art & magic

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 "when the girders of the mind are unloosed in psychopathic states, the creative 
 imagination produces strange things for our undoing. it may terrify us with 
 phantasms of the primeval past, or turn us into lotus-eaters neglectful of 
 reality. when the nuclear consciousness retains control, the same destroying 
 element in the psyche can be disciplined into creation through art-forms, so 
 sophisticated and stylized that their original content is hardly discernible 
 save when it is working on the traditional material of myth and folklore. 
 through this connecting link we can trace the relationship between the creative 
 imagination of the artist and the technique of the adept who uses myths as his 
 formulae. both are working with the same level of the subliminal mind, and each 
 has something of the other in him; perhaps the degree of creativeness in either 
 branch of art or magic depends on the proportion in which the other is 
 present." (dion fortune: applied magic, chapter 9)

                   
     with the afternoon sun shining into the room: kfl