PHOTOGRAPHY BY LILLIAN LIU
Model: @prisciliavanb
Designs: Syban Velardi-laufer @sybansyban
Makeup: Maya Lewis Makeup @mayalewismakeup
Lighting: Lumecube @lumecube

Model: Karie Holst @karieleighholst
Environment Artist: CSaros @eyeofsaros Dress: Firefly Path @fireflypath
Headdress: DreamscometrueUA @dreams_cometrueua
Necklace: Regal Rose @regalrose Nails: Lory Sun Artistry @lorysunartistry Lighting: Elinchrom @elinchrom_ltd, Nanlite @nanliteusa

On a long winter’s night, at an hour through which most mortals slumber like cozy hedgehogs, your mind roams the heavens. You soar past the rooftops and treetops and into the clouds; you drift among stars and planets, gazing tenderly down at the quiet world.

You are drawn, naturally, to the moon. She is your sister; her light is your light too.

So it’s natural that when you open your eyes in the darkness, she follows you to earth. In her shimmering gown and glowing moonstones, she finds you in the slumbering woods—among the remnants of a Gothic palace, let’s say—and dips her feet into the stream of time. Thus she connects herself to the tides, the stars, the planet, and the universe. We believe there’s no kinder protector possible.

“Assemble, ye huntresses and warriors,” she calls. “Gather to us, our sister spirits of the heavens’ untapped powers!”

You watch, rapt, as a pantheon of celestial figures manifest in different phases and moods. They’re luminous, regal, curious, playful, commanding, serene … Clad in gold dust and silver armor, bright silks in shades that drape like curtains made of twilight, and bold tiaras with dangerous tips, your divine companions marry strength to beauty and hold spirit above all. They don’t need to bow to the queen goddess, because the moon doesn’t require obeisance in order to shine; her power is her power is her power, and there’s no one who will deny it. Each one of you will have a turn to illuminate the land, the sea, the sky.

Yes, you are also an aspect of the moon. This is also your night to shine.

Photographer Lillian Liu, the brilliance behind our celestial photo feature, calls the silvery über-goddess on our cover “the soft whisper of night, the comforting glow that keeps the creeping darkness at bay.” As embodied by model Karie Holst, she’s also a creation of inspiration and innovation, just as you’d expect from an artist whose own fantasies always fuel her art.

The goddesses have bestowed multiple talents on Lillian. She’s not only a prolific photographer but also a model and a concert pianist who has performed everywhere from Vancouver (her current city) to Paris. She holds multiple degrees in music, including one in classical piano performance earned at London’s Royal College of Music, and is on the faculty of several

esteemed schools and conservatories. As a lover of antiquarian books, vintage art, animals, and (of course) fantastic costumes, she’s a creative contributor and member of the Paris-based humanitarian and environmentalist collective Free Spirit, which blends art and music with philanthropy.

With such a diverse background, where did she draw inspiration for these pictures?

“My moon goddess here isn’t derived from one culture specifically,” Lillian says, while noting that the water sign of Cancer, which is ruled by the moon, did inspire the stream in which she’s stepping and the jugs on the ground around her.

Lillian created the moon goddess character with Karie in mind. Karie is a “chameleon” who Lillian says beams yin energy—the quiet, feminine, dark type of power that finds its mate in the more aggressively garish yang.

The exquisite costume helped guide the shoot. “I build ideas from the costume up,” Lillian says. One of her first steps was to “source the dress that would convey the theme best.” She found it in the design studio of JoEllen Elam Conway, otherwise known as Firefly Path. “The gown was a perfect piece,” she says, “because of its simplicity and that fabric, which offers sleek shine with its liquid texture and an ethereal design, reminiscent of glowing moonlight radiating off the water. The floating pieces of the gown on her skin look like embedded sigils.”

She decided that Karie’s makeup would be “cool-toned and dewy as well to match the luminescent glow of the dress. And of course, we can’t forget the white wig!” Lillian and Karie did the makeup and styling themselves.

When I asked how Lillian found the perfect location for the cover shoot, she told me she created it—in her apartment.

That was where she took the photos. Once they were done, she started sketching an ideal environment for the character they’d just created. The Gothic arches made the perfect frame for Karie’s sinuous pose, and we think they’re all the palace a moon goddess will ever need—because of course she should have plants and flowing water and open sky wherever she goes.

Finally, Lillian says, “I approached my artist friend CSaros, and he brought this beautiful and mystical world to life” as a 3D rendering. “I then embedded the photograph of the model, painting in light and shadow, and began toning the whole piece,” shading the colors seamlessly.

So the Gothic arches, the stream, the silver-blue rays reaching through twisty tree branches like the timeless enchanted forest of our wishes—all of that was created from scratch and imagination, as if the goddess summoned it into being herself ?

Well, naturally. That’s what goddesses do: They create.

And, of course, they conjure. We imagine the goddesses of these inside pages represent the moon in all her attributes and phases. They were, Lillian says, “inspired by different stories and elements” and include “warriors that channel their power from the night” and the personifications of light and radiance itself, all tricked out in gold and silver … as well as a few figures of, say, speckled moonbeams on a staircase, and a sleeper who might be the dark moon at rest between waning and waxing.

You’ll recognize our perennial favorite Yinsey Wang, who embodies a mere sliver of luminous moon in glimmering blue sky, touching down at a stream in the Azores. Other phases evolve in new locations. Lillian pauses at the Château du Vivier in Fontenay-Trésigny, France, where Janis from Mars brings the blue-silver crescent of an armored new moon. Outside a church in Paris, Theresa Fractale reflects the golden glister of a bright harvest phase crowned with stars, hovering just above Earth in late summer and early fall.

In time, even the brightest heavenly body feels the need for rest. The moon goddess understands, and she promises to bestow upon you the gift of deep, peaceful repose. She guides you toward that oneiric realm in which all your dreams will be good ones.

“You’ll wake refreshed and serene,” she promises.

So go ahead—lie down below the windows of that Gothic palace grown up. Drape yourself over the stones like a knight in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Sleep as long as you can—even after the sun rises and beams yang energy toward Earth. We know the moon is always with us.

I’m going to make a prophecy. All through the coming year, I predict, you will dream of the moon. You’ll embrace her spirit and take her luster for your own. While you sleep, let the shadows guard your secrets; this gathering of celestial beings will inspire you to create more. If cold, bitter sorrow strikes, you’ll continue to shine. You have the moon’s harmonious balance for inspiration.

That’s because the truth, my luminous sisters, is that we’re all goddesses of the moon. We have our phases and dreams, our powers and light. And this season, we shine together.

We all know the cottage. The one in the story, the one where the witch lives. It sits east of the sun and west of the moon, a stone’s throw away from a glass mountain and a quick trot from the hollow tree where three dogs howl. It’s a place of boundaries and limits and risk, the beginning and end of the story, time out of time. That cottage.

And the witch makes it … cozy? Petite, anyway. Maybe even miniature.

A dollhouse, with or without humanlike figures inside. It always looks as if she just stepped out for a second. She’ll be back before you know it, with some marvel hidden in her pocket.

We all know the witch too. She’s better than her reputation. She is a healer, most likely; a reader, certainly. Her shelves are as crowded with books as her rafters are thick with bunches of drying herbs. Or maybe (additionally?) she is a temptress and a goddess of wrath, the one who builds a home out of candy and cake and then calls us rude for tearing it to bits and stuffing our faces. Or she’s a doddering old grandma waiting innocently for her red-caped granddaughter to show up with some lunch.

Which witch is yours? Where does she live? Does she prefer to sleep in a cozy cupboard bed or a wrought-iron cot? What fills her cauldron, her nightstand, her étagère?

Yes, of course witches have étagères. They need the shelves for their supplies and the objets d’art et de vertu they bring back from their travels. One broomstick can carry a girl pretty far in a night—over the seas, maybe, or back in time about a hundred years or so.

My witch is a time traveler. She also adores tiny things. She’s a friend to the bats, and of course she loves cats (and occasional rhymes). She grows flowers for the bees and bakes cakes just because.

If I talk about her as I would a friend, it’s because to me she is Real.

