Category: {occult}

Occult

Prince Iskandar’s horoscope

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The horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror, by Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar’s birth on 25th April 1384.

From the Wellcome Trust image collection. Considering the Wellcome Trust’s medical background, there’s a surprising amount of non-scientific material in its image library, not least a collection devoted to Witchcraft. This perhaps reflects the wide-ranging interests of the Trust’s founder, Henry Wellcome. Jay Babcock and I visited the exhibition of artefacts from Wellcome’s vast collection at the British Museum in 2003 and that proved to be a similarly surprising cabinet of curiosities, including sheets of tattooed human skin and Charles Darwin’s skull-headed walking stick. I was sure I had a photograph of the latter but don’t seem able to find it if it’s still around. Never mind, the BBC has a picture, together with other items from the exhibition. Also on display there was a specially-commissioned film from the Brothers Quay which can now be seen in their DVD collection.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

Chiaroscuro II: Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734–1797

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An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

As promised, one of my favourite chiaroscurists. The impression Joseph Wright’s work made on me at the age of 13 was one of many revelations from my first visit to the Tate Gallery. The paintings which struck me most of the older works there were all of the Romantic or late-Romantic era: Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, Philippe de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright’s enormous An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is now housed in the National Gallery. The National Gallery site has this to say about the picture:

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright’s day. The artist’s subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.

As with many paintings, the online reproductions do little justice to the subtlety of Wright’s rendering of light and shade. This remains his most famous picture although he made another on a similar theme, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (below) and, like Godfried Schalcken, he has at least two studies of people viewing statues by candlelight, a common practice at that time for the way the light gave classical sculpture a spurious life. Wright’s painting of The Alchymist is another popular work, turning up frequently in occult encyclopedias. Being a native of Derby he also became (along with de Loutherbourg) one of the first painters to depict the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution whose flaring furnaces provided an ideal subject for dramatists of flame and shadow.

Before leaving the tenebral world, I’ll note that Claire left a message to say that issue 24 of Cabinet Magazine has a feature on shadows in art, symbolism and philosophy.

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The Séance at Hobs Lane

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Séance, 2001 version.

Drew Mulholland, aka Mount Vernon Arts Lab (also Mount Vernon Astral Temple and Black Noise…), has joined forces recently with the masterful Ghost Box collective, purveyors of finely-crafted and frequently creepy electronica. MVAL’s 2001 release, The Séance at Hobs Lane, is now Ghost Box release no. 9 and comes repackaged in their Pelican Books-derived livery. Inspired by (among other things) Quatermass and the Pit, Séance makes a good companion to the creepiest of the Ghost Box releases to date, Ouroborindra by Eric Zann. Further points us to Mark Pilkington’s 2001 interview with MVAL for Fortean Times.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
• New Delia Derbyshire
• The man who saw tomorrow
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box

The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

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Man Emerging from a Tree Stump (no date).

Yet another artist I’d be unlikely to have come across had it not been for the web. Andrey Avinoff’s art manages to be both mystical and homoerotic in equal measure and there’s a good selection of his paintings and drawings to be found in a collection at the Kinsey Institute. Avinoff was an entomologist and worked as director of the Carnegie Museum along with that other famous butterfly enthusiast, Vladimir Nabokov. He was also a friend of Alfred Kinsey’s for many years and the art which Kinsey collected seems (perhaps inevitably) more sexual than the artist’s mystical work or his butterfly pictures. As with other artists discussed here, we learn that “he may have been homosexual”, an equivocation which seems particularly silly when looking at his study of a (naked) young man entitled My Special Longing. He was also a Nijinsky enthusiast and one of his portraits has the dancer as a naked faun bestride an overgrown butterfly.

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left: Standing Nude Man with Figure of Saint (no date); right: Nijinsky (1918).

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