate, which is perhaps another way of understanding the Adamic tongue, the primordial, perfect language of Creation. And because Spare’s embraced non-dualism, the distinction between ascent and descent, God and Nature, immanence and transcendence, is not so relevant in the end: up or down, the serpent eats its tail.

Parting Thoughts

This essay has attempted to pull back the curtain on a most ubiquitous yet magical communication technology, the alphabet, and illuminate its widespread yet overlooked impact on the Western religious and magical imagination. In turn, these metaphysical narratives have shaped the cultural context in which more elaborate media technologies continue to be designed and deployed, and the cycle goes on.

If this is the case with something as rudimentary to the writing machine as the alphabet, what unintended effects might more complex and “advanced” media technologies exert upon our sense of self and of the cosmos? For one thing, the transcendent trope has shapeshifted into a view of the human as nodes within a vast cosmic information network, in which technologies are less and less conceived as human tools, but as vessels of an expanding collective mind—the body and nervous system of a collective consciousness striving to become aware of Itself, orchestrating its own upleveling and evolution through technological innovation (Davis, p. 313).

Yet, as figures such as Hermes and Thoth remind us, technology is fundamentally tricksterish. Maybe, as Davis suggests, a wiser approach is to treat it neither as extensions of the self, nor as Gods, nor as slaves, but as “unknown constructs with whom we must make creative alliances and wary pacts” (p. 355).

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21. New Moon - April 2026

I’m lucky to live in a place where winter is never completely dormant, so we’ve been on the brink of spring for many weeks already. Lately, though, there’s been an undeniable shift rippling through the landscape and through every area of my life. I’m ready to welcome the emergence of what gestated in the fertile void of winter, as it begins to break ground.

My nervous system is adjusting to the influx of light; the dark days are over. The bear stumbles out of the cave, slow and blinking, eyes adjusting to the overwhelming brightness of a world that insists on being seen. Nature is wanting, horny, and hungry. There’s a certain youthful cockiness to the landscape, a loud and irrepressible vitality pushing outward. The thrust of spring. Which I delightfully receive.

The return of the light brings with it small freedoms. Mostly, it’s the longer evenings. After work, I go on long, meandering walks, and tune in to the frequency of place. I receive small gifts: image fragments, all sorts of messages, sparks of inspiration, even tangible, precious things like the tiny songbird skull I recently found in pristine shape beneath a hedge. I collect these bits and pieces and carry them back with me to the studio, where they shapeshift into something else.

In the studio, it seems like I’ve tapped the solar undercurrent of the relentless steed and painted this tiny painting. The mighty stallion forges ever onward, pulling the chariot of the Sun—the undying one—across the sky. In myth, Helios is the personification of the physical sun, the light that never fails. Apollo, god of light, music, and prophecy, represents the Sun’s radiant aspect. He is the beauty that shines outward, the birdsong that sweetens the silence. Very springlike, in my opinion.

I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m trying to keep Studio Notes more contained so that I have more time to paint and to write other, more time-consuming pieces, such as new installments of the A Magical Theory of Art series. Here’s my latest one:

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Also includes the above tiny painting. You can send a private message to inquire.

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Creation is an act of ensoulment.

This impulse is written into our oldest creation myths. Across cultures, with a consistency that perhaps points to something other than coincidence, a creator god shapes the first human from clay and ensouls it through breath. In Mesopotamia, Enki and Ninhursag fashion humanity from clay mixed with divine essence (the blood of a sacrificed god); in Egypt, the potter-god Khnum shapes body and ka on his potter's wheel using silt from the Nile River while Isis gives Life; in Genesis, God molds Adam from dust and breathes into his nostrils. And so on.

To be made in the image of the Creator is to inherit that same creative urge. As such, the act of crafting a form and calling a spirit into it is among the most ancient things we know how to do, as we shall see. The recurring breath-of-life motif hints at the simultaneous drawing in and drawing forth of inspiration, received and exhaled into form. Thus, humans possess a peculiar capacity to bridge the realms of spirit and matter, transmuting the imaginal, the conceptual, and the emotional into material form.

In this co-creative dance between worlds, art and magic converge.

Making Gods in Our Image

The origin of representation in art is inseparable from the magical imagination. It is well to remember that our species’ creative instincts originate within the animist matrix of our ancestors, in which all things possessed a spirit. In a world permeated with consciousness, the image embodied an aspect of what it represented and offered a direct link to its life force. Through craft, this link was activated, setting its effects in motion in the material realm. Art and magic were not separate disciplines, but twin expressions of our capacity for symbolic thought, nuanced feeling, and the instinct for worship.

Our species’ earliest “marks” on the world are hand stencils from Indonesia, dating back at least 67,800 years, recently found in the Liang Metanduno cave on Muna Island, Indonesia1. The earliest representational art we know of was recently discovered on the island of Sulawesi, also in Indonesia, dated to at least 51,200 years ago2. It depicts what appears to be a hunting scene and is evidence of storytelling and symbolic thought.

While these examples ground early human experience in representation, the earliest example of sculptural art is the Löwenmensch, or Lion Man, discovered in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany3. Being the first figurine we know of, it also stands as the first being shaped by human hands, although it’s likely that we’ve lost many others to time. Carved some 40,000 years ago from mammoth ivory, the being is a therianthrope (part human, part animal), a recurring creature throughout early myth.

It is estimated that the artifact required around 400 hours to carve, a considerable expenditure of time and energy for an activity not directly tied to physical survival. The carver must have been ignited by a burning inspiration, slowly working the ivory, conjuring the Lion Man out of nothing and giving it a body.

In a world understood as an enspirited web, it is safe to say that Lion Man was no meaningless figure. The object likely functioned as an effigy: a vessel for a particular spirit, an entity alive within the narrative and ritual life of its makers. While the Lion Man’s story is lost to us, it reaches out across time. He is a glimpse into the kind of phantasms that roamed the inner landscapes of our ancestors, and into some of the first stories shared around the fire.

Around the same time, and continuing for tens of thousands of years afterward, humans across vast distances were crafting what we now call Venus figurines4. Over 200 examples survive, dating from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. The earliest known, the Venus of Hohle Fels, was discovered in 2008 in a cave not so far from where the Lion Man was found. She is the earliest known depiction of a human being in art.

Spanning tens of thousands of years, the Venus figurines attest to our ancestors’ widespread and enduring engagement with a representation of the divine feminine as primeval creatrix, expressed and embodied through a big booty, generous hips, ginormous breasts, and a rounded belly. A potent, sacred figure likely tied to fertility, abundance, and survival narratives. Effigies of the archetypal spirit of a nourishing mother who lived on in the collective imagination of our ancestors across cultures and time.

These two figures, the Lion Man and the Venus of Hohle Fels, are likely among the earliest devotional artifacts our species ever crafted, long-lost gods shaped in our image. Through their anthropomorphic forms, early humans found a way to relate to the otherworldly, giving shape to what would otherwise remain abstract and invisible. In Ensouling the Effigy, Matthew Venus articulates this beautifully:

“The spirit envisioned in a human form offers us eyes to witness us, a face to look upon, ears to hear our prayers and conjurations, hands to bestow blessings and aid us in our burdens, and feet to lay our offerings before […] The gods created us in their image, and we in turn have created them in ours” (p.138).5

While the Lion Man stands just over 30 centimeters and Venus figurines range from 3 to 30 centimeters, it is not until we arrive at one of the world’s earliest known temples, the enigmatic 12,000-year-old Karahan Tepe and the surrounding region of Şanlıurfa, Türkiye, that we encounter the first sculpture at a human scale. The 11,500-year-old statue found at Karahan Tepe, often referred to as the “Corpse Statue,” was unearthed in a ceremonial chamber and stands at 2.3 meters tall6. The 9,000-year-old Urfa Man, discovered in the same region, stands at 1.8 meters.

Though both statues share obvious similarities as depictions of a V-necked man holding his erect penis—a consistent iconography among the Taş Tepeler people who sculpted them—the Urfa Man has uncanny obsidian eyes and lacks a mouth. Archeoastronomer Alistair Coombs suggests that “the feature of his absent mouth forms part of a stylistic design that symbolically insinuates the presence of the dead,” and further proposes that he may have been intended as “a communicator from a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape.”7 In this light, both statues raise questions about ideas of divine lineage, ancestor worship, and ritualized communication with the dead.

Through these examples of our creative origins, I have sought to show the evolution of our engagement with spirits and divinity through art, highlighting how the impulse to create was intertwined with the urge to worship and reach out to the Otherworld from the very beginning. I believe that the patterns we see recurring across time and culture point to symbolic motifs not necessarily transmitted via oral traditions alone, but through our ancestors’ direct experience of, and communication with, spirits—forces, entities reified through stories and form. As such, the earliest artists were storytellers and mythmakers, but also midwives to spirits. But what, then, are spirits?

What Are Spirits?

“An idea is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of manifestation.” — Alice Bailey

Warning: In this section, we ponder big questions that cannot be definitively resolved. Things like the nature of consciousness, the structure of reality, and the flickering boundary between inner and outer remain Mysteries better approached with awe, humility, and a willingness to accept that some things are just ineffable and debatable. Yet, we can treat the unknown as a generative space, a playful field for experimentation and weird, visceral encounters. We can cultivate a direct experience of it. That’s my two cents.

Within an animistic worldview—the soil out of which early human creativity emerged—consciousness is not an isolated, boundaried phenomenon but a fundamental property of Creation. Everything is ensouled, imbued with its own form of intelligence, however foreign and impenetrable it may be to us. Not only animals and plants, but rivers, stones, natural forces, planets, and stars participate in this vast continuum of awareness. Even at scales far removed from human perception, from atoms to galaxies, there is a sense of interiority, of some kind of personhood.

If consciousness permeates all things, then the distinction is not so much between what is conscious and what isn’t, but between what is chaotic and what is organized. From this lens, spirits can be understood as organized patterns of consciousness, an idea I owe to occultist Jason Miller8.

Miller explains that for human beings, consciousness is primarily organized around the physical body. However, there are many more possible configurations. Consciousness may also organize itself around place (a forest, a river, a mountain). It may organize itself around a given tradition as the accumulation of myth, story, ritual, and attention shapes and reifies an entity over time. Spirits can also organize themselves around emotional patterns, behaviours, or ideas.

Additionally, these unique patterns of consciousness can be engaged with, given one has the right sensory and cognitive tools. For our animist ancestors, this was a primary mode of perception—one that, for us, has largely atrophied under the weight of dualistic rational thought. This is where the cultivation of a receptive inner space becomes essential to this wider dialogue with the unseen, along with learning the language of signs and synchronicities.

This leads to a long-standing and often polarizing question within magical and esoteric communities: are spirits autonomous entities existing outside of ourselves, or are they psychological projections arising from within? Perhaps both are not so mutually exclusive, as culture and expectations shape our experience of the liminal.

I was curious to see how Richard Kaczynski would approach this question in his book Mind Over Magick9, which draws on a wealth of peer-reviewed research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience to shed a more empirical light on ritual magic. I was surprised to learn that the experience of a “Third Man”—a sensed presence that offers feelings of hope and guidance during extreme survival situations—is a widely documented phenomenon in psychology, one on which numerous books have been written10.

Whether this sensed presence is interpreted as a guardian angel or the spirit of a deceased loved one watching over the experiencer, some researchers suggest that it may be an adaptive phenomenon. Sensed presence has three fundamental properties: it is apparent and recognizable, localized in space (often behind the experiencer), and intentional. Most importantly, it “may be the common phenomenological base from which experiences of god, spirits, angels, and other entities are derived” (p. 157). Therefore, one might ask whether this innate capacity can be triggered intentionally.

Of course, this is the long-standing claim of the witch and the magician, and also of many artists.

Consorting with Spirits

“Magical work generally involves altering one’s consciousness, inhabiting liminal spaces, and seeking inspiration.”—Richard Kackzynski

In 17th-century England and early modern Europe, “consorting with spirits” was an actual criminal charge for which many, often women, were tried, sentenced, and executed for allegedly collaborating with familiars and demons. While many were undoubtedly innocent people swept up in the Church-fueled hysteria of the witch hunts, there is evidence in surviving grimoires, manuals, and testimonies that some were indeed trafficking with spirits. In Consorting with Spirits, the above-mentioned Miller underlines, “spirits were considered so important and powerful that people risked imprisonment and execution to contact them and communicate with them” (p.1).

A witch’s familiar was a companion, a teacher, and an assistant in her magical work, acting as both a protective entity and a guide from which she drew spiritual and divinatory insight—not unlike the Greek concept of the Agathos Daimon (the “Good Spirit”). An intermediary spirit between worlds, it was understood as a guide associated with fate, inspiration, and genius. Daimon, originally a neutral term encompassing a wide range of spirits—from lesser divinities to intermediary beings between gods and mortals—later became the “demon” so feared within the Christian framework11.

Therefore, what was condemned as consorting with spirits was more like our ancestors’ long-standing participation in an animist ecosystem in which communication with non-human intelligences is possible, and relationships are reciprocal. In this context, the familiar or daimon acts as a mediator between worlds, a “third man” that can be called forth for guidance, knowledge, and inspiration.

