text:
The Snowflake Man of Vermont

By Keith C. Heidorn
February 14, 2011

Keith C. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal.

In 1885, at the age of twenty, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley. Our belief that “no two snowflakes are alike” stems from a line in a 1925 report in which he remarked: “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.”
It started with a microscope his mother gave him at age fifteen which opened the world of the small to young Wilson. A lover of winter, he made plans to use his microscope to view snowflakes. His initial investigations proved both fascinating and frustrating as he tried to observe the short-lived flakes. So that he could share his discoveries, he began by sketching what he saw, accumulating several hundred sketches by his seventeenth birthday. When his father purchased a camera for his son, Wilson combined it with his microscope, and went on to make his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal on January 15, 1885.
In addition to the development of the hardware, Bentley also had to devise a protocol to capture a snow crystal and transport it with minimal damage to the camera’s field of vision. What he found worked best was to capture the crystals on a cool velvet-covered tray. Taking care not to melt the crystal with his breathe, he identified a suitable subject and lifted it onto a pre-cooled slide with a thin wood splint from his mother’s broom and nudged it into place with a turkey feather. The slide was then carried into his photographic shed and placed under the microscope. The back-lit image was focused using a system of strings and pulleys he devised to accommodate his mittened hands. Once focused, the sensitized glass plate — the “film” — was exposed and stored for further processing, development and printing.
Bentley also devised his own processing methods. In addition to developing the original image, he also created a post-development process to enhance it. Since each photograph was taken of a white snow crystal against a white background, Bentley was dissatisfied with the initial photograph. He felt he could improve the contrast and enhance the detail if he presented the crystal against a dark background. To do this, he painstakingly scraped away the dark emulsion surrounding the snow crystal image from a duplicate of the original negative using a sharp penknife and steady hand. The altered image was then carefully placed upon a clear glass plate and then printed, giving it a dark background. Even after years of practice, this post-production process often took as long as four hours for a complex snow crystal.
With 70-75 photographs per storm and notes on the conditions under which they were collected, Bentley accrued a considerable understanding of snow. In 1897, he became acquainted with Professor George Perkins, a professor of geology at the University of Vermont, and they prepared the first paper on snow crystals published in the May 1898 issue of Appleton’s Popular Scientific entitled “A Study of Snow Crystals.”
While photographing snowflakes was his passion, Bentley also turned his interest to examining and sizing raindrops for seven summers from 1898 to 1904. From that work, he gave us early insights into raindrops and their size distribution in storms. After some experimentation, he developed a simple yet effective apparatus for gathering raindrops: a shallow pan of wheat flour. At first, he simply photographed the imprints made by the falling rain in the flour. Then in 1898, he made a serendipitous finding. In his journal, he wrote: “In the bottom of each raindrop impression in the flour there could always be found a roundish granule of dough nearly exact size of raindrop. After experimenting with artificial raindrops I could measure [its] diameter before falling into the flour, and thus tell if the dough granule corresponded in size with the measured raindrop.”
Bentley measured these raindrop “fossils” and divided them into one of five size-range categories. Over the tenure of his raindrop studies, he collected 344 sets of raindrop pellets from over 70 distinct storms, including 25 thunderstorms, to which he added meticulous weather data about the storm: date, time of day, temperature, wind, cloud type and estimated cloud height. He concluded that different storms produce different size raindrops and different size distributions. Few rainfall events had uniform drop sizes, but when they did, he discovered, they were composed of either all small drops or all large drops. Low rain clouds produced mostly small drops. The largest drops, around a quarter inch in diameter, fell from the tall cumulonimbus clouds of thunderstorms. He concluded that the size of drops and snowflakes could tell a lot about the vertical structure of the storm.
Unfortunately, Bentley was so far ahead of his time that he wasn’t fully appreciated by contemporary scientists. They didn’t take this self-educated farmer seriously. It was forty years later — the study of cloud physics and precipitation processes would not blossom until the 1940s — before his raindrop work was rediscovered and corroborated. The first recognition of Bentley’s raindrop experiments appears to have been by US Soil Conservation Service scientists J. O. Laws and D. A. Parsons, who published a paper in 1943 reporting measurements of raindrop size under various rainfall intensities using Bentley’s collection method.
Although he dropped his study of raindrops after a few years, he continued to photograph snow crystal and speculate on the nature of snow. From his large data archive, Bentley’s analysis convinced him that the form the ice crystal took (hexagonal plate, six-sided star, hexagonal column, needle, etc.) was dependent on the air temperature in which the crystal formed and fell. Nearly three decades would pass before Ukichiro Nakaya in Japan would confirm this hypothesis.
He also wanted to promote his work for its beauty, and thus submitted articles and delivered lectures that focused on his snow photography over the years. His lectures were popular, and from them he was dubbed The Snowflake Man and Snowflake Bentley by the newspapers. Over one hundred articles were published in well-known newspapers and magazines such as The Christian Herald, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and the American Annual of Photography. His best photographs were in demand from jewellers, engravers and textile makers who saw the beauty in his work.
He also submitted technical reports to the US Weather Bureau’s publication Monthly Weather Review. Although he received scant recognition from most scientists, he did receive encouragement from Weather Bureau chief meteorologist Dr William J. Humphreys who helped him publish a collection of his photographs. Humphreys wrote the technical introduction and appeared as co-author. The book Snow Crystals by W. A. Bentley and W. J. Humphrey was published by McGraw-Hill in November 1931. It contained 2500 selected snow crystal photos plus 100 of frost and dew formation. The book has since been republished by Dover Books.
As a grown man, Bentley was slight of frame, likely just over five feet tall and weighing around 120 pounds, but could dig a row of potatoes or pitch hay as well as any farmer in the valley. He continued to farm the acreage with his older brother for all his life. Though not an outgoing man, he loved to entertain by playing the piano or violin and singing popular songs. He also played clarinet in a small brass band and could imitate the sounds of many animals. Bentley never married.
In early-December 1931, Wilson Bentley walked six miles, ill-dressed, through a slushy snowstorm to reach his home. Not long thereafter, he contracted a cold, which grew into pneumonia. “Snowflake” Bentley died on December 23 at the age of sixty-six. In March of that year, he had taken the last of his photomicrographs of snow, still using the same camera that took the first one.
Although his father thought Wilson’s snow photography a lot of nonsense and not the proper thing for a farmer to do, Wilson broke unique ground in the early days of modern meteorology as well as microscopic photography. His biographer, cloud physicist Duncan Blanchard, dubbed him “America’s First Cloud Physicist”. The Burlington Free Press wrote in a Christmas Eve obituary for Bentley:
Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.
On the morning he was laid to rest in the Jericho Center cemetery, it began to snow, leaving a dusting over the burial ground.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 14, 2011

author: Keith C. Heidorn


text:
Dog Stories from The Spectator

By Frank Key
September 5, 2011

Dogs who shop, bury frogs, and take 800-mile solo round trips by rail - writer and broadcaster Frank Key gives a brief tour of the strange and delightful Dog Stories from The Spectator.

Here is a puzzle:
[Feb. 2, 1895.] I venture to send you the following story I have lately heard from an eye-witness, and to ask whether you or any of your readers can throw any light upon the dog’s probable object. The dog in question was a Scotch terrier. He was one day observed to appear from a corner of the garden carrying in his mouth, very gently and tenderly, a live frog. He proceeded to lay the frog down upon a flower-bed, and at once began to dig a hole in the earth, keeping one eye upon the frog to see that it did not escape. If it went more than a few feet from him, he fetched it back, and then continued his work. Having dug the hole a certain depth, he then laid the frog, still alive, at the bottom of it, and promptly scratched the loose earth back into the hole, and friend froggy was buried alive! The dog then went off to the corner of the garden, and returned with another frog, which he treated in the same way. This occurred on more than one occasion; in fact, as often as he could find frogs he occupied himself in burying them alive. Now dogs generally have some reason for what they do. What can have been a dog’s reason for burying frogs alive? It does not appear that he ever dug them up again to provide himself with a meal. If, sir, you or any of your readers can throw any light on this curious, and for the frogs most uncomfortable, behaviour of my friend’s Scotch terrier, I should be very much obliged. — R. Acland-Troyte.
It appears in a curious volume entitled Dog Stories From The Spectator : Being Anecdotes Of The Intelligence, Reasoning Power, Affection And Sympathy Of Dogs, Selected From The Correspondence Columns Of The Spectator by J St Loe Strachey (1895). Strachey’s purpose, as given in his introduction, is to provide “no little entertainment for all who love dogs”, and in this he surely succeeds. Indeed, one may have no liking for dogs whatsoever, yet find many of these stories oddly compelling.
There are tales of syllogistic dogs, sermonising dogs, hospital dogs, parcel-carrying dogs, and purchasing dogs — that is, dogs which “understand the first principles of the science of exchange”. We learn of dogs with a sense of humour, dogs’ talent for friendship with hens, rabbits, and pigeons,  dogs that foretell death, and dogs that recognise themselves in the mirror. By the time we get to the end of the book we may agree with Strachey that “a single story of a clever dog may amuse, but . . . if we have half a dozen illustrating the same form of intelligence, the value of the evidence is enormously increased”.
An added pleasure of the book is, of course, its age. This was a time when the correspondence columns of a general interest magazine were filled with letters written in formal, elegant, crafted prose. The sense of a lost world of good manners and civility could not be better expressed than in Strachey’s apology, worth quoting in full:
Before I conclude this Introduction, I should like to address a word of apology to the correspondents of the Spectator whose letters form the present volume. Though the copyright of the letters belongs to the editors and proprietors of the Spectator I should have liked to ask the leave of the various writers before republishing their letters. Physical difficulties have, however rendered this impossible. In the case of nearly half the letters the names and addresses have not been preserved. In many instances, again, only the names remain. Lastly, a large number of the letters are ten or twelve, or even twenty years old, and the writers may therefore be dead or out of England. Under these circumstances I have not made any effort to enter into communication with the writers before including their letters in this book. That their permission would have been given, had it been asked, I do not doubt. The original communication of the letters to the Spectator is proof that the writers wished a public use to be made of the anecdotes they relate. As long, then, as the letters are not altered or edited, but produced verbatim, I may, I think, feel assured that I am doing nothing which is even remotely discourteous to the writers.
As for that Scotch terrier fond of burying frogs, Frances Power Cobbe suggested an explanation a week later:
[Feb. 9, 1895.] I think I can explain the puzzle of the Scotch terrier and his interment of the frogs, for the satisfaction of your correspondent. A friend of mine had once a retriever who was stung by a bee, and ever afterwards, when the dog found a bee near the ground, she stamped on it, and then scraped earth over it and buried it effectually -presumably to put an end to the danger of further stings. In like manner, another dog having bitten a toad, showed every sign of having found the mouthful to the last degree unpleasant. Probably Mr. Acland-Troyte’s dog had, in the same way, bitten a toad, and conceived henceforth that he rendered public service by putting every toad-like creature he saw carefully and gingerly “out of harm’s way,” underground.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 5, 2011

