Imagination is the Medium
A psychic experiment for the Literary Coven
Welcome to part 3 of our series on Creative Mediumship, Imagination is the Medium. In these conversations, we’re exploring the intersections of creativity, consciousness, trance, magick, and imagination. If you’re new to the Literary Coven, start at the beginning with Creative Mediumship: Spells for Spring, then head over to The Threshold: A Writing Ritual from Kate Belew. Join the Literary Coven for a journey into and through the landscape of the unseen.
You’re probably familiar with the expression "seeing is believing,” but this is only a fragment of a longer idiom. The full saying goes like this: “Seeing is believing, but feeling is truth.”
So, (considering this deception), how are you feeling right now? I don’t mean how do you feel about idioms half-known; how do you feel about the idea of truths you cannot touch, tether, or hold in your hands? How do you feel about the truths that are invisible to the naked eye, that make us question reality and whisper from the abyss - truths that initiate us into the Mysteries of the unseen?
Historically, seers and oracles didn’t rely on eyesight to receive prophecies. The most notorious oracle in the ancient Greek world was the Pythia, the prophetess at Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. The Oracle sought her prophecies from her cave while chewing on bay laurel leaves. It was there, from atop her three-legged stool (and potentially aided by hallucinogenic vapors weeping from the Below), that the Oracle gazed into the abyss, listened, and gathered messages for her patrons.
The Pythia’s transmissions were not clear-cut, and rarely were they logical. Her prophecies were fragments, and often, they resembled riddles. Some people claimed the Oracle wasn’t channeling Apollo as she claimed, but instead, her messages were the result of madness.
“The greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven-sent.” - Socrates on the Oracle of Delphi
In the ancient world, ‘madness’ was not necessarily a sign of illness but divinity, so perhaps the Pythia’s strange transmissions had something to do with Dionysus, a god of the vine. Before Apollo claimed the temple at Delphi, some theorize that Dionysus and his Maenads roamed the land and seeded it with spells of ecstasy. Within their wooded temple, Dionysus and his priestesses wore animal pelts and crowns woven from their wildness. Slithering like snakes, the Maenads danced to a melody only they could hear.
The Maenads were not gods like Dionysus (at least, not initially). They were mortal women who yearned for freedom, a desire that beckoned to them from the wilderness. When these ‘civilized’ women began humming a curious tune, their bodies swaying to a song nobody else seemed to hear, they had to make a choice: They could either follow the song into the forest and learn the source of this mysterious music or, if they rejected the Maenad’s invitation, Dionysus responded by turning them into bats.
Those who danced with the Maenads were also transformed, their bodies becoming channels and receivers for divine knowing. In their frenzied state, the women plucked prophecies from the starry skies and the fruiting trees, oracles that bloomed through movement and sibylline song.
“Many images of initiation show masked Maenads and other followers of Dionysos using trance as a way to shapeshift, taking the name of eriphe ‘the goat’ a scene which is often accompanied by a kista mystica (a basket of sacred objects, often present at initiation) with a snake inside. Those dressed as animals are also reported to have screeched, bellowed and hissed like animals, and this is something which may be reflected in some of the techniques in the Greek Magical Papyri which involve bellowing and hissing as part of their magical operations.” - Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy: A study of the God Dionysos: history, myth and lore by Vikki Bramshaw
If the Pythia and the Maenads were around today, we might call these wild women witches, psychics, or mediums. Mediums are people who ‘see’ into other realms, although the lens through which mysteries are revealed is different for everyone. Sometimes, mediums channel through trance or altered states. Altered states require a shift in our awareness which can happen unintentionally or through meditation, chanting, drumming, or when dreaming (think lucid dreaming or astral projection). Dance can also be a doorway to altered states.
Joseph Campbell described dance as an “expression of life-power, life-courage, and the ecstasy of being…From earliest times, the dancer has been the human symbol of life-indestructible. The Dionysos-dance of annihilation is at the same time the dance of the fire of creation: the oxidizing fire of the interior of the living cell.”
Campbell compares the dance floor to a ‘temenos,’ or sacred area, a magic circle where we shut out the day-to-day and experience another reality, one of oneness and connection. He says that if a word, phrase, or idea moves our imagination during this altered state, we must retire to our own quietness and brood over the mysterious gift.
“The dancer, that is to say, is not a semaphorist, but a work of art in the flesh; her function is not to flash messages back and forth from brain to brain but to embody Significant Form. And what is Significant Form? It is the rhythm of life projected in design; the invisible pattern of the psyche reflected in time and space; a profoundly inspired disposition of feeling-charged materials stemming from, and addressed to, that creative center where human consciousness and the unconscious fruitfully touch.” - The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology & Dance by Joseph Campbell
Campbell wrote that art is the funnel through which spirit is poured into life, and suggested that “art, like mythology, has the power to open the contemporary, individual mind to a direct experience of the timeless, transcendent wisdom of the universe, a wisdom based in the body and visited in our dreams.”
This month, the Literary Coven invites paid subscribers to participate in a psychic experiment, one that tests the idea that we are more than our physical bodies. Here at Pointy Hat Press, we believe that altered states, the moments when we see, hear, and feel the unseen oracular, are opportunities to channel inspiration.
Channeling for creativity is more than just a method to fuel our artistic endeavors — it’s a way to build your relationship with the invisible. The final step of this experiment (upgrade to paid for your step-by-step guide) requires that we create a piece of art using the symbols, fragments, and questions born from this spell. Whether you choose to craft a poem, drawing, weaving, writing, or even a dance is up to you.
Imagination is the Medium: A Psychic Experiment for the Literary Coven
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