The Largest Free Kitchen in the World: Discover India’s Golden Temple Which Serves 100,000 Free Meals Per Day

If you find your­self hun­gry in Amrit­sar, a major city in the Indi­an state of Pun­jab, you could do worse than stop­ping into the Gold­en Tem­ple, the largest Sikh house of wor­ship in the world. It thus also oper­ates the largest com­mu­ni­ty kitchen, or lan­gar, in the world, which serves more than 100,000 free meals a day, 24 hours a day. Any­one famil­iar with Sikhism knows that, for its believ­ers, serv­ing food to the hun­gry con­sti­tutes an essen­tial duty: not just to the poor, and cer­tain­ly not just to fel­low Sikhs, but to all com­ers. Wher­ev­er in the world you may live, if there’s a Sikh tem­ple or shrine in the vicin­i­ty, there’s quite pos­si­bly a lan­gar you can vis­it as well.

Of course, no oth­er lan­gar match­es the scale of the Gold­en Tem­ple’s. As explained in the Food Insid­er video above, it oper­ates with a per­ma­nent staff of 300 to 350 employ­ees as well as a large num­ber of vol­un­teers, all of whom work in con­cert with machines around the clock to pro­duce an unend­ing stream of veg­e­tar­i­an meals, which include daal lentil stew and cha­p­ati bread. There’s always been a mar­ket for free food, but recent years have seen increas­es in demand great enough to neces­si­tate the con­struc­tion of addi­tion­al din­ing halls, and total oper­at­ing expens­es come to the equiv­a­lent of some US$4 mil­lion per year. (Every day, $5,000 goes to ghee, or Indi­an clar­i­fied but­ter, alone.)

Apart from the peo­ple of Amrit­sar and pil­grim­age-mak­ing devo­tees, the Gold­en Tem­ple lan­gar has also drawn the atten­tion of culi­nar­i­ly mind­ed trav­el­ers. Take the Cana­di­an Youtu­ber Trevor James, bet­ter known as the Food Ranger, to whose taste for extreme scale and quan­ti­ty the oper­a­tion no doubt appeals. His vis­it also affords him the oppor­tu­ni­ty, before his meal, to be out­fit­ted in tra­di­tion­al dress, up to and includ­ing a Sikh tur­ban. (The Gold­en Tem­ple requires its din­ers to wear a head-cov­er­ing of some kind.) James’ stock of trav­el-vlog­ger superla­tives is near­ly exhaust­ed by the splen­dor of the tem­ple itself before he steps into the kitchen to observe (and even lend a hand in) the cook­ing process. “Look at this,” he exclaims upon tak­ing his seat on the floor of the hall with a tray of his own. “This is an almost spir­i­tu­al meal” — an aura exud­ed whether you believe in Wahe­gu­ru, the gods of street food, or any­thing else besides.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Al Jazeera Trav­el Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food

When Al Capone Opened a Soup Kitchen Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion: Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Mobster’s Oper­a­tion

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.

Discover Ibn Sina (Avicenna), a Missing Pixel in Your Image of Philosophy: Partially Examined Life Episode #267 Featuring Peter Adamson

Most Amer­i­can stu­dents in phi­los­o­phy live on a diet of ancient Greek phi­los­o­phy on the one hand, and then “mod­ern” phi­los­o­phy, which starts around the time of Descartes (the 17th cen­tu­ry), with numer­ous schools and approach­es spilling into the present day. If you get any­thing from between those ancient days and moder­ni­ty, it’s prob­a­bly some church­men, i.e. Augus­tine (from the 4th cen­tu­ry) and Thomas Aquinas (the 13th cen­tu­ry), with per­haps a few Romans thrown in there and (if you’re Jew­ish) Mai­monides (12th cen­tu­ry).

But a key part of this lin­eage was the East­ward turn that the great works of Greek and Roman phi­los­o­phy took dur­ing the so-called Dark Ages, when they were pre­served and copied in the Islam­ic world, and this peri­od pro­duced a wealth of phi­los­o­phy includ­ing two fig­ures who became influ­en­tial enough in the West that their names were Latinized: Ibn Sīnā (980‑1037 C.E.) and Ibn Rushd, a.k.a. Aver­roes (1126–1198). Aquinas was very famil­iar with these fig­ures and incor­po­rat­ed them into his influ­en­tial works, and in the case of Ibn Sina, at least, impor­tant fig­ures like John Locke had def­i­nite­ly known at least about his views, if not his actu­al works.

