US occult author, curator and witch, Pam Grossman, is perfectly poised, like the Magician card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, to capture the diaphanous strands linking mysticism, magic and creativity – in the widest sense of that word – and to alchemise those strands into her own beautiful creation on the subject.
With this metaphysical yet page-turning book, Grossman weaves a cloak of enchantment for anyone intrigued by the notion that creativity is not only an expression of the intellect, but also of the spirit. Magic Maker is a delightful, extensively researched, inspiring personal and cultural exploration and practical spell-book on the art – practised down through the ages – of materialising the unmanifest through the process of creation.
As a fan of Grossman’s Witch Wave podcast and her previous books – including Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power and the Witchcraft volume of Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series – I feared Grossman might struggle to reach comparable heights. But with Magic Maker, this word-witch doesn’t disappoint.
Here we reap the benefit of Grossman’s esoteric erudition and vast knowledge and appreciation for “seekers and creators who used their art to interface with something cosmic and otherwise uncontainable”; for creatives whose subjects have been inherently occultural, and also for artists, writers, musicians and many more makers who have applied rituals, invocations, meditation, dreamwork and other practices and ideas from the fields of mysticism, spirituality, magic, alchemy, animism, divination and nondual consciousness, in order to generate and disseminate their work.
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Threaded skilfully throughout Grossman’s excavation of what magic is, and her engagingly structured buffet on how readers might incorporate spiritual techniques and understandings to enhance their own creativity, are stories the author has unearthed about famous creatives who have used these very techniques in their work. What a clever and original unifying theme and angle!
To gather these fascinating, often overlooked tales: of Dürer hiding talismans in his engravings; the deliberate conjuration of glamorising avatars by Bowie and Beyoncé; Brian Eno’s co-creation of an oracle deck; Sylvia Plath’s cultivation of contacts with the spirit world; Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry blowing ganja smoke into his recording equipment to channel plant magic ...
Practitioners of magic describe what they do as “The Art” and “The Craft”. Reading Magic Maker, you’ll understand why.
