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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
It gets dark before dinner now in my part of the world, a recipe for seasonal depression. Vincent van Gogh wrote about such low feelings with deep insight. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Yet, when he looked up at the night sky he saw not darkness but blazing light: a full moon shines yellow from White House at Night like the sun, and peeks like a gold coin from behind blue mountains in Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon. The stars in Starry Night Over the Rhône appear like fireworks. We are all familiar with the blazing night sky of its sequel, The Starry Night.
It’s been suggested that Van Gogh saw halos of light because of lead poisoning from his paint, and that the Digitalis Dr. Gachet prescribed for his temporal lobe epilepsy caused him to “see in yellow,” the Van Gogh Gallery Blog writes, “or see yellow spots which could explain van Gogh’s consistent use of the color yellow in his later works.”
His most brilliant works date from this later period, during his time at the hospital at Arles, where he painted his famous bedroom. All of these paintings, and hundreds more, can be found in high-resolution scans at the new van Gogh resource, Van Gogh Worldwide, “a consortium of museums,” notes Madeleine Muzdakis at My Modern Met, “doing their part to bring the work of one of the world’s most famous artists to the global masses.”
The museums represented here are all in the Netherlands and include the Van Gogh Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Van Gogh was not only a prolific painter, of shining night scenes and otherwise, but he was “also a prolific sketch artist. His pencil and paper drawings are worth exploration; they depict landscapes as well as emotive figures from Van Gogh’s everyday life. Van Gogh Worldwide provides insight into these works of art and the artist behind them. One can also find behind-the-scenes museum information, such as details of restorations, verso (back) images, and other curatorial notes.”
Van Gogh Worldwide expands other digital collections like the Van Gogh Museum’s almost 1,000 online works. Where that resource includes short informational articles and links to literature about the artworks, Van Gogh Worldwide does not, as yet, feature such additional materials, but it does include links to Van Gogh’s letters. In one of them, he writes to his brother, Theo, about their parents: “They’ll find it difficult to understand my state of mind, and not know what drives me when they see me do things that seem strange and peculiar to them—will blame them on dissatisfaction, indifference or nonchalance, while the cause lies elsewhere, namely the desire, at all costs, to pursue what I must have for my work.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of our prehistory, religious beliefs and practices were largely localized, confined to the territorial or tribal boundaries of individual groups.
For people groups in the British Isles a thousand years ago, for example, the Levant may as well have been another planet. How is it that Britain became a few hundred years later one of the most zealously global evangelizers of a religion from Palestine? How is it that an Indian sect, Buddhism, which supposedly began with one man sometime in the 5th Century B.C.E., became the dominant religion in all of Asia just a few hundred years later?
Answering such questions in detail is the business of professional historians. But we know the broad outlines: the world’s major religions spread through imperial conquest and forced conversion; through cultural exchange of ideas and the adaptation of far-off beliefs to local customs, practices, and rituals; through migrant and diaspora communities moving across the globe. We know religions traveled back and forth through trade routes over land and sea and were transmitted by the painstaking translation and copying by hand dense, lengthy scriptures.
All of these movements are also the movements of the modern globalized world, a construct that began taking shape a few thousand years ago. The spread of the “Big 5” religions corresponds with the shifting of masses of humans around the globe as they formed the interconnections that now bind us all tightly together, whether we like it or not.
In the animated map above from Business Insider, you can watch the movement of these five faiths over the course of 5,000 years and see in the span of a little over two minutes how the modern world took shape. And you might find yourself wondering: what will such a map look like in another 5,000 years? Or in 500? Will these global religions all meld into one? Will they wither away? Will they splinter into thousands? Our speculations reveal much about what we think will happen to humanity in the future.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
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 Metamorphosisand “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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Why these books? Though written for the general public, The Problems of Philosophy has also proven useful to Henderson in teaching introductory courses, not least thanks to Russell’s eloquent defense of philosophical study itself. Think, a more recently written broad survey, “introduces you to some topics that almost everyone is interested in: free will, the problems of knowledge and rationality, the existence of God, the existence of the self, the problems of ethics.” And given the scope of Plato’s writings, if you carefully read through them all, you’ll be “a remarkably different person at the end of that process.”
The name of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman Empire in the middle of the second century, has lately become an even better-known than it already was thanks to a resurgence of public interest in Stoicism. Henderson recommends his Meditations as an example of “philosophy as a way of life.” In the Confessions, Augustine blends “poetry, theology, and philosophy in a really compelling way,” dealing with such matters as “the nature of time,” “motivation and the will” and “the metaphysics of evil.” Descartes’ Meditations offers not just a primer on skepticism, but also the contest for the famous line “I think, therefore I am.” Mill’s On Liberty opens the path to trace modern, much-thrown-around political notions (including the titular one) back to their sources.
These books, as Henderson stresses, constitute a starting point, not a goal in themselves. Read them, and you’ll get a much clearer sense of what philosophy deals with, but also where your own philosophical interests lie. The field has a long history, after all, and in that time it has grown so vast that no one, no matter how seriously dedicated, can walk all of its intellectual paths. Whatever the particular realm of philosophy to which your inclinations take you, don’t be surprised if you find yourself revisiting these very same books time and again. Nobody ever truly masters Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, or Mill, and on some level, philosophy itself keeps its practitioners eternal novices. The important thing is to cultivate and maintain what the Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind” — but then, that’s a whole other branch of philosophy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
The story of the Globe Theatre, the ancestral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shakespearean, in all of the ways we use that adjective: it has deep roots in English history, a tragic backstory, and represents all of the hodgepodge of London, in the early 17th century and today, with the city’s colorful street life, mingling of international cultures, high and low, and its delight in the play and interplay of languages.
“The first public playhouses,” notes the British Library, “were built in London in the late 1500s. Theatres were not permitted within the boundaries of the City itself”—theater not being considered a respectable art—”but were tolerated in the outer districts of London, such as Southwark, where the Globe was located. Southwark was notorious for its noisy, chaotic entertainments and for its sleazy low-life: its theatres, brothels, bear baiting pits, pickpockets and the like.”
The Globe began its life in 1599, in a story that “might be worthy,” writes the Shakespeare Resource Center, “of a Shakespearean play of its own.” Built from the timbers of the city’s first permanent theater, the Burbage, which opened in 1576, the Globe burned down in 1613 “when a cannon shot during a performance of Henry VIII ignited the thatched roof in the gallery.” Within the year, it was rebuilt on the same foundations (with a tiled roof) and operated until the Puritans shut it down in 1642, demolishing the famed open-air theater two years later.
In a twist to this so far very English tale, it took the tireless efforts of an expatriate American, actor-director Sam Wanamaker, to bring the Globe back to London. After more than two decades of advocacy, Wanamaker’s Globe Playhouse Trