When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depend­ing on how we define it. When did sci­ence fic­tion begin? Many cite ear­ly mas­ters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its prog­en­i­tors. Oth­ers reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Franken­stein as the gen­e­sis of the form. Some few know The Blaz­ing World, a 1666 work of fic­tion by Mar­garet Cavendish, Duchess of New­cas­tle, who called her book a “her­maph­ro­dit­ic text.” Accord­ing to the judg­ment of such experts as Isaac Asi­mov and Carl Sagan, sci-fi began even ear­li­er, with a nov­el called Som­ni­um (“The Dream”), writ­ten by none oth­er than Ger­man astronomer and math­e­mati­cian Johannes Kepler. Maria Popo­va explains at Brain Pick­ings:

In 1609, Johannes Kepler fin­ished the first work of gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion — that is, imag­i­na­tive sto­ry­telling in which sen­si­cal sci­ence is a major plot device. Som­ni­um, or The Dream, is the fic­tion­al account of a young astronomer who voy­ages to the Moon. Rich in both sci­en­tif­ic inge­nu­ity and sym­bol­ic play, it is at once a mas­ter­work of the lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion and an invalu­able sci­en­tif­ic doc­u­ment, all the more impres­sive for the fact that it was writ­ten before Galileo point­ed the first spy­glass at the sky and before Kepler him­self had ever looked through a tele­scope.

The work was not pub­lished until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death, by his son Lud­wig, though “it had been Kepler’s intent to per­son­al­ly super­vise the pub­li­ca­tion of his man­u­script,” writes Gale E. Chris­tian­son. His final, posthu­mous work began as a dis­ser­ta­tion in 1593 that addressed the ques­tion Coper­ni­cus asked years ear­li­er: “How would the phe­nom­e­na occur­ring in the heav­ens appear to an observ­er sta­tioned on the moon?” Kepler had first come “under the thrall of the helio­cen­tric mod­el,” Popo­va writes, “as a stu­dent at the Luther­an Uni­ver­si­ty of Tübin­gen half a cen­tu­ry after Coper­ni­cus pub­lished his the­o­ry.”

Kepler’s the­sis was “prompt­ly vetoed” by his pro­fes­sors, but he con­tin­ued to work on the ideas, and cor­re­spond­ed with Galileo 30 years before the Ital­ian astronomer defend­ed his own helio­cen­tric the­o­ry. “Six­teen years lat­er and far from Tübin­gen, he com­plet­ed an expand­ed ver­sion,” says Andrew Boyd in the intro­duc­tion to a radio pro­gram about the book. “Recast in a dream­like frame­work, Kepler felt free to probe ideas about the moon that he oth­er­wise couldn’t.” Not con­tent with cold abstrac­tion, Kepler imag­ined space trav­el, of a kind, and peo­pled his moon with aliens.

And what an imag­i­na­tion! Inhab­i­tants weren’t mere recre­ations of ter­res­tri­al life, but entire­ly new forms of life adapt­ed to lunar extremes. Large. Tough-skinned. They evoked visions of dinosaurs. Some used boats, imply­ing not just life but intel­li­gent, non-human life. Imag­ine how shock­ing that must have been at the time.

Even more shock­ing to author­i­ties were the means Kepler used in his text to reveal knowl­edge about the heav­ens and trav­el to the moon: beings he called “dae­mons” (a Latin word for benign nature spir­its before Chris­tian­i­ty hijacked the term), who com­mu­ni­cat­ed first with the hero’s moth­er, a witch prac­ticed in cast­ing spells.

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Kepler’s pro­tag­o­nist, Dura­co­tus, and Kepler him­self (such as a peri­od of study under Dan­ish astronomer Tycho Bra­he) led the church to sus­pect the book was thin­ly veiled auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal occultism. Rumors cir­cu­lat­ed, and Kepler’s moth­er was arrest­ed for witch­craft and sub­ject­ed to ter­ri­tio ver­balis (detailed descrip­tions of the tor­tures that await­ed her, along with pre­sen­ta­tions of the var­i­ous devices).  It took Kepler five years to free her and pre­vent her exe­cu­tion.

