A 2024 survey of more than 1,300 self-identified Disney adults found that 71 percent are between 25 and 44 years old, 80 percent are women, and 91 percent expect to remain Disney adults for the rest of their lives.1 Fifty-eight percent report spending between $1,000 and $10,000 annually on Disney products and experiences. Roughly 4,000 couples marry at Walt Disney World each year. A 2018 study by StreetLight Data found that only 36.7 percent of Walt Disney World visitors came from households with children.2 The majority of visitors are millennial adults.

Harry Potter fandom runs parallel to this, though on a somewhat smaller scale. Morning Consult polling from 2023 found that millennials constitute the largest share of avid fans and that 56 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of the franchise, a figure exceeding the Marvel Cinematic Universe.3 Over 90 percent of Pottermore’s digital users are female.4 The franchise has generated an estimated $43 billion across books, films, games, theme parks, and merchandise.5 Hogwarts Legacy, the 2023 video game, earned $850 million and sold more than 12 million units in its first two weeks.6 When Universal Orlando opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in 2010, park merchandise revenue jumped 104 percent in a single quarter.7

The form of enchantment these franchises supply has a specific and predictable structure built on what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth: the story of an individual who is marked from birth with special potential, called to adventure, and returned transformed, bearing a gift for the community.8 Campbell believed he had found the universal pattern underlying all mythology, but what he more precisely described was the hero’s journey as a story of individual transformation, stripped of the communal and ritual context in which myths actually operate. Harry Potter follows Campbell’s template: the orphan with the lightning bolt scar, unaware of his destiny; the call in the form of the Hogwarts letter; the mentor in Dumbledore; the road of trials; the willing walk toward death; the return. The majority of Disney Films and those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe all follow the same structure, now so pervasive that audiences perceive it as the natural shape of narrative.9

Henry Giroux, author of The Mouse That Roared, argues that Disney “favours tales of hyper-individualistic heroism over collective action. Saving people always comes in the form of superhuman powers.”10 You are special simply because of who you are. The practitioner’s sole requirement is to show up and pay. Giroux calls Disney a “teaching machine” that produces “strategies of escapism and consumerism that reinforce an infantilised and utterly privatised notion of citizenship.” Infantilisation, he argues, is a form of depoliticisation: “You infantilise people so they can’t think, so they can’t act.” Sociologist Idil Galip notes that the financial and emotional investment “signals a break from regular society or real life.”11 The viral 2019 discourse, ignited when a mother’s Facebook rant against “CHILDLESS COUPLES AT DISNEY WORLD” was screenshotted to Twitter, crystallized a broader anxiety that adults were seeking from a theme park what earlier generations sought from churches, pilgrimages, or the land itself.12

Max Weber delivered “Science as a Vocation” in Munich in 1917 in which he declared that the world was disenchanted. “One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits. Technical means and calculations perform the service.” Weber understood that this process left a wound. Science, he noted, “is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”13

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), mapped the interior architecture of the disenchanted subject. Taylor distinguishes between the “porous self” of the premodern world, open and vulnerable to spirits, demons, and cosmic forces, and the “buffered self” of modernity, which draws a firm boundary between inner experience and outer world.14 The porous self absorbed forces already present in the world around it; meanings were not interior but environmental. The buffered self is sealed, master of its own interiority, invulnerable to anything outside. Even so, Taylor argues, people feel pulled toward transcendence: “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured.”15 The pull has to go somewhere. “So people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane.” Theme parks designed as enchanted kingdoms, sorting ceremonies that echo initiatory rites: these are attempts to simulate porosity from within the buffered condition. The frisson fades, because it was manufactured to fade, because the business model depends on return visits.

Jason Josephson-Storm, in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), argues that disenchantment never actually occurred as a historical event. It functions instead as a “regulative ideal”: a disciplinary norm that leads people to disavow belief in magic and act as though the Western world is disenchanted, even when it plainly is not.16 The capacity for enchantment never vanished. It was driven underground, forced to express itself through sanctioned containers. A Disney annual pass is one such container. A Hogwarts house affiliation is another. Commodity witchcraft and other types of consumerist spirituality position themselves above these expressions but there is little difference. At the end of the day it’s all just LARPing.

Real magic is constituted by relationship: with the dead, with spirits, with the land, and with community. Bessie Dunlop, tried in Edinburgh in 1576 for “Sorcery, Witchcraft and Incantation, with Invocation of spirits of the devil,” worked with a familiar who offered guidance on brewing remedies and finding lost objects, tried to persuade her to renounce her baptism, introduced her to the Queen of Faerie, and attempted to draw her under the mound into the realm of the dead.17 The familiar could take the form of a fairy, a demon, an animal, or one of the dead; whatever shape it assumed, it required sustained engagement, and it changed the practitioner.

In Central European village communities, seers, táltos, and wise women served as mediators between the living and the dead.18 These practitioners were embedded in their communities, serving functions at once spiritual and social, recognized and accountable. The magical systems of fairy belief, sorcery, and witchcraft operated simultaneously within the ecology of village life, woven into the fabric of how a community understood and navigated its world.

This is what magic looks like when it is true: relational, reciprocal, rooted, demanding, and transformative. A theme park visit can be repeated identically a thousand times; a single encounter with the dead can change you forever. The person who spends thousands of dollars a year at Disney World and weeps at a character meet-and-greet is reaching for this kind of encounter, displaced into the only container the capitalist overculture has to offer. Joel Christensen and Sarah Bond, writing on Campbell’s legacy, observe that the monomyth “encourages audiences to see themselves as protagonists in a great struggle and all others as either helping or hindering their journey,” a use that is, they write, “in a way nearly perfectly narcissistic.”19 The form itself excludes the communal, place-bound, ancestor-connected world where magic was actually practiced, and is still practiced, by people willing to honor it.

Taylor’s cross-pressures describe exactly this: a person caught between the immanent frame that modern life enforces and the persistent sense that the world is larger and weirder than it has been officially permitted to be. The feeling being chased takes the form of nostalgia for childhood, but runs deeper. It is the feeling of a porous self: open, susceptible, in genuine contact with something beyond the closed loop of private interiority. The franchises simulate this feeling without producing it, which is why the return visits are required.

What the cunning folk knew, what the seers Pócs documents knew, what every practitioner working in genuine relationship with spirits and land and the dead knows, is that the porosity was never sealed. It was declared sealed. The buffered self is a social and ideological formation, a learned posture, not an accomplished metaphysical fact. The spirits did not leave because modernity arrived; they were told they did not exist. The land did not go inert; it was fenced, developed, administered, and the practices that maintained human relationship with it were stigmatized out of public life. The dead did not stop pressing at the edges of the living world; the living stopped making space to receive them.

Magic is real and available to you. It always has been. The question is what you are willing to enter into relationship with, and what it will cost you, and whether you can sustain the cost when there is no corporation maintaining the infrastructure and no fandom to validate the experience. I’m not saying that Harry Potter and Disney adults should all go sign their name in the devil’s book, but I’m also not NOT saying that. What I will say is that I guarantee that a glass of water and a candle on a shelf for your ancestors will do more to enchant your life than a fucking funko pop ever will.