Enchanted Reality

A miniaturist craves two reactions: Wow, how did you make that? And Wow, that looks Real!

When a mini lover tells you that something seems “real,” they’re talking about way more than verisimilitude. Let’s capitalize it: What’s Real is a feeling, a vibe, a je ne sais quoi that connects with the Beyond and the creator in all of us.

The Real is the otherworldly rush I get from gazing into a scene. I let my eyes go soft and a little blurry. I breathe deeply and remind myself to relax. And then I forget what size I am. I also forget the year, the date, and where I’m standing—I melt into the setting. I get to live in that suspended moment, get a taste of what it would be like to be Mary, Queen of Scots, in hiding (for example). Or the wisewoman who bandages the dragon queen’s wounds and helps her live to fight another day. Or the childless crone who watches from a window while a couple of waifs pick at the walls of her cottage and swallow gobbets of marzipan and chocolate from the place where she lives.

Just for a moment, let’s not call this Real thing a dollhouse. I prefer the term domestic sculpture. We’re talking about art on a finicky scale, a magic of transformation.

No surprise, miniaturists are wisewomen and witches themselves. We are crafty repurposers and makers of arcane little doodads that puzzle our partners and give our familiars something to bat around the floor. We are Borrowers, à la the mini people in the Mary Norton novels, taking things from the big world and making them Real. We fashion stonework out of egg cartons and thatched roofs out of faux fur; we cut up our clothes to stitch crazy quilts. And please don’t invite us to play chess. The temptation is too great—queens and knights make lovely statuary, and a pawn is a fabulous pedestal to prop up a polymer-clay sink. You would be wise to at least ask us to empty our pockets before we leave.

“I actually feel it when an item has a history—a soul, if you will,” says my friend Mark, who is building a vast Georgian mansion, one room at a time. Whether the sense of history comes from the age of the object itself (vintage is huge in the tiny world) or from the parts having done duty as something else, nostalgia helps to create a connection to a world he is both reproducing and correcting in perfect little scenes.

Mini Reality and the Fine Arts

Some of the world’s great museums display miniaturism as fine art. Denmark’s National Museum has collected over a hundred antique domestic sculptures,

and in Holland you’d probably have a hard time finding a museum that doesn’t feature a dollhouse. In the U.S., the mini capital is Chicago, where you’ll find both the Thorne miniature rooms and Colleen Moore’s fairy castle. Both deliver a Real rush, but they do it in different ways.

The Thorne rooms—a few more of which are displayed in Phoenix, a few in Knoxville, Tennessee—are the gold standard for letter-perfect reality. Narcissa Niblack Thorne was a collector and design historian whose husband was an heir to the Montgomery Ward estate.

With a bit of that five-and-dime fortune, she commissioned over one hundred of the world’s swankiest and most accurate representations of historical settings from the late 1200s to the 1940s, sixty-eight of which are now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Launching her project during the Depression of the 1930s, Thorne hired out-of-work artisans, designers, and fine artists to re-create great interiors from Europe, Asia, and North America: We curtsey in a gilded French salon from 1780, or we pull up a square chair in a New Mexican dining room from 1940, its white fireplace carefully shaded to show smoke damage. Admire the cubist paintings in a tiny California hallway.

You can’t help walking away from the Thorne rooms with some morsel of historical knowledge. So Thorne’s labor of love completes the mission of the Dutch baby houses of the 1500s and beyond.

Usually a tall cabinet with shelves divided into rooms, the baby house was a teaching tool: Little girls were meant to learn about housekeeping by caring for their mini rooms. (For a trip back in time to see such a house, read or watch The Miniaturist.) Almost all of the rooms are in 1:12 scale, which means that one inch of a miniature scene equals one foot of real life—the most common scale for mini creations. The same proportions suit the miniature hyperreal in Randy Hage’s faithfully gritty renderings of decaying storefronts in the New York City area—club CBGB, for example, and a favorite delicatessen, a mom-and-pop grocery. You’ll never see anything more realistically Real; you might even find that IRL seems dull and imprecise after you sink into the miniaturist trance.

As proof that a domestic sculpture doesn’t have to be realistic to feel Real, a few miles away from the Thorne rooms, you can visit a twelve-foot-high fairy castle. This is the brainchild of actress Colleen Moore, who took her dark-eyed gamine charm off to Hollywood in the 1920s to cavort across the silver screen as a flapper. The moment you see her creation, you simply fall in love; you become a different person, a more hopeful, heart-glad sort of fairy (or witch). It’s a glittering marvel that took seven years and $500,000 to make.

In contemporary currency, that’s a cost of more than $9 million—but the skills to make such a magnum opus don’t exist anymore, so, you know, priceless.

Moore was known to hand over her own personal jewels and ask that they be turned into the back of a mini chair, or maybe a diamond and emerald chandelier. Her undersea-themed library holds tiny books (usually a few lines of text spread over several pages) signed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise), Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Agatha Christie (At Bertram’s Hotel), and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca). The astonishing confection is now on display in the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.

The fact that these houses have a place in museums means they are continuing to educate. Through them we learn what a household is; we see how different countries and eras defined it. Architectural styles, members of the family, members of the staff, the marriage of beautiful things with practical ones. And the element of fantasy in creating a home.

My mini chum Vicky Brandt used to visit Moore’s fairy castle when she was in grade school. “I would just stand there on a stool and stare,” she says. Now she makes historical miniatures and doll clothes. “I am in control of the little world I create,” she says. “That is totally opposite to the reality we live in.”

Who needs full-size reality? I’ll take a fairy castle, a cubist painting, and one of Vicky’s frocks any day. And this song, “Garden Below, Garden Above,” written by Timothy Bailey of Timothy Bailey and the Humans during the Covid pandemic:
You held her and she spoke to you
She loves you in a miniature room, a miniature room
You live inside of the house she’s made
Outside, calamity, but inside it’s safe.

Into a Great Big Beyond

Each diminutive setting is a gesture toward something so big that it boggles the mind. Call it Art or Imagination, Beauty or the Eternal; by any name, it is a magic carpet ride into another mind, a time machine, a way of connecting to whatever in us is eternally human: our imagination.

Most of us can’t afford Thorne and Moore or Hage-level brands of transcendence, but we can and do keep pushing to think of ways to repurpose things that already exist in our lives.

So the stolen chess piece does become a garden statue, a bottle cap a mixing bowl, a dental floss dispenser the back of a sleek modern toilet.

We love kits. Especially those of us with no saw or knife skills: We’ll take the factory-milled walls and clever towers, yes, please! We might get out a Dremel and cut new holes for windows, maybe kit-bash a couple of things together and change a Victorian manor into a Castle Rackrent. To make the cottage pictured on the next page, I used a very basic kit that I bought years ago. I didn’t bash anything into it (such a term!), but I did change the precut holes to accommodate Gothic windows and a door, then filled in the extra space in the corners with balsa wood and spackle. (Remember how I said I don’t have good saw or knife skills? Not a lie.) I used joint compound to get a plaster effect on the interior walls. The wood floor started out as a $4 box of coffee stirrers that I stained four different colors, then glued down on a piece of cardboard patchworked together from old envelopes.

For every fancy, swanky, amazingly Real and incredibly expensive mini manor-castle-cottage out there, you can be sure there are dozens of makers who are doing something similar with unusual materials—meaning trash—and the castoffs of full-scale modern life. If you can’t afford the stone siding made by a high-end materials company, you can certainly afford to make your own using cardboard egg cartons, as I did here. (I think it looks more Real than what you can buy anyway, and it’s easy and fun.) You don’t even have to eat eggs; when I posted a wish for a few egg cartons, my neighbors started dropping them off by the dozen. If you are my neighbor, I’ll be happy to share, because miniaturism is also about community and joy.

The Scary Side of Tiny

But. Right. You say you happen to know somebody who loathes miniatures in all forms, who always refused to play with dollhouses and dolls themselves, even shudders at the tiny toothpaste tube that comes in a motel’s convenience pack. This person probably can’t put the feeling into words other than “creepy.” They find the Thorne rooms “creepy”! He says your sweet little cottage gives him the willies!