Kepler’s sto­ry is trag­ic in many ways, for the loss­es he suf­fered through­out his life, includ­ing his son and his first wife to small­pox. But his per­se­ver­ance left behind one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing works of ear­ly sci­ence fiction—published hun­dreds of years before the genre is sup­posed to have begun. Despite the fan­tas­ti­cal nature of his work, “he real­ly believed,” says Sagan in the short clip from Cos­mos above, “that one day human beings would launch celes­tial ships with sails adapt­ed to the breezes of heav­en, filled with explor­ers who, he said, would not fear the vast­ness of space.”

Astron­o­my had lit­tle con­nec­tion with the mate­r­i­al world in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. “With Kepler came the idea that a phys­i­cal force moves the plan­ets in their orbits,” as well as an imag­i­na­tive way to explore sci­en­tif­ic ideas no one would be able to ver­i­fy for decades, or even cen­turies. Hear Som­ni­um read at the top of the post and learn more about Kepler’s fas­ci­nat­ing life and achieve­ments at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script of Franken­stein: This Is “Ground Zero of Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Says William Gib­son

Stream 47 Hours of Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­els & Sto­ries: Asi­mov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Love­craft & More

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics Avail­able on the Web (Updat­ed)

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

A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation

Most of us assume Japan­ese Bud­dhist monks to be silent types. In their per­son­al lives they may well be, but if they want to go viral, they’ve got to log onto the inter­net and make some noise. This is the les­son one draws from some of the Bud­dhist fig­ures pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture: Kos­san, he of the Bea­t­les and Ramones cov­ers, or Gyōsen Asaku­ra, the priest who per­forms psy­che­del­ic ser­vices sound­tracked with elec­tron­ic dance music. Depend­ing on your taste in music, their per­for­mances may or may not induce the men­tal qui­et one asso­ciates with Bud­dhist prac­tice, and the music of Yoget­su Akasa­ka, the lat­est Japan­ese Bud­dhist monk to attain inter­net fame, may at first sound equal­ly untra­di­tion­al. But lis­ten and you may well find your­self in a med­i­ta­tive state with­out even try­ing.

“The 37-year-old went viral in May, after post­ing his ‘Heart Sutra Live Loop­ing Remix,’ a video that’s relax­ing like ASMR, and engross­ing like a DJ set,” writes Vice’s Miran Miyano. “With the loop machine, he lay­ers sounds and chants all com­ing from one instru­ment — his voice.” A musi­cian since his teens and a beat­box­er since his ear­ly twen­ties, the Tokyo-based Akasa­ka became a monk five years ago, fol­low­ing the path tak­en by his father, an abbott at a tem­ple in rur­al Iwate Pre­fec­ture.

“Before he was ordained in 2015, he belonged to a the­atre com­pa­ny formed in Fukushi­ma pre­fec­ture, north­east Japan, after the region was dev­as­tat­ed by the 2011 Tohoku earth­quake and tsuna­mi,” writes Richard Lord in the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post. “He has also been a full-time busker in coun­tries includ­ing the Unit­ed States and Aus­tralia.”

A busker Akasa­ka remains, in a sense, albeit one who, from the cor­ner of YouTube he’s made his own, can be heard across the globe. In addi­tion to record­ings like his hit ver­sion of the Heart Sutra, he’s also been live stream­ing per­for­mances for the past two months. Last­ing up to near­ly two hours, these streams pro­vide Akasa­ka an oppor­tu­ni­ty to vary his musi­cal as well as spir­i­tu­al themes, bring dif­fer­ent instru­ments into the mix, and respond to fans who send him mes­sages from all over the world, most­ly out­side his home­land. “I think in Japan, peo­ple often asso­ciate Bud­dhism with funer­als, and the sutra has a lit­tle bit of a neg­a­tive and sad image,” he says to Vice. Indeed, as the say­ing goes, the mod­ern Japan­ese is born Shin­to, mar­ries Chris­t­ian, and dies Bud­dhist. But as Akasa­ka shows us, his tra­di­tion has some­thing to offer all of us, no mat­ter our nation­al­i­ty, in life as well.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Bud­dhist Monk Cov­ers Ramones’ “Teenage Lobot­o­my,” “Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bea­t­les’ “Yel­low Sub­ma­rine” & More

Bud­dhist Monk Cov­ers Judas Priest’s “Break­ing the Law,” Then Breaks Into Med­i­ta­tion