On the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, which has been going for 13 years now, we range wide­ly over the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy but had not actu­al­ly cracked the Islam­ic world. Luck­i­ly, Ibn Sīnā is one of the favorite philoso­phers of one of our favorite guests, Peter Adam­son of King’s Col­lege Lon­don. Peter runs his own pod­cast, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy (With­out Any Gaps), which as the name implies, cov­ers Medieval phi­los­o­phy with admirable thor­ough­ness, cov­er­ing not only Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd, but also fig­ures like al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī, Al-Ghazālī, and many oth­ers.

Peter was good enough to rec­om­mend some read­ings to intro­duce us and our lis­ten­ers to this fig­ure, some of which he actu­al­ly wrote. Because of the vol­ume, redun­dan­cy, and style of Ibn Sīnā’s writ­ings, some sort of guide to col­lect and to some degree explain pas­sages is essen­tial for get­ting a han­dle on this idio­syn­crat­ic and bril­liant thinker. He wrote at least three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of his all-encom­pass­ing sys­tem, which was influ­enced by and meant to sup­plant Aris­totle’s. In addi­tion to philosophical/theological top­ics, it includ­ed math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, psy­chol­o­gy, and more. So instead of try­ing to read a whole work cov­er­ing all that, it makes more sense to pick indi­vid­ual top­ics and then look at the var­i­ous for­mu­la­tions he gave about these.

Our two top­ics for this dis­cus­sion were a pecu­liar argu­ment for the exis­tence of God — with impor­tant impli­ca­tions for talk­ing about meta­physics more gen­er­al­ly — and an argu­ment for the imma­te­ri­al­i­ty of the soul, which like­wise tells us a lot about the way that Ibn Sīnā thought about knowl­edge and its rela­tion to the world.

The argu­ment for the exis­tence of God was lat­er called by Thomas Aquinas “the argu­ment from con­tin­gency.” It posits that things in the world don’t sim­ply exist, but that they require some­thing else to sup­port their exis­tence. This isn’t a cause is the chrono­log­i­cal sense that we talk about it: a pri­or event that gave rise to the thing. Rather, the mate­r­i­al com­po­nents of some­thing in a cer­tain arrange­ment make it con­tin­ue to exist as that thing right now; for exam­ple, a house exists because its com­po­nent wood parts exist, with nails and such hold­ing them in place. And the wood in turn has its char­ac­ter because of its physical/chemical com­po­nents, etc. If these com­po­nent caus­es weren’t in place, the thing would not exist; the thing is thus “con­tin­gent,” mean­ing it might well not have exist­ed were it not for those caus­es.

This pic­ture of the uni­verse thus includes a giant net­work of causal­i­ty, but does that net­work itself rest on any­thing? Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, there must be some­thing that is not con­tin­gent that holds every­thing else up. But is this thing God (in the sense that a good Mus­lim of his time would rec­og­nize it)? Ibn Sīnā then has a long series of argu­ments to show one by one that just by being “the nec­es­sary being,” this enti­ty also must be unique, must be all-pow­er­ful, gen­er­ous, and all the oth­er things one would expect God to be.

The argu­ment for the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul is per­haps Ibn Sīnā’s most famous argu­ment, often called the fly­ing or float­ing man argu­ment. It’s a thought exper­i­ment where­by you imag­ine you’ve just been cre­at­ed, but ful­ly mature, so you can think, but with no mem­o­ry, and your sens­es are inop­er­a­ble. You can’t even feel grav­i­ty or the ground under your feet (thus the “fly­ing” part). Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, you would still in such a sit­u­a­tion know that you exist. Since your appre­hen­sion of self did not include any part of your body (you could­n’t feel your body at all), that is sup­posed to prove that your body is not an essen­tial part of what you are.

Ibn Sīnā thought this argu­ment defin­i­tive because of his the­o­ry of knowl­edge by which if you know any­thing at all, then you know about the essen­tial com­po­nents of that thing. If you know what a tri­an­gle is, you know that it’s an abstract geo­met­ri­cal fig­ure with three straight sides. If you know what a horse is, you know that it’s a bio­log­i­cal ani­mal with a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that you can iden­ti­fy. And to know what you are essen­tial­ly, you only need know that feel­ing of your own mind; any­thing else about that mind being asso­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar body that lives in a par­tic­u­lar part of the world and is just knowl­edge of con­tin­gent, rela­tion­al facts about your­self.