She refuses to let herself relax into the dreamy appreciation of things miniature!

That is, perhaps, the problem: the allure of small things, small worlds, that feel Real and yet aren’t quite real, not to our scale. They make us question ourselves and our selves and our place in the universe.

In his “Essay on the ‘Uncanny,’” Sigmund Freud described the unsettling effect of doppelgangers, simulacra, and reproductions quite simply: They make us unsure about what we call life. Amid so much that is Real but not alive, how do you know that you are alive? And that the doll who might inhabit your sculpture is not? Such questions can keep you up at night, I’ll admit.

So maybe it’s natural that there are so many miniaturists who celebrate Halloween all year long. They specialize in haunted houses and witches’ lairs. Is there anything more uncanny and disturbing than a ghost living in a dollhouse? Well, your leery friend could point out, every dollhouse is haunted—at very least by childhood ideas and games that linger long after the dollhouse stops being a plaything or an educational tool.

I imagine a tiny lady in a stiff gray frock, passing from floor to floor without a staircase, weeping for what she has lost … What has she lost? Does she need help? And what sorts of experiences has my time-traveling witch had that I’ll never share?

I give my witch all my best treasures and plans, souvenirs from the places I’ve been and even the places I want to go.

I give her some books I love and others I want to read. Her cottage is my diary and day planner.

What we see in a domestic sculpture might be Real and recognizable, but it isn’t entirely little-r real. No matter how meticulous the mini work is, we know there will be some little detail that jars you, something that seems wrong.

The thickness of the writing on a jar of eye of newt, for example: From the perspective of a 1:12 person, it looks like a spluttery attempt by a kindergartner.

Most commonly, we notice that our fabrics are all far too thick to move properly in curtains, carpets, bed hangings; even all the geniuses of the Thorne rooms can’t quite make the drapes look entirely real.

And that can be alarming. Maybe we were just about to surrender to the illusion and live imaginatively (as I truly believe I could) as a miniature person in a wistful Gothic cottage, but then we see that the small world is different. Ordinary reality whooshes in and plucks us back.

I, for one, would love to rid myself of that reality.

The miniature world beckons. How far in you let yourself enter is between you and your psyche.

“All the things real people couldn’t have”

As Colleen Moore said when she was planning her spectacular fairy castle in the midst of the Great Depression, “We’ll have to think of all the things real people couldn’t have.” That’s the purpose of miniaturism: making what’s impossible in the real world into a deeper Reality, using whatever comes to hand.

In the Thorne collection, each roombox hints at a vaster world. A door opens into another room, barely glimpsed, or a dramatically curved staircase; a window offers a hint of tantalizing view. You think, This could be my room, if only I could shrink down …

Which world is Real and which simply real?

Build the cottage.

Be the witch.

Photographer: Ava Rymer @gingeredspice
Model: Molly Katherine @scarlett.o.hair
Gowns: Chotronette @chotronette
Florals: Mary Love with Love is in the Air @loveisintheairevents
Venue: Vaughan House Greenhouse & Enchanted Cottage @vaughanhouse

A rose is a broom is a wand is a door. A door is an hour is a way into a bright burst of dreams that are color and magic and a new season, a new life, for an autumn queen tangled up in enchantments. The dryads have watched over our queen pictured here,

Molly Katherine, for how long? A week? A summer? A century? Long enough for her talisman rose to have darkened and her hair to have grown into the branches. With the first chill in the air, the magic that clings to her stirs—Wake up, wake up!

Molly grips the stem of the rose. It is not the blossom that will return her fully to life; it is the thorns. So she dreams, ’til the stem transforms into the handle of a broom and the forest a familiar.

When she opens her eyes, her first thought is of home.

A stone dragon points the way. She and the broom take off … for a palace? No, no, no—what she needs now is a cottage.

An enchanted one. She has plans to lay.

Autumn is the season of memories and plans. This is the time for looking back on the year thus far and dreaming up future magic. You gather mushrooms and firewood, the last foraging from the glen. Scour the windows, plump the pillows, set a soup pot to simmering. Settle in with a book or a craft and mull over who you’ll be next.

There is no better place for a season’s contemplation—and reinvention—than a cottage. We become our best selves in a meaningful space, one with a connection to the earth and the past, a place for contemplation, safety, comfort, the glow of hearth and heart.

Naturally, we would follow Molly just about anywhere.

We are lucky that she headed for one of our mutually favorite haunts, the Vaughan House near Lynchburg, Virginia. Their new cottage—perfect for queens, fairies, witches, all manner of enchanted creature—is just the place to regroup.

In its traditional definition, a cottage is a small home without land. Other than that, it could be almost anything. It could cluster with others in a village; it might stand alone on a moor, in the middle of a forest, or the edge of a bog, maybe teeter at the top of a cliff or nestle into the rock just below.

Cottages are history, fairy tales, romance, tradition, abundance. The pluckiest heroines (and most wizened witches) live in cottages. They’ll take a palace, sure, once they’ve earned

it—but they start their lives the hardscrabble way and have to learn to value the so-called simpler things such as good bread and family love. Especially in a tale by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm, when a cottage might at first look to the characters like what we’d call a hut, even a hovel: something mean and poor, a starting place rather than an end.

I grew up with a version of “Hansel and Gretel” that begins in such a hovel, where the parents cannot manage to put food on the table. When Mother and Father decide, regretfully, to send the children into the forest to fend for themselves, the kids make an unpromising start by using the bread in their supper basket for marking their path. There’s a bit of good luck when they spot a cottage made out of glorious food—what says “Welcome home” better than a beautiful meal? Plentiful food, full bellies, pleasure … It all sounds great to the resident witch too, as long as the children feed her in return.

It is her cottage after all. Her home. And just look at how creative she’s been with building and decorating it. At the very least, the place continues to define ingenuity, as Hansel and Gretel use their wits to escape.

They return, of course, to the cottage where they were born, and their remorseful parents celebrate their arrival.

In a bustling world, we yearn for home, for simplicity free of the pressures that come with living crowded into cities, competing for space. We want a home with a personality, a sense of tradition verging on nostalgia (and what’s wrong with remembering the best of the past? Nothing). Cottages are quaint in the best way, one-of-a-kind and picture-worthy: the walls half- timbered, rock-faced, wood-shingled, or coated in pebbly harling and tinted white or ochre; the roof thatched or slate-shingled, peaked, sturdy. Naturally sourced, connected to the earth, they are part of our autumn dreams, when we all want to be witches.

And our art and our stories. In Dutch master Adriaen van Ostade’s Cottage Dooryard of 1643, a father gazes over laundry, a chicken coop, a boy playing with a dog, a mother cleaning mussels, a daughter tending a younger sibling. It’s a vision of life that is simply life, a quiet contentment. Berthe Morisot took us indoors with her Cottage Interior of 1886, in which the artist dares to show light colors, a table set for tea, and a girl framed in a doorway, moving from one space to another as she steps toward the transformation of young womanhood.

Now step into The Enchanted Cottage of 1945, an early romantasy movie in which two disfigured lovers see each other as they really are inside. We know all along that Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young are meant for each other—if only they weren’t so determined to see themselves as homely. What do looks matter anyway? Well, just in case: The cottage shapeshifts their exteriors to match the gorgeous people they are deep down, and then—even better—they accept the love that’s offered, and they become their true selves freed of concern about their appearance.

A dream cottage hovers behind every cascade of pink roses in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. John William Waterhouse’s Soul of the Rose (1908) is all sensory delight as a young woman revels in the pleasures of smell and touch; one hand cups the petals gently while the other digs into the rough wall as if to say that she’s ready for all experience.

Claude Monet’s 1925 House Among the Roses is a quintessential impressionist confection celebrated in suggestive strokes of color, not rigid forms and boundaries. It depicts the house where the artist lived in Giverny—rather, a portion of that house, for the whole home is quite grand. In painting just a portion of it, he created an intimacy and dizzy lyricism to hint that even those who can afford something fancy prefer a cottage.

Inside, a cottage is just right for serious work too. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple lives in the last cottage on Old Pasture Lane. From the comforts of her tea table and easy chair, she puts chaos into order by solving all manner of nasty murders inside cozy novels.