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

Beat­box­ing Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions

What Beat­box­ing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

An Introduction to Thought Forms, the Pioneering 1905 Theosophist Book That Inspired Abstract Art: It Has Returned to Print

“It is some­times dif­fi­cult to appre­ci­ate the impact that the late-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (and ongo­ing) occult move­ment called Theos­o­phy had on glob­al cul­ture,” Mitch Horowitz writes in his intro­duc­tion to the new­ly repub­lished 1905 Theo­soph­i­cal book, Thought Forms. That impact man­i­fest­ed “spir­i­tu­al­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, and artis­ti­cal­ly” in the work of lit­er­ary fig­ures like James Joyce and William But­ler Yeats and reli­gious fig­ures like Jid­du Krish­na­mur­ti, hand­picked as a teenag­er by Theosophist leader Charles W. Lead­beat­er to become the group’s mes­sian­ic World Teacher.

The Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety helped re-intro­duce Bud­dhism, or a new­ly West­ern­ized ver­sion, to West­ern Europe and the U.S., pub­lish­ing the 1881 “Bud­dhist Cat­e­chism” by Hen­ry Steel Olcott, a for­mer Colonel for the Union Army. Olcott co-found­ed the soci­ety in New York City in 1875 with Russ­ian occultist Hele­na Blavatsky. Soon after­ward, the group of spir­i­tu­al seek­ers relo­cat­ed to India. “Near­ly a cen­tu­ry before the Bea­t­les’ trek to Rishikesh,” writes Hor­witz, “Blavatsky and Olcott laid the tem­plate for the West­ern­er seek­ing wis­dom in the East.”

Theos­o­phy also had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on mod­ern art, includ­ing the work of Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, until recent­ly con­sid­ered the first Abstract painter—that is until the paint­ings of Hilma af Klint came to be wide­ly known. The reclu­sive Swedish artist, whom we’ve cov­ered here a few times before, came first, though no one knew it at the time. After show­ing her rev­o­lu­tion­ary abstract work to philoso­pher and one­time Ger­man and Aus­tri­an Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety leader Rudolf Stein­er, she was told to hide it for anoth­er fifty years.

Theos­o­phy gained many promi­nent con­verts in the UK, Europe, and around the world. Af Klint joined the Swedish soci­ety and remained a mem­ber until 1915. The sym­bol­ism in her mys­te­ri­ous abstrac­tions, which she attrib­uted to clair­voy­ant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with “an enti­ty named Amaliel,” may also have been sug­gest­ed by the draw­ings in Thought Forms, an illus­trat­ed book cre­at­ed by Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety lead­ers Lead­beat­er and Annie Besant, who was “an ear­ly suf­frag­ist and polit­i­cal activist,” notes Sacred Bones Books. The small press will release a new edi­tion of the book online and in stores on Novem­ber 6. (See their Kick­starter page here and video trail­er below.)

Besant was “far ahead of her time as an artist and thinker. Theos­o­phy was the first occult group to open its doors to women and Thought Forms offers a reminder that the his­to­ry of mod­ernist abstrac­tion and women’s con­tri­bu­tion to it is still being writ­ten.” Although that unfold­ing his­to­ry cen­tral­ly includes af Klint and Besant, the lat­ter did not actu­al­ly make all of the illus­tra­tions we find in this strange book. She and Lead­beat­er claimed to have received, through clair­voy­ant means, “forms caused by def­i­nite thoughts thrown out by one of them, and also watched the forms pro­ject­ed by oth­er per­sons under the influ­ence of var­i­ous emo­tions.”

So Besant would write in 1896 in the Theo­soph­i­cal jour­nal Lucifer. After these “exper­i­ments,” the two then described going into trances and view­ing “auras, vor­tices, ether­ic mat­ter, astral pro­jec­tions, ener­gy forms, and oth­er expres­sions from the unseen world.” The two described these visions to a col­lec­tion of visu­al artists, who ren­dered them into the paint­ings in the 1905 book.

Among those who do study the Theo­soph­i­cal Society’s impact, its first gen­er­a­tion of publications—especially Olcott’s “Bud­dhist Cat­e­chism” and Blavatsky’s 1888 The Secret Doc­trine—are espe­cial­ly well-known texts. But Thought Forms may prove “the most wide­ly read, last­ing, and direct­ly influ­en­tial book to emerge from the rev­o­lu­tion that Theos­o­phy ignit­ed,” Horowitz argues.