PEL hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Dylan Casey grap­ple in detail with Peter about these argu­ments, both on this record­ing and on a sec­ond part of the dis­cus­sion for those that want to hear more. To read more about these argu­ments and get the cita­tions to the texts we read for this dis­cus­sion, see the essay for this episode at partiallyexaminedlife.com. The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy pod­cast also fea­tures four mono­logues and an inter­view about Ibn Sīnā. Don’t let this gap in your knowl­edge of major fig­ures in intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry remain unfilled!

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

Beautiful 19th-Century Indian Drawings Show Hatha Yoga Poses Before They Reached the West

Yoga as an ath­let­ic series of pos­tures for phys­i­cal health came into being only about 100 years ago, part of a wave of gym­nas­tics and cal­is­then­ics that spread around the West­ern world in the 1920s and made its way to India, com­bin­ing with clas­si­cal Indi­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and asanas, a word which trans­lates to “seat.”  Yoga, of course, had exist­ed as a clas­si­cal spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline in India for thou­sands of years. (The word is first found in the Rig Veda), but it had lit­tle to do with fit­ness, as yoga schol­ar Mark Sin­gle­ton found when he delved into the roots of yoga as we know it.

Asana prac­tice was often mar­gin­al, even scorned by some 19th cen­tu­ry Indi­an teach­ers of high caste as the domain of “fakirs” and men­di­cant beg­gars. “The first wave of ‘export yogis,’” writes Sin­gle­ton, “head­ed by Swa­mi Vivekanan­da, large­ly ignored asana and tend­ed to focus instead on pranaya­ma [breath prac­tice], med­i­ta­tion, and pos­i­tive think­ing…. Vivekanan­da pub­licly reject­ed hatha yoga in gen­er­al and asana in par­tic­u­lar.”

In the 20th cen­tu­ry, yoga became asso­ci­at­ed with Indi­an nation­al­ism and anti-colo­nial resis­tance, and import­ed West­ern pos­es were com­bined with asanas for a pro­gram of intense phys­i­cal train­ing.

West­ern­ized yoga has obscured oth­er tra­di­tions around the world that devel­oped over hun­dreds or thou­sands of years. For his book with James Mallinson, Roots of Yoga, Sin­gle­ton con­sult­ed “yog­ic texts from Tibetan, Ara­bic, Per­sian, Ben­gali, Tamil, Pali, Kash­miri, Old Marathi, Avad­hi, Braj Bhasha, and Eng­lish,” notes the Pub­lic Domain Review, who bring our atten­tion to this ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry series of images from a text called the Joga Pradīpikā, made before clas­si­cal yoga became known in the west by adven­tur­ous thinkers like Hen­ry David Thore­au.

A few mil­len­nia before it was the prove­nance of lycra-clad teach­ers in bou­tique stu­dios, asana prac­tice com­bined rig­or­ous, often quite painful-look­ing, med­i­ta­tive pos­tures with mudras (“seals”), hand ges­tures whose ori­gins “remain obscure,” though yoga his­to­ri­an Georg Feuer­stein argues “they are undoubt­ed­ly the prod­ucts of inten­sive med­i­ta­tion prac­tice dur­ing [which] the body spon­ta­neous­ly assumes cer­tain sta­t­ic as well as dynam­ic pos­es.” The col­lec­tion of draw­ings in the 118-page book depicts 84 asanas and 24 mudras, “with explana­to­ry notes in Bra­ja-Bhasha verse,” notes the British Library, and one image (top) relat­ed to Kun­dali­ni yoga.

What­ev­er the var­i­ous prac­tices of yog­ic schools in both the East­ern and West­ern world, “the meth­ods and lifestyles devel­oped by the Indi­an philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al genius­es over a peri­od of at least five mil­len­nia all have one and the same pur­pose,” writes Feuer­stein in his sem­i­nal study, The Yoga Tra­di­tion: “to help us break through the habit pat­terns of our ordi­nary con­scious­ness and to real­ize our iden­ti­ty (or at least union) with the peren­ni­al Real­i­ty. Indi­a’s great tra­di­tions of psy­chos­pir­i­tu­al growth under­stand them­selves as paths of lib­er­a­tion. Their goal is to lib­er­ate us from our con­ven­tion­al con­di­tion­ing and hence also free us from suf­fer­ing.”

