Unquiet
Things

I recently wrote about building my own personal curriculum to better understand 1) the ideas and concepts around the term “hauntology,” and 2) wrap my head around Julia Kristeva’s writings. But it occurred to me that I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention my own books in terms of creating some courses for self-learning!

I put together a (hopefully very shareable) slideshow of graphics about how each book might assist in studies of the arcane & esoteric, the darker side of life, and the fantastical, and how you shouldn’t skip the visual component when you’re deepening your understanding of this, that, or the other thing. (Coming from a rather lazy student, I mean obviously more pictures and less words is the way to go hehehe.)

Building Your Personal Curriculum: Where My Books Fit

If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen people talking about “personal curriculums,” essentially, self-directed courses of study built around whatever you’re genuinely curious about. Instead of following someone else’s syllabus, you’re creating your own path through a subject, pulling together books, films, essays, art, music, whatever feeds your particular obsession.

It’s a beautiful way to learn, and it’s having a moment because people are hungry for depth, for expertise that comes from genuine interest rather than algorithmic recommendation. You get to be both student and curator of your own education.

I love this concept because it’s exactly how I’ve always learned: following threads of interest across mediums and disciplines, building connections between visual art and literature and history and folklore. It’s also, not coincidentally, how I approach curating my books. (It’s also a good reason to buy new notebooks!)

Which brings me to this: if you’re building a personal curriculum, here’s where my Art in the Margins series fits.

Studying the occult, symbolism, or esoteric art history?

The Art of the Occult belongs in your visual studies. From theosophy and kabbalah to the zodiac and alchemy, from spiritualism and ceremonial magic to the elements and sacred geometry—this book brings together artists who have been drawn to these unknown spheres and created curious artworks that transcend time and place. Whether you’re learning tarot, diving into the history of magical practice, or exploring Hermetic traditions, you need the visual language that goes with it. These works stem from a soul-deep desire for truth and awareness, revealing the hidden rules of nature and our world through imagery that has haunted and inspired across centuries.

Exploring Gothic aesthetics, melancholy, or the beauty of darkness?

The Art of Darkness is your visual companion. This book celebrates artists who have been obsessed with darkness throughout history—creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, and play on our innermost fears. From dreams and nightmares to matters of mortality, from depravity and destruction to gods and monsters, these artworks indulge our greatest fears while asking: what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? If you’re studying Victorian mourning culture, exploring Gothic traditions, or simply trying to understand why certain aesthetics speak to something deep within you, this is your sourcebook. Denial of our darkness leads us to fear it….better to create a connection with our shadows and revel in all the inspiration and wonder we may find there!

Deep-diving into fantasy worldbuilding, mythology, or the fantastic?

The Art of Fantasy gives you the visual language. Artists have explored imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures for centuries, expressing the unreal and impossible, the mystical and mythical through paint and illustration. This book presents a compendium of artworks inspired by myth, fantasy, and the unreal—from beasts and beings to forgotten realms and wonderlands, from dreams and magic to faith and philosophy. If you’re studying folklore, reading epic fantasy, learning about mythological traditions across cultures, or working on your own creative worldbuilding, these visual flights of fancy and imagination show you how artists have conveyed the vast swathe of hopes and dreams in our collected hearts. Fantasy is not simply an escape from reality…it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.

Why Visual Art Belongs in Your Curriculum

Whatever you’re studying, visual art deepens your understanding in ways that text alone cannot. It shows you how ideas manifest aesthetically, how concepts become tangible, how symbolism operates visually. The artists in these books are thinking deeply about their subjects, creating work that’s in conversation with history, mythology, spirituality, and culture across centuries.

If you’re building your own curriculum for any of these subjects, please don’t skip the visual component! These books are resources, and they’re meant to be referenced, returned to, absorbed alongside whatever else you’re studying.

And if you’re building a curriculum around something else entirely? Tell me about it. I want to know what you’re learning, what threads you’re following, what obsessions are driving your self-directed education. That’s always been my favorite kind of conversation!