“By many esti­mates, Thought Forms marks the ger­mi­na­tion of abstract art”—originated through sev­er­al artists’ best guess at what visions of psy­chic phe­nom­e­na might look like. You can fol­low Sacred Bones’ Kick­starter cam­paign here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

A Vision­ary 115-Year-Old Col­or The­o­ry Man­u­al Returns to Print: Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s Col­or Prob­lems

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

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

Breathtakingly-Detailed Tibetan Book Printed 40 Years Before the Gutenberg Bible

The Guten­berg Bible went to press in the year 1454. We now see it as the first piece of mass media, print­ed as it was with the then-cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy of met­al mov­able type. But in the his­to­ry of aes­thet­ic achieve­ments in book-print­ing, the Guten­berg Bible was­n’t with­out its prece­dents. To find tru­ly impres­sive exam­ples requires look­ing in lands far from Europe: take, for instance, this “Sino-Tibetan con­certi­na-fold­ed book, print­ed in Bei­jing in 1410, con­tain­ing San­skrit dhāranīs and illus­tra­tions of pro­tec­tive mantra-dia­grams and deities, wood­block-print­ed in bright red ink on heavy white paper,” whose “breath­tak­ing­ly detailed print­ing” pre­dates Guten­berg by 40 years.

That descrip­tion comes from a Twit­ter user called Incunab­u­la (a term refer­ring to ear­ly books), a self-described bib­lio­phile and rare book col­lec­tor who posts about “the his­to­ry of writ­ing, and of the book, from cave paint­ing to cuneiform tablet to papyrus scroll to medieval codex to Kin­dle.”

Incunab­u­la’s six-tweet thread on this ear­ly 15th-cen­tu­ry Sino-Tibetan book includes both pic­tures and descrip­tions of this remark­able arti­fac­t’s inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or.

Its text, writ­ten in the Tibetan and Nepalese Rañ­janā script, “is print­ed twice, once on each side of the paper, so that the book may be read in the Indo-Tibetan man­ner by turn­ing the pages from right to left or in Chi­nese style by turn­ing from left to right.” The book’s con­tent is “a sequence of Tibetan Bud­dhist recita­tion texts,” or chants, all “pro­tect­ed at front and back by thick­er board-like wrap­pers,” each “cov­ered in fine pen-draw­ings in gold paint on black of 20 icons of the Tathā­gatas.”

Incunab­u­la has also post­ed exten­sive­ly about Bud­dhist texts from oth­er times and lands: a Thai fold­ing man­u­script from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry telling of a monk’s jour­neys to heav­en and hell; a Mon­go­lian man­u­script from the same peri­od that trans­lates the Čoy­i­jod Dagi­ni, “a pop­u­lar Bud­dhist text about virtue, sin and the after­life”; an exam­ple of “Japan­ese Bud­dhist print­ing 150 years before Guten­berg”; an “8th cen­tu­ry Khotanese amulet­ic scroll from the Silk Road.” The cre­ators of these texts would have meant the words they were pre­serv­ing to sur­vive them — but our mar­veling at them hun­dreds, even more than a thou­sand years lat­er, would sure­ly have come as a sur­prise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Old­est Book Print­ed with Mov­able Type is Not The Guten­berg Bible: Jikji, a Col­lec­tion of Kore­an Bud­dhist Teach­ings, Pre­dat­ed It By 78 Years and It’s Now Dig­i­tized Online

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

The World’s Largest Col­lec­tion of Tibetan Bud­dhist Lit­er­a­ture Now Online

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Intro­duc­tion to Tibetan Bud­dhism (Record­ed at Colum­bia U)

Tibetan Musi­cal Nota­tion Is Beau­ti­ful

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

500+ Beautiful Manuscripts from the Islamic World Now Digitized & Free to Download

Math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, his­to­ry, law, lit­er­a­ture, archi­tec­ture: in these fields and oth­ers, the Mus­lim world came up with major inno­va­tions before any oth­er civ­i­liza­tion did. This Islam­ic cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al flow­er­ing last­ed from the 11th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, and many of the texts the peri­od left as its lega­cy have gone most­ly unre­searched. So say the cre­ators of Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World, a project of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, the Free Library of Philadel­phia, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Bryn Mawr Col­lege, and Haver­ford Col­lege aimed at cre­at­ing an online archive of “more than 500 man­u­scripts and 827 paint­ings from the Islam­i­cate world broad­ly con­strued.”

