The Sistine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Collection Features Remarkable High-Resolution Views of the Murals of Michelangelo, Botticelli & Other Renaissance Masters

in Art, Books, History, Religion | April 22nd, 2022

Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Having considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter — and, given his skill with stone, not without cause — he felt that taking on such an ambitious project could bring him to ruin. But one does not simply turn down a job offer from the Vatican, and especially not when one is among the most respected artists in sixteenth-century Italy. In the event, Michelangelo proved equal to the task, or rather, much more than equal: he completed his ceiling frescoes in 1512 for Pope Julius II, and 23 years later was commissioned again by Pope Paul III to paint the Last Judgment over the altar.

Long before Michelangelo touched a brush to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, a team of painters including Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, and Pinturicchio had already adorned the building’s interior with frescoes depicting the lives of Moses and Jesus Christ.

Taken together, the Sistine Chapel has long been regarded as one of the greatest achievements in Western art, if not the greatest of them all. Hence the six million tourists who visited it each year before COVID-19; hence, more recently, the painstaking care that has gone into the production of The Sistine Chapel, a three-volume at-book set that brings the building’s Biblical visions as close as any earthly reader cold hope to see them.

The fruit of a half-decade-long collaboration between the Vatican and two publishers, Callaway Arts & Entertainment and Scripta Maneant, The Sistine Chapel demanded 65 nights of consecutive work from its photographers, who shot 270,000 high-resolution images. Capturing the masterworks on the walls and ceiling down to the textures of their paint and brushstrokes necessitated climbing up on scaffolding, just as Michelangelo himself famously did to make his contributions in the first place. Limited by the Vatican to a print run of 1,999 copies, the set is now available for purchase at AbeBooks, though it will cost you $22,000. In a sense that’s a small price to pay, for as Goethe put it, “without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.” Find The Sistine Chapel book collection here.

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New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures

Michelangelo’s Handwritten 16th-Century Grocery List

The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients: Archaeologists Discover 8 Miles of Art Painted on Rock Walls in the Amazon

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

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

The Library of Esoterica: Taschen’s Visual History of Tarot, Astrology & Witchcraft

in Art, Books, Religion | April 18th, 2022

Generations and generations of Americans dissatisfied with life in their hometowns have acted on the same migratory impulse: to go west. Many have done so in order to make their fortunes, but a fair few have been seeking varieties of satisfaction altogether less tangible. In the human spirt in general and the American spirit in particular, there is a yearning for “secret knowledge” of reality’s hidden workings. Those whose spirits most yearn for that knowledge tend to end up in California, the logical end of American civilization. There they’ve found vibrant communities of yogis, spiritualists, Aenerians, theosophists, healers, Unarians, alchemists, Rosicrucians, witches, tarot readers, astrologers… the list goes on.

More recently, California has also been home to Taschen’s American headquarters, the acclaimed publishers of lavishly produced books on art and culture with no compunction about exploring the fringes of human experience. A couple of years ago we featured their visual history of tarot Divine Decks here on Open Culture; now they’ve put out a three-volume coffee-table Library of Esoterica that includes books on not just tarot but astrology and witchcraft as well.

Assembled and designed to Taschen’s usual aesthetically painstaking standard, the set comes edited by writer and filmmaker Jessica Hundley, who used the opportunity to open the most “inclusive and seductive way into these practices, which is through the art” they’ve inspired.

That’s what she told Los Angeles Times’ Steffie Nelson, who writes that “Hundley has been fascinated by alternative spiritualities and the occult since she was a goth-punk teenager on the East Coast.” Later she moved to Los Angeles, “drawn to the city’s legacy of esoteric exploration and its renown as a place where dreams are made manifest and identity is mutable.” This project’s worldwide search for art and other materials related to these fields of esoterica began at Los Angeles’ own Philosophical Research Society, founded in the nineteen-thirties by mystic Manly P. Hall. With its richly reproduced imagery and accompanying explanatory essays, the Library of Esoterica offers a reading experience liable to open anyone’s doors of perception. The age of Aquarius may be over, but there’s a seeker born every minute.