Under a broad umbrel­la, yoga has flour­ished as an incred­i­ble wealth of tra­di­tions, philoso­phies, reli­gious prac­tices, and schol­ar­ship whose strands weave loose­ly togeth­er in what most of us know as yoga in a syn­the­sis of East and West. Learn more at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and have a look at their new book of his­toric images, Affini­ties, here, a curat­ed jour­ney through visu­al cul­ture.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

How Yoga Changes the Brain and May Guard Against Alzheimer’s and Demen­tia

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

Exquisite Watercolors of Demons, Magic & Signs: Behold the Compendium Of Demonology and Magic from 1775

Noli me tan­gere, says the title page of the Com­pendi­um of Demonolo­gy and Mag­ic: “Do not touch me.” For the book’s tar­get audi­ence, one sus­pects, this was more entice­ment than warn­ing. Writ­ten in Latin (its full title is Com­pendi­um raris­si­mum totius Artis Mag­i­cae sis­tem­a­ti­sa­tae per cele­ber­ri­mos Artis hujus Mag­istros) and Ger­man, the book pur­ports to come from the year 1057. In fact it’s been dat­ed as more than 700 years younger, though to most 21st-cen­tu­ry behold­ers a book from around 1775 car­ries enough his­tor­i­cal weight to be intrigu­ing — espe­cial­ly if, as the Pub­lic Domain Review puts it, it depicts “a var­ied bes­tiary of grotesque demon­ic crea­tures.”

The spec­i­mens cat­a­logued in the Com­pendi­um of Demonolo­gy and Mag­ic are “up to all sorts of appro­pri­ate­ly demon­ic activ­i­ties, such as chew­ing down on sev­ered legs, spit­ting fire and snakes from gen­i­talia, and parad­ing around decap­i­tat­ed heads on sticks.”

Grotesque­ly com­bin­ing fea­tures of man and beast, these hideous chimeras are ren­dered in “more than thir­ty exquis­ite water­col­ors” that still look vivid today. In fact, with their punk­ish cos­tumes, insou­ciant expres­sions, and often inde­cent­ly exposed nether regions, these demons look ready and will­ing to cause a scan­dal even in our jad­ed time.

Near­ly two and a half cen­turies ago, we might fair­ly assume, a greater pro­por­tion of the pub­lic believed in the exis­tence of demons — if not these spe­cif­ic mon­strosi­ties, then at least the con­cept of the demon­ic in gen­er­al. But we’re sure­ly lying to our­selves if we believed that nobody in the 16th cen­tu­ry had a sense of humor about it. Even the work of this book’s unknown illus­tra­tor evi­dences, beyond for­mi­da­ble artis­tic skill and wild imag­i­na­tion, a cer­tain comedic instinct, seri­ous busi­ness though demon­ic inten­tions toward human­i­ty may be.

With its less humor­ous con­tent includ­ing exe­cu­tion scenes and instruc­tions for the pro­ce­dures of witch­craft from div­ina­tion to necro­man­cy, the Com­pendi­um of Demonolo­gy and Mag­ic belongs to a deep­er tra­di­tion of books that elab­o­rate­ly cat­a­log and depict the vari­eties of super­nat­ur­al evil. (A much old­er exam­ple is the Codex Gigas, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, a “Dev­il’s Bible” that also hap­pens to be the largest medieval man­u­script in the word.)

You can behold more of these delight­ful­ly hell­ish illus­tra­tions at the Pub­lic Domain Review and even down­load the whole book free from the Well­come Col­lec­tion. (See a PDF of the entire book here.) And no mat­ter how close­ly you scru­ti­nize your dig­i­tal copy, you won’t run the risk of touch­ing it.

The Com­pendi­um of Demonolo­gy and Mag­ic is one of the many texts fea­tured in The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Man­u­scripts and Oth­er Lit­er­ary Curiosi­ties from His­to­ry, a new book fea­tured on our site ear­li­er this week.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Foot-Lick­ing Demons & Oth­er Strange Things in a 1921 Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script from Iran

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

Help a Library Tran­scribe Mag­i­cal Man­u­scripts & Recov­er the Charms, Potions & Witch­craft That Flour­ished in Ear­ly Mod­ern Europe and Amer­i­ca

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

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.

Artist Makes Micro-Miniature Sculptures So Small They Fit on the Head of a Pin

The jury remains out as to the num­ber of angels that can dance on a pin, but self-taught artist Flor Car­va­jal is amass­ing some data regard­ing the num­ber of itty bit­ty sculp­tures that can be installed on the tips of match­sticks, pen­cil points, and — thanks to a rude encounter with a local reporter — in the eye of a nee­dle.

Accord­ing to Tucson’s Mini Time Machine Muse­um of Minia­tures, where her work is on dis­play through June, The Van­guardia Lib­er­al was con­sid­er­ing run­ning an inter­view in con­junc­tion with an exhib­it of her Christ­mas-themed minia­tures. When she wouldn’t go on record as to whether any of the itty-bit­ty nativ­i­ty scenes she’d been craft­ing for over a decade could be described as the world’s small­est, the reporter hung up on her.

