The Rise of--and Hysteria Related to--The 1960s "Death Disc": Guest Post by Eric Huang, Morbid Anatomy Foreign Corespondent

 

In the following guest post, Morbid Anatomy foreign corespondent Eric Huang reports on the little-remembered phenomenon--and hysteria related to--the 1960s "death disc," or songs in which the love interest dies "due to a lovers’ spat, jealousy, a cruel twist of fate, or suicide."

Just a few well known examples of "death discs"--which spanned such genres as rock, Motown and country and western--are "Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las (1965); "Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobby Gentry (1967); "Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Petersen (1960); and "Teen Angel" by Mark Dinning (1960).

Following is the full and fascinating story, along with videos of ten of the best remembered "death discs." Thanks, Eric, for this excellent report!

THE RISE OF THE DEATH DISC

In the 1960s, there was a trend in popular music dubbed, ‘death discs’ or ‘splatter platters.’ All were songs about love-lost in which the protagonist – often male and almost always named Johnny or Tommy – dies due to a lovers’ spat, jealousy, a cruel twist of fate, or suicide. The girl in the song is usually the one at fault. It’s her honor that he protects to the death, her infidelity/ambivalence that leads to his demise.

On a recent BBC documentary about songs banned in the UK, historians described how death discs were new outlets for women, finally able to sing about their tormented modern lives. The songs reflected a rejection of 1950s morality by a new generation, but it wasn’t a pretty picture: those who didn’t obey the rules always met with death. Jim Stark, James Dean’s character in ‘Rebel without a Cause’ (1955), is a prime example - as are Romeo and Juliet, who were resurrected in Franco Zeffirelli’s award-winning box office smash in 1968. This sexed-up adaptation of the Shakespearean tale had all the ingredients of an archetypal death disc tragedy: youth, rebellion, passion, death.

The plane and car crashes that ended many teen celebrities’ lives from the 50s onwards were a massive influence on this morbid music trend. Sports cars, motorcycles and high-flying airplanes represented another new way of life, one that was too fast for many. Death discs were about losing lovers in exactly this way: tragically in crashes just before a wedding day or right after a warning to be careful. The death disc hit, ‘Three Stars’, by Tommy Dee was about the very plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly in 1959.

Death discs spanned genres: from rock and roll to Motown to country and western. But the most popular death disc of all was ‘Leader of the Pack’ by the Shangri-Las. Singer Mary Weiss laments the tragic story of her hot-blooded biker boyfriend. They were deeply in love, but she bowed to societal pressure to ‘find someone new.’ Moments after breaking up, a fatal crash ends his life. So popular was this song about teenage death, that it toppled the Beatles from the US charts!

The popularity of death discs shocked the establishment. Journalist Alexandra Apolloni describes Seventeen magazine’s condemnation of these morbid songs:

A 1965 editorial made it clear that good Seventeen readers shouldn’t be listening to death discs: “I expect the Johnny Mathis version of ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ to live considerably longer than the Shangri-Las’ gory ditties about motorcycling or hot-rodding death scenes."

Nevertheless, ‘Leader of the Pack’ and numerous songs like it flourished in the 1960s. The music industry cashed in on a never-ending obsession with untimely death, turning young idols like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe – later Jimmy Hendrix, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse - into immortals.

Here is a playlist of ten 1960s death disc faves:

"Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las (1965)

"Condition Red" by The Goodees (1968)


"Teen Angel" by Mark Dinning (1960)


"Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Petersen (1960)


"Patches" by Dickie Lee (1962)


"Johnny Remember Me" by Johnny Leyton (1961)


"Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobby Gentry (1967)


"The Hero" by Bernadette Carroll (1965)


"Ebony Eyes" by The Everly Brothers (1961)


"Car Crash" by The Cadets (1960)

"The Paris Morgue Closed to Sightseers," 1907

Doing research for the 2015 Morbid Anatomy Museum Wall Calendar, I came across the wonderful tidbit above from the a 1907 issue of Australia's Kalgoorlie Miner. For more on the Paris morgue--which attracted throngs of tourists throughout the 19th century eager to view the bodies of the unclaimed dead--see these recent Morbid Anatomy posts (1, 2, 3). To find out more about the calendar--and pre-order a copy!--click here.

"Vesalius & the Invention of the Modern Body" Symposium, St. Louis, Missouri; February 26 - February 28, 2015

For those in the St. Louis area: February of next year, St. Louis University and Washington University will be co-presenting an interdisciplinary symposium to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the birth of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), founder of the study of modern human anatomy.

The symposium--which runs from February 26 - February 28, 2015--is open to the public, and will feature some of our favorite international anatomical scholars including Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine; Andrea Carlino of the University of Geneva
; Jonathan Sawday of Saint Louis University; and Rebecca Messbarger, author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini. Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein will also be speaking.

Schedule follows. To find out more--and get tickets--click here. Hope to see you there!

This interdisciplinary symposium will celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the birth of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), founder of the study of modern human anatomy. Saint Louis University and Washington University plan to jointly host three days of events especially inspired by the landmark publication of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543 and 1555) and the new critical edition and translation of this work, the New Fabrica. The conference program will feature a roster of internationally-renowned speakers, including keynote speakers Daniel Garrison, Malcolm Hast, and Sachiko Kusukawa. In addition to the presentation of academic papers of leading research, the schedule will also include an anatomy demonstration, rare books workshops, and a publishers’ exhibit hall.

Because the Fabrica represented a collaborative project involving a scientist (Vesalius), a humanist (Johannes Oporinus, the printer), and an artist (Jan van Kalkar), the goal of the conference is to encourage a network of scholars working in disparate fields to explore the potential for future interdisciplinary research. 

