QUOTES from Seligmann: artist as alchemist and more

In "Magic Circles," for View, Seligmann used Jung as the springboard for an analogy between artistic creation and alchemical process:

According to Jung, the alchemic process is mainly of a psychic nature; and this makes it even more analogous to the artist's labor. In vain do we seek to investigate the nature of the occult forces which are at work in the act of artistic creation. The artist himself does not master them. He is subjected to them just as a medium experiences the trance; and it is in this state that the artist produces beings which obey the morphological laws and the ordering forces of nature.

From Martica Sawin

Another

In The History of Magic and the Occult Kurt Seligmann writes:
We think of the magus as the possessor of occult secrets, a master of esoteric wisdom, who makes use of this knowledge for his own good as well as for that of his fellow men. He is a “white” magician, less fond of prodigies than of the contemplation of nature, in which he discovers marvelous active forces where others only see familiar things. For him the power of God is not concentrated in this One, but permeates every being of the universe. (Seligmann 206)

MORE Writing from Seligmann

Kurt Seligmann’s “Heritage of the Accursed” from Charles Henri Ford‘s magazine View (number 5, December 1945). Reprinted in View: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940–1947 (compiled by Catrina Neiman & Paul Nathan; printed by the Thunder’s Mouth Press in 1992) as pages 179–182.

Seligmann Website