To me, there is great value for artists in engaging our inner genius at the level of personhood, seeing it as a spirit in its own right, while developing the ability to evoke it at will, and becoming a receptive vessel through which its daimonic force can move and create. Re-rooting our creative practice within an animist framework also means engaging with ideas and images as if they possess a life of their own. When we court inspiration, enter into dialogue with it, and birth it forth into being, we too are consorting with spirits. Only through us can their incorporeal nature gain power and influence in the material realm.

Each creative act is a reenactment of the first breath, with spirit exhaled into form again and again. The Lion Man, the Venus figurines, the Corpse Statue, and Urfa Man remind us that art-making has always been bound to the desire to commune with otherworldly forces. From the beginning, the image has always functioned as a site of encounter, ensouled through ritual, story, devotion, and offerings.

Even now, in a world that has largely forgotten its animist roots, this dynamic persists. Our creations open a locus of engagement where unseen, incorporeal forces gather themselves, take form, and enter into relation with the maker, the viewer, and the wider field of meaning in which it circulates.

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20. New Moon - March 2026

That uncanny moment when something peers back at you from beyond the canvas. Oh, hello there, nice to finally meet you.

I’ve been working with her image since the dead of winter, during Capricorn season. She started as a sketch, an exploration of the Crone, something I’m contemplating more and more as I find myself aging in a culture that loves reminding us how gross aging women are. To botox or not to botox (surely, not). Oh, Horned-Mother, guardian of thresholds, midwife to the Mystery of womb and tomb, you who teach fertility in all its forms—you have no time for this bullshit.

Maybe this painting is an invocation.

I’ve often written about how the creative impulse is essentially a drive towards wholeness. The recurring archetypes, symbols, and images that surface in our work hint at parts of the self seeking integration. This is a psychologized view of creativity, a more tolerable entry point, one that keeps the door to magic slightly open without yet invoking the enspirited Otherworld, this discrediting realm of non-human intelligences and weird encounters. But obviously, this painting is not just about the Crone. It’s also about the Witch. And so here, I must straddle both views: the psychological, which sees these recurring images as disowned parts seeking expression, and the animist, which takes seriously the possibility that they have a life of their own.

Witchcraft implies craft, and it also implies spirit work. Be it medicine, fetishes, or talismans, the witch makes things with her hands and in doing so enlists a wild variety of spirits towards her desired working—ancestral, land-based, planetary, etc. Through her craft, she reifies their abstract, invisible existence and gives them a body. She makes the unseen tangible, the immaterial incarnate, which is not so different from what artists do. In my painting, I’m especially fond of the horned-crone’s hands—crooked hands, hands that have meddled with creative forces. She holds a skull (Nature’s original spirit vessel) and is grounded in the power that comes with standing aware and embodied at the crossroads between worlds.

As a figurative artist drawn to the body and the face, I am fascinated by that moment when the painting appears to wake up and come alive as if a new entity is born out of my focused attention and flow state. I will explore the deeper parallels between art and the crafting of spirit-vessels in a future instalment of A Magical Theory of Art, my series on the intersection between creativity and magic, but for now, I’ll just say that something palpable changes in a painting when it crosses into that felt sense of Presence.

When you spend so much time with an image (I must be tallying over fifty hours with this painting by now), it tends to come alive in the psyche like a rogue phantasm. From a psychological angle, working with a chosen symbol or image generates its own field, enabling the psyche to restructure itself around it. We can direct the shaping of the psyche by feeding it a desired image and giving it our sustained attention. From an animistic perspective, painting a chosen image is a devotional act that builds resonance with the spiritual force it represents, thus establishing a bond.

Images have a strange power. What we feed feeds us in return, setting into motion a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Our Instagram feeds (what a fitting term) work much the same way, shaping us in the image of whatever holds our attention, whether we are conscious of it or not. My feed lately has been full of face yoga, guasha routines, and infrared masks—the overculture’s answer to aging gracefully. I get this content because I engage with it, and as a result, I perpetuate this anxious compulsion to continually manage my face. It’s ok. Aging is an initiation we all have to go through. To embrace the Crone in this day and age is a transgressive act. And still, I must.

I share all of this and the painting is not even finished yet. But the conjuring is on. I call forth the Crone, the Witch, the Hag. Wild one, wise one. She who looks at death straight in the eye, never alone, with hordes of ghosts and spirits at her back.

She looks at me with a knowing gaze.

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Dreams are a universal gateway to the Otherworld, a passage through slumber that opens onto the vast expanse of Mystery. Each night, we all wander these liminal dreamscapes, immersed in strange inner lands that dwell in the far recesses of the psyche. Cryptic, absurd, and sometimes dreadful images flicker across our eyelids, only to dissolve almost instantly upon waking. And because dreaming is so utterly ubiquitous, we remain mostly unaware of our dream lives’ straight-up weirdness and wild possibilities. The Night illuminates and dazzles with astral light.

I, for one, have neglected the dream as a portal to the beyond, even though I am almost always engaged in a combination of occult practices. Meditation, breathwork, yoga, self-hypnosis, trance, automatic writing, ecstatic dancing, psychedelics, you name it. I love a daily practice, a discipline that grounds the Mystery into the mundane. But, I recently devoured a luminous little book titled Initiations into Dream Mysteries by researcher and avid lucid dreamer Sarah Janes, which left me genuinely excited about the creative applications of the dream state.

In her book, Janes presents archaeological and anthropological findings on ancient Western dream cultures, tracing the co-evolution of imagination, memory, and consciousness from the Paleolithic era to ancient Greece. She suggests that dreams played a formative role in the birth and evolution of culture, shaping beliefs about ancestors, gods, and the afterlife. As she writes, “human spiritual thought, and therefore many of our world’s cultures, gestated in the nexus of memory, language, and dreams” (p.13). Did we dream the gods into being?

Initiation into Dream Mysteries cued me in on a whole ancient lineage of ritual practices devoted to cultivating the healing, revelatory, and oracular potential of the dream. It’s expanded my understanding of the oneiric as more than a tool for self-exploration and individuation in the Jungian sense, but as a legitimate medium for philosophical, metaphysical, and creative inquiry with an uncanny capacity to shape waking life in unexpected ways.

A Brief History of Dream Incubation

“The ancient Greek god of healing, Asklepios, appeared in dreams to pilgrims who slept at his temples. This practice was formalized as ‘incubatio’; that is, dreams were deliberately incubated like eggs, and hatched - as medical or magical prescriptions.” — Colin Wilson

Dream incubation is the intentional use of the dream state for healing and insight, a ritual technology of the oneiric mind. Through a constellation of preparatory practices such as purification, prayer, offerings, magical writing, spells, and mind-altering substances, we can prime the psyche to receive particular kinds of visions and invite or even engender a desired dream. Because myth, culture, and expectation frame our experience of the liminal, the programmable nature of the mind can be intentionally leveraged to incubate the dream, a mechanism not unlike ritual magic.

Though modern culture often dismisses dreams as nonsensical mind-stuff, dream incubation rituals and sleep sanctuaries have existed for millennia. Dream Mysteries stretch East and West, and the ancients understood the dream as both a channel of communication with ancestors, spirits, and gods and a path toward self-realization and awakening.

The ancients were on to something. While writing this piece, I discovered that the MIT Media Lab has developed a dream-incubation gadget to “awaken creativity”, Dormio, which uses “biometric-based audio interaction in hypnagogia to incubate and capture sleep onset dreams.” I share this because scientific institutions and technology carry an aura that legitimizes what some might otherwise dismiss as delusion, superstition, or make-believe. Though one should never underestimate the power of make-belief.

Here are some of my favourite examples of ancient dream culture from Janes’ Initiation into Dream Mysteries:

At Çatalhöyük (7500–5600 BCE), one of the most well-preserved early settlements in ancient Anatolia (south-eastern Turkey) which is often described as a honeycomb city for its maze-like, interconnected habitation cells, the inhabitants buried their dead intramurally, beneath the floors of their dwellings. Archaeological evidence suggests that sleeping platforms were intentionally positioned above the graves of the deceased. Janes believes this makes a strong case for the idea that the people of Çatalhöyük sought close proximity to their ancestors during sleep, perhaps purposefully orienting themselves to dream with the dead, which might also help explain their curious habit of taking skulls with them every time they moved (p. 44-45)

Some of the earliest recorded dream incubation protocols in Western history appear in the Old Women Rituals of Hatti, where the ritual texts of female ritual practitioners from the ancient Hatti culture of Bronze Age Anatolia (c. 2000 BCE) are well documented. Evidence from these records also attests to the ritual banishment of nightmares and the recognition of dreams’ prophetic potential (p. 47-49).

In Ancient Greece (c. 500 BCE), dream incubation was integral to the healing sanctuaries of Asklepios, god of medicine, to whom we owe the caduceus. Archaeological evidence attests to more than 300 Asklepions throughout the region, where pilgrims travelled in search of cures for their ailments (p. 111). Instructions for treatment were revealed to them, riddle-like, in dreams, which temple attendants helped interpret. A visit from Asklepios himself augured some of the most auspicious cures. The iamata—dream cure narratives recorded at these centres—proclaim thousands of successful healings, from restored sight to mended limbs (p.118).

Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, played a vital role in the ritual life of the Asklepions. She was invoked in the final rite before incubation, accompanied by a fumigation of frankincense, an aromatic resin believed to enhance memory and cognition. Without remembrance of the dream, the cure was fleeting, left unrealized. Janes clarifies:

“It’s improtant to understand that the act of incubation […] is about lying down to dream, but not completely fall asleep. […] The particulars of this mode of liminal dreaming requir a form of mental alertness and remembrance. The lucid dream may be induced during wakefulness, the goal being to keep the patient from slipping intp the oblivion of deep sleep.” (p.119)

Perhaps this state was achieved through hypnagogic trance or the ingestion of oneirogenic substances, as some have proposed. The fact that non-venomous Aesculapian snakes, sacred to Asklepios, slithered freely about the temples probably helped prevent dreamers from slipping into too deep a sleep.

Mnemosyne was also central to the Orphic Mysteries, presiding over the remembrance of prophetic visions. Most compelling for our purposes—i.e., dream incubation as a method of creative inspiration—Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses: she who “gave birth to creativity and is the source of all that is divinely inspired,” as Janes beautifully puts it (p. 120). We could say that Mnemonyse granted Self-rememberance to the incarnated, carnal self, helping her devotees realize their divine, creative nature so that they may eloquently weave their own self-fulfilling prophetic narratives through literature, science, and art. Her sister, Lethe, embodied Oblivion and gave rise to strife, pain, hardship, lies, and murder, illustrating how the ancient Greeks understood memory as essential to psychic coherence and the spiritual integrity of both the individual and the whole.

Incubating the Self: Dreams as Initiatory Rites

“Magical ritual is a mnemonic process so arranged as to result in the deliberate exhilaration of the Will and the exaltation of the Imagination.” —Israel Regardie

Jane’s book is itself a testament to the creative, magical, and initiatory potential of the dream. Each chapter concludes with a psychomagical narrative sequence inviting the reader’s subconscious to engage intuitively with the cultural dream research she presents. What I love is that these narratives were, of course, incubated. They feel eerily surreal and communicate directly to the oneiric mind. The imagery is conjured dream-substance. Here’s an example:

The snakes move as one. They rotate their scaly neck bodies and hiss at me. Now I notice the low hum of many bees coming from deep within the old woman’s rib cage. Her breath is sweet and sickly. Bees crawl out of her mouth. She drools honey and crushes the comb with her pitted gums as she grins. […] Now I can see she holds the head of the old grandmother in her hands. Her hands are the talons of the vulture, and they are caked in bloody mud…” (p.54)

The book is meant as a self-initiatory journey, one in which gnosis comes about from within the dream experience. The author recommends re-reading the narrative dream-sequences before bed to prime the mind, stimulate memory, and plant imaginal seeds that bloom organically in the dreamscape. This practice is reinforced by the hypnagogic meditation accompanying each chapter, inviting the psyche to generate its own imagery and source its own transformation. It’s been great fun to play and experiment with these.

Initiatory rites reconfigure our sense of self, and the author suggests that dreams function as such: “another way to look at dreams is that they provide an incubation realm for the personality, a liminal zone in which the architecture of the psyche can evolve” (p. 13). By engaging the dream at this level, we can learn to fine-tune what the author calls “the dream-reality feedback loop,” allowing new possibilities to manifest simultaneously in the waking and dreaming realms. In a way, Will and imagination can guide the arc of transformation and incubate new realities into being.

This initiatory process leads us through a labyrinth of memory and identity, as the dream mirrors conditioned self-narratives while opening new possibilities for unknowing, remembering, and becoming.

