Back in 2014 we featured a short primer and documentary on the life and work of Aleister Crowley, also known — at least to the British press of the time — as “the wickedest man in the world.” The name rings a bell to just about everyone, and for many of us summons up vague notions of a life dedicated to the promotion of alternative morality or paganism or trickery or some kind of relished evil, but how many of us can name one of Crowley’s works? The best-known occultist-artist-mountaineer of the early 20th century left behind a rich and colorful legacy, and here we have one of its most tangible products: the Thoth tarot deck.
Crowley worked on the deck, says Learntarot.com (itself drawing from Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot), from 1938 to 1943, according to principles laid out in his Book of Thoth. The artist, Lady Frieda Harris, “worked with Crowley’s rough sketches to produce images that would be faithful to his interpretations and her own vision.” You can purchase copies of the Thoth Tarot Deck here.
Raven’s Tarot Site offers a piece of correspondence from Harris to Crowley dating from 1940, around the middle of the project. “I do not pretend to apprehend it, only it is like music, and the only kind of writing I want to read,” she writes of his famously difficult-to-comprehend but (under the right circumstances) entertaining writing on the occult, “only it makes me feel as if I lived in a desert and I am mighty thirsty.”
Crowley had — and nearly 70 years after his death, still has — that effect on some people. He inspired Harris, who would become one of the standout disciples, to produce a work of divinatory art whose aesthetics reflect as much his own as those of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner. Now best known for his role in developing the Waldorf system of childhood education, Steiner also came up with a philosophical system called anthroposophy that posits the human ability to contact the spiritual realm. It may lack the same dangerous and flamboyant black-magic (or rather, black-magick) appeal of Crowley’s visions, but both men, in their own way, spent a lifetime striving for ways to tap into a world hidden beneath the surface of existence. For those with an interest in that sort of thing, turning over a few tarot cards remains one of the easiest ways to knock on its door.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’re a linguist, you’ve read Noam Chomsky—no way of getting around that. There may be reasons to disagree with Chomsky’s linguistic theories but—as Newton’s theories do in physics—his breakthroughs represent a paradigmatic shift in the study of language, an implicit or explicit reference point for nearly every linguistic analysis in the past few decades.
If you’re on the political left, you’ve read Chomsky, or you should. Even if there are significant reasons to disagree with whatever controversial stance he’s taken over the years, few political theorists have approached their subject with the degree of doggedness, intellectual integrity, and erudition as he has. Chomsky began his second career as a political activist and philosopher in the late sixties, speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam war. Since then, he’s written majorly influential works on mass media propaganda, Cold War politics and interventionist war, economic imperialism, anarchism, etc.
Now an emeritus professor from MIT, where he began teaching in 1955, and a laureate professor at the University of Arizona, Chomsky has reached that stage in every public intellectual’s career when archivists and curators begin consolidating a documentary legacy. Librarians at MIT started doing so a few years ago when, in 2012, the MIT Libraries Institute Archives received over 260 boxes of Chomsky’s personal papers. You can hear the man himself discuss the archive’s importance in the short interview at the top. And at the MIT Library site unBox Chomsky Archive, you’ll find slideshow previews of its contents.
Those contents include the 1953 paper “Systems of Syntactic Analysis,” which “appears to be Chomsky’s first foray in print of what would become transformational generative grammar.” Also archived are notes from a 1984 talk on “Manufacturing Consent” given at Rutgers University, outlining the ideas Chomsky and Edward S. Herman would fully explore in the 1988 book of the same name on “the political economy of the mass media.” And in the category of “activism,” we find materials like the newsletter below, published by an anti-war organization Chomsky co-founded in the 60s called RESIST.
MIT hopes to “digitize the hundreds of thousands of pieces” in the collection, “to make it accessible to the public.” Such a massive undertaking exceeds the library’s budget, so they have asked for financial support. At unBoxing the Chomsky Archive, you can make a donation, or just peruse the slideshow previews and consider the legacy of one of the U.S.’s most formidable living scientific and political thinkers.