author: Frank Ke

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Beatus of Liébana

By John Williams
April 18, 2011

In a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, 700 years after the Book of Revelations was written, a monk set down to illustrate a collection of writings he had compiled about this most vivid and apocalyptic of the New Testament books. Throughout the next few centuries his depictions of multi-headed beasts, decapitated sinners, and trumpet blowing angels, would be copied over and over again in various versions of the manuscript. John Williams, author of The Illustrated Beatus, introduces Beatus of Liébana and his Commentary on the Apocalypse.

Towards the end of the eighth century Beatus, a monk in the monastery of San Martin de Turieno, near present day Santander, compiled a Commentary on the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, from the writings dedicated to the topic by such patristic authors as Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose and Irenaeus. Recognition of Beatus of Liébana has survived to our time thanks to his decision to illustrate the sixty-eight sections into which he divided the text of the Book of Revelation. It was a decision that could not easily have been anticipated, for it is not at all clear that Beatus had ever seen an illustrated book, and it is almost certain these illustrations were invented by him or an assistant. The pictures would remain integral to the many — some twenty-six — copies of the Commentary that have survived.
Some have assumed that Beatus’s great work was linked to his campaign against “Adoptionism,” the heretical position on the nature of the Godhead espoused by the bishop of Toledo, but it antedated that campaign. More commonly the book has been linked to the fact that Christian Spain had been conquered and occupied by Muslims. Perhaps some monks, who expected to adopt an allegorical mode for much that they read, identified the assailants of the righteous in the Book of Revelation with their Andalusian neighbors, but the texts harvested by Beatus were all written before Muhammad’s time and can not explicitly target Islam. In fact, the few passages that can be attributed to Beatus himself, make it clear that he chose the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible and the one that prophesies the future, because of the common belief that the world would end in A.D. 800 and usher in the Last Judgment. The fact that most copies date after the tenth century, when millennial expectations might have been revived, shows that the tradition had a life of its own. The illustrations must have played a major role in survival of the tradition.
The Apocalypse dramatically exposes the future as a contest between the people of God and a triumphant Godhead and the Anti-Christ and his minions, often in the guise of fantastic beasts. Lacking any copy from before the tenth century, we cannot be sure of the appearance of Beatus’s original illustrations, but those in copies of the tenth century employ a dramatic and colorful style eminently suited to the visions offered by John in the Apocalypse.  From the copies that preserve the version of the text closest to the original, we know the pictorial format chosen by Beatus placed the figures directly on the vellum within one of the two columns of text.
This format was radically revised in the middle of the tenth century by the scribe and painter Maius in the monastery of San Salvador de Tábara in the southern part of the kingdom of León, as first witnessed in the Commentary in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Inspired by the manner in which biblical subjects were illustrated at the French monastery of Saint-Martin de Tours, Maius enlarged the pictures, sometimes spreading them in an inventive way across two facing pages. With the addition of frames the backgrounds were painted, often — and again Touronian painting was influential — in horizontal bands of contrasting colors. No one would mistake this polychromatic expressionistic style for the classicizing style of Tours, nor can it be traced, as is sometimes assumed, to the influence of the art of Andalusia. In the succeeding centuries, however, native style would give way to successive phases of pictorial language invented north of the Pyrenees. The last illustrated copy surviving dates to the middle of the thirteenth century, a time that coincides with the decline of monastic culture.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: John Williams


text:
Labillardière and his Relation

By Edward Duyker
August 15, 2011

When the French explorer Lapérouse went missing, a search voyage was put together to retrace his course around the islands of Australasia. On the mission was the naturalist Jacques Labillardière who published a book in 1800 of his experiences. Edward Duyker, author of Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), explores the impact of his pioneering work.

Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière’s Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse (1800) is a personal account of an attempt to solve a mystery which began in March 1788. After a five week sojourn–following up on James Cook’s discoveries, investigating reports of a new British colony and undertaking scientific work — the French explorer Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse sailed out of Botany Bay, New South Wales, and was never seen again by Europeans. His disappearance was a matter of great national concern in France. Just before mounting the scaffold of the guillotine, Louis XVI is said to have asked: ‘Is there any news of M. de Lapérouse?’. In 1791, when the French National Assembly decided to send a rescue expedition, probably the first humanitarian mission on a global scale in world history, Admiral Antoine Raymond Joseph Bruny d’Entrecasteaux was chosen as the commander of its two ships: Recherche and Esperance (‘Search’ and ‘Hope’).
We know now that Lapérouse’s expedition was wrecked off Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. Although d’Entrecasteaux sailed very close to Vanikoro, he failed to discover the fate of Lapérouse and ultimately perished during the voyage. Nevertheless, his expedition made a number of significant geographical discoveries. In Tasmania these discoveries included Recherche Bay, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel (between the mainland and Bruny Island) and the estuaries of the Huon and Derwent Rivers. In Western Australia, d’Entrecasteaux discovered Esperance Bay and surveyed the Archipelago of the Recherche. He also discovered islands in the d’Entrecasteaux group off New Guinea and named and surveyed the Huon Peninsula. Furthermore, his expedition was of considerable significance in the history of geophysics, for it returned with the first survey of global magnetic intensity, proving that it strengthens away from the equator to both north and south.
D’Entrecasteaux’s voyage also yielded significant natural history collections and ethnographic observationsincluding some of the earliest recorded observations of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. The most valuable contributions in these areas was made by the naturalist Labillardière. His Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouseone of the classic works of French travel literaturepublished by the printer and bookseller H.-J. Jansen in the rue des Maçons, was accompanied by an atlas of impressive engravings based on sketches of scenes by Jean Piron, but also of plants by the great Pierre-Joseph Redouté and of birds by Jean-Baptiste Audebert. Labillardière’s Relation proved to be an international best seller. There were several French editions and in 1817 the Atlas was reprinted. Four English editions quickly appeared between 1800 and 1802, and German editions were published in Hamburg (1801) and Vienna (1804). Through his authorship of the Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, Labillardière helped to usher the southern continent into the European imagination and may even have helped precipitate British pre-emptive settlement of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).
Labillardière would also produce what in practical terms was the first published flora of Australia: the magnificent two-volume Novae Hollandiae plantarum specimen (1804–06) containing 265 copperplate engravings. Labillardière has the distinction of having named the floral emblems of Tasmania (Eucalyptus globulus) and Victoria (Epacris impressa), as well as the genus Anigozanthus to which the floral emblem of Western Australia belongs. Later he published the first flora of New Caledonia, Sertum austro-caledonicum (1824—1825), which unlike his earlier works was not organized on Linnean lines.
Born in Alençon, Normandy, in 1755, Labillardière was the son of a lace merchant. After studies at Alençon’s Collège Royale, he studied botany and medicine at Montpellier under Antoine Gouan (a correspondent of Linnaeus), Reims and then in Paris where he came under the influence of Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier, Professor of Botany at the Jardin du Roi. He visited England in 1783 and met Sir Joseph Banks. On his return to France, Labilllardière travelled in the Alps with Dominique Villars and later Carlo Antonio Bellardi.  In 1787—8, with the assistance of Le Monnier and Foreign Minister Vergennes, he collected in Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria—travels which provided the foundations for his important early work on the botany of the Near East: Icones plantarum Syriae rariorum (1791—1812). He was selected to join d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition in 1791. Labillardière was a supporter of the French Revolution and was known for his difficult temperament. After the disintegration of the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, on royalist and republican lines in the Dutch East Indies, he suffered the indignity of internment and having his natural history specimens confiscated. Fortunately for posterity, these precious collections were returned through the gracious intervention of Sir Joseph Banks.
Although the Relation hints at sympathy for the ‘transmutationist’ ideas of Lamarck, Labillardière did not develop any evolutionary notions based on his field research. Nevertheless, his books and articles had considerable taxonomic, systematic, biogeographic and morphological significance, and it was upon such foundations that later evolutionary ecology was built. In an age when the discovery of new species and genera was often seen as the apogee of botanical pursuit, Labillardière was accorded ample kudos. Even today, some fifty of the plant genera he established survive. However, in his Relation and in a number of scientific papers, Labillardière ventured beyond a mere cataloguing of nature. He had a strong interest in applied botany and his writings contain numerous observations on subjects such as timber, plant fibres, food crops and herbal pharmacology. They also include studies of significant aspects of animal behaviour and physiology. And aside from his commercial-military strategic perceptions — such as the advantages offered by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel for a trading maritime power, or the value of cultivating New Zealand flax for naval cordage — Labillardière’s applied observations often had enduring ethnological significance. Furthermore, as an ethnographer he attempted to apply empirical methods to record the customs and social structures of indigenous communities he encountered in Australia and the Pacific. Arguably his vocabularies of native languages, as keys to cultural understanding, also beg comparison with his systematic botanical descriptions, representing as they do a necessary ordering of the natural world on the threshold of modern ecological and evolutionary understanding.
In the wake of Napoleon’s victories in Italy, Labillardière was appointed a special commissioner by the French government and to his discredit was involved in the plunder of Italian museums and libraries for France. In 1799 he married Marthe Goudes Desfriches, the twice-widowed daughter of a military surgeon, but they had no surviving children. He was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1800. Labillardière died in Paris on 9 January 1834 and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The English botanist Sir James Edward Smith named the genus Billardiera in his honour.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Edward Duyker