The exaltation of our creative potential may find its clearest expression in lucid dreaming. Awake within the dream, one becomes viscerally aware they are the very origin of the dreamworld. As Janes writes, “you know you are not just the dream avatar but the entire multidimensional dream reality […] This can sometimes enable you to change and manifest objects, locations, characters, and scenarios at will” (p. 11). As such, lucidity offers the dreamer a delightful taste of omniscience, which is often quite ecstatic.

Just as anxiety dreams and nightmares can ripple outward into waking life—both mirroring and amplifying stress in the bodymind and reinforcing a limiting dream-reality feedback loop—so too can this experience of vast, godlike, all-creative power reshape our sense of self and expand the field of possibility as we remember (and experience) our boundlessness.

Ok, so what do we do with all of this?

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Praxis: Working the Dream-Reality Feedback Loop

I want to leave you with some actionable steps to start fiddling with your own dream-reality feedback loop and incubate new possibilities into being.

Start by writing down your dreams backward from the moment you wake up as far back as you can recall. Try doing it every day. Sometimes, you won’t remember much, but you’ll be surprised how simply paying attention can quickly prompt remembrance. We get what we feed. Feed the dream creatures, water the dream garden. See what strange flowers grow.

Consider consecrating a special sketchbook for your explorations. In it, make art with the symbols, sensations, and imagery in your dreams. Give a voice to the many beings and entities that roam your inner landscapes. Interact with them, dialogue with them. Use automatic writing. Something about the artistic and aesthetic process of making something beautiful and pleasing, or just cathartic, reaches out to the object of our attention. Your creations will soon take on a life of their own within your psyche.

Show your psyche that you care, that you really, really want to get to know her, and make this sketchbook feel as special as Carl Jung’s Red Book. Let it be a living record of your incursions into the dreamworld, a chronicle of your experiments, a generative field of possibilities.

Inspired by Celeste Mott’s excellent Dream Magic 101 course (which I recommend), you might treat this sketchbook as an Oneiric Grimoire. Fill it with art, poetry, surreal musings, and dream mood boards. It’s a sacred place to immortalize your most potent dreams through art, to develop a relationship with the recurring symbols that draw you in, to learn their multi-layered language, and to develop your personal dream lexicon. The dream-reality feedback loop generates its own psychic field, and your oneiric grimoire becomes the talismanic object that anchors that manifestation into waking life.

In your grimoire, you can write your petitions for dream incubation and lay down your creative challenges to the gods, the ancestors, or whatever being or construct you wish to invoke and appeal to. Set intentions, and be specific about the activity you wish to manifest in the dream space, the places you want to visit, the people you wish to encounter. Conjure them through narrative and art in your grimoire, like a hypersigil.

Bring your questions to the oracle within and see what riddle you receive. Don’t try to solve it, though. So much importance is put on analyzing dreams, on cracking them open, which often shuts down the part of ourselves that is receptive to and intuitively understands their liquidy language. Dreams speak of dissolution and unknowing. Just take in and experience the dream for the aesthetic, sensorial, and emotional experience that it is. Keep making art about it and let it work on you at a deep level. It won’t take long before you establish a feedback system between your active imagination and the creative dreaming process.

Finally, leverage the hypnagogic state and practice incubation during the day so you don’t sink into Lethe’s oblivion. When you return to waking consciousness, lie still and retrace your steps backward to stimulate recall. Take notes. Make art. Keep an eye out for dream symbols and words making an appearance in waking life. Keep track of synchronicities. Walk the tight rope of lunacy. The dream world is a mirror world—see how both sides reflect one another.

Wishing you the very best on this exciting journey within. May you create strange, wonderful things. <3

A Magical Theory of Art: Previous Essays

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19. New Moon - February 2026

Swan Song speaks of death, grief, and grace. But I didn’t yet know that when I first sketched her into my notebook four or five years ago. She first appeared as a bride, until I understood she was a widow. Brides, like swans, are wrapped in white as virginal symbols of purity and grace. They are solar and divine figures who carry their opposites within. Like all light casts a shadow, the bride augurs the widow.

Every single thing you love, you will lose.

And yet, few of us have learned to grieve properly. No shared cultural story or myth maps the descent into the wound, nor the way back through toward healing or renewal. Instead, the prevailing myth is one of denial—of compulsory optimism at best, or, at worst, the sedating script of an industry that profits off it. Both stem from the fear that grief is a devouring void, a vampire feasting on all that is holy and good. Don’t you just wanna be in a good mood?

To negate grief is to resist being undone and put back together. It’s to delay the dismantling that reveals our bare bones, our luminous core. I see all magnitudes of sorrow as potentially soul-revealing. I’m not only referring to heart-shattering moments of utter loss and tragedy, but also to the quiet, almost banal suffering we coexist with each day, just walking downtown and witnessing the same old carnage of a world in decay, feeling numb to it as we go through the motions between home, work, and the grocery store. It’s ok to feel dull and heavy and slow and sink our way down into the Underworld. It’s where grief inevitably leads. The descent is where transformation begins.

Yes, shedding skins sucks. But what we won’t let go of tends to harden and calcify over festering wounds, making us sicker. Swan Song reflects back at me all the parts that are still holding on to denial, the parts that resist mourning. Let me be the thick, slithery, iridescent serpent that rises and grows wings. Let me shed myself raw and grow ever fuller, expanding anew into the fullness of my Self, as the world devours its tail.

I say grieve. I say wail.

The Art of Lament

As the lore goes, swans are silent for most of their lives and sing only once at the time of death, a most beautiful and haunting song. In myth and folklore, swans often serve as psychopomps. Gliding effortlessly across water—that mirror of the unconscious and window between realms—the swan moves between the shore of all that is known and everything unseen beyond. Like luminous guides at the threshold between worlds, swans escort the soul with eerie grace.

In many ancient traditions, from Sumer to Egypt to Ireland, it was believed that the soul needed to be coaxed from the body after death, or it would remain trapped. It was the weeping and keening, the singing and lamentation of the mourners, often women, that stirred and disentangled the soul from its old skin, calling it forward into the Otherworld. These acted as shared rituals of release, sacred, necessary, and, in their own way, artful. One of the oldest poems in recorded history is itself a lament: the Sumerian Lament for the Destruction of Ur (c. 2112–2004 BCE), which already mourned a world in ruins, pleading to gods who had abandoned their people. It gave voice to unspeakable loss, a swan song guiding the souls of our ancestors onward through death and destruction, carved in stone so we too would sing along.

And now, in our own sad world, I wonder what swan songs might carry us forward and through. Though these ancient traditions may be lost to us, the art of lament remains available in art and music. Only by allowing ourselves to touch what is unbearably raw and tender can we draw down grace in moments of excruciating pain, transmuting grief into something at once beautiful and devastating. Lhasa de Sela recorded her final album while battling breast cancer, a magical feat of sublime melancholy, a gift (listen to “I’m Going In” and see for yourself). Following the death of his wife, Geneviève Castree, Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie wrote A Crow Looks at Me, one of the rawest and most plainly human albums I’ve ever heard (try “Real Death”). I have listened to this album probably more than I should. Yet in the vulnerability and aching relatability of these songs, I feel the shape of my own mortality and am struck by the delicate fragility of everyone I love. To embrace grief in this way is to be reoriented to what really matters. It opens the heart and makes the shedding easier.

In the awareness of death, art is born. And so to art I turn, as a way back through the dark pit of sorrow and reclaim grief as something holy. This is what my painting Swan Song is about.

Remember death.

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This essay explores what it means to live cyclically in these strange, liminal times, within the confines of this strange, Machine-world. Along the way, I take a tangential, slightly esoteric detour to contemplate the topic through the World Dancer archetype, but I promise it comes full circle! I then leave you with a practical tool I use for my own cyclical/seasonal planning, which I hope you’ll find helpful—assuming you’re in the Northern Hemisphere.

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We live in a world that idolizes the Machine, and we have moulded ourselves in its image, expecting to operate more and more like one. We’ve grown increasingly desensitized to the subtle signals of exhaustion, and many of us, myself included, simply push through, regardless of changing seasons, energy levels, or unexpected life challenges. Such expectations are even more exhausting for women, whose hormonal rhythms unfold within a 28-day cycle, compared to men’s, which fluctuate on a 24-hour circadian rhythm—hence the enduring association of the archetypal Feminine with the moon and Masculine with the sun.

Technology’s appeal is its promise of emancipation from the daily hustle and from the inconvenience of our ebbing, flowing biology. But more often, the Machine creeps deeper into our systems, intensifying the myth of self-optimization and raising expectations of efficiency and productivity to inhumane heights. And then we get terribly sick, or simply burn out.

We are cyclical beings. Our animal bodies aren’t cut out for the steady, unrelenting grind of the Machine. Our souls either.

Until relatively recently—meaning a very, very long time before the Electrical Age, which, lest we forget, began little more than a century ago—our ancestors were bound to nature’s cycles by necessity. Their lives unfolded according to the rhythms of the land and sky: planting and harvest, hunting and rest. The seasons instructed them, and shaped everything from food and sleep, to community and rituals, to the very flow and experience of time. Cyclical awareness is woven into our ancestors’ myths and stories, and into systems like astrology, which essentially stems from a mythopoetic expression of astronomical and agricultural correspondences.

All that to say that if, like me, you’re feeling tired, it’s normal, it’s winter. We were not meant to be staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day under fluorescent lights. It’s normal to feel dead inside.

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In our death-phobic, rest-averse culture, winter is the most misunderstood season. Though we often feel pressure to get things done the moment we cross the New Year threshold, winter calls for undoing. When we bypass a season, we miss the long-evolved wisdom it has to impart. Winter invites us inward, into rest and renewal, into the dark cave of the psyche where the healing waters of the soul can revitalize depleted ground. This is the season of breakdown and composting, where the previous cycle is metabolized and returned to the soil as fertile black earth. Here, in the creative void of potentiality, we find clarity and orient ourselves toward what is yet to be born.

Reframing our creative energy around land-based metaphors helps us remember that it’s natural for our energy to change and fluctuate as we travel around the sun. It enables a necessary shift in perception: we are not the ones doing the growing. Our role is to tend the conditions that allow Life to grow and bear fruit in its own time. Productivity conditioning gives way to a cultivation approach; force yields to patience and care. This reframing helps us harness creative energy without exhausting ourselves by swimming against the currents, allowing us instead to ebb and flow with it. We, too, pulsate within the vitalistic web that links earth and sky.

And yet most of us are taught to override this reality and feel a nagging pressure to remain generative at all costs, at all times. Winter reminds us that rest is not a failure but a necessary phase of creation. There is no rebirth without dying first. Really, I’m writing this as much for myself as for anyone else, because I need the reminder. And I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.

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The World Dancer

“Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hieroglyphics of deeper ideas.”—P.D. Ouspensky

I often consult the tarot when writing essays, and this time, I pulled Arcanum XXI: The World, an uncannily fitting archetypal lens through which to contemplate the theme of cyclical living.

As the final card of the Major Arcana, The World communicates themes of realization, completion, and wholeness. Having passed through each shade of archetypal experience, Arcanum 0: the Fool, has come full circle, an idea symbolically echoed in the evergreen wreath—symbol of victory and Life’s endless renewal.

Central to the card’s symbolism is the World Dancer, a figure of joy, perpetual movement, balance, and grace. The World Dancer implies a beat, the cosmic and earthly rhythms expressed by the bull, lion, eagle, and human figures in each corner of the card. Astrologically, these correspond to the Fixed Cross (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius), as well as to the four elements, the four suits of the Minor Arcana, and the four seasons, together indicating alignment with natural order, stability, and equilibrium. The four elemental qualities radiate towards the centre, fully integrated and realized—or is it the other way around? For the World Dancers implies an ever-whole universe in perpetual motion, held together not by a fixed point but by an ever-moving centre, an idea tarot luminary Rachel Pollack articulates in the following passage:

“Everything in the universe moves, the Earth around the sun, the sun within the galaxy, the galaxies in clusters, all cycling around each other. There is no centre, no place we can say, ‘Here it all began, here it all stops’. Yet the centre exists, everywhere, for in a dance the dancer does not move around any arbitrary point in space, but rather the dance carries its own sense of unity focused around a constantly moving, constantly peaceful centre. Nothing and everything all at once.”

As such, The World paradoxically represents success and achievement while simultaneously challenging the idea that these are fixed destinations. It speaks instead of perpetual endings and beginnings—of Life expressing itself through an endless cycle of death and birth.

The world is born anew through each creative act, and so are we. True to his delight in symbolic transgression, Surrealist Filmmaker and tarot aficionado Alejandro Jodorowsky reads The World as evoking “a female sex organ inhabited by exultation (orgasm), or an individual (pregnant woman).” To my mind, the imagery translates to ecstatic, even orgasmic birth, an experience intrinsic to the physiology of childbirth, and a near-perfect expression of Nature’s creative design, which our weird birth-phobic Machine-world systematically hinders in its treatment of birth. The point is that bliss and ecstasy are not rewards for creation, but embedded in the creative process at every level, through birth, sex, and death. To me, this is part of what the World Dancer communicates.