Rather than stew, she imme­di­ate­ly start­ed exper­i­ment­ing, switch­ing from Sty­ro­foam to syn­thet­ic resin in the pur­suit of increas­ing­ly minis­cule manger scenes.

By sun­rise, she’d man­aged to place the Holy Fam­i­ly atop a lentil, a grain of rice, the head of a nail, and the head of a pin.

These days, most of her micro-minia­ture sculp­tures require between 2 and 14 days of work, though she has been labor­ing on a mod­el of Apol­lo 11 for over a year, using only a mag­ni­fy­ing glass and a nee­dle, which dou­bles as brush and carv­ing tool.

In a vir­tu­al artist’s chat last month, she empha­sizes that a calm mind, steady hands, and breath con­trol are impor­tant things to bring to her work­bench.

Open win­dows can lead to nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. The odds of recov­er­ing a work-in-progress that’s been knocked to the floor are close to nil, when said piece is ren­dered in 1/4” scale or small­er.

Reli­gious themes pro­vide ongo­ing inspi­ra­tion — a recent achieve­ment is a 26 x 20 mil­lime­ter recre­ation of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Last Sup­per — but she’s also drawn to sub­jects relat­ing to her native Colum­bia, like Goran­chacha, the son the Muis­ca Civ­i­liza­tion’s Sun God, and Juan Valdez, the fic­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the nation­al cof­fee grow­ers fed­er­a­tion.

See more of  Flor Carvajal’s micro-minia­tures on her Insta­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Cook­ing with Wool: Watch Mouth­wa­ter­ing Tiny Woolen Food Ani­ma­tions

Watch Tee­ny Tiny Japan­ese Meals Get Made in a Minia­ture Kitchen: The Joy of Cook­ing Mini Tem­pu­ra, Sashi­mi, Cur­ry, Okonomiya­ki & More

The Grue­some Doll­house Death Scenes That Rein­vent­ed Mur­der Inves­ti­ga­tions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

As an exer­cise draw a com­po­si­tion of fear or sad­ness, or great sor­row, quite sim­ply, do not both­er about details now, but in a few lines tell your sto­ry. Then show it to any one of your friends, or fam­i­ly, or fel­low stu­dents, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to por­tray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale.

- Pamela Col­man-Smith, “Should the Art Stu­dent Think?” July, 1908

A year after Arts and Crafts move­ment mag­a­zine The Crafts­man pub­lished illus­tra­tor Pamela Colman-Smith’s essay excerpt­ed above, she spent six months cre­at­ing what would become the world’s most pop­u­lar tarot deck. Her graph­ic inter­pre­ta­tions of such cards as The Magi­cianThe Tow­er, and The Hanged Man helped read­ers to get a han­dle on the sto­ry of every new­ly dealt spread.

Colman-Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was com­mis­sioned by occult schol­ar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fel­low mem­ber of the British occult soci­ety the Her­met­ic Order of the Gold­en Dawn, to illus­trate a pack of tarot cards.

In a humor­ous let­ter to her even­tu­al cham­pi­on, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Alfred Stieglitz, Col­man-Smith (1878 – 1951) described her 80 tarot paint­ings as “a big job for very lit­tle cash,” though she betrayed a touch of gen­uine excite­ment that they would be “print­ed in col­or by lith­o­g­ra­phy… prob­a­bly very bad­ly.”

Although Waite had some spe­cif­ic visu­al ideas with regard to the “astro­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance” of var­i­ous cards, Col­man-Smith enjoyed a lot of cre­ative lee­way, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it came to the Minor Arcana or pip cards.

These 56 num­bered cards are divid­ed into suits—wands, cups, swords and pen­ta­cles. Pri­or to Colman-Smith’s con­tri­bu­tion, the only exam­ple of a ful­ly illus­trat­ed Minor Arcana was to be found in the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing deck, the Sola Bus­ca which dates to the ear­ly 1490s. A few of her Minor Arcana cards, notably 3 of Swords and 10 of Wands, make overt ref­er­ence to that deck, which she like­ly encoun­tered on a research expe­di­tion to the British Muse­um.

Most­ly the images were of Col­man-Smith’s own inven­tion, informed by her sound-col­or synes­the­sia and the clas­si­cal music she lis­tened to while work­ing. Her ear­ly expe­ri­ence in a tour­ing the­ater com­pa­ny helped her to con­vey mean­ing through cos­tume and phys­i­cal atti­tude.