As UPenn Libraries Senior Cura­tor of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Mitch Fraas tells Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah Rose Sharp, “The aim of this project was to find and dig­i­tize all the Islam­i­cate man­u­scripts in Philadel­phia col­lec­tions and along the way we part­nered with Colum­bia on a grant to take a mul­ti-city approach.”

To the sources of its man­u­scripts it also takes a mul­ti-cul­ture approach, includ­ing “texts relat­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty (Cop­tic and Syr­i­ac mss. galore), Hin­duism (epics trans­lat­ed into Per­sian in Mughal India), sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, music, etc. but which were pro­duced in the his­toric Mus­lim world.” There are also texts, he adds, “in Per­sian, Ara­bic, and Turk­ish of course but also in Cop­tic, Tamazight, Aves­tan, etc.”

If you can read those lan­guages, Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World obvi­ous­ly amounts to a gold mine. (You may also find some­thing of inter­est in the dig­i­tal archives of 700 years of Per­sian man­u­scripts and 10,000 books in Ara­bic we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) But even if you don’t, you’ll find in the col­lec­tion mar­vels of book design that will appeal to any­one with an appre­ci­a­tion of the lush aes­thet­ics, both abstract and fig­u­ra­tive, of these places and these times. Some of them aren’t even as old as they may seem: take the man­u­script at the top of the post, “over­paint­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry to mim­ic Mughal style.” Or the one below that, whose colophon “says the copy was com­plet­ed in 1121 A.H. (1709 or 1710 CE),” which “does not make sense giv­en the author like­ly lived in the 19th cen­tu­ry.”

The oth­er pages here come from a set of “illus­tra­tions from Qur’ānic sto­ries” (this one depict­ing “Abra­ham sac­ri­fic­ing his son”) and a “Per­sian cal­lig­ra­phy and illus­tra­tion album.” You’ll find much more in Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World, host­ed on OPENN, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s online repos­i­to­ry of “high-res­o­lu­tion archival images of man­u­scripts” accom­pa­nied by “machine-read­able TEI P5 descrip­tions and tech­ni­cal meta­da­ta,” all released into the pub­lic domain or under Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es. Though each man­u­scrip­t’s entry comes with basic notes, the col­lec­tion is, in the main, not yet a thor­ough­ly stud­ied one. If you have an inter­est in the Islam­ic world at its peak of cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al influ­ence so far, you may just find your next big research sub­ject here — or at the very least, mate­r­i­al for a few hours’ admi­ra­tion. Enter the col­lec­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Down­load 10,000+ Books in Ara­bic, All Com­plete­ly Free, Dig­i­tized and Put Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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

Few mod­ern writ­ers so remind me of the famous Vir­ginia Woolf quote about fic­tion as a “spi­der’s web” more than Argen­tin­ian fab­u­list Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attach­es his labyrinths is a librar­i­an’s life; the strands that anchor his fic­tions are the obscure schol­ar­ly ref­er­ences he weaves through­out his text. Borges brings this ten­den­cy to whim­si­cal employ in his non­fic­tion Book of Imag­i­nary Beings, a het­eroge­nous com­pendi­um of crea­tures from ancient folk tale, myth, and demonolo­gy around the world.

Borges him­self some­times remarks on how these ancient sto­ries can float too far away from rati­o­ci­na­tion. The “absurd hypothe­ses” regard­ing the myth­i­cal Greek Chimera, for exam­ple, “are proof” that the ridicu­lous beast “was begin­ning to bore peo­ple…. A vain or fool­ish fan­cy is the def­i­n­i­tion of Chimera that we now find in dic­tio­nar­ies.” Of  what he calls “Jew­ish Demons,” a cat­e­go­ry too numer­ous to parse, he writes, “a cen­sus of its pop­u­la­tion left the bounds of arith­metic far behind. Through­out the cen­turies, Egypt, Baby­lo­nia, and Per­sia all enriched this teem­ing mid­dle world.” Although a less­er field than angelol­o­gy, the influ­ence of this fas­ci­nat­ing­ly diverse canon only broad­ened over time.