As a card representing the perpetual dance of Totality, The World dissolves the boundaries between part and whole, self and other, birth and death. It speaks to creation as a single, interpenetrating living ecosystem, the great web of life that finds fulfillment in the harmonious, reciprocal functioning of all its parts, and that swallows itself whole when the time has come.

So, my takeaway is this: many wonder how to best serve the world right now, our unraveling Machine-world. Perhaps it is by following the Fool within, willing to take a leap of faith. Perhaps it is by tending to the conditions that beget more life and more beauty while embracing the breakdown as a necessary shedding, and grieve wholeheartedly as we situate ourselves within a much larger historical cycle of death and rebirth. Perhaps it’s by ensouling the sterile Machine-world through our creative acts, naive or wise, and restoring the ecosystem to wholeness, birthing it anew as we go. And perhaps, just like T.Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer,” it’s by dancing ourselves simultaneously out of the womb and into the tomb, in perpetuity.

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Seasonal Planning

Ok, and now, something more practical. I created this seasonal living tool for myself and decided to share it here in case it’s helpful to you, too. It’s designed to support a more cyclical, seasonal approach to planning, with notes on how each phase can inform the growth of a creative business, which is one of my main focuses this year.

Winter — Compost & the Fertile Void

Element - Earth
Direction - North
Pentacles - Body and physical health, financial resources, stability, and practicality
Fourth Quarter of the Zodiac - Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces

• Prioritize rest and nourishment

• Establish grounding, supportive routines for the nervous system

• Prune and review what’s in place; strengthen and optimize existing systems

• Dreamwork & shadow work

• Reflect on the previous cycle—metabolize and compost what has passed

What it means for building a creative business

• Take stock of what remains unfinished

• Envision the year ahead (vision boarding, subconscious priming, gathering inspo)

• Clarify and set goals

Spring — Seeds & Emergence

Element - Air
Direction - East
Swords - Thoughts, ideas, intellect, strategy, communication, discernment
First Quarter of the Zodiac - Aries, Taurus, Gemini

• New beginnings

• Sow meaningful seeds of intention and action from the clarity gained in the fertile void

• Gently expand nervous system capacity, supported by the grounding routines developed in winter

• Playful experimentation

• Nurture growth through small, consistent actions rather than big energy expenditures

What it means for building a creative business

• Build income streams: create useful offerings that meet real needs

• Skill-building: develop the skills you need to learn to support your creative business

• Strengthen communication channels between your audience and you

Summer — Bloom & Visibility

Element - Fire
Direction - South
Wands - Will, desire, passion, creativity, erotic energy, purpose, action
Second Quarter of the Zodiac — Cancer, Leo, Virgo

• Step into visibility; radiate and shine

• Action and expansion

• Growth: seeds planted in spring now bloom and blossom

• Joy, connection, outward focus

• Adventure and exploration

What it means for building a creative business

• Strategize

• Share your work

• Collaborate and network

• Go all in: increase frequency and activity out in the world (not in the studio)

Autumn — Harvest & Bounty

Element - Water
Direction - West
Cups - Emotions, relationships, intuition, healing, the subconscious
Third Quarter of the Zodiac - Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius

• Harvest: cultivate a sense of abundance and enoughness

• Prepare for descent

• Reflect and let go

• Assess where rebalancing is needed

• Cultivate surrender and acceptance

What it means for building a creative business

• Celebrate achievements

• Share the bounty: have a sale

• Recalibrate after the outward-facing energy of summer

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18. New Moon - January 2026

It’s dark out, and I’m wintering.

The previous year is being composted. Rot and ferment turn dirt to black soil, feeding the microbiome and storing nutrients for what will grow next. I’ve been dream-weaving the year ahead, flirting with the reality I want to create. This feels like the invitation of Capricorn season: the slow, steady work of making a vision tangible begins in the capacity to see and imagine it.

Capricorn’s emblem, the Sea-Goat, embodies this paradox. Straddling earth and water, it is at ease both in the climb toward great heights and in the descent into far-reaching depths. It finds its fullest expression when its mystical nature serves its material purpose, spiritualizing matter in the process. Capricorn is the birthplace of the Sun gods.

I’ve been working steadily in my studio, mostly drawing. My sun is in Capricorn, and I feel my best when I have a self-imposed mountain to climb, a goal or ambition to build toward—a new skill to learn, a painting to chip away at, a business to launch. I’ve come to accept strife as part of Capricorn’s texture, as is the lust for limitation and boundary, something to push against and transcend.

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Capricorn is the great manifestor of the zodiac. The drive toward mastery is intrinsic to its nature, though it can easily distort into rigidity and control, which I’m often guilty of. Capricorn’s task is to master time and matter not by becoming their servant, but by becoming sovereign over them. Higher ground lends the goat perspective.

Time is a constant source of anxiety for me, and Capricorn teaches the mystery of time. Ruled by Saturn, Capricorn is associated with Chronos, Father Time, the devourer of his children. But we often forget that Capricorn is a feminine, earthy sign. Its deeper teaching is cyclical time. Chronos is also Crone, and the Crone reveals another way of relating to the passage of time.

Woman was the first clock, her body churning through cycles of fertility, gestation, birth, and death. The Crone knows that to master time is not to impose rigid structures of control, but to live in accordance with nature’s creative cycles.

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So I’ve been thinking about cyclical living. About planning the coming year in attunement with seasons and lunations, achieving more by doing less, by aligning and harnessing with the creative force of nature rather than overriding it. I’m looking at the year as a whole, asking what I want to grow, and when it’s best to plant seeds. There are mountains ahead, but also fields to tend.

I find myself looking back at a Capricorn watercolour I painted a decade ago, when the Crone was so far off in the distance she didn’t even enter my field of awareness.

Examining the symbology I chose then is revealing. I was immersed in esoteric astrology and understood Capricorn’s ultimate aim as initiation and the transcendence of earthly forms in pursuit of spiritual attainment. Esoterically, Capricorn is the gateway of Spirit, the threshold of Christ consciousness born after nine months of gestation initiated in Aries. The Unicorn, a symbol of purity, one-pointed striving, and holy ascension, stands in contrast to the unruly, horny goat, long associated with fertility and the Devil.

In retrospect, I was mostly avoiding the parts I didn’t know how to deal with at the time. My body was an arid and cold place. I didn’t bleed for years. I didn’t fully understand that transcendence isn’t repression, but healthy integration and fertile composting.

Now I’m older, and ideas of spiritual purity annoy me, much in the same way reductive materialism does. I’ve made peace with the Devil, I am a child of Saturn after all. I surrender to the Great Mother. I can hear her triple-call. I have a renewed appreciation for the Sea Goat and for the horned gods who teach fertility in all its forms. My spirituality is entangled with flesh, sensuality, matter, time, and decay.

The lesson of Capricorn is this: time ripens what we care for. We reap what we sow; we get what we feed.

Other sketches I drew

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January is here, and just like that, we step into 2026. Ready or not, the gate swings open. The month derives its name from Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds, portals, and new beginnings, a key deity in the Roman pantheon from whom we inherited the fiscal year. At this time, we, too, like Janus, look backward and forward. We take stock of what has passed. We reorient and set our intentions for what is to come. But the New Year often feels like a coerced ending and a false start.

Threshold rituals help create intention and meaning in moments of change. They name and acknowledge the occurring transition and support the integration of personal and collective transformation. They help delineate the passage of time and create a structure for us to move through and be shaped by so that hopefully, we come out the other end renewed and reborn.

But polarizing time along a past and future axis is a two-dimensional construct. It collapses the fertile void of liminality into fixed categories. Neither here nor now. So I want to share a few thoughts about navigating and honouring the in between, not just because it’s January, but because we live in liminal times. The future is not what it used to be.

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Keeping each other sane

If you keep up with astrological transits, you know we’ll be starting the year with a wild one: Saturn conjuncts Neptune on February 20, setting the tone for the entire year. Historically, this transit has been correlated to periods of significant global and political shifts and with the dissolution of established systems. Recent examples include the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution and the onset of World War I in 1917.

While this conjunction occurs every 36 years or so (and the world is constantly in a state of upheavals), the fact that it’s occurring at 0°Aries is significant: the very first degree of the astrological wheel is a most potent threshold.

Here, dreams (Neptune), be they religious visions or nightmarish utopias, meet reality (Saturn) in fiery Aires (impulsive action). As astrologer Austin Coppock sums it up: “Saturn is out to lunch with Neptune and letting his eight-year-old run things for a couple of years. A lot of stupid things are possible.”

Whether you believe in astrology or not, ontological disruption is on the horizon1. You’ve seen what AI can do (there are already deepfakes of Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s kidnapping). Add to that religious fanaticism, information warfare, algorithmic surveillance, UFO/UAP disclosure, pandemics, cyber attacks, nuclear weapons, and environmental collapse, and we’re in for a ride. Narratives will be imposed on us, stories no one really believes in, but are coerced into.

Things are going to get weird, confronting us with both the limits and malleability of reality. We will have to navigate our loss of the plot together with polarizing media technology that collapses all nuances into binaries on platforms held by billionaires mining for our attention, with agendas of their own. I wish us all to be kind to one another and cultivate our capacity for ambiguity. Reality undefined is not comfortable—people will ache for a story to latch onto.

I love Charles Eisenstein’s idea that “sanity is a group project.” He suggests that we cannot hold a story alone, that reality itself needs to be held in community. Writing and sharing my thoughts here on Substack feels, to me, like a kind of threshold ritual: a practice I’ll be maintaining in 2026 to metabolize my experiences, and an attempt to hold and test my reality in communion with others.

Liminality is dysregulating to the nervous system. The unknown triggers a deep, primordial fear in us. There is more to keeping each other sane than simply affirming one another’s view of reality, because this same idea can just as easily sustain collective psychosis instead of sanity if we are not tending to our systems. Humans need one another to co-regulate, to shake off stress, and to feel safe again through subtle, multisensory cues. Simply being bodies together (assuming one among us is calm) can ripple outward and weave a net of safety that holds us back from falling into the abyss.

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Why make art while the world burns

Why make art when the world is burning, and people everywhere are suffering?

I’ve been writing a lot about the parallels between art and magic. To some, this attempt to cultivate a relationship with the unseen and paint pretty pictures about it might seem like indulgent escapism. Sometimes, I ask myself the same thing. Yet, can we afford to abandon the very capacities (attention, imagination, coherence) that enable us to navigate the unknown with grace?

An art practice, like any spiritual or magical practice, is a reflection of who we are. It is alchemical to the degree that we are willing to engage with it at that level. My practice is sacred to me, but like everyone else, it’s also wrapped up in layers of conditioning. I’m not chill about art or writing. Ingrained stories of productivity and time scarcity loop constantly in my mind, making my breathing shallow and keeping me in a state of busyness. When I create from that place, I feel like a cornered animal.

I don’t always make art for the “right” reasons, but I try to stay attentive to the climate of strife my practice is entangled with, and to gently unravel it. To bring in more ease and surrender. My reflections on the erotic nature of creativity, and on reclaiming the pleasure inherent in bringing new things into the world, are part of this inner work. It works a lot more like sex than we tend to acknowledge.

For creativity to be Eros-driven and genuinely pleasurable and exciting, it has to be grounded in embodied reality. Our bodies need to feel safe and open enough to tap unconscious layers of the psyche and allow something new to emerge. Therefore, creating from this place is regulating. There is also an intelligence to the erotic spark. Desire can be distorted into compulsive patterns that perpetuate suffering, just as it can function as a compass, pulling us toward greater wholeness. Practices that generate flow states are not indulgent; they are a prerequisite for insight, innovation, and, dare I say, genius.

Through creative flow, we bring forth things the rational mind cannot access. We metabolize experience into understanding, and understanding into wisdom. Through self-expression, we offer our idiosyncratic way of seeing not to add to the noise and confusion, but in the hope of contributing clarity and coherence to the wider discourse.

The flow state that arises from engaging our creative spark is the opposite of attention capture, and perhaps even an antidote. I don’t see it as an escape, but rather a form of resilience, one that strengthens our capacity to remain present, receptive, and responsive to a world in flux.

My intention is for my art practice to become more of a threshold ritual. A way to regulate my nervous system, bring order to chaos, and reclaim my attention at a time when it is constantly under siege. The creative process is one of the few ways we can imagine new stories, new myths, and new solutions that do not simply repeat the same destructive patterns over and over again. May your creative spark light the way forward in these liminal times.

Oneiric thresholds

Every night, we cross a threshold and find ourselves inside our own phantasmagorical dreamscape. Dreams are mysterious but revealing about the nature of integration. Metabolizing experience is not something we consciously do. It’s an intelligent process inherent in the mind-body that we surrender to in the dark.

Often referred to as a “threshold plant,” Mugwort2 has long been valued for its ability to assist transitions, especially the passage from waking consciousness to the dream state. Both used for medicinal and magical purposes, it works paradoxically as a nervine that relaxes the body, while also stimulating the mind, leading to a heightened hypnagogic state and more vivid dreams.