February 26
Saint Louis University — Medical Center Library

6:00 - 7:00pm OPENING SESSION
Welcome Remarks by [TBD] Location TBD
An Updated Census of the 1st Edition (1543) and 2nd Edition (1555) of Vesalius’ de Humani Corporis Fabrica in the USA

Stephen N. Joffe MD FACS FRCS (Edin, Glas) FCS (SA)

7:00 - 9:00pm RECEPTION* and TOURS
Saint Louis University Medical School (more info to follow)

*The Welcome Reception is sponsored by the generosity of Dr. and Mrs. Stephen N. Joffe

February 27
Saint Louis University — Frost Campus

8:00 - 9:00am REGISTRATION/BREAKFAST 
DuBourg Hall - Pere Marquette Gallery 
Publishers’ Exhibit Hall open

8:00am-5:30pm DuBourg - Grand Hall

8:45am CONFERENCE WELCOME
Opening Remarks: Philip Gavitt (Saint Louis University)

9:00am 

SESSION 1 - Public Dissections as Spectacle in Early Modern Europe DuBourg Hall-Pere Marquette Gallery
Session Chair: Anne Stiles (Saint Louis University)

• Andrea Carlino (University of Geneva)

• Cynthia Klestinec (University of Miami Ohio)

10:30am COFFEE BREAK

11:00am SESSION 2 - Discovery and Deconstruction of the Body: Cultural Contexts of the Fabrica 
DuBourg Hall – Pere Marquette Gallery

Session Chair: Sara van den Berg (Saint Louis University)

• Jonathan Sawday (Saint Louis University)
• Glenn Harcourt (Independent Scholar)

12:30am LUNCH BREAKLunch at Saint Louis University – Refectory, DuBourg Hall
; Shuttle service from DuBourg Hall to Young Hall

2:00pm SESSION 3 - Mapping the Interior: 3D Anatomy Demonstration Young Hall Auditorium


3:30pm COFFEE BREAK 
Shuttle service from Young Hall to DuBourg Hall

4:00pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS - Creating the New Fabrica
DuBourg Hall – Pere Marquette Gallery

Introduction by: Jonathan Sawday (Saint Louis University)

Keynote Speakers: Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast (Northwestern University)

6:00 - 7:30pm RECEPTION*
Pius XII Memorial Library – 2nd floor/TBD

*The Keynote Reception is sponsored by the generosity of Pius XII Memorial Library

February 28
Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

8:00am REGISTRATION/BREAKFAST
EPNEC Center

8:45am OPENING REMARKSby Thomas Woolsey

9:00am SESSION 4 - Anatomical Specimens in the Early Modern Period
EPNEC Center

Session Chair: Amy Eisen Cislo, Washington University in St. Louis

• Rebecca Messbarger (Washington University in St. Louis)

  Re-casting the Vesalian Dissection Scene: Wax Anatomical Figures of the Italian Enlightenment
• Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy Museum) From the Anatomical Theatre to the Anatomical Venus: The Intersection of Entertainment and Edification in Public Anatomies


10:30am COFFEE BREAK11:00am SESSION 5 - From the Renaissance to the Present: 19th and 21st Century Anatomical Imager
EPNEC Center

Session Chair: Elisabeth Brander, Bernard Becker Medical Library

• 
Michael Sappol (National Library of Medicine)
  The apotheosis of the dissected plate: Spectacles of layering and transparency in 19th- and 20th-century anatomy
• 
R. Gilbert Jost (Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine)
  Visualizing the Human Body Using Modern Imaging Techniques

12:30am LUNCH BREAK

2:00pm SESSION 6 - Small SessionsBecker Medical Library

• Suzanne Karr Schmidt – Rare Books
• 
Marisa Anne Bass – Rare Books
• 
Jane Phillips Conroy and Glen Conroy – Tour of Anatomy Labs

3:30pm BREAK

4:15pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS 
EPNEC Center
Introduction by: Rebecca Messbarger (Washington University in St. Louis)
Sachiko Kusukawa (Cambridge University) The Body in the Book: the Fabrica and the Epitome (1543)


5:45 - 7:30pm RECEPTION
EPNEC Center

Image: Hand Colored Frontispiece to Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica; sourced here. Citation: "This presentation copy for Charles V is the only one known to have been hand colored under the direction of Vesalius. It is, by way of an anonymous donor, now in the New York Public Library. This image is from their Seeing is Believing exhibition."

The Churches and Mummies of Mexico City and Oaxaca: Photos from the Morbid Anatomy Museum Day of the Dead Trip, 2014

The Morbid Anatomy Musuem crew has just returned from our annual Day of the Dead field trip in Mexico. This year, our trip--as always, under the guidance of Scholar in Residence Salvador Olguín--took us to Oaxaca and Mexico City, where we saw markets, mummies, churches, skeleton puppet shows, three day of the dead celebrations, and much, much more.

We have just posted a set of photographs--from which the above are drawn--documenting some of the fabulous churches, mummies and street scenes we saw whilst in Mexico; you can see the full set--at much higher quality!--by clicking here.

For more, you can see Day of the Dead celebration photos here, and photos from our visit to Enriqueta Vargas' Tultitlan-based Santa Muerte Shrine by clicking here. If you would like to be put on the wait list for the 2015 Day of the Dead trip, you can email Salvador at info [at] borderlineprojects.com or sign up for the Morbid Anatomy Mailing List (and thus receive an alert when it is announced) by clicking here.

And thanks so much to the forty or so folks who joined us on our trip this year, from such far-flung locales as New Orleans, London, Oakland, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Virginia, San Francisco, and New York City! Hope you had a great time, and hope to see you again next year.

Santa Muerte Shrine, Tultitlan, Mexico

Santa Muerte--literally "Holy Death" or "Saint Death"--is the sacred figure of death personified as a woman. She is venerated by an ever growing number of people in Mexico and beyond, and is especially popular with disenfranchised members of society such as criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, homosexuals, prisoners, the very poor, and other people for whom conventional Catholicism has not provided a better or a safer life. The phenomenon is thought to have its roots in a syncretism of the beliefs of the native Latin Americans and the colonizing Spanish Catholics.

We at Morbid Anatomy have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of Santa Muerte (on which more here) and, whilst in Mexico last week for the Morbid Anatomy Day of the Dead field trip, we had the very good fortune--thanks to our good friend Dr. Andrew Chesnut--to visit to the epic Santa Muerte shrine in Tultitlan, Mexico. Founded in 2007 by Jonathan Legaria Vargas (aka “Comandante Pantera"), the shrine--marked by a 75 foot tall figure of "The Skinny Lady"--consists of a series of small pavilions devoted to Santa Muertes wearing different colored gowns, and thus bearing different powers; Red, for example, is love; Gold is money; and black is protection). Each pavilion is stuffed with candles, drawings, flowers, stuffed animals, liquor, cigarettes, incense and other offerings; one pavilion is even devoted to healing broken Santa Muertes!

In 2008,“Comandante Pantera" was killed by gunfire. Since then, the shrine has been lovingly run by his mother, Enriqueta Vargas. In a very touching way, this shrine to Saint Death also seems to act as a memorial for her lost son.

Above are a few photographs of the shrine. You can see a full photoset by clicking here.

