If you’re a regular reader of Open Culture, you know we like to bring you the latest attempts to decipher the legendary Voynich Manuscript, a strange medieval book whose language has baffled scholars for centuries. Like many other early 15th century texts, the Voynich seems to combine medicine, alchemy, herbology, botany, zoology, astrology, and other forms of folk knowledge in a compendium. But it’s filled with bizarre illustrations (see an online version here) and written in a language no one can read. Is it a lost ancestor tongue? The secret code of a cult? Is it a hoax? Why was it made and by whom?
Researchers have tried to translate the Voynich language as variant forms Latin, Arabic, and Sino-Tibetan. An AI identified it as Hebrew. This year a father and son team convincingly made the case for Old Turkic. No Voynich translation has been definitively accepted by a scholarly consensus, and perhaps none ever will. This may say as much about the mysterious Voynich as it does about the niche research area, in which academic linguists, codicologists, and all manner of amateur sleuths try to make a name for themselves as Jean-François Champollions of Voynich studies.
The hour-long documentary above tells the story of both the manuscript’s enigmas and the cult of fascination that has grown up around them. We first learn the origin of the name: Acquired by Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, the manuscript passed into the care of his wife Ethel, an Irish artist and novelist, upon his death in 1930. Ethel died 30 years later in New York, leaving the manuscript behind, sealed in a bank vault. “Its fate had troubled both Mrs. Voynich and her husband before her.”
Wilfred Voynich has often been suspected as the manuscript’s true author, but its materials have been carbon dated to the early 1400s, and its first confirmed owner, an alchemist from Prague named George Baresch, lived in the 17th century. Other proposed authors have included Queen Elizabeth I’s advisor John Dee, an alchemist and occult philosopher, and Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon, who was renowned as a wizard almost two centuries before the extant Voynich could have been produced.
Evidence for these claims is often tenuous, but the wealth of speculation to which the Voynich has given rise only deepens the mystery of its creation. As more Voynich scholars undertake frustrating, and often fruitless, investigations, they add to the manuscript’s lore, itself so rich as to occasion another, two-hour, follow-up video from our documentarian, who goes by the name The Histocrat on YouTube. See the further “Deep Dive” on the Voynich manuscript’s many historical owners—both confirmed and rumored—just above.
Where did art begin? In a cave, most of us would say — especially those of us who’ve seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams — and specifically on the walls of caves, where early humans drew the first representations of landscapes, animals, and themselves. But when did art begin? The answer to that question has proven more subject to revision. The well-known paintings of the Lascaux cave complex in France go back 17,000 years, but the paintings of that same country’s Chauvet cave, the ones Herzog captured in 3D, go back 32,000 years. And just two years ago, Griffith University researchers discovered artwork on a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that turns out to be about 44,000 years old.
Here on Open Culture we’ve featured the argument that ancient rock-wall art constitutes the earliest form of cinema, to the extent that its unknown painters sought to evoke movement. But cave paintings like the one in Sulawesi’s cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which you can see in the video above, also shed light on the nature of the earliest known forms of storytelling.
The “fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment,” writes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, depicts “about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo.” This first known narrative“tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast.”
Like other ancient cave art, the painting’s characters are therianthropes, described by the Griffith researchers’ Nature article as “abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on).” Given the apparent importance of their roles in early stories, how much of a stretch would it be to call these figures the first superheroes? “Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today — the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries,” writes Gopnik.
If you haven’t followed this struggle for the soul of storytelling in the 21st century, Scorsese wrote a piece in The New York Times claiming that today’s kind of blockbuster superhero picture isn’t cinema, in that it shrinks from “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” (“He didn’t say it’s despicable,” Coppola later added, “which I just say it is.”) And yet, as Gopnik puts it, “our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s.” If we just imagine how those therianthropes — “A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile!” — must have thrilled their contemporary viewers, we’ll understand these cave paintings for what they are: early art, early storytelling, early cinema, but above all, early spectacle.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Last Christmas, we featured Charles Dickens’ hand-edited copy of his beloved 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. He did that hand editing for the purposes of giving public readings, a practice that, in his time, “was considered a desecration of one’s art and a lowering of one’s dignity.” That time, however, has gone, and many of the most prestigious writers alive today take the reading aloud of their own work to the level of art, or at least high entertainment, that Dickens must have suspected one could. Some writers even do a bang-up job of reading other writers’ work: modern master storyteller Neil Gaiman gave us a dose of that on Monday when we featured his recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from memory. Today, however, comes the full meal: Gaiman’s telling of A Christmas Carolstraight from that very Dickens-edited reading copy.
