The 135 Movies You Must See to Understand Cinema

If you wish to become a cinephile wor­thy of the title, you must first pledge nev­er to refuse to watch a film for any of the fol­low­ing rea­sons. First, that it is in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage and sub­ti­tled; sec­ond, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow; fourth, that it is too long; and fifth, that it has no “sto­ry.” These cat­e­gories of refusal are what Lewis Bond, co-cre­ator of the YouTube chan­nel The House of Tab­u­la, calls “the five car­di­nal sins of cin­e­ma,” and no one who com­mits them can ever attain an under­stand­ing of the art form, its nature, its his­to­ry, and its poten­tial. Once you’ve made your vow, you’ll be ready to watch through the 135 chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered motion pic­tures that con­sti­tute The House of Tab­u­la’s “Ulti­mate Film Stud­ies Watch­list,” ful­ly explained in the video above.

While the movies first emerged in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and plen­ty con­tin­ue to be made here in the twen­ty-first, they stand unop­posed as the defin­ing pop­u­lar art form of the twen­ti­eth. And it is from the span of that cen­tu­ry that all the films on this list are drawn, from Georges Méliès’ Le Voy­age dans la Lune and D. W. Grif­fith’s The Birth of a Nation to all the way to Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Pulp Fic­tion and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.

What hap­pened to cin­e­ma between those peri­ods was, in a sense, a process of tech­no­log­i­cal and artis­tic evo­lu­tion, but as Bond’s com­men­tary under­scores, old­er films aren’t super­seded by new­er ones — or at least, old­er films of val­ue aren’t. Indeed, the ambi­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty of these decades, or even cen­tu­ry-old movies, puts many a cur­rent release to shame.

By no means is the list dom­i­nat­ed by obscu­ri­ties. Gone with the Wind, Fan­ta­sia, Sin­gin’ in the Rain, Psy­cho, Jaws, Alien: even the least cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inclined among us have seen a few of these movies, or at least they feel like they have. Maybe they’ve nev­er got around to watch­ing Cit­i­zen Kane, but they’ll have a sense that it belongs on any syl­labus meant to cul­ti­vate an under­stand­ing of film as an art form. The pres­ence of Star Wars may come as more of a sur­prise, but no less than Cit­i­zen Kane, it illus­trates the ben­e­fit of watch­ing your way through cin­e­ma his­to­ry: if you do, you’ll expe­ri­ence just how much of a break they rep­re­sent­ed with all that came before. Ordi­nary movie­go­ers may feel like they’ve seen it all before, but cinephiles — espe­cial­ly those who’ve made the jour­ney through The House of Tab­u­la’s watch­list — know how vast an area of cin­e­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty remains unex­plored.

Relat­ed con­tent:

78 Great Direc­tors Who Shaped the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma: An Intro­duc­tion

The 30 Great­est Films Ever Made: A Video Essay

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

The Evo­lu­tion of Cin­e­ma: Watch Near­ly 140 Years of Film His­to­ry Unfold in 80 Min­utes

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

The 15 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time: Explore Films by Wern­er Her­zog, Errol Mor­ris & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration

The prac­tice of car­toman­cy, or div­ina­tion with cards, dates back sev­er­al hun­dred years to at least 14th cen­tu­ry Europe, per­haps by way of Turkey. But the spe­cif­ic form we know of, the tarot, like­ly emerged in the 17th cen­tu­ry, and the deck we’re all most famil­iar with—the Rid­er-Waite Tarot—didn’t appear until 1909. Pop­u­lar main­ly with occultists like Aleis­ter Crow­ley and Madame Blavatsky in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the tarot explod­ed into pop­u­lar cul­ture in the new age 70s with books like Stu­art Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and For­tune Telling, and by way of cult film­mak­ers like Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky.

Since its rel­a­tive­ly recent pop­u­lar­iza­tion, “fun” and “for­tune telling” have more or less defined most people’s atti­tude to the tarot, whether they approve or dis­ap­prove of either one. But for artists and poets like William But­ler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and sur­re­al­ist direc­tor Jodorowsky—whose film nar­ra­tion is per­haps the most poet­ic in mod­ern cinema—the tarot has always meant some­thing much more mys­te­ri­ous and inspir­ing. “The tarot,” says Jodor­owsky in the short film above, “will teach you how to cre­ate a soul.”

After study­ing the Major and Minor Arcana and the suits, and puz­zling over the sym­bols on each card, Jodor­owsky dis­cov­ered that “all 78 cards could be joined in a man­dala, in just one image.” Learn­ing to see the deck thus, “You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a lan­guage that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a con­man.” Like oth­er mys­ti­cal poets, Jodorowsky’s study of the tarot did not lead him to the super­nat­ur­al but to the cre­ative act.

And like many a poet before him, Jodor­owsky explored the jour­ney of the Fool in his 1973 film The Holy Moun­tain, a “daz­zling, ram­bling, often inco­her­ent satire,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz, that “unfurls like a hal­lu­cino­genic day­dream.” Jodorowsky’s cin­e­mat­ic dream log­ic comes not only from his work as a “shaman­ic psy­chother­a­pist.” He also cred­its the tarot for his psy­chomag­i­cal real­ism. “For me,” says Jodor­owsky in the video at the top, “the tarot was some­thing more seri­ous. It was a deep psy­cho­log­i­cal search.” The result of that search—Jodorowsky’s sin­gu­lar and total­ly unfor­get­table body of work—speaks to us of the val­ue of such an under­tak­ing, what­ev­er means one uses to get there.