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ comment

Somewhere, there is a mythic, lachrymose storybook from another world, and machumaYu is its illustrator and caretaker, both. They tend their inhabitants the way one tends a terrarium of singular, precious creatures: with patience, with devotion, with a face pressed to the glass, cataloguing every ceremony, every migration, every small and serious life within.

Inside, the cast goes about its business with complete solemnity: foxes and goats and wolves deep in their appointed tasks — a gloomier, more arcane Busytown, every creature with a purpose, every purpose shrouded in mystery — small cloaked figures gathering around volcanoes and caged lions, children sealed inside glass flasks, animal-headed scholars presiding over books and globes and celestial instruments.

I was deep in the “Imagery And Inspiration Of The Elements” chapter of The Art of the Occult when machumaYu’s work found me, the way certain things on Tumblr have always had an uncanny instinct for finding exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

A curious blue dog-girl hybrid sealed inside a glass flask, guarded by a winged, scaled creature and a watchful cloud, disembodied figures drifting through sky above a medieval castle, each wearing a different head , tree, sun, flame. I knew immediately I was looking at just one mythology among many in someone’s expansive, fully inhabited, weird, weird world.

machumaYu’s inhabitants do not know they are being watched, or if they do, they have decided it is of no matter to them. A rabbit cycles a unicycle while playing piano, reaching for the keys with total concentration. Small white-robed figures hover in solemn a circle around a caged lion wreathed in flame, themselves ensconced in a larger wheel, part of a strange cycle. An owl-headed scholar, his body composed of stacked books, holds open a text with both hands as though the answer to something urgent is in there somewhere.

None of this is played for laughs. None of it invites you to find it absurd. And yet there is something in the cumulative weight of all this earnest, diligent strangeness, creatures going about their ancient business with the focused gravity of beings who have never once questioned the logic of their world, that produces in the viewer a feeling adjacent to a gentle fondness, adjacent to amusement, but not quite either. Something warmer and more complicated than both.

machumaYu’s world did not begin when you arrived. It feels conceived in a candlelit scriptorium by someone with a melancholic disposition and an extensive knowledge of folklore, deeply committed to alchemy and the collective unconscious, and indeed it has centuries behind it, ancient myths, founding narratives, lost histories of characters whose names have dissolved into time.

The Rohm Founding Myth gives us a many-horned goat presiding over a jagged rock formation encrusted with the ruins of a miniature city, two armored figures riding an enormous wolf below, an old-world map hovering in the sky above like a record of territories long since forgotten.

Universe assembles four animal-headed figures around a root-limbed child at the center of a circular fortress, a deer holding scales, a lion clutching a book, a hare with a crystal ball, a figure whose head has become a tangle of branches, as though we have stumbled into the founding ceremony of something that will long outlast us. And yet this world is not only ancient history; it has its own living present, its own seasonal rituals and natural laws.

In The Night Party of Flowers, a doll-like girl cradles a lizard beneath lush, oversized blooms that dwarf the surrounding trees, a flower with a human face presiding at her side, a human figure with a blossom head, accompanied by an accordian, and In Death and Life: The Cycle, three animal skulls rest on the ground amid mushrooms and small plants while swirling vines wrap themselves around fox and owl and hummingbird alike, the whole composition a tender and unhurried account of everything that ends and everything that follows.

The same figures return across machumaYu’s paintings like characters in a story that has no single beginning and no fixed end. Lions and deer, foxes and hares, wolves and leopards, children with enormous solemn eyes. They migrate from painting to painting, appearing in new configurations, new landscapes, as though their lives continue between canvases in rooms we cannot see.

They move through a world rendered in the muted, dimmed palette of something viewed through old glass or remembered imperfectly — ochre and ash and pewter, the occasional bruised blue, colors that feel a little moth-eaten and weather-beaten, dusk, and shadowed and eternally overcast.