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i am admittedly late to the clarice lispector party but i feel like i made a new friend via time travel.

her work gets called “witchy” a lot, she is discussed as having been a witch, her writing described as “a ritual”, and reading her work as a “mystical experience”, etc.

none of these go far enough. the passion according to g.h isn’t about a woman having a mystical experience. it is about a woman becoming a witch. becoming something the social order cannot contain. it is about a woman who has an encounter with the other, and though this experience becomes demoniac, dies, becomes something more than human, and then performs the ultimate act of bodily transgression. that is what it means to be a witch. make no mistake about this.

those who approach this purely through theory, theology, archetypes or “witchy vibes” type aesthetics don’t understand this and will always retreat to the safety of theoretical language because they don't have a body that truly knows what it means to be other.

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related: thinking about helen mirren as morgan le fay in excalibur again

today is the 5 year anniversary of my moving to upstate new york from the city. the crows were some of my first friends here.

my next piece is for them.

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Constraint charts territory that freedom, paradoxically, cannot reach.

the rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape

In November of 1960, the novelist Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais founded a small Parisian group they called the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle: the Workshop of Potential Literature, or OULIPO.1 The founding meeting was convened as a subcommittee of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, the Parisian institution devoted to the science of “imaginary solutions” and the study of exceptions, and the group was largely made up of novelists, mathematicians, engineers, and poets. “Potential Literature” described their ideal of what writing could become if put under the right kind of pressure. Their intent according to Queneau was: “To propose new ‘structures’ to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity: props for inspiration as it were, or rather, in a way, aids for creativity.” Essentially, their idea was to apply sets of rules and mathematical formulae to the process of writing as a means of building conditions under which literature might become something it had never been before.

Queneau had spent time as a Surrealist before breaking with André Breton in the 1930s2 For the Surrealists, the ideal creative act was automatic writing: the suspension of conscious control in favor of whatever the unconscious produced. To him, a writer who claimed to be free of all constraint was simply enslaved to unconscious ones. Voluntary writing builds a structure in advance, commits to it absolutely, and discovers that the structure, because it resists the writer, forces invention into territory the unconstrained mind would never reach. He famously referred to Oulipans as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

Despite the mathematical seriousness of the methods, OULIPO was extremely playful in their application. When you commit to a constraint strictly enough, it ultimately leads into territory so absurd the only way out is through comedy, invention, or both. Membership in OULIPO was for life; Queneau noted that the only way to leave was to die, and even then, it was unclear you’d been released.3

It’s at this point I must issue a warning to the reader. Although I have never been an official member of the group, I have been fully captured by this movement for almost 25 years with no escape in sight. Read on at your own risk.

OULIPO divides its activity into two branches. Anoulipism is the retrospective work: identifying writers throughout literary history who operated under self-imposed formal constraints before OULIPO existed to theorize the practice. These writers are called “plagiarists by anticipation,” and all are retroactively drafted into OULIPO’s genealogy.4

Synthoulipism is the prospective work: inventing new constraints and demonstrating their potential. This is where the group’s energy primarily lives, in the generation of new forms that future writers can use. All literature already operates under constraint: the sonnet, the detective novel, and the thriller differ from OULIPO’s more extreme procedures only by degree.

The clinamen is a third key term, borrowed from Lucretius’s atomist physics. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes atoms falling in parallel paths through the void, and posits an unpredictable swerve, the clinamen, that causes them to collide and create the world. Within OULIPO, the clinamen names a conscious deviation from the constraint: a point where the writer deliberately breaks the rule for aesthetic reasons. The clinamen marks the difference between a purely mathematical operation and a work of art. The distinction between a principled and conscious deviation and a failure of nerve or skill is where OULIPO’s literary seriousness lives. There is little power in the breaking of taboos that one never observed in the first place.

the constraints

A lipogram is a text written with the deliberate exclusion of one or more letters of the alphabet, from the Greek leipo, “I leave.” The practice has ancient precedent, but its most famous modern instance is Georges Perec’s La Disparition, which omits the letter E across nearly three hundred pages. This work was also remarkably translated into English as A Void, also without the letter E.

The N+7 method takes any existing text and replaces every noun with the noun appearing seven entries later in a chosen dictionary. Different dictionaries produce different results, but all share a quality that sounds as if it might mean something while continuously sliding away from sense. The method works as a reading device as well as a writing one: running a canonical text through N+7 defamiliarizes it completely and reveals how much of its apparent meaning rests on habitual word combinations.

The snowball is a poem whose lines grow by one letter with each verse, one-letter first line, two-letter second, creating a shape on the page that gives the constraint its name.

The prisoner’s constraint permits only letters that contain no ascenders or descenders, only letters that fit between two lines. The palindrome, a word or sentence which is the same written forwards or backwards, was also heavily experimented with, and Perec’s Le Grande Palindrome was 1247 letters long, a unfathomable literary feat.

Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, 1961)5 is the work that most dramatically demonstrates what OULIPO means by potential literature. Ten sonnets are printed on cards, with each of the fourteen lines on a separate strip the reader can cut and recombine. Because all ten sonnets share the same rhyme scheme and end sounds, any line from any sonnet can be combined with any line from any other, producing a grammatically and metrically valid sonnet each time. The total number of possible sonnets is 10¹⁴. Queneau calculated that reading all of them, at one per minute, eight hours a day, would take approximately 190,258,751 years. The work exists primarily as potential: a machine for generating poems that will never all be realized.

This is the philosophical core of OULIPO: constraint generates inexhaustible possibility. The microscopic contains the infinite.

perec and constraint as mourning

Georges Perec was born in 1936 to Polish Jewish immigrants in Paris. His father, Icek Judko Perec, volunteered for the French army and died in June 1940.6 His mother, Cyrla Perec, was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. She never returned. After the war, when Perec sought documentation of her fate, the French bureaucracy certified her not as dead but as “disappeared.” The last official record he received of his mother’s existence was a form called anacte de disparition: a vanishing act, the making of a void.7

La Disparition was published in 1969. At nearly three hundred pages, it contains no instance of the letter E, the most common letter in the French language. The novel follows a group of people searching for their lost friend Anton Vowl. Warren Motte, a scholar of Perec, writes: “The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning.”8 As Daniel Levin Becker explains, the formal constraint worked by “foregrounding the technical in order to take pressure off the personal,” which paradoxically allowed the personal “to express itself more or less organically.” Ian Monk adds: “An apparently trivial constraint would thus have given Perec the means of approaching a subject that he had not succeeded in facing directly.”9

This is one of the most moving examples of the generative power of constraint: restriction can open a passage to the material that direct approach cannot. It provides a container for experiencing things without being fully consumed by them.

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calvino and the tarot

In Italo Calvino’s 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, he argues that writing is “simply the process of combination among given elements”10 Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) utilizes the tarot as its primary constraint. A group of travelers arrives at a castle, lose the power of speech, and must tell their stories using tarot cards. The narrator attempts to read the sequences laid out by different travelers and decipher their intended meaning. The tarot functions as a combinatorial constraint: a finite deck of 78 cards generates an infinite variety of narrative sequences, and any particular arrangement determines what story can be told from it. As with A Void, the constraint also functions as a plot device within the story itself.

The tarot constraint differs from a purely arbitrary constraint because the tarot carries significations beyond its formal structure. Each card carries layers of symbolic meaning accumulated through centuries of use in divination and esotericism. Calvino acknowledged this tension in the novel’s endnote, writing that he intended the tarot as a means of making language “say something it cannot say, something it doesn’t know, and that no one could ever know.”11

garétta, gender and the turing limit

Anne Garréta was elected to OULIPO in 2000, but her first novel, Sphinx, appeared in 1986, fourteen years earlier.12 Sphinxis a love story written with the constraint that neither of the two main characters, the narrator, and their lover A***, is ever given a gender marker of any kind. In French, a language whose grammar encodes grammatical gender in past-tense verbal agreement and in the coordination of adjectives with their nouns, this is a sustained grammatical feat requiring a complete rethinking of how French sentences can be built13

Garréta’s strategies for maintaining the constraint include sustained first-person narration, obsessive repetition of A***’s half-name as a substitute for pronouns, and physical description through synecdoche: face, body, hand replacing he or she as sentence subjects. A*** exists in the novel entirely through partial descriptions of a body that is never assigned a sex.