Gaiman read to a full house at the New York Public Library, an institution known for its stimulating events, holiday-themed or otherwise. But he didn’t have to hold up the afternoon himself; taking the stage before him, BBC researcher and The Secret Museumauthor Molly Oldfield talked about her two years spent seeking out fascinating cultural artifacts the world over, including but not limited to the NYPL’s own collection of things Dickensian. You can hear both Oldfield and Gaiman in the recording above. But perhaps the greatest gift of all came in the form of the latter’s attire for his reading: not only did he go fully Victorian, he even went to the length of replicating the 19th-century literary superstar’s own severe hair part and long goatee. And School Library Journal has pictures.
The nature of marketing in the nearly-over 2010s, with all its unexpected brand crossovers and collaborations, gave rise to many strange commercial bedfellows. But for sheer artistic shock value, did any of them surpass Christmas of 1960, when Salvador Dalí designed holiday greeting cards for Hallmark? It was the rare intersection of the kind of company that has built an empire on broadly appealing, inoffensive expressions of love and festivity and an artist who once said, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”
“Hallmark began reproducing the paintings and designs of contemporary artists on its Christmas cards in the late 1940s, an initiative that was led by company founder Joyce Clyde Hall,” writes the Washington Post’s Ana Swanson.
“The art of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe all took a turn on Hallmark’s Christmas cards.” And so, Swanson quotes Hall as writing in his autobiography, “through the ‘unsophisticated art’ of greeting cards, the world’s greatest masters were shown to millions of people who might otherwise not have been exposed to them.”
Hallmark signed Dalí on in 1959. The painter of The Persistence of Memoryand Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)asked the greeting-card giant for “$15,000 in cash in advance for 10 greeting card designs, with no suggestions from Hallmark for the subject or medium, no deadline and no royalties.” The designs Dalí came up with included “Surrealist renditions of the Christmas tree and the Holy Family,” as well as some “vaguely unsettling” images, such as a headless angel playing a lute and the three wise men atop some insane-looking camels. Ultimately, Hallmark only produced two of the Dalí cards, a nativity scene and a depiction of the Madonna and Child. Alas, even those relatively tame images didn’t go over well.
Dalí’s “take on Christmas,” as Patrick Regan writes in Hallmark: A Century of Caring, was “a bit too avant garde for the average greeting card buyer,” and the negative public response soon convinced Hallmark to drop Dalí’s cards from their product line — thus ensuring their future as sought-after collector’s items. As inauspicious as the marriage of Dalí and Hallmark might seem, the artist did possess a commercial sense more in line with Joyce Clyde Hall’s than not: in his lifetime Dalí created a range of products ranging from prints to books (including a cookbook) to tarot decks, and even appeared in television commercials. Not all of his ventures were successful, but as with his Hallmark Christmas cards — about which you can learn more at the site of Spanish language and literature professor Rebecca M. Bender — sometimes the failures are more memorable than the successes.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Softness is perhaps not the first quality that springs to mind when one imagines recreating the chaos and anguish of Picasso’s Guernica in a 3‑dimensional representation.
Though how else to describe the primary medium of the urban knitting group Sul filo dell’arte?
Clutch imaginary pearls, rest the back of your hand on your forehead, look wan and stricken, begin to wilt, and most people will recognize the symptoms of your sarcasm, aimed at some pejoratively feminized qualities we’ve seen characters embody in movies. The “literary swoon” as Iaian Bamforth writes at the British Journal of General Practice, dates back much further than film, to the early years of the modern novel itself, and it was once a male domain.
“Somewhere around the time of the French Revolution (or perhaps a little before it) feelings were let loose on the world.” Rationalism went out vogue and passion was in—lots of it, though not all at once. It took some decades before the discovery of emotion reached the climax of Romanticism and denouement of Victorian sentimentality:
Back in 1761, readers had swooned when they encountered the ‘true voice of feeling’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; by the end of the decade, all of Europe was being sentimental in the manner made fashionable a few years later by Laurence Sterne in his A Sentimental Journey. Then there was Goethe’s novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which made its author a celebrity.
It’s impossible to overstate how popular Goethe’s book became among the aristocratic young men of Europe. Napoleon “reputedly carried a copy of the novel with him on his military campaign.” Its swooning hero, whom we might be tempted to diagnose with any number of personality and mood disorders, develops a disturbing and debilitating obsession with an engaged woman and finally commits suicide. The novel supposedly inspired many copycats and “the media’s first moral panic.”
If we can feel such exaltation, disquiet, and fear when in the grip of romantic passion, or when faced with nature’s implacable behemoths, as in Kant’s Sublime, so too may we be overcome by art. Napoleonic novelist Stendhal suggested as much in a dramatic account of such an experience. Stendhal, the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, was no inexperienced dreamer. He had traveled and fought extensively with the Grand Army (including that fateful march through Russia, and back) and had held several government offices abroad. His realist fiction didn’t always comport with the more lyrical tenor of the times.