text:
Tales from Tahiti

By Ray Davis
February 8, 2011

In 1890, Henry Adams - the historian, academic, journalist, and descendent of two US presidents - set out on a tour of the South Pacific. After befriending the family of "the last Queen of Tahiti," he became inspired to write what is considered to be the first history of the island. Through Adams' letters, Ray Davis explores the story of the book's creation.

The book variously titled in its two small self-published editions Tahiti, Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, or Memoirs of Arii Taimai was a collaboration between the American historian Henry Adams and two Queens of Tahiti: Arii Taimai (positioned as the first-person narrator of the work) and her daughter, Marau Taaroa.
After his wife’s suicide in December 1885, Adams lost himself in the massive job of finishing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. After it was done, he came close to losing himself in nothing at all. In 1890, he set out with a friend, the fashionable painter John La Farge, for an indefinite voyage into the Pacific. His purported list of goals included tracking down and sampling the legendary durian fruit, following his friend Clarence King’s example and falling madly in lust with exotic native girls, and attaining Enlightenment.
Predictably, all these pseudo-hopes were frustrated: the durian was a “shameful disgrace to humanity” (although the mango and mangosteen comforted), and intellectual bemusement ran stronger than either bodily or spiritual lust. But the unspoken purpose -- to somehow re-learn survival -- was gained: Adams started the trip in an almost catatonic depression and ended it sparkling with bitches and moans in high pissant form.
During the travellers’ five months in Tahiti, Adams grew bored with passive tourism:
Lovely as it is, it gets on my nerves at last -- this eternal charm of middle-aged melancholy. If I could only paint it, or express it in poetry or prose, or do anything with it, or even shake it out of its exasperating repose, the feeling would be a pleasant one, and I should fall in love with the very wrinkles of my venerable and spiritual Taïtian grandmother; but when one has nothing else to look at, one rebels at being forever smiled upon by a grandmother whose complexion is absolutely divine, and whose attitude indicates the highest breeding, while she suggests no end of charm of conversation, yet refuses to do anything but smile in a sort of sad way that may mean much or mean nothing. Either she or I come near to being a fool.
After searching the coral reef for confirmation or refutation of Darwin, he became close friends with the family of “the last Queen of Tahiti,” Marau Taaroa:
... she is greatly interested in Taïti history, poetry, legends and traditions, and as for ghost-stories, she tells them by the hour with evident belief.... She always seems to me to be quite capable of doing anything strange, out of abstraction; as she might mistake me for her small child, and sling me on her arm without noticing the difference, such as it is, in size.
... and especially attached to Arii Tamai, described in an early letter as “the hereditary chiefess of the Tevas, the grandest dame in Tahiti, the widow of Salmon, the London Jew.” (The psychologically speculative might wonder whether Adams was attracted by the contrast between her warm-heartedness and the frankly cold aggression of his own family of faded nation-rulers.) On May 10, 1891, he wrote:
By way of excitement or something to talk about, I some time ago told old Marau that she ought to write memoirs, and if she would narrate her life to me, I would take notes and write it out, chapter by chapter. To our surprise, she took up the idea seriously, and we are to begin work today, assisted by the old chiefess mother, who will have to start us from Captain Cook’s time.
And a week later:
Luckily I am rather amused and occupied. My “Memoirs of Marau, Queen of Tahiti” give me a sort of excuse for doing nothing. Whenever Marau comes to town, I get from her a lot of notes, which I understand very little, and she not much; then I write them out; then find they are all wrong; then dispute with her till she becomes energetic and goes as far as the next room to ask her mother. The dear old lady has been quite unwell. The other evening I was taken in to see her, and found her sitting on her mat on an inner verandah. When I sat down beside her, she drew me to her and kissed me so affectionately that the tears stood in my eyes.... La Farge is not in love with her as I am; he takes more to Marau and the girls; but I think the Hinarii is worth them all.
At the beginning of June:
Marau is to go on with her memoirs, and send them to Washington. So she says, with her ferocious air of determination, half Tahitian and half Hebrew; and if she keeps her word, I shall have a little occupation which will amuse you too, for I have begged her to put in all the scandal she can, and the devil knows that she can put in plenty.
And on leaving Tahiti a few days later:
... we had a gay breakfast; but I cared much less for the gaiety than I did for the parting with the dear old lady, who kissed me on both cheeks -- after all, she is barely seventy, va! -- and made us a little speech, with such dignity and feeling, that though it was in native, and I did not understand a word of it, I quite broke down. I shall never see her again, but I have learned from her what the archaic woman was. If Marau only completes the memoirs, you will see; and I left Marau dead bent on doing it.
The work did continue after Adams’s return to America — part of a letter from December 1892 survives in which Adams presses Marau at scholarly length on dozens of points of genealogy and geography — finally achieving what would be its final form in a privately printed edition of 1901. It’s a decidedly odd form, certainly not the personal memoirs originally described: Marau shows up not at all, and the supposed narrator has turned into Arii Tamai. The mix of scholarly history, ethnographic reportage, and primary source material hasn’t been worked into a organic voice or structure.
Given this, the book perhaps wouldn’t make the best introduction to Henry Adams. But as the first history of Tahiti, written with the full support of the family at the center of the island’s annexation as a French colony, and as an attempt to give full attention to both sides of the confrontation between “civilized” and “primitive” cultures, it deserves wider access than it’s attained to date.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 8, 2011

author: Ray Davis


text:
American Kaleidoscope
Morton Prince and the Boston Revolution in Psychotherapy
By George Prochnik
August 5, 2011

In 1906 the American physician and neurologist Morton Henry Prince published his remarkable monograph The Dissociation of a Personality in which he details the condition of 'Sally Beauchamp', America's first famous multiple-personality case. George Prochnik discusses the life and thought of the man Freud called "an unimaginable ass".

1.
Morton Prince—physically hale, philosophically heterodox, ethically uncompromising, psychologically splintered—epitomizes a classic New England character at its sunset hour. Indeed, Prince’s fiery conviction that he could make all his contradictory elements hang together makes his own psychology as fascinating as that of the patients and politicians he scrutinizes. And even when he fumbles in making a grand diagnosis of the foibles of others, it sometimes seems that it’s precisely Prince’s lack of a compelling master-theory that makes his work such a rich repository of individual observations. Until Freud and the rearrangement of values occasioned by the Great War soured his spirit, Prince sustained a note of plucky anarchy in his approach to almost all social problems. In a typical instance of this happily contrarian strain to Prince’s thoughts, he once responded to a suggestion by Upton Sinclair that intercollegiate football be abolished as a “killer of thought” by announcing that what should be abolished was rather the professional coach, whose last duty before surrendering his office should be “handing the game back to the boys.”
Less felicitous was Prince’s combative sense of near infallibility as a judge of what was wrong with everyone else—the quality his famous patient Miss Beauchamp once described as Prince’s tendency to be “so awfully wrathy and superior.” Prince fought back against the era’s double threat of moony spiritualists and zealous psychoanalysts on the grounds of his adversaries’ refusal to rationally engage with evidence that challenged their axiomatic beliefs. But confronted with the intractability of those who could not see the virtues of his own high-minded middle way, Prince tended to swerve over into untempered opposition that partook of the same absolutism he condemned in others. When Freud’s disciple Ernst Jones objected to his pugnaciousness, Prince dismissed Jones outright—not for his ideology but for the wimpiness of his come-back punch. “Can you imagine John Brown, Luther, Calvin . . . whimpering ‘like a girl’ because their opponents hit them back or because they would not believe?” he railed to a colleague. Even at his more offensive moments, the vigor of his high dudgeon makes for lively reading.
2.
Prince’s lifelong focus lay in charting the relationship between body and mind. He never forgot an experience he’d had in church as a child when the preacher abruptly pointed above the congregation’s head to a chandelier swaying in the breeze and remarked that the human body was affected by the spirit exactly as those dangling crystals were by the wind. The puzzle of what, precisely, this correlation meant haunted Prince’s professional life. He strove to show that there was, at the last, no opposition between mental function and bodily mechanics because there was no integral distinction between the two. But the question of what this seamless contiguity implied for ultimate questions of human nature was a matter on which he waffled with uninspired ambivalence.
For the first part of his career, Prince sought to minimize the element of spirit altogether by advocating a purely materialist vision of mental dynamics. Thought and emotion did not act to influence the operations of the brain; they were the substance of those operations.  In the 1880s and 1890s, Prince contributed to the evolution of a sophisticated behaviorist theory of mental health that anticipated many aspects of cognitive therapy. He argued that neuroses developed through the often random associations between negative experiences and phenomena surrounding such experiences. These associations were then fixed through repetition and habit; but could be unraveled in treatment through aggressive “conditioning,” both physical and ideational, which eventually reconfigured corrosive behavioral patterns.