“The natives record­ed in the Tal­mud” soon became “thor­ough­ly inte­grat­ed” with the many demons of Chris­t­ian Europe and the Islam­ic world, form­ing a sprawl­ing hell whose denizens hail from at least three con­ti­nents, and who have mixed freely in alchem­i­cal, astro­log­i­cal, and oth­er occult works since at least the 13th cen­tu­ry and into the present. One exam­ple from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, a 1902 trea­tise on div­ina­tion from Isfa­han, a city in cen­tral Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of water­col­ors added in 1921 that could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for illus­tra­tions from the ear­ly Mid­dle Ages.

As the Pub­lic Domain Review notes:

The won­der­ful images draw on Near East­ern demono­log­i­cal tra­di­tions that stretch back mil­len­nia — to the days when the rab­bis of the Baby­lon­ian Tal­mud assert­ed it was a bless­ing demons were invis­i­ble, since, “if the eye would be grant­ed per­mis­sion to see, no crea­ture would be able to stand in the face of the demons that sur­round it.”

The author of the trea­tise, a ram­mal, or sooth­say­er, him­self “attrib­ut­es his knowl­edge to the Bib­li­cal Solomon, who was known for his pow­er over demons and spir­its,” writes Ali Kar­joo-Ravary, a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Reli­gious Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. Pre­dat­ing Islam, “the depic­tion of demons in the Near East… was fre­quent­ly used for mag­i­cal and tal­is­man­ic pur­pos­es,” just as it was by occultists like Aleis­ter Crow­ley at the time these illus­tra­tions were made.

“Not all of the 56 paint­ed illus­tra­tions in the man­u­script depict demon­ic beings,” the Pub­lic Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the ani­mals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scor­pi­on — asso­ci­at­ed with the zodi­ac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fan­tas­tic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plen­ty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delight­ed.

A blue man with claws, four horns, and a pro­ject­ing red tongue is no less fright­en­ing for the fact that he’s wear­ing a can­dy-striped loin­cloth. In anoth­er image we see a mous­ta­chioed goat man with tuber-nose and pol­ka dot skin mani­a­cal­ly con­coct­ing a less-than-appetis­ing dish. One recur­ring (and wor­ry­ing) theme is demons vis­it­ing sleep­ers in their beds, scenes involv­ing such pleas­ant activ­i­ties as tooth-pulling, eye-goug­ing, and — in one of the most engross­ing illus­tra­tions — a bout of foot-lick­ing (per­formed by a rep­til­ian feline with a shark-toothed tail).

There’s a play­ful Bosch-ian qual­i­ty to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our per­spec­tive as absurd, he appar­ent­ly took his bizarre inven­tions absolute­ly seri­ous­ly. So too, we might assume, did the illus­tra­tor here. We might won­der, as Woolf did, about this work as the prod­uct of “suf­fer­ing human beings… attached to gross­ly mate­r­i­al things, like health and mon­ey and the hous­es we live in.” What kinds of ordi­nary, mate­r­i­al con­cerns might have afflict­ed this artist, as he (we pre­sume) imag­ined demons goug­ing the eyes and lick­ing the feet of peo­ple tucked safe­ly in their beds?

See many more of these strange paint­ings at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

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

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

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

New Digital Archive Will Bring Medieval Chants Back to Life: Project Amra Will Feature 300 Digitized Manuscripts and Many Audio Recordings

Among his­to­ri­ans of Euro­pean Chris­tian­i­ty, it long seemed a set­tled ques­tion that Irish Catholi­cism, the so-called “Celtic Rite,” dif­fered sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the mid­dle ages from its Roman coun­ter­part. This despite the fact that the phrase Celtic Rite “must not be tak­en to imply any nec­es­sary homo­gene­ity,” notes the Catholic Ency­clo­pe­dia, “for the evi­dence such as it is, is in favour of con­sid­er­able diver­si­ty.” Far from an insu­lar reli­gion, Irish Catholi­cism spread to France, Ger­many, Switzer­land, Italy, and North­ern Spain through the mis­sions of St. Colum­banus and oth­ers, and both influ­enced and absorbed the Continent’s prac­tices through­out the medieval peri­od.