Or as Jodor­owsky says in one of his mys­ti­cal pro­nounce­ments, “If you set your spir­it to some­thing, that phe­nom­e­non will hap­pen.” If that sounds like mag­i­cal think­ing, that’s exact­ly what it is. Jodor­owsky shows us how to read the tarot as he does, for psy­cho­log­i­cal insight and cre­ative inspi­ra­tion, in the video above, addressed to a fan named John Bish­op. Span­ish speak­ers will have no trou­ble under­stand­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion, as he quick­ly slides almost ful­ly into his native lan­guage through lack of con­fi­dence in his facil­i­ty with Eng­lish. The video belongs to a series on Jodorowsky’s YouTube chan­nel, most of them ful­ly in Span­ish with­out sub­ti­tles.

Nev­er­the­less, for Eng­lish speak­ers, the sub­ti­tled video at the top offers a sur­pris­ing­ly dense les­son on the Chilean mystic’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the tarot’s sup­posed wis­dom as a sym­bol­ic sys­tem, and a way of telling the present.

Should you wish to know more, you can find it in Jodorowsky’s book The Way of Tarot: The Spir­i­tu­al Teacher in the Cards, and prac­tice on your very own deck of Jodor­owsky-designed tarot cards.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the For­got­ten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Tarot Deck (1909)

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Carl Jung on the Pow­er of Tarot Cards: They Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious & Per­haps a Way to Pre­dict the Future

The Tarot Card Deck Cre­at­ed by Sal­vador Dalí

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

When a Salvador Dalí Sketch Was Stolen from Rikers Island Prison (2003)


In 2003, a Sal­vador Dalí draw­ing was stolen from Rik­ers Island, one of the most for­mi­da­ble pris­ons in the Unit­ed States. That the inci­dent has nev­er been used as the basis for a major motion pic­ture seems inex­plic­a­ble, at least until you learn the details. A screen­writer would have to adapt it as not a stan­dard heist movie but a com­e­dy of errors, begin­ning with the very con­cep­tion of the crime. It seems that a few Rik­ers guards con­spired sur­rep­ti­tious­ly to replace the art­work, which hung on a lob­by wall, with a fake. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for them, they made a less-than-con­vinc­ing replace­ment, and even if it had been detail-per­fect, how did they expect to sell a unique work whose crim­i­nal prove­nance would be so obvi­ous?

Yet the job was, in some sense, a suc­cess, in that the draw­ing was nev­er actu­al­ly found. Dalí cre­at­ed it in 1965, when he was invit­ed by Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tion Com­mis­sion­er Anna Moscowitz Kross to meet with Rik­ers Island’s inmates. “Kross, the first female com­mis­sion­er of the jail sys­tem, believed in reha­bil­i­tat­ing pris­on­ers with art, includ­ing paint­ing ses­sions and the­ater pro­duc­tions,” writes James Fanel­li, telling the sto­ry in Esquire. As for the artist, “as long as the city’s news­pa­pers would be there to cap­ture his mag­nan­i­mous act, he was game” — but in the event, a 101-degree fever kept him from get­ting on the fer­ry to the prison that day. Instead, he dashed off an image of Christ on the cross (not an unfa­mil­iar sub­ject for him) and sent it in his stead.

“For near­ly two decades, it hung in the pris­on­ers’ mess hall,” writes Fanel­li. “In 1981, after an inmate lobbed a cof­fee cup at the paint­ing, break­ing its glass cas­ing and leav­ing a stain, the Dalí was tak­en down.” It then went from apprais­er to gallery to stor­age to the trash bin, from which it was saved by a guard. By 2003, it had end­ed up in the lob­by of one of the ten jails that con­sti­tute the Rik­ers Island com­plex, hung by the Pep­si machine. That no one paid the work much mind, and more so that it has been appraised at one mil­lion dol­lars, was clear­ly not lost on the employ­ee who mas­ter­mind­ed the heist. Yet though they man­aged to catch his accom­plices, the inves­ti­ga­tors were nev­er able legal­ly to deter­mine who that mas­ter­mind was.