Thanks so much to the lovely Señora Vargas the rest of her crew, who were incredibly gracious and welcoming to us all. We also invite you to stop by The Morbid Anatomy Library to see some of the artifacts we acquired in the shrine's most excellent giftshop. To learn more the history of the shrine and the Santa Muerte phenomenon in general, check out the Most Holy Death website by clicking here. You can learn more about Enriqueta Vargas and her shrine by clicking here.

Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature - Conference at the School of Visual Arts, NYC; Friday November 14 - Sunday November 16

The Morbid Anatomy Museum's creative director Joanna Ebenstein will be giving a talk as part of a conference at New York City's School of Visual Arts. Entitled "Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature," the conference will take place from Friday November 14 through Sunday November 16. You can find out more--and purchase tickets--by clicking here.

Conference
Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature is an interdisciplinary conference investigating the fluctuating “essences” of “nature” and the “natural” in the 21st century. Each of these terms carries with it an enormity of philosophical questions ranging from the alteration of life itself to dialogues concerning the notion of the Anthropocene, a term used to describe man’s intervention into the natural world. The talks presented here will focus on contemporary issues in the visual arts as they intersect with the biological and geological sciences, confirming that nature remains an intrinsically mysterious, ever more mutable entity.  At the present time, cellular parts are being remixed in laboratories to create synthetic organisms while geological transformations are forecasting wild swings in weather conditions. Human reproduction regularly occurs in Petri dishes while cucumbers are grown in space. The artificial and the natural now combine to form novel entities, never before seen on earth, while animal species dwindle down to extinction every day.  Animals and plants are exhibited as contemporary art, while the real is conflated with the imaginary. Technological advances and their theoretical undertones have migrated into art practice producing New Media installations, Bio Art exhibitions and a global community of art practitioners adapting novel productions to cultural resources.   In addition, visual art has become a social practice platform with projects that intersect with urban farming, DIY biology and extremes in performance art.  Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature brings together artists, historians, curators, philosophers and scientists to examine and comment on these ideas.

In addition, there will be an exhibition of work by students, alumni and faculty, generated through SVA’s Bio Art Laboratory, the first of its kind in the U.S.A.

Program

Friday, November 14, 2014

4:00pm - 5:00pm Conference Registration

5:00pm - 5:15pm Introduction by Suzanne Anker

5:15pm - 7:30pm

Keynote Speakers 

• Dr. Melentie Pandilovski - The Biotech Species

• Lucas Evers - Bio Art and creative biotechnology in the Anthropocene - some innovative misunderstandings

• Moderator: Suzanne Anker

7:30pm - 8:30pm Opening Reception for the exhibition Blue Egg: Visions of Nature

Saturday, November 15, 2014

9:00am - 10:00am Conference Registration and Breakfast

10:00am - 12:00pm  Panel 1: Conditions of Possibility

• Gary Sherman -Artificial Sublime

• Sabine Flach - In the Pursuit of the Magic

12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch

1:30pm - 4:30pm: Panel 2: Water-Bodies: A Relationship of Paradox

• Zach Moser  - Shrimp Boat Projects

• Irene J. Klaver - tbd

• Sarah E. Durand - tbd

• Henry G. Sanchez - THE ENGLISH KILLS PROJECT

• Moderator: Aimee Morgana

4:30pm - 5:00pm Coffee Break

5:00pm - 7:00pm Panel 3: Anthropocene

• Roy Scranton - The Compulsion of Strife: Nature, War, and the Anthropocene

• Laura Ballantyne-Brodie - A systems approach to ethics: earth system ethics

• Janet Biggs - Far Afield

• Joe Mangrum - This is not Sand

• Moderator: Daniel Grushkin

7:00pm Dinner Reception

Sunday, November 16, 2014
9:00am - 10:00am Conference Registration and Breakfast

Panel 4: Dead or Alive 10:00am - 12:30pm  

• Joanna Ebenstein - The "Once-Alive and the Eerily Lifelike" at The Morbid Anatomy Museum

• Dana Levy - The Poetics of Unwild Things

• Nancy Chunn - Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear

• Moderator: Michael Sappol

12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm - 4:00pm Panel 5: DIY Biology

• Ellen Jorgensen - Community Lab as Cultural Nexus

• Joseph DeGiorgis - The Aquatic Studio: the fine art of using novel and traditional scientific techniques to capture images of life

• Adam Stennett - The Artist Survival Shack Project

• Sebastian Cocioba - Genetically modified foods

• Moderator: Oliver Medvedik

4:00pm - 4:30pm Coffee Break
4:30pm - 6:30pm

Panel 6: Colonizing Nature

• Suzanne Anker - Lepidoptera, Reptilia and the New Geography

• Raul Valverde - Adapted Landscape

• Marco Castro - Bus Roots

• Moderator: Sabine Flach

The Uncanny: Liminal Spaces and the Seduction of Melancholic Mystery: Guest Post by Romany Reagan

Following is a guest post by Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London, on the idea of the uncanny. If this topic interests you, we hope you'll join us for her illustrated lecture "A Theoretical Ghost: Analysing the Uncanny Through the Lens of Charles Dickens' Night Walks" tomorrow night--Tuesday November 4th. More information and tickets are available here.

The Uncanny: Liminal Space and the Seduction of Melancholic Mystery
By Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London

The uncanny is apprehension rather than experience, dread rather than terror. It inhabits a liminal psychological space, existing in our peripheral vision and built on uncertainty. The moment our imagination is satisfied into certainty — whether that be of safety or of horror — the moment ceases to be uncanny. If a ghost were to be proven to be a ghost, it would no longer be uncanny; it would be paranormal. Under this term fall an entire franken-family of concepts: the ‘death drive’, doppelgängers, ghosts and the spirit world, déjà vu, allegory in literature, cemeteries, ruins, oral storytelling, telepathy, the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis, dolls — and practically everything under the heading of ‘gothic’.

The uncanny can be something gruesome or terrible, such as death and corpses, live burial, the return of the dead. However, it can also be something strangely beautiful. It can excite our curiosity, but at the same time be frightening. It is the irresistible seduction of mystery. It comes in the uncertainties of silence, solitude and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter, it is highly personal and not usually something felt with others. It is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

While experience of the uncanny is brought about by outside stimulus, it is not an independent entity. It lives in our sensory perception — filtered through personal experience, and therefore impossible to document with impartial empiricism. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, unstable definitions of reality and the experience of liminality.