Here are Pacif­ic North­west witch and tarot prac­ti­tion­er Moe Bow­stern’s thoughts on Smith’s Three of Pen­ta­cles:

Pen­ta­cles are the suit of Earth, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of struc­ture and foun­da­tion. Col­man-Smith’s the­ater-influ­enced designs here iden­ti­fy the occu­pa­tions of three fig­ures stand­ing in an apse of what appears to be a cathe­dral: a car­pen­ter with tools in hand; an archi­tect show­ing plans to the group; a ton­sured monk, clear­ly the stew­ard of the build­ing project. 

The over­all impres­sion is one of build­ing some­thing togeth­er that is much big­ger than any indi­vid­ual and which may out­last any indi­vid­ual life. The col­lab­o­ra­tion is root­ed in the hands-on mate­r­i­al work of foun­da­tion build­ing, requir­ing many view­points.

A spe­cial Pix­ie Smith touch is the phys­i­cal ele­va­tion of the car­pen­ter, who would have been placed on the low­est rung of medieval soci­ety hier­ar­chies. Smith has him on a bench, show­ing the impor­tance of get­ting hands on with the project. 

For years, Col­man-Smith’s cards were referred to as the Rid­er-Waite Tarot Deck. This gave a nod to pub­lish­er William Rid­er & Son, while neglect­ing to cred­it the artist respon­si­ble for the dis­tinc­tive gouache illus­tra­tions. It con­tin­ues to be sold under that ban­ner, but late­ly, tarot enthu­si­asts have tak­en to per­son­al­ly amend­ing the name to the Rid­er Waite Smith (RWS) or Waite Smith (WS) deck out of respect for its pre­vi­ous­ly unher­ald­ed co-cre­ator.

While Col­man-Smith is best remem­bered for her tarot imagery, she was also a cel­e­brat­ed sto­ry­teller, illus­tra­tor of children’s books and a col­lec­tion of Jamaican folk tales, cre­ator of elab­o­rate toy the­ater pieces, and mak­er of images on behalf of women’s suf­frage and the war effort dur­ing WWII.

Out­side of some ear­ly adven­tures in a trav­el­ing the­ater, and friend­ships with Stieglitz, author Bram Stok­er, actress Ellen Ter­ry, and poet William But­ler Yeats, cer­tain details of her per­son­al life—namely her race and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion—are dif­fi­cult to divine. It’s not for lack of inter­est. She is the focus of sev­er­al biogra­phies and an increas­ing num­ber of blog posts.

It’s sad, but not a total shock­er, to learn that this inter­est­ing, mul­ti-tal­ent­ed woman died in pover­ty in 1951. Her paint­ings and draw­ings were auc­tioned off, with the pro­ceeds going toward her debts. Her death cer­tifi­cate list­ed her occu­pa­tion not as artist but as “Spin­ster of Inde­pen­dent Means.” Lack­ing funds for a head­stone, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Explore more of Pamela “Pix­ie” Colman-Smith’s illus­tra­tions and read some of her let­ters to Alfred Stieglitz at Yale University’s Bei­necke Rare Book and Man­u­script Library’s col­lec­tion.

via Messy­Nessy/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

When Sci-Fi Legend Ursula K. Le Guin Translated the Chinese Classic, the Tao Te Ching

Bren­da (laugh­ing): Can you imag­ine a Taoist adver­tis­ing agency? “Buy this if you feel like it. If it’s right. You may not need it.”

Ursu­la: There was an old car­toon in The New York­er with a guy from an adver­tis­ing agency show­ing his ad and the boss is say­ing “I think you need a lit­tle more enthu­si­asm Jones.” And his ad is say­ing, “Try our prod­uct, it real­ly isn’t bad.”

Per­haps no Chi­nese text has had more last­ing influ­ence in the West than the Tao Te Ching, a work so ingrained in our cul­ture by now, it has become a “change­less con­stant,” writes Maria Popo­va. “Every gen­er­a­tion of admir­ers has felt, and con­tin­ues to feel, a pre­science in these ancient teach­ings so aston­ish­ing that they appear to have been writ­ten for their own time.” It speaks direct­ly to us, we feel, or at least, that’s how we can feel when we find the right trans­la­tion.