The Library of Esoterica can be purchased as a complete collection. Or you can purchase separate installments on Astrology, Tarot and Witchcraft.

The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

Exquisite Watercolors of Demons, Magic & Signs: Behold the Compendium Of Demonology and Magic from 1775

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World Documents the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Mountaineer

Watch Häxan, the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1922)

Atheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

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

A Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse

in Religion | April 4th, 2022

The Book of Revelation is a strong competitor for weirdest text in all of ancient literature. Or, at least, it is “the strangest and most disturbing book in the whole Bible,” says the narrator of the video above from a channel called hochelaga, which features “obscure topics that deserve more attention.” Most of these are supernatural or religious in nature. But if you’re looking for a religious or theological interpretation of St. John of Patmos’ bizarre prophetic vision, look elsewhere. The examination above proceeds “from a secular, non-religious perspective.”

Instead, we’re promised a survival guide in the unlikely (but who knows, right) event that the prophecy comes true. But what, exactly, would that look like? Revelation is “highly symbolic” and very “non-literal.” The meanings of its symbols are rather inscrutable and have seemed to shift and change each century, depending on how its interpreters wanted to use it to forward agendas of their own.

This has, of course, been no less true in the 20th and 21st centuries. If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, for example, you were bound to have come across the works of Hal Lindsay – author of The Late Great Planet Earth (turned into a 1977 film narrated by Orson Welles). And if you lived through the 1990s, you surely heard of his entertaining successors: the bloody-minded Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

The Apocalypse has been big business in publishing and other media for 50 plus years now. Revelation itself is an incredibly obscure book, but the use of its language and imagery for profit and proselyting “made the Apocalypse a popular concern,” as Erin A. Smith writes for Humanities. Lindsay’s book sold both as religious fact and science fiction, a genre later evangelical writers like LaHaye and Jenkins exploited on purpose. The influence has always gone both ways. “A kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing about our current world,” Paul Boyer, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tells PBS.

Whether it’s a discussion of climate catastrophe, viral pandemic, economic collapse, the rise of artificial intelligence, or civil strife and international warfare, the apocalyptic metaphors stack up in our imaginations, often without us even noticing. Get to know one of their primary sources in the video introduction to Revelation just above.

Christianity Through Its Scriptures: A Free Course from Harvard University

Free Online Religion Courses

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

17th-Century Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate: How “Buddhist Emoji” Made the Sūtra Legible for Those Who Couldn’t Read

in Books, History, Language, Religion | February 1st, 2022

Even with 21st-century teaching aids, the written Japanese language isn’t the sort of thing one picks up in a few weeks’ study. A few hundred years ago it would’ve been much more difficult still, especially for those engaged in learning the sūtras or scriptures of Buddhism. “The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early modern era,” writes The Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, “with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sūtra recitation (dokyō) becoming an art form in the following century.” Imported from India and rewritten in classical Chinese with few clues as to how its words should actually be spoken, the Buddhist canon of east Asia set a mighty challenge even before the perfectly literate.

As for the illiterate — of whom, in complete contrast to modern-day Japan, there were many — what chance did they stand? Salvation, or at any rate a chance at salvation, arrived in the 17th century in the form of texts written just for them. “Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sūtras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language,” writes Dukes. “The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable.” Geared toward an agricultural “readership,” this system drew its imagery from what they knew: farming tools, domestic animals, and even figures of myth.

The sections here come from a 20th-century example of this type of publication, variously Mekura-kyō or Monmō-kyō, held by the British Library. It contains a rendition of the text of the Heart Sūtra, the most widely known piece of scripture in the canon of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and as the Kyoto National Musem’s Eikei Akao puts it, “probably the best-known, most well-loved sutra in Japan.” (You may also remember the 37-minute version performed by beatboxing Buddhist monk Yogetsu Akasaka, which we previously featured here on Open Culture.) Not long ago, the United States Library of Congress posted this Heart Sūtra for the illiterate to its Facebook page. The occasion? World Emoji Day.