The constraint was retroactively formalized as the “Turing constraint” referencing Alan Turing’s imitation game, and added to OULIPO’s official list of procedures after Garréta joined the group. In Garréta’s terms, this is explicitly political as well as formally interesting: the text is “a trap” that exposes the reader’s assumptions about gender, assumptions they bring to the novel and cannot help projecting onto its deliberately blank pronouns.14 Sphinx demonstrates that constraint can operate at the level of social meaning rather than purely at the level of phonological or lexical form .

140 characters

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I want to draw attention to a particular internet phenomenon that was undoubtedly Oulipan in nature: Weird Twitter. Weird Twitter was a very loose movement of writers, comedians, and poets on Twitter (I will never call it X) around approximately 2012 who, due to the strict 140-character limit, began playing with language in new and innovative ways. For better or for worse, this largely changed the ways that people think and speak online forever. Alt-lit was largely born from this. Unknown comedians with no connections began getting television writing jobs purely as a result of their Twitter accounts.15 Poets and writers got book deals.16 @dril, one of its central figures and arguably the greatest shitposter of all time, was ranked by Slate alongside Umberto Eco and Anne Carson as one of the best writers of 2017, and published a book of his tweets.17 Welcome to Night Vale gained a huge Twitter following, pioneered the podcast audio drama format, and became the number one most downloaded podcast on iTunes in July 2013.18

Later, as the platform became more journalist-heavy, much of journalism began revolving purely around “hot takes.” People began thinking and speaking in short, punchy phrases. Nuance disappeared. I could literally feel my brain changing in bizarre and upsetting ways. “Twitter-speak” was born and persists in most online spaces, despite the decline of the platform.

I was a semi-prominent member of this group, posting under @knifesex, though I take no credit for its effects, nor do I mention this in any self-aggrandizing way (lol). I was simply a person who saw and recognized what was happening to language and culture online in real time, and participated in something that at the time felt very alive and fun. I had not done much creative writing previously but the medium and its constraints allowed me to channel my anguish at the state of the world and my own mind into short snippets of absurdist horror poetry, allowing me to move through a period of profound depression with levity. I became friends with the Welcome to Night Vale creators after bonding over our dark senses of humor and contributed writing to their episode “Poetry Week.”19 I connected with many other creative people during that time I’m still friends with today.

Once the movement started being defined it largely broke apart, but the real decline of Twitter, in my opinion, came with the implementation of quote tweeting, threads, and a larger character limit. The generative potential was the product of the constraint, and its relevance as a driver of culture quickly evaporated once that was removed.

the erotics of the bind

There is something inherently erotic about working under constraint. Erotic in the sense of charged, urgent, demanding full presence. The limitation concentrates the work, creating a quality of intensity and a friction which transforms not only the work, but also the creator. It hones like a whetstone. Is not friction the essence of the sex act itself?

Michel Foucault, reflecting in 1982 on BDSM practice, identified what negotiated power exchange generates as “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.”20 The constraint of the scene, the rules established in advance, and the structure within which surrender takes place, produce experiences inaccessible outside that structure. Practitioners describe the space a scene creates as “a bubble, or a magic circle, denoting a space distinct from the everyday, an alternative as-if reality within which different qualities of experience, relationship, self and other can be explored.”21 The boundary generates a charge, and submission to the rule generates a particular kind of power and pleasure.

Magical practice is also an art, and its formal constraints generate the same eros. The magic circle concentrates the encounter, heightens attention and sensation within the boundary, and mediates contact with overwhelming or dangerous forces. It facilitates the ecstasies of spirit flight by protecting the physical body of the witch. The spirit pact takes this even further. Its conditions are often initiatic: rendering a person something more than human; disassembling them completely to produce someone new.

The classical memory palace demonstrates constraint operating on the level of the imaginal. Frances Yates's The Art of Memory describes the loci as a fixed architectural structure, real or imagined, within which vivid images are placed.22 The more rigid the spatial constraint, the more the system can hold, the more creative associations it generates. Giordano Bruno transformed the method into combinatorial mnemonic wheels: concentric rotating rings of mythological figures and symbols that generated vast associative possibilities within a fixed structural framework.

The astrological election constrains time rather than space. The practitioner submits to the celestial bodies, waiting for a precise configuration and yielding to that window absolutely. The window may be twenty minutes wide, or it may not come again for years. That waiting is itself a form of longing. When the moment finally opens, its brevity creates its own intensity: everything sharpened, charged, and urgent, the work happening under pressure of the closing window.

Lacan observed something related in his reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans: the commandment “thou shalt not covet” generates desire.23 Before the prohibition, there is no particular object of longing. The Law names what cannot be had, and by naming it, makes it the thing that is desired. This is the mechanism of jouissance, the specific quality of pleasure that constraint generates: overwhelming, dissolving, the little death Barthes names when he borrows the French word for orgasm. As Lacan puts it, “transgression in the direction of jouissance takes place only if it is supported by the forms of the Law.” It is in the friction of struggle against a limit that we touch the sublime.

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also this PVA album

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present constraint (i will be writing about this soon): sculpt an entire piece for a spirit on their feast day. outcome: wax and final casting for saint sebastian

highlighted passages:

[Saint] Anne has dominion over subterranean realms, including mines and caves, and by extension, wombs. - Illes, Judika. Encyclopedia of Mystics, Saints & Sages

your house spirit wants you to make a simmer pot, probably

a protection working

pre-save this album: Matter and Desire
(album art by moi)

always reshare

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The Pleiades (Messier 45) is an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, approximately 444 light-years from Earth.1 The cluster contains over a thousand gravitationally bound stars, but most observers can see only six with the unaided eye, and under excellent dark-sky conditions sometimes nine to fourteen.2 The brightest members are blue-white giants whose light scatters through a surrounding veil of interstellar dust, giving the cluster its characteristic hazy glow. They span about two degrees on the sky, roughly four times the apparent diameter of the full moon, and are visible even from light-polluted cities. In antiquity, counting how many of the seven stars one could see served as a practical test of visual acuity.3

Human attention to the Pleiades may reach back as far as 17,000 years. In the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne, a cluster of six painted dots floats above the shoulder of a large aurochs, and the German archaeoastronomer Michael Rappenglück has argued that these dots represent the Pleiades, making the composition a Paleolithic precursor of the constellation Taurus.4 The Babylonians recorded the cluster in their star catalogues as MUL.MUL, literally “the stars,” in the second millennium BCE.5 Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, told farmers to begin the harvest when “the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising” and to plough when they set.6 Homer placed them first among the constellations wrought on the Shield of Achilles and made them the navigational stars by which Odysseus steered his raft across open water.7 The Nebra sky disk, a bronze-age artifact dated to roughly 1600 BCE, bears a gold cluster of seven dots identified by scholars as the Pleiades, positioned alongside a crescent moon, possibly encoding a lunisolar calendar.8