Where does Rat live in The Wind in the Willows? Sure, it’s called an underground home, the Dulce Domum, a burrow—but look at the pictures Kenneth Grahame’s novel inspires. You’ll see books and fireplaces, a cupboard bed with a curtain to draw snug, a simple table where Rat can write poetry. Inside, it’s all cottage.

In our photo story, Queen Molly makes one transformation on her way into the cottage, another once she’s in it. Tugging at the door isn’t enough to gain entrance; you can’t just assume that the cottage is waiting for you. So she sleeps in the courtyard and wakes to embrace the season in its riot of ruddy color, its abundance of pumpkins and gourds, seed pods and stone. Only then does she find the home she didn’t know she was seeking.

You know you live in a cottage. Whatever it’s called, whatever it’s made of, it’s your safe space, your bastion and refuge, your locus amoenus of inspiration. Open the window; let the brisk air scour out the cobwebs (the ones no one is using, anyway). Fill it with the season’s flowers and pictures and books; hang herbs to dry from the rafters and do your housework barefoot. Or leave the walls blank and let the space speak for itself. If your home is an apartment, let it be a cottage of the mind; its physical shape means next to nothing when it follows the heart of its occupant. No matter how big or small, if there’s room for a stack of books, you have a library like the one where our Molly curls up to lose herself in other worlds and lives.

We consider autumn to be the kindest season. After summer wanderings, you return home to anchor yourself in your community. That pot of soup that Molly cooked up a few hours ago—surely there’s someone in the village who could use a bowl. The queen will bring it over herself with a heavy round loaf of bread, stepping carefully around the marshy places in the path.

Our Molly may flirt with spectacular gowns stitched together from fae wishes and laughter, but she ends dressed for practical tasks, perched in the kitchen with a mug of tea. Ballgowns and rubies are all very fine, she thinks, but kindness is an art too, and its own sort of luxury. She’s really just at the start of her fairy tale.

Let the autumn magic begin.

Art by Thistlemoon

Autumn brings crisp temperatures to invigorate and inspire your suddenly homebody self. While you’re hunkering down and cozying up for the season, you might also be reading more, exercising with new vigor, and giving your home a good clean and your wardrobe a makeover. This autumn is about renewal—with appreciation for the past that has given you strong foundations. Nothing is as important now as protecting the emotional and spiritual integrity of your special space, which is the best way to ensure that creativity and happiness will also be at home with you. Here are some cottage-friendly ways to make your place even homier.

• This one is a classic for a reason: Upon moving into a new home, or anytime you feel an odd and unwelcome presence in your place, try smudging it to cleanse the energy. Whether you burn incense, bay leaves, sage, or a green wax candle, you’ll take in good energy along with the heavenly aroma. Of course you’ll do it with all respect for the long tradition each item carries with it—the best way to connect with people of the past. As a bonus, many smudgeable substances (such as green candles and peppermint incense) enhance creativity.

• To gather a community of lives and hearts with wisdom and goodwill from the past, fill your space with secondhand objects of art and sentimental significance. If you’ve inherited ancestral pieces from your family, lucky you! You might also have had your eye on a beautiful art nouveau lamp at a nice antique store, or maybe the local thrift store offers some great deco dishes and cast-iron candlesticks at a dollar apiece. You don’t have to spend a ton. A flea-market find will work just as well as a major auction purchase to plug you into the passions and ideas of the other people who have used those objects before. When you eat from those plates, you sit down with a nice big company of fellow diners. And when you’re done with the fabulous time-traveling object, you can pass it on to someone else who needs the connection.
• Another classic is this warding spell used all over Europe. Use black rock salt or sea salt to make a line across the doorway. For added strength, try chanting, “Disappear, disappear; you are not welcome here.”
• Nothing says cottage couture like homespun fabrics woven with colored threads (as opposed to fabrics printed with color later on). Because it’s dyed in the wool or in the cotton, homespun promotes truth telling and honest interactions.
• Then again, we love velvet. No other fabric is so soft and elegantly cozy. It also has a unique relationship to light—rippling under a fickle light source, soaking up light when the nap (the fuzzy bits) runs one way, reflecting a lush shimmer when you reverse direction. Even the simplest of cottages has room for a bit of velvet in a beautiful color.
• The use of a horseshoe as a home mascot goes back to ancient Egypt, where the crescent shape was associated with Isis, goddess of magic, healing, fertility, and so many other good things. Just about everywhere except China, horseshoes are talismans bringing good luck and good health to a home. You can nail one up over a door, or bury one at the roots of an ash tree; just be sure to hang it so the U shape keeps the benefits from spilling out. If you’re in Bermuda and you feel a malevolent witch approaching your home, thrust a horseshoe into the flames to make her go away.
• Hearts are a much-loved motif in many traditions. Paint a red one on a wall and you’ll encourage not only love but also safety, tranquility, and balance in your life.

Feature Image;
Handmade glass vases by Evan Chambers Objects

It is coming on fast: one of the year’s most magical moments, a gossamer bubble of time entranced within the ordinary. And so you plan a soirée that will radiate for the solstice. You’ll celebrate light and lightness among shadows in a backyard meadow packed with daisies.

Think a bit like a daisy yourself, perhaps like Gatsby’s dashing flapper Daisy Buchanan, who is famous for asking, “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” Your interest is the year’s shortest night. You won’t miss a minute.

You plan to begin as the daisies close their petals at dusk and end when they open again in the light. In between, diaphanous dresses will swirl through the brief hours of darkness; iridescent glassware and beads will shimmer in light from the sunset, candles, bonfire, twinkle lights, dawn. The gossamer is an ineffable extra element, the almost-not-there that reminds us not to simply look through the light, the water, the air—everything we would ordinarily call invisible and intangible—but to look at them. Touch them. Even air can take on body and substance. In its strict definition, the word gossamer refers to a loose weave of very thin fabric, like the cotton gauze with which it might share etymology (goss-amer, gauze).

Or it can refer to that thin, shimmery film that covers things like spiderwebs. But when have things gossamer ever been strict? The term is about expansion and release, shining light and being light—meaning both brightness and almost-weightlessness. It can gather all the senses and spin them into a cloud of synesthesia, so touch and vision become the same experience, sounds have a taste, colors have smells, and light and lightness entwine everywhere.

You probably need a few things, which means you have a most delightful mission to complete. It could start with a dragonfly wing or a peacock feather you find on a walk. Then a trip to the flea market, the thrift store, a friend’s attic, even a rare maybe-this-time visit to a fancy antiques mall and art gallery as you hunt for a blue glass bowl that color-shifts and shimmers as you fill it with flowers. And a veil of lace, a linen chemise, a silk dress.

You’ll honor time itself when you bring in a few special somethings to transform your space … and perhaps even yourself. The gossamer glints from the shadows or floats down from above, light as air. It is, most of all, what surprises us. A Look at Light From Both Sides Now Iridescence, for example, always seems to catch us off guard.

A damselfly’s glassy wing is all but invisible against the light as it wavers past to a riverbank and then settles in with a mere gleam of icy blue. Or a serendipitous bubble floats away, swirling pink and blue, when you set down your bottle of dish soap. The wing and the bubble contain a gossamer secret. They are transparent and almost colorless in themselves, but we still see color on them, and the color moves and changes according to the angle from which we see.

Our eyes perceive color and shimmer because we’re looking at two nearly invisible layers, and they make light start to fight itself. Most of what we see, we see because it reflects light: Light hits the object and bounces back from the surface, sending information about shape and color back to us. With transparent or translucent objects, we might also see by refraction—meaning that a wave of light enters the object and is bent or redirected, as in a prism.

This happens a lot with glass, including crystals cut especially for the job, but it’s more common elsewhere than it might sound at first. Take that errant soap bubble. It’s a sphere with air at the core, enclosed by an extremely thin wall of water with a smidge of glycerol (about one-tenth the thickness of a single hair), wrapped again by the air.