“Because these pictures represent sounds, rather than objects or ideas, they don’t really act as pictograms the way emoji do,” admits the writer of the Library of Congress’ post. “But in their icon-like appearance, succinct and functional, they do bear a resemblance to our use of emoji today.” It was then reblogged on Language Log, one of whose commenters offered some explanation of the system as seen in the pictures: “The Sanskrit phrase ‘Prajñāpāramitā’ is rendered ‘Hannyaharamita’ in Japanese. ‘Hannya’ here is written with a drawing of the hannya demon mask from Noh. ‘Harami’ appears to be a picture of a body (mi) in an abdomen (hara), and then ‘ta’ is a picture of a ricefield (tanbo, the “ta” of many Japanese names, like Tanaka and Toyota).” Hands have been wringing about the potential of internet communication to deliver us into a “post-literate” society; perhaps these curious chapters in the history of the Japanese language show us where to go from there.

via The Public Domain Review

Related contrast:

Download 280 Pictographs That Put Japanese Culture Into a New Visual Language: They’re Free for the Public to Use

Breathtakingly Detailed Tibetan Book Printed 40 Years Before the Gutenberg Bible

The World’s Largest Collection of Tibetan Buddhist Literature Now Online

The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online

One of the Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts Has Been Digitized & Put Online: Explore the Gandhara Scroll

A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

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

A Brief Animated History of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses & the Reformation–Which Changed Europe and Later the World

in Animation, History, Religion | January 31st, 2022

Whatever our religious background, we all sooner or later have occasion to speak of nailing theses to a door. Most of us use the phrase as a metaphor, but seldom entirely without awareness of the historical events that inspired it. On October 31, 1517, a German priest and theologian named Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church his own theses, 95 of them, which collectively made an argument against the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, or pardons for sins. Luther could not accept that the poor should “spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven,” nor that it should be “easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory.”

In other words, Luther believed that the Church in his time had become “way too much about money and too little about God,” according to the narration of the short film above. Created by Tumblehead Studios and showcased by National Geographic for the 500th anniversary of the original thesis-nailing, its five playfully animated minutes tell the story of the Reformation, which saw Protestantism split off from Catholicism as a result of Luther’s agitation. It also manages to include such events as Luther’s own translation of the New Testament, previously available only in Greek and Latin, into his native German, the publication of which created the basis of the modern German language as spoken and written today.

Luther’s translation gave ordinary people “the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language,” free from the interpretations of the priests and the Church. It also gave them, perhaps less intentionally, the ability to “use the words of the Bible as an argument for all sorts of things.” Luther’s thoughts were soon marshaled “in the power struggles of princes, in revolts, and in the struggle between kings, princes, and the Pope about who actually decides what.” Squabbles, battles, and full-scale wars ensued. The consequent institutional schisms changed the world in ways visible half a millennium later — but they first changed Europe, where traces of that transformation still reveal themselves most strikingly. Few travelers can be trusted to find and explain those traces more ably than public-television host Rick Steves.

In Luther and the Reformation, his 2017 special above, Steves visits all the important sites involved in the central figure’s life journey, a representation in microcosm of Europe’s grand shift from medievalism into modernity. In more than 40 years of professional travel, Steves has paid countless visits to the monuments of Catholic Europe. Appreciating them, he admitted in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, required him to “park my Protestant sword at the door.” His story-of-the-Reformation tour, however, lets him draw on his own Lutheran tradition with his characteristic enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, in part, that has made him a such a successful travel entrepreneur, though he presumably knows when to stop amassing wealth: after all, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Or so the New Testament has it.