As was often the case with Prince, key theoretical positions were born of personal experience. Prince’s entire family suffered from a thunder phobia that led them to flee inside closets, dive beneath beds and rush into each other’s shivering arms to hide from storms. Prince finally conquered the syndrome by forcing himself to remain outside in the most violent thunder fusillades until his angst about the warring heavens was quashed.
Regardless of his motivations, by placing so strong an emphasis on the role of learned habits of association in the development of symptoms, Prince helped undermine the position of social conservatives who condemned whole families, neighborhoods and populations on the basis of hereditary degeneration. Concurrently, he bolstered the case for the work of New England’s large network of progressive civic reformers, in which he himself played a passionate role. Indeed, Prince’s understanding of the complex web of motives that converged in the behavior of individuals and states led to his championing numerous issues of social justice in national and international arenas. Prince attacked the Sacco-Vanzetti verdict as a gross, cynical manipulation of the jury’s ignorance about the working of perception and memory. He fought for the League of Nations as an essential counterbalance to monolithic, megalomaniacal state enterprise of any stamp.
By the turn-of-the-century, Prince stood at the forefront of a cadre of Boston psychotherapists whose open minds, erudition and dogged clinical labors had upended previous American understandings of how the mind worked. Building on scaffolding erected by such pivotal French psychologists as Jean Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet, Prince linked neuroses to extreme “dissociations” between mental states that resulted in a kind of psychological deadlock. This deadlock manifested in rigid behaviors that failed to respond to external reality’s flux and flow. To reintegrate the self, Prince collaborated with his fellow New Englanders in developing a surprisingly sophisticated proto-Freudian version of talk therapy. Like others in his circle, he was also a talented hypnotist who translated a subtle understanding of the power of suggestion into effective clinical practice. Together with colleagues like James Jackson Putnam, Prince began to outline a new, holistic approach to the challenge of psychological treatment that took elements of older, so-called “somatic” treatments like hydrotherapy and electric therapy and melded these onto language-based probings of patients’ psychological conditions.
There were still some wild and woolly edges of his methodology to be sure. In The Dissociation of Personality, Prince’s best-selling, hugely influential account of America’s first famous multiple-personality case, he describes a (literally) climactic moment of treatment that qualifies as not just surprising, but jaw-dropping. In order to fully exorcise the sassy alternative personality nicknamed “Sally” who had been tormenting his patient, Prince began applying an established technique whereby he put pressure on a “hypno-genetic point” over the patient’s spine. “With a strength that I did not think she possessed,” Prince records, “she fought, wrestled, struggled to throw off my grasp, and to resist the subtle power. The rush of physical sensations through her body, and the mental feeling that her consciousness was being engulfed in oblivion were more than she could bear. In mental anguish she shouted aloud. Thus for two hours we struggled.”
Two hours? Try to picture this insane, erotic wrestling match in a prim Boston medical office between a righteous, jaunty medical luminary then in his mid-fifties and a withdrawn college-age young woman of humble origins. Rather than the brush of Prince's actual portraitist John Singer Sargent, one longs for the hand of Francis Bacon to do the duel justice.
There’s something symptomatic of Prince's deeper conundrum in this ethically chaotic moment of full-throttle body-mind therapy.  For all his intermittent clinical acumen, the unbending value systems Prince and his fellow Boston doctors inherited from their forbearers ultimately hindered them from orienting their practice effectively toward modernity. Prince had seen through the past, but when he looked into the future, he felt so revolted by what he saw that he tended to violently swerve his gaze backward again. Thus, in works like The Psychology of the Kaiser and The Creed of Deutschtum, Prince revealed himself to be enormously prescient about the dangers of German militarism and the militaristic state of mind as such. In the former study he described militarism under the Kaiser as “something much more than a system of defense against encroachments from within and without—it is a mode of, and organization for, attack in the enforcement of progressive policies, of national growth, and of the will of the State, whatever direction these may take.” Yet in trying to fashion an argument for American interventionism against these kinds of threats in the international arenas Prince fell back on a jingoistic sense of his home country’s historic moral clarity. And in attempting to explain why America had so far failed to respond to the German invasion of Belgium in 1915, he could only surmise that as “a polyglot nation speaking many tongues” his country had lost “the homogeneity of a single race” that had hitherto enabled the maintenance of a national conscience.
3.
In 1908 Sigmund Freud received an invitation from the president of Clark University to come to the United States and lecture on psychoanalysis at the school’s 20th anniversary celebration, scheduled for July. With his theories failing to gain traction among professional circles at home, and the psychoanalytic movement itself already fissured by nasty spats, one might have expected Freud to seize this opportunity to export analysis to the New World. However, Freud politely declined the offer, citing in his refusal letter the economic hardship of preempting the seasonal loss of income that would descend with Vienna's summer hiatus. In private, however, he gave another explanation. To his disciple, Karl Abrams, who’d recently had a paper concerned with the psychology of sexuality rejected by The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, (the periodical Prince had founded and continued to edit), Freud remarked, “Morton Prince, who has always been a kaleidoscopic character, is this time really lamentable. Where do the Americans expect to get with this fear of public prudery?” Writing to Jung a few days later, he elaborated on his apprehensions, noting his belief that “once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great. That is why I’ve no desire to risk the trip there in July.”
Freud almost didn’t come to the United States at all because of his virulent distaste for a host of American bugbears that seemed to dovetail in the person of Morton Prince, whom Freud would soon be calling “the most arrogant ass imaginable.” Indeed Prince— a champion yachtsman, a talented horseman, a member of many jolly social clubs and an all-around emblem of sporty Yankee self-reliance fit the model of the privileged WASP that made Freud most self-conscious about his own ancestral stereotypes.
But for all of Freud’s understandable apprehensions about Prince having a constitutional aversion to psychoanalytic theory, (“the gentle zephyrs of prudery blowing across from America” were ones for which Prince had “a quite special organ” Freud told Jung), he failed to take the measure of the man himself. Not only was Prince not a prude, he confessed in later years that with some patients he’d even pushed too hard to find a sexual etiology to their symptoms where none actually existed. Indeed, after exposure to Freud’s work, Prince’s practice continued to reflect many aspects of Freudian theory. Most of all, Freud misjudged in assessing that Prince was a threat to Freud, rather than the other way around. As Prince wrote looking back on the era of Freud’s arrival in America, “Freudian psychology . . . flooded the field like a full-rising tide, and the rest of us were left submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water.”
Rather than the importance of sexuality to human’s psychological make-up, what Prince challenged was the dogmatism with which Freud's axioms were propounded—the insistence that all neurotic symptoms were rooted in sex.  (To name but one exception important to Prince, he contended that the convolutions of pride and shame could also distort mental health.) Prince summed up his objection to Freud in a response to an attack by Jones recorded in the 1911 Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “it sometimes seem as if the followers of Freud care more for the acceptance of their method—for being baptized in the faith, than for the determination of truth.” For himself, he says, in the spirit of his one-time mentor, William James, “I don’t care a button what method is employed in the investigation of any given problem, provided it does not lead to fallacies in the results.”
It was this mobility of ideological allegiance that got the goat of the Freudians and stoked their hostility to him. Yet given its latter-day history, Prince’s balanced agnosticism about analysis appears only too justified. Now that the Freudian tide has receded, it is Prince's early support for cognitive therapy that appears remarkably forward looking, while Freud's opus—rightly or wrongly—has been largely side-channeled into cultural studies programs of the academy.
We have much to learn from re-examining figures like Prince who occupy a pivotal position in early 20th Century psychological debates, before the dogmatism of Freud's disciples crowded out elements that might have fostered a more fruitfully heterogeneous approach to psychotherapy. Reading their copious writings, we catch glimpses of multiple intriguing alternative histories—and, perhaps, come to question the orthodoxies of our own time.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 5, 2011

author: George Prochnik


text:
Geronimo
The Warrior
By Edward Rielly
August 29, 2011

In 1906, Geronimo published his autobiography recounting the fascinating story of his life, from his years as a resistance fighter, to his capture and subsequent period of celebrity in which he appeared at the 1904 St Louis World Fair and met President Roosevelt. Edward Rielly, author of Legends of American Indian Resistance, tells of the tragic massacre which underpinned his life.