Why do stories, images and experiences of the uncanny attract rather than repel some people? Are these people perhaps searching for answers to some very personal philosophical questions when they do not feel their answers lie elsewhere? The drive towards, and not away, that which sparks feelings of uncertainty and unease is perhaps driven by a quest for knowledge; or a need to feel the ‘secular sublime’ for those who do not classify themselves as adhering to any particular religious dogma. Ernst Jentsch suggests, “the feeling of uncertainty not infrequently makes its presence felt of its own accord in those who are more intellectually discriminating when they perceive daily phenomena, and it may well represent an important factor in the origin of the drive to knowledge and research”.[1]

Study of the uncanny is relatively new, and there are no explicit theoretical explorations of it before the twentieth century. Concepts surrounding the uncanny are constantly oscillating. It is difficult, therefore, to catalogue with an assurance of comprehensiveness within the field, or consensus amongst theorists, everything included under the umbrella of the term. As professor Nicholas Royle points outs in his study on the subject, “everyone’s relation with the uncanny is in some sense their own and no one else’s”.[2]

German philosopher Friedrich Schelling first introduced the uncanny as a term in 1835. However, it was not officially acknowledged as school of thought until it was later expanded upon by the German psychologist Ernst Jentsch in 1906. Even thought Jentsch wrote about it first, it is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Unheimlich’, or ‘The Uncanny’, that is credited with being the seminal study on the subject.



Freud defined the feeling of the uncanny as the, shiver of realizing that modern reason has merely repressed, rather than replaced, primitive superstition. All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe ‘officially’ that the dead can become visible spirits, yet Freud suspected that, at times, almost all of us think as primitive cultures did on this topic. This return to pre-modern beliefs was itself the product of thinking of human subjectivity as a history of developmental layers that could be stripped away in an instant of dread, returning us to a ‘savage’ state.[3]

Many people experience an uncanny feeling in anything relating to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. The uncanny thrives within questions, and no other question has plagued us through ages more persistently than to wonder, “what happens when we die?"



Haunting is an important component of the uncanny, yet it is always the question rather than the answer that is key to the definition. In studies of hauntings, spatialization has been the classic starting point. In haunted houses and haunted castles: ghosts are almost always locked into buildings and ancient sites. Ruins have traditionally been thought of as uncanny, haunted places. As well as simply being the traces of the buildings in which people long since dead once lived, ruins have themselves often been figured as skeletons, corpses or ghosts. The sight of a ghost is necessarily spatial. Indeed, the idea of a haunted place depends upon the very materiality of a ghost assuming a habitual routine in place. As scholar of the uncanny Dylan Trigg observes, “a placeless ghost is, after all, as inconceivable as a placeless memory; the shadow in the hallway does not linger aimlessly, but dwells in a specific place, indeed, if not even in specific things within that place. The sense, therefore, of a presence intensifying and diminishing in proximity to particular things is entirely consistent with the idea of the ghost as retaining a phantom relationship to the same world it did when alive”. [4]

While most people don’t relish the thought of snapping awake at 3am to hear something ghoulish banging about in the basement, when removed slightly from our immediate experience, this fear isn’t entirely unpleasant. In popular culture we find evidence of people running towards these feelings with dark glee. Simply look at the prevalence of horror films. Even when we know very well that we are being fooled by merely harmless illusions, many people cannot suppress an extremely uncomfortable feeling when watching these films. In life, we usually do not like to put ourselves in danger or expose ourselves to fear. However, in the cinema or theatre, or while reading, we gladly immerse ourselves in these emotional worlds: we experience certain powerful excitements which awake in us a strong feeling for life, with complete impunity and without having to accept the consequences of the causes of these unpleasant feelings.

The uncanny can be composed of things widely considered gruesome or terrible, but there is an element of curiosity that tempers our horror. The uncanny hints at a promise of answers that saves uncanny images and themes from being simply horrific — something that hints to unveiling an elemental truth, which excites us to lean in closer. That is what makes the uncanny attractive, yet at the same time frightening. There is an aspect of not being able to help yourself, the curiosity and intrigue is at equal war with your fear. This is also what separates the uncanny from the strictly melancholic. Excitement in the face of mystery, and attraction to the not-instantly-knowable, speaks to a creative engagement with one’s environment, not an introversion. There is an active curiosity that drives engagement with the darkness. Within the darkness there are more questions than answers; but the questions are why we like coming here, aren’t they?



IMAGE LIST

1. Frederick Simpson Coburn, 1899
2. Sigmund Freud
3. ‘The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel’, Louis Daguerre, 1824
4. Photo by: Ella Guru, Abney Park Cemetery, 1987

ENDNOTES

1. Jentsch, Ernst, On the Psychology of the Uncanny, 1906. Essay. p4
2. Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny, (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 2003. Book. P26
3. Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, 1919. Essay.
4. Trigg, Dylan, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, (Athens: Ohio University Press) 2012. Book. p294

Happy (Almost) Halloween with Some of Our Favorite Macabre Videos!

Above: "Dry Bones," The Lennon Sisters, The Lawrence Welk Show, 1965
Center: "The Skeleton Dance," Disney Silly Symphonies, 1929
Below: "You're Always Welcome at our House," lyrics by Shel Silverstein, performed by Marisa Berenson, star of Cabaret; The Muppet Show, 1978

Happy Halloween and Day of the Dead from Morbid Anatomy: Events, Products and News

We at the Morbid Anatomy Museum are celebrating our favorite time of the year with scores of terrific events and new seasonal products. Following is a list of events taking place this week and those newly announced; for a list of all upcoming events, click here.

New in The Morbid Anatomy Online Gift Shop: We are delighted to be offering a special limited, edition signed sugar skull screen print (seen above) by former Artist and Anatomist in Residence Emily Evans! To commemorate Day of the Dead, she is offering free delivery until November 3rd! To find out more--and order a copy of your own!--click here. 

In the News: National Geographic just posted a thoughtful and intelligent video about our popular anthropomorphic mouse taxidermy class and its teacher, Taxidermist in Residence Divya Anantharaman; you can check that out here. The Museum also got a shout out in the Ted blog as one of ten surprising and strange New York attractions; more on that here.

In addition, The New York Times just published another nice piece about death and mourning in New York exhibitions which featured The Morbid Anatomy Museum, which you can read here. And, fans of romantic ballet might enjoy this brief article on the uncanny allure of the artform by our museum's director in this month's Royal Academy of Dance's Dance Gazette.

We at Morbid Anatomy are committed to making all of our events affordable, but to do this, we need you support. If you are a fan of what we do, please consider becoming a member (with all the benefits that entails!) by clicking here, or making a donation by clicking here. To sign up for our mailer and get these alerts sent weekly directly to your inbox, click here.