Admir­ers of the Taoist clas­sic have includ­ed John Cage, Franz Kaf­ka, Bruce Lee, Alan Watts, and Leo Tol­stoy, all of whom were deeply affect­ed by the mil­len­nia-old philo­soph­i­cal poet­ry attrib­uted to Lao Tzu. That’s some heavy com­pa­ny for the rest of us to keep, maybe. It’s also a list of famous men. Not every read­er of the Tao is male or approach­es the text as the utter­ances of a patri­ar­chal sage. One famous read­er had the audac­i­ty to spend decades on her own, non-gen­dered, non-hier­ar­chi­cal trans­la­tion, even though she didn’t read Chi­nese.

It’s not quite right to call Ursu­la Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching a trans­la­tion, so much as an inter­pre­ta­tion, or a “ren­di­tion,” as she calls it. “I don’t know Chi­nese,” she said in an inter­view with Bren­da Peter­son, “but I drew upon the Paul Carus trans­la­tion of 1898 which has Chi­nese char­ac­ters fol­lowed by a translit­er­a­tion and a trans­la­tion.” She used the Carus as a “touch­stone for com­par­ing oth­er trans­la­tions,” and start­ed, in her twen­ties, “work­ing on these poems. Every decade or so I’d do anoth­er chap­ter. Every read­er has to start anew with such an ancient text.”

Le Guin drew out inflec­tions in the text which have been obscured by trans­la­tions that address the read­er as a Ruler, Sage, Mas­ter, or King. In her intro­duc­tion, Le Guin writes, “I want­ed a Book of the Way acces­si­ble to a present-day, unwise, unpow­er­ful, per­haps unmale read­er, not seek­ing eso­teric secrets, but lis­ten­ing for a voice that speaks to the soul.” To imme­di­ate­ly get a sense of the dif­fer­ence, we might con­trast edi­tions of Arthur Waley’s trans­la­tion, The Way and Its Pow­er: a Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chi­nese Thought, with Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Pow­er of the Way.

Waley’s trans­la­tion “is nev­er going to be equaled for what it does,” serv­ing as a “man­u­al for rulers,” Le Guin says. It was also designed as a guide for schol­ars, in most edi­tions append­ing around 100 pages of intro­duc­tion and 40 pages of open­ing com­men­tary to the main text. Le Guin, by con­trast, reduces her edi­to­r­i­al pres­ence to foot­notes that nev­er over­whelm, and often don’t appear at all (one note just reads “so much for cap­i­tal­ism”), as well as a few pages of end­notes on sources and vari­ants. “I didn’t fig­ure a whole lot of rulers would be read­ing it,” she said. “On the oth­er hand, peo­ple in posi­tions of respon­si­bil­i­ty, such as moth­ers, might be.”

Her ver­sion rep­re­sents a life­long engage­ment with a text Le Guin took to heart “as a teenage girl” she says, and found through­out her life that “it obvi­ous­ly is a book that speaks to women.” But her ren­der­ing of the poems does not sub­stan­tial­ly alter the sub­stance. Con­sid­er the first two stan­zas of her ver­sion of Chap­ter 11 (which she titles “The uses of not”) con­trast­ed with Waley’s CHAPTER XI.

Waley

We put thir­ty spokes togeth­er and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is noth­ing that the
use­ful­ness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a ves­sel;
But it is on the space where there is noth­ing that the
use­ful­ness of the ves­sel depends.

Le Guin

Thir­ty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where is it’s use­ful.

Hol­lowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s use­ful.

Le Guin ren­ders the lines as delight­ful­ly folksy oppo­si­tions with rhyme and rep­e­ti­tion. Waley piles up argu­men­ta­tive claus­es. “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so fun­ny,” Le Guin com­ments in her note,” a qual­i­ty that doesn’t come through in many oth­er trans­la­tions. “He’s explain­ing a pro­found and dif­fi­cult truth here, one of those coun­ter­in­tu­itive truths that, when the mind can accept them, sud­den­ly dou­ble the size of the uni­verse. He goes about it with this dead­pan sim­plic­i­ty, talk­ing about pots.”

Such images cap­ti­vat­ed the earthy anar­chist Le Guin. She drew inspi­ra­tion for the title of her 1971 nov­el The Lathe of Heav­en from Taoist philoso­pher Chuang Tzu, per­haps show­ing how she reads her own inter­ests into a text, as all trans­la­tors and inter­preters inevitably do. No trans­la­tion is defin­i­tive. The bor­row­ing turned out to be an exam­ple of how even respect­ed Chi­nese lan­guage schol­ars can mis­read a text and get it wrong. She found the “lathe of heav­en” phrase in James Legge’s trans­la­tion of Chuang Tzu, and lat­er learned on good author­i­ty that there were no lath­es in Chi­na in Chuang Tzu’s time. “Legge was a bit off on that one,” she writes in her notes.

