Language of Flowers by Alphonse Mucha, Plate 35 from Album de la Décoration, 1900. color lithograph. There is also another part, "Byzantine", also 1898/99, and a similar image "Woman with a daisy"/"Femme a la marguerite" of 1899/1900. All of them were given to Forrer's studio as a draft and were printed on fabric by them.
Researcher in Evolutionary Ecology, Monica Gagliano, believes plants have something to say. Though an unusual belief in the capitalist age, where much of the natural world has been reduced to a resource, she follows in a long line of thinkers, artists and herbalists who have conversed with plants. Many herbalists have been known to ask plants questions, or tell clients to see how they get on with Melissa (lemon balm, known for its anxiety-reducing properties) as if this were not just an act of consuming but a relationship to be found. Similar language can be found in the way people talk about psychoactive drugs, many practitioners describing a psilocybin trip as akin to “meeting the spirit of the mushroom.” Some will see this process as conversing with the unconscious mind, god, or another realm. For creative writing, it doesn’t really matter what you believe so long as you are open to experience.
Go on a walk in nature, whether that’s your local park, woodland or coast, and look out for trees and plants. Think about what feelings they evoke for you—some of these will be deeply personal, others, culturally-derived. Every tree, flower or herb has different associations in different cosmologies and folk traditions, while medicinal usages are more universal. The Victorians formalised codifying messages via flowers in the poetically named Language of Flowers. When you’ve found your plant collaborator, allow it to impart a story, poem or essay via an automatic, channelled process. These seeds may well grow into something more polished. As always, your work needn’t be about plants or our magazine themes—it might engage with magic but then it might not—this is occult-generated writing so the resulting work could be science writing or social realism—the story could even be set in a concrete parking lot.
A reminder: it doesn’t have to be about plants, in fact, we’d prefer it wasn’t. As with all Spiritus Mundi themes, we are asking you to use a tool to find the story; in the same way a seer might look into a crystal ball and see a vision of the future, not an image of herself gazing in a crystal ball, speak to plants in order to find the seeds of an original piece of work.
Please note: this is a call for submissions for our website, not for our book, forthcoming from Liminal 11.
How to submit
You may respond to this theme with short fiction, creative non-fiction, or poetry (maximum three poems).
We accept submissions via email. Please send your work to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. We ask that you include Spiritus Mundi in the subject line, followed by your name and the genre of the work you are submitting. Your work should be provided as an attachment, not pasted into the body of your email. It needn’t be occult-themed, though we do love work that draws on the occult, mythology, folklore and magic; more importantly, it must in some way be generated by speaking with plants. All submissions should be accompanied by an artist bio of no more than 100 words. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer a fee for online Spiritus Mundi submissions, nor can we offer feedback to unsuccessful entries (if you want feedback, we offer it to Patreon subscribers)—this is because we are fully volunteer-run. The deadline is July 1st.
*Note: though we accept submissions to Spiritus Mundi, one of our prime goals here is to offer generative prompts for helping you get in touch with the unconscious, conjure up images and words which you can use later on. We will be publishing selected submissions sometime between August and September on our website.