What if every time you sit down to write, paint, or create anything, you’re not just being metaphorically magical? What if you’re actually casting a spell, opening a portal between invisible forces and visible matter, making something real out of nothing?
Most of us have been taught to think of creativity as either divine inspiration (totally out of our control) or disciplined labor (totally within our control). But Pam Grossman argues there’s a third option that’s been suppressed for centuries. Creativity is magic. Not in a cute, motivational poster way. In an actual, literal, you’re-performing-an-ancient-practice way.
And once you understand how creativity and magic use the exact same mechanisms, you stop forcing your work and start channeling it instead.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
This conversation goes deep into why casting a creative circle before you work functions identically to casting a magical spell. Pam breaks down the magician’s pose (one hand up receiving divine inspiration, one hand down grounding it into matter) and why this isn’t just symbolic. It’s describing the actual role of the creator as the bridge between realms.
You’ll also discover why magic wasn’t suppressed because it was fake, but because it was real in a way that threatened capitalism and colonial control. When you can access your own power through ritual, plant medicine, divination, and creative practice, you don’t need external authority to tell you what’s true. That’s dangerous to systems built on obedience.
And finally, Pam walks through practical techniques like bibliomancy (divination through randomly opening books), tarot pulls for creative guidance, and how to ritualize your creative process so your brain learns to shift into flow state on command.
Why Creativity as Magic Matters Right Now
We’re living in an era that tells us productivity is discipline, creativity is talent, and magic is delusion. But this materialist worldview is only a few hundred years old. For thousands of years across every culture, humans understood that making art, healing bodies, communicating with the dead, and accessing invisible forces were all part of the same practice.
The suppression of magic was never about protecting people from lies. It was about controlling populations who had direct access to their own power. When indigenous communities practiced plant medicine ceremonies, when women were healers and midwives, when folk magic allowed people to divine their own futures, they didn’t need priests or politicians to interpret reality for them.
Reclaiming creativity as magic is a political act. It’s saying you trust your own intuition, your own rituals, your own direct line to Source more than you trust external systems designed to keep you small. And in a world built on consumption and distraction, that’s rebellion.
About Pam Grossman
Pam Grossman is the author of Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity and Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power. She’s also the host of The Witch Wave podcast, where she interviews the world’s most creative magical people.
Pam isn’t approaching this from a purely spiritual angle or a purely academic one. She’s what she calls a “pragmatic witch” with a high bullshit meter. She’s studied how the archetype of the witch reflects cultural fears about feminine power, and she’s spent decades documenting how the most effective creators throughout history (Beyoncé, Benjamin Franklin, Toni Morrison, David Bowie) all used techniques traditionally considered magical.
Her work bridges the sacred and the scientific, making ancient practices accessible without dumbing them down.
Key Insights from Pam Grossman
Creativity Literally Functions as Spellwork
Pam makes the case that when you light a candle before writing, when you pull tarot cards for guidance on a project, when you meditate to access what David Lynch called “the unified field,” you’re not preparing to be creative. You are being creative. The ritual itself is the work. Magic and making use the same process of taking invisible energy and grounding it into visible matter. That’s why so many artists, musicians, and writers have altars, perform rituals, and call on muses. They’re not being eccentric. They’re using consciousness technology that works.
You Are the Potato (And That’s Actually the Point)
In what might be the best metaphor of the episode, Pam compares the creative person to a potato in a science class battery experiment. You’re not the power source. You’re the conductor that allows opposite currents to flow through and close the circuit. One hand reaches up to receive divine inspiration. The other hand reaches down to ground it into the material world. Your job isn’t to generate the electricity. Your job is to get out of the way and let it flow through you. Most productivity advice tells you to be more disciplined, smarter, more strategic. But magic says stop forcing the current and start becoming the channel.
Magic Was Banned Because It Was Real, Not Fake
This is where the conversation gets political. Pam traces how the suppression of magic coincided with colonialism and capitalism. When you label someone’s spiritual practice as witchcraft or sorcery, you’re not identifying something evil. You’re identifying something powerful that threatens your control. Indigenous populations who used plant medicine, communities who practiced divination, women who were healers—all of them had direct access to invisible forces that didn’t require institutional approval. That’s dangerous to empires built on extraction and obedience. So magic was demonized, trivialized, and reframed as either stupid (for modern rational people) or evil (for religious fundamentalists). Both narratives serve the same function: keep you disconnected from your own power.
The Placebo Effect Isn’t Fake—It’s Part of the Magic
When skeptics dismiss magic as placebo, Pam flips the script. Why are we acting like placebo is fake? You believe something, so your body does something or you see something differently. That’s not delusion. That’s how consciousness works. If lighting a candle and calling on a goddess makes you feel more present, more open, more creative, who cares if it’s “real” in a materialist sense? The results are real. Your nervous system shifts. Your work flows. Ideas come through that you didn’t consciously plan. Call it psychology, call it neuroscience, call it magic. The mechanism matters less than the outcome.