Geronimo (1829-1909), whose given name was Goyahkla, sometimes spelled Goyathlay, is one of the most famous figures in the history of the American Indian resistance effort. His name is virtually synonymous with that of a warrior, so much so that his name has been appropriated for a wide range of military (or simply adventuresome) endeavors. Geronimo’s reputation is well deserved, for his very name excited fear in settlers both north and south of the U.S-Mexican border. He was hated by Euro-Americans and even by some Apaches, who blamed him for continuing to stoke the fires of warfare after ultimate defeat of the Apaches seemed inevitable. In addition, he lacked the social and political leadership skills of a Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the multidimensional qualities (including the spiritual character) of a Sitting Bull, the great Lakota leader who served as the magnet attracting huge numbers of Plains Indians to him, a force that would secure the most famous resistance victory ever against the U.S. military — at Little Bighorn in 1876.
Geronimo was primarily a fighter, a lasting reputation that led American paratroopers in World War II to call out the name “Geronimo” before plunging from their planes. Schoolchildren, for decades after Geronimo’s death, would similarly yell his name before undertaking a real or imagined feat of bravery, such as leaping from a swing into a river. A much more recent, and highly controversial, use of Geronimo’s name was its employment by the U.S. military as a code name linked to the 2011 operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
The association of Geronimo’s name with that of the hated terrorist elicited considerable resentment by a wide range of organizations and individuals, including the National Congress of American Indians, the Onondaga National Council of chiefs, Native American publications, Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser, and Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo. Their response was so intense that the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs took up the issue at a hearing previously scheduled to discuss use of Indian names and images as sports mascots and in other areas of popular culture. Defense Department officials argued that they had intended no disrespect to Geronimo and had named the total operation against bin Laden Operation Neptune Spear, further naming each step alphabetically. The “G” step involved the capture or killing of bin Laden and was coded with the Indian leader’s name, an explanation that did not do much to satisfy those who had raised objections to the use of Geronimo’s name.
So what led Geronimo onto the path that would lead from the battlefields of Mexico and the Southwest to a raid into Pakistan? Although it would be serious oversimplification to reduce all of Geronimo’s public life to one incident, certainly his life as a warrior was deeply influenced by a very personal event — an attack on an Apache camp by a Mexican general, José María Carrasco.
For years, Apaches had been both trading with and fighting Mexicans. As soon as he reached adulthood, at about the age of seventeen, Goyahkla, who was not yet known as Geronimo, was accepted as a warrior and entered into this dual relationship with Mexicans. About two years earlier, around 1844, Goyahkla’s father, Taklishim, had died of an illness, and Goyahkla assumed responsibility for his mother, Juana (Juanita). Geronimo’s autobiography — dictated to Stephen M. Barrett, superintendent of schools in Lawton, Oklahoma, with Asa Adklugie, a former student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, translating, and published in 1906 — shows a son deeply committed to his mother.
Shortly after becoming a warrior, Goyahkla married a young Nednai Apache, Alope, giving a herd of ponies — a substantial sum — to her father, Noposo, for the privilege of wedding her, the price, according to his autobiography, set so high because she was a good daughter and her father perhaps wanted to keep her with him. Goyahkla and Alope had been lovers for some time, and he records in the autobiography that his greatest joy upon arriving at adulthood was that he could marry her. Goyahkla took Alope to live near his mother. His bride decorated their tipi with beads and pictures drawn on buckskin. She was a good wife, he notes, and they were happy together with their three children.
When Goyahkla crossed into Mexico again around 1850 (Geronimo in his autobiography cites 1858 but is often off in his dating), he had no reason to suspect anything out of the usual. Traveling in a large group under Mangas Coloradas, the Apaches — including members of the Bedonkohe band to which Goyahkla belonged and the Nednai band, both subdivisions of the Chiricahua Apaches — passed through Sonora on their way to Casas Grandes. They camped at what is generally believed to be Janos (but referred to as Kaskiyeh in the autobiography), and many of the men went into town to trade. This went on for several days, each time a guard of men staying behind to protect the women, children, and supplies.
One afternoon, however, as the men were returning to camp, they met some women and children fleeing from Mexican troops who had attacked the camp, killing the guards as well as many of the women and children, destroying supplies, and stealing the Apaches’ ponies. When Goyahkla reached the camp, he discovered his wife, mother, and three children all dead. He tells in his autobiography of going off by himself and standing by a river. Geronimo, so many years after the event, does not say what he was feeling at that river, but his understated description clearly speaks powerfully to a great grief and sense of loss.
Without supplies and with most of their weapons and ponies lost, the survivors turned back toward Arizona. The elderly Geronimo recalls how he was unable to pray or devise any plan of action at the moment — devoid of purpose, he followed his comrades silently, staying by himself just within hearing of the now much smaller group.
Arriving at his home, Goyahkla gazed, certainly with great sorrow, at Alope’s decorations and their children’s toy before burning them, along with his tipi and his mother’s. Never again, Geronimo notes in his autobiography, would he feel content in his own home. Then, turning from his immediate grief, he vowed revenge on the Mexicans. A year later, Goyahkla returned to Mexico within a large war party and began to exact that revenge. It reportedly was during this excursion into Mexico that his enemies began calling him Geronimo, although no definitive explanation for the naming has ever been given. The name stuck, and Geronimo would continue his battles against Mexicans and, before long, settlers and soldiers of the United States who invaded his homeland, earning the warrior’s reputation that would stay with him throughout his life and into the twenty-first century, even into places that Geronimo could never have imagined, such as Pakistan.
At first glance, Geronimo seems an unlikely candidate to compose his life story and be willing to share it with those whom he had been fighting for most of his adult life. There is a great desire, however, in many people, perhaps in most, to want to set the record straight and be understood and Geronimo seems to have been no different in this regard. He also expressed his hope that his story might persuade the government to allow him and other Apaches to return to their native Southwest to live. In addition, Geronimo saw his autobiography as a way to make money; during his late years as a prisoner, he had learned the power of money and had taken to selling photographs, buttons, and other souvenirs. Consequently, when Barrett raised the possibility of telling his story, Geronimo insisted that he be paid for doing so. Geronimo’s occasional suspicions that Superintendent Barrett may have wanted his story in order to do him harm were softened by the presence of translator Asa Adklugie, who was a son of Juh (also spelled Whoa), a longtime Geronimo friend, ally, and cousin by marriage.  Fully aware that he was hated by many and at the mercy of the government, Geronimo was politically astute as he narrated his exploits, focusing in detail on his battles with Mexicans but remaining generally reticent concerning encounters with the U.S. military.
Still, the autobiography probably would never have been published without the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. Barrett’s request to write Geronimo’s life was rejected by the military, but an appeal to the president brought the desired permission. Responding later to the complete manuscript, President Roosevelt again offered his support but with the suggestion that Barrett clarify that opinions expressed in the book were Geronimo’s alone.  Roosevelt was not hard to convince. Prior to Barrett¹s request, Roosevelt had himself made a request that Geronimo ride in his inaugural parade in March 1905, which the Apache leader did. Before leaving Washington, Geronimo met with the president and made a plea to be permitted to return to his homeland.  Roosevelt listened compassionately but refused, explaining that he feared reprisals against the Apaches by area residents if they returned. When the autobiography was published in 1906, Geronimo, still trying, and apparently believing that the president might relent, dedicated his narrative to President Roosevelt.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Edward Riell


text:
Stories of a Hollow Earth

By Peter Fitting
October 10, 2011

In 1741 the Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg published Klimii Iter Subterraneum, a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel detailing the adventures of its hero Niels Klim in a utopian society existing beneath the surface of the earth. Peter Fitting, author of Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, explores Holberg's book in the wider context of the hollow earth theory.

