Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years

in History, Music, Religion | August 29th, 2025

Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say that figuratively, but for medieval monks, it was the literal truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much closer to God, but especially the times when everyone came together and sang. For English monks accustomed to that way of life, it would have come as quite a shock, to say the very least, when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries between the mid fifteen-thirties and the early fifteen-forties. Not only were the inhabitants of those refuges sent packing, their sacred music was cast to the wind.

Nearly half a millennium later, that music is still being recovered. As reported by the Guardian’s Steven Morris, University of Exeter historian James Clark found the latest example while researching the still-standing Buckland Abbey in Devon for the National Trust.

“Only one book — rather boringly setting out the customs the monks followed — was known to exist, held in the British Library.” But lo and behold, a few leaves of parchment stuck in the back happened to contain pieces of early sixteenth-century music, or rather chant, with both text and notation, a vanishingly rare sort of artifact of medieval monastic life.

Just this month, for the first time in almost five centuries, the music from the “Buckland book” resonated within the walls of Buckland Abbey once again. You can hear a clip from the University of Exeter chapel choir’s performance just above, which may or may not get across the grimness of the original work. “The themes are heavy — the threats from disease and crop failures, not to mention powerful rulers — but the polyphonic style is bright and joyful, a contrast to the sort of mournful chants most associated with monks,” writes Morris. For listeners here in the twenty-first century, these compositions offer the additional transcendental dimension of aesthetic time travel. The only way their rediscovery could be more fortuitous is if it had happened in time to benefit from the nineteen-nineties Gregorian-chant boom.

A YouTube Channel Completely Devoted to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gregorian Chant, Byzantine Chant & More

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New Digital Archive Will Bring Medieval Chants Back to Life: Project Amra Will Feature 300 Digitized Manuscripts and Many Audio Recordings

A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation

The History of Classical Music in 1200 Tracks: From Gregorian Chant to Górecki (100 Hours of Audio)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The 1830s Device That Created the First Animations: The Phenakistiscope

in Animation, Film, History, Technology | August 28th, 2025

The image just above is an animated GIF, a format by now older than most people on the internet. Those of us who were surfing the World Wide Web in its earliest years will remember all those little digging, jackhammering roadworkers who flanked the permanent announcements that various sites — including, quite possibly, our own — were “under construction.” Charming though they could be at the time, they now look impossibly primitive compared to what we can see on today’s internet, where high-resolution feature films stream instantaneously. But technologically speaking, we can trace it all back to what this particular animated GIF depicts: the phenakistiscope.

Invented simultaneously and independently in late 1832 by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and Austrian geometry professor Simon Stampfer, the phenakistiscope was a simple wheel-shaped device that could, for the first time in the history of technology, create the illusion of a smoothly moving picture when spun and viewed in a mirror: hence the derivation of its name from the Greek phenakisticos, “to deceive,” and ops, “eye.”

When it caught on as a commercial novelty, it was also marketed under names like Phantasmascope and Fantascope, which promised buyers a glimpse of horse-riders, twirling dancers, bowing aristocrats, hopping frogs, flying ghouls, and even proto-psychedelic abstract patterns, many of which you can see re-animated as GIFs in this Wikipedia gallery.

Eventually, according to the Public Domain Review, the phenakistiscope was “supplanted in the popular imagination: firstly by the similar Zoetrope, and then — via Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope (which projected the animation) — by film itself.” Muybridge, previously featured here on Open Culture, did pioneering motion-photography work in the eighteen-seventies that’s now considered a precursor to cinema. Understanding what he was up to is an important part of understanding the emergence of movies as we know them. But the most instructive experience to start with is making a phenakistiscope of your own, instructions for which are available from the George Eastman Museum and artist Megan Scott on YouTube. The finished product may not hold anyone’s attention long here in the age of Netflix, but then, the age of Netflix would never have arrived had the phenakistiscope not come first.

How Animated Cartoons Are Made: A Vintage Primer Filmed Way Back in 1919

The Trick That Made Animation Realistic: Watch a Short History of Rotoscoping

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Painting the Earliest Form of Cinema?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Film (1899)

in Film, History, Theatre | August 27th, 2025

At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. The medium soon matured enough to accommodate drama, which for early filmmakers meant simply shooting what amounted to stage productions from the perspective of a viewer in the audience. At that stage, we could say, film still hadn’t evolved past simple documentary purposes, having yet to incorporate editing, to say nothing of the other qualities we now regard as characteristically cinematic. This wasn’t a cultural matter, but a technical one, as evidenced by Momijigari, the oldest Japanese film in existence.