Thanks, and hope to see you at one of these great upcoming events!

THIS WEEK

• Halloween: The Curious Story of America’s Most Horrible HolidayTONIGHT Sunday, October 26th, 8pm, $8, Tickets (and more info) here

• Spirits and Ghosts I Have Known and Loved: An Illustrated Presentation with Dr. Stanley Krippner
  Tuesday, October 28th, 8pm, $12, Tickets (and more info) here

• Death and the Idea of Mexico: An Illustrated Lecture by Claudio Lomnitz
  Wednesday, October 29, 8pm, $8, Tickets (and more info) here

• Monsters on the Brain: A Natural History of Horror: Illustrated lecture with Professor Stephen T. Asma
  Thursday, October 30, 8pm, $8, Tickets (and more info) here

• Anthropomorphic Mouse (One or Two Headed!) Taxidermy Class with Divya Anantharaman
  Saturday November 1st, 12pm - 5pm, $110 - $125, sold out (but more info) here

• Bat Skeleton in a Dome Workshop with Wilder Duncan
  Sunday, November 2nd, 1pm - 6pm, $200, Tickets (and more info) here

NEWLY ANNOUNCED

• Christmas Special Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class with Divya Anantharaman
  Saturday December 13th, 12pm - 5pm, $110 - $125, Tickets (and more info) here
  
  
• The French Pantheon and its Dead: The Grateful Fatherland. An Illustrated talk by Mitch Abidor
  Wednesday December 17th, 8pm, $8, Tickets (and more info) here

An Official Guide for Demon Hunters: Helpful Advice from Theologians and Witch-Hunters: Guest Post by Stephen T. Asma, PhD

Following is a very helpful guest post for the demon hunters among you by friend of Morbid Anatomy Stephen T. Asma, PhD. Dr. Asma might already be known to some of you as the author of Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, the book which inspired me take to the road to photograph medical museums on a trip which led to the founding of this blog. He is also the author of the equally thoughtful On Monsters.

Next Thursday, October 30th, we hope you'll join us for a lecture by Dr. Asma at The Morbid Anatomy Museum entitled "Monsters on the Brain: A Natural History of Horror;" The after party will feature music by our DJ in residence Friese Undine. More information and tickets are available here.

And now, without further ado: "An Official Guide for Demon Hunters: Helpful Advice from Theologians and Witch-Hunters," compliments of the illustrious Dr. Stephen Asma:

Saint Anthony
The story of Saint Anthony of the Desert (c.251-356) had a huge impact on the development of demonology. He is sometimes referred to as the Father of Monks, having created a desert monasticism that drew Christian ascetics far away from the urban centers. But his famous fight with demons in the Egyptian desert also laid the groundwork for all subsequent thinking about demons and possession.(1) 

Questing after spiritual purification, Anthony left the pleasures of domestic life and moved to live in a tomb outside his village, where he was attacked by a “multitude of demons” who sliced him into a bloody mess. “For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment.” But his faith revitalized him and he rallied back. After throwing off the temptations of the flesh, Anthony was revisited by the devil many times –but the devil always shape-shifted to appear as some creature. “Changes of form for evil are easy for the devil,” Anthony explained, “so in the night they make such a din that the whole of that place seemed to be shaken by an earthquake, and the demons as if breaking the four walls of the dwelling seemed to enter through them, coming in the likeness of beasts and creeping things.”

But most demons, Anthony assures us, have no real power in the physical world. They only seem to be causally efficacious. The trick is to acknowledge that you are having a frightening experience, but realize that the frightener is like a hallucination rather than a material creature. In fact, reading St. Anthony is like reading an early self-help treatise for schizophrenics.

In addition to demons who shape-shift into frightening phantasms –which are easily banished by a resolute sign-of-the-cross –Anthony acknowledges the phenomenon of real human possession. This is somewhat difficult to square with his persistent claim that demons have no real power. In the last half of the Life of Anthony, Athanasius tells of many terrible cases of people who have come into the custody of demon spirits. A man named Fronto, for example, had a madness that involved biting his own tongue and injuring his own eyes, a woman from Busiris had mucus fall from her nose that immediately turned into worms once it hit the ground, and “another, a person of rank, came to him, possessed by a demon; and…he even ate the excreta from his own body.” And this young man actually attacked Anthony, but the sage said, “Be not angry with the young man, for it is not he, but the demon which is in him.”

Anthony cured all these cases and many more, but it is unlikely that the man eating his own excrement would have agreed with Anthony’s refrain that demons are powerless. And, for that matter, if they are truly powerless, why would anyone need Anthony’s exorcising acumen? The logic here can be reconstructed perhaps by saying that demons do not have real power unless you become afraid of them, in which case you grant them entry into the cause-and-effect world. Our response to demon attack can either give them causal traction in our world or banish them from it. We are instrumental in the outcome of the encounter.

Saint Augustine
Anthony’s demonology was further refined by many Church Fathers, including Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Augustine, for example, took pains in his City of God to distinguish earlier positive uses of the term “demon” (by pagans like Socrates), from the only truly positive spirit beings –the “angels.” The pagans, he argued, were aware of angels and demons, but not as such. Heathens lacked the Christian truth and therefore misinterpreted their occasional encounters with the spirit realm –imagining a pagan theology where they should have seen a monotheism. But more interestingly, Augustine delved into the psychology or epistemology of the demon mind –arguing that demons have knowledge but their knowledge is not sanctified by a sense of charity. Citing Corinthians, Augustine says “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up,” and he uses this point to connect demonic psychology with pride.(2)  In a tour de force of hermeneutics, he further shows that this is why human pride is empty of charity and indistinguishable (except perhaps by degree) from demonic psychology. Demons, he says, are capable of getting the outward shell of Christ’s message, but not the inner meaning. Demons have knowledge, but it is sterile. And the important difference between demonic and angelic knowledge is spelled out. “The good angels, therefore, hold cheap all that knowledge of material and transitory things which the demons are so proud of possessing.”(3)  Perhaps the good news for humans in this picture is that because demons focus, like humans, on the transitory changing world, they can be deceived. They, like us, live in the world of shadows, and passions can agitate them as well. That means their own emotions can be used against them, by the clever demon hunter. Angels on the other hand (and Saints), behold, in the wisdom of God, the eternal “cardinal causes” of things, and so they are never deceived.

