Imagination is the Medium: A Psychic Experiment
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.