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In Greek mythology the Pleiades are seven sisters, daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Okeanid-nymph Pleione.9 Six became consorts of gods: Maia bore Hermes to Zeus, Electra bore Dardanus the founder of Troy, Alcyone lay with Poseidon. Only Merope married a mortal, Sisyphus of Corinth, and hid her face in shame. This is the traditional explanation for why only six stars are clearly visible: Merope’s light is dimmed by grief. Aratus, writing around 275 BCE, states: “Seven are they in the songs of men, albeit only six are visible to the eyes.”10 The hunter Orion pursued Pleione and her daughters across Boeotia for seven years without finding them; Zeus, pitying the girls, placed them among the stars, and so Orion seems to follow them as they flee toward the west, the hunter perpetually chasing.11

Alcyone, the brightest of the sisters, gives her name to the primary star of the cluster (η Tauri), a blue-white giant roughly 1,750 times more luminous than the Sun.12 In the medieval astrological tradition she stands as the representative of the entire cluster, and the Pleiades as a whole hold a place among the fifteen Behenian fixed stars.13 Ptolemy, in the Tetrabiblos, assigned the Pleiades the nature of Moon and Mars.14 The Moon governs sight and the imaginative faculty; Mars governs heat, sharpness, and the cutting force. Under that pairing, the cluster whose talisman promises to increase the light of the eyes and summon the spirits of the dead can also cause blindness.15

One could spend a lifetime exploring the lore of these stars and their legion of spirits and still barely scratch the surface. What follows is my own personal experiences and discoveries that emerged during the extended working of creating these talismans.

My original design for the talismans’ jewelry was the form of a ring, with flames surrounding the stone, as a reference to the associated talismanic image of a lamp. The talismans had other plans, however, and the art quickly took on a life of its own, with the spirits directly guiding their form. I scrapped the initial prototype ring and went back to the drawing board, realizing that these stones wanted to be set into a larger pendant. I knew that I wanted the jewelry to incorporate flames as the rings did, and so I began to draw. My jewelry designs typically begin as drawings, and while I was sketching out the flames, the image of a woman began to emerge. This excited me as the other talismanic image of the Pleiades besides a lamp, is a woman. As I completed the drawing, I was struck by an unexpected similarity between this figure, with her arms raised and surrounded by flames, and the Anima Sola (the Lonely Soul), a Catholic devotional image depicting a soul in purgatory, with her chained hands raised toward heaven.

I knew instinctively that there was a deeper mystery here for me to unravel, and I was reminded of a passage from Bernadette Brady’s Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars:

“The Celts also used the acronychal rising of the Pleiades to mark their month of mourning for dead friends. Prayers for the dead were said on the first day of what we now know as November. This custom is still echoed today with All Hallows Eve (October 31), All Saints Day (November 1), and All Souls Day (November 2), still celebrated as the feast days of the dead.”16

While the heliacal rising of a star marks its first visibility, the acronychal rising marks its final visibility.17 This is the moment when the star touches the cross of matter and walks among us one last time before descending into the underworld. It represents a pivotal threshold between the upper and lower worlds, and the fact that this occurs around the time of many cross-cultural festivals of the dead holds deep significance. The three-day sequence of Halloween, All Saints’, and All Souls’ is the preservation of something much older, a collective turning toward the dead that the stars marked long before any church calendar codified it.18

All Souls’ Day also holds personal significance for me, as it is the day I was born. As such the holy souls have been a source of fascination and inspiration for me since childhood through my Catholic upbringing, and have greatly informed my engagement with Catholicism magically as a fundamentally necromantic cult. Its saints are elevated dead, its relics are their physical remains, its central sacrament is celebrated in communion with the faithful departed, and its most distinctive theological invention, purgatory, keeps the living in active relationship with the souls of the dead through prayer. The Anima Sola, the lonely soul burning in purgatory with arms raised toward heaven, is a concentrated reflection of this: a soul awaiting release, enlisted as an intercessor by whoever chooses to pray for her.

I decided to explore Slavic traditions surrounding both the Pleiades and purgatory, as my father was a Polish immigrant, and the source of my Catholic ancestry.

I came upon the following passage in a paper entitled The Pleiades In The Belarusian Tradition: Folklore Texts And Linguistic Areal Studies by Tsimafei Avilin which can be found here.

While describing this star cluster, sources often draw an obvious parallel between the holes in a sieve and the stars: “Sitečko. So, it looks like sifted flour. The same in the sky: many stars in a heap” (Avilin 2015); “there are also [the Little Sieve, Blr. Maloe Sita] holes, small stars” (ibid.); “The Sieve (Blr. Sita) of stars … the stars [in the Sieve] as the holes, there are many of them” (ibid.); “Siciečka (a little Sieve) – many, many stars as intertwined” (ibid.); “[Why was it called the Sieve?] So, I don’t know, maybe because it begins to sow corn from the autumn for the winter. Close to autumn, after the Sieve has risen, it began to sow corn” (ibid.). Also notice a quite popular Belarusian riddle: “How many stars in the sky, so many holes in the ground” (key – a stubble (the lower part of the grass stem after harvesting). In the Słuck and Homiel regions some beliefs indicate this sieve is a place where souls are being sifted: “The Sieve is fiery candles in the sky in the place where righteous souls get together. Angels sift here the righteous souls from the wicked” (Sieržputoŭski 1930: 7); “The souls are sifted – the wicked to hell, and the righteous to paradise” (Avilin 2015). Meteors were interpreted in a similar way: if a star falls, it indicates that the human soul flies from Purgatory. The famous Polish-Belarusian writer Mickievič described this heavenly sieve as a reminder about the first creations of God: “To the north shines the circle of the starry Sieve, through which God, as they say, gifted grains of corn, when he cast them down from heaven for Adam our father, who had been banished for his sins from paradise” (Mickiewicz 1834: 136–137).19

What strikes me most about this is that the same stars the Celts used to mark the month of mourning for the dead were understood in the Slavic world, as the instrument through which the dead are sorted, a fiery celestial sieve and a time-marker for collective grief. And each falling star in this cosmology is a soul escaping purgatory. These and many other discoveries made during this extended working illuminated the numerous connections between the Pleiades, the dead, and mediumship echoed in their talismanic uses as described in Hermes on 15 Fixed Stars:

“Fennel seed with frankincense and quicksilver placed under a crystal with the appropriate character [engraved on it], with the Moon conjunct the Pleiades rising or at midheaven, preserves the eyesight, summons demons and the spirits of the dead, calls the winds, and reveals secrets and things that are lost.”20

Agrippa also reflects this: “Under the constellation of Pleiades, they made the image of a little Virgin, or the figure of a lamp; it is reported to increase the light of the eyes, to assemble spirits, to raise winds, and to reveal secret and hidden things.”21

During the electional window, I inscribed quartz stones, carved in the shape of an eye, with the sigil of the Pleiades. Quartz is the stone associated with talismans of these stars, and their connection with both physical and mystical vision, as well as protection from the evil eye made these a fitting choice. The stones were then enspirited and suffumigated with frankincense and fennel.

Though the ring was abandoned in this first working in favor of the pendant, I will be releasing Pleiades talisman rings in the next few months, made, as Agrippa says, to reveal secret and hidden things. If you would like to be notified when these are released you can sign up for my shop mailing list here.

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I have spent much of my life as a perpetually embarrassed person. I remember taking foreign language classes in high school and doing so horribly in them that I eventually switched over to Latin. This was at least partly because I was a big nerd who loved mythology and The Odyssey, but I can’t deny there was also major appeal in the fact that Latin isn’t really spoken. The reason I was bad at the other languages is that speaking and pronouncing them properly requires something I crucially lacked at the time: willingness to sound stupid.