Mugwort’s Latin name, Artemisia vulgaris, reflects the plant’s historical association with Artemis and the moon, linking it to cycles, the subconscious, and unseen realms. When prepared as an oil, mugwort can support dreamwork and oneiric exploration. While I suck at recording my dreams consistently, another threshold ritual I’m experimenting with this year, especially around the full and new moons, is to rub my temples, third eye, or abdomen with a small amount of mugwort oil before bed. My intention is to deepen my relationship with the dreamworld and with the archetypal forces that move through my subconscious. Dreams are everyone’s direct line to the psyche’s mad wisdom.

January is here, and while we might feel excited by new goals, intentions, and resolutions, it’s still winter. Nature is asleep—dreaming, integrating, gestating. Hit the snooze button. Linger a little longer in the in-between. Relish the liminal. Get comfortable with uncertainty, with dissolution. Let’s hope it all goes well. Wishing you all the very best for 2026.

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I am most anxious about never having enough time to create and become who I want to be in the process. I have a strong Saturnian temperament paired with a leonine desire to express, create, and, you know, shine. I am prone to always feeling that I have never done enough.

Since this is the last Studio Notes of the year, I was going to do a retrospective of my creative output since January. But as I scroll through the photos on my phone, I realize that I don’t have tons to share. Art takes time, and my focus has been elsewhere.

The whole point of Studio Notes was to share glimpses of my studio practice, but the irony is that I spent so much time writing these that I didn’t have much time for a studio practice. These newsletters were meant to be raw and unedited, but it’s not how I operate. If you’ve seen my art, then you know I’m a bit of a perfectionist.

It started like this: “Studio Notes is an intentional practice to undo this paralyzing concern for perfection and be witnessed through the various phases of creation.”

But somewhere along the way, the whole endeavour turned into longer and longer essays, until my practice became a kind of background prop. But I remain loyal to the daemon, the spark, trusting whatever slimy new thing insists on sliding out of the metaphorical birth canal, such as my new essay series, A Magical Theory of Art.

This is one of the essays I enjoyed writing the most this past year.

Managing my time and creative energy alongside a day job—and then adding a bi-monthly Substack to the mix—while maintaining a social life and still making time to go inward, to meditate, to read and study, to philosophize, to dance and move my body, to be in nature, to rest, and even to do nothing, was exhausting at times.

Therefore, Studio Notes will no longer be essays, but short notes and updates about my practice and related offerings, as it should be. I will continue writing essays, but will publish only on the full moon, giving myself a full cycle to bring them to fruition. Maybe then, I can finally catch my breath.

But I’ve really enjoyed finding my voice on this platform and learning to give language to my practice, and to the ideas that inform it, through essays like the one below—an essay that became my first artist talk, exploring three recurring archetypes in my work: the Femme Fatale, the Witch, and the Cyborg.

As for my art practice, I’m calling in smaller things: sketches, collages, paintings, studies—small, manageable works I can churn out when the mood strikes. After finishing The Encounter, my spooky alien painting from earlier this fall, which I worked on for over three months, I felt the need to revive my sketchbook practice. As much as I love having a painting to chip away at after work, focusing on the same thing for months on end can sometimes begin to feel stagnant, or like a chore even. And that’s not what art is for.

I’ll end this year in review with a few small works and sketches, such as this recent exploration of Hekate based on invocations found in the Greek Magical Papyri.

I’ve also been into making these spontaneous collages/drawings.

Thank you for reading my work and following me on this new creative journey. In a digital space where everything and everyone competes for our attention, it means a lot that you’re here <3

“The Renaissance is a rebirth of the ‘occult sciences’ and not, as taught in schools, the resurrection of classical philology and a forgotten vocabulary.” — Will-Erich Peuckert

In the Renaissance, the imagination held a far more central place than it does today in the modern West. Informed by Hermetic and Neoplatonic ideas, it was understood as a legitimate mode of perception: an inner sense through which one could engage the hidden layers of reality. This elevated view of the imaginal helped create the intellectual climate in which the occult sciences of the period flourished, as these relied on the disciplined use of the imagination as a tool of inquiry into the workings of the mind of God.

However, this elevated status did not last. As religious and political pressures intensified—from the witch craze to the Reformation—the imaginal became increasingly suspicious and seen as a space of dangerous delusion and idolatry. It did not take much back then to get burned at the stake. Out of the heretics’ ashes rose mechanistic modern science, which confined the known universe to the domain of quantities. Today, a further shift has occurred, and much of our imaginative faculty has been externalized and outsourced to digital media, leaving us with fewer skills, if any, to consciously curate and create our own imaginal space, as the Renaissance magus once could.

For artists—and for anyone who desires an enchanted, possibility-rich existence— the imagination is the magical stuff of life: creative, innovative, weird, and also, illusory and deceptive. This essay explores how Renaissance magic, both as philosophy and practice, might help us relearn to operate the psychic machinery of the mind.

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Phantasia: The Inner Sense

Renaissance thought was as much steeped in Christian theology as it was in Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. With the rediscovery and translation of key texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and The Ennead, the figure of the Renaissance magus emerged. He was a learned practitioner and polymath, at once scientist and alchemist, who sought to understand and manipulate the forces of nature through Hermetic knowledge and philosophical insight.

The Renaissance worldview also rested on a markedly different conception of the imagination. In light of Plato’s philosophy, this faculty was referred to as phantasia, the inner sense. It was seen as a sort of psychic interface that mediates communication between body and soul, translating stimuli from one to the other, and doing so through inner images and phantasms.

In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), a peculiar book by historian of religion Ioan P. Couliano—which will inform much of this essay’s contents—the author emphasizes the central role of the inner sense in the Renaissance:

Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by the inner sense and had developed the utmost human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. […] It had a firm belief in the power of phantasms, which were transmitted by the phantasmic apparatus of the transmitter to that of the receiver. It also believed that inner sense was preeminently the locale for manifestations of transnatural forces—demons and the gods.

Takeaway

As a bridge to higher knowledge but also a place of apparitions, the imagination is a treacherous space—a hall of mirrors. Those who wish to travel these strange lands must learn to discern the real from the unreal. This is why one of the first steps on any mystical, religious, or magical path involves cultivating discrimination and learning the right use of the imagination. This is also a sound approach for the artist who wishes to wander this wild phantasmagorical space through magical means. These are shifty grounds where confirmation biases abound! Still, I am all for artists indulging in a healthy dose of magical thinking. Learn how the imagination works, and use it to your advantage. The next section introduces a technique for refining and purifying the inner sense.

Ars Memoriae: Mnemonic Engines

My favourite metaphor for understanding magic comes from Erik Davis, who describes the Western ceremonial tradition as a “ritual technology of the imagination.” The association between magic and machine is further echoed in their shared etymological ancestry: the ancient root magh, meaning “to be able, to have power.” In magic, this power is exercised primarily through images and semiotics in the broadest sense.

And if magic is a symbolic machine, then its psychic engines are the mnemonic systems of correspondences that the magus employs to restructure consciousness and cultivate an intuitive understanding of reality.

Mnemotechnics were widely practiced among Renaissance thinkers, and especially by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who wrote an entire treatise, Ars memoriae, on the subject. A Dominican friar with an appetite for unorthodox ideas, Bruno was fascinated by the Art of Memory. Influenced by Plato’s theory of Ideas, he believed that the eternal, archetypal realm of pure, unchanging Forms is beyond the grasp of ordinary humans, and that what we apprehend are only their shadow reflections.

For Bruno, the Hermetic adage “As above, so below” revealed a universe teeming with infinite correspondences. By encoding these webs of symbolic associations—planets, virtues, elements, seasons, hours, directions, and more—into elaborate inner images or phantasms, symbols, seals, mind palaces, and memory wheels (a device Bruno designed to train the imagination), one could strengthen and purify the inner sense, becoming better at discerning the real from the unreal. This practice also enabled the construction of a sort of artificial memory capable of producing synthetic insights.

Simply put, Bruno’s mnemonics organized the cosmos into a symbolic system through which he could internalize a representational map of the universe—much like a mandala. Contemplating and recombining these images was a means of approaching gnosis of the pure, transcendent Forms.

Since phantasms are inner images charged with emotional and symbolic meaning, Bruno’s method often employed images that carried violent, absurd, sexual, or divine connotations to help stimulate memory and more effectively encode knowledge. Doing so was a way of seducing one’s own imagination so that the “lower” passions would be directed “upward” toward intellectual pursuits. Externalized, the same mechanism becomes a core principle of Renaissance magic, which is, as we shall see, fundamentally erotic. It also has a darker application, as the next section will show.

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Takeaway

Because artists also work directly with images, Bruno’s system takes on particular relevance. First, such mnemonic tools help one develop symbolic thinking and understand images as multilayered carriers of meaning held together by association and resonance, rather than as literal representations. Next, by working within a specific symbolic register—be it a traditional system like astrology or the tarot, or a more personal vocabulary of iconographies—artists can use it as a generative creative constraint, opening new pathways and unexpected combinations. Finally, Bruno’s mnemonic practices were contemplative. Artists can also engage image-making as a way to attune the inner sense, allowing soul and body, conscious and unconscious, to communicate through the language of images and move toward greater coherence and synergy. Art, too, can be a contemplative practice.

Eros: Desire Binds

If magic is a machine, then Eros is its fuel, the binding agent. Originating in ancient Greece, where it is articulated in both mythic dramas and philosophical terms, Eros refers to the evolutionary and creative force of love, desire, and libido, which also finds expression in the heart’s yearning for the realm of ideal Forms. Eros sustains the push–pull dynamic between body and soul, keeping opposites locked in a state of attraction and longing. It is the living fabric of reciprocity that permeates natural ecosystems, just as it binds the whole universe into one pulsating web of correspondences—the Great Chain of Being.

How humans experience Eros is intimately linked to the imagination, for, as Couliano notes in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, “desire is the pursuit of a phantasm, and phantasm itself belongs to the imaginary world.” What we desire—and what we recoil from—are acts of imagination: movements toward or away from an inner image.

This idea forms the core of Renaissance magic, in which erotic processes blend completely with magical ones. Turned outward, Bruno’s mnemotechnics make one a manipulator of phantasms who can shape and direct the desires, motivations, and fears of others by utilizing their erotic charge to bind them to a particular image and outcome. Bruno is the first to push the application of magic to its ultimate conclusion: psychological influence. Far from offering a sociological critique, he exposes the psychic mechanisms of religion—with its enthusiastic proliferation of moralistic imagery—as a tool for mass manipulation. Couliano writes:

“By using effective techniques, the founders of religion were able, in a lasting way, to influence the imagination of the ignorant masses, to channel their emotions and make use of them to arouse feelings of abnegation and self-sacrifice they would not have experienced naturally.”

As such, Couliano argues that Bruno’s manipulator of phantasms—the erotic magician—is an early “prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses.” In this sense, because of the ambiguous power of imagination, Bruno sees that everything and everyone is manipulable, including the manipulator. Indeed, in magic, as with any technology, there is always the risk of becoming the tool of our tools.

Pioneering Marshall McLuhan by a few centuries, Bruno warns the memory artist: “Be careful not to change yourself from manipulator into the tool of phantasms”, the most dangerous pitfall for those who tamper with the imagination. His solution: cut all erotic ties, become immune to desire, learn everything there is to know about love, and escape love’s chains!

While extreme, Bruno’s aescetic—and even borderline sociopathic—remedy finds its perfected expression in today’s algorithmic systems of manipulation, all of which are specifically designed to predict and influence our behavior by serving us erotically charged images tailored to our unique phantasmic profile.

Takeaway

There is great power in defining the narrative of reality, and the imagination has long been the battlefield. Today, popular culture and media icons populate our imaginal realm, shaping how we perceive, interpret, and imagine most of what we encounter online and in life. Most alarmingly, at least to me, our image-making faculty has largely been externalized onto devices designed to capture human attention for all kinds of extractive, deceitful, and nefarious aims.

Creativity, like magic and mass manipulation, is driven by erotic energy. Reverse-engineering Bruno’s system of erotic magic offers artists a way to reclaim the imagination by re-internalizing its processes. Against Bruno’s advice to resist Eros, I believe that learning to tap our desire is essential—it is the force that motivates us to act, create, and connect with others through self-expression. Becoming familiar with our inner phantasmic landscape enables us to engineer it to our liking. Likewise, understanding how desire is engineered makes us more immune to manipulation in all its forms.

It is useful to gather inspiration outside ourselves and to utilize the tools and technologies at our disposal, but we can also easily develop a dependency and lose creative autonomy. We risk losing touch with our inner sense and becoming desensitized to the feel and texture of our own creative impulse, as we continue to reproduce and amplify the often contradictory phantasms that have been implanted in us by countless actors. Sometimes a detox is needed to turn inward. Purification is often a prerequisite to magical rituals. Once the lens of perception is cleansed, what strange images bubble up from the void?

I assume that for many, Renaissance magic may seem rooted in an obsolete worldview. The concepts of machine and technology are, of course, only metaphors for understanding the mechanism of magic as a psychology of desire, fueled by memory and Eros, but it remains a mysterious thing. Still, I hope this essay has shown how some of its core principles remain practical and useful for reclaiming the imagination, the inner sense, and the phantasms that shape our perception and creative life.

