Did Psychedelic Mushrooms Appear in Medieval Christian Art?: A Video Essay

in Art, History, Psychology, Religion | November 18th, 2022

Historical research reveals psychoactive substances to have been in use longer than most of us would assume. But did Adam and Eve do mushrooms in the Garden of Eden? Unsurprisingly, that question is fraught on more than one level. But if you wish to believe that they did, spend some time with the thirteenth-century artwork above, known as the Plaincourault fresco. In it, writes Atlas Obscura’s Emma Betuel, “Adam and Eve stand in the Garden of Eden, both of them faceless.” Between them “stands a large red tree, crowned with a dotted, umbrella-like cap. The tree’s branches end in smaller caps, each with their own pattern of tiny white spots” — just like you’d see on certain species of fungus. “Tourists, scholars, and influencers come to see the tree that, according to some enthusiasts, depicts the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria.”

This image, more than any other piece of evidence, supports the theory that “early Christians used hallucinogenic mushrooms.” Supports is probably the wrong word, though there have been true believers since at least since 1911, “when a member of the French Mycological Society suggested the thing sprouting between Adam and Eve was a ‘bizarre’ and ‘arborescent’ mushroom.” The video essay just below, “Psychedelics in Christian Art,” presents the cases for and against the Tree of Life being a bunch of magic mushrooms. It comes from Youtuber Hochelaga, whose videos previously featured here on Open Culture have covered subjects like the Voynich Manuscript and the Biblical apocalypse. This particular episode comes as part of a miniseries on “strange Christian art” whose previous installments have focused on hellmouths and the three-headed Jesus.

Nevertheless, Hochelaga can’t come down on the side of the mushrooms-seers. Similar vegetation appears in other pieces of medieval art, but “in reality, these are drawings of trees, rendered with strange forms and bright colors,” as dictated by the relatively loose and exaggerated aesthetic of the era. But that doesn’t mean the Plaincourault fresco has nothing to teach us, and the same holds for other “psychedelic” Christian creations, like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the art-inspiring music of Hildegard von Bingen. Judging by the investigations this sort of thing has inspired — Tom Hatsis’ “The Psychedelic Gospels, The Plaincourault fresco, and the Death of Psychedelic History,” Jerry B. Brown and Julie M. Brown’s Journal of Psychedelic Studies article “Entheogens in Christian Art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels” — the relevant history constitutes quite a trip by itself.

The Drugs Used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

A Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

Michael Pollan, Sam Harris & Others Explain How Psychedelics Can Change Your Mind

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings

in Art, History, Religion, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | October 3rd, 2022

Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) never saw a rhino himself, but by relying on eyewitness descriptions of the one King Manuel I of Portugal intended as a gift to the Pope, he managed to render a fairly realistic one, all things considered.

Medieval artists’ renderings of cats so often fell short of the mark, Youtuber Art Deco wonders if any of them had seen a cat before.

Point taken, but cats were well integrated into medieval society.

Royal 12 C xix f. 36v/37r (13th century)

Cats provided medieval citizens with the same pest control services they’d been performing since the ancient Egyptians first domesticated them.

Ancient Egyptians conveyed their gratitude and respect by regarding cats as symbols of divinity, protection, and strength.

Certain Egyptian goddesses, like Bastet, were imbued with unmistakably feline characteristics.

The Vintage News reports that harming a cat in those days was punishable by death, exporting them was illegal, and, much like today, the death of a cat was an occasion for public sorrow:

When a cat died, it was buried with honors, mummified and mourned by the humans. The body of the cat would be wrapped in the finest materials and then embalmed in order to preserve the body for a longer time. Ancient Egyptians went so far that they shaved their eyebrows as a sign of their deep sorrow for the deceased pet.

Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 f. 23v (England, c 1200)

The medieval church took a much darker view of our feline friends.

Their close ties to paganism and early religions were enough for cats to be judged guilty of witchcraft, sinful sexuality, and fraternizing with Satan.

In the late 12th-century, writer Walter Map, a soon-to-be archdeacon of Oxford, declared that the devil appeared before his devotees in feline form:

… hanging by a rope, a black cat of great size. As soon as they see this cat, the lights are turned out. They do not sing or recite hymns in a distinct way, but they mutter them with their teeth closed and they feel in the dark towards where they saw their lord], and when they find it, they kiss it, the more humbly depending on their folly, some on the paws, some under the tail, some on the genitals. And as if they have, in this way, received a license for passion, each one takes the nearest man or woman and they join themselves with the other for as long as they choose to draw out their game.

Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull in 1484 condemning the “devil’s favorite animal and idol of all witches” to death, along with their human companions to death.

13th-century Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus refrained from demonic tattle, but neither did he paint cats as angels:

He is a full lecherous beast in youth, swift, pliant, and merry, and leapeth and reseth on everything that is to fore him: and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith: and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice: and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and reseth on them in privy places: and when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play. In time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grievously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with another: and unneth is hurt when he is thrown down off an high place. And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about: and when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home; and is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.

Pigs and rats also had a bad rep, and like cats, were tortured and executed in great numbers by pious humans.

The Worksop Bestiary Morgan Library, MS M.81 f. 47r (England, c 1185)

Not every medieval city was anti-cat. As the Academic Cat Lady Johanna Feenstra writes of the above illustration from The Worksop Bestiary, one of the earliest English bestiaries:

Some would have interpreted the image of a cat pouncing on a rodent as a symbol for the devil going after the human soul. Others might have seen the cat in a completely different light. For instance, as Eucharistic guardians, making sure rodents could not steal and eat the Eucharistic wafers.

Bodleian Library Bodley 764 f. 51r (England, c 1225–50)

St John’s College Library, MS. 61 (England (York), 13th century)

It took cat lover Leonardo DaVinci to turn the situation around, with eleven sketches from life portraying cats in characteristic poses, much as we see them today. We’ll delve more into that in a future post.

Conrad of Megenberg, ‘Das Buch der Natur’, Germany ca. 1434. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms.2.264, fol. 85r

An Animated History of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Predator to Sofa Sidekick

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Christopher Hitchens’ Final Interview: Hear the Newly-Released Uncut Conversation with Richard Dawkins

in Religion, Science | August 30th, 2022

Never was there such an exhilarating time and place to be interested in atheism than the internet of ten or fifteen years ago. “People compiled endless lists of arguments and counterarguments for or against atheism,” remembers blogger Scott Alexander. One atheist newsgroup “created a Dewey-Decimal-system-esque index of almost a thousand creationist arguments” and “painstakingly debunked all of them.” In turn, their creationist arch-enemies “went through and debunked all of their debunkings.” Readers could enjoy a host of atheism-themed web comics and “the now-infamous r/atheism subreddit, which at the time was one of Reddit’s highest-ranked, beating topics like ‘news,’ ‘humor,’ and — somehow — ‘sex.’ At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.”

This was the culture in which Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, in 2006, and Christopher Hitchens published his God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in 2007. “I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle,” Alexander quotes Hitchens as saying. “I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without ‘Big Brother,’ without a totalitarian permission, means we can’t be good to one another without this, we must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone whom we fear — the essence of sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on.”

Dawkins and Hitchens became known as two of the “Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse,” a group of public intellectuals that also included Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. The label stuck after all of them sat down for a two-hour conversation on video in the fall 2007, during which each man laid out his critique of the religious worldview. Four years later, Dawkins and Hitchens sat down for another recorded conversation, this time one-on-one and with a much different tone. Having suffered from cancer for more than a year, Hitchens seemed not to be long for this world, and indeed, he would be dead in just two months. But his condition hardly stopped him from speaking with his usual incisiveness on topics of great interest, and especially his and Dawkins’ shared bête noire of fundamentalist religion.

Dawkins, a biologist, sees in the power granted to religion a threat to hard-won scientific knowledge about the nature of reality; Hitchens, a writer and thinker in the tradition of George Orwell, saw it as one of the many forms of totalitarianism that has ever threatened the intellectual and bodily freedom of humankind. In this, Hitchens’ final interview (which was printed in Hitchens’ Last Interview book and whose uncut audio recording came available only this year), Dawkins expresses some concern that he’s become a “bore” with his usual anti-religious defense of science. Nonsense, Hitchens says: an honest scientist risks being called a bore just as an honest journalist risks being called strident, but nevertheless, “you’ve got to bang on.”

Is There an Afterlife? Christopher Hitchens Speculates in an Animated Video

Christopher Hitchens: No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask

Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers

The Last Interview Book Series Features the Final Words of Cultural Icons: Borges to Bowie, Philip K. Dick to Frida Kahlo

Richard Dawkins on Why We Should Believe in Science: “It Works … Bitches”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: Watch the Six-Part Series with Bill Moyers (1988)

in Religion, Television | August 25th, 2022

The twenty-first century encourages us to regard ourselves as having evolved beyond heroes, to say nothing of myths. Such things were only useful in the pre-modern world, as yet unblessed by the conveniences, pleasures, and certainties of science and technology. What, then, explains how devoted people are to Star Wars? For scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, George Lucas’ blockbuster space opera — and the trilogy it began — demonstrated modern man’s undiminished need for myth. Lucas returned the compliment, saying that could never have made it without the knowledge of archetypal heroes and their journeys he drew from Campbell’s work.