Read­ers of Fanel­li’s sto­ry, or view­ers of the Inside Edi­tion video at the top of the post, may well find them­selves sus­pect­ing a par­tic­u­lar cor­rec­tions offer, who suc­cess­ful­ly main­tained his inno­cence despite being named by all his col­leagues who did get con­vic­tions. Any drama­ti­za­tion of the Rik­ers Island Dalí heist would have to make its own deter­mi­na­tion about whether he or some­one else was real­ly the ring­leader, and it might even have to make a guess as to the ulti­mate fate of the stolen draw­ing itself. One isn’t entire­ly dis­pleased to imag­ine it hang­ing today in a hid­den room in the out­er-bor­ough home of some retired prison guard: made in haste and with scant inspi­ra­tion, dam­aged by cof­fee and poor stor­age con­di­tions, and pos­si­bly ripped apart and put back togeth­er again, but a Dalí nonethe­less.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Great­est Art Heist in His­to­ry: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Lou­vre (1911)

How Art Gets Stolen: What Hap­pened to Egon Schiele’s Paint­ing Boats Mir­rored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

How Jan van Eyck’s Mas­ter­piece, the Ghent Altar­piece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in His­to­ry

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Mod­ern Art Was Used As a Tor­ture Tech­nique in Prison Cells Dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

How Thieves Stole Priceless Jewels at the Louvre in 8 Minutes

On Sun­day morn­ing, some auda­cious thieves stole price­less jew­els from the Lou­vre Muse­um. The heist took only eight min­utes from start to fin­ish.

At 9:30 a.m., the rob­bers parked a truck with a portable lad­der in front of the Parisian muse­um. They ascend­ed the lad­der, cut through a sec­ond-floor win­dow, entered the muse­um, smashed through dis­play cas­es, and snatched price­less jew­els, includ­ing a roy­al emer­ald neck­lace. By 9:38 a.m., they descend­ed the lad­der and escaped on motor­cy­cles. And, with that, they made off like ban­dits.

Above, the Wall Street Jour­nal video helps you visu­al­ize how the theft unfold­ed, as does this arti­cle in the New York Times.

In the Relat­eds below, you can learn about the great­est theft in Lou­vre history—that is, the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, which helped turn da Vin­ci’s art­work into the most famous paint­ing in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

The Great­est Art Heist in His­to­ry: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Lou­vre (1911)

 

The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003)

In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu’s Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Lac­los’ Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe’s Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin’s Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters: soon after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1740, Samuel Richard­son’s Pamela — by some reck­on­ings, the first real Eng­lish nov­el — grew into an all-encom­pass­ing cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, which Richard­son him­self out­did eight years lat­er with Claris­sa. Alas, when the BBC sur­veyed the pub­lic two and three-quar­ter cen­turies lat­er to deter­mine the most beloved nov­el in the U.K., nei­ther of those books even made the top 100.

With the pos­si­ble excep­tions of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la (#104) and Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein (#171) — two works of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry hor­ror that make use of a vari­ety of tex­tu­al forms, let­ters includ­ed — the rank­ings pro­duced by “The Big Read” includ­ed prac­ti­cal­ly no epis­to­lary nov­els. (Nor did eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry works of any oth­er kind make the cut.) What hap­pened to the lit­er­ary genre that had once caused such a nation­al craze? For one thing, Jane Austen hap­pened: nov­els like Pride and Prej­u­dice, Emma, and Per­sua­sion revealed just how rich a sto­ry could become when its nar­ra­tion breaks away from the pen of any char­ac­ter in par­tic­u­lar, gain­ing the abil­i­ty to know more about them than they know about them­selves. Not for noth­ing did all three of those books per­form well on The Big Read the bet­ter part of 200 years after they came out; Pride and Prej­u­dice even came in at num­ber two.

The top spot was tak­en by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy: an under­stand­able out­come, giv­en not just its ambi­tion but also its mas­sive and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and influ­ence. Still, one does won­der if Peter Jack­son’s block­buster film adap­ta­tions, released in the years lead­ing up to the poll, might have had some­thing to do with it. Sim­i­lar sus­pi­cions adhere to the likes of Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin (#19), Amer­i­can Psy­cho (#185), The Beach (#103), and Brid­get Jones’s Diary (#75), all of which pro­vid­ed the basis for major motion pic­tures around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Umber­to Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of a scat­ter­ing of trans­lat­ed nov­els to make the list, also got the Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the book itself sold so well that its Eng­lish trans­la­tor could use his roy­al­ties to build an addi­tion to his Tus­can vil­la called the “Eco Cham­ber.”

Apart from Austen, the oth­er nov­el­ists with mul­ti­ple books on The Big Read­’s top 100 include Stephen King, who also has three; Thomas Hardy, with four; and Charles Dick­ens, with sev­en. Those are, in any case, some of the nov­el­ists for adults. The abid­ing British appre­ci­a­tion for chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture shows in the high rank­ings of Roald Dahl, who secured a great many votes with even less­er works like The Twits and Dan­ny, the Cham­pi­on of the World; J. K. Rowl­ing, who would have ben­e­fit­ed from the height of Har­ry Pot­ter mania in any case; and the pro­lif­ic Dame Jacque­line Wil­son, whose four­teen nov­els on the list place her sec­ond only to Sir Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s fif­teen. It could be that his com­ic-fan­ta­sy sen­si­bil­i­ty, sat­u­rat­ed with both the out­landish and the mun­dane, res­onat­ed unique­ly with the British psy­che. Or, as Pratch­ett him­self says in the BBC’s Big Read tele­vi­sion broad­cast, “it could just be that I’m quite pop­u­lar.”