“I was out walking with two friends – the sun began to set – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature.”― Edvard Munch
That’s how painter Edvard Munch described the dread-filled scene that led him to paint “The Scream” in 1910. As Dr. Noelle Paulson notes over at Smarthistory, except for da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Munch’s painting “may be the most iconic human figure in the history of Western art. Its androgynous, skull-shaped head, elongated hands, wide eyes, flaring nostrils and ovoid mouth have been engrained in our collective cultural consciousness.”
“The Scream” might also be one of the more fetishized and commodified paintings we’ve seen to date. These days, you’ll find “The Scream” on t‑shirts, jigsaw puzzles, and non-slip jar grippers. And, thanks to a Japanese company called Good Smile, you can now buy The Scream Action figure. It has posable joints, allowing you to put the figure into different poses (witness above). Or you can stand it alongside the other art history figures in Good Smile’s collection–da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Rodin’s The Thinker, and The Venus de Milo. Oh, the fun you could have this weekend.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die.” So, in one episode of Rick and Morty, says the fourteen-year-old Morty Smith, one of the show’s titular co-protagonists. With the other, a mad scientist by the name of Rick Sanchez, who also happens to be Morty’s grandfather, he constitutes the animated team that has entertained thousands and thousands of viewers — and made insatiable fans of seemingly all of them — over the past four years. To those few who haven’t yet seen the show, it may just look like a silly cartoon, but the true fans understand that underneath all of the memorable gags and quotable lines lies an unusual philosophical depth.
“The human desire to fulfill some special existential purpose has existed throughout history,” says video essayist Will Schoder in his analysis of the philosophy of Rick and Morty. But the titular duo’s adventures through all possible realities of the “multiverse” ensure that they experience firsthand the utter meaninglessness of each individual reality.
When Morty breaks that bleak-sounding news to his sister Summer with the now oft-quoted line above, he actually delivers a “comforting message”: once you confront the randomness of the universe, as Rick and Morty constantly do, “the only option is to find importance in the stuff right in front of you,” and their adventures show that “friends, family, and doing what we enjoy are far more important than any unsolvable questions about existence.”
Schoder, also the author of a video essay on Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s mythological storytelling technique as well as one we’ve previously featured about David Foster Wallace’s critique of postmodernism, makes the clear philosophical connection to Albert Camus. The philosopher and author of The Stranger wrote and thought a great deal about the “contradiction between humans’ desire to find meaning in life and the meaninglessness of the universe,” and the absurdity that results, a notion the cartoon has dramatized over and over again, with an ever-heightening absurdity. We must, like Sisyphus eternally pushing his rock uphill, recognize the true nature of our situation yet defiantly continue “to explore and search for meaning.” Morty, as any fan well knows, offers Summer another solution to her despair: “Come watch TV.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I’ve been a fan of the Academy of Ancient Music since I picked up its performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as a teenager in the UK. Though into rock and prog at the time, I was always trying to expand my learning and would occasionally turn the dial from BBC Radio One (for John Peel, late at night) to Radio Four where I tried to make my way in the heady world of classical music. It was how the album was promoted and sold: you’ve never heard Vivaldi until you’ve heard it on the original instruments! I mean, this tied right in at the time to the advent of CDs (“hear it as the musicians did in the control room!”) and the beginning of “from the original master tapes!” turning up on recordings. I was all in, and it’s a thrilling recording.
That thrill never goes away, as demonstrated with the above video of Robert Levin, recently announced as the first Hogwood Fellow of the Academy, playing Mozart on Mozart’s own piano. Or rather, Mozart’s fortepiano, a smaller and much lighter version of the piano. It is two octaves shorter, and only seven feet long.
Mozart used this fortepiano for both composing and performing from 1785 until his death in 1791. He wrote over 50 works on it. The instrument dates to 1782, built by Anton Walter, one of the best-known piano makers in Vienna at that time. In 2012 it finally returned to Mozart’s Salzburg home (now a museum), having been in the possession of the Cathedral Music Association and Mozarteum for the majority of the years since the composer’s death.