The word magic comes from a root that means to be able, to have power. That power has a consistent enemy: lack of conviction. The Picatrix, a tenth-century Arabic compendium of astral magic drawing on Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and earlier Mesopotamian sources, states this directly in Book I: “One who practices magical arts ought to believe in his workings without any doubt regarding the work, because this is how the practitioner is well disposed to receive the aforesaid effects.”¹ Doubt is a poison that undermines the work before it even begins. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy offers one explanation as to why: the mind contains “a certain virtue” capable of “changing, attracting, impeding, and binding things and men toward that which it desires,” but it operates only when “carried in great excess by some passion or virtue in such an amount that it overcomes that which it binds.”² Your conviction must be strong enough to outstrip the object of your desire.

No one at this point in magical history needs Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic restated for them; his importance here is his insistence on the primacy of Will, which his entire system of Thelema was built around.³ “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”⁴ Austin Osman Spare’s Book of Pleasure builds its entire method around solving this problem of lust of result. This concept is often misread as a counsel to suppress desire or detach from outcome. But Spare identifies the problem as anxious monitoring of desire rather than desire itself: “Concentration is dissatisfied desire, a conflict that can never be satisfied, because of its means.”⁵ Free belief, in Spare’s system, is belief-energy liberated from ego’s compulsive checking, the product of doubt. You don’t continuously dig up a seed to see whether it has sprouted. The practitioner compelled to check has already told themselves something about their confidence in the soil.

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Ernest Holmes, a prominent figure in the New Thought movement, describes the same phenomenon. In The Science of Mind he implores the reader to imagine his desires “not as an illusion but as a reality, not as a dream but as an experience; to declare that their presence is now here. BUT WE MUST NEVER LOOK TO SEE IF THEY ARE HERE, BECAUSE THIS WOULD IMPLY DOUBT AND WOULD NEUTRALIZE OUR WORD.”(caps in original) Holmes created an entire spiritual system around the operative power of belief called Religious Science, which integrated the principles of New Thought into a form of applied Christianity. In his own words: “The more power one gives to his thought—the more completely he believes that his thought has power—the more power will it have.”⁶ Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey was adamant about the focused direction of will and attested that scattered emotional investment “only guarantees the weakening of what should be ritualistically directed force, by spreading it thin and diluting it.”⁷ LaVey even applied this condition to the working after the fact. The Seventh Satanic Rule states: “If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.”⁸

Renaissance Neoplatonists, Thelemites, proto-Chaos Magicians, New Thought practitioners, and Satanists have little in the way of shared metaphysics. They agree on almost nothing about the nature of reality or the source of magical power. New Thought teaches that the practitioner participates in God’s creative power; LaVey installs the practitioner as a god. Yet they all seem to agree that being wishy-washy unmakes the work, and none appear to have any tolerance for ironic detachment.

It would be easy to read all of this as an argument for positive thinking, and while I’m not dismissive of that, a purely psychological read here would be radically incomplete. Many of the traditions mentioned assume an animate cosmos populated by entities with their own agendas, stars, spirits, daimons, the Logos itself. The condition of conviction is not just about what you generate internally, but also how you present yourself to the forces that are present and rise up to meet you (or don’t). It is a condition of spiritual authority. Never forget that one of the most brutal owns in history was the direct result of its lack:

And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? -Acts 19:15

The process through which these qualities are embodied and enacted is ritual, and ritual is, at its core, performance. Performance studies comes to many of the same conclusions with regard to its conditions: performing both requires and enacts belief. Richard Schechner argued that theater and ritual exist on a continuum, and that theatrical performance at its fullest produces genuine transformation in performers and audiences.⁹ In other words, “fake it ‘till you make it.” Victor Turner’s concept of liminality describes the state in which this becomes possible: “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial,” a space set apart in which the ordinary rules governing social life are suspended.¹⁰ Liminality requires the surrender of the social self: its definitions, its protective irony, its monitoring functions. Pierre Bourdieu locates this surrender in the body: “The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief… What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.”¹¹

Through ritual, we internalize and enact belief, and this process causes the body itself to also believe. The embarrassed, self-monitoring body, watching itself perform and evaluating whether it looks stupid, cannot properly ritualize. It is present at the ritual while remaining outside it. Artaud makes the same diagnosis: “If our life lacks brimstone, i.e. constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined forms instead of being impelled by their force.”¹² Self-observation drains performance of its power.

This same self-observation is ubiquitous within contemporary irony culture, a relational framework fundamentally opposed to the requirements of effective magic: complete and total conviction in your ability to change reality, and the embodiment of that conviction through performative ritual acts. Irony takes our deepest, most precious desires and transforms them into a text message to God with “lol” on the end.

Jedediah Purdy describes fear as the underlying impetus for this state: “There is something fearful in this irony. It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us to these.”¹³ While irony attempts to function as a protection against vulnerability, it is ultimately a form of cowardice that is incompatible with magical will.

Irony culture polices full commitment in a world that has decided it is naive, embarrassing, a sign of not knowing how things actually work. Taking anything seriously is cringe. Performance is cringe. The cringe response becomes internalized over time: the external cultural judgment becomes internal monitoring, the imagined audience of ironists watching the ritual becomes a permanent presence inside the performance. One cultural antibody to this has been a kind of approved “new sincerity,” earnest and feel-good yet entirely without stakes, in the service of nothing in particular. Magic is sincerity in the service of actually changing something, which is a different and much riskier proposition.

The irony-pilled practitioner and the result-lusting practitioner have the same problem: they cannot stop watching. A practitioner’s compulsive monitoring of the working, unable to entrust the operation to deeper processes, is the same splitting of attention, the same presence of the internal observer. Irony culture has made that observer universal, automatic, and socially rewarded. It trains the psyche at a cultural level, infects practitioners before they begin, and makes its removal feel like abandoning intelligence. Kierkegaard identified the limit of this position in The Concept of Irony: irony “is a nothing that devours everything, and a something one can never grab hold of, something that is and is not at the same time, but something that at rock bottom is comic.”¹⁴

Reject it. Be cringe. Be free.

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1. Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim, c. 10th-11th century), Book I, Chapter 4, trans. John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (Iowa City: Renaissance Astrology Press, 2010-11).

2. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), Book I, Chapter 68, trans. Eric Purdue (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021).

3. [Thelema]

4. Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), I:44 (1904). https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm

5. Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913). https://hermetic.com/spare/pleasure

6. Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, rev. ed. (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 1938).

7. Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (New York: Avon Books, 1969), Book of Belial. On the intellectual decompression chamber: https://www.dpjs.co.uk/idc.html

8. LaVey, “Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth” (1967), Rule 7. https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/

9. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), ch. 4, “From Ritual to Theater and Back: The Efficacy-Entertainment Braid.”

10. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 95.

11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73.

12. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

13. Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Knopf, 1999).

14. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131.

“For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.’ - Plato, Ion

Art has been a refuge for me since I was a child. I grew up carrying the weight of childhood abuse, a dark secret that set me apart from other kids, alongside undiagnosed autism that made the ordinary social world feel confusing to navigate. Art was a place to disappear into. A way of letting things move through me. A form of exorcism. At my darkest periods, through depression, addiction, and suicidal ideation, making art and music saved my life, over and over again, and continues to do so.