And everywhere, containers: glass flasks holding girls and unicorns, domes enclosing entire ecosystems, circular structures, armillary spheres, globes. machumaYu is drawn to the world within the world, the small and sovereign place inside the larger one, which is perhaps why their paintings feel less like windows and more like diminutive vivariums: controlled and enclosed, rare and self-sustaining behind glass, breathing its own air, following its own ancient rules.

machumaYu calls it “bright darkness,” and spending time in this world they have built, you understand just what they mean. There’s a lonely, dolorous undercurrent running beneath everything in this fanciful ecosystem, and yet there is warmth here too, and tenderness, and something that sits just beside a droll whimsy without ever quite becoming comical, and none of these things resolve into each other or cancel each other out. They companionably coexist, the way they do in the deepest parts of the human interior.

machumaYu keeps vigil over this world they have built with the attention of someone who built it from nothing and knows every corner of it, keeping faithful watch over the brightness and the darkness in careful, equal measure.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ 1 comment

Here is a a link fantastic interview I did with Dr. Pedro Ortega Ventureira of Aulós Publishing. I genuinely appreciated the thoughtful questions and the opportunity to ruminate on and attempt to articulate how I think about all kinds of things. The questions were genuinely considered and gave me room to think out loud in ways I don’t often get to.

We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.

Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .

✥ 4 comments

When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.

What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.

Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.

I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.

In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.

Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.

And then the work changed again.

Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.

Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?

If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”

And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.

To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.

Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ comment

Now that I’ve spent December celebrating everyone else’s books, it seems only fair to mention my own. There are still a few shopping days before the holiday, though I can’t guarantee anything will reach you in time.

But if you’re shopping for friends who trace sigils in the margins and dream in symbols, the family member who gets lost in museum rooms for hours, who collect visual obsessions like other people collect recipes, or if that person is absolutely, unquestionably you sitting there right now thinking “yes, actually, I do deserve something gorgeous and weird that rewards endless returns”—here’s my trilogy.

The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic is where sacred geometry meets spirit art, where witches conjure alongside alchemists, where astrology and Kabbalah and ceremonial magic all get their visual due. Over 175 artworks spanning centuries, organized into The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and Practitioners. Artists driven by that soul-deep hunger to reveal hidden truths, to make the invisible visible, to show us the secret shapes underlying everything. Essential for tarot readers and Hermetic scholars, for anyone who’s ever traced a sigil or stared into a crystal ball, for those building occult study curriculums or simply hungry for imagery that transcends the ordinary and reaches for something vast and glimmering and strange.

The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is nightmares and plagues, mourning art and murder ballads, the monstrous feminine and supernatural beings, memento mori and existential dread. Artists who understood that darkness carries weight and beauty, that our shadows deserve attention, that facing our demons might actually comfort us. Over 200 artworks across centuries asking: why are we drawn to the macabre? What happens when we stop denying our darkness and start reveling in it? Essential for Gothic souls and Victorian mourning enthusiasts, for anyone who’s ever felt more at home in graveyards than crowds, for those who understand that beauty and horror often share the same face.

The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal is beasts and forgotten realms, myth and impossible landscapes, artists building entire worlds from imagination alone. Dragons and wonderlands, magic and philosophy, hope made visible through paint and illustration. Fantasy isn’t escape—it’s that irresistible impulse toward wonder, that refusal to accept reality as the only option, that hunger for what could be. Essential for worldbuilders and folklore scholars, for anyone who’s ever needed to see how you make the impossible feel real, for those who understand that imaginary worlds deserve our fiercest attention and deepest study.

You can find these wherever books are sold, or order signed copies from me directly. I can’t promise they’ll arrive in time for your Hexmas gifting needs as the postal gods remain mysterious and unknowable, but I promise to get them in the mail today. Receiving a book in January when you’ve half-forgotten you ordered it feels like a gift from your past self anyway—an extended holiday, a little magic arriving precisely when January gets bleak, and you need it most.

✥ comment

Hello there, weirdos and lovelies! To my longtime readers who’ve been following my musings for years—you know all this already, and I adore you for sticking around through every obsession and existential spiral. But for those who’ve recently discovered me through my Ghoul Next Door column in Rue Morgue magazine, found my Midnight Stinks perfume reviews on TikTok (no longer updated in that space, but I’ve been writing about perfume since before TikTok was born and continue to do so literally everywhere else), or stumbled across this blog through some strange artsy rabbit hole mystery revolving the lost and found cover artist of an iconic children’s fantasy book, let me introduce myself properly. I’m a published author. Three times over, in fact.

