The Creative Occult: An Art Seance with the Five is a 3-week psychic experiment and workshop in intuitive art-making and creative mediumship. Alongside Pointy Hat Press co-founders, Caitlyn Barone & Kristin Lisenby, participants will gather around the virtual candle for a collective psychic experiment using art as a doorway into the creative unconscious. Join the art séance here. Questions? Send a DM or leave a comment for Kristin and Caitlyn below.
Last year, Caitlyn and I invited Literary Coven-mates to join a psychic experiment, and referred to our process as Creative Mediumship. Since then, we’ve continued this ritual of inspired making via the Book Club and art workshops, using intuition and dreams as our creative compasses. And while the symbols and themes within each experiment have varied, a message endured:
Art-making is mediumship, and a vehicle into realms hidden and unconscious, the elusive dwelling of Spirit.
Art & the Unconscious
Leaning on Spirit to make art, or leaning into art to meet Spirit, is something humans have been doing for ages. Some people call it channeling, automatism, or psychography, forms of divination that include automatic writing and drawing. Before these modern terms, people called mystical art-making spirit drawing, a technique first recorded in China in the 5th century. Half a millennium later, planchette drawing was born, and people began using a heart-shaped (possibly haunted) piece of wood to record messages to and from the spirit world.
People often credit André Breton and other 20th-century Surrealists with popularizing the idea that artistic expression drew on unconscious, unseen realities. However, the Surrealist Movement was undoubtedly influenced, in part, by the recent rise of Spiritualism. As a belief system that encouraged communication with otherworldly mentors, ancestors, and invisible entities, Spiritualism flourished around the end of the 19th century as the concept of spiritual science took shape. While people attended séances to speak with the spirit world, scientists experimented with different methods and theories to prove, once and for all, the existence of an afterlife.
In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton said Surrealist art was created without conscious thought, describing it as “Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”
Spiritualists embodied a similar philosophy through séance, trance mediumship, automatic drawing, and other means of communicating with the unseen world. Many participants were mediums and psychics, and naturally gifted in giving voice and form to the invisible. Today, when people talk about Surrealist methods of art-making, they’re also talking about Spiritualist methods for communicating with the dead, methods created by mediums, most of whom were women.
“For most of history, anonymous was a woman.”
Virginia Woolf