What I didn’t understand in my youth, and have spent years trying to articulate since, is what is actually happening in these moments. The force that moves through me when I make things feels like self-expression, but a self that is somehow larger than my ordinary one, and the expression itself only partially mine. It is me, and it is also something more. Something alien.

This is not a unique experience. Across cultures and centuries, artists, poets, musicians, and mystics have described the same phenomenon: that something makes through them. The creator must be emptied, hollowed of ego, self, and often sanity, so that an external or separate force can enter and speak. What occurs through this process is an ordeal of co-creation which the artist often struggles to understand or control. It exists outside of language. The study of this mystery also reveals a darker phenomenon: the force that makes great art can also remake or destroy the person it moves through, and the line between divine inspiration, possession, and insanity is a fine one, if it exists at all. I have touched on these ideas briefly in my previous pieces on Algol, and making talismans, but I wanted to give them a fuller treatment, as this phenomenon is so foundational to my experience as an artist and my own battles with mental illness.

the daimon

The Greek word daimōn (δαίμων) likely derives from daíō, meaning “to divide” or “to distribute,” allotting fortunes or destiny.1 In Hesiod’s Works and Days, blessed mortals of the Golden Age become daimones upon death, guardian spirits who “roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist, and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth.”2 The daimon takes the form of an invisible companion, mediating presence assigned to human life.

Plato expands on this idea in the Symposium. Here the priestess Diotima defines Eros itself as a great daimon whose function is to interpret between gods and humans, “conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods.” Diotima adds that whoever is wise about this intermediary function is a daimonios anēr, a daimonic man, and that all other wisdom is mean and vulgar by comparison. The daimonic, in Plato’s scheme, is the highest form of knowing.

Socrates claimed a personal daimon, to daimonion, “the divine sign,” a voice he had heard since childhood. He described it in the Apology as “a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything.”3 It functioned like a compass needle pulling away from false directions.

The Romans translated the concept into the genius, from gignere, “to beget.”4 Every person was born with a genius, a natal spirit embodying their vital force, moral character, and destiny.5 The genius was honored on birthdays through libations. Over centuries, the word became increasingly secularized, transforming from external spiritual companion to inner quality of character, to the modern meaning of exceptional intellectual talent. What was once a relationship with the sacred became relegated to a property of the ego.

The concept also underwent a Christian inversion. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, daimonion was used to translate shedim, foreign idols, importing the concept into a monotheistic framework that had no place for intermediary beings.6 In the New Testament pagan daimones became evil spirits opposed to God. The force of divine guidance and inspiration was rebranded as demon, pure malevolence.

the soul’s code

An important modern recovery of the daimon concept comes from James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. Hillman believed each person is born with a unique soul-image or destiny, much as an acorn contains the pattern of the oak. He referred to this as the acorn theory.

Hillman drew directly on Plato’s Myth of Er, in which souls choose their lives before birth, selecting a paradeigma, a basic pattern encompassing their entire destiny, and a daimon to carry them into the world. Upon arrival, the soul passes through the plain of Lethe and forgets everything. But the daimon remembers.7

Hillman catalogued the many names humanity has given this entity: “The Romans named it your ‘genius’; the Greeks, your ‘daimon’; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart... For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the ‘ka,’ or the ‘ba.’” The persistence of this concept across cultures points to something universal in human experience.

For Hillman, the daimon explains the otherwise mysterious quality of creative compulsion, the fact that artists do not choose their art but are chosen by it. “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”

Many artists are familiar with these ideas that simply will not leave until they are expressed. In my own experience this pressure escalates, becoming increasingly destabilizing the longer it goes unmet. When I finally acquiesce to the demand, the making often feels less like a relief and more akin to giving birth: violent, and begetting something of me but not fully mine.

theia mania: divine madness

Plato’s theory of theia mania (divine madness) describes what happens when the pull of destiny becomes all encompassing. In the Ion, Socrates disputes Ion’s claim to artistic skill by arguing that poetic power is a possession, a divine takeover.8

Socrates introduces here the metaphor of the magnet and the iron rings: “There is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet... not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings.” The Muse inspires the poet, the poet inspires the performer, the performer inspires the audience, forming a chain of divine transmission in which no one in the chain possesses the power independently.

The argument here is clear: The artist is not in their right mind when creating. “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.”

According to Plato, technique without divine possession produces nothing of lasting value. The sane, skilled craftsman is always surpassed by the one who has been emptied and filled.

the horse and the rider

In West African and Afro-diasporic religious traditions, spirit possession is a living, central practice. In these traditions, the possessed person is referred to as the “horse” that the spirit “mounts” or “rides.” The individual’s identity is temporarily displaced; their body takes on the attributes, voice, gestures, and desires of the spirit that inhabits it.9

Robert Farris Thompson, a scholar of African diasporic aesthetics, quotes Yoruba elders in his excellent work Flash of the Spirit: “When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god.”10

In Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti filmmaker Maya Deren described the experience of possession as “a white darkness, its whiteness a glory, and its darkness, terror.” According to Deren, through the dance and drumming individuals are elevated through connection to the collective. “The individual participates in the accumulated genius of the collective, and by such participation becomes himself part of that genius, something more than himself. His exaltation results from his participation, it does not precede and compel it.”

the devouring daimon

Plato’s theory of divine madness carries an implication that the later Western tradition has been reluctant to follow to its conclusion: if the poet’s power comes from being seized by a force that displaces reason, then the state that produces great art is, by definition, a form of insanity. The creative state and the psychotic state share a common structure: the ordinary self is unseated, and something else speaks through the body. The question is whether these are two distinct phenomena or whether they are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles.

Rollo May, an existential psychologist who brought the daimon concept into clinical practice, believed they were the same. In Love and Will, May defined the daimonic as “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person... The daimonic can be either creative or destructive, but it is normally both.”11

His framework does not distinguish between healthy inspiration and pathological madness. The daimon that drives a person to create a masterpiece and the daimon that drives them to destroy themselves are the same entity, the same primal force of nature. When the daimon takes over without the person’s conscious participation, the result is psychosis, violence, or self-destruction.

This is the dark side to Hillman’s acorn theory: the daimon does not go away, but it also does not care about your survival. It demands expression, and the vessel that cannot contain it, breaks.

Vaslav Nijinsky embodied this paradox more completely than most artists in modern history. Considered the greatest male ballet dancer who ever lived, Nijinsky was known for his leaps that appeared to defy gravity, and for choreography so radical it caused riots. His Afternoon of a Faun scandalized Paris with its eroticism, and his Rite of Spring provoked one of the most famous audience uprisings in theatrical history.12

By the age of twenty-nine, Nijinsky had stopped dancing, stopped speaking, and begun writing a diary in which he declared himself God.

The diary, kept over six weeks, is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of art and madness. The diary oscillates between lucidity and disintegration. “I am God. I am the spirit. I am everything,” Nijinsky wrote.13 But also: “My madness is my love towards mankind.” He knew something was happening to him but could not determine whether it meant he was divine or insane, or whether the voice speaking through him was God’s, or his own unraveling mind.

What makes Nijinsky’s story so compelling is the continuity between his genius and his madness. His art was itself a form of self-annihilation: the dancer’s body given over entirely to the role, and the choreographer shattering the conventions of classical ballet because the force moving through him did not recognize those conventions. The same dissolution of self that made him the greatest dancer in the world eventually dissolved him entirely.

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While Nijinsky documented his own dissolution, Antonin Artaud attempted to theorize and reenact it. His Theatre of Cruelty, outlined in The Theatre and Its Double, called for a theater that would function as ritual possession: “violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.”14 He drew on the trance-inducing Balinese ritual dance he had seen in 1931, seeking a form of performance that would bypass rational thought entirely.