In 1818 John Cleves Symmes, Jr, issued his “Circular Number 1,” sending copies to “each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislature, city, college, and philosophical society, quite around the earth”:
I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.
The fortunes of the idea that the Earth was “hollow and habitable within,” from classical references to the underworld to esoteric and New Age writers today, have been recounted elsewhere, most notably by Walter Kafton-Minkel in his Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the earth (1989). Symmes’s theories led to a number of fictional visions of the “world within”, most immediately, Adam Seaborn’s 1820 novel Symzonia — a work which has often been attributed to Symmes himself; and the novel with its diagrams and drawings was for some time cited as evidence that the world is hollow. In a somewhat different way, Symmes’s conviction that there were openings at the poles also led to the establishment of perhaps the most famous American naval scientific expedition, the “United States Exploring Expedition” which was commissioned to explore the South Pacific and led to the establishment of a national museum of natural history — the Smithsonian Institute. (The history of the expedition and its origins in Symmes’ ideas is recounted in William Stanton’s 1975 The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842).
Symmes, however, was not the first to argue that the Earth was hollow; nor is Symzonia the first novel set in a hollow earth. There are of course numerous narratives — dating back to Greek and Roman texts — of descents into the underworld, but hypotheses about vast channels or chasms inside the Earth appear to be a much more recent idea advanced by some European thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries as an explanation of volcanoes, whirlpools and the like. This period is filled with a variety of now discarded cosmological hypotheses, many inspired by the attempt to reconcile scriptural accounts of Creation with scientific observation: hypotheses about the movement of the sun, the earth and the stars, about the universality of the great Flood, about creation and the origins of life, and about the earth’s own formation. Among the proponents of now abandoned theories about the composition of our planet was Edmond Halley (better known for the comet which bears his name), who proposed (in a paper explaining the movement of the magnetic poles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1692) that the earth was hollow: “that the seemingly solid earth is actually a shell about 500 miles thick containing three smaller concentric spheres . . . each sphere separated from the others by about 500 miles of atmosphere.”
While it is perhaps relatively easy to follow the theories of inner cavities or of a passage between the poles (in writers like Thomas Burnet and Athanasius Kircher in the late 17th century), and to see their relationship to a text like the anonymous 1721 Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde, (which describes a channel running through the Earth from pole to pole), it is much more difficult to understand how the idea of the hollow Earth emerged as part of Halley’s explanation of the motion of the magnetic poles. Even more inexplicable is the depiction of the hollow earth some fifty years earlier — complete with inner sun and earth — in Ludvig Holberg’s 1741 subterranean utopia, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. This is a far greater imaginative leap, for instance, than Jules Verne’s well-known account of a descent into the bowels of the earth through a dormant volcano (Voyage au centre de la terre, 1865). Verne’s narrative of the discovery of a vast underworld cavern formed during an earlier geological period seems much more plausible than Holberg’s invention of two entire inner worlds — one a planet inhabited by intelligent trees, the other the underside of the earth’s crust, as vast as the outer crust on which we live, and populated with a fantastic variety of intelligent life forms.
First published in Latin in 1741, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, with a new theory of the Earth and the History of the previously unknown Fifth Kingdom (Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, Novam Telluris theoriem ac Historiam Quintae Monarchiae adhuc nobis incognita exhibens) was quickly translated into a number of European languages. (The first English edition dates from 1742). As with Verne’s Voyage, the adventure begins with the descent into a cave, although here the hero falls through a hole into the subterranean world, discovering: “that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets”.
On the central planet, Klim discovers a happy and prosperous utopian land of intelligent, mobile trees. In his subsequent travels around the planet Klim encounters many bizarre varieties of intelligent trees, and each species forms a separate social grouping. It is these sections of the novel that have earned Klim a place in the history of utopia. But in the final sections of the work Holberg turns from utopia and social satire to fantasy: Klim is expelled from the utopian land of Potu to the underside of the earth’s crust which is inhabited by many other fantastic creatures, all of which — plant and animal species alike — are intelligent and gifted with speech; and then he discovers a race of human savages, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were barbarous and uncivilized”. Klim takes it upon himself to civilise them, and uses his knowledge to manufacture gunpowder and to conquer all of the countries of the firmament, becoming a tyrant — the “Alexander of the Subterranean world”. When his subjects eventually rebel, he is forced into flight and falls into the same hole through which he had previously fallen, thus returning to Norway.
The Journey of Niels Klim was widely known in the 19th century: the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” includes the “Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm” among his readings, while the poet Thomas de Quincy began a translation of Klim sometime in the mid-1820s. Giacomo Casanova (better known for his Memoirs) wrote a lengthy subterranean utopia — L’Icosameron (1788) — in which he acknowledges the importance of Holberg’s novel; while Mary Shelly mentions in her diary that she read Klim as she was writing Frankenstein. Fictional settings inside the earth can be found throughout the 19th and 20th centuries — from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Ms. found in a Bottle” (1833) and his unfinished “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” (1837), through to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels, beginning with At the Earth’s Core (1922); and more recently there are authors like Raymond Bernard and William Read who continue to argue that the Earth is hollow.
Born in Bergen, Norway at the time of the Dano-Norwegian monarchy, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) is probably the most European of Scandinavian writers before Ibsen and certainly the best known; he is often referred to as the “father” of Danish and Norwegian literature. He was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright who travelled extensively throughout Europe and is often credited as bringing the Enlightenment to the Nordic countries. In fact, the author of The Journey of Niels Klim was far better known for his “Introduction to Natural and International Law“ and his theatre (he has been described as the “Moliere of the North”). Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Klim is a combination of social satire, utopia and the fantastic. But Swift’s shipwrecked narrator is a much more familiar (and plausible) utopian narrative device than is Holberg’s imagination of a hollow earth. Holberg never explains who “those men . . . who hold the Earth to be hollow” are, and none of his critics have been able to identify them. As long as Holberg’s sources continue to be a mystery, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground must be considered the first presentation of the idea of the hollow earth.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 10, 2011

author: Peter Fitting


text:
John Muir’s Literary Science

By Terry Gifford
June 9, 2011

The writings of the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir are known for their scientific acumen as well as for their rhapsodic flights. Terry Gifford, author of Reconnecting with John Muir, explores Muir's multifaceted engagement with 'God's big show'.