His­to­ri­ans have recent­ly set out to “restore [the Irish Church] to its right­ful place on the Euro­pean his­tor­i­cal map,” writes Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin’s Ann Buck­ley in her intro­duc­tion to a book of schol­ar­ly essays called Music, Litur­gy, and the Ven­er­a­tion of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a Euro­pean Con­text.

To vary­ing degrees, all of the schol­ars rep­re­sent­ed in this col­lec­tion write to counter the essen­tial­iz­ing “quest for what might be unique or ‘oth­er’ about Ire­land and Irish cul­ture” among all oth­er Euro­pean nation­al and reli­gious his­to­ries.

Buckley’s writ­ing on the ven­er­a­tion of Irish saints has made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to this effort, and her decade and a half of archival work has helped cre­ate the Amra project, which aims “to dig­i­tize and make freely avail­able online over 300 man­u­scripts con­tain­ing litur­gi­cal mate­r­i­al asso­ci­at­ed with some 40 Irish saints which are locat­ed in research libraries across Europe.” So write Medievalists.net, who also point out some of the most excit­ing aspects of this acces­si­ble resource:

The dig­i­tal archive, when com­plet­ed, will also incor­po­rate record­ings and per­form­ing edi­tions of all the chants and prayers from the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts, as well as trans­la­tions of the Latin texts into a num­ber of Euro­pean lan­guages. In this way, con­tem­po­rary audi­ences can enjoy first-hand the devo­tion­al songs asso­ci­at­ed with Irish saints, bring­ing them out of their slum­ber after more than half a mil­len­ni­um.

You can hear one antiphonal chant, “Mag­ni patris/Mente mun­di,” from the Office St. Patrick, just above. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, “no oth­er Irish saint is rep­re­sent­ed so exten­sive­ly or with such vari­ety in medieval litur­gi­cal sources,” writes Buck­ley. Man­u­script hymns, prayers, and offices for Patrick have been found in Dublin, Oxford, Cam­bridge, the British Library, and “in the Vien­na Schot­ten­kloster dat­ing from the time of its foun­da­tion by Irish Bene­dic­tine monks in the twelfth cen­tu­ry.” (See the open­ing of the Office of St. Patrick, “Veneren­da immi­nen­tis,” from a late-15th cen­tu­ry man­u­script, at the top.)

Oth­er saints rep­re­sent­ed in the archival mate­r­i­al include Brig­it, Colm­cille, Colum­banus, Canice, Declan, Cia­ran, Fin­ian, and Lau­rence O’Toole. The mis­sion­ary monks all received their own “offices,” litur­gi­cal cer­e­monies per­formed on their feast days. Many of the man­u­scripts, such as the open­ing of the Office of St. Brig­it, above, con­tain musi­cal nota­tion, allow­ing musi­col­o­gists like Buck­ley to recre­ate the sound of Irish Catholi­cism as it exist­ed in Ire­land, Britain, and Con­ti­nen­tal Europe sev­er­al hun­dred years ago.

The project is devel­op­ing a dig­i­tal archive of such record­ings, as well as “a ful­ly search­able data­base,” Medievalists.net notes, with “inter­ac­tive maps show­ing the geo­graph­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion of the cults of Irish saints across Europe, and of the libraries where the man­u­scripts are now housed. A series of doc­u­men­tary films is also envis­aged.” You don’t have to be a spe­cial­ist in the his­to­ry of the Irish Church, or an Irish Catholic, for that mat­ter, to get excit­ed about the many ways such a rich resource will bring this medieval his­to­ry to new life.

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Did the Monk’s Hair­cut Come From? A New Vox Video Explains the Rich and Con­tentious His­to­ry of the Ton­sure

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

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

Evelyn Waugh’s “Victorian Blood Book”: A Most Strange & Macabre Illustrated Book

Most U.S. read­ers come to know Eve­lyn Waugh as the “seri­ous” writer of the saga Brideshead Revis­it­ed (and inspir­er of the 1981 minis­eries adap­ta­tion). This was also the case in 1954, when Charles Rolo wrote in the pages of The Atlantic that the nov­el “sold many more copies in the Unit­ed States than all of Waugh’s oth­er books put togeth­er.” Yet “among the lit­er­ary,” Waugh’s name evokes “a sin­gu­lar brand of com­ic genius… a riotous­ly anar­chic cos­mos, in which only the out­ra­geous can happen—and when it does hap­pen is out­ra­geous­ly divert­ing.”