In total, more than 750,000 read­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Big Read poll. Find read­ers’ top 100 books below:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prej­u­dice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Mate­ri­als, Philip Pull­man
4. The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dou­glas Adams
5. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire, JK Rowl­ing
6. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, Harp­er Lee
7. Win­nie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nine­teen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Char­lotte Bron­të
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuther­ing Heights, Emi­ly Bron­të
13. Bird­song, Sebas­t­ian Faulks
14. Rebec­ca, Daphne du Mau­ri­er
15. The Catch­er in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Wil­lows, Ken­neth Gra­hame
17. Great Expec­ta­tions, Charles Dick­ens
18. Lit­tle Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tol­stoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Mar­garet Mitchell
22. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Philoso­pher’s Stone, JK Rowl­ing
23. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Cham­ber Of Secrets, JK Rowl­ing
24. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Pris­on­er Of Azk­a­ban, JK Rowl­ing
25. The Hob­bit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Mid­dle­march, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irv­ing
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Stein­beck
30. Alice’s Adven­tures In Won­der­land, Lewis Car­roll
31. The Sto­ry Of Tra­cy Beaker, Jacque­line Wil­son
32. One Hun­dred Years Of Soli­tude, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
33. The Pil­lars Of The Earth, Ken Fol­lett
34. David Cop­per­field, Charles Dick­ens
35. Char­lie And The Choco­late Fac­to­ry, Roald Dahl
36. Trea­sure Island, Robert Louis Steven­son
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Per­sua­sion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Her­bert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Mont­gomery
42. Water­ship Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gats­by, F Scott Fitzger­ald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexan­dre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revis­it­ed, Eve­lyn Waugh
46. Ani­mal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christ­mas Car­ol, Charles Dick­ens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Good­night Mis­ter Tom, Michelle Mago­ri­an
50. The Shell Seek­ers, Rosamunde Pilch­er
51. The Secret Gar­den, Frances Hodg­son Bur­nett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Stein­beck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karen­i­na, Leo Tol­stoy
55. A Suit­able Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swal­lows And Ama­zons, Arthur Ran­some
58. Black Beau­ty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Pun­ish­ment, Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky
61. Noughts And Cross­es, Mal­o­rie Black­man
62. Mem­oirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Gold­en
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dick­ens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCol­lough
65. Mort, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
66. The Mag­ic Far­away Tree, Enid Bly­ton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Ter­ry Pratch­ett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Gold­ing
71. Per­fume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Phil­an­thropists, Robert Tres­sell
73. Night Watch, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
74. Matil­da, Roald Dahl
75. Brid­get Jones’s Diary, Helen Field­ing
76. The Secret His­to­ry, Don­na Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dick­ens
80. Dou­ble Act, Jacque­line Wil­son
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Cap­ture The Cas­tle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gor­meng­hast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arund­hati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacque­line Wil­son
87. Brave New World, Aldous Hux­ley
88. Cold Com­fort Farm, Stel­la Gib­bons
89. Magi­cian, Ray­mond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Ker­ouac
91. The God­fa­ther, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Mag­ic, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coel­ho
95. Kather­ine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jef­frey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacque­line Wil­son
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Mid­night’s Chil­dren, Salman Rushdie

Relat­ed con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Select­ed by 503 Nov­el­ists, Poets & Crit­ics

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

The 100 Best Nov­els: A Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Cre­ates a List in 1898

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The First Electric Guitar: Behold the 1931 “Frying Pan”

Frying Pan Schematic

The names Leo Fend­er and Les Paul will be for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with the explo­sion of the elec­tric gui­tar into pop­u­lar cul­ture. And right­ly so. With­out engi­neer Fend­er and musi­cian and stu­dio wiz Paul’s time­less designs, it’s hard to imag­ine what the most icon­ic instru­ments of decades of pop­u­lar music would look like.

They just might look like fry­ing pans.

Though Fend­er and Paul (and the Gib­son com­pa­ny) get all the glo­ry, it’s two men named George who should right­ly get much of the cred­it for invent­ing the elec­tric gui­tar. The first, naval offi­cer George Breed, has a sta­tus vis-à-vis the elec­tric gui­tar sim­i­lar to Leonar­do da Vinci’s to the heli­copter.

In 1890, Breed sub­mit­ted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, uti­liz­ing the two basic ele­ments that would even­tu­al­ly make their way into Stra­to­cast­ers and Les Pauls—a mag­net­ic pick­up and wire strings. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Breed, his design also includ­ed some very imprac­ti­cal cir­cuit­ry and required bat­tery oper­a­tion, “result­ing in a small but extreme­ly heavy gui­tar with an uncon­ven­tion­al play­ing tech­nique,” writes the Inter­na­tion­al Reper­to­ry of Music Lit­er­a­ture, “that pro­duced an excep­tion­al­ly unusu­al and ungui­tar­like, con­tin­u­ous­ly sus­tained sound.”

Like a Renais­sance fly­ing machine, the design went nowhere. That is, until George Beauchamp, a “musi­cian and tin­ker­er” from Texas, came up with a design for an elec­tric gui­tar pick­up that worked beau­ti­ful­ly. The first “Fry­ing Pan Hawai­ian” lap steel gui­tar, whose schemat­ic you can see at the top of the post, “now sits in a case in a muse­um,” writes Andre Mil­lard in his his­to­ry of the elec­tric gui­tar, “look­ing every inch the his­toric arti­fact but not much like a gui­tar.” Giz­mo­do quotes gui­tar his­to­ri­an Richard Smith, who dis­cuss­es the need in the 20s and 30s for an elec­tric gui­tar to be heard over the rhythm instru­ments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s pre­ferred style, Hawai­ian music, “where… the gui­tar was the melody instru­ment. So the real push to make the gui­tar elec­tric came from the Hawai­ian musi­cians.”