When light hits the bubble, some of it stops at the outside layer and some makes it through to the back of that very thin wall. So we see it bouncing off two surfaces at once. And the angles send different color signals; in true scientific parlance, they then “interfere” with each other—basically, they fight, and we get the rapidly shifting colors we love. Finally, the layer of water is under constant pressure from the air inside and out, so its thickness never stops changing—which produces the movement that activates the shimmer … until, eventually, the bubble bursts. When you study a clear insect wing, too, you’re looking at outside and inside at the same time. The wing is composed of two layers of chitin, the same tough, translucent material that makes up your fingernails. As a damselfly or dragonfly hovers, you perceive light bouncing off both layers, and the waves interfere with each other again.

Ordinary flies’ wings do the same trick. So why don’t all transparent insect wings shimmer in this way? Actually, they do, according to a coterie of researchers. About fifteen years ago, one group suddenly realized that they’d been looking at insect wings all wrong. When a scientist holds one up to the light, she tends to study the veins between colorless layers of chitin. When she lowers that wing and takes a moment to let a light shine on it, she understands magic.

Light interference also puts a faint shine to the transparent wings of grasshoppers. And cockroaches. And fairies. It excites the eye and inspires the heart.

My husband and I live in a 125-year-old farmhouse where the land has been producing one major crop these days: Fungus. It is thriving. We have trails of wide- capped parasols, shingled colonies of turkey tails and frilly oyster mushrooms, and high up in one tree, a shaggy, slow-growing lion’s mane that we occasionally harvest because eating it is good for the brain. When we first experienced this bounty, I was dismayed to think that these gorgeous, spongy, odd little (or big) miracles are growing from places where our beloved trees are decaying. I’m just glad that they’re there.

Truth is, this hasn’t been a great couple of years for the trees in our neighborhood, as wind or human so-called developers have knocked them down. But it has been a rich and beautiful time for fungus. Some of the magnolias are said to have stood for more than 250 years, and they’re fine, but the line of elms and maples planted along the drive when the house was new have mostly lived out their natural lives, and individual trees have been dying out too. But the underground fungal web that fruits into mushrooms has been here for … who knows how long? And it is having a grand time helping the trees (and itself).

One particular reason to celebrate fungi is their ability to cooperate with other organisms, most especially Kingdom Plantae. Fungus enables a marvelous system of communication within the plant world, and scientists are only just starting to understand how it all works together. The truth is about as bizarre as an episode in one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, in which what seems to be completely fantastical breaks down into a logic that not only makes sense but also inspires joy and hope—and reveals an even greater, even more surprising web of sentience, the ability to feel and to make certain connections.

In fact, that’s a good place to start—with Alice. She knows the underground world pretty well.

“Who Are You?”: On Charismatic Species

Without fungus, life on Earth would be unrecognizable. It is all around us (and on us and in us); we just don’t always know how to see it.

That’s why every kingdom needs a poster child, a charismatic citizen that lures others in and makes them care. The fungus kingdom is not short on that kind of rock star, because mushrooms are glamorous. We take their pictures; we tell their stories. We want to be around them, and we beg them to reveal themselves. We revere them as a symbol of spiritual growth.

So let’s talk for a moment about the most famous mushroom in the history of mushrooms, one of the stars of every version of Alice in Wonderland that has manifested since the book was first published in 1865: that strange fungus upon which a blue Caterpillar sits smoking a hookah. (Rather scandalous, I’ve always thought: Shouldn’t we know what’s in that hookah?) Alice stands up on tiptoes to get a good look, and Chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” begins:

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Maybe not for Alice, but “Who are you?” (emphasis on both words) had been quite the catchphrase in London around 1841 and after—a way of saying hello in a tavern or, I would guess, a hookah lounge.

Who—or what—is Alice, and how does she fit into this strange world? The plot of Wonderland keeps asking how to classify Alice, physically as well as figuratively. The underground world varies confusingly in scale, and she is constantly caught between returning to her old self and adapting to fit each new setting. Along the way, mistakes are made. Her head might

shoot suddenly through a treetop, or she might nearly drown in a sea of her own tears. This is the adolescent condition; it’s also the human condition: looking for your place amid a messy set of deceptive signals and slippery language, growing, shrinking, “saying what you mean” vs. “meaning what you say,” to borrow from a famous conversation between Alice and the March Hare.

There’s a parallel question in Wonderland for all of us: How do we define the objects and creatures we encounter? Or rather, how do we recognize them for what they are, beyond our own preconceived ideas? That mushroom, for example … It might not be what you’ve always thought it was.

Scientists are only starting to untangle the fungus puzzle—how it lives, where it lives, and even what it is. Our word mushroom seems to derive from the medieval French mousseron, which refers to moss. For most of scientific history, fungus was part of the plant kingdom. But then researchers started to scratch their heads: Fungus does not photosynthesize and turn light into nutrients, as plants do. Its cells are made of chitin, like insects’ and crustaceans’ exoskeletons (which are very close to human hair). It is a heterotroph, meaning it cannot produce its own food; to absorb nutrients, it takes in molecules of other organisms—a fancy way of saying it eats basically the way animals do. Some species (like the turkey tails on our fallen logs) secrete digestive enzymes to hurry the process along.

So since 1968, we have recognized Kingdom Fungi. Long may it flourish!

And keep in mind that as we study it, it might be studying us. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, author Zoë Schlanger proves that the animal brain is only one form of “mind,” only one way to think of intelligence, memory, decision-making, and sentience. We need to expand our idea of intelligence to embrace other kingdoms.

Because mushrooms might be smart.

A ring of pale mushrooms sprang up with the morning dew, and tonight you’re going to fly and whirl in a mad fairy dance. What if you want to honor the occasion but don’t have time for a full wardrobe refresh? You could turn up in a filmy gown made from flower petals and fervent wishes, as usual, or make a statement by doubling down on fungal fashion. You can collect some fantastic accents and accessories on your way to the fling.

• The mushroom hat is a fae wardrobe staple, whether it’s a warm brown-gray or a flashier amanita red with white flecks.And you don’t have to stop at one shroom—try piling them on top of each other till one big cap is covered in dozens of tiny ones, or wear them in bands and swirls for crowns and tiaras, like the forest lovers in our “Mushroom Maidens” feature.

• For highlights to cheeks, eyes, or any feature you want to render especially fetching, rub the desired areas with a sample from your favorite bioluminescent species. We recommend Mycena pura, Britain and Ireland’s lilac bonnet, for gentle purple shades. North America’s multi-lobed bitter oyster, Panellus stipticus, is a classic for the green tones Titania favors. It’s one of the brightest of the approximately 70 to 125 species of glowing mushrooms on the planet.
• Bitter oysters and their kin also make bewitching jewels for eyebrows, fingers, and wrists. The fungi themselves are able to control the amount of light they shed using enzymes that react to oxygen.
• Your favorite skirt might already imitate a mushroom cap, with a smooth outer layer supported by a full understructure of ruffly gills. Why not experiment by adding plenty of petticoats and frilly bracket fungi (trending now: turkey tails and oysters)—some of which come in fantastic bright colors?
• Someday even the fabric a human designer uses might be made of fungus. Scientists have discovered a way to spin the chitin and chitosan in some species’ cell walls into weavable threads.
• It’s a great time to play with textures. Nothing looks more chic than a morel’s brainy whorl set as an accent at wrists and neck, and many other species make their own fungi fur. Try a shaggy ink cap (Coprinus comatus): As it matures, the “fur” on top gets longer and lusher, with smoky lowlights around the base of the white shag. You’ll need to dry it out well before use, but do save the ink to pour where you want your next colony to grow, because it carries the mushroom spores. And the Coprinus absorbs heavy metals from the soil, so it’s an extra-eco-friendly resource.
• If you misplace your hat on a bright day, pluck a wide-capped mushroom to make your own shade. We like Macrolepiota procera, appropriately known as the parasol. It starts out ethereally delicate, then matures into a big, robust fruiting body with a shaggy-barked top.
• When you’re all zhuzhed up and in the fairy ring at last, you’ll find the mushrooms around the edge also make natural seating for fairy confabs. Their cushiony flesh conforms to your flesh for a good rest after a wild dance or a long spin around the circle.
• You might even want to drape yourself and your mushroom finery over one of them for your own communion rite. Turn your face to the sky and drink in the moonlight while your friends twirl the night away. You and your finery will be gone in the morning.

