THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 113

I have seen the creative act as channeling for a while. It became obvious to me when I was exploding with ideas & would spend at least 8 hours a day drawing that I was tapping into something. Especially when the creative well never went dry & I would get bored of new things frequently as soon as I devoted them to paper, frequently before the drawing was even done. The well still hasn’t gone dry, knock on… wood. The thing is, channeling typically evokes a picture of drawing down from something external. From the spirit world. What I think is going on is dredging things up from the vast recesses of our minds. Pulling from within. There is a certain romance to the idea of pulling things out of the air, especially when humanity is thought of so negatively in this moment. From my understanding of Jodorowsky’s book on the Tarot (heavily Jung influenced), where he mixes psychology with the tarot, it’s about evoking archetypes that exist in most human minds. If you look at the idea that we only actively use 10% of our brains, it’s easy to imagine there is a lot else going on in there, This is easily extrapolated to art in general. From this perspective it makes perfect sense. I wrote previously that my understanding is that there is no spirit world, but that the spirit is part of material reality. This dimension of spirit is not accessible with our conventional senses but it’s there. This way of thinking is why I am really interested in the Western occult boom that happened in the late 1800s. This was during a time of intense scientific discovery & the occultists were doing their best to incorporate scientism into their occult studies. It is this area where the traditions mix that is most fertile. Like a tidal estuary. I am similarly interested in how alchemy led to conventional chemistry, I’m sure that Arabic mystics helped to usher in Algebra & the idea of imaginary numbers too (I’ll need to research that). Sure, there is a lot of BS that is created during this mix, but a good bullshit detector is needed in life.