Beauchamp devel­oped the gui­tar after he was fired as gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Nation­al String Instru­ment Cor­po­ra­tion. Need­ing a new project, he and anoth­er Nation­al employ­ee, Paul Barth, began exper­i­ment­ing with Breed’s ideas. After build­ing a work­ing pick­up, they called on anoth­er Nation­al employ­ee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a wood­en neck and body for it. In sev­er­al hours, carv­ing with small hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first ful­ly elec­tric gui­tar took form.” (An ear­li­er elec­tro-acoustic gui­tar—the Stromberg Elec­tro—con­tributed to ampli­fi­er tech­nol­o­gy but its awk­ward pick­up design didn’t catch on.)

Need­ing cap­i­tal, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion, Beauchamp con­tract­ed with tool­mak­er Adolph Rick­en­backer, who mass pro­duced the Fry­ing Pan as “The Rick­en­bach­er A‑22″ under the com­pa­ny name “Elec­tro String.” (The com­pa­ny became Rick­en­backer Gui­tars after its own­er sold it in the 50s.) Although the nov­el­ty of the instru­ment and its cost dur­ing the Great Depres­sion inhib­it­ed sales, Beauchamp and Rick­en­backer still pro­duced sev­er­al ver­sions of the Fry­ing Pan, with cast alu­minum bod­ies rather than wood. (See an ear­ly mod­el here.) Soon, the Fry­ing Pan became inte­grat­ed into live jazz bands (see it at the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adolph Zukor short film) and record­ings.

How does the Fry­ing Pan sound? Aston­ish­ing­ly good, as you can hear for your­self in the demon­stra­tion videos above. Although Rick­en­backer and oth­er gui­tar mak­ers moved on to installing pick­ups in so-called “Span­ish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz box­es with their famil­iar f‑holes—the Fry­ing Pan lap steel con­tin­ues to have a par­tic­u­lar mys­tique in gui­tar his­to­ry, and was man­u­fac­tured and sold into the ear­ly 1950s.

The next leap for­ward in elec­tric gui­tar design? After the Fry­ing Pan came Les Paul’s first ful­ly solid­body elec­tric: The Log.

Learn More about the inven­tion of the elec­tric gui­tar in the short Smith­son­ian video just above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the Elec­tric Gui­tar: An Intro­duc­tion to Every Major Vari­ety of the Instru­ment That Made Rock-and-Roll

The His­to­ry of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo: A Sev­en-Part Series

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Hear the Bril­liant Gui­tar Work of Char­lie Chris­t­ian, Inven­tor of the Elec­tric Gui­tar Solo (1939)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront Big Questions & Give Life Meaning

The twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry so far may seem light on major tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, at least when com­pared to the twen­ti­eth. An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence boom (per­haps a bub­ble, per­haps not) has been tak­ing place over the past few years, which at least gives us some­thing to talk about. Before that, most of us would have named the smart­phone, for bet­ter or for worse, as the defin­ing devel­op­ment of our time. Relat­ed­ly, we could also zoom out and declare that humankind has elim­i­nat­ed bore­dom. But unlike, say, get­ting rid of small­pox, that achieve­ment has yield­ed mixed bless­ings at best. The rea­son is that, as Har­vard Busi­ness School pro­fes­sor Arthur C. Brooks puts it in the Har­vard Busi­ness Review video above, you need to be bored.

“Bore­dom is a ten­den­cy for us not to be occu­pied oth­er­wise, cog­ni­tive­ly, which switch­es over our think­ing sys­tem to use a part of our brain that’s called the default mode net­work,” Brooks says. In that mode, which kicks in absent any oth­er stim­u­la­tion, we must face “big ques­tions of mean­ing” — by their very nature, uncom­fort­able ones — in our lives. “One of the rea­sons we have such an explo­sion of depres­sion and anx­i­ety in our soci­ety today is because peo­ple actu­al­ly don’t know the mean­ing of their lives, much less so than in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions.” What has insu­lat­ed us so com­plete­ly from the need even to con­sid­er it? Why, “that thing in your pock­et with the screen, which you take out even when you’re stand­ing on the street cor­ner, wait­ing for the light to change.”

“We all have pock­et-sized com­put­ers now,” wrote the jour­nal­ist Kaleb Hor­ton, who died last month, in a blog post from ear­li­er this year addressed to his own father in the nine­teen-eight­ies. “You can look up ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cles and stuff but you’ll most­ly use it for check­ing the stock mar­ket and play­ing a game called Can­dy Crush. It’s real­ly just some­thing to do with your hands, like cig­a­rettes.” To those suf­fer­ing the kind of strange malaise he sens­es beset­ting so many of us here in the hyper-con­nect­ed twen­ty-twen­ties, he offers rec­om­men­da­tions includ­ing the fol­low­ing: “Log off as hard as you can. Go out­side, talk to peo­ple in real life where it’s actu­al­ly kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actu­al­ly see the friends you usu­al­ly just text mes­sage. Go for a long dri­ve and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hob­bies or pick one and learn it for a while.”