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At last, I finished a new oil painting: The Encounter. Spooky, I know, and a bit outside the bounds of what I usually paint. I wrote about the piece’s genesis and more technical aspects in a previous Studio Notes. Here, I’ll share some of the reflections that have been percolating as I was painting it, mostly on the topics of technology, religion, and UFOs.

On the Phenomenon

While painting The Encounter, I read American Cosmic (2019), an ethnographic study of the UFO phenomenon by Professor of Religious Studies Diana Walsh Pasulka. Over six years, she interviewed successful scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thus dispelling the common assumption that UFO belief dwells on the fringe.

Pasulka argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of religiosity—one shaped by technology. Drawing parallels to early Christianity, she suggests that we are entering an era in which technology holds as much power over the human imagination as God did in the medieval world. This rings true to me.

The Rise of a New Pantheon

Before reading Pasulka, I had never cared much about UFOs, which is odd given how I usually lean toward the weird and arcane. They seemed to belong to a different symbolic register. More sci-fi than esoteric.

As I kept reading, though, something clicked, and I could finally see where UFOs and aliens, alongside the Cyborg archetype I’ve been exploring lately, fit within a larger constellation of emergent techno-mythic figures. UFOs are an essential presence in today’s pantheon of contemporary “gods.”

This realization made its way into The Encounter. What I thought would be another iteration of a megalithic cyborg instead gave way to an archetype I didn’t know I had been circling.

Seeing is Believing

“Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”—Red Hot Chili Peppers

At the heart of every cult and religion is an extraordinary encounter, a gnosis of some kind—powerful, life-altering, and unpredictable in its social effects. This is essentially the Phenomenon: a direct encounter with the weird, at once ambiguous, destabilizing, sometimes terrifying, sometimes revelatory. How such encounters are framed depends on a culture’s media ecosystem, the space where its myths are generated, sustained, and proliferated.

American Cosmic examines how beliefs are formed and how people interpret unexplainable experiences within the symbolic frameworks available to them. The interplay between technology, media, religion, and mystery is consequential.

Pasulka discusses the key role media plays in belief formation, arguing that seeing is believing. The brain struggles to differentiate between virtual and real experiences, consolidating associations and absorbing representations, whether they are grounded in reality or not. Memory is malleable and the subconscious takes in images indiscriminately. In a screen-addicted culture like ours, the implications of Pasulka’s argument are significant.

We find ourselves in a sort of phenomenological feedback loop, where mediated images not only shape belief but also shape experiences of the Phenomenon itself. Experiencers come to interpret what happens to them through the imagery they’ve already absorbed.

That being said, the chasm between the Phenomenon and its media representations doesn’t negate the reality of these mysterious experiences. They’ve been with us for a long time. Across folklore, religious texts, and historical accounts, we can trace consistent patterns of encounter. Religious scholars look beyond truth claims, understanding that beliefs are real in their social effects.

Scientist-Believers & Techno-Mystics

Religions are built upon the testimonies of believers. Since the Phenomenon cannot be studied directly, Pasulka relies on credible witnesses—in this case, the community of scientist-believers she follows in the book. We come to know two of them closely, introduced under the aliases Tyler D and James. The latter has since revealed his true identity as Professor Garry Nolan, a prominent immunologist at Stanford University.

The mysterious Tyler D is a former aerospace engineer who worked extensively with the American space program before becoming a wealthy biomedical tech entrepreneur with over 30 patents to his name—innovations he attributes to off-planet intelligences.

Like many of the scientist-believers Pasulka surveys, Tyler D understands the Phenomenon as functioning like a kind of communication technology, with the human being—body, brain, mind—serving as both receiver and transmitter of information. Through this interface, nonhuman intelligence may seek to make contact, and, with the right protocol, we can reach out to them as well.

This process is referred to as the download.

This techno-mystic perspective has been intertwined with space programs from the very beginning. In the United States, there was Jack Parsons—the Thelemite occultist, rocket scientist, and pioneering figure in the early space program—who believed that nonhuman entities interacted with humans to guide them toward space travel. In Russia, another foundational figure, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of rocketry and aeronautics, wrote:

We are made as the “ethereal beings,” existing beyond our dimensions of recognized reality. These higher beings are in communication with us, reading our thoughts and sending us messages through celestial symbols which most of us do not perceive, much less understand. A genius is one who comprehends and channels these messages from higher beings into technologies, products, and even art.

As an artist who understands genius and the creative process in similar terms, I find it absolutely riveting that this same mode of communicating with “the other side” is, in a way, further validated through its scientific and technological applications. For Pasulka, it’s the material reality of our technologies that will make this new type of religiosity so convincing and powerful. I believe that she is right.

Thanks for reading. Did you ever experience an encounter? Has the Phenomenon made contact? Let me know in the comments, as they say.

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What I’m working on: Entering ideation mode. Nothing has started yet; everything is possible.

What I’m reading: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan P. Couliano

Announcement: Luna x KWENCH Winter Market | Dec. 6

Victoria people can find me on Saturday, Dec. 6, 12-4 pm, at the Luna x KWENCH Winter Market, the only event I plan on vending at this year. Along with 60 other artisans and creatives, I’ll be selling art prints, small works, and gift certificates to private classes. Come say hi and support local makers!

Magical Theory: The Artist as Magician

English artist and poet William Blake famously said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” As a mystic and prolific writer and painter, Blake exemplifies what I mean by the Artist as Magician: an intermediary between realms, someone able to perceive the “unseen”, with access to a rich phantasmagorical inner world, and capable of giving it form through craft.

To clarify, the “unseen” isn’t necessarily found on some inner plane, although one could argue that the imaginal is always skewing perception one way or another. The Artist as Magician doesn’t need to be a mystic to be able to see the world in a new light and share their way of seeing with others.

To me, the notion of perception is key to understanding what the Magician represents. His creative power lies not in manipulating reality per se, but the viewer’s perception of it—bending it to his will, transforming it, immersing it in an experience of his own making. Reframing it. Giving it meaning. This is what artists do (and advertisers, but that’s a conversation for another day).

In the Tarot, Arcanum I: the Magician embodies this very dynamic: consciousness focused into form. He stands as a fitting emblem for the Artist as Magician.

Practical Magic: The Magician Arcanum in Art

The Magician: Key Symbolism

I don’t want this essay to read like a tarot booklet, but I’ll briefly break down some of the key symbolism you’ll notice recurring in artistic representations of the Magician:

• Linked to Thoth, Mercury, and Hermes: deities of magic, language, knowledge, and alchemical transformation. Messengers who can cross the boundaries between worlds. Creators with mastery over their powers. Psychopomps and guides through the unseen.

• Lemniscate & Ouroboros: Endless cycles of creation and destruction. Nothing fixed, a constant state of flux and transformation. An infinite process of giving and receiving.

• The Tools: The four elements. Skillful use of the physical world. Intellect, emotion, vitality/desire, and the body.

• The Magician’s Stance: A living conduit, like a lightning rod channeling creative energy. His will directs the inner fire without being consumed by it. Manifestation is an active process.

• The Juggler: Skill, dexterity, and mastery. Juggling masks and realities, the Magician reminds us that life itself is a performance, a play of appearances.

Visualizing the Magician

As a visual medium, the tarot has inspired countless artistic reinterpretations, especially since the publication of the iconic Waite–Smith deck in 1909. Here are some examples:

At last, here is my take on the Magician Arcanum. I knew I wanted to weave some personal imagery into this piece, and serendipitously found a statue of Mercury striking the Magician’s pose in one of my collage books. I let the rest of the image unfold from there.

Writing the Magician

One way I like to connect with tarot archetypes is through automatic writing. I sit down with a pen and paper and meditate on a card until words begin dropping into my field of awareness. While writing this, I asked for a one-liner and the Magician said: “Think. Say. Make. Do. From the centre to the periphery. As Above. So Below. As Within. So Without.”

Pretty standard, even cliché, Magician stuff, I’ll admit. But I think the gold lies in returning to this practice again and again (or sit with it longer), until the more basic associations fall away and something unexpected begins to speak through.

Russian philosopher and esotericist P.D. Ouspensky was one of the first to experiment with this technique. His essay The Symbolism of the Tarot (1913) includes personal meditations on each Major Arcana archetype. Of the Magician, he writes:

I trembled before the depth of the mysteries I touched . . . The words I heard seemed to be uttered by the Great Magician himself, and it was as though he spoke in me.

I was in deep trepidation and at moments I felt there was nothing before me except the blue sky; but within me a window opened through which I could see unearthly things and hear unearthly words [italics mine].

I love that last sentence.

Chilean and French avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is also an uber tarot geek. In The Way of Tarot (2004), he gives voice to each Arcanum. His Magician emphasizes the timeless present, where the future is seeded through each action taken:

I, The Magician, take a position at the crossroad of eternity and infinity that we call the present. I am loyal to everything that I am: my body, my intelligence, my heart, my creative force. My table of flesh has its three feet rooted in the ground; I anchor myself somewhere in the diversity, and it is from this point that I take action. Out of the infinite number of possibilities, I have chosen one, my golden pentacle, the traction point that will lead me to Totality.

Now, your turn.

The Magician in Music

I’m sure there are plenty of songs inspired by The Magician out there, but my favourite one is Andy Shauf’s. The video is an absolute masterpiece, opening the floodgate to a trippy, hallucinatory dimension to get lost in, if only for a few minutes.

Thanks for reading! If you know some great Magician-related art or have some thoughts on the parallels between art and magic, let me know in the comments.

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Sometimes, Studio Notes is a sort of reading diary.

I recently finished Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (2023) by Phil Baker, a meticulous account of one of the most enigmatic figures of the early twentieth century (1886–1956). Spare was a gifted, if controversial, artist, possessed by a morbid and lustful imagination. He was also an occultist, writer, and sorcerer with a blazing inner life, who devised his own idiosyncratic belief system and cosmology born of deep incursions into psychic realms.

Spare’s artistic career started out promising. Hailed as a prodigy, he was the youngest artist to ever exhibit at the prestigious Royal Academy. He gained a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art at age 13 or 17—depending on the source. Yet, his celebrity years were short-lived. Maybe he wasn’t made for worldly success, or maybe, as George Bernard Shaw reportedly quipped, “Spare’s medicine [was] too strong for the average man.” Either way, his art and ideas were certainly not meant for mass appeal.

Between 1905 and 1927, Spare articulated a radical magical philosophy grounded in pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality. But his career sank into obscurity in the early 1920s, and he lived in deep poverty while continuing to produce extraordinary, otherworldly art with daemonic fervor. He died in a dark, dank basement surrounded by his cats.

Since his death, Spare has been, as Baker writes, “simultaneously celebrated and forgotten.” In art history, he remains a marginal presence, yet his mythos lives on in magical and occult subcultures. Here are a few ideas that stuck with me after finishing his biography.

Art is magic is art

For Spare, art and magic were one and the same—living, creative processes concerned with the manipulation of symbols, images, and words, and drawing their potency from the deep subconscious. The latter was of vital importance to Spare, who formulated his own theory of the subconscious mind, regarding it as the sole true source of artistic inspiration. Harnessing the latent creative force of the subconscious formed the foundation of his magical and artistic ethos.

For Spare, desire, and especially unconscious desire, was the driving force underlying the creative process, finding its fulfillment in art on both individual and cosmic levels. He saw desire as the evolutionary current within nature, the erotic pulse. In The Book of Pleasure (1913), Spare writes:

“A bat first grew wings and of the proper kind, by its desire being organic enough to reach the sub-consciousness. If its desire to fly had been conscious, it would have had to wait till it could have done so by the same means as ourselves, i.e. by machinery.”

Conscious desire, Spare believed, only intensified the sense of separation from what we long for but do not possess, whereas unconscious desire could mobilize the organic process of natural selection itself.

To this end, he developed techniques such as automatic drawing and sigilization—the creation of an abstract symbol charged with the intent to manifest a specific desire or outcome. Like logos channels consumer desire for a brand, sigils are designed to bypass and distract the conscious mind, allowing the unconscious to carry out the work. In this, he stands as both a precursor to Surrealism and a key influence on the later Chaos Magic movement of the 1970s.

Obsession & Genius

For Spare, the goal of the artist was to act as a clear medium for magical obsession, “that state when the mind is illumined by subconscious activity evoked voluntarily… for inspiration. It is the condition of genius,” he writes. Interestingly, several distinct artistic styles recur in his work, as if he channeled multiple personalities—or entities—through his art.

In an interview, Spare candidly explained, “During the automatic period, I am obsessed or possessed by the spirit of some artist, perhaps a dead artist. I don’t exactly know. The only evidence I may have is that it’s like Dürer or Blake, or someone I’ve never heard of.” Whether it’s true or not, who knows, but he certainly had range.