Photo of the Basilica of Santa Croce by Diana Ringo, via Wikimedia Commons
But he was also of the generation of young men who read Werther while touring Europe, contemplating the varieties of emotion. He had held a similarly unrequited obsession for an unavailable woman, and once wrote that “in Italy… people are still driven to despair by love.” During a visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce in 1817, he “found a monk to let him into the chapel,” writes Bamforth, “where he could sit on a genuflecting stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s fresco of the Sibyls without interruption.” As Stendhal described the scene:
I was already in a kind of ecstasy by the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw it close-up—I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.
With the recording of this experience, Stendhal “brought the literary swoon into tourism,” Bamforth remarks. Such passages became far more commonplace in travelogues, not least those involving the city of Florence. So many cases similar to Stendhal’s have been reported in the city that the condition acquired the name Stendhal syndrome in the late seventies from Dr. Graziella Magherini, chief of psychiatry at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. It presents as an acute state of exhilarated anxiety that causes people to feel faint, or to collapse, in the presence of art.
Magherini and her assistants compiled studies of 107 different cases in 1989. Since then, Santa Maria Nuova has continued to treat tourists for the syndrome with some regularity. “Dr. Magherini insists,” writes The New York Times, that “certain men and women are susceptible to swooning in the presence of great art, especially when far from home.” Stendhal didn’t invent the phenomenon, of course. And it need not be solely caused by sufferers’ love of the 15th century.
The stresses of travel can sometimes be enough to make anyone faint, though further research may rule out other factors. The effect, however, does not seem to occur with nearly as much frequency in other major cities with other major cultural treasures. “It is surely the sheer concentration of great art in Florence that causes such issues,” claims Jonathan Jones at The Guardian. Trying to take it all in while navigating unfamiliar streets and crowds.… “More cynically, some might say the long queues do add a layer of stress on the heart.”
There’s also no discounting the effect of expectation. “It is among religious travelers that Stendhal’s syndrome seems to have found its most florid expression,” notes Bamforth. Stendhal admitted that his “ecstasy” began with an awareness of his “proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen.” Without his prior education, the effect might have disappeared entirely. The story of the Renaissance, in his time and ours, has impressed upon us such a reverence for its artists, statesmen, and engineers, that sensitive visitors may feel they can hardly stand in the actual presence of Florence’s abundant treasures.
Perhaps Stendhal syndrome should be regarded as akin to a spiritual experience. A study of religious travelers to Jerusalem found that “otherwise normal patients tended to have ‘an idealistic subconscious image of Jerusalem’” before they succumbed to Stendhal syndrome. Carl Jung described his own such feelings about Pompeii and Rome, which he could never bring himself to visit because he lived in such awe of its historical aura. Those primed to have symptoms tend also to have a sentimental nature, a word that once meant great depth of feeling rather than a callow or mawkish nature.
We might all expect great art to overwhelm us, but Stendhal syndrome is rare and rarified. The experience of many more travelers accords with Mark Twain’s 1869 The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, a fictionalized memoir “lampooning the grandiose travel accounts of his contemporaries,” notes Bamforth. It became “one of the best-selling travel books ever” and gave its author’s name to what one researcher calls Mark Twain Malaise, “a cynical mood which overcomes travelers and leaves them totally unimpressed with anything UNESCO has on its universal heritage list.” Sentimentalists might wish these weary tourists would stay home and let them swoon in peace.
With the holidays fast approaching, two interns at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library turned to the center’s collection of vintage advertising cookbooks for inspiration.
Their labors, and the fruits thereof—a queasy-looking Crown Jewel Dessert and a savory fish-shaped “salad” as per the Joys of Jell‑O Gelatin Dessert cookbook—are showcased above.
While the library has yet to digitize that particular early-60’s gem, there are plenty of other options from the Nicole Di Bona Peterson Advertising Cookbook Collection available for free download, including several that are gelatin based.
The authors of the pre-Women’s‑Suffrage Jell‑O: America’s Most Famous Dessert, would have boggled at our 21st-century abundance of flavors (and our godlike telephones), just as our eyes widen at their lush full-color illustrations and hundred-year-old social norms.
As one might expect, given the Sallie Bingham Center’s mission of preserving printed materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present, these vintage cookbooks speak to far more than just culinary trends.
Royal Baking Powder’s 55 Ways to Save Eggs puts a positive spin on wartime economies by framing cheap ingredient substitutions as something clever and modern, attributes the young housewife depicted on the cover would surely wish to embody.