I’ve spent nearly two decades balancing corporate drudgery with creative pursuits that would make my HR department deeply uncomfortable. (If I had one, if I wasn’t, in fact, the HR department.) While documenting my obsessions with fragrance, fashion, and all things fantastically macabre here on this corner of the internet, I’ve also been working on a trilogy (soon to be a quartet!) of art books. Apparently, I decided that years of research into dead artists and occult symbolism would be a brilliant use of my free time. My bank account remains unconvinced.

The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic was my first foray into published territory, a visual feast exploring how artists throughout history have been drawn to mystical realms. From theosophy and kabbalah to alchemy and sacred geometry, this book examines why creators are perpetually pulled toward the esoteric. If you’re the type who finds tarot cards aesthetically compelling even if you can’t tell a death card from a grocery list, who gets shivers from Hilma af Klint’s automatic drawings, or who’s ever wondered about the symbolic mysteries hidden in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this one’s for you.

The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre followed two years later, diving headlong into humanity’s eternal fascination with mortality, fear, and the grotesque. This isn’t about glorifying death but rather examining why artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo to Louise Bourgeois have found beauty in darkness, comfort in confronting our demons. If you’re someone who finds Victorian mourning jewelry beautiful, who appreciates the sublime terror in Goya’s black paintings, or who understands that sometimes the most profound art emerges from our deepest fears, this book speaks your language.

The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal completed the trilogy in 2023, celebrating the impossible, the imaginary, the utterly fantastical. From Blake’s visions to contemporary illustrators conjuring digital dragons, this book asks why artists are compelled to create worlds that never existed. If you’re enchanted by myth and magic, if you’ve ever lost yourself in a museum gallery full of surrealist paintings, or if you believe impossible worlds can reveal unexpected insights about our own, this collection will bewitch you.

The links above will direct you to the Amazon page for each book. However, if you’re in the US and would like a signed copy (and a bookmark!) for your collection, you can order directly from me here.

Want to dive deeper before committing? I’ve written extensively about a handful of the artists and themes in each book—you can find behind-the-scenes stories and detailed features under the corresponding categories right here on my blog.

The Art of the Occult | The Art of Darkness | The Art of Fantasy

Here’s something you might not know about me: more than writing books, I’ve always dreamed of selling them. Picture me in some dusty, overstuffed used bookshop, surrounded by towering stacks of forgotten treasures, helping fellow bibliophiles discover their next obsession. While I don’t yet own that quaint little shop (my retirement plan, wheeee!) I’ve found the next best thing.

My Pango bookshop has become my virtual version of that dream. It’s where I sell my carefully curated collection of used books: horror novels with deliciously creepy covers, poetry collections that make your soul ache, esoteric volumes on tons of weird shit. These are books I’ve loved, books that have lived on my shelves until space demanded difficult decisions, books that deserve new homes with readers who will appreciate their particular magic. Also, I am running a 20% off sale right now!

Browsing my bookshop feels a bit like wandering through my personal library, which, in a way, it is. You’ll find first editions alongside well-loved paperbacks, academic texts on occult symbolism next to vintage horror paperbacks with lurid covers. These are books I’ve loved, books that have earned their place through great writing, beautiful design, or sheer oddball charm.

My day job is in jeopardy, which has me scrambling to shore up my side hustles. After nearly 20 years, losing that steady paycheck means these passion projects need to start paying actual bills. It’s terrifying and liberating in equal measure; my fight-or-flight response can’t decide if this is a disaster or an opportunity; I am simultaneously puking and turning ecstatic cartwheels. I’m a fucking mess.

Your support, whether through purchasing my books, browsing my virtual bookshop, or simply sharing a post that resonated with you, helps keep this strange little corner of the internet alive. It allows me to continue exploring the intersections of art and the occult, beauty and darkness, the real and the fantastical, without the pressure of advertising or sponsored content diluting our conversations.

Ways to Support This Work

Not sure which book might speak to you? Are you drawn to mysticism, spirituality, or the esoteric? Start with The Art of the Occult. Do you find beauty in melancholy, comfort in confronting mortality? The Art of Darkness is calling your name. Are you enchanted by myth, magic, and impossible worlds? The Art of Fantasy will transport you to realms beyond imagination.

