This nineteenth-century Tibetian painting is of a well-known deity in the Tantric Buddhist tradition, named Vajrayogini. Unlike some other Buddhist traditions which have neither Gods nor Goddesses, the Vajrayana Tantric tradition has both, as we can see here. Vajrayana Buddhism differs from many other religious traditions in its elevation of the female. The eleventh-century Tantric […]
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The leader of all the Gods in Norse mythology, Odin, was routinely accompanied by his ravens named Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“mind”), appearing together in visual records as early as the sixth century The names of these birds called attention to Odin’s vast knowledge — the medieval Icelandic sources have Odin’s ravens fly all over
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Painted on a silk scroll by the 18th-century Japanese artist Maruyama Okyo, this image is one of Japan’s most well-known artistic creations. _The Ghost of Oyuki_, as it is known, was painted when the artist Okyo awoke from his sleep to see the ghost, or _yurei_, of his deceased lover. She had pale skin, disheveled
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Ghost stories have been an important part of China’s culture for centuries. As shown from this 14th-century Yuan Dynasty tomb, beliefs about ghosts can be seen in the visual arts, as well as in written sources. One of the most prominent types of undead spirits were the “Jiang Shi,” which were zombie-like reanimated beings. The
Jiang Shi Spirits from Chinese Culture Read More »
What drives us to learn? Are people with unusual intellectual capabilities also predisposed to want to use them? The case of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) raises these questions, because she possessed a rarified mind in an era when women of her social class were expected to marry and attend to domestic affairs rather than academic
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Kellys Run Nature Preserve near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is today part of a recently made ecological conservancy with beautiful views (see second photo) of the Susquehanna River amidst a great variety of forest life. The tree canopy and rugged terrain predominate the vista so much that you might never know earlier, human-driven economies had once existed
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This is Mary Grace Quackenbos, a.k.a. “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes,” and she was a good apple. Born in 1869, she came into a large estate in her youth and enrolled in law school. She used her fortune to help the poor and powerless, starting up “The People’s Law Firm”in 1905. When a young Italian immigrant headed
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“The Temptation of Eve” from the cathedral at Autun dates to about 1130. It was the first large-scale nude sculpture since Antiquity, and has become a hallmark of the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.” Although not as naturalistic as Ancient Roman sculptures could get, the Eve portrait gets kudos for representing the nude female body
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Yesterday (November 5) in the U.S. was voting day, but in the U.K. many people lit bonfires and threw in effigies of “the Guy” for Guy Fawkes Day. In fact, our slang word “guy” comes from the person who became the most well-known architect of the Gunpowder Plot. In 1605, Guy Fawkes, a discontent Roman
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In the Late Middle Ages, one chemical became a driving force in the economy, even forming the source of a cartel by the Papacy. Potash Alum [KAl (SO4)2] is a chemical compound that occurs naturally as crystals in some encrustacions (see second photo). It enables cell walls to harden – it can give a dill
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Dude underwear in the Middle Ages is something we actually know about. Commonly made out of linen (from the flax plant – but that’s material (*groan*) for another day), men wore versions of undershirts and boxers that tended to be loose and long (knee-length), but tied or tucked as the situation warranted. The undergarments were
Men’s Underwear in Medieval Europe Read More »
In our current social climate, it can seem that confidence in the scientific method and trust in the expertise of professionals are being challenged for the first time. Is it good news or bad, then, to realize that this is not the case? Strap in, ladies and gents, as I introduce you to _The Cellular
Cyrus Tweed’s “The Earth a Concave Sphere” Read More »
This illustration is the best I can do to represent American scientist Eunice Foote, since no extant images of her remain. This is a shame, because Foote was the first scientist to analyze the composition of gasses to predict what we now call the Greenhouse Effect. In 1856, hundreds of scientists were in attendance at
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Here you see an illustration of one of the most important medical textbooks in history: Avicenna’s _Canon of Medicine_. Written by 1025 CE, the _Canon_ represented a pinnacle of scientific progress in the Golden Age of Islam. Avicenna synthesized knowledge from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Ancient and Medieval India, China, and Persian Muslim traditions
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The disembodied eyeballs you see on these two images represent the “eye of providence” or “the all-seeing eye” in art history. Floating eyes have made this appearance in visual media as far back as the Ancient Egyptian eye of Ra, but the Late Middle Ages in Europe saw a re-invigorization of the symbol, where it
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I adore Early Modern Science! Through no fault of their own — since genes hadn’t been discovered but everyone in Europe knew about horrible parasitic body worms — some biologists thought of sex and propagation in very different ways than we do now. For instance, _preformationists_ thought that there were very small people inside either
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The most important work on magic in Medieval Europe has a title that sounds like a Pokemon: _Picatrix_. Written in Arabic in the melting-pot culture of Islamic Spain, _Picatrix_ is a bewildering text that draws from Greek, Egyptian, Indian, Islamic, and other traditions. It is a hot mess organizationally, but three big emphases are the
Picatrix – The Melting Pot of Medieval Times Read More »
The scratchings you see on this picture are not my students’ writings, which makes me glad for two reasons. First, they are written in Ancient Romano-British Latin. Second, the lead tablet shown here records a ritualistic curse — it is a type of item found widespread in the Ancient world. 130 examples alone, dating from
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Sometimes Medieval art gets weirder the more you look at it. For instance, take these scenes of an animal fleeing from a hunter: the creature isn’t just turning his head back — he is actually biting off his testicles to throw them to his pursuer. Medieval people thought that beavers regularly did this (I know:
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You are looking at a late 3rd-c. CE Tauroctony, the sacred scene from the Roman Cult of Mithras. Frequently compared with the emerging religion of Christianity, Mithraism featured a savior deity who came down from the stars to save his adherents. Worshippers of this cult were all men, and they met in chambers that resembled
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