Art Is Magick: Pam Grossman Interview

In this episode of The Transmute Tapes, we speak with Pam Grossman — writer, curator, and host of the podcast The Witch Wave — about witchcraft, art, ritual, and the quiet forces shaping creative life today. Our conversation begins with fairy tales, winter thresholds, and first encounters with witches, and moves into questions of how magic is learned, practiced, inherited, and performed. We talk about everyday, quiet forms of witchcraft and moments when magic must become visible: staged, shared, or even confrontational. From German folk traditions around Frau Holle and Perchta to contemporary ritual performance, we explore the thin line between theatre and belief, care and danger, nourishment and threat. We speak about ancestral memory, historical violence, and the long shadow of the witch trials, including personal journeys into family history and sites of persecution. With Pam, we discuss creativity as a sacred practice: rituals that sustain artistic work, the role of intuition and discipline, and the ways artists across history have worked with unseen influences. We reflect on what makes an artwork feel alive, whether magic is embedded in the object or activated through encounter, and if art has ever truly been separate from ritual or spiritual practice. This episode is not about nostalgia or aesthetics, but about presence, responsibility, and attention, about what happens when art, magic, and culture meet without clear boundaries. A conversation about witches, creativity, ancestry, and the forces we carry – knowingly or not.