Augustine instructs us about the imperfect minds of demons, but also offers some insight into their mysterious bodies. He asks the Christian reader not to feel envy about the demon’s amazing “aerial bodies” –capable of becoming invisible, floating, flying, shape-shifting, and even passing through walls. He points out that many animals too have greater bodily powers of strength, perception, and speed, but humans are more than compensated with the infinitely important faculties of rationality and virtue.  Okay, demons have really impressive magical bodies, but “divine providence gave to them bodies of a better quality than ours, that that in which we excel them might in this way be commended to us as deserving to be far more cared for than the body, and that we should learn to despise the bodily.”(4)

Saint Aquinas
Writing almost nine-hundred years later, Aquinas is still refining Christian demonology and giving nuance to the ideas first formed by St. Anthony. In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas considers whether demons are inherently evil. He offers some standard theological and scriptural ways of thinking about demons and monsters. “Nothing can exist unless it has existence from the first being, and the first being is the sovereign good. But since every being, as such, acts to the production of its own likeness, all things that come of the first being must be good.” And he caps this theological claim with some scripture –“This is also confirmed by the authority of Holy Scripture: for it is said, Every creature is good (1 Tim. iv, 4): God saw all things that he had made, and they were very good (Gen. I, 31).”(5)  This means demons are not intrinsically evil, and Aquinas gives a philosophical argument for this surprising view.(6)

He starts from an old premise about the way that conscious beings make decisions and act. Conscious beings, which would include humans but also aerial-bodied demons, and even angels (but not lower animals), always act for the sake of some perceived good. They may be wrong about it, but at least they are moving in a direction that seems beneficial to them in some way. Imagine, for example, that you’re late for an important event. You are pushing a crowd of people in the street in order to get to your destination, and some people are injured in the scuffle. Their suffering is not your intended goal or motivation. Their suffering is an unfortunate but unintended consequence of your over-zealous sense of punctuality. You are not guilty of knowingly and willfully hurting other people –but you are guilty of being careless and thoughtless about the safety of others. You’re not excused for the harm you’ve done, but you’re not an inherently harmful or intrinsically evil person either.

Aquinas thinks this point extends to the demons as well. The wider popular culture believes demons to be inherently evil beings that intentionally seek the pain and suffering of others as their only real goal and purpose. But Aquinas thinks demons are confused and weak-willed --accidentally evil, not essentially evil.(7)  When those demons tortured St. Anthony, for example, they were motivated by their (admittedly selfish and wrongheaded) sense of good. Like other cases of evil and sin, the suffering of St. Anthony is the result of a “false judgment” rather than a “bad will.” The only other way, theoretically, for a demon’s will to be truly bad would be if it were tied to a faulty faculty of understanding --one that would always misjudge, always make a false judgment. But, according to Aquinas, “false judgments” (e.g. thinking heroin might be good for one’s children, or thinking hemlock would make a good snack, etc.) are actually freakish occurrences, not the norm. “False judgments in acts of the understanding” he says, “are like monsters in the physical universe, which are not according to nature, but out of the way of nature: for the good of the understanding and its natural end is the knowledge of truth.”

One suspects that Anthony, and other victims of demon torture, would have found this nuanced theory to be cold-comfort. This more sophisticated view of conscious agency hardly takes the sting out of the demon’s venom. A demon’s victim might retort: So, if they’re not intrinsically evil, then why are they causing me so much pain and misery? In fact, more crucially, if there’s no real “bad will,” then whence comes sin? The answers are interesting. With impressive consistency, Aquinas claims that the demon’s volitions are still only good (by definition), but the demon has failed to submit his own personal good to the higher, superior good (God’s will). The demon’s sin is the failure to restrict his own agenda of perceived personal goods to the cosmic perfect good of God’s benevolence.

Aquinas analyzes the fall of the prince of demons himself, Lucifer, and finds a perfect illustration of his general theory. Even the devil is not naturally or essentially evil. Referring to Isaiah (chapter xiv), Aquinas says that the devil did not properly impose the Higher Good upon his own. Lucifer’s will “was not regulated by any higher will, a position of independence proper to God alone. In this sense we must understand the saying that he aimed at equality with God, not that he ever expected his goodness to equal the divine goodness: such a thought could never have occurred to his mind. But to wish to rule others, and not to have one’s own will ruled by any superior, is to wish to be in power and cease to be a subject; and that is the sin of pride.”(8)
  
Now we know what makes demons tick, so to speak. There is no evil “force” or “power” skulking about in the shadows of our world. Demons are not, contrary to popular opinion, embodiments of this imaginary evil energy.(9)  They are instead, aerial-bodied agents with conscious volition who confusedly seek their own self-aggrandizement –in other words, they are meaner versions of ourselves, who can also shape-shift and turn invisible. Strangely, the issue of sadism (actually taking pleasure in another’s pain) does not seem to have occurred to Aquinas. At least he prefers to analyze demonic deeds in the context of prideful power struggles for recognition –the torture techniques of demons are just their means to the end of “conversion to the dark side” or their coercive attempts to get reverence, and other similar sins of pride. Aquinas does not seriously entertain the idea that the misery of the tortured human is the pleasurable end goal of the demon’s activity.(10)  

The Witch-Hunter, Institoris
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII gave Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Institoris wide ranging legal powers to pursue and eradicate witches (Papal Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus). The Bull was used as a justificational preface for Institoris’ famous demon hunting guide Malleus Maleficarum.

The Malleus Malificarum argues throughout for a “middle-way” position between witchcraft that’s too real (and therefore in violation of God’s goodness and power) and that which is not real enough (purely imaginative and fictional). Earlier demonologists, like Aquinas and the authors of the influential Canon Episcopi,(11)  argued that the frightening visions and shape-shifting episodes associated with witchcraft were really just quasi-dream-like phantasms. If any mischievous manipulation is occurring to a man who thinks he’s a werewolf, or experiences aerial lift-off on a broom, then the cause would have to sneak in, according to these more skeptical demonologists, at the physiological juncture where his “imaginative faculty” meets his “interior senses.” The imaginative faculty is described as a “treasure house” in each person that stores or preserves visible shapes, like the images of animals for example. It’s a treasure house of memories. If some evil spirit were to trigger this storage faculty just right, then it would flood the perceptual senses and give the person the illusory experience of real external stimuli outside the body. A mundane version of this happens all the time, when bodily humors trigger the “treasure house” in sleep and we subsequently dream.