“One writes for acoustical and aesthetic properties of the instruments at hand,” Levin says, explaining the Academy’s mission and ideology. Naturally it follows that Mozart sounds the best on Mozart’s instrument. The fortepiano is brighter and jauntier, and can be a revelation for those with the talent and fortune to play it. Levin says:
“So sitting down at Mozart’s piano, sitting down at an organ which Bach played himself, you understand things about the weight of the keys going down and the repetition and the balance in sound. And all of these things bring you very, very close to the music and make you say ‘A‑ha, that’s why it’s written that way’, which is not the kind of thing you’re going to get if you’re playing on the standard instruments that are being manufactured today”
Levin is currently recording Mozart’s piano sonatas on this very fortepiano. The piece he plays in the video is Mozart’s Sonata No. 17 in B flat major KV 570 (3rd movement).
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
We all know the name Marie Curie—or at least I hope we do. But for far too many people, that’s where their knowledge of women in science ends. Which means that thousands of young boys and girls who read about Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur never also learn the story of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), the first woman to discover a comet, publish with the Royal Society, and receive a salary for scientific work—as the assistant to the king’s astronomer, her brother, in 19th century England. Herschel discovered and catalogued new nebulae and star clusters; received a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society; and she and her brother William “increased the number of known star clusters,” writes the Smithsonian, “from 100 to 2,500.” And yet, she remains almost totally obscure.
Open a math or physics textbook and you may not come across the name Emmy Noether (1882–1935), either, despite the fact that she “proved two theorems,” the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) notes, “that were basic for both general relativity and elementary particle physics. One is still known as ‘Noether’s Theorem.’”
Noether fought hard for recognition in life. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Göttingen in 1907, and she eventually surpassed her scientist father and brothers. But at first, she could only secure work at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen in a position without title or pay. And despite her brilliance, she was only allowed to teach at Göttingen University as the assistant to David Hilbert, also without a salary.
Noether suffered discrimination in Germany “owing not only to prejudices against women, but also because she was a Jew, a Social Democrat, and a pacifist.” Other prominent women in scientific history have encountered similarly intersecting forms of discrimination, and continue to do so. Much has changed since the times of Herschel and of Noether, but “there is much work to be done,” writes Eamon O’Flynn of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “Part of making positive change includes celebrating the contributions women have made to science, especially those women overlooked in their time.” For this reason, the Perimeter Institute has created a poster series, called “Forces of Nature,” for “classrooms, dorm rooms, living rooms, offices, and physics departments.”
People all over the world enjoy Japanese tea, but few of them have witnessed a proper Japanese tea ceremony — and seeing as a proper Japanese tea ceremony can last up to four hours, many probably imagine they don’t have the endurance. But Japanese tea culture holds up meticulousness as a high virtue for the preparer, the drinker, and even more so the craftsman who makes the tea ware both of them use. In the video above, you can see one such master named Shimizu Genji at work in his studio in Tokoname, a city known as a ceramics center for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Shimizu, writes the proprietor of pottery site Artisticnippon.com about a visit to his workshop, “throws a block of clay onto the wheel, creating the teapot’s body, handle, spout and lid one after another, all from the same block. It really is quite mesmerising and awe-inspiring to watch.”
Once he assembles these formidably solid-looking but deceptively light pieces, he dries them out over three days, a process that offers “just one example of the time and care invested in the crafting of exquisite Tokoname teapots.” Finally comes the seaweed, of which certain pieces get a layer applied before firing. Afterward, the traces left by the seaweed create a “charred” patterning called mogake.
We would surely welcome any of Shimizu’s products, or those by the other respected practitioners of his tradition, into our home. But as with all Japanese crafts honed over countless generations, the process counts for just as much as the product, or even more so. Take, for instance, Shimizu’s process as captured by this video: we appreciate the concentration, deliberation, and sensitivity shown at each and every stage, and the pieces of the teapot as they come into existence don’t look half bad either. But if we become too attached to the final result we’ve been anticipating over these fourteen minutes — well, suffice it to say that the master craftsman has a lesson in impermanence in store for us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?
Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.
One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.
Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.
His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolph Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism.
In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.”
“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing.
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