Art: Mother Mushroom With Her Children (c. 1900), by Edward Okun. Image courtesy Art Renewal Center.

They had names like Sofonisba and Lavinia and most of all Artemisia. They were brilliant and gifted and (sometimes)
ferocious—because they had to be, sure, and perhaps also because they wanted to be. They were courtiers and wives and warriors. They were artists at a time when women just didn’t do that.

But they did.

A handful of talented, tenacious, and perhaps rather lucky young women were able to work in what was then the unfeminine medium of paint. Smeary, messy, very physical paint, which required the grinding of stones and beetles and you-just-name-what-else, and mixing with linseed oil, and preparing heavy slabs of wood for the laying on of all that rich, expensive color. We’re talking about lone women working in studios populated by male creatures from first adolescence to well-advanced senescence, women painting some strikingly realistic arms and hands and other body parts into being, newly detailed thanks to a shift in painterly aesthetic. Women who sought to give a good long look to actual flesh, because you couldn’t quite paint it if you didn’t inspect it thoroughly first. And a typically well-brought-up female was never, ever supposed to look, let alone touch.

These women simply had to look. And grind. And mix. And create. They felt thwarted by the norms that limited what they could do … and then they painted circles around those norms. Of all these fiercely talented artists, one name stands out. You probably know it already: Artemisia Gentileschi, at the time called a “prodigy of painting, easier to envy than to imitate.” She came along at the end of the Italian Renaissance, born in 1593 and alive till about 1656; she worked at the height of the dramatic Baroque style—no, she helped define the Baroque, and she was one of its foremost practitioners.

And now I come to a trigger warning. Artemisia was born into a milieu in which femininity meant never being entirely safe. That was especially true in a male-dominated profession, for a lower-class girl, no matter how scrappy she was. In short, Artemisia endured a trauma that no one should ever have to experience, and we have to know about it in order to understand both her life and her oeuvre.”

But her story is not about being a victim. In the next forty years, she became a master of her art, and she is now known for big, bloody pictures of avenging women, heroines, and warrior queens. Given her history, it is natural to see Artemisia as a warrior queen herself … but I think her story and her art are more complicated than that. Painting as she did may have been partly revenge, but great art is never just revenge.

So if you read on, you’ll encounter Renaissance violence and injustice. You’ll also meet other remarkable artists who rose to prominence in the rich 16th and 17th centuries, women who broke with some traditions and created new ones in masterworks we celebrate today. Artemisia stands on their shoulders.

Just look at her 1638 Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting: She’s glorious in mid-career, prosperous, and wearing a fine gown and gold necklace, all surfaces shimmering, all textures finely rendered … a lady. But she’s contorting in order to get the right sight line on the work and keep her fine-tipped brush headed for a precise spot. This is a beautiful woman whose beauty does not matter to her in the moment, because she’s focused on what she can create. Her pose shows the difficulty—for anyone, not only women—of doing the work. And it caps a new tradition for female painters.

As the centuries rolled on, these artists mostly sank back into perhaps colorful marginal notes as oddities … or else they got no notes at all and dropped into obscurity. But the past thirty or so years have seen a surge of interest in these artists as artists, and not just as female ones. Their work embodies the culture and shifting aesthetics of the era; they also created new modes and genres of paintings, most significantly the self-portrait of the artist as (in fact) an artist. They delved into the problems of flesh, the body, the self, and the nature of art, and their eyes are watching us now.

So let us celebrate, once again, their lives and creations, from birth to success and whatever else came along.

A Rebirth of the Flesh

O those terrifically louche, very physical ancient Greeks and Romans! The heavenward gaze of the Middle Ages had preferred not to look at what prior cultures had done, with their pagan emphasis on the body and their glory in some of the more animal impulses—depictions of lust, anger, and love, for example, in a recognizably three-dimensional space. Most Inset: Miniature Self-Portrait (1556), by Sofonisba Anguissola medieval art centered on the Christian divine, placing what later seemed like flat, idealized forms in an equally flat symbolic space.

Sometime in the 1300s, our focus started to shift back to all the messiness of humanity, where it stayed until the religious resurgence of the 1600s. In 1550, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (more on that worthy tome later) referred to the change as a rinascita—a rebirth. In English and French, the concept caught on around 1855 as the Renaissance. Physicality was just one aspect of humanism, which was an all-around return to interest in people (rather than divinity) with all their flaws and curiosity and doubts and capacity for growth. In other words, creativity and philosophy now were about real, complicated flesh and emotions.

This is not to take anything away from medieval art, which we love. Women were active painters then too, illuminating manuscripts in convents—where would we be without our perennial girl crush Hildegard von Bingen?—and creating even more pictures with thread in the one medium always approved for women and girls: embroidery. These Renaissance painters emerged as much from these artistic traditions as from the male- dominated studio system.

As more women took up the brush outside of the convent, they participated in a movement by which the idea of beauty itself—both as something a person possessed and as something they could represent in art—was becoming more individualized. So each face and figure had to stand out as unique. For example, in self-portraits, Artemisia’s pointed nose sets her apart from Sofonisba’s rounded cheeks and blue eyes; they are artists, not an icon meaning Artist. Backgrounds and settings also became more distinctive and realistic, with a rediscovered sense of perspective, because bodies now lived inside a network of light, shadow, and depth, a complex sense of space in which other objects loomed or dwindled with distance.

Just look at the work of another superstar, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). She was known primarily for portraits, but she was also one of a few women who took on religious subjects and classical mythology. The bodies in her work have a certain jarring beauty not entirely in line with what we think we observe every day. That’s because Lavinia’s aesthetic followed the Mannerist school, which strove to achieve elegance and grace through exaggerated poses and sometimes slightly off-kilter proportions. Maybe it was paradox, maybe genius, but it was all still realistic by standards of the time, under a somewhat heightened reality. Lavinia, let us say, was a leg woman. Her archangel Gabriel, in the Annunciation of 1575, has thighs nearly to his underarms— but they suit him, as if there’s no other way for an angel to be. The same is true for her always-a-bit- larger-than-life Christ figures.

They dominate the space; they force us into a relationship with the body as a body. And her nudes are positively sinuous, as we’ll see below. Therein lay a danger, plus a major obstacle to female painters: Good girls were not supposed to be so familiar with the body.

Apprenticeship and the Forbidden Lesson

There’s no denying that art in the Renaissance was a man’s world. The guilds, the academies, the commissions—all were controlled by men. A girl with a talent and a yearning to accomplish something exceptional had to gain entrée somehow, and that meant learning from (yes) a man. So Catharina van Hemessen took lessons from her painter father, Jan; Lavinia Fontana was trained by her father, Prospero, who bragged about her talent and seems to have needed her to help support him; Nunzio Galizia taught his daughter, Fede (c. 1578–c. 1630); and Artemisia learned from her father, Orazio.

One exception is the Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli (1524– 1588), who is said to have been self-taught. That reputation may be misleading; she resided in a convent originally sponsored by Savonarola (1452–1498), the bossy little zealot who vowed to make Florence great again with bonfires of the vanities and restrictions on citizens’ freedom. He might have been a fanatic, but he did encourage women to draw and paint religious subjects as a way of staying busy. Convents such as Plautilla’s became (in a way Savonarola did not expect, and often after his death) flourishing art colonies. Plautilla would have learned from some of the best. She did quite well with some massive church pieces
and even painted her way into Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” the exclusive men’s club of a Who’s Who. Three other women also made the book: sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi and painters Madonna Lucrezia and Sofonisba Anguissola. (We’ll visit with her again in just a moment.)

What girls picked up in their apprenticeships was not always what an artist wants to learn. The most vital lesson was forbidden: drawing from life. It was a somewhat new idea that in order to paint the body realistically, you had to look at it intimately. Some male painters even dissected bodies to gain an understanding of how muscle and sinew and skin work together. That sort of gaze was forbidden to female painters.