(Shout out to any home bakers who were aware that cream of tartar is derived from grapes…)
Dainty Dishes for All the Year Round (1900) finds its publisher, North Brothers Manufacturing Co., sitting pretty, unable to imagine a future some twenty years hence, in which technological advances would result in the commercial mass production of ice cream, thus damning their star item, Shephard’s “Lightning” Ice Cream Freezer, to the category of inessential countertop clutter.
Sadly, not all of the delicious-sounding ice cream recipes by Mrs. S. T. Rorer, a leading culinary author and educator and America’s first dietician, are included, but you can browse many illustrated ads for North Brothers’ built-to-last goods, including a meat cutter, a number of screwdrivers, and a magnificently steampunk Christmas tree stand.
Would it surprise you to learn that our current preoccupation with ancient grains is far from a new thing?
1929’s Modern Ways with an Ancient Foodwas aimed squarely at mothers anxious, then as now, that their children were properly nourished.
The grain in question was not quinoa or freekeh, but rather farina, referred to by most Americans by its most popular brand name Cream of Wheat, a fact not lost on this volume’s publisher, Cream of Wheat competitor Hecker H‑O Company.
History shows that Cream of Wheat trounced Hecker’s Cream-Farina.
Given the blandness of the grain in question, chalk it up to Cream of Wheat’s muscular advertising approach, and robust licensing of products featuring the iconic image of Rastus, a smiling black spokeschef whose palpably offensive, dialect-heavy endorsements are one pitfall Hecker seems to have skirted.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC tonight, Monday, December 9, as her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates another vintage advertising pamphlet, Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday
The Tate-LaBianca murders and the violence at Altamont in 1969 have become emblems of the end of “the notion of spontaneity,” writes Richard Brody at The New Yorker, “the sense that things could happen on their own and that benevolent spirts would prevail. What ended was the idea of the unproduced.” Perhaps it’s important to keep in mind that this was only ever an idea, nurtured by those with the means and talent to produce it, and to overshadow, for a time, figures like Manson, a Laurel Canyon hanger-on before he became a cult-leading, spree-killing mastermind.
Likewise, the Hells Angels had been present at the birth of the counterculture. As anyone who’s read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test knows, they were regular attendees of Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties and early Grateful Dead shows, at the same time as the release of the famous 1965 Lynch report, a six-month study detailing the criminal activities of motorcycle gangs in California. Two years later, Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels book would both corroborate and downplay the report’s shocking revelations.
It was evident to people paying attention that the supply chain moving drugs through the scene was a particularly nasty business, a shadow side of hippie culture as menacing as Manson’s power tripping race war delusions. Leave it to the Rolling Stones to move this background to the foreground when they hired the Hells Angels to do security at Altamont on December 6, 1969, paying them in beer. The drunken bikers responded to unrest in the crowd by beating fans with weighted pool cues and motorcycle chains before stabbing 18-year-old black fan Meredith Hunter to death, as the band, unaware, played “Under My Thumb.”
George Lucas happened to be there, working with Robert Elfstrom on the Maysles crew. The two were sent “to the top of this hill and they spent all day futzing with this long lens,” says Selvin, “trying to keep it in focus. When it was all over, they were both convinced they had been to Woodstock.” Indeed, “Woodstock of the West” is how Altamont was characterized until Rolling Stone published its in-depth coverage of events. How then did Altamont become known thereafter as the “anti-Woodstock” that broke the sixties?
Woodstock itself “was very close to being a total disaster,” Selvin points out, a point Jerry Garcia himself makes in post-Altamont interview above. They were “two sides of the same coin, two ways that that kind of expression can go.” The stigma surrounding the Hells Angels greatly contributed the infamy, as news of their full involvement spread. Had accused killer Alan Passaro not been in a notoriously violent biker gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an earlier altercation with the gang. (Passaro was charged but not convicted.)
But perhaps no artifact has helped mythologize the tragic events at Altamont more than Gimme Shelter, a film that also documents just how electrifying the Stones were onstage, how transformed as a band after the death of Brian Jones months earlier and addition of guitarist Mick Taylor.
They debuted “Brown Sugar” at Altamont (hear it above), a song that wouldn’t be released until three years later on Sticky Fingers and that would define their take on roadhouse blues in the early seventies. At least in performance, they held up remarkably well in a festival that bristled with restless, overcrowded menace even before the bikers started a riot. (A fan punched Mick Jagger as he got out of his helicopter.)
As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of Altamont, we might also rethink its immortalization as a symbol of the death of sixties’ innocence. Something else died instead, writes Brody. “The haunting freeze-frame on Jagger staring into the camera, at the end of the film, after his forensic examination of the footage of the killing of Meredith Hunter at the concert, reveals not the filmmakers’ accusation or his own sense of guilt but lost illusions” of control over the culture’s darker side.
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