Artaud believed that civilization had made humans “sick and repressed creatures” and that theater’s true function was to liberate each individual’s instinctual energy. Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years confined in psychiatric institutions. In 1937, he traveled to Ireland believing he was returning St. Patrick’s walking stick and preparing to bring on the apocalypse. He was deported back to France in a straitjacket.15 He passed through a series of asylums before arriving at Rodez, where Dr. Gaston Ferdière subjected him to approximately fifty-two electroshock treatments.16 The early days of electroshock were brutal: Artaud fractured a vertebra from the convulsions, and by the end of treatment his teeth had fallen out. He wrote that the treatment “plunges the shocked person into that death rattle with which one leaves life.”17

Ironically it was during this time that Artaud produced his most extraordinary work. He filled over 400 school exercise books with poetry, drawings, spells, curses, and glossolalia. After his release in 1946, Artaud wrote Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, a scathing essay that was as much about his own experience as about the painter. Artaud argued that society had invented psychiatry “to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucidities whose faculties of divination disturbed it.” The essay contains Artaud’s most devastating line about the relationship between madness and creation:

Nobody has ever written or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except to get out of hell18

Foucault, writing fifteen years after Artaud’s death, argued in Madness and Civilization that the modern world had silenced the voice of unreason by medicalizing it, reducing an entire dimension of human experience to a set of diagnostic categories. In the Renaissance, madness had been understood as possessing its own form of wisdom. The Enlightenment stripped that recognition away: the mad were no longer carriers of dangerous truths but simply ill, objects of clinical management. Foucault saw Artaud, alongside Goya, Nietzsche, and de Sade, as artists through whom unreason continued to speak despite medicine’s attempts to silence it.

the authors are in eternity

William Blake provides an account of art as spiritual dictation. In a letter to Thomas Butts in 1803, Blake wrote of his poem Milton:

“I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d Non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all produc’d without Labour or Study.” 19

In another letter, he states: “I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity.”20

W.B. Yeats explored poetic creation through the use of automatic writing, based on the experiments of his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees.21 Over three years, they produced approximately 4,000 pages of automatic script from various spirit communicators.22 When Yeats proposed devoting his life to assembling the fragments, the spirits delivered their famous reply: “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” The result was A Vision, Yeats’s elaborate cosmological system.23

In Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Yeats developed his concept of the Daemon as the anti-self, an opposite that feeds on what the person lacks: “The Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man and Daemon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts.” He acknowledged the creative uncertainty this produced: “as I write the words ‘I select,’ I am full of uncertainty not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay.”24

The Surrealists secularized spirit possession into aesthetic method. André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express... the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason.” Scholar Tessel Bauduin has demonstrated that Surrealist automatic techniques “were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism, psychical research and experimentation with mediums,” though the Surrealists eventually discarded the theology.25

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, on the other hand, attributed her work entirely to spirit entities.26 As she describes the process, “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”27

Walking along the cliffs of Duino Castle on the Adriatic, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke heard a voice in the wind speaking what became the first line of the Duino Elegies: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” He completed the First Elegy that night.28 It wasn’t until a decade later that inspiration returned as a physical storm at the Château de Muzot. In a matter of days, he completed all remaining Elegies and composed the entire Sonnets to Orpheus. He wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome: “All in a few days, it was an indescribable storm, a hurricane of the spirit... every fibre and tissue cracked within me, any thought of food was out of the question, God knows who fed me.”

Jackson Pollock described a parallel experience in Possibilities magazine: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”29

John Coltrane conceived A Love Supreme as prayer in the form of song. In his liner notes, Coltrane wrote: “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” His prayer-poem contains the line: “God breathes through us so completely... so gently we hardly feel it... yet, it is our everything.”30

Bob Dylan, in his 2004 60 Minutes interview, described his early songwriting in terms of lost access to a mysterious source: “All those early songs were almost magically written... There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic. It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic.” When asked if he could do it again, he answered simply, no.31

Alice Walker described moving from New York to rural Northern California so that the characters of The Color Purple, whom she described as spirits, would feel comfortable enough to visit her. She experienced the novel’s creation as collaborative, working alongside spiritual presences who chose her as their vessel.32

Keith Richards wrote “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep: “I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player.” Playing back the tape, he found thirty seconds of the riff followed by forty-five minutes of snoring.33

I experienced a similar phenomenon while working on my devotional album to the goddess Babalon. The entire album was created almost entirely in the course of one weekend that I have almost no recollection of. I have also occasionally discovered music files on my computer I have no memory of making. I am often impressed by the quality of this work which usually feels above my level of skill.

the duende

Federico García Lorca’s 1933 lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende” approaches creative possession from a darker angle. Lorca distinguishes three sources of artistic power: “Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form…While the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.”34

Named for a mischievous class of spirit from Iberian folklore akin to a goblin, the duende is a dark, earthy force rooted in the body, in death, in the most ancient culture.

With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.

Duende has little to do with skill. An artist with perfect technique and no duende is empty. What makes the duende unique among theories of creative possession is its insistence on proximity to death: “The duende won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house.”

the mystery at the heart of creation

Through these cross-cultural frameworks and testimonies we begin to see the mystery take form: the ordinary self is displaced, a force enters that exceeds the individual, and the resulting work belongs to something larger than its creator. This same force has the capacity to unmake the maker. It cares not for whether we survive the encounter.

The artist’s task, then, is to stay in relationship with the force, to keep the channel open without being consumed by what flows through it, to ride the horse without being thrown. To perpetually dance on the edge of madness.

This dance is not without cost, but it is one I choose to pay willingly, over and over. To refuse the demand, to keep a safe distance from “the edge of the pit,” is its own kind of death.

Whether we call the force daimon, genius, lwa, duende, or insanity, one thing remains clear: authentic creation is an act of surrender, and surrender is never safe.

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i’ve been making more of my own magical oils lately. some recent ones i made

my partner turned me on to this really cool and weird Blawan album.

raw unpolished casting of a ring in progress

recent sigils

i just started the second book in Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire series. highly recommended series if you’re into vampires and dark fantasy/horror.

be well.

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I’ll keep this part as brief as possible—this is a newsletter about art and magic, but I believe it’s necessary context for understanding the space talismanic work occupies.

There is a certain phenomenon surrounding the making of astrological talismans in that although there are a relatively small number of people producing and selling them publicly, everyone seems to have very strong opinions about it. I have plenty of thoughts about why this is, at least one of them being that it has been an extremely profitable endeavor for some, and this rubs people the wrong way. I’m not one of those for whom this is true, but neither do I begrudge those who have found a high level of success with it. Some criticisms levied are valid, others less so. More often than not, they come from people who don’t make talismans themselves or even practice magic at all. I will not be debating them. There’s always been a massive disconnect between astrologers and magicians, and not much has changed in this regard over the past decade. This disconnect leads to many misunderstandings of what talismans actually are and how they work, as well as plenty of fearmongering.