The com­ic Waugh’s imag­i­na­tion “runs to… appalling and macabre inven­tions,” incor­po­rat­ing a “lunatic log­ic.” The sources of that imag­i­na­tion now reside at the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin, who hold Waugh’s man­u­scripts and 3,500-volume library.

The nov­el­ist, the Ran­som Cen­ter notes, “was an invet­er­ate col­lec­tor of things Vic­to­ri­an (and well ahead of most of his con­tem­po­raries in this regard). Undoubt­ed­ly the sin­gle most curi­ous object in the entire library is a large oblong folio decoupage book, often referred to as the ‘Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book.’”

Waugh deeply admired Vic­to­ri­an art, and espe­cial­ly “those nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry ene­mies of tech­nol­o­gy, the Pre-Raphaelites,” writes Rolo. Still, like us, he may have looked upon scrap­books like these as bizarre and mor­bid­ly humor­ous, if also pos­sessed by an unset­tling beau­ty. (One 2008 cat­a­logue described them as “weird” and “rather ele­gant but very scary.”) More than any­thing, they resem­ble the kind of thing a goth teenag­er raised on Mon­ty Python and Emi­ly Dick­in­son might put togeth­er in her bed­room late at night. Such an artist would be car­ry­ing on a long “cher­ished tra­di­tion.”

“Vic­to­ri­an scrap­book­ing,” the Ran­som Cen­ter writes, “was almost exclu­sive­ly the province of women,” a way of orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion, although “the esthet­ic aspect” could some­times be “sec­ondary.” The “Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book,” how­ev­er, is the work of a pater­fa­mil­ias named John Bin­g­ley Gar­land, “a pros­per­ous Vic­to­ri­an busi­ness­man who moved to New­found­land, went on to become speak­er of its first Par­lia­ment, and returned to Stone Cot­tage in Dorset to end his days.”

Inscribed to Bin­g­ley’s daugh­ter Amy on Sep­tem­ber 1, 1854, the book seems to have been a wed­ding present, made with seri­ous devo­tion­al intent:

How does one “read” such an enig­mat­ic object? We under­stand­ably find ele­ments of the grotesque and sur­re­al. But our eyes view it dif­fer­ent­ly from Vic­to­ri­an ones. As Gar­land’s descen­dants have writ­ten, “our fam­i­ly does­n’t refer to…‘the Blood Book;’ we refer to it as ‘Amy’s Gift’ and in no way see it as any­thing oth­er than a pre­cious reminder of the love of fam­i­ly and Our Lord.”

The “Blood Book“ ‘s actu­al title appears to have been Duren­stein!, which is the Aus­tri­an cas­tle where Richard the Lion­heart­ed was impris­oned. Assem­bled from hun­dreds of engrav­ings, many by William Blake, it appar­ent­ly depicts “the spir­i­tu­al bat­tles encoun­tered by Chris­tians along the path of life and the ‘blood’ to Chris­t­ian sac­ri­fice.” The “blood” is red India ink. The quo­ta­tions sur­round­ing each col­lage, accord­ing to the Gar­land fam­i­ly “are encour­ag­ing one to turn to God as our Sav­iour.”

One can imag­ine the “seri­ous” Waugh look­ing on this strange object with almost rev­er­en­tial affec­tion. He lapsed into a high­ly affect­ed, reac­tionary nos­tal­gia in his lat­er peri­od, announc­ing him­self “two hun­dred years” behind the times. One con­tem­po­rary declared, “He grows more old-fash­ioned every day.” But the sav­age­ly com­ic Waugh would not have been able to approach such a bizarre piece of folk col­lage art with­out an eye toward its use as mate­r­i­al for his own “appalling and macabre inven­tions.”

See a full scanned copy of the “Vic­to­ri­an Blood Book,” and down­load high-res­o­lu­tion images, online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

Browse The Mag­i­cal Worlds of Har­ry Houdini’s Scrap­books

A Wit­ty Dic­tio­nary of Vic­to­ri­an Slang (1909)

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

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