Are you channelling Mystic Lit?

Is the new genre of Mystic Lit passing you by? (I have my editor at The Bookseller to thank for coming up with the name; let’s hope it catches on).

Mystic Lit contains properties so nourishing you might think its books appear overnight of their own volition, like toadstools. The genre is already an explosive presence in poetry, with poets writing with – and through – crystals, tarot and natural remedies. Already a booming global market, it’s time for publishers of all stripes to put a cleansing geode to their forehead and consider their plans for the years ahead.

There is, of course, a long tradition of mysticism and its resulting literature which provides the bedrock for the current renaissance. From its roots in the Greek through to its presence in the Bible, the striving for a union with an absolute is perhaps one of the fundaments of human existence; the work of the Romantics is testament to this.

The 20th century took mysticism away from the people as it entered the philosophical world of writers such as William James, but what’s distinct in the current explosion is a move away from any sense of religious fundamentalism or over-thinking into a more direct relationship with physical prompts: crystals, tarot card and natural remedies.

This is leading towards a more accessible and attainable form of mysticism, laying the ground for Mystic Lit to explode into a new populism.

The crystal market is booming. According to globalnewswire.com, the economy for crystals was $4.4bn in 2023, estimated to rise to $6.6bn by 2034. This has a lot to do with the practical use of crystals in modern electronics, though the presence of crystals on market stalls, high-street shops and, of course, in bookshops is rising.

Crystals for Beginners: The Guide to Get Started with the Healing Power of Crystals by Karen Frazier has 40,000 reviews on Amazon. New books of natural healing are entering the UK market all the time, most recently Forgotten Home Apothecary: 250 Powerful Remedies at Your Fingertips by Nicole Apelian, available from the TikTok shop. Tarot decks are selling in their thousands, most noticeably the original Rider-Waite deck, with an estimated 100 million copies in circulation across 20 countries. 

What’s distinct in the current explosion is a move away from any sense of religious fundamentalism or over-thinking into a more direct relationship with physical prompts: crystals, tarot card and natural remedies

Poetry, as is often the case, is leading the way, with small presses at the forefront of experimentation. ZimZalla are the publishers of Sascha Aurora Akhtar and John Alexander Arnold’s Only Dying Sparkles, 45 double-sided poem and image postcards in a box, inspired by tarot. Tarot also runs through David Keenan’s To Run it Wild: A Handbook of Autonomic Tarot, published by Rough Trade, which shows the novelist’s effortless move into experimental poetry.

In collaboration with artist Sophy Hollingdon, here you’ll find a future-facing tarot decked out in punk glam. This was so good Rough Trade couldn’t resist making the tarot cards for real and, true to the zeitgeist of Mystic Lit, the deck went quickly out of stock.

Set to become one of the collections of the year, Richard Scott’s That Broke into Shining Crystals contains a glinting, refractory sequence of poems using gemstones to work through trauma. In prismatic dialogue with Rimbaud’s Illuminations, these poems show how far a journey into crystals can go: "Thirty-eight and I am learning a lot about rocks", the second poem in the sequence reads.

Scott’s lines run like liquid jade, dazzling in the potential to make things shine in crystalline light: "No more lying to yourself. Magnesite is astral bright." These are poems demonstrating the potential of crystals to heal: inviting you into the sensory present-tenseness of rocks – their colour-shadows and suggestive imagery – taking the self beyond the self, inviting new ways of being in the moment. "The world seems amber-tinted".

Scott begins his sequence with a quote from another radical queer poet, CAConrad. The quote is from one of Conrad’s rituals, in which readers are invited to momentarily give over their bodies to a new mode of being: "Unearth the crystal, hold it in your right hand again and ask, ’What was it like down there?’…The crystal will translate the way to the poem(s) with you".

Conrad’s ritual poems gathered in You Don’t Have What it Takes To Be My Nemesis, And Other (Soma)tics, demonstrate this potential, from inviting readers to eat food only of a certain colour for a day (while wearing clothes of the same colour) to running out into a rain storm to absorb every drop: "You are not running from the storm, you are opening to it, you are IN IT!"

For those based around the Merseyside area – or who can be – don’t miss out on Conrad’s live reading at the Open Eye gallery on Monday 24th March. There will be prismatic light over the Mersey that evening.

Richard Scott’s publication by Faber, and CAConrad’s by Penguin, is a clear rallying call for publishers to embrace Mystic Lit. Tune into your impulses, connect to the waves that are already there – it’s time to take up the truism that there’s no better way to understand the tarot than to create your own.