Ritual Trains Your Brain to Enter Flow State
This is where the woo meets the science. Pam talks about having a specific album she listens to before creative work, a certain pressure point she presses, objects on her altar she interfaces with. These aren’t arbitrary. They’re Pavlovian triggers. You’re training your brain to recognize “this is the shift into magician mode.” It’s the same technique NLP practitioners and hypnotists use. Pick your cue (candle, scent, song, pose) and your brain learns the pattern: this equals creative state. You don’t have to spend 45 minutes convincing yourself to work. You light the candle and your nervous system knows what to do.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Creative Magic
Most people want magic to be passive. They want to light the candle, say the words, and have inspiration download fully formed with no effort. But that’s not how it works.
Magic is collaboration, not abdication. You still have to show up. You still have to do the work. You still have to sit in the chair and write the book, record the album, finish the project. The ritual doesn’t replace labor. It makes the labor flow instead of feel forced.
And this is where a lot of people get stuck. They think if they’re truly in flow, it should feel effortless all the time. But Pam’s clear: you will still have creative demons. You’ll still hit resistance. You’ll still second-guess yourself. The difference is you learn to expect the demons, allow them to show up, but not let them stop you. You know they’re part of the process, not proof you’re on the wrong path.
The uncomfortable part is that magic asks you to trust something you can’t control. It asks you to believe in forces you can’t see. It asks you to ritualize your work and surrender to mystery instead of white-knuckling your way through every project. For people trained in materialism and rationality, that feels terrifying. But it’s also the only way to access the depth of creativity that actually transforms you and your work.
Quotes That Hit Different
“I wouldn’t bother with magic if it didn’t work for me.” — 2:07
This is Pam’s entire ethos in one sentence. She’s not interested in theory or belief systems. She’s results-driven. If the techniques didn’t produce better creative output, she wouldn’t use them.
“You’re not avoiding the feeling. You’re avoiding what you’re afraid the feeling means about you.” — (referenced in context)
This applies to creative resistance just as much as emotional avoidance. When you can’t start a project, you’re usually not afraid of the work. You’re afraid of what it means if you try and fail, or try and succeed.
“By calling out to spirit, it can be an ancestor. I love calling to my grandmothers in particular for help from the other side. But use a name for it and call out to it and just ask it to help you with a creative project that you’re working on and see what happens.” — 56:16
The simplest possible instruction: ask for help. Name the force (spirit, ancestor, deity, Luke Skywalker, whatever resonates) and invite collaboration.
“Magic often has to do with interfacing with invisible forces and communing with something that is greater than ourselves so we can make real change here in the material embodied world.” — 10:40
This reframes magic from escapism to embodiment. You’re not leaving reality. You’re bringing something invisible into reality.
“These magical techniques I’ve seen have worked for thousands of people, if not millions of people. And so I think it’s worth sharing and encouraging anyone who has felt attracted to these ideas, but then kind of stopped themselves because they thought it was silly or stupid or sinful.” — 54:24
Permission slip for anyone who’s been curious about magic but shut it down because of shame, skepticism, or religious conditioning.
How to Apply This in Your Life
Start with one ritual before your creative work. It can be absurdly simple. Light a candle. Put on a specific song. Hold a stone. Strike the magician’s pose (one hand up, one hand down) and invite spirit to collaborate.
The key is consistency. Do the same ritual every time you sit down to create. Your brain will start to recognize the pattern and shift into flow state faster. You’re building a Pavlovian trigger for your nervous system.
If you want to go deeper, create a small altar. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. A corner of your desk works. Put objects there that feel meaningful—deities, fictional characters, candles, anything that represents the energy you want to work with. Before you create, light a candle or give an offering of water. You’re building a relationship with the invisible forces you’re calling on.
And when you hit resistance, ask yourself Pam’s question: Are you afraid of the work, or are you afraid of what it means about you if you do the work? Usually it’s the second one. That’s a demon you can name, acknowledge, and work with instead of letting it stop you entirely.
Resources & Links from This Episode
- Pam Grossman’s website: pamgrossman.com – Access to all her work, books, and podcast
- Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity – Pam’s book on blending magic and making (available wherever books are sold)
- Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power – Pam’s first book on the witch archetype and feminine power
- The Witch Wave podcast – Pam’s podcast interviewing creative magical people
- Related Mind Love episodes on ritual, consciousness, and creative practice
Take This Work Deeper
If this conversation hit you and you’re ready to work with creative blocks using something deeper than discipline alone, join us in the Mind Love Collective. We meet monthly for themed calls where you get coached through whatever you’re navigating that month, including how to blend the sacred and the practical in your own work. It’s free to join at mindlove.com/collective.
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