Not quite paradoxically, the new understanding of the body was possible only because of women’s work. Western art has long depended on sex workers as models and muses. Just imagine everything we’d have missed if prostitutes and mistresses had refused to spend hours on end posing for those serene paintings of the Annunciation or the torments of the Pietà.

And now we come to the nudes … those enchanting erotic beings who transcend the paint that has made them. In the art world, there’s a difference between someone who’s naked and a nude. Think, for a moment, of what happens when the body undresses. Is it just going about its daily life, or is it trying to prevent you (O presumed-to-be-masculine viewer) from going about yours?

The nude displays itself for the viewer’s gaze in a certain way, hoping to provoke a reaction. Perhaps a wisp of gossamer veil preserves a last inch or two of modesty, but we confront breasts, bottoms, and bellies, bare arms and legs, set up for a certain pleasure that will not be found, say, in a picture of the Virgin breast-feeding Jesus or in a martyr’s tortured flesh.

So nakedness might be natural; the nude was (is) dangerous. And women, of course, could not be trusted to make a smart distinction between them. Who knew what ghastly things might happen if they got themselves near enough any bare flesh at all? A girl should not stare at a naked man, obviously, though there must have been plenty of them around the cities, urinating in the streets, wrestling on the bridges of Venice, and whatnot.

Women were not allowed to look at prostitutes and paint them either. The girls who did manage to train as artists were of a higher social class and had to be protected from those immoral creatures. So instead, a female apprentice spent extra time poring over miniature versions of famous sculptures and plaster casts of hands and feet. A woman would not have the right to paint a nude until Lavinia Fontana, whose Mars and Venus, as we will see, is a masterwork both witty and erotic.

Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) had no teacher in the family and not that much of a family fortune, but she did have sisters who were also inclined toward the easel. Her parents managed to give their six daughters and one son good educations that included apprenticeships to local artists. Three other sisters stuck with painting and became professionals, but Sofonisba was the most talented of all. On a sketching trip to Rome at age twenty-two, she impressed a painter whose name now is lost—and he introduced her to one whose name is everything: Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was gobsmacked. It is easy to imagine the two of them together: he turning over pages of her portfolio, she explaining about all those plaster hands and feet and the statues she was sketching in Rome, along with some drawings of people in the street. Not being allowed to look at a nude—well, it was crippling her work. Michelangelo probably sympathized; he also knew how hard it was to work without being able to study the body so closely. He had fought to win the right, at around age nineteen, to attend public dissections before reputedly finding a way to conduct a dissection himself.

For such a gifted and otherwise well-educated painter as Sofonisba to miss that opportunity must have been beyond frustrating—but Sofonisba was resourceful. She used her sisters as models. And for at least two years, she enjoyed an honor no doubt envied by just about anybody at work in the art world: She was Michelangelo’s long-distance protégée, sending drawings through the mail for his critique.

Artemisia came along after all these women had served their versions of apprenticeships, but getting an education was no easier for her—in fact, it was even more difficult, as her family was neither noble nor rich. Her mother died when Artemisia was twelve, and she grew up a bit rough-and-tumble, surrounded by violence and general seediness. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, but his connections were considerably less accomplished and gentlemanly than Michelangelo. They posed a constant, if low-level, danger. When the Gentileschis decided to take in a tenant to help make ends meet, Orazio chose a woman, perhaps thinking she would provide some sort of companionship and motherly influence to young Artemisia … which would turn out to be no help at all, as we will see.

All these women artists would outshine their fathers and other teachers. Well, except maybe Michelangelo; he seems to be standing the test of time.

The era is named for rebirth—a transformation, a new arrival. A new you? The charms and spells to use in a Renaissance frame of mind are most fittingly about crafting a rebirth as well.

• A few words can change something ordinary—bread, a knife, a wildflower—into a powerful magical implement. To make an onion bring you a lover, for example, plant it in a pot and chant, “As this plant grows, and as its blossom blows, may her heart be ever turned to me.” Onions bloom in their second year of growth, so remember that love is patient.

• We all carry a natural fire inside that transforms what we eat—basically, our body cooks the food inside us. So dinner menus have to be balanced not just to distribute the traditional medieval hot, wet, cold, and dry properties appropriately but also to compensate for the activities of the person about to dig in. After, say, you’ve spent a few hours poring over your Enchanted Living, the reading will have made your humors dry, cool, and slow, so you should avoid very rich and heavy food until you’ve stoked your internal oven with some exercise.

• Cooking is what sorceresses do best—making all those simple ingredients into complex unguents and potions, combining commonplace items to make magic. Your own attitude toward your cooking means everything. So for another love charm, press your hand into a loaf of bread before you bake it. Anyone who eats a slice will find you irresistible … even though you know you’re still the same (irresistible) you.

• If you long to know how the future will transform the present, you may be one of thousands of people who still study the Prophecies of French physician-astrologer Michel de Nostredame. Better known as Nostradamus, he started writing annual prophetic almanacs in 1550. In 1559, after he seemed to predict the death of France’s King Henri II, people started relying on him for timely warnings, though the complicated poetic style in which he wrote has sometimes made the divinations hard to decode. Given the power of incantation, you might want to be careful about reading his cryptic poetic lines aloud, lest you bring about a tragedy buried in the lines.

• You have almost certainly tried bibliomancy before—asking a question aloud, then closing your eyes and flipping through a book until your finger lands on a single word or phrase that you know can change your life. This might be the best way to read Nostradamus now: You get to interpret his prognostications based on one word and what your intuition says it means to you personally.

• A name is also an incantation, of course. If you want to break up two lovers or friends, tie a knot in a rope and say the name of the first one. Say the second person’s name as you tie the rope again. And then use a sharp knife to slice the knot open. Those two just don’t stand a chance.

• But we know you prefer to use your powers for good. So take a new rope, say the couple’s names again, and tie the knot. Loop the rope ends down and braid the frayed part together. Your love knot is now in the shape of a heart, and it’s stronger than ever—a rebirth to good feeling. All the best things will come to the person who wishes others well.

Spring has its freshness and promise, summer gets all that lush light, and winter brings cozy idle hours—but autumn is really the most creative season. As the natural world’s showy stars (roses, larkspur, la-di-da) shed their blossoms, the air becomes crisp and brisk, driving out summertime languor. Trees flame with color; new mushrooms pop up among the roots. So we shed our old ideas and let new ones, long percolating, leap to the forefront. We’re filled with ideas for poems, plays, paintings, and recipes. We dive into our projects with renewed purpose.

Our minds can’t help but turn to longtime Romantic crushes Emily Brontë and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who embraced the season with all they had. In her poem “Fall, Leaves, Fall,” an atypically joyful Brontë gushes that “Every leaf speaks bliss to me.” Percy B. felt the same way, and his “Ode to the West Wind” of 1819 is an anthem for the season of creativity:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing […] Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

What if, indeed? Has anyone ever loved our Percy less for thinning a little? We honor him for daring to be the wind, for commanding it: “Be thou me, impetuous one!” That cleansing wind blows away old thoughts and habits; a purer poet sings the season. Who has not recited these lines while walking through a stiff breeze?

Well, now you will. Because this is the season for embracing the creative spirit with a full heart, for venturing with it into the wind and the rain and especially the woods. Most especially the woods at night, when we join bats and moths and other creatures that rustle and flit through dark corners of the mind. This is the season for daring a little or a lot, adding our own music to the symphony that is always playing around us.

The night and the forest are beckoning. Step inside.

The Darkness

And turn off your flashlight, because tonight is going to change how you see.

The forest crepitates in an almost perfect darkness. Drop a city dweller into it and she’s completely disoriented. Eyes used to the bright lights see nothing but black—which is terrifying at first, for how can you tell what’s lying in wait to come rushing toward you? The fragments of moon and stars that shine through the branches don’t help. So you dip into the old magic and adapt an Irish cairn, or protection incantation, to your favorite guiding spirit:

Be thou a bright flame before me, Be to me a guiding star above,
Be to me a smooth path below, Today, tonight, and forever.