Shot in 1899, Momijigari depicts nearly four minutes of a kabuki play involving Onoe Kikugorō V and Ichikawa Danjūrō IX, two famous masters of the form at the time. The idea was to preserve a record of their presence on stage, no matter how haphazardly or for how short a time, before they shuffled off this mortal coil.

It certainly wasn’t too soon: both men would die in 1903, the year of the film’s first exhibition. No fan of Western modernity, Danjūrō had stipulated that it be shown only after his death, but in the event, it was screened for the public in his place at a performance at which he was too sick to appear, which extended to a longer run in honor of Kikugorō’s recent death.

Like its Western historical equivalents, Momijigari depicts a theatrical work. The titular sixteenth-century Noh play, also performed in kabuki and dance-oriented shosagoto versions, involves a woman and her retinue on an outing to do some maple-leaf viewing (the literal meaning of momijigari). Like all female kabuki roles, these would have been played without exception by male actors, who were in any case thought better able to convey femininity onstage. The lady entices a passing warrior to drink, and when he passes out, he’s informed in his dream that she’s actually a demon. In the following scene, she reverts to demon form and the two do battle. Pioneering Japanese filmmaker Shibata Tsunekichi fits a surprising amount of this narrative into a very brief runtime, which also includes the wholly accidental loss of a fan. Danjūrō had insisted on shooting outside, even on a windy day, and one doesn’t simply say no to a kabuki master.

via Metafilter

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Franz Kafka’s Anxious Letters to His Fiancée, Read Aloud by Richard Ayoade

in History, Letters, Literature | August 26th, 2025

It can’t have been easy being Franz Kafka. But then, it can’t have been much easier being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evidenced by the correspondence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Letters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Monday morning,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on November 4, 1912. “I have been waiting for a letter since 10:30 on Saturday morning, but again nothing has come. I have written every day but don’t I deserve even a word? One single word? Even if it were only to say ‘I never want to hear from you again.’ ” This anxious, hectoring tone was not a one-off indulgence. “Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so?” he pleaded just over two weeks later.

Kafka and Bauer had been introduced three months before. She was a relative of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and eventual literary executor, and according to Kafka’s diaries, made a fairly unprepossessing first impression: “Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it turned out, she by no means was.”

Yet during their ensuing five-year correspondence, he was moved to write her more than 500 letters, some of them sent one day after the other — and more than a few berating her for not writing back quickly enough.

This relationship twice led to engagement, but perhaps unsurprisingly, never culminated in marriage. Nevertheless, Bauer’s relationship with Kafka remained important enough to her that she saved everything he wrote to her, which was collected and published in book form as Briefe an Felice (and later, in translation, as Letters to Felice) in 1967. Perhaps, as burdensome as they could no doubt be, Kafka’s letters suggested to Bauer a certain literary skill. (This was, after all, the same period in which he wrote The Metamorphosis and “In the Penal Colony,” as well as early versions of The Trial). They also hint at his since-celebrated sense of humor, not least in a concluding line like “Damn the mail!” — words that, in Ayoade’s delivery, draw a round of applause.

Related content:

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka

Underground Cartoonist Robert Crumb Creates an Illustrated Introduction to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

David Foster Wallace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Story “A Little Fable” (and Explains Why Comedy Is Key to Kafka)

Behold the Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907–1917)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

in History, Religion | August 25th, 2025

The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evocations of that embodiment of (or perhaps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temptation that many of us have encountered in popular culture have little, if anything, to do with Biblical scripture. Here to explain Satan’s real textual origins is Religion for Breakfast creator Andrew Mark Henry, who in the video above goes all the way back to the ancient Israelites and the Hebrew Bible — in which “the notion of a singular, supreme evil entity and opponent to God is completely absent.”

Henry mentions that the Hebrew term śāṭān, which means “adversary or accuser,” does appear early in the Bible, but it “simply refers to human adversaries.” Only in later texts, like the Book of Job, does the word take on the meaning of a “divine job title, kind of like a prosecutor” or “legal adversary in a divine court.”

We’re still far from the current Christian concept of Satan, which may eventually have arisen, according to some scholars, out of centuries of cultural exchange between Christianity and Zoroastrianism. The ancient Middle Eastern religion proposes a perfectly good divine being Ahura Mazda “locked in battle with a wholly evil being named Angra Mainyu.” This encounter between civilizations would explain something about the emergence of the now widely acknowledged idea of “a cosmic struggle between good and evil.”