Campbell himself lays out this knowledge in the six interviews with journalist Bill Moyers that constitute The Power of Myth. That documentary series has just come available free to watch on the Youtube channel of distributor Kino Lorber, 34 years after its original broadcast on PBS in 1988.

At that time, Moyers says in an updated introduction, “when millions of people were yearning for a way of talking about religious experience without regard to a religious belief system, Campbell gave them the language for it.” For decades — for centuries, really — once-inviolable narratives of the world and man’s place in it had been breaking down. The inability to trace a mythological arc in their own lives has driven people in various directions: toward cults, toward health fads, toward therapy, toward pop culture.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, this created the most opportune of conditions for Campbell’s rise as a public intellectual. Though formed by the Depression rather than the Age of Aquarius, he could adapt his teachings about ancient myth, as if by instinct, for listeners hoping to raise their consciousness. “Follow your bliss,” he said, thinking of the Hindu Upanishads, and the New Age made into a cliché. But the Campbell of The Power of Myth has much still-relevant wisdom to offer, even for those who feel plunged into a despair unique to our moment. “The world is a wasteland,” he admits. “People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth.” But “the way to bring it to life is to find, in your own case, where your life is, and be alive yourself.” A hero’s journey awaits each of us, but never has there been so much to distract us from making it.

How Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” Recreates the Epic Hero’s Journey Described by Joseph Campbell

Updating Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” to Cover Female Action Heroes–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #33

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

When Christopher Hitchens Vigilantly Defended Salman Rushdie After the Fatwah: “It Was a Matter of Everything I Hated Versus Everything I Loved”

in Current Affairs, Literature, Politics, Religion | August 16th, 2022

I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me. –Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie remains in critical condition after suffering multiple stab wounds while on stage in New York, a shocking occurrence but not quite surprising given that the author has lived with a death sentence over his head since 1989. (You can read the history of that controversy here.) The nation of Iran has denied any responsibility for the attack on the author, but it’s probably safe to assume that his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses has something to do with it, over thirty years after the fact.

“Even before the fatwa,” Steven Erlanger writes in The New York Times, “the book was banned in a number of countries, including India, Bangladesh, Sudan and Sri Lanka.” Protests of the novel resulted in several deaths and attacks on booksellers. Rushdie had not set out to enrage much of the Islamic world, but neither had he any interest in appeasing its conservative leaders. Always outspoken, and a ferocious critic of British Empire as well as Islamic theocracy, his career since the fatwa has demonstrated a commitment to freeing the literary arts from the dictates of church and state.

On the subject of imperialism, Rushdie and the late Christopher Hitchens came to disagree after the U.S.‘s invasion of Iraq and Hitchens’ “U‑turn across the political highway to join forces with the war-makers of George W. Bush’s administration,” Rushdie writes in a Vanity Fair appreciation for Hitchens’ after the latter’s death. But his book God is Not Great “carried Hitch away from the American right and back toward his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency”; a collection of people who see the free expression of ideas as a far preferable condition to the existence of theocratic death squads.

Wherever he fell at any given time on the political spectrum, Hitchens never gave up his defense of Rushdie, one in which, as he wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22, he was completely committed from the start:

It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship–

Hitchens was gravely disappointed in liberal writers like Arthur Miller who refused to publicly support Rushdie out of fear, as he says in the television interview at the top of the post. The ambivalent response of many on the left struck him as gross political cowardice and hypocrisy. He went on the attack, arguing roundly on popular shows like Question Time (below, with his brother Peter, Baroness Williams, and recently deposed prime minister Boris Johnson).

Hitchens “saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence,” Rushdie writes, “that across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes — blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, ‘insult’ and ‘offense.’ ” Rushdie had meant no offense, he writes, “I had not chosen the battle.” But it seems to have chosen him:

It was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offense culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt… understood.

If the fatwa against Rushdie made him infamous, it did not make him universally beloved, even among his fellow writers, but he always had a fierce ally in Hitchens. Let’s hope Rushdie can pick up the fight for free expression once again when he recovers from this brutal stabbing.

