Imagine you are in a city where you have never been before.
At first, you are disappointed, it feels so much like any other city: modern workers speak in modern tones into modern phones as they go striding between modern buildings. But you keep walking, and you get lost, and eventually you come to an older neighborhood, where the buildings are lower to the ground and the past spirit is intact. Here, there are cafes and bars for locals, and the second-story apartments have red and blue garden boxes projecting out beneath fluttering white curtains. You wander into a used bookstore. The place smells dusty; the owner, behind the counter, gives you a quiet nod - almost curt. You keep going back into the store. Shelves are filled with hardcovers whose spine-printed titles are fading. And then, one particular shelf, holding a set of tall old periodicals, catches your eye. On an impulse, you pull down one of the journals. It is called The Daughter’s Grimoire.
The Daughter’s Grimoire is a new online magazine, whose mission is to channel deep and enduring veins of the human imagination. Although made for the Internet—that is, designed to be read and viewed on a screen—each issue invites readers to fall into a space that is timeless. A collaboration between photographer Jamie Thompson and fiction writer Max Scheinin, The Daughter’s Grimoire seeks to cast spells, to make the ancient new and the new ancient. Among TDG’s guiding spirits are the thinkers Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Terence McKenna—renegade scholars who sought to show that, across ages and cultures, a constant substratum of imagination informs the images and themes of myths, folklore, dreams.
Each issue is organized around a central mythopoeic motif: issue one will be “The Forest Issue” and issue two “The UFO Issue.” Photography, fiction, art and essays interweave to create worlds to explore: you may forget you are still looking at your browser.
Besides featuring Thompson’s photography and Scheinin’s stories, The Daughter’s Grimoire showcases work by artists and thinkers both established and unknown. This magazine is accessible and engaging and challenging. We aspire to cut across traditional lines of taste: to enthrall academics and pop-culture enthusiasts equally, to be read as avidly by teenagers seeking something cutting-edge as by lifelong readers who are ready for a new, online reading experience.
The Daughter’s Grimoire may be best described in the words of Guy Patin, a seventeenth-century man of letters and dealer in clandestine books, who said of a now-forgotten volume, “It is a strange and pleasant book, but very delicate and wholly mystical; the author is not lacking in wit and you will see in him quaint and delightful thoughts. There are hardly any books of this sort.” You would not leave the used bookstore in the city you were visiting without buying several issues of The Daughter’s Grimoire, and ever after, you would be haunted by the stories and images contained in the mysterious journal’s pages.