With Agassiz, Darwin, and God in a Collection's Inner Sanctum

We often think about museums as public institutions, their collections made available for our consumption. When I visit an art museum, for example, I know there are some things in the collection that are not on display, but I don't imagine there is anything they would never display publicly. But the history of museums belies this notion. The first natural history museums, known as Wunderkammer, were originally private collections of the extremely wealthy and sometimes eccentric collectors. These rooms contained animal specimens, shells and coral, and minerals and gems, and they often held fantastic objects as well, such as unicorn horns, most likely the twisting horns of the narwhal. Only those who were part of the upper classes were allowed to see, and maintain, these "cabinet of curiosities." It wasn't until the Louvre in Paris that a museum opened its collection to the public, in 1793, due, in large part, to the French Revolution. And, much unlike the museums of today, the purpose of early natural history was to reveal the glory of God in the diverse forms of nature.

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Harry Smith and the Consciousness of Magic

I was happily surprised to recently learn all kinds of amazing things about Harry Smith, the man whose personal record collection was to become the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music. First of all, Smith regarded himself as a magician and was deeply interested in the secret magical societies as well as spiritualism and alchemy. He was also one of the early experimental animators and his work is a remarkable fusion of music, image, and magical symbolism. The animation itself serves as a form of alchemy, and I can be used for certain kinds of meditations on consciousness. Here is a prime example:



I want to use Smith and this film as a springboard for thinking about metaphor, magic, and consciousness. I am working on an article right now that has as its central theme the question of whether or not there is a mystical consciousness that independent of cultural ideas, religious tradition or personal expectations. Jung, for example, saw these kinds of alchemical symbols has playing an important function in the development of archetypes or rather, serve as vessels for archetypal imagining. But the symbols themselves are the product of very specific cultural and religious ideas, having their own history and even Western bias. Is it possible to parse how symbols can be both cultural/historical and perennial?