All Art Is Magic, and Your Journal Is a Grimoire

Creativity is dangerous. My best ideas have been my craziest ones, so I tend to lean into the crazy. In both life and my creative work, I follow ideas that lead me down novel paths where I have no prior experience to predict what’s ahead. That’s why creativity can be so terrifying. A creative life is a chaotic life. It requires surrender and a willingness to let yourself be carried by tumultuous currents toward unknown destinations that risk unraveling your carefully constructed identity and worldview.

I’ve compulsively chased that danger for most of my life—chasing ideas, chasing novelty, chasing the unpredictable, sometimes to unhealthy degrees. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found balance, and I’ve done that through a personal scientific method of experimentation and journaling, taking meticulous notes about every success and failure, noting when I’ve taken the chaos too far while equally noting when I became too stagnant.

Eventually, all those notes found a name: my creative grimoire. A grimoire is a book of spells. It’s a book of strategies that have attracted creative inspiration, and especially that ecstatic kind that floods the mind with torrents of revelation and ideas that shift the consciousness in sustainable and positive directions and move my life toward a sense of alignment with what I might call my true will.

The birth of a grimoire

Like most people, I was an imaginative kid. Unlike many people, I never stopped being imaginative. I’ve cultivated my imagination. I’ve studied it. I valued it early because it helped me get through childhood trauma. As a child, I read books about visualization, art, creativity, and anything that stirred my imagination. As I grew older, I followed research on creativity and adjacent topics and took extensive notes. I practiced, meditated on the paths my mind took when I was at my most creative, and kept records of my experiments and experiences.

I’ve made a hobby of free writing and free talking. I sit with a notebook and a pen and write whatever pops into my head (or go for a walk and talk into a recorder)…and often, what I write is more enlightening than I could have expected. When I return to past writings, I often find surprising insights I’d either forgotten or hadn’t considered at the time of writing.

I treat it like science. I have processes and ideas that form the foundation for my work. If that foundation leads to good outcomes, the ideas supporting it survive. If something isn’t working, I delete, revise, and replace ideas as needed to strengthen the foundation.

As I said, I came to think of this collection of notes as my grimoire — a personal record of what I’ve learned, what I’ve tried, and what has resulted from the effort.

The language is intentional. A “creative diary” or “creative journal” is mundane, but a “creative grimoire” is something held in reverence. When I consult my grimoire, there’s an amount of ritual involved. A grimoire has power.

You might think I’m playing semantic games, and I am. Words affect perception, and in creative work, perception is everything. It doesn’t matter that the physical materials of a grimoire versus a diary are precisely the same. It doesn’t matter if you plan to use it in the same way. It only matters that the name we give it changes its role in your life and work. Would you rather have a diary of your creative work, or a spell book?

All art is magic

When people make art, they’re practicing magic whether they know it or not. To create at all is to exercise power. To create art is to exert power on your own mind and push your influence into the minds of others. The work can shape moods, opinions, identities, ideologies, and even politics.

By almost any definition of magic, art is magic. If we define magic as imagination manifested in the material world, then art is magic. If we define it as the will of the practitioner conveyed into the collective consciousness, then art is magic. If we define it as the intentional shaping of perception, then art is magic. If we define it as the bending of one mind by another, then art is magic.

Aleister Crowley’s definition was “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” He may or may not have truly believed change was occurring in the material world as a direct result of conscious will, but I suspect belief isn’t necessary to achieve the same results.

Dion Fortune refined Crowley’s definition: “the art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with the Will.” This is an internal definition—a change in the mind.

Alan Moore aligns better with my own experience and the philosophy I’d like to promote, claiming that art and magic are the same act. He defines it as “the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images to achieve changes in consciousness.” He also points to the shared roots of the words themselves. A grimoire is just a grammar. To cast a spell is “to spell.” To recite an incantation is to enchant, or to chant. Art and magic share the same roots because they were never separate.

Those definitions work fine, but my own nutshell definition is: Learned flexibility of mind in order to change our experience and, possibly, the experiences of others.

Simple.

But the practice can be necessarily difficult, continuously training that flexibility of mind, using imagination and experimentation to wrench the mind free of assumed and accumulated knowledge, opinions, and habitual behaviors—all the lazy ideas about reality and our place within it that we set and forget. It’s about upsetting the balance, seeing where you fall, and finding new balance. Just like stretching the body to become more flexible, the mind must be stretched as a regular practice.

No belief required

I don’t believe in metaphysical magic. I only claim that, by the above definitions, I see magic’s effects all around me. I don’t need belief to apprehend the precarious structural map that human consciousness and creativity imposes on cosmic disorder and how arbitrarily that map was drawn using a limited number of barely seen roadmaps. In fact, belief can even be a hindrance to change and creativity, making it harder to redraw the map and forcing a person to ignore contradictory landmarks, lest one has to admit the fallacies in the map as a whole.

But we can make it work without belief. Breathing isn’t a matter of belief; we just do it. Magic isn’t a matter of belief, yet we’re all wandering through our lives performing small rituals that have effects on our minds and on the experiences of others—but since we don’t recognize the power we wield, we can avoid taking responsibility for its effects.

I’ve been referring to belief in its more concrete variety. But belief, when it’s flexible, dynamic, and chosen with intent, can be powerful.

Most of us cling to beliefs that give us a sense of certainty, which offers us comfort, and then we confuse those beliefs with reality itself. That’s the kind of belief that keeps us chained to our delusions and unable to see the universe of possibilities that exist outside them. They limit imagination and keep us stuck in ruts, repeating habitual behavior and unable to find creative ways to escape our problems. But beliefs can be flexible. They can be chosen with intent for their seeming accuracy or usefulness in helping us make decisions and navigate the world effectively. When they fail those tests, we discard them or swap in better ones. I call these dynamic beliefs.

Consider the difference between these two statements:

The universe is conspiring to help you create.

When I approach creativity with the assumption that the universe is conspiring to help me, I notice more opportunities and feel more courageous in my work.

The first makes a claim about external reality. The second describes an inner experience and its practical effects. I write in the second mode. You can try any approach I describe without committing to a concrete belief system. If it enhances your creativity, use it. If it doesn’t, set it aside.

Take “flow” as an example of finding multiple ways of viewing the same phenomenon to varying effects. The term was coined in 1975 by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi for the state where self-consciousness dissipates and you’re so fully immersed the activity feels effortless. The cult of productivity has coopted it into a tool for shipping more. The “flow state,” as they practice it, is mundane; it’s a mere way to get more done.

But now let’s talk about mystical transcendence—which, by the way, is a measurable state that has been studied in laboratories…again, no belief in the supernatural is required. But supernatural or not, transcendence reaches beyond the practical. It extends deeper into the consciousness than simple concentration. By treating my creative practice as a mystical practice rather than a mundane act of focus, I give it far more gravity, and I get far better results. And this is supported by research: when scientists have studied flow, peak experiences, and mystical states, they’ve found they share nearly identical features, which we can file together under the umbrella term “self-transcendent experiences.” This is the same move as turning a diary into a grimoire. The name changes what the thing can do.