Hear Salman Rushdie Read Donald Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard”

Jeff Koons and Salman Rushdie Teach New Courses on Art, Creativity & Storytelling for MasterClass

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover The Key of Hell, an Illustrated 18th-Century Guide to Black Magic (1775)

in Books, Religion | August 11th, 2022

According to the Book of Revelation, the returning Christ arrives surrounded by seven candlesticks. In its author’s prophetic dream, “his head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.” From his mouth issues “a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.” It’s a startling image, created for symbolic purposes. Without a key to what those symbols mean, the text remains obscure. It is, after all, a vision given to a mystic hermit exiled on an island.

Many a Revelation-inspired magical grimoire from succeeding centuries also remains nearly incomprehensible to non-adepts. Such is the case with the “strange 18th-century manuscript called Clavis Inferni (key of hell),” as Benjamin Breen writes at Slate. “Filled with invocations, cryptic sigils, and paintings of supernatural beings” — such as the illustration from Revelation above — “the book defies interpretation — as it was meant to do.” Also, like Revelation, the text’s authorship is mysterious, and yet significant to our understanding of its intent.

The Key of Hell is attributed to a Cyprianus, a name that “probably refers to St. Cyprian of Antioch (d. 304 CE),” Breen writes in a post at Atlas Obscura, “a very common apocryphal attribution for medieval magical texts, since Cyprian was reputed to have been a powerful magician and demon-summoner before converting to Christianity.” The use of pseudoepigraphy — an author assuming the name of a long-dead figure — was common practice throughout the history of both theological and alchemical writing. Rather than an attempt at deception, it could signal the continuation of a tradition of occult knowledge.

The title page of the Key of Hell “seems to date it to 1717,” writes Breen, but a Sotheby’s catalogue entry claims, “the script seems to be of the late 18th century” and dates it to 1775. At the Wellcome Library — who host the text online in its entirety — we find this “Harry Potter-esque” origin story:

Also known as the Black Book, [the Key of Hell] is the textbook of the Black School at Wittenberg, the book from which a witch or sorcerer gets his spells. The Black School at Wittenberg was purportedly a place in Germany where one went to learn the black arts.

Written in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and “the Magical Alphabet devised by occultist Cornelius Agrippa in his Third Book of Occult Philosophy from 1510,” notes Flashbak, the manuscript is “filled with invocations to spirits and demons — including a Hebrew invocation for summoning God.” (It also includes helpful instructions for banishing summoned spirits.) The manuscript’s full Latin title — Clavis Inferni sive magic alba et nigra approbata Metatrona — translates to “The Key of Hell with white and black magic approved by Metatron,” an archangel in the Talmudic and Kabbalist traditions. The use of this name suggests the spells within come from a higher authority.

Breen, however, found some unusual commentary on the book’s possible author, including the idea in Denmark that Cyprianus was “a fellow Dane so evil during his lifetime that when he died the devil threw him out of Hell,” writes professor of Norwegian literature Kathleen Stokker. Cyprianus was so enraged by this treatment that “he dedicated himself to writing the nine Books of Black Arts that underlie all subsequent Scandinavian black books.” Another apocryphal story identifies Cyprianus as a “ravishingly beautiful” Mexican nun from 1351 (?!) who met a “gory” end.

Whoever wrote the Key of Hell, and for whatever reason, they left behind a fascinating book of sorcery full of curious illustrations and a cryptic cosmology. See Breen’s attempts to decipher some of its key symbols here and make your own with the full text at the Wellcome Library.

1,600 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

A Big Archive of Occult Recordings: Historic Audio Lets You Hear Trances, Paranormal Music, Glossolalia & Other Strange Sounds (1905–2007)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Is There Life After Death?: Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, Sam Harris & More Explore One of Life’s Biggest Questions

in Life, Religion, Science | July 22nd, 2022

We should probably not look to science to have cherished beliefs confirmed. As scientific understanding of the world has progressed over the centuries, it has brought on a loss of humans’ status as privileged beings at the center of the universe whose task is to subdue and conquer nature. (The stubborn persistence of those attitudes among the powerful has not served the species well.) We are not special, but we are still responsible, we have learned — maybe totally responsible for our lives on this planet. The methods of science do not lend themselves to soothing existential anxiety.

But what about the most cherished, and likely ancient, of human beliefs: faith in an afterlife? Ideas of an underworld, or heaven, or hell have animated human culture since its earliest origins. There is no society in the world where we will not find some belief in an afterlife existing comfortably alongside life’s most mundane events. Is it a harmful idea? Is there any real evidence to support it? And which version of an afterlife — if such a thing existed — should we believe?

