Journal & archive · 3 dossiers · 48 pieces
Journal of the Vision Quest
Exploring Visionary Art & Culture
Dossiers
Vision Craft Charting 21st Century Visionary Art
Visionary art emerged across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a countercurrent to modernist formalism and the dominance of high-concept art. Rather than treating the image primarily as critique, proposition or aesthetic object, it employs signs, symbols and imaginal forms as records of transpersonal exploration—attempts to render altered states, archetypal realities and expanded modes of consciousness visible.
An Introduction to Ernst Fuchs
Ernst Fuchs was an extraordinarily talented and multifaceted Austrian artist born on February 13, 1930. He was a master of several mediums including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, and he also ventured into architecture, stage designing, poetry, and singing. Fuchs was a pivotal figure in the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a movement he co-founded. His legacy places him as one of the pivotal founders of contemporary visionary art and one of the great preservers and reinvigorators of the timeless legacy of sacred art.
Interview iiFlowing Light – The Art of A. Andrew Gonzalez
A. Andrew Gonzalez, of San Antonio, Texas, has been depicting the human form "as temple and vessel sublimed by transformative forces" for over 15 years. Empowered by an artistic mission to "transform the collective imagination",
Interview iiiH. R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century
A penetrating and groundbreaking analysis of the biomechanical, transhuman, mystical and perinatal imagery in the artistic oeuvre of Han Rudi Giger.
Source ivOn Visionary Art
The Visionary lineage predates religion, and has informed sacred art across the millennia. The Visionary artist is the eternal poet – ‘ein verschollener Stil’ is the grammar through which they speak. The lineage from these founding fathers is subtle but true. From the shaman’s etchings, this artistic spirit continues into the carvings of the ancients.
Essay vPsychedelia & Visionary Art
This essay investigates the poetics of visionary art as a result of interactions between local cultures and non-ordinary states of consciousness. We seek, through brief examples, to draw a parallel between images produced in the past, images produced by Amazonian tribes, and the production of contemporary artists and to point out series of meaningful coincidences between them.
Essay viThe New Eye – Visionary Art and Tradition
The historical lineage of visionary artists masks a deeper and more commanding claim that sets the genre apart from the marvelous idiosyncrasies of outsider art. The claim is that the visionary artist gives personal expression to a transpersonal dimension, a cosmic plane that uncovers the nature that lies beyond naturalism, and that reveals, not an individual imagination, but an imaginal world, a mundus imaginalis.
Essay
Psychonautics Perinatal, Transpersonal and Archetypal Psyche
Psychonautics is the exploration of territories of psychological and spiritual experience, states linked to birth, death, and rebirth. Experiences that extend beyond the ordinary ego, and encounters with mythic images, figures and patterns that appear to possess an archetypal symbolic reality.
Psychology of the Future : Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research
Holotropic Experiences and Their Healing and Heuristic Potential. The source of observations explored in this article has been long-term systematic study of what academic psychiatry calls ‘altered’ or ‘non-ordinary states of consciousness.’…
iiA Cosmological Hypothesis
The following pages by Dr. A. Kafkalides have been taken from his book (in Greek) Beyond the Boundaries of the Womb which was left unfinished in 1987 due to his death. We thank John Alevizos , Nicholas Biniaris and Jody Morgan for the translation of the pages into English.
Essay iiiGoddess of the Jewelled Web – The Transmission of the Transpersonal in Visionary Art
Art striving for an existential veracity or 'truth' will be put upon a difficult and confusing road, forking and branching pathways; between on one hand positivist and nominalist systems tending toward rationality (as in 'ratio', to measure), and on the other extreme something akin to pure aesthetics, decor, and the enjoyment of a sensoric object. What we wish to seek here is a deeper meaning for the Arts which put Sacred Art upon a respectable and integral foundation.
Essay ivSome general properties of self-regulating open hierarchic order (SOHO)
The regenerative potential of organisms and societies manifests itself in fluctuations from the highest level of integration down to earlier, more primitive levels, and up again to a new, modified pattern. Processes of this type seem to play a major part in biological and mental evolution, and are symbolized in the universal death-and-rebirth motive in mythology.