The last two images are examples of what Spare called Siderealism, a style he invented by experimenting with anamorphic distortions. The effect is uncanny, and “in some of the most extreme cases,” Baker writes, “seems to locate the viewer in an impossible space. […] they are also an instance of the perverse power of art, bending reality, making it malleable.” Again, driving the point home that art and magic operate in the same way.

All in all, I’m still unsure whether Spare was a genius and visionary or a lonely, deluded man haunted by madness and trauma. Probably all of the above, and more. Reconstructing a life on the page is never easy and inevitably falls short of the living person, though many critics agree that Baker did an admirable job of unearthing and weaving scattered fragments into a coherent portrait. Reading about Spare’s life and his wild theories, I felt a deep sympathy for him and a resonance with his ideas about art, obsession, and magic—and with his dark, goth aesthetic.

What I’m working on: Channelling the spirit of Spare, and hoping to learn from his flawless draughtsmanship, I sketched a small study of his Nude with Crystal Ball, one of my favourite drawings by him.

What I’m reading: The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (2017) by historian Ronald Hutton.

What I’m listening to: moody October music like Ora Cogan who is apparently from Victoria, BC, too. The song “Cowgirl” is nice.

What did you think of Austin Osman Spare? Would love to know in the comments <3

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Friends, this is a short one since my previous Studio Notes took some time to write, and I miss painting. If you haven't read it yet, I write about the elusive meaning of the Feminine through three recurring archetypes in my work: the Femme Fatale, the Witch, and the Cyborg. It was a fun one to arrive at articulating.

Announcement: Open House at 780 Blanshard St.

If you’re around this weekend, come by for the Open House at 780 Blanshard St., downtown Victoria’s iconic Art Deco building. Along with over 80 artists, my studio will be open, and I’ll be happy to chat about my work with you. ❤︎

On Keeping it Interesting

I’m working on a new painting, and I had the impulse to paint the background neon green and went with it. Then I immediately regretted it because there was my edge, and I’d had to meet it.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve plateaued in my technical skills. But maybe it’s that I haven’t been taking risks. I’ve been so focused on learning how to write that I haven’t been as invested in improving my skills as a painter. But with this one, I’m actually excited to push myself again and learn something new in the process. This is what keeps the work interesting.

And I found just the right artist (and book) to help me through this.

Patrick J. Jones’s book had been on my bookshelf for years, but I haven’t been serious about learning from it until now. He’s got mad skills. I especially like how he adapts classical painting techniques like grisaille and glazing to fantasy and sci-fi imagery. There’s so much to learn by studying another artist’s work.

His breakdown of his painting, “Valley of the Serpent”, has been my guide as I problem-solve my way through. I’m using it as a reference for my colour palette.

There’s so much to learn by studying another artist’s work. His Jones’s paintings are so luminous and dynamic, and that’s because he’s a master of contrast, focusing on values over colours. His use of a muted palette is key to the vibrancy of his work. This is something I hope to emulate.

I also want to get better at painting settings. My painting in progress features two cyborgish figures (aliens, perhaps?), guarding a gateway mounted by a pair of sphinxes. Jones keeps his backgrounds loose, which enables the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks. It’s also what creates the illusion of depth, directing the eye to what’s in focus. This is a principle of realism I want to be mindful of in this new piece.

Oh, and the inspiration for this ‘mise en scène’ comes from the Lions’ Gate in Ḫattuša, Turkey. I’ll discuss the symbolism in a forthcoming Studio Notes.

Final Notes

What I’m reading: Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist by Phil Baker, an excellent biography that’s stimulating many thoughts on the connection between art, creativity, and magic. I absolutely love Spare’s occult aesthetic, and because of his pioneering use of automatic techniques, he is sometimes regarded as the father of Surrealism. But he was an atypical figure, whose medicine, as George Bernard Shaw once said, was “too strong for the average man”.

What I’m listening to: “Pretender” by Sarah Jaffe on repeat.

Leave a comment below. ❤︎

I’ve been invited to speak about my art practice at my friend Emrys Damon Miller’s zine launch on September 26. His project, witnesses, is inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites—a 19th-century symbolic-realist movement romanticizing two prominent themes: women and nature. These have long been muses for me, symbolic expressions of an archetype I’m endlessly drawn to: the Feminine.

In anticipation of the talk, I thought I’d unpack the Feminine by doing a little writing, curious about what the process might reveal.

What is the Feminine?

I don’t claim to understand the nature of Reality, but I sense that recurring archetypal motifs shape how we construct meaning and map our existence. These inherited patterns, symbols, and images woven into our psyche attempt to pin down laws and principles words fail to fully express. Words like Feminine and Masculine.

The ancient archetypal dualism of the Feminine and the Masculine reflects the underlying paradox of our universe: Day/Night, Life/Death, Mind/Body, Self/Other, Active/Receptive, Yin/Yang. This motif of primordial syzygy points to complementary opposites that give rise to one another. Polarities that sometimes exist in tension but that must ultimately be balanced, harmonized, reconciled, and alchemized.

This is the dance of creation.

To explore the elusive meaning of the Feminine, I turn to three recurring archetypes in my work: the Femme Fatale, the Witch, and the Cyborg.

The Femme Fatale: Creative Eroticism

The Femme Fatale embodies the Western world’s fraught history with the Feminine. She is the dark mirror of a culture that fears what it cannot dominate: the erotic, the cyclical, the fluid, the wild.

You notice the culture’s unsettling discomfort in how her domains—birth, sex, and death—have been made taboo, sanitized, or pathologized. Deep down, we all sense that these are not only biological events, but mysterious thresholds that confront us with transformation, loss of control, and ego dissolution.

She evokes an element of risk.

The Feminine is self-cannibalizing Nature churning through endless cycles—a serpent eating its tail. We are confined to her embodied, material limits. She evokes a deep, primal fear of death and chaos, of ego dissolution, for she is endowed with the mysterious power to undo, to break down, and recycle. Creation is a constant flux of transformation. Birth, sex, and death.

As an eroticized figure, the Femme Fatale seduces us into surrendering our separate sense of self. She compels us to confront the dazzling darkness and to be aroused by the Mystery—open and receptive to the sacred procreative and creative force that courses through our bodies and dissolves the boundary between ourselves and the Great Body of Nature. Though nature continually renews itself through sexuality, this cycle of renewal is given meaning through love—Eros. Eros urges us toward wholeness. Eros binds together. Eros transforms.

Engaging with the Femme Fatale archetype in my creative practice revealed the inherently erotic nature of self-expression. She is the all-consuming muse, the attention seeker demanding the artist’s devotional gaze. Don’t look away—she requires one-pointedness, and she gives back on her own terms. If you hold on too tight, she will torment you and make you suffer, for the muse was never yours to begin with.

Yield. Let go. Surrender to her timeline. Let the same force that gave birth to the cosmos gestate new life within you. Let strange things emerge from your deep, dark core. Trust what feels good. Follow the spark. Fan the flame. Your burning desires beckon you home. You will die a little in the process, and that’s the point.

The Witch: Transgressive Knowledge

Whereas the Femme Fatale embodies the erotic and transformational power of the Feminine, the Witch represents her transgressive, forbidden knowledge—ways of knowing that challenge dominant narratives and the prevailing model of reality.

The Witch archetype has long lingered at the margins of Western culture, shapeshifting through the centuries to mirror evolving anxieties and aspirations about the Feminine. The persecution of earth-based spiritualities—especially by dominant religious institutions—was instrumental in casting the Witch as a symbol of demonized and forbidden traditions. To modern science, she became discredited as a charlatan and a quack.

The Witch continues to reveal our culture’s deep unease with knowledge sourced outside accepted norms. Western myth often portrays feminine curiosity as dangerous, as if a clear moral boundary delineates acceptable and unacceptable ways of knowing. Eve bites the apple. Pandora opens the box. In both cases, great suffering follows.

The Witch’s wisdom is transgressive and thus threatening. Gleaned outside traditional power structures, her arcane knowledge is feared as heretical or dismissed as irrational. Her knowing is sensual, instinctive, intuitive, relational, ecological. She learns directly from the natural and unseen worlds, and preserves ancestral knowledge in kinship with other women. The Witch is midwife, healer, and seer—she can see beyond the veil.

Cast to the margins of art history, the Witch finds resonance with many women artists whose contributions to Modernism were overlooked, erased, or overshadowed by their male counterparts—artists I admire, like Hilma af Klint, Ithell Colquhoun, Agnes Pelton, and Leonora Carrington. Each cultivated a fertile relationship with the hidden side of things, treating art as a means of communication and communion with other realms.

A relentless muse may be calling from beyond the veil, but the artist must cross over and apprehend her mysteries directly to channel and ground her expression here, on this side of things. The creative process becomes a door to the vastness within and without, blurring the line between imaginal and material, summoning visions and thought-forms out of thin air. As a symbol, the Witch embodies the compelling creative power of those who dare cross the threshold and learn to speak the liminal language of the psyche.

The Cyborg: Sterilizing Nature

Recently, the Cyborg has surfaced in my work as a new archetype, raising questions as to where the body ends and technology begins. If the Witch dwells at the threshold between seen and unseen realms, the Cyborg emerges at the interface between body and machine.

At this point, I have more questions than answers. I think we are all contending with the Cyborg. I think we should all be asking questions.

What does the wild, embodied, erotic pole of being—the Feminine—mean for Techno-sapiens? How does technology intersect with and transform the procreative and creative process, the wheel of birth, sex, and death? These questions echo an ancient tension between cyclical, embodied existence and our cultural agenda toward linear progress and transcendence.

The Cyborg doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it is the product of a culture obsessed with overcoming the body and sanitizing matter. It is a creature devoid of eroticism, severed from the web of life, programmed to build its own optimized cocoon, its own silicon womb. Where the Femme Fatale embodies the wild pull of Eros and the messy renewal processes of Nature, the Cyborg represents her sterilization: the erotic flattened into stable efficiency.

The Cyborg sources knowledge not from direct sensory experience but from representational maps abstracted into algorithmic processes. As such, it stands in stark contrast with the Witch’s embodied and relational wisdom. Sensual input does not exist for machines. Is the technological project, then, at odds with the Feminine? Is it a telling fantasy that mirrors back our anxious pursuit of totalizing knowledge—our desire to rip the veil open altogether and invade the Mystery with predictability and mathematical certainty?

Is the Cyborg a dystopian figure, or an admission that our physical, biological reality is equally embedded in stories? We may be animals tethered to earthly processes, but we also exist and evolve within a larger cultural matrix, an ecology encompassing the technologies that continually reshape human perception, social relations, and our malleable sense the real.

The Cyborg highlights our own predictability and programmability. In a context where maps take precedence over the territory, we lose touch with the ground and float disembodied in a hyperreal construction where everything competes for our attention. The simulacrum feeds on our erotic charge and begins to wear our bodies, our flesh hijacked by irresistible systems designed to capture, predict, and shape our behavior. In this way, the Cyborg asks: Are you a machine?

I could go on and on, but this is starting to feel a bit lengthy for a Studio Notes. My creative practice is a form of inquiry, and exploring the Feminine has been and continues to be central to my artistic journey. The Femme Fatale, the Witch, and the Cyborg are all characters within the larger, ongoing narrative of a culture that, like me, is grappling with the power, mystery, and contradictions of the Feminine.

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Friends, this one is a weird blend of what’s been on my mind lately as I come home from Iceland. Part travelogue, I also touch on my need for stillness and process Ozzy Osbourne’s death.

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On Coming Home

Coming home after a 10-day trip to Iceland feels lovely, like a much-needed exhale. We covered a lot of ground, driving over 1,500 km around the country. But I remain a Capricorn, and routine is nice.

Majestic Iceland. Gloomy Iceland. A vast, infernal land of volcanoes, dragon-shaped mountains, and relentless waterfalls. Heavy fog, misty rain, looming clouds, everything green, rebirth green. Lava fields slowly turn into mossy pillows, little by little, setting the food chain into motion. For life prevails.

A Land of Extremes

Iceland is merciless and elemental. A land of extremes that swings between solstices and lingers at each pole. Either months of night, or a sun that refuses to set. A place of opposites, where the raw splendour of the landscape coexists with the mundanity of a well-oiled tourist industry.

I had high romanticized hopes to “connect” with the landscape, and let myself be swallowed by its sublime grandiosity. Like Chinese wandering poet Li Bai, I pictured myself “[sitting] together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” Alas, this did not turn out to be my experience of Iceland.

Instead, we joined the herds of tourists, all of us making our way from feature to feature, all trying to snap a photo that best captures what the place would feel and look like without tourists. For social media. As I sit, writing this “travelogue”, the irony isn’t lost on me.

Stillness is a Homecoming

We were constantly moving, crossing items off our ChatGPT-generated travel itinerary one by one, which is how you make the most of a 10-day trip. And we did. It was a completely stunning and extraordinary trip, albeit a dizzying one. Now, the time is ripe for integration, for stillness.

On long drives through Iceland’s fairy-tale landscapes, we filled the silence with the disembodied voices of podcasters, maintaining a lifeline to a world on fire even while vacationing. It wasn’t just the adventuring or the constant motion that made me dizzy, but the nausea of feeling tethered between beauty and ongoing collapse.