Such questions stack up. Answers in forms science can reconcile seem diminishingly few. Nonetheless, as we see in the Big Think video above, scientists, science communicators, and science enthusiasts are willing to discuss the possibility, or impossibility, of continuing after death. We begin with NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller, who references Einstein’s theory of the universe as fully complete, “so every point in the past and every point in the future are just as real as the point of time you feel yourself in right now.” Time spreads out in a landscape, each moment already mapped and surveyed.

When a close friend died, Einstein wrote a letter to his friend’s wife explaining, “Your husband, my friend, is just over the next hill. He’s still there” — in a theoretical sense. It may not have been the comfort she was looking for. The hope of an afterlife is that we’ll see our loved ones again, something Einstein’s solution does not allow. Sam Harris — who has leaned into the mystical practice of meditation while pulling it from its religious context — admits that death is a “dark mystery.” When people die, “there’s just the sheer not knowing what happened to them. And into this void, religion comes rushing with a very consoling story, saying nothing happened them; they’re in a better place and you’re going to meet up with them after.”

The story isn’t always so consoling, depending on how punitive the religion, but it does offer an explanation and sense of certainty in the face of “sheer not knowing.” The human mind does not tolerate uncertainty particularly well. Death feels like the greatest unknown of all. (Harris’ argument parallels that of anthropologist Pascal Boyer on the origin of all religions.) But the phenomenon of death is not unknown to us. We are surrounded by it daily, from the plants and animals we consume to the pets we sadly let go when their lifespans end. Do we keep ourselves up wondering what happened to these beings? Maybe our spiritual or religious beliefs aren’t always about death.…

“In the Old Testament there isn’t really any sort of view of the afterlife,” says Rob Bell, a spiritual teacher (and the only talking head here not aligned with a scientific institution or rationalist movement). “This idea that the whole thing is about when you die is not really the way that lots of people have thought about it.” For many religious practitioners, the idea of eternal life means “living in harmony with the divine right now.” For many, this “right now” — this very moment and each one we experience after it — is eternal. See more views of the afterlife above from science educators like Bill Nye and scientists like Michio Kaku, who says the kind of afterlives we’ve only seen in science fiction — “digital and genetic immortality” — “are within reach.”

Richard Feynman on Religion, Science, the Search for Truth & Our Willingness to Live with Doubt

Michio Kaku & Brian Green Explain String Theory in a Nutshell: Elegant Explanations of an Elegant Theory

Philosopher Sam Harris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guided Meditation

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

in Art, History, Poetry, Religion | June 22nd, 2022

Given his achievements in the realms of both poetry and painting, to say nothing of his compulsions to religious and philosophical inquiry, it’s tempting to call William Blake a “Renaissance man.” But he lived in the England of the mid-eighteenth century to the near mid-nineteenth, making him a Romantic Age man — and in fact, according to the current historical view, one of that era’s defining figures. “Today he is recognized as the most spiritual of artists,” say the narrator of the video introduction above, “and an important poet in English literature.” And whether realized on canvas or in verse, his visions have retained their power over the centuries.

That power, however, went practically unacknowledged in Blake’s lifetime. Most who knew him regarded him as something between an eccentric and a madman, a perception his grandly mystical ideas and vigorous rejection of both institutions and conventions did little to dispel.

Blake didn’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger underlying truths using his formidable imagination, exercised both in his art and in his dreams. Cultivating this capacity allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it merely hints at the depth and breadth of his worldview — indeed, his view of all existence. His entire corpus, written, painted, and printed, constitutes a kind of atlas of this richly imagined territory to which “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake” provides an overview. Though very much a product of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clearly drew less inspiration from the world around him than from the world inside him. Reality, for him, was to be cultivated — and richly — within his own being. Still today, the chimerical conviction of his work dares us to cultivate the reality within ourselves.

William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations

William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

William Blake Illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Literature, Original Stories from Real Life (1791)

William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Did Psychedelic Mushrooms Appear in Medieval Christian Art?: A Video Essay

Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings

Christopher Hitchens’ Final Interview: Hear the Newly-Released Uncut Conversation with Richard Dawkins

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: Watch the Six-Part Series with Bill Moyers (1988)

When Christopher Hitchens Vigilantly Defended Salman Rushdie After the Fatwah: “It Was a Matter of Everything I Hated Versus Everything I Loved”

Discover The Key of Hell, an Illustrated 18th-Century Guide to Black Magic (1775)

Is There Life After Death?: Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, Sam Harris & More Explore One of Life’s Biggest Questions

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

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