But just wait; the forest is working its magic, and your senses are already sharper. First breathe in that earthy, peat-scented darkness and its notes of blackberry, gooseberry, and spruce. Perhaps you’re near some lingering summer flowers that release their aromas in darkness rather than sunlight: giant angel trumpets blaring the headiest scent on the planet, full of longing; tiny white phlox that smell of vanilla and almond; or a rainbow of night-scented stock whispering a delicate sweetness to charm as your skirt brushes past.

Let those layers wind around you. You’ll hear more too, from the rustle of voles and beetles among the leaves to the feathery whisper of a sphinx moth’s wings in flight or the crisp susurration of a great horned owl. October is owls’ hooting month, as they stake claims to territory before mating season; that low, pure note sometimes drowns out the high screech of a big-eared bat as it uses sound waves to navigate among bare branches rattling in that wild westerly wind. Bats have very good eyesight, by the way, as long as they are in low light; the phrase “blind as a bat” is an injustice.

When you open your eyes, you’ll find your vision has begun to adjust too. Your perception of absolute darkness is shifting. You see nuances of color, shades of gray and varied blacks. At night our eyes perceive colors in shades tending toward blue … except red. What’s red in the sunlight becomes deepest black to us in the darkness, so your favorite rosebush has just gone goth. Smelling as sweet as by any other name, of course.

You watch that bat flying jerkily overhead and think of D.H. Lawrence, who described a bat in flight as

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight …
Its sinewy wings stitch the night together.

Everything will become even clearer in the next twenty to forty-five minutes. That’s how long it takes to achieve full night vision, when your eyes are ten thousand to a million times more sensitive than they are in daylight. Details emerge as the grays continue to refine: the rough puzzle pieces of spruce and pine bark, the molting sycamore turning white for the winter.

Darkness moves against darkness when a fox lopes by (red by day, black by night vision) or that bat flits down to snap its jaws on the flies that have maddened you all day.

A gray-white opossum lumbering along seems shockingly bright, as she opens her absurdly pointy jaw and shows every one of her fifty sharp teeth. She does that by reflex; she would never wish you ill. She is only foraging for beetles and any last fruits of the season. Her sole defense from a potential predator is to hiss a little, then fall into a faint. She might even exude the odor of a dead animal for a few hours. She will respond well to kindness, so leave her a grape (opossums love grapes!) and walk on. Later, you may write a poem or paint a portrait for her.

Of Moth and Metaphor

The night air is alive with creatures in flight—autumn’s winged muses.

You can take a page from the book of another genius, Sylvia Plath—whose first name, in fact, means “of the forest.” One of the dearest moments in all her work, a moment that makes me love the girl that she was as much as the artist she’d become, appears in her college diaries. On November 14, 1953, in the wake of heartbreak, she planned her next creative work: She would write about “a weak, tense, nervous girl” preyed on by a spoiled man. “There will be an analogy,” she mused, “a symbol, perhaps, of a moth being consumed in the fire.”

O Sylvia: Thank you for showing us that the well-worn metaphors on which we cut our teeth—dare we call them clichés?—can open a gateway to all the brilliance, the crackling anger and dazzling bliss, in breath-of-being poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Ariel.” You were, of course, not the first literary great to write of moths and flames; even the Bard made use of the trope in The Merchant of Venice, when the formidable female lawyer, proverb-happy Portia, decried, “Thus hath the candle singed the moth,” with an appended comment: “O, these deliberate fools!”

Those light-hungry, fluttery, tiny-feathered white and brown moths—the less glamorous cousins of the fancy butterflies who rule the daylight—are an important part of the ecosystem. They pollinate flowers and trees, and they are food for predators such as bats and birds. (Everybody is food for somebody else.) They do good work.

But why are moths so self-destructively drawn to flames? You ponder it as you pause on a welcoming boulder for a sip of water. If you use a flashlight to check the rock for critters and picnicking elves, you’ll find a dozen moths fluttering around the beam. Scientists say that even these nocturnal insects are drawn to daylight and the sun, and any light will stand in for it. But some people (O, deliberate poets!) write that what the moths want is not the light but the deeper, more absolute darkness behind it—the infinite, the mystery.

As Walter de la Mare described it in his 1919 poem “The Moth,” the attraction is seductive and special—Isled in the midnight air, Musked with the dark’s faint bloom, Out into glooming and secret haunts The flame cries, “Come!”

How is a moth to resist a come-hither like that? She Stares from her glamorous eyes; Wafts her on plumes like mist; In ecstasy swirls and sways To her strange tryst.

Alas, a flame never brought anything good to a moth. So switch the flashlight off. Your eyes don’t need it now anyway.

The Web Underground

Eventually the trees give way to a glen, a grassy clearing.

If you’re lucky, tonight you’ll step into a mysterious circle of mushrooms, otherwise known as a fairy ring. It can be a good thing or a bad one, depending on how you feel about fairies (and indeed about mushrooms).

Some people believe that these rings are made by witches, and that stepping inside means you must do a witch’s bidding. Even if the fairies claim authorship, when you disturb a Scottish ring in any way, you’re doomed to bad luck and hardship, as an old rhyme will tell you:

He wha tills the fairies’ green Nae luck again shall hae:
And he wha spills the fairies’ ring Betide him want and wae.

Particularly harsh fairies might even bring about your early demise. So tread lightly.

But take heart! In Scandinavia (yay, Scandinavia!), the mushrooms grow where elves dance. If the nisser are dancing when you arrive, prepare to be caught up in the circle—literally caught, as the magical beings grab your hands and pull you in to spin and spin until daybreak. But if your ring is in Ireland

or Wales, you might see the fairies more quietly pulling up one mushroom to sit on while eating a light supper off another. Or perhaps they pluck a wide cap to use as an umbrella when it rains (as will inevitably happen in autumn).

In a rare mischievous mood, Emily Dickinson decided that “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”:

’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler— The Germ of Alibi—Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie—

It’s sneaky, in other words. It lives to trick people, to start green things growing … and then vanish.

Now I must thank Ms. Plath again (O, sylvan Sylvia!) for the work of her early twenties. One memorable night in my own early youth, I drove down a saguaro-lined byway—Arizona’s version of a forest—in the midst of a drenching thunderstorm, headlights on high beam to spot cactus, coyotes, mule deer, and Gila monsters. I was listening to an audiobook of her flat, rather nasal voice (sounding to me like a shy Katharine Hepburn) reading from early poems about mushrooms and the like. It was an Experience, all that emotion pouring into the night of the season’s biggest storm. As she described mushrooms subsisting

on water, biding their time and then taking over the world in one busy night, I felt that old symbolic moth grow into a horde of quiet but fierce creatures.

“Mushrooms” is a strong feminist allegory, even stronger than Plath could have known. We now know more about mushrooms’ place in the natural world: They are astonishing super-organisms, crucial to the forest’s survival … but they in turn are just part of a much larger being. They and their fungal kin belong to a hitherto mysterious web that lies beneath the forest. When you walk among trees, you’re stepping on tendrils of fungus spun around their roots and woven together for yards and miles. The dome-capped nubbins that the fairies use as umbrellas are simply the aboveground outshoots of a symbiotic system known as the mycorrhizal network. Mushrooms are the fruit that spreads the spores.

“I lost my heart to the heart of the woods,” Canadian poet Ethelwyn Wetherald (how one does love a good Victorian name!) announced in 1895. She could have entrusted it to no better network:

Through the wild night, tempest-tossed and drear, My heart slept peacefully.

I found my heart in the heart of the woods, I looked on it and smiled;

And over it still the woodland broods, As a mother over her child.

The heart of the forest is its hub trees, sometimes called mothers, and this is where the web clusters: their ancient, deep roots. We’ve long known that fungus breaks down dead matter and produces phosphorus; it has recently been discovered that trees use the web for much more. They share water, plus sugar made through photosynthesis and other nutrients; they even send messages to each other through the web. A tree in trouble can signal for help—a jagged wound from a fallen branch, a sapling that doesn’t get enough light or water to thrive—and the mothers send it a sort of care package of water and sugar. The fungus receives plenty of rewards in return, siphoning off about 30 percent of the sugar that reaches it.

So we step with care, harvest our mushrooms with gratitude, embrace the power of connection. We honor this mystery.