Schol­ar­ly den­si­ty does not make for per­fect accu­ra­cy or a read­able trans­la­tion. The ver­sions of Legge and sev­er­al oth­ers were “so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond West­ern com­pre­hen­sion,” writes Le Guin. But as the Tao Te Ching announces at the out­set: it offers a Way beyond lan­guage. In Legge’s first few lines:

The Tao that can be trod­den is not the endur­ing and
unchang­ing Tao. The name that can be named is not the endur­ing and
unchang­ing name.

Here is how Le Guin wel­comes read­ers to the Tao — not­ing that “a sat­is­fac­to­ry trans­la­tion of this chap­ter is, I believe, per­fect­ly impos­si­ble — in the first poem she titles “Tao­ing”:

The way you can go 
isn’t the real way. 
The name you can say 
isn’t the real name.

Heav­en and earth
begin in the unnamed: 
name’s the moth­er
of the ten thou­sand things.

So the unwant­i­ng soul 
sees what’s hid­den,
and the ever-want­i­ng soul 
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one ori­gin, 
but dif­fer­ent in name, 
whose iden­ti­ty is mys­tery.
Mys­tery of all mys­ter­ies! 
The door to the hid­den.

All images of the text cour­tesy of Austin Kleon. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: The Dis­ci­pline That Fueled Her Imag­i­na­tion

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Stamp Get­ting Released by the US Postal Ser­vice

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

Saint John Coltrane: The San Francisco Church Built On A Love Supreme

Lit­tle of San Fran­cis­co today is as it was half a cen­tu­ry ago. But at the cor­ner of Turk Boule­vard and Lyon Street stands a true sur­vivor: the Church of St. John Coltrane. Though offi­cial­ly found­ed in 1971, the roots of this unique musi­cal-reli­gious insti­tu­tion (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) go back fur­ther still. “It was our first wed­ding anniver­sary, Sep­tem­ber 18, 1965 and we cel­e­brat­ed the occa­sion by going to the Jazz Work­shop,” write founders Fran­zo and Mari­na King on the Church’s web site. “When John Coltrane came onto the stage we could feel the pres­ence of the Holy Spir­it mov­ing with him.” Over­come with the sense that Coltrane was play­ing direct­ly to them, “we did not talk to each oth­er dur­ing the per­for­mance because we were caught up in what lat­er would be known as our Sound Bap­tism.”

Or as Mari­na puts it in this new short doc­u­men­tary from NPR’s Jazz Night in Amer­i­ca, “The holy ghost fell in a jazz club in 1965, and our lives were changed for­ev­er.” This was the year of Coltrane’s mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme, a jazz album that, in the words of The New York­er’s Richard Brody, “isn’t mere­ly a col­lec­tion of per­for­mances. It’s both one uni­fied com­po­si­tion and, in effect, a con­cept album. And the core of that con­cept is more than musi­cal — it’s the spir­i­tu­al, reli­gious dimen­sion.”

Coltrane, as the doc­u­men­tary tells it, com­posed the suite in iso­la­tion, deter­mined to go cold-turkey and kick the hero­in habit that got him fired from Miles Davis’ band. In the process he under­went a “spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing,” which con­vinced him that his music could have a much high­er pur­pose.

It was Coltrane’s ear­ly death in 1967 that clar­i­fied the Kings’ mis­sion in life, even­tu­al­ly prompt­ing them to con­vert the lat­est in a series of jazz spaces they’d been run­ning into a prop­er house of wor­ship. “John Coltrane became their Christ, their God,” writes NPR’s Anas­ta­sia Tsioul­casA Love Supreme “became their cen­tral text, and ‘Coltrane con­scious­ness’ became their guid­ing prin­ci­ple.” Over the past 50 years, their church has endured its share of hard­ships. In the ear­ly 1980s a life­line appeared in the form of the African Ortho­dox Church, whose lead­ers want­ed to bring it into the fold but had, as Fan­zo remem­bers it, one con­di­tion: “John Coltrane can­not be God, okay?” Then the Kings remem­bered a remark Coltrane con­ve­nient­ly made in a Japan­ese inter­view to the effect that, one day, he’d like to be a saint. Thence­forth, St. Coltrane it was: not bad at all for a sax play­er from North Car­oli­na.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

John Coltrane Draws a Mys­te­ri­ous Dia­gram Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal & Mys­ti­cal Qual­i­ties of Music

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

New Jazz Archive Fea­tures Rare Audio of Louis Arm­strong & Oth­er Leg­ends Play­ing in San Fran­cis­co

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

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.

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