Black, red, and fabulously witchy
Wild Alchemy Journal is designed to look a bit like a spellbook. The dust jacket is decorated with birds and slightly menacing looking eye-balls, and the contributor page doubles as a constellation of stars. The magazine describes itself as an exploration of “earth, fire, water, air and aether”, and some of the lines in the editor’s letter are so magical and mystical, they are borderline incomprehensible:
“The sun kisses the moon as we chase our tails riding dragons across night skies and as Martians we take up our iron swords, the scent of pepper and smoke filling our lungs… We rise, like the tulip, to face the sun for a new day.”
If the idea of kissing the moon and riding a dragon sounds fun to you, Wild Alchemy will be a delight. Inside this issue, which is devoted to the ‘Fire’ element, there are recipes for heat-based herbal medicines, and “sex magic” spells, as well as more academic contributions (the latter may come as a relief to anyone not entirely convinced that they are in fact a tulip/ martian). One such highlight is an interview about heliophysics with the multi-disciplinary artist Aoife van Linden Tol, who has been a guest lecturer at NASA.
Wild Alchemy’s design, which is black and red and fabulously witchy, is enough to convince even the most skeptical reader that she is dabbling in the occult.
Below we’ve photographed some of our favourite spreads.