As one ancient text is layered atop another, “an evil leader of fallen angels or evil spirit in general becomes a recurring character,” and in the New Testament, “the chief adversary of God” is called by the name Satan — or by the Greek word diábolos, which gave us Devil and all its related words. In reference to the origins of Satan, the Book of Isaiah offers the line “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, Son of Dawn!” The term “Day Star,” which refers to the planet Venus, was rendered in the Latin Vulgate translation as Lucifer, which has become another common name for this ever-more-charged figure. Whether we fear him, condemn him, deny his existence, or even — depending on our musical genres of choice — imagine that we worship him, our culture does, in some sense or another, seem to need him.

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Manuscript in the World

The Legend of How Bluesman Robert Johnson Sold His Soul to the Devil at the Crossroads

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966

Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn & Twain Himself Meet Satan in the Zany 1985 Claymation The Adventures of Mark Twain

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Did Paul McCartney Really Die in 1966? How the Biggest Beatles Conspiracy Theory Spread

in History, Music | August 22nd, 2025

No pop music can have inspired more scrutiny than that of the Beatles. Of course, intense and sustained attention has been paid to every aspect of the band’s existence — and, in the case of Paul McCartney, his purported non-existence as well. The theory that he actually died in the nineteen-sixties and was thereafter secretly played by a double has demonstrated such pop-cultural staying power that even those who barely know the Beatles’ music make reference to it. The phrase “Turn me on, dead man” now floats free of its origin, an act of creative listening applied to “Revolution 9” played backwards.

The idea, as explained in the Vinyl Rewind video above, is that “after an argument during a Beatles recording session on November 9th, 1966, Paul McCartney sped off in his car, only to be decapitated in an auto accident when he lost control of his vehicle. The U.K. security service MI5 advised the band to find a replacement, for they feared that if the news of Paul’s death got out, mass hysteria would spread among Beatles fans, leading to civil unrest and, possibly, mass suicide.” The hunt for a Paul lookalike turned up “a Scottish orphan named William Shears Campbell, also known as Billy Shears.”

That name will sound familiar to even casual Beatles listeners, announced as it is so prominently, and so early, on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album’s cover, too, proved to be a fount of imagery suggesting that the rumor of Paul’s death, which had been referenced in an official Beatles publication in 1967 specifically to dispel it, was actually true. A couple of years later, a Detroit radio DJ and a University of Michigan student-journalist got the story into wide circulation. No one clue — the recurring shoelessness of Paul or his impersonator, the death-of-Oswald lines from King Lear incorporated into “I Am the Walrus,” the car wreck described in “A Day in the Life,” the license-plate of the VW on Abbey Road’s cover — was dispositive, but eventually, they added up.

They added up if you were expressly looking for evidence of Paul’s death and substitution: engaging in pareidolia, in other words, the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random noise, or in this case a range of minor, non-orchestrated details across pieces of media. Given the Beatles’ personalities, nobody would put it past them to make cheeky hidden references to exactly what they weren’t supposed to talk about, but anyone familiar with the music business would also suspect that Capitol Records had no interest in putting a stop to a false rumor that was generating a profit. It’s certainly a stretch to imagine that someone who just happens to look like Paul McCartney would also be willing and able to carry on the man’s solo career for decade after decade. But then, the history of popular music is full of lucky men, and maybe — just maybe — Billy Shears was among the luckiest.

Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Questions in Two New Videos

The Paul McCartney is Dead Conspiracy Theory, Explained

Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

Hear The Beatles’ Abbey Road with Only Paul McCartney’s Bass: You Won’t Believe How Good It Sounds

Paul McCartney Admits to Dropping Acid in a Scrappy Interview with a Prying Reporter (June, 1967)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object That Has Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries

in History | August 21st, 2025

There isn’t much place for dodecahedra in modern life, at least in those modern lives with tabletop role-playing. In the ancient Roman Empire, however, those shapes seem to have been practically household objects — not that we know what the household would have done with them. Thus far, well over 100 similarly designed copper-alloy second-to-fourth-century artifacts labeled “Roman dodecahedra” have been discovered: the first was unearthed in 1739, and the most recent just two years ago. With their complex structure, knobbed corners, and (in some cases) surface designs, their construction would have required a skilled metalworker. Perhaps they were the result of professional examination, premised on the idea that a man who can make a proper dodecahedron can make anything.

That’s one theory, if only one of many. In the video above, Joe Scott goes over a variety of them, explaining why amateurs and experts alike have proposed that the Roman dodecahedron was everything from a military rangefinder to a sundial calendar to a decoder to a measuring device to a coin validator to a ritualistic amulet to a “Roman fidget spinner.”