In oth­er words, get offline and “try out some of those nor­mal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s won­der­ful because we’re not sup­posed to get bored any­more. It turns out bore­dom is the Cadil­lac of feel­ings.” With­out it, we’re liable to find our­selves on the way to the junk­yard: “If every time you’re slight­ly bored, you pull out your phone,” Brooks says, “it’s going to get hard­er and hard­er for you to find mean­ing, and that’s the recipe for depres­sion and anx­i­ety and a sense of hol­low­ness, which, by the way, are all through the roof.” If you delib­er­ate­ly and reg­u­lar­ly go with­out check­ing your phone, or indeed expos­ing your­self to any oth­er source of elec­tron­ic stim­u­la­tion, you’ll build “the skill of bore­dom,” which will enable you not only to con­front life’s grand ques­tions, but also to be less bored with ordi­nary life — some­thing we should all learn to savor while we still can.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ben­e­fits of Bore­dom: How to Stop Dis­tract­ing Your­self and Get Cre­ative Ideas Again

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

How to Take Advan­tage of Bore­dom, the Secret Ingre­di­ent of Cre­ativ­i­ty

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

Bored at Work? Here’s What Your Brain Is Try­ing to Tell You

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as hav­ing fall­en around 476 AD, but had things gone a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, it could have come to its end much ear­li­er — before it tech­ni­cal­ly began, in fact. In the year 44 BC, for instance, the assas­si­na­tion of Julius Cae­sar and the civ­il wars rag­ing across its ter­ri­to­ries made it seem as if the founder­ing Roman Repub­lic was about to go down and take Roman civ­i­liza­tion with it. It fell to one man to ensure that civ­i­liza­tion’s con­ti­nu­ity: “His name was Octa­vian, and he was Caesar’s adopt­ed son,” says sci­ence reporter Car­olyn Beans in the new Cod­ed Cham­bers video above. “At first, no one expect­ed much from him,” but when he took con­trol, he set about rebuild­ing the empire “city by city” before it had offi­cial­ly been declared one.

This ambi­tious project of restora­tion neces­si­tat­ed an equal­ly ambi­tious shoring up of infra­struc­ture, no sin­gle exam­ple of which more clear­ly rep­re­sents Roman engi­neer­ing prowess than the empire’s aque­ducts.

Using as an exam­ple the sys­tem that fed the city of Nemausus, or mod­ern-day Nîmes, Beans explains all that went into their con­struc­tion over great lengths of chal­leng­ing ter­rain — no stage of which, of course, ben­e­fit­ed from mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques — with the help of Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin clas­si­cal archae­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Rabun Tay­lor. The most basic task for Rome’s engi­neers was to deter­mine the prop­er slope of the aque­duc­t’s chan­nels: too steep, and the flow­ing water could cause dam­age; too flat, and it could stop before reach­ing its des­ti­na­tion.

Sur­vey­ing the prospec­tive aque­duc­t’s route involved such ancient tools as the diop­tra (used to estab­lish direc­tion and dis­tance over long stretch­es of land), the gro­ma (for straight lines and right angles between check­points), and the choro­bates (to check if a sur­face was lev­el). Then con­struc­tion could begin on a net­work of under­ground tun­nels called cuni­culi. Where dig­ging them proved unfea­si­ble, up went arcades, some of which — like the Pont du Gard in south­ern France, seen in the video — still stand today. They do so thanks in large part to their lime­stone bricks hav­ing been arranged into arch­es, whose geom­e­try directs ten­sion in a way that allows the stone to sup­port itself, with no mason­ry required. When water began run­ning through an aque­duct and into the city, it would then be dis­trib­uted to the gar­dens, foun­tains, ther­mae, and else­where — through con­duit pipes that hap­pened to be made of lead, but then, even the most bril­liant Roman engi­neers could­n’t fore­see every prob­lem.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still With­stand the Weight of Mod­ern Cars & Trucks

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved: Why Has Roman Con­crete Been So Durable?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Night When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Watch Him Play “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965

The phrase “when Dylan went elec­tric” once car­ried as much weight in pop cul­ture his­to­ry as “the fall of the Berlin Wall” car­ries in, well, his­to­ry. Both events have reced­ed into what feels like the dis­tant past, but in the ear­ly 1960s, they like­ly seemed equal­ly unlike­ly to many a seri­ous Bob Dylan fan in the folk scene. They also seemed equal­ly con­se­quen­tial. To under­stand the cul­ture of the decade, we must under­stand the import of Dylan’s appear­ance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965, backed by Mike Bloom­field and oth­er mem­bers of the Paul But­ter­field Blues Band.

