Creative Mediumship: Symbolic Illumination
Welcome to part 6 of our series on Creative Mediumship, Creative Mediumship: Symbolic Illumination. 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, before checking out Imagination is the Medium: A Psychic Experiment for the Literary Coven , The Cloak Within: A Writing Ritual from Sarah Justice , and The Journey with Jennifer Green. If you’re new to the halls of Pointy Hat Press, join the Literary Coven for a journey into and through the landscape of the unseen.
“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.”
This past April, inspired by the unfurling of spring, we set out on a quest to explore the intersections of creativity, consciousness, trance, and magick, or what we call creative mediumship.
What is Creative Mediumship?
Creative mediumship is the practice of treating your creative world as a doorway. It’s intuitive art-making and channeled writing. It’s summoning music through our dreams for a new song or score. If we’re weaving stories into tapestries, crafting desk altars for our muses, or ritualizing our creativity alongside our magical world in a way that makes us feel alive, we’re already engaged with this practice.
Creative mediumship is befriending the inherently weird and wondrous parts of ourselves and letting the language of mystery guide our quill.
Over the past few months, we’ve invited friends, makers, and inspiring humans to join us on the Pointy Hat Press podcast to discuss their connection to creativity. We wanted to know: Who were their muses? How do they engage with trance or channeling? In what ways do their dreams serve as guides?
You can listen to all the episodes here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts), but the big takeaway is this:
The creative spirit is ever-present. It’s also a shapeshifter. Sometimes it speaks clearly, confidently, like a long-lost friend; other times it slithers in and around our curiosities, making nests within our imaginations. Sometimes the creative spirit takes the shape of a goddess, a mythical creature, or a childhood muse. This entity can arrive as a shooting star or a synchronicity too peculiar to be ignored. For makers and mystics, the realm of spirit and inspiration flickers at the crossroads of our waking desires, our nightly dreams, our art, and our oldest, most enduring memories. But when the spirit worldopens its mouth, it isn’t words that tumble out, but symbols. Symbols are inherently mysterious, their meanings are both veiled and illuminated by our creative work.