Beyond purchasing books (though that’s always appreciated), there are many ways to help keep this creative work flourishing:

• Leave reviews if you’ve read my books—your words help others discover this work
• Share posts that resonate with you across social media
• Request my books at your local library
• Engage in the comments—your thoughts and reactions inspire new ideas
• Browse my Amazon affiliate links when you’re shopping anyway

Your engagement matters just as much as financial support. Every comment, every share, every moment you spend in this space contributes to keeping it alive and thriving.

Whether you decide to add one of my books to your collection, discover a treasure in my virtual bookshop, or simply continue reading these midnight musings about the beautiful, the dark, and the strange, know that you’re part of something special. You’re supporting not just me, but the entire ecosystem of independent creators who choose to work in the margins, who believe that art and beauty and weirdness matter.

✥ 4 comments

When I reached out to Asheville Raven & Crone about carrying signed copies of my book, The Art of the Occult, I had to laugh at myself. What was I going to say? “Hi, I’m an author! My book exists! Want some?” But they said yes, and now here I am, promoting myself as a “kinda sorta local author” to Asheville, which feels both ridiculous and perfectly accurate.

(Still waiting to hear back from Mr. K’s, by the way. Call me, Mr. K’s!)

The truth is, I’m not local to Asheville at all. I live hundreds of miles away and visit maybe once a year when I can manage it. But Mary – my sister – chose this place, built her whimsigoth paradise here among the artists and musicians and people still rebuilding after the hurricane. Through her, I’ve gotten to see how this town works, how it holds space for mystics and weirdos and creative people who’ve found their community.

When I thought about it, that’s what the “kinda sorta” qualifier really captures – the way belonging works when you’re a creative person. It’s not zip codes or voter registration. It’s recognizing something familiar in a place, even when you’re technically just passing through.

✥ 2 comments

The paths books take can sometimes surprise their own authors. When Ediciones Akal published the Spanish translation of my second book, The Art of Darkness, in 2023, I hadn’t expected my first book, The Art of the Occult, would follow. Yet late in 2024,  The Art of the Occult became available to Spanish readers. This unexpected sequence – the second book paving the way for the first – makes the arrival of The Art of the Occult in Spanish feel particularly special.

For both books, I had the pleasure of responding to thoughtful questions from journalist Esther Peñas, whose email interviews were arranged through my publisher. In our wide-ranging exchange, we explored the deep connections between art and magic, the role of the unconscious in occult practices, and how contemporary artists engage with these ancient traditions. Peñas’s thoughtful questions touched on everything from the nature of ritual to the evolution of magical thinking in our modern world, allowing us to delve into the heart of what makes the occult such an enduring source of artistic inspiration.

Read the interview in its entirety here: “The similarities between the artist and the magician are profound.”

I was particularly moved by Peñas’s question about what qualities one needs to engage with the occult, as it allowed me to articulate something I feel deeply about the accessibility of wonder:

“…It requires receptivity to possibilities, a willingness to be surprised, to be wrong, to be utterly transformed by what you discover. It asks us to remain vulnerable to mystery, to allow ourselves to be moved, changed, and even open to wonder. These are not esoteric qualities reserved for a select few. They are natural to all of us, even if they are sometimes buried under layers of skepticism or fear. To delve into the occult is really to delve into our own capacity for wonder, our own capacity to stand breathless and humbled by the vast mysteries around us, to feel our hearts open with the realization that there is so much more to existence than there is; that we could ever imagine, and that this infinite unknown is not something to be feared, but something that makes life itself magnificent and heartbreakingly beautiful.”

Here’s to hoping the magic continues and The Art of Fantasy completes this enchanted trilogy in Spanish!

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ comment

BEHOLD, MORTALS!

By peculiar planetary alignments and mysterious postal machinations, signed copies of The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook For The Modern Mystic have writhed their way back into existence! Like phantoms at dawn, these tomes have a habit of dissolving into the ether – so if you seek to infuse your Hexmas season with deliciously strange splendors, the moment pulses with possibility. Summon your copy directly from my web-realm before they skitter back into the void!