The death of rock and roll in the 50s is often told through the lens of tragedy, but there was also anger, dis­gust, and mass dis­af­fec­tion. The Pay­ola scan­dal had an impact, as did Elvis join­ing the army and Lit­tle Richard’s return to reli­gion. Rock and roll was bro­ken, tamed, and turned into com­mer­cial fod­der. Sim­ply put, it wasn’t cool at all, man, and even the Bea­t­les couldn’t save it sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. Their arrival on U.S. shores is mythol­o­gized as music his­to­ry Normandy—and has been cred­it­ed with inspir­ing count­less num­bers of musicians—but with­out Dylan and the blues artists he imi­tat­ed, things would very much have gone oth­er­wise.

In the ear­ly 60s, Dylan and the Bea­t­les’ “respec­tive musi­cal con­stituen­cies were indeed per­ceived as inhab­it­ing two sep­a­rate sub­cul­tur­al worlds,” writes Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love: The Bea­t­les, Britain, and Amer­i­ca. “Dylan’s core audi­ence was com­prised of young peo­ple emerg­ing from adolescence—college kids with artis­tic or intel­lec­tu­al lean­ings, a dawn­ing polit­i­cal and social ide­al­ism, and a mild­ly bohemi­an style…. The Bea­t­les’ core audi­ence, by con­trast, was com­prised of ver­i­ta­ble ‘teenyboppers’—kids in high school or grade school whose lives were total­ly wrapped up in the com­mer­cial­ized pop­u­lar cul­ture of tele­vi­sion, radio, pop records, fan mag­a­zines, and teen fash­ion. They were seen as idol­aters, not ide­al­ists.”

To evoke any­thing resem­bling the com­mer­cial pablum of Beat­le­ma­nia, and at New­port, no less, spoke of trea­son to folk authen­tic­i­ty. Some called out “Where’s Ringo?” Oth­ers called him “Judas.” Dylan’s set “would go down as one of the most divi­sive con­certs ever”—(and that’s say­ing a lot)—“putting the worlds of both folk and rock in tem­po­rary iden­ti­ty cri­sis,” Michael Mad­den writes at Con­se­quence of Sound. The for­mer folk hero accom­plished this in all of three songs, “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phan­tom Engi­neer,” an ear­ly take on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Pete Seeger famous­ly “threw a furi­ous tantrum” upon hear­ing the first few bars of “Maggie’s Farm,” above, though he’s since said he was upset at the sound qual­i­ty.

The moment was defining—and Dylan appar­ent­ly decid­ed to do it on a whim after hear­ing Alan Lomax insult the Paul But­ter­field Band, who were giv­ing a work­shop at the fes­ti­val. He came back onstage after­ward to play two acoustic songs for the appre­cia­tive audi­ence who remained, unfazed by the vehe­mence of half the crowd’s reac­tion to his ear­li­er set. Yet the rev­o­lu­tion to return rock to its folk and blues roots was already under­way. With­in six months of meet­ing Dylan in 1964, Gould writes, “John Lennon would be mak­ing records on which he open­ly imi­tat­ed Dylan’s nasal drone, brit­tle strum, and intro­spec­tive vocal per­sona.” (Dylan also intro­duced him to cannabis.)

In 1965, “the dis­tinc­tions between the folk and rock audi­ences would have near­ly evap­o­rat­ed.” The two met in the mid­dle. “The Bea­t­les’ audi­ence, in keep­ing with the way of the world, would be show­ing signs of grow­ing up,” while Dylan’s fans showed signs of “grow­ing down, as hun­dreds of thou­sands of folkies in their late teens and ear­ly twen­ties” redis­cov­ered “the ethos of their ado­les­cent years.” They also dis­cov­ered elec­tric blues. New­port shows Dylan accel­er­at­ing the tran­si­tion, and also sig­ni­fied the arrival of the great elec­tric blues-rock gui­tarists, in the form of the inim­itable Mike Bloom­field, an invad­ing force all his own, who inspired a gen­er­a­tion with his licks on “Like a Rolling Stone” and on the absolute clas­sic Paul But­ter­field Blues Band debut album, released in The Year Dylan Went Elec­tric.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tam­bourine Man” in Col­or at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

Tan­gled Up in Blue: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

How Bob Dylan Kept Rein­vent­ing His Song­writ­ing Process, Breath­ing New Life Into His Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema: An Introduction

When first we take an inter­est in movies, we must fig­ure out our own method of decid­ing what to watch next. The cen­tral fac­tor may be box office per­for­mance, the pres­ence of a favorite per­former, adher­ence to a favorite genre, or the use of a famil­iar sto­ry from oth­er media. Such paths through cin­e­ma can lead to enter­tain­ing view­ing expe­ri­ences, no doubt, but it’s safe to say that very few movie-lovers become bona fide cinephiles with­out even­tu­al­ly switch­ing their alle­giance to direc­tors. In eras past, a prop­er­ly orga­nized video store — that is, one whose tapes, Laserdiscs, or DVDs were ordered alpha­bet­i­cal­ly, by the direc­tor’s name — could pro­vide a gate­way. (Mine was Scare­crow Video.) Today’s bud­ding cinephiles have YouTube chan­nels like The House of Tab­u­la.