One particularly compelling explanation holds that it was an aid for a chain-making technique called “Viking knitting,” which would at least make sense given that all extant examples have come from northern Europe. Yes, no Roman dodecahedron has ever been found in Rome, or even in the whole of Italy, and that’s far from the most confusing fact about these still-mysterious objects.

The proposition that the Roman dodecahedron was a knitting aid, especially if it was used for making chain, is undercut by the lack of wear on all known examples. Military or technical applications are also made somewhat implausible by the absence of numerals or other markings. While some Roman dodecahedra have been dug up from army camps, many more came from the tombs of upper-class women, suggesting that they had more value as a status symbol than a practical tool. Most bewildering of all is the fact that no texts or images from the period make any reference to the things, which Scott takes as evidence for their being so common as not to merit discussion — much like, say, the icebox doors or telephone shelves built into nineteenth and early twentieth-century houses. At this point, can we really rule out the notion that the Romans made them as a prank on the far-future inheritors of their civilization?

How the Ancient Greeks Invented the First Computer: An Introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism (Circa 87 BC)

Discover the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Torture Machine That Doubled as a Musical Instrument

The “Dark Relics” of Christianity: Preserved Skulls, Blood & Other Grim Artifacts

Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

21 Rules for Living from Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s Samurai Philosopher (1584–1645)

in History, Philosophy | August 20th, 2025

Browse the ever-vaster selection of self-help books, videos, podcasts, and social-media accounts on offer today, and you’ll find no shortage of prescriptions for how to live. Much of what the gurus of the twenty-twenties have to say sounds awfully similar, and almost as much may seem contradictory. As in so many fields of human endeavor, the best strategy could be to look to the classics first, and as rules for living go, few have stood more of a test of time than the 21 principles of Dokkōdō, or “The Path of Aloneness,” written by the seventeenth-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, who’s said to have fought 62 duels and won them all.

Whatever the actual number was, Miyamoto clearly knew something that most of his opponents didn’t — and for that matter, something that most of us today probably don’t either. It was at the very end of his 60-year-long life, about which you can learn more from the videos from Pursuit of Wonder above and Einzelgänger below, that this most famous of all samurai condensed his wisdom into the principles of Dokkōdō, which are as follows:

Accept everything just the way it is.
Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
Be detached from desire your whole life long.
Do not regret what you have done.
Never be jealous.
Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
In all things have no preferences.
Be indifferent to where you live.
Do not pursue the taste of good food.
Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
Do not act following customary beliefs.
Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
Do not fear death.
Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.
Never stray from the Way.

The reference to Buddha in principle #19 may not come as a surprise, given how rich this list is with apparently Buddhist themes: relinquishment of desire, release of attachments, acceptance of the inevitable. There are also resonances with contemporary texts on the art of living produced by civilizations well outside Asia: Spanish Jesuit priest Baltasar Gracían’s Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (or The Art of Worldly Wisdom), for instance, which was first published just two years after the principles of Dokkōdō.

You might also sense much in common between Miyamoto’s worldview and that of the Stoics, who were laying down their own precepts fifteen or sixteen centuries earlier. Each in his own way, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca reached a form of the same understanding that Miyamoto did: that we must first, as he himself puts it, “accept everything just the way it is.” We may devote our lives to satisfying our preferences, but both the Stoics and the samurai knew that, as Pursuit of Wonder’s narrator puts it, “it is our ability to shift with a world that regularly opposes our preferences that enhances the quality of our experience.” Among Miyamoto’s distinctive contributions is his emphasis on focus: that is, “clear intent, devoted attention, emotional control, perceptiveness, and a kind of mental emptiness and adaptability”: all qualities that, having just last week become a father of two, I’d surely do well to start cultivating in myself.

What Is Stoicism? A Short Introduction to the Ancient Philosophy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Modern Times

How to Be a Stoic in Your Everyday Life: Philosophy Professor Massimo Pigliucci Explains

A Mischievous Samurai Describes His Rough-and-Tumble Life in 19th Century Japan

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years

The 1830s Device That Created the First Animations: The Phenakistiscope

Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Film (1899)

Franz Kafka’s Anxious Letters to His Fiancée, Read Aloud by Richard Ayoade

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

Did Paul McCartney Really Die in 1966? How the Biggest Beatles Conspiracy Theory Spread

The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object That Has Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries

21 Rules for Living from Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s Samurai Philosopher (1584–1645)

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