For those who haven’t yet ventured into these enchanted pages, imagine slipping into art history’s most bewitching territories: automatic drawings scratched out in prophetic frenzies, sacred geometries encoded in cathedral stones, mythic beasts prowling through moonlit gardens of esoteric symbols, and cosmic maps charting the vast seas between worlds. Here, in the spaces between reality and dream, generations of artists have attempted to capture glimpses of the ineffable.

Within these pages, you’ll encounter both celebrated visionaries and hidden pioneers of mystical art. Witness Hilma af Klint’s monumental temple paintings, created decades before abstraction was “invented,” channeled from realms unknown. Lose yourself in Madge Gill’s mediumistic masterpieces, thousands of intricate works produced in trance states by moonlight. Follow Remedios Varo’s alchemical transformations and Leonora Carrington’s occult bestiary. Delve into the fierce, shadowy visions of Marjorie Cameron and the wild-souled ink drawings of Vali Myers. In our own era, discover Laurie Lipton’s ethereal graphite phantasms, Alison Blickle’s modern mystical narratives, and Shannon Taggart’s haunting documents of contemporary spiritualist practices. From the symbolic paintings of the fin de siècle to the resurrection of witch-worn folkloric imagery, these artists translate their otherworldly experiences into visual feasts that still pulse with uncanny power.

This is more than just an art book – it’s a skeleton key to understanding why humans have always yearned to capture the uncapturable, to paint the invisible, to draw down the divine. Through 175 carefully curated artworks divided into explorations of The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and The Practitioners, you’ll discover how artists across time and space have translated their mystical experiences into visual feasts that still resonate with otherworldly power.

Perfect for:

• Modern mystics and seasoned skeptics alike
• Your favorite art historian with a taste for the transcendent
• That friend who has more crystals than socks
• The coffee table that yearns for something more esoteric than casual conversation starters
• Anyone who’s ever wondered why humans keep trying to paint the unpaintable
• Your own personal cabinet of curiosities
• The cosmic wanderer who collects beautiful oddities
• Hexmas giving (because nothing says “seasonal cheer” quite like a deep dive into mystical artworks, and everyone’s shelf needs a touch of the numinous)

These enchanted editions tend to vanish rapidly. Summon your signed copy before they return to whatever dimension they came from. No incantations required (though your incantatory reviews if you already have a copy are always appreciated!)

Art is, after all, magic made visible, and hopefully you will consider this book your grimoire. Here, in its pages, each brushstroke is a conjuring, each line a spell cast in pigment and possibility. Within these collected visions and voices, the unseen takes form and the ineffable finds its image.

✥ comment

Happy birthday to my three beloved art books, published in Septembers 2020, 2022, and 2023!

Let’s take a moment to appreciate these visual feasts that explore the mystical, the dark, and the fantastical.

✨ The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook For The Modern Mystic (2020)
A journey through the esoteric and spiritual in art, from theosophy to sacred geometry. This book showcases how artists have been drawn to the mystical, creating works that transcend time and place.

“The Art of the Occult crosses mystical spheres in a bid to inspire and delight, acting as a light introduction to the art of mysticism.”

✨ The Art of Darkness: A Treasury Of The Morbid, Melancholic & Macabre (2022)
Dive into the shadows with this exploration of how artists have grappled with the darker aspects of the human condition. From the haunting to the horrifying, this book asks: what comfort can be found in facing our demons?

“We deny our inner darkness at our own peril. This book invites us to sit for a while with these shadows – from the safety of our armchairs.”

✨ The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal (2023)
Embark on a magical journey through the realms of imagination. From mermaids to mythical creatures, this book celebrates the fantastical visions that have captivated artists throughout history.

“Our most madcap adventures and extraordinary flights of fancy – this is the fabulous realm of fantasy, and the spectrum of fantastic art is an abundant, richly diverse wonderland to explore.”

These books are more than just curations of art – they’re gateways to other worlds, invitations to explore the depths of human creativity and imagination. Whether you’re drawn to the mystical, the macabre, or the magical, there’s a book in this trio for you.
Find them here or grab a signed copy here and join me in celebrating these weird little art goblins and the windows they open into extraordinary realms!

✥ comment