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On the flip-side, people doing this work are frequently disdained by the magical community as well. Magicians tend to balk at astrology because it’s difficult to learn, and many don’t like the idea of being overly constrained by time or subject to forces out of their control. Online magicians frequently posture about how “Mercury Retrograde has no effect on them” or aggressively push back against the idea that “you must elect everything.” I largely consider this to be a straw man, as I have never held that position, nor do I know anyone else who does. At least no one who is sane. I elect when it is appropriate to do, and no more. If I’m doing a working that does not explicitly call for an election, I do not use one. When I am working within traditions that have little or no relationship to astrology, I don’t look at it at all. There’s also a perception that astrological magicians look down on other types of magic as being inferior or less advanced. This is also not true, at least in my case, though I still often encounter a level of defensiveness from other magicians who assume this about me. Learning astrology can be challenging and doing elections requires a certain level of technical proficiency, but I do it because I enjoy it, not because I think it’s superior. It’s also only one facet of my personal practice, among many.

Being a person who makes talismans forces you to exist in a strange liminal state of mild dislike and mistrust from both camps. I have come to accept this. And on some level, I get it. But it’s still weird.

With that established, I wanted to talk briefly about how I make talismans, why I make them, and how I think about them, with the general disclaimer that this is but one way among many. And beyond that, this style of practice as a whole is just one small subset of the countless ways that humans interact with the heavens magically, and have across time.

how i came to this work

I’ve been interested in astrology for most of my life, but I didn’t start studying it seriously until around 2016 or so. I had already been practicing magic for over a decade by that time. I began studying astrological magic with Christopher Warnock around 2017 and eventually attained the title of “astrologicus magus” from him. I owe a great deal to him, as does anyone studying this art today, due to his vast contributions to the field in the form of making translations available as well as extrapolating tech from original sources into a workable system. I credit my pursuit of astrology to the late Jake Stratton-Kent, who had a habit of repeatedly espousing the unpopular idea that magicians should learn astrology. I have a number of his old facebook posts saved, including one where he claimed, “recovering Magical Astrology for our times remains one of the most important and most neglected tasks; its continued neglect erases the claims of various hierophantic pretenders.”

My practice and study of astrology has always been in service of magic, and I will always consider myself to be a magician, first and foremost.

About a year later, astrological magic exploded in popularity due to the innovative and highly successful work of a particular maker that most people are familiar with. I continued engaging with the practice privately in my own work, building relationships with stellar and planetary spirits and experimenting with different ways of engaging with astrology magically. I never had any intention of making talismans for the public or having a magical business of any sort. Over the course of about 3 years beginning in 2020, however, I experienced multiple initiatory events, one including the constellations of Corvus and Hydra that lasted several months, which led me to pursue a new art form and to begin offering my work publicly. I taught myself to electroform copper in late 2023 and then eventually lost wax casting in early 2024. I had some previous experience with lost wax in college, where I learned bronze casting at our school’s foundry. I didn’t pick it up again until years later, but I never lost my fascination with this ancient art. I also feel that making art and reclaiming the “work of the hands” in our current moment is extremely vital.

My personal definition of a talisman is simply an object that has been intentionally enspirited. There are many ways of accomplishing this, and many cultures and traditions have their methods. (For other examples of applications of this technology, I recommend the book Ensouling the Effigy by my friend Matthew Venus.) The creation of an astrological talisman, as I practice it, accomplishes this through the use of astrological timing, an image, ritual, suffumigation, and the calling of spirits into an object and pacting with them to perform a specific function. The user of a talisman can then form a relationship with these spirits through the talisman and allow them to act upon them and in their life.

Astrological timing often takes the form of a full chart election, but can be elected in other ways as well, such as lunar conjunctions with stars, planetary days and hours, heliacal rise, or other various methods. An election simply refers to an auspicious time to perform an action. I like working with full charts because I enjoy exploring the ways that math and time are extremely weird and haunted, and because I get much from the process of both finding and scrying a chart. The search for an election is part of the magic for me, and I have never had success or good results from using other people’s elections, though this is not the case for many. Each method has strengths and drawbacks, though none of them should ever preclude the need to go outside and look up.

In my creation of talismans, the actual talismanic component of the piece is a gemstone. This is the object that is engraved with an image and enspirited during an electional window. For many practitioners, this is the end of the process. This is perfectly valid. A piece of jewelry is not required for a talisman to be functional and potent, and talismans can take many forms. I choose to create a piece of jewelry to house the gemstone because art and spirit-work are the backbone of my entire life. I am not the first or only person to do this, though I can only speak to my motivations. The jewelry I make functions as both a spirit house, akin to a pot or bottle, protecting the talisman and allowing it to be worn, and also as a vehicle for visionary artwork co-created with the spirit itself. Sometimes I have an idea for what this will look like in advance, sometimes not, but I am always surprised by the ways the spirits shape and reshape things, and how I am continually shaped and reshaped in turn. I will often spend weeks or months with talismanic stones before they reveal forms or certain aspects of their nature to me. This allows me to create and maintain unique relationships with these spirits, which in turn make me a better magician and artist.

I am deeply grateful to this practice and art which continues to inspire and surprise me. If you would like to see some of my talismanic work, you can visit my site.

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I’ve been talking about how art is extremely devalued within public occulture for well over a decade now. I’ve been thinking about this a lot more recently in light of AI. I posted this on facebook the other day:

about 10 years ago or so I remember posting on twitter about how bizarre it was to me that art was so devalued in public occulture over writing and that only people who wrote books were taken seriously. but it’s always been clear that the reason for this is that the majority of online occultists are actually armchair magicians who would rather just think about magic than actually do it. this has taken on a new dimension in the age of AI where the prevailing sentiment among occultists seems to be that AI “art” is perfectly fine to use but not writing. It says a lot to me about how little people value artists and the creation of art (an actual magical act) over the intellectualization of ideas (important but separate from actual practice.) And imho that’s because the latter is the only one armchair magicians can relate to.

To be clear, I don’t actually think there is anything wrong with being an armchair magician. I don’t work every grimoire I read. I consume plenty of media centered around magic purely as infotainment. I think magic is cool and interesting. It’s my autistic special interest, you could say. I just don’t think that people who don’t actually practice or have direct experience of things should be the spokespeople for them.

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There’s already been much said about the ethics of AI use by much better writers than myself. It’s problematic on many levels I’m sure you are aware of that I won’t get into here. What I wanted to address here specifically is my beef with it that is, for obvious reasons, discussed much less often than its ethical implications:

It’s fucking ugly.

I have not seen a single piece of AI “art” that didn’t look like utter, soulless dogshit. It’s sterile and hollow. The vibes are terrible. I actively feel bad looking at it.

It’s dead.

I know a lot of people with differing opinions on this. Plenty of occultists have gleefully adopted its use, despite being on their high horses about ethics around theft of work and originality for years. Many are passing off AI art and writing as their own work (though the tells are always there if you know how to look). Others see art as simply window dressing for their brilliant ideas (the REAL work), so who cares where it comes from. Here’s the thing, though:

I’ve never seen a person who likes or uses AI art who has good taste or a sense of style that I remotely admire in any way.

It’s become popular to dismiss much of the magical practice seen online as empty aesthetics, and while that is often the case, this has led to a popularization of the idea that aesthetics do not matter at all to the practice of magic. I vehemently disagree. They are not the only thing that matters, and emergency or on-the-fly workings are often crude and visually unappealing, but if magic is a means of ordering the universe according to our will, how can we say that aesthetics are meaningless? When it comes to magic, everything matters. Consider what you are feeding it and representing it with. And consider the implications of outsourcing your creativity, which is the most divine part of yourself.

Real art is the spoils of ordeal. True artists know this. You don’t have to suffer to make good art, but you do have to struggle. It’s not really fire if you didn’t have to steal it from the gods. Know the difference, and support those who still find the distinction meaningful.

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