John Muir was not unaware of how his discoveries from his empirical research in Yosemite were being used by the professionals who were impatient for conventional scientific papers from him. Muir suspected that his refusal of scientific discourse initially left him vulnerable. Muir’s early revolutionary newspaper article titled ‘Living Glaciers of California’ began life in a letter of 8 October 1872 to his friend Jeanne Carr in which Muir set out his empirical research results in glaciology, joking, ‘You will have the first chance to steal’. This follows his complaint that a paper for the Boston Society of Natural History from Professor Samuel Kneeland drew from Muir’s work ‘and gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings, and stole the broadest truth to himself’. When Muir’s literary executor William Frederic Badè compiled The Life and Letters (1924; reprinted 1996) he tactfully omitted a paragraph from this letter in which Muir also wondered how much credit he was being given in a lecture by the Berkeley geologist Professor LeConte whom Muir had guided with his students in Yosemite two years before. This lecture was to be published and was advertised as ‘advancing many new and interesting theories’. Muir wrote to Jeanne Carr that he could better express his own thoughts for the public than LeConte’s ‘second-hand rehash’. So Muir’s resolve to publish his own work more effectively, using Jeanne Carr as, in effect, his literary agent, derived, at least in part, from a mistrust of professional scientists. In his determined amateurism and refusal to limit himself to the discourse of the professionals, Muir reached a wider audience with greater effect, gaining for himself a place not only in scientific, but also in literary history. In the richness of Muir’s discourse he reveals himself to be what he admired in Asa Gray, ‘a great, progressive, unlimited man like Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall’.
What are the ways in which Muir’s discourse might be described as ‘progressive’ and ‘unlimited’? Two key features are narrative and metaphor. Even as he prepared to give the facts and figures of the movements of his stakes in the Mt McClure glacier which proved that the living glaciers of the high Sierra were moving at one inch each day, Muir launched into a mystery narrative, vivid with detail, lively in analogy, seductive in alliteration and powerfully rhythmic:
One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains of the Merced group, following the footprints of the ancient glaciers that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could of their history as written in moraines and canyons and lakes and carved rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before seen.
Ending this sentence with a slightly formal inversion enables Muir to produce the rhyme that sets up the mystery: ‘stream’/’seen’.
In his personal narratives Muir frequently exclaims aloud: ‘Before I had time to reason I said, “Glacier Mud! — mountain meal!”’ The dramatic effect of this on the page has actually been enhanced by Badè’s addition of the quotation and exclamation marks. It is worth remembering that Muir developed a reputation for oral dramatic story-telling that must have been symbiotic with his written narrative sense. Ronald Limbaugh has brilliantly shown that Muir integrated not only his reading, but his oral story-telling with what we have in print in the case of the story of Stickeen. (See Gifford 1996, page 893ff, for a memoir of Muir’s ‘wonderful story-telling ability’.) So, as the narrative unfolds, mud leads to a terminal moraine, above which is snow, on which are lines of stones clearly moving in curves and ‘I shouted, “A living glacier!”’ The Berkeley scientist LeConte had mistrusted Muir’s sample of glacier ice that he had sent him years before, so Muir ‘determined to collect proofs of the common measured arithmetical kind’ which in this letter/article/paper he goes on provide. Of course, what Muir’s measurements revealed was a narrative much more important than that of personal discovery, solving a mystery, or correcting the sceptical professionals of his day who clung to a belief that Yosemite Valley was formed by a single seismic cataclysm. Muir’s is the fundamental narrative demonstrated from different data by Darwin, that creation is still ongoing.
It is the dynamic interplay of elemental forces in the natural world that is Muir’s central narrative and the reason why his writing is so dramatic is because he seeks to place himself in their way for the purpose not only of empirical observation, but also to be at home in them as a species. Muir’s scientific data is always a personal narrative because he wants to demonstrate that it is possible for our species to find a place in that ongoing creation. His personal example leads his readership to be aware of choices crucial to its influence on evolution. If, for example, logging reduced the number of tree species in America, the future evolution of American forests was limited in its development. Conservation became, for Muir, not just nostalgic preservation, but an intervention in potential futures. In specific cases this narrative would determine whether the human species could survive in America. Muir noted that the logging of watersheds, for example, was having a disastrous effect upon water conservation in a California that looked unlikely to be able to sustain its growing human population.
Commenting on Darwin’s evolutionary narrative Gillian Beer writes, ‘Evolutionary theory brings together two imaginative elements implicit in much nineteenth-century thinking and creativity. One was the fascination with growth . . . The other was the concept of transformation.’ When Beer writes that the reason why Wordsworth and Coleridge mattered to Darwin was because of their ‘emphasis on growth and process rather than on conclusion and confirmation’, one recognises Muir’s central narrative drive. For Muir that unfinished process of American nature — rather than American ‘landscapes’ — had implications for the human species that called for a conservation debate that went deeper than the usual nineteenth century American concept of ‘wise use of resources’. This required a popular mode of writing that could draw upon all the resources of rhetoric. As a trained scientist who had studied the Bible, Milton and Burns, Muir had the literary skills as well as the discipline-base to combine the discourses of authoritative scientist, popular poetic nature writer and conservationist preacher with, admittedly, varying degrees of success.
Unlike Darwin, it is clear that Muir delighted in his rhetorical resources. ‘Despite the metaphoric density of his writing,’ Beer writes, ‘Darwin seems never to have raised into consciousness its imaginative . . . implications . . . He saw some of the dangers of “authorisation”.’ Muir revelled in ‘authorisation’, playfully and brilliantly mixing his metaphors to startling effects. One of the techniques Muir frequently used to generate the awe of looking at something afresh was the analogy of poetic images. Thus we have in the discourse of the Studies in the Sierra (1874; reprinted in Gifford 1996) ‘ice-ploughs’, ‘glacial cultivation’, ‘ice-wombs, now mostly barren’, ‘pages of rocks embellished with gardens’, a ‘canyon-tree’ of ice whose ‘fruit and foliage’ are ‘meadow and lake’, together with a ‘five-petalled glacier’.  In her study of Victorian scientific prose, Gillian Beer notes the use of poetic effects: ‘Poetry offered particular formal resources to think with . . . The poet sets up multiple relations between ideas in a style closer to the form of theorems than of prose.’ It is clear that Muir was thinking with his metaphors, as when he wrote that whilst the tree analogy for a river served some aspects well, in other respects they ‘more nearly resemble certain gigantic algae with naked stalks’. The essay on the ‘Formation of Soils’ concludes with Muir’s all-encompassing proto-ecological vision that all his poetic devices try to serve: ‘Nor in all these involved operations may we detect the faintest note of disorder; every soil-atom seems to yield enthusiastic obedience to law — boulders and mud-grains moving to music as harmoniously as the far-whirling planets.’ The scope of this, as well as its biblical construction and rhythms, conveys a subtle spiritual dimension that is inherent rather than explicit. But later in life, faced with the urgent need for conservation campaigning, based upon his then extensive scientific knowledge, Muir was also to be roused to the ranting discourse of the preacher.
‘Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well as dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.’ Muir could work his rhetoric up to end a book with a bang. ‘God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought disease, avalanches and a thousand straining levelling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.’ The final arguments of The Yosemite and Our National Parks respectively are not Muir’s strongest, despite their strong form of discourse. Both arguments appear to appeal to the religious norms of his readers, but both are flawed by their own internal logic. If man-made temples are not as holy as Hetch Hetchy Valley they might actually provide better water-tanks. And no post-Darwinian proto-ecologist can believe that ‘God’ has ‘saved’ America’s forests. In fact, the rather more measured discourse that has preceded these resounding final rants is more convincing.
On the Hetch Hetchy issue, Muir took each of the popular arguments for flooding the valley and corrected false information and impressions. Muir argued that this valley is ‘one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people . . . where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.’ The argument for the healing power of direct contact with wild nature for urban humans appealed to both utility and spirituality. In his later writing Muir’s democratic appeal on behalf of ‘the people’ was the basis for his conservation strategy. As himself an immigrant with an immigrant’s faith in American democracy, Muir made a moving argument at the end of Our National Parks about America’s welcoming those to the woods who would live wisely in them, but that regulation for sustainable living must ultimately be made by the federal government to control corporate lumber interests. So ultimately, it is not just that Muir could not confine himself to the discourse of the empirical scientist, could not deny his poetic muse. Muir’s talent as a popular writer reaching a wide audience throughout America was put at the service of the American land through the medium of the voting power of the American people.
Of course, some of Muir’s writing can seem excruciatingly New Age to the contemporary reader unsympathetic to this discourse, as in the most sentimental of Muir’s personifications when, returning from days spent on the glaciers, ‘bird and plant friends’ welcomed him back among them. It is worth noting Gillian Beer’s observation that Darwin’s anthropomorphisms were ‘based on the assumed congruity of man with all other forms of life’. It is fair to recognise that Muir’s eccentric whimsical persona produced these effects partly out of the same mode of discourse that allowed for ‘snowflowers’ and ‘petalled glaciers’. Images that reminded readers of the seamless nature of the processes of growth and decay, of the sensitivity of everything to its context, were key features of Muir’s rhetorical strategy. We may now wince ourselves to read in the Studies that ‘the huge granite valley was lithe as a serpent, and winced tenderly to the touch of every tributary’. But here was a work of science that sought to convey a vision of more than just ‘congruity’ that strains at the limits of the resources of human discourses themselves.
Muir’s earliest published journal, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, is probably his earliest sustained prose attempt to find a discourse adequate to his sense of the dimensions of the world to which he was so alert. This journal is a young man’s purging of many of the assumptions with which he has grown up. It is both a humbling and an uplifting experience: ‘The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.’ But for Muir the demand for a rich use of multiple discourses that not only integrate our forms of knowledge but our modes of expression, is produced by the attempt to confront the complexity of the world in which we have to be at home or die. Muir’s early frustration at the limits of human discourse arose out of a deep sense of the richness of relations in the natural world he wanted to mediate. In that early journal Muir wrote: ‘There is not a fragment in nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together form the one great palimpsest of the world.’ Only a literature such as Muir developed, that drew from all the multiple modes of discourse available, could hope to see into and serve that palimpsest.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Terry Gifford


text:
In Hollywood with Nathanael West

By Marion Meade
January 1, 2011

Today the works of Nathanael West enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts, a new biography about West, takes a look at his life in Hollywood and the story behind his most famous work, The Day of the Locust.

Hollywood has served as a novelist’s muse for almost a century. The list of writers who found inspiration there includes the likes of Fitzgerald, Mailer, Schulberg, Bukowski, Chandler, Huxley, Waugh, and O’Hara, among plenty of others. But the gold standard for Hollywood fiction remains The Day of the Locust.
Nathanael West—novelist, screenwriter, playwright—was one of the most original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life would prove remarkably prophetic. In addition to The Day of the Locust he is the author of another classic Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) as well as two minor works, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) and A Cool Million (1934).
Seventy years after publication, The Day of the Locust is still the most significant novel ever written about Hollywood. Beyond that, West’s story examines America during the Great Depression, revealing a diseased country being stained by corruption, hypocrisy, greed, and rage.
Movie stars who get their faces on the screen did not excite West. Neither was he dazzled by Hollywood as the glitz and glamour capital of the world. Instead, his tale goes backstage to focus on the raw inner workings of a byzantine business and the working stiffs who write scripts, design sets, and appear in crowd scenes.
In the novel’s opening scene, a mob of fake infantry and cavalry is being herded away to fight the fake Battle of Waterloo.
“Stage Nine—you bastards—Stage Nine!” a second unit director shouts hysterically through his megaphone.
West’s heroes are the cheated ones dredged up from the sea of extras and bit players, the menial assistant directors and lowly writers.
Buzzing in the background, meanwhile, are the locusts, the plagues of angry migrants disconnected from Middle America, seduced by the promise of California sunshine and citrus. (The Grapes of Wrath showcases some of the same displaced folks.) Battered by hard knocks, these ragtag bands hang out at movie premieres to gawk at celebrities and sometimes they freak out and start busting balls for no apparent reason. In The Day of the Locust, they are first responsible for a bloody murder, then they riot and start setting fire to the city.
By paying homage to the Hollywood machine and its invisible workers, West was able to illuminate the film business from the bottom up. There is not much beauty to be found in what he called the “Dream Dump,” or in his chronicle of American life in the Thirties. It’s all violence all the time, with sickening scenes that still retain the power to shock. W.H. Auden would call West’s people “cripples.” They weren’t cripples to West, who lovingly described his excitable characters as “screwballs and screwboxes.” His original title for the book, The Cheated, accurately reflected their frustration.
A native New Yorker, West spent his early life managing Manhattan hotels and writing in his spare time. His first three novels earned a pathetic total of $780, hardly a living wage even during the Depression. Losing confidence in himself as a novelist, West in 1935 moved to Hollywood where he found a screenwriting job at one of the poorest studios, Republic, whose biggest stars were horses and singing cowboys. At the same time that he was learning the craft of movie writing, he was forming the ideas for his next novel.
1939 was a very good year for fiction. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath immediately went off the grid, creating heat and noise when it shot onto the best seller list and won a Pulitzer. (Soon the book would become a movie classic starring Henry Fonda.) Unfortunately, The Day of the Locust was eclipsed by Steinbeck’s blockbuster when it was published a few weeks later. Like his previous books, it was unbought, unread, and clobbered by most literary critics, including some of West’s own friends like Edmund Wilson who took an unexpected swipe at the novel. (It did not measure up to Miss Lonelyhearts, Wilson thought.)
Writing to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, West sounds like a slugger who’s been knocked out: “So far the box score stands: Good reviews—fifteen percent, bad reviews—twenty five percent, brutal personal attacks, sixty percent.” Even worse, he fretted, “ Sales: practically none.”
He went on to tell Edmund Wilson that “the book is what the publisher calls a definite flop.” This was a blow because its brilliance had impressed Random House and the publisher Bennett Cerf. As a result, pre-publication prospects could not have been brighter. Turning on a dime, a vexed Cerf failed to promote the title and went on to grumble that he never wanted to see another novel about Hollywood. This proved a bit of an exaggeration because he would shortly publish Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? Who said the book business was soft-hearted?
West, devastated, was trying his damndest to sound cheerful. In truth, he felt awfully confused. “I seem to have no market whatsoever,” he said.
The Day of the Locust would be West’s last book. In December 1940 he and his wife Eileen were killed in a car crash in the middle of the lettuce fields near El Centro, California. He was 37, she was 27. That he should perish dramatically on the highway came as no surprise to his friends, because he was known to be one of the world’s worst drivers.
Despite West’s claim to be writing another novel his effects included only a few notes for a story that sounds similar to Miss Lonelyhearts. During the last year of his life he finally began achieving success as a screenwriter, a highly paid profession in the Thirties. Had he lived, I believe he would have continued to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, director, or producer. He enjoyed the nice Southern California weather, not to mention a nice fat bank account. Would he have written more novels? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
In the decade following his premature death, West’s fiction was pretty much ignored until it made a comeback in the 1950s. Now The Day of the Locust is a classic and its author considered one of America’s premier novelists.
Ironically, it took thirty-five years for a screen adaptation of West’s masterpiece. In 1975, John Schlesinger directed a big-budget production, whose spectacular finale showed rioters going on a rampage and setting fire to Los Angeles. Probably West would have got a kick out of seeing his screwballs and screwboxes on the screen.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 1, 2011