Institoris breaks with this more benign version of witchcraft, and offers a clever way to get demons back in their threatening positions. Works of evil, according to Institoris, are not just indigestion-like fabrications of the body. They are real and they are happening in the external world; children really are being eaten by demonic were-wolves, the witches are actually taking flight. But how is it done, if only God has true creative power like this?

Demons according to Institoris do not make something from nothing when they enact their transgressions –that would truly violate a cardinal notion of the monotheistic God. It may seem that demons and their witches conjure monsters and terrors from thin air, but they do not really create in such an absolute manner. Instead, the demons have an amazing understanding of the Book of Nature. They grasp the first principles, fundamental springs, and material trajectories of physical nature itself. Demons are manipulative “scientists” long before this term even existed. They are the ultimate alchemists.(12)  

When demons do shape-shifting and other seemingly supernatural marvels, they are not “creating” so much as “altering” nature. According to Institoris, the evil ones sift the matter of nature to find the seeds (semina) of transformation, and then use these micro-agents as catalysts for their own nefarious inventions.(13)  Demons transform nature more by chemistry than by magic. Just as the form of the oak tree exists like a germ in the acorn, so too all of nature is filled with micro-seeds that when triggered alter the perceivable world in significant ways. Demons understand these mechanisms, which are invisible to humans, and they engineer outcomes in ways that look miraculous to us. By this subtle knowledge of nature, witches appear to predict the future, but they cannot really see the future (as God can). (14)  In this way, Institoris explains how demons and witches “create” mayhem in the world, but he avoids the heresy regarding ex nihilo creation. Demons simply alter nature in ways that scare and frighten us, and seem supernatural.(15)  But now we see why “God’s acquiescence” is frequently intoned in the Malleus explanation of witchcraft. The logic is this. Even if witchcraft is only altering nature, rather than “creating” it, it’s still doing significant damage in the world. Nature is being altered by demons in ways that allow witches to kill their neighbors with effigies and pins. And letting insignificant chump-demons and their paltry witch covens undo the beautiful divine cosmic plan would reflect very badly on God, unless God was actually giving his permission for this suffering. Why God gives His permission to let demons and witches turn someone against his neighbor is really beyond the speculative power of the demonologist. Institoris doesn’t really need to understand his target, he only needs to punish him.

Those who were possessed, however, were considered differently than witches. In the case of possession, the person afflicted was not considered to be evil or malicious, but rather set-upon (not entirely responsible for their actions). In these cases, their demonic behavior could be exorcised and they could be restored to fully human status. Interestingly, Institoris notes that when exorcism fails after multiple attempts, then the victim may have been misdiagnosed and probably deserves their condition as a divine punishment.

If your demon hunting catches a possessed person, a typical exorcism is outlined by Institoris.(16)  It’s best if a cleric performs the function but anyone of good character can do it if necessary. First, make the afflicted person give a confession. Next do a careful search of the home to detect any magical implements (e.g., amulets, effigies, etc.) and burn these. It’s important to get the afflicted into a church at this point, and make he/she hold a blessed candle while righteous witnesses pray over her. This should be sustained three times a week to restore grace, and the victim should receive the holy sacrament. In stubborn cases, you should write the beginning phrases of John’s Gospel on a tablet and hang it around the person’s neck --holy water should be applied liberally. If exorcism ultimately fails, then either the person is being punished by God and has to be surrendered, or your faith, as the exorcist, is not strong enough (and new administrators should be brought in).

    In closing then, always remember to employ the three tried-and-true weapons of the demon hunting arsenal; prayer, fasting, and faith. Anthony first recommended these low-tech strategies, and they remain the bread-and-butter of demon hunting. But new armaments, especially the antipsychotic Clozapine, have also proven themselves crucial in 21st century demon management. Go forth and mollify.

Footnotes:

1. Anthony’s marvelous episodes have also fueled the pictorial tradition, from the medieval period to the present. Paintings by Heironymus Bosch, Matthias Grunewald, and Salvadore Dali, for example, have helped to keep Anthony’s tribulations in the popular imagination. Anthony’s battle with monsters comes to us via his famous biographer Athanasius of Alexandria (c.293-373). Athanasius chronicled Anthony’s life in a work titled simply Vita Antonii, or Life of Anthony. The book was eventually translated into Latin and set the template for subsequent medieval monastic biographies. Athanasius is revered in all the major sects of Christianity as the first Church Doctor. He served under Alexander of Alexandria, until succeeding him as Patriarch of Alexandria, and may have accompanied Alexander to the First Council of Nicea in 325. Athanasius was adamant to stamp out the popular theory about Christ, called Arianism, named after another Alexandrian theologian named Arius (c.250-336). Arians believed that God created Christ –Christ is not the same substance as God. This was anathematized by the Nicene Creed, which makes Christ, and the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with God the Father. Athanasius’ position, that the holy trinity is the same being (homoousia in Greek, or essentia in Latin) and all are eternal, became the orthodox theology for Christianity. But this orthodoxy was not established until after a sustained attack on Arianism as heresy, some of which occupies the later sections of the Life of Anthony.
2. See I Corinthians, Chapter 8, 1.
3. See Book IX, 22.
4. See Book VIII, 15.
5. See Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, Chapter CVII. Quotations are drawn from Joseph Rickaby’s, translation (London: Burns and Oates, 1905).
6. The starting premise of this argument, indeed this entire way of looking at agency, is derived from Aristotle’s (and even Socrates’) view that conscious action is always teleologically arranged toward the perceived good of the actor. Aquinas, and most Christian theologians adopt this starting point, but also add unique considerations (that did not trouble the ancients) about the relevant mechanisms of sin.
7. To get the full sense of Aquinas’ argument we have to understand his rather different notion of “causality” and the old essential/accidental distinction. Causes produce effects that are similar in kind to their causes. Conscious goals are causes of actions/effects. Since a conscious goal is by definition a kind of “good” (a perceived good at the very least), and since such goals are causes, then Aquinas thinks it follows that a person’s intentions can only cause evil “accidentally.” The cause is essentially good, and therefore no evil can flow from it –so any evil that results is incidental. Finally, he thinks, this proves that evil (which is always caused incidentally) is not a real metaphysical presence in the world (a real causal force), but only a kind of unpleasant epiphenomenon. “For no agent acts except with some intention of good: evil therefore cannot be the effect of any cause except incidentally. But what is caused incidentally only cannot be by nature, since every nature has a regular and definite mode of coming into being.” (Chapter CVII).
8. See Chapter CIX.
9. Here Aquinas tows a line first laid out by Augustine against the Manicheans. The Persian notion of evil is this idea of a cosmic metaphysical force or power –something outside of God and His control. In silencing this heresy, Augustine redefined “evil” to mean a “privation” or “lack” of a good. Evil is not a positive reality, but a purely negative adjective that people mistake for a “thing.” The word “evil” might be considered more like the word “shadow” in the sense that it picks out something particular, but in reality a shadow is just the absence of light. It is nothing in itself.
10. Aquinas can counter the sadism point (and maybe even the more difficult masochism issue) by pointing out that the true telos (end goal) is the pleasure enjoyed, not the harm. But the modern mind finds this protest somewhat naïve in the sense that sadism means that a certain kind of pleasure is only attainable in the harming. To use his own lingo, there may be an essential causation between the harm and pleasure.
11. The Canon Episcopi is probably a ninth century Frankish document (sometimes thought to originate in the fourth-century), and its short text on witches had become Canon Law by the time of the Malleus. It characterizes the more “psychological” theory that I’ve been sketching, and that Institoris was reacting against. Roughly speaking, witches are just very confused about their own powers and experiences (delusions), but this still makes them dangerous heretics because they tend to infect other innocents with their promises of Satanic power and that betrayal is still real (even if the magical powers are imaginary). The Canon Episcopi famously formulated the scenario of groups of women (hallucinating themselves to be) riding through the air for great distances.
12. Alchemy had been a positive part of Islamic scientia for centuries, but when the texts and ideas flowed into Europe (after the Moor expulsion) it came to be seen as a threatening alternative knowledge base (with infidel origins). Alchemy became associated with the black arts and heresy, but ironically many of the “research programs” of alchemy (e.g., the transformation of natural substances) became the foundations of later chemistry. Dominicans like Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, together with Franciscan Roger Bacon, originally tolerated alchemy, trying to submit its claims to rational criteria. But by the fourteenth-century alchemy was outlawed in many places. See Chapter One of Roslynn D. Haynes’ From Faust to Strangelove (Johns Hopkins University, 1994).
13. The idea that nature is filled with invisible seeds of transformation (rationes seminales) was very useful to theologians like Augustine, who used the concept whenever he needed to explain natural growth, development, or evolution in a monotheistic paradigm of “fiat creationism” that precluded such transformation. Ecclesiasticus 18:1 states that all things were created by God simultaneously (qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul), but Genesis gives us a staggered creation over time. Augustine’s idea of “germs” of forms existing within other forms helped to make consistent the unrolling of creation and the simultaneous miracle of creation. Institoris seems to be drawing on this tradition to help him explain demon “creative” power.
14. Institoris, in defense of his demonology, cites a gloss on Exodus 7 (when Pharao’s magicians also made serpents from staffs), which says, “When workers of harmful magic try to do something by chanting [the names] of evil spirits, they [the spirits] run off in different directions through the world, and in a very short time bring back the seeds of those things with which they stimulate this [process], and in this way, with God’s permission, produce new forms from these.”
15. Institoris points out that such demonic “alterations” of nature can never violate the ways of nature (e.g., bring a dead man to life), but only speed-up, slow-down, mix or otherwise mutate changes that could happen anyway (theoretically).
16. See Chapter 6, Part II.

Images:

1. Attributed as copy by the young Michelangelo after an engraving by Martin Schongauer around 1487-9, The Torment of Saint Anthony. Oil and tempera on panel. One of many artistic depictions of Saint Anthony's trials in the desert. Via Wikipedia

"The Eternal Vigil" New Illustrated Photo Book on the Palermo Catacombs: Guest Post by Bizzarro Bazar

Following is a guest post by the creators of the Bizzarro Bazar blog, who have a new heavily illustrated book just out on the Palermo Catacombs. You can find out more about the book--and order a copy of your own--by clicking here. Following is the guest post:

Over the years, the writers of Bizzarro Bazar have extensively delved into wunderkammern, anatomical museums and collections, sideshow and carnival history, antique and weird science, strange history, photography, classic and modern art, music, literature, but also anthropology, thanatology, psychology, sexuality, humor, and so on. Now we are thrilled to announce that the blog is landing in bookstores, and not with a single book but with an entire series: the Bizzarro Bazar Collection has been conceived by the publisher, Logos Edizioni, with the specific object of exploring Italy’s hidden wonders through a series of monographs, both in English and Italian.

“Wonders," “marvels:” even our occasional followers are aware by now that we're interested above all in the etymological meaning of the word, mirabilia, namely all the things that arouse astonishment and curiosity, but which often show some kind of disturbing element. In this sense, Italy is a huge wunderkammer, overflowing with astounding places and collections. Hoping to arouse reflection on Italy’s anthropological and cultural heritage, we are going to explore the unusual side of our peninsula, the least known and celebrated one – in search for awe and amazement.

A leading role in this journey will be played by Carlo Vannini’s photographs, an artist who deserves a few words. One of Italy's most renowned art photographers, Carlo has enthusiastically accepted to participate in this project, well aware that beauty does not only lie in classical proportions. His images do not simply embellish the book pages: they are the real focus of the series. Carlo has an unmatched ability to set the details in full light (and he uses light to paint his photographs), those details that our eyes can’t catch. His pictures are offered to the reader as a perfect visual guide.

The first volume of the series, entitled The Eternal Vigil, is dedicated to the world-famous Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo. Not a hidden and unknown place, for sure, but a necessary starting point to deal with Italy’s “alternative” wonders. The Capuchin Catacombs host the largest collection of spontaneous and artificial mummies in the world. The book traces the history of this unique place that has always fascinated poets and intellectuals and analyses its anthropological and thanatological relevance. It also explains the techniques and procedures through which the friars were able to perfectly preserve corpses.




In this volume, you will find: the history of the Catacombs, how they became an unequalled site in terms of the number of mummies it hosts; an exact description of the methods (thanatometamorphosis) used by the friars to preserve corpses; many bizarre anecdotes concerning how the people in Palermo related to death; the influence of the Catacombs on literature; a meticulous investigation of the anthropological context within which this place was created, and its ethical, religious and philosophical implications.




This book is the result of several months of hard work, and of the enthusiasm of all the professionals involved in its creation. To my knowledge, in all sincerity, Carlo Vannini’s photographs look absolutely unparalleled, and I believe such meaningful pictures of the Catacombs have never been taken throughout the whole history of this extraordinary cemetery.

Below is a booktrailer which will give you a better sense of the book. Again, you can find out more--and order a copy of your own--by clicking here.