60-Second Adventures in Religion: Watch New Animations by The Open University

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Christianity Through Its Scriptures: A Free Course from Harvard University

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 11 Seasons of America’s Favorite Traveler Free Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

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

100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)

in History, Literature, Religion | September 6th, 2021

This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death — which means it also marks the 701st anniversary of his great work the Divina Commedia, known in English as the Divine Comedy. We’ve all got to go some time, and it’s somehow suitable that Dante went not long after telling the tale of his own journey through the afterlife, complete with stops in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It remains a journey we can all take and re-take — and interpretively grapple with — still these seven centuries later. Starting this month, you can take it as a group tour, so to speak, by joining 100 Days of Dante, the largest Dante reading group in the world.

A project of Baylor University’s Honors College (with support from several other American educational institutions), 100 Days of Dante has launched a web site “through which modern seekers and pilgrims can follow the great epic poem with free video presentations three times a week.”

So writes Aleteia’s John Burger, who explains that “the three books of the Divine Comedy, known in Italian as Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, are divided into 33 chapters known as cantos. [Inferno actually had 34.] Each video will present one canto, with commentary on it from leading experts in Dante studies.” You can also read the entire work on 100 Days of Dante’s web site, in English or Italian — a language Dante’s own poetry did much to shape.

Nobody interested in the language of Italy, let alone the country’s history and culture, can do without experiencing the Divine Comedy. One of 100 Days of Dante’s aims is a re-emphasis of its nature as a thoroughly religious work, one that renders in vivid, sometimes harrowing detail the worldview held by Christians of Dante’s place and time. But believer or otherwise, you can join in the reading from when it begins on September 8, to when it concludes on Easter 2022. You may well find, as the long Italy-resident English writer and translator Tim Parks observes, that Dante has a way of slipping through convenient interpretative frameworks cultural, historical, and even religious. “Long after the fires of Hell have burned themselves out,” he writes, “the debate about the Divina Commedia rages on.” Find more educational resources on Dante and The Divine Comedy below.

An Illustrated and Interactive Dante’s Inferno: Explore a New Digital Companion to the Great 14th-Century Epic Poem

A Digital Archive of the Earliest Illustrated Editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487–1568)

Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today

Explore Divine Comedy Digital, a New Digital Database That Collects Seven Centuries of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Comedy? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages

in Books, History, Religion | August 26th, 2021

I’ve concluded that one shouldn’t lend a book unless one is prepared to part with it for good. But most books are fairly easy to replace. Not so in the Middle Ages, when every manuscript counted as one of a kind. Theft was often on the minds of the scribes who copied and illustrated books, a laborious task requiring literal hours of blood, sweat and tears each day.

Scribal copying took place “only by natural light — candles were too big a risk to the books,” Sarah Laskow writes at Atlas Obscura. Bent over double, scribes could not let their attention wander. The art, one scribe complained, “extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”

The results deserved high security, and Medieval monks “did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew” for manuscript theft, writes Laskow, namely threats of “excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death.”

Theft deterrence came in the form of ingenious curses, written into the manuscripts themselves, going “back to the 7th century BCE,” Rebecca Romney writes at Mental Floss. Appearing “in Latin, vernacular European languages, Arabic, Greek, and more,” they came in such creative flavors as death by roasting, as in a Bible copied in Germany around 1172: “If anyone steals it: may he die, may he be roasted in a frying pan, may the falling sickness [epilepsy] and fever attack him, and may he be rotated [on the breaking wheel] and hanged. Amen.”

A few hundred years later, a manuscript curse from 15th-century France also promises roasting, or worse:

Whoever steals this book
Will hang on a gallows in Paris,
And, if he isn’t hung, he’ll drown,
And, if he doesn’t drown, he’ll roast,
And, if he doesn’t roast, a worse end will befall him.