Thankfully, there was Björk’s extensive discography to set the mood to these emotional landscapes. We also found respite in Michael Anthony’s deep-dive art history podcast ArtHoles, which featured a six-hour episode on the French Revolution, an oddly reassuring reminder that, historically, the world has seen some shit.

I come home to find that something in me longs for a deeper kind of homecoming, for the sweet relief of resting in the awareness of the ground (or groundlessness) of Being, a “place” I only know to access via meditation and a baseline I feel an urgent need to cultivate with greater discipline, especially right now. As I see it, the “attack” on human attention is making the concentration necessary to achieve deep meditation states increasingly harder to sustain. As my new favourite writer, Erik Davis, writes, “Waking up is hard when we rush about like sleepwalkers on speed”. And indeed, digital spaces are specifically designed to hijack our nervous system, keeping us addicted and entranced. It’s up to us to reconnect with “this side” of things, the embodied side.

Perhaps, this desire to withdraw inward is a reaction to the madness I’m tuning into every time I pick up my phone or engage with mediated reality. Some could say it’s escapism. Yet, the fragmentation that results from constant stimulation is affecting me in alarming ways, and I am slightly ashamed at how much I struggle with going about the world without it (I am a podcast addict).

The antidote is to sit and do nothing more. And while the buzzing layers of accumulated tension feel vertiginous at first, a gentle sense of relief washes over me as the mind settles and the body begins to open.

I have arrived. I am home.

Mama, I’m Coming Home

On July 22, Ozzy Osbourne died. I’m in Vík, land of the black sands, when I hear the news—a fitting place to mourn the passing of the Prince of Darkness. See, I am the daughter of a die-hard Ozzy fan/devotee. For as long as I can remember, Ozzy has been a sort of larger-than-life mythic figure, a god in the my dad’s metal pantheon. Ozzy is, in some way, part of the family. He and Sharon even signed my 16th birthday card.

In the following days, I catch myself tearing up on numerous occasions, which surprises me. I don’t typically care much about celebrity drama. Driving through the Eldhraun pillow lava field—on our way to the, I kid you not, Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon near Kirkjubæjarklaustur—we listen to my favourite Black Sabbath and Ozzy songs. Childhood memories flicker: when my dad and I would sing (scream) along to “Crazy Train” in the car, the music as loud as it could be, speakers glitching. Or the few times we saw Ozzy live together, and he flashed his ass…

Anyway, I am moved by Ozzy’s stubbornness to say goodbye to his fans properly in one final concert, a display of gratitude and reciprocity that’s admirable in an industry full of entitled and narcissistic rock stars. Back to the Beginning in Birmingham closed the ritual circle cast 55 years earlier, when Black Sabbath struck the first heavy metal chord that would forever transform popular culture, and as author Jason Louv aptly noted, “turned the Satanic Panic into a multi-million dollar industry”. More than 40,000 followers gathered at Villa Park to hear the prophet’s final transmission. My father was among them and described the experience as the pilgrimage of a lifetime. Here’s a brief overview, in case you’ve been living under a rock:

Discussing the Ozzy phenomenon, it’s hard not to employ religious language. His music was a sort of mystical experience for many, his concerts bacchanals, cathartic for fringe dwellers who found a sense of belonging in his metal “church” of outcasts. He was funny, witty, and a real creative force. It strikes me how, sitting on his bat throne, cripled by Parkinson’s disease, rocking back and forth, with tremors in his knee, the Prince of Darkness still had the crowd entranced and hypnotized like a leader of an ecstatic cult.

Throughout his career, Ozzy’s music and persona satisfied the real devotional desire that immortal god-like icons once did, reminding us that these emotions run deep within the human psyche and generate authentic feelings of connection and transcendence that are hard to negate. The world needs heroes, and with his passing, we lost a massive one. RIP Ozzy.

Final Words

What I’m Working on: I barely just landed, and I’m already getting ready to take off elsewhere. I still spent a little time in the studio, just to get reacquainted with my space. Here’s a sneak peek of a new cyborg piece I started. Trying something new with a neon green underpainting. It looks terrible at this point, but just wait…

What I’m Reading: I just finished the revelatory media studies cult classic, TechGnosis by Erik Davis, which I will need to process in a forthcoming essay. It’s hard to match such a stimulating read, but I hope Jason Louv’s biography, John Dee and the Empire of Angels, on Renaissance magus and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, Dr. John Dee’s legacy, and the occult roots of the modern world, will fill the void.

What I’m Listening to: Lots of Black Sabbath.

Thanks for reading this month’s Studio Notes, which did not pertain much to my studio practice. But taking time off is necessary to refuel the creative fire, so it counts.

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Friends, I feel that Studio Notes needs a structure, so I’m going to try something new, starting with housekeeping items and announcements, such as this one.

After some thought, I’ve decided to make this a monthly newsletter, in synch with the full moon. This way, I can better focus on my art practice as well as on other writings that are beginning to clutter my mindspace.

In this Studio Notes, though, I’m excited to tell you about my artist crush, Ithell Colquhoun. And what is a crush but being infatuated by projected parts of the self onto an idealized other?

Get cozy, because it turns out I have a lot to share. But before we begin,

Announcement: Private lessons now available!

I’m excited to offer private lessons in oil painting and drawing, customized to your personal goals and experience, both in-person and online. I truly believe that one-on-one sessions unlock a depth of learning that's hard to match. You can book a single afternoon deep-dive or a series of private sessions.

Lessons are $60/hour. Paid Substack subscribers receive an additional 15% discount.

Please, inquire if interested. I’d love to paint with you ♥.

On Ithell Colquhoun

I recently finished Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (2020), by Amy Hale, a biography of the brilliant yet largely forgotten artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988). Thankfully, she is experiencing a significant posthumous comeback. In 2019, her extensive archive was acquired by the Tate, which hosted the first retrospective exhibition of over 200 paintings earlier this year (February to May 2025).

I wrote about my burgeoning love of Colquhoun in a previous Studio Notes. While she left behind an equally impressive collection of writings, including published and unpublished novels, nonfiction books, articles, poetry, and essays, here, I will focus on Colquhoun’s unique artistic practice.

Art as Extra-dimensional Portal

Colquhoun is often grouped with the Surrealists, and she was, indeed, a prominent figure in British Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s, but her art is so much more than that. Her artistic practice was inseparable from her search, fully in service to it, and she embraced various forms of automatic techniques as vehicles to communicate with and give form to transcendent dimensions—not so much as a means of probing the subconscious mind, as was more common within the Surrealist movement. As Hale writes:

“The artistic expression of an extra-dimensional portal represented an important spiritual concept for Colquhoun, namely that we are surrounded by other worlds and Otherworlds, and that with the right spiritual technology we can contact them. She believed that people in other times had the ability to move between worlds, and she was not only interested in apprehending those dimensions herself, but longed to represent their mysteries to others [emphasis added]”.

The question of enlightenment through art mattered most to Colquhoun, and her vast body of work is a deep pool of occult experimentation, rich with hermetic references and magical correspondences. She was influenced by several thinkers, including Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, whose work on the fourth dimension had become popular with many artists, including pioneers of the Cubism movement who dared to reimagine perspective. Colquhoun saw her art practice as a means of developing fourth-dimensional vision.

Colour as Entities

Colour is central to Colquhoun’s artistic and magical practice, and without an understanding of the Golden Dawn system of Kabbalistic colour attributions, one cannot fully understand the full meaning and intention behind her work.

Hale provides some historical context I find fascinating, for it shows how technology often intersects with the magical imagination, shaping culture in unforeseen ways. When the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888, a new era of colour experimentation was underway, made possible by the development of a wide range of artificial pigments, including new colours released by the still-operating Winsor & Newton paint company. Such innovation was undoubtedly transformative for many artists at the time, unlocking bold hues that blending alone could never achieve. For Golden Dawn magicians and artists Moina Mathers and Florence Farr, these new pigments enabled the formulation of the theoretical framework for colour experimentation that would become emblematic of the magical organization’s ritual practice. Hale explains:

“What developed as a result is an exciting set of ritual practices and meditations which combine traditional esoteric colour correspondences, and the idea that colours were themselves entities which could be invoked, with newly emerging ideas about the effect of colour on physiology and the psyche.”

A lifelong student of the Golden Dawn system, Colquhoun saw colours not as symbolic representations of archetypal principles, but as gateways to experiencing colours as forces in themselves.

Her magical and artistic practice is exalted in her gorgeous Taro as Colour (1977), one of the first abstract tarot decks ever created and one of the early decks informed solely by Kabbalistic colour correspondences. Created with bright, opaque enamel paint, each of the 78 cards is stripped of enigmatic symbols, sigils, and narrative elements, offering the viewer direct access to the card’s underlying essence or even plane of reality. Colquhoun designed this deck specifically for meditation and contemplation, as a means to refine one’s ability to journey to worlds beyond.

Alchemical Erotica

Beyond colour, Colquhoun’s work mainly explores themes of sex, magic, death, and decay—all themes I resonate with. She was especially fascinated with the image of the divine hermaphrodite, which she imagined as a perfected state of being in which the primeval polarities, male/female, are in conjunctio, and as such, transcended. Her vision of sacred alchemical union went beyond conventional ideas of gender, and throughout her life, Colquhoun had romantic relationships with both men and women.

In private, Hale reveals that “Colquhoun explored the world of alchemical erotica like a woman obsessed.” Through Kabbalistic, Tantric, and alchemical symbolism, she formulated her own philosophy and practice of sex magic, which was, of course, radical for a woman of her time.

In Sex Magic: Ithell Colquhoun’s Diagrams of Love (2024), Hale unveils a striking selection of Colquhoun’s erotic paintings, drawings, and poems. This beautiful little art book, published by the Tate, brings her voice and imagery into renewed conversation with the occult subcultures that shaped the early 20th century, while also offering a rare woman’s perspective and take on the sex magic theories that were circulating in underground British magical communities—of which Colquhoun was very much an insider.

Among the Living Stones

During World War II, Colquhoun left chaotic London and settled by the sea in witchy Cornwall, where she felt a deep connection to the land and to the enigmatic megalithic stone circles that had stood there for millennia. She was passionate about ancient sacred monuments, which she viewed as remnants of a lost pre-Celtic civilization—an idealized people, magical and technologically advanced, who lived in harmony with the land and knew how to harness its powers.

Based on Colquhoun’s writings—for instance, she wrote an uncommon travelogue about Cornwall, The Living Stones (1957), featuring odd cultural and historical facts as well as sacred landscape illustrations that some could read as overtly erotic—and her megalith paintings, one could say that she was a pioneer of alternative archaeology. As early as the 1940s, she was exploring ideas about electromagnetic currents (today known as telluric currents) and ley lines, considering whether these ancient sites functioned as portals to other dimensions. Hale notes that it was not until the 1960s that these ideas coalesced into the Earth Mystery movement. Still, they were not uncommon in the Atlantean lore of Western esotericism that Colquhoun was steeped in.

Touched by the Hand of Ithell

Colquhoun’s ideas were indeed “out there,” even too out there for the British Surrealist Group, and she was expelled from the organization in 1940. Her magical painting practice was shaped by a Venn diagram of obscure interests that fueled her spiritual search. Sadly, despite her brilliance, she never managed to articulate her theoretical framework in a way that was easily accessible. Her writings are often impenetrable, even to those with a foundation in esoteric concepts. Besides, women artists were largely dismissed in her day. When she died in 1988, at the age of 82, Colquhoun left, in Hale’s words, “an odd sense of defeat behind her.”

Regardless, Colquhoun was a woman well ahead of her time— weird, outspoken, well-read, and unapologetic, and that’s what I like about her. I see in her example a call to claim my identity as an occult and esoteric artist, and I guess, writer (I’ve even reworked my about page). Interestingly, some artists have identified a strange phenomenon, as if, when encountering Colquhoun’s work, her spirit begins shaping their life and practice in unforeseen ways. I think that I, too, have been touched by the “Hand of Ithell”.

Final Words

What I’m Working on: It’s been hard to spend any time in my studio, and I haven’t been super productive. Summer is always like that; summer is for adventuring! I’ve been out of town, or out and about with friends, enjoying the sunshine. Still, my hermit part finds it somewhat exhausting and quietly dreams for long, uninterrupted periods of focused work in the studio (Fall will come again).

Still, I was able to complete the second layer of this painting, which I might title Sing Me a Swan Song. I’m hoping to finish it before I head off to Iceland in a week. Fingers crossed…

What I’m Reading: The book I’ve always wanted to read but didn’t know existed until I found Erik Davis’s TechGnosis (1998), where media studies meet occult history.

What I’m Listening to: I guess I’m in my Erik Davis era, my new fave media theorist. Check out his Expanding Mind podcast, where he explores the culture of consciousness, discussing topics at the intersection of magic, psychedelics, and technology.

Thanks for reading. It was a long one! I hope you found something of value that kindled your creative flame. Let me know in the comments. ♥

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