For­mer­ly known as The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy (and before that as Chan­nel Criswell), The House of Tab­u­la has pro­duced many video essays on film pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture. More than a few close­ly exam­ine par­tic­u­lar direc­tors: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan­ley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Quentin Taran­ti­no, to name just four that appear in The House of Tab­u­la’s new three-and-a-half-hour video “The Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma.”

A jour­ney through the evo­lu­tion of film as reflect­ed in the work of 78 dif­fer­ent direc­tors, it cov­ers Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Lynch, and Taran­ti­no in its lat­er chap­ters on “the Mod­ern Mas­ters” and “the New School.” The ear­li­er chap­ters exam­ine pic­tures by every­one from Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisen­stein, D.W. Grif­fith, and Char­lie Chap­lin to Alfred Hitch­cock, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and Orson Welles.

This view of cin­e­ma sub­scribes to “auteur the­o­ry,” which holds the direc­tor to be the guid­ing artis­tic intel­li­gence, or “author,” of a film. Most of us accept at least a ver­sion of this idea rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly in our jour­ney into cinephil­ia, and soon there­after encounter the vari­eties of objec­tion to it that have been lodged for decades and decades. Some direc­tors may oper­ate their own cam­eras, but most don’t; a few direc­tors act in their own movies, but the vast major­i­ty would­n’t even con­sid­er it (which is prob­a­bly all to the good). With some notable excep­tions, cin­e­ma is an intense­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive art, but as House of Tab­u­la co-cre­ator Lewis Bond puts it, the direc­tor is still the “voice” of a film. Togeth­er, the voic­es of the auteur film­mak­ers like the ones fea­tured in this video define the lan­guage of cin­e­ma, or per­haps the lan­guage that is cin­e­ma — one that every cinephile spends a life­time learn­ing to under­stand.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 30 Great­est Films Ever Made: A Video Essay

480 Film­mak­ers Reveal the 100 Great­est Movies in the World

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

Paul Schrad­er Cre­ates a Dia­gram Map­ping the Pro­gres­sion of Art­house Cin­e­ma: Ozu, Bres­son, Tarkovsky & Oth­er Auteurs

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

Near­ly 70 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe in angels, at least accord­ing to a sta­tis­tic often cit­ed in recent years. But what, exact­ly, comes to their minds — or those of any oth­er believ­ers around the world — when they imag­ine one? Per­son­al con­cep­tions may vary, of course, but we can be fair­ly cer­tain of one thing: most of them will bear no resem­blance to the angels actu­al­ly described in the Bible. Here to give us a sense of their appear­ance is Tom­mie Trelawny, cre­ator of the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga, whose video above explains “Why Bible Accu­rate Angels Are So Creepy.”

Far from the winged, white-robed embod­i­ments of gen­tle­ness we might know from greet­ing cards, says Trelawny, the angels of the Bible, and specif­i­cal­ly the Old Tes­ta­ment, are “hor­ri­fy­ing abom­i­na­tions” who would be more at home in an H. P. Love­craft nov­el. Angel, from the Greek ange­los, which itself comes from the Hebrew mal’akh, means “mes­sen­ger.” That implies an innocu­ous-enough set of duties, but then, you may recall the sto­ry of Passover, with its angel who slaugh­tered the Egyp­tians’ first-born sons; or the angel who “struck 70,000 Israelites to death”; or the angel who “sin­gle­hand­ed­ly killed 185,000 Assyr­i­an sol­diers in one night.”

The Bible does­n’t say any­thing about those angels hav­ing wings. “In fact, they look like any ordi­nary per­son,” as do even the most famous exam­ples like Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. In the grand heav­en­ly scheme of things, such humanoid angels, or Malakh, don’t rank par­tic­u­lar­ly high. Still, they’re one rung above the Cheru­bim, who turn out to be less like Cupid and more like “the myth­i­cal beasts of ancient Mesopotamia, espe­cial­ly the Baby­lon­ian Lamas­su, which has the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a king” — with a more-than-pass­ing resem­blance to the Egypt­ian sphinx or the Hit­tite grif­fin. Even the pop­u­lar image of the pudgy, fly­ing cherub, which emerged much lat­er, seems to have been import­ed from Greek and Roman myths.

Ranked above the Malakh are the six-winged Seraphim, or “burn­ing ones.” The ori­gins of these “care­tak­ers of God’s throne” are sug­gest­ed by the Hebrew word Saraph, mean­ing “a ven­omous ser­pent in the desert,” much like the cobra whose image adorned the head of the Egypt­ian pharaoh. As for the Ophan­im, it’s any­one’s guess where they come from. Tak­ing the form of a wheel with­in a wheel float­ing in the sky, its rims lined with eyes, an Ophan would make for an intim­i­dat­ing sight indeed: per­haps a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the wheels of God’s char­i­ot, per­haps the result of “the prophet ingest­ing a psy­che­del­ic plant,” and per­haps — accord­ing to a fringe the­o­ry — vis­i­ta­tion by a space­craft. What­ev­er the evi­dence for those expla­na­tions, it’s safe to say they’re not quite as com­fort­ing as all those placid celes­tial harpists.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

The Ori­gins of Satan: The Evo­lu­tion of the Dev­il in Reli­gion

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Angels & Demons: The Sci­ence Revealed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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