The plucking out of eyes also appears to have been a theme. “Whoever to steal this volume tries, Out with his eyes, out with his eyes!” warns the final couplet in a 13th-century curse from a Vatican Library manuscript. Another curse in verse, found by author Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses, gets especially graphic with the eye gouging:

To steal this book, if you should try,
It’s by the throat you’ll hang high.
And ravens then will gather ’bout
To find your eyes and pull them out.
And when you’re screaming ‘oh, oh, oh!’
Remember, you deserved this woe.

The hoped-for consequences were not always so grimly humorous. “Gruesome as these punishments seem,” the British Library writes, “to most medieval readers the worst curses were those that put the eternal fate of their souls at risk rather than their bodily health.” These would often be marked with the Greek word “Anathema,” sometimes “followed by the Aramaic formula ‘Maranatha’ (‘Come, Lord!’).” Both appear in a curse added to a manuscript of letters and sermons from Lesnes Abbey. Yet, unlike most medieval curses, here the thief is given a chance to make restitution. “Anyone who removes it or does damage to it: if the same person does not repay the church sufficiently, may he be cursed.”

Curses were not the only security solutions of manuscript culture. Medieval monks also used book chains and locked chests to secure the fruit of their hard labor. As the old saying goes, “trust in God, but tie your camel.” But if locks and divine providence should fail, scribes trusted that the fear of punishment – even eternal damnation — down the road would be enough to make would-be book thieves think again.

The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the University of Colorado

Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

in Religion, Science | August 13th, 2021

Some public intellectuals associated with science court disagreement with religious believers; others cultivate suites of rhetorical techniques expressly in order to avoid it. While Carl Sagan didn’t shrink from, say, debating a creationist on talk radio, he always engaged with characteristic aplomb. But dealing with belligerent callers-in is easier, in a way, than responding to an earnest, straightforwardly expressed curiosity about one’s own religious beliefs. In the Q&A clip above, taken from his 1994 “lost lecture,” Sagan receives just such a question: “What is your personal religion? Is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a purpose, given that we’re just sitting on this speck in the middle of this sea of stars?”

“Now, I don’t want to duck any questions,” Sagan replies, “and I’m not going to duck this one.” Nevertheless, he requests a trifling clarification: “What do you mean when you use the word God?” Pressed by none other than Carl Sagan to define God, few of us would presumably hold up well.

Here the questioner changes his angle, drawing on Sagan’s own definition in Pale Blue Dot of the “Great Demotions,” those “down-lifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo’s facts, delivered to human pride.” And so, “given all these demotions,” the man asks, “why don’t we just blow ourselves up?”

“If we do blow ourselves up,” Sagan asks, “does that disprove the existence of God?” This is an intriguing reversal, but Sagan doesn’t simply reply to questions with questions. Scientific knowledge increasingly leaves us “on our own,” he says, which is a state “much more responsible than hoping someone will save us from ourselves.” What if we’re wrong, and a deity does indeed step in to save us? “Okay, that’s all right, I’m for that; we, you know, hedged our bets. It Pascal’s bargain run backwards.” The problem lies with God itself, “a word so ambiguous, that means so many different things,” and one used “to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree.” Despite its importance, not least for “social lubrication,” no term can be useful to truth that encompasses so many different personal conceptions — billions and billions of them, one might say.

Hear Carl Sagan Artfully Refute a Creationist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Darwinian Concept of Evolution is Profoundly Verified”

Carl Sagan Explains Evolution in an Eight-Minute Animation

Ted Turner Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Socialist?;” Sagan Responds Thoughtfully (1989)

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Sistine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Collection Features Remarkable High-Resolution Views of the Murals of Michelangelo, Botticelli & Other Renaissance Masters

The Library of Esoterica: Taschen’s Visual History of Tarot, Astrology & Witchcraft

A Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse

17th-Century Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate: How “Buddhist Emoji” Made the Sūtra Legible for Those Who Couldn’t Read

A Brief Animated History of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses & the Reformation–Which Changed Europe and Later the World

100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)

Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages

Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

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