Source vWise Mind – A Case for the Integration of Subjective Experience with Objective Reality in the Age of Fragmentation
By: Flore Singer Aaslid (flore.aaslid@svt.ntnu.no) Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Abstract The manner in which reality is perceived and conceptualized has profound implications for many levels of human existence. From…
Entheogenic Shamanism The Visionary Pharmakon
The Greeks had one word - pharmakon - for both remedy and poison. This dossier takes the plant as an instrument rather than a sacrament or a drug. The plant arranges a condition. Jonathan Ott, who with Ruck, Bigwood, Staples and Wasson coined the word 'entheogen'. Ott had no patience for the phrase psychedelic renaissance: nothing had died, so nothing was being reborn - the practice has been continuous for ten thousand years and is still going strong.
An Interview with Pablo Amaringo
The late Pablo Amaringo trained as a curandero in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. Pablo left us this November 2009, and this interview is posted in homage to this great Artist and great Man.
Interview iiBody Signs : Body Decoration and Sensory Symbolism in South America
By : David Howes Sociology and Anthropology Concordia University Montreal . Quebec CANADA H3G 1M8 Westerners are accustomed to seeing photographs of native South Americans with elaborately painted bodies or with lips…
Essay iiiRitual
By : The Bricoleur Ritual can be described in various ways. Here are the most accurate descriptions I can think of: Mircea Eliade, a pioneer in the study of religion and spirituality,…
Essay"Without Vision, the people perish." Black Elk
A library, research project, community network and place of inspiration,
exploring the history, present and future of Sacred Art, Visionary Art, techniques and theory. An evolving body of knowledge and mentorship around visionary art accessible anywhere in the world.
Established in 2002, having moved through many permutations, Lila has relaunched in July 2026 in conditions of technological acceleration, to help support and answer the call for ‘inner life’.
Templo Sacrosanto
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Templo Sancto - Pablo Amaringo
Strands
A dossier is a finite editorial constellation organised around a governing question — an issue. A strand is a continuing line of inquiry that runs across many dossiers; each dossier brings several of them into temporary conjunction.
Creativity, Art, Embodiment, Integration How is vision carried into form, body, praxis and culture? Pigment, glaze and the icon canon; visionary prose, music and architecture; mark-making; creative vitality; collective integration. 0 Ecology, Cosmos & Emergence How does visionary experience disclose relations between living systems, natural form, cosmology and emergent order? Plant intelligence and animism, complexity and self-organisation, the more-than-human world. 7 Futures, Cyberdelics, Sociotechnical Imaginaries How do technologies and designed environments produce, mediate or alter visionary experience? How does our dreaming of the future shape it? Digital and immersive media, engineered awe, the politics of induced states (cyberdelics). 0 Myth & Symbol How do visionary images acquire, carry and transform meaning? Archetype and correspondence, sacred geometry, iconography, the traffic between private image and inherited form. 3 Psyche & Transformation What does visionary experience do to a person and a culture, and what enables transformation rather than inflation or collapse? Integration, individuation, spiritual emergency, the ethics of altered states. 6 Traditions & Transmission How is visionary knowledge preserved, taught, inherited and revised? Lineages and schools, master and student, continuity and rupture - and the questions of cultural change, inheritance and legitimacy. 20 Visionary States How does visionary experience arise, and what distinguishes its conditions? Entheogenic and trance states, dream and hypnagogia, the perinatal and the mystical, awe and dread. 2Practicing Art
Vision Craft
Vision is a faculty, it can be cultivated and expressed through art. We teach it as a sequence of capacities. Saturation, withdrawal, incubation, invitation, dialogue, realisation — a rhythm. Sustained inner seeing, hypnagogic trance, active imagination, automatic mark-making, image fasting, symbolic incubation, and bringing forth a world through techniques of Visionary Art.
Spontaneity & Symbols
Learning to let forms emerge before intention closes around them. Developing a personal symbolic language from instinct, memory, vision and recurring image.
Pigments & Elements
Understanding colour as material substance: earth, mineral, binder, glaze and light. Building a practical relationship with the physical elements from which an image is made.
Decalcomania
Using pressure, transfer and accident to generate forms that conscious design could not predict. Learning to recognise, develop and refine the worlds concealed within the resulting textures.
Bringing Forth a World
Moving from isolated images towards a coherent imaginative environment. Developing atmosphere, scale, narrative and internal laws so that a world begins to sustain its own reality.
Mischtechnik
Building luminosity through layered underpainting, translucent colour and controlled opacity. Learning the historic technique as a living method for giving visionary images depth, radiance and presence.