author: Marion Meade


text:
Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine

By Urszula Szulakowska
September 13, 2011

Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterpiece Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, a two-volume work packed with over sixty intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska looks at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the first volume, an exploration of the macrocosm of the universe and spiritual realm.

Robert Fludd was a respected English physician (of Welsh origins) employed at the court of King James I of England. He was a prolific writer of vast, multi-volume encyclopaedias in which he discussed a universal range of topics from magical practices — such as alchemy, astrology, kabbalism, and fortune-telling — to radical theological thinking concerning the interrelation of God with the natural and human worlds. However, he also proudly displayed his grasp of practical knowledge, such as mechanics, architecture, military fortifications, armaments, military manoeuvres, hydrology, musical theory and musical instruments, mathematics, geometry, optics, and the art of drawing, as well as chemistry and medicine. Fludd used the common metaphor for the arts as being the “ape of Nature”, a microcosmic form of how the universe itself functioned.
Fludd’s most famous work is the History of the Two Worlds (Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617-21) published in two volumes by Theodore de Bry in Oppenheim. The two worlds under discussion are those of the Microcosm of human life on earth and the Macrocosm of the universe (which included the spiritual realm of the Divine).
Fludd himself was a staunch member of the Anglican Church. He was educated in the medical profession at St. John’s College in Oxford. At the turn of the seventeenth century, he set out for an extended period of travel on the continent. He spent a winter with some Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order deeply opposed to Protestantism who, nevertheless, tutored Fludd on magical practices. Fludd, however, always claimed to have worked out the theological and magical systems in his first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) during his undergraduate days at Oxford. In this work Fludd devised a lavishly illustrated cosmology based on the chemical theory of Paracelsus, in which the materials of the universe were separated out of chaos by God who acted in the manner of a laboratory alchemist.
Fludd was a deeply convinced adherent of the medical and magical practice of the German doctor, surgeon, and radical theologian Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. This loyalty led Fludd into severe conflicts with the established British medical profession. His later publications described a medical practice almost devoid of chemical remedies but which depended almost solely on prayer and the use of the name of Jesus on the model of the first apostles of Christ. This devotional medicine was supported by a theology derived from the secret mystical teaching of Judaism, the kabbalah, which Fludd employed in a Christianised form derived from the ideas of the German philosopher, Johannes Reuchlin.
In his medicinal incantations Fludd used the Hebrew form of the name of Jesus which, he claimed, possessed immense magical potency. He equated Jesus Christ with the kabbalistic angel Metattron, the heavenly form of the Jewish Messiah. He was said to be the soul of the world (“anima mundi”), pervading it throughout, or Anthropos. Fludd states that “Hochmah” (Wisdom in the kabbalistic Tree of Life) is the same as the “Verbum” (the “Word” in the Christian Gospel of John who is identified with Jesus Christ). The Christian “Word” is the same as the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “Aleph”. This Christian Messiah is the most potent medicine for all human ills. The “Verbum”, or Metattron-Christ-Messiah, is a form of God himself, residing in the the sun.
In Fludd’s medical theories the operation of the aerial nitre, or quintessence, in the human body was of critical importance to health. It was said to originate in the tabernacle of the aerial spirit which was the sun. The essence of the aerial nitre was celestial light. It was breathed in by the lungs and carried to the heart, where it was separated from the air and dispersed as the vital spirit throughout the body. In his short text, the “Tractatus de Tritico” (Tractate on Wheat), which reappeared in his Anatomiae Amphiteatrum (1623) and also in the Philosophia Moysaica (1638), Fludd described the distillation of the aerial nitre from the wheat using the heat and light of the sun’s own rays. Fludd claimed that this distilled spirit was the universal panacea, whose generative celestial fire had been drawn out of the sun.
All of Fludd’s treatises were lavishly illustrated with extraordinary engravings, unique in their form and subject matter, which have the visionary quality of a genuine spiritual seer and which exerted an influence on his contemporary occultists such as Michael Maier, Jacob Boehme, and Johannes Mylius. Fludd himself designed these images and they were engraved by the artisans employed at his publishers. (Some of his own original drawings still exist for the first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617).
Fludd’s concepts of the creative and healing forces of light were illustrated by diagrams, the principles of light and darkness being represented by two intersecting cones, or pyramids. The base of the “pyramidis formalis” was placed in the Empyreum of God, signifying rays of divine light, while the base of the “pyramidis materialis” was located on the earth pointing upward toward God. Fludd described these diagrammatic forms as “pyramides lucis” (cones of light), claiming to have invented them himself, although they seem to be based on antique and medieval optical theory. Within the lozenge shape created by the intersection of the downward and upward pointing cones, Fludd placed the sun, since the nature of this sphere balanced the oppositions of spirit and matter, male and female, sulphur and mercury.
From the outset of the “Macrocosm” section, Fludd’s cosmogony was based on the three generative principles which were those conceptualised by Paracelsus in his own alchemy, namely, those of light, darkness, and water, from which emerged the three primary elements that constituted matter, that is, Salt from darkness (as the “prima materia”), Sulphur from light (as the soul), and Mercury from water (as the spirit). These, in turn, produced the four qualities of antique and medieval physics, the qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and moistness. Fludd’s alchemical cosmology was explained by a series of intricate geometrical diagrams of great power and beauty.
In the third book of the “Macrocosm” section, Fludd also offered another interpretation of the structure of the universe, complementing his earlier alchemical visualisations, but expressed musically. He analysed what he claimed to be the “Musica Mundana”, the musical forms that pervaded and structure universal creation based on the musicology and mathematics of the ancient Greek, Pythagoras. The fifth chapter of the “Musica Mundana” included an illustration of a cosmic lyre.
Fludd achieved a certain notoriety in his own time for his early support of the “Rosicrucian Manifestos” in his treatise the Apologia (1616) (expanded into the Tractatus Apologeticus, 1618). The two texts, which came to be called the Rosicrucian Manifestos, consisted of the Fama which appeared in 1614, followed by the Confessio in 1615. They were published anonymously in Kassel and they have been the subject of extensive debate in regard to their origins and authorship. The authors never revealed themselves but they called for supporters to join the Rosicrucian movement, claimed to have been in existence for centuries. Those who responded by publishing letters to the Rosicrucians were a heterogeneous group of Protestants, mostly of a radical reformist character, as well as adherents to antique philosophy and magic: kabbalists, followers of Hermes Trismegistos — a mythical Egyptian sage — as well as practitioners of magic on the model of Cornelius Agrippa (a sixteenth century German sage) and of Paracelsus. The Manifestos seem to have been written to counteract the re-conversionary activities of the Jesuit order in central Europe. Said to be supporters of a legendary figure of the fourteenth century, Christian Rozenkreutz, there never did exist in reality any such entity as the Rosicrucian Order in the seventeenth century. It could be said, however, that there did exist a popular Rosicrucian movement whose supporters developed the original ideas of the founders and in which Fludd’s influence was a dominating factor.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 13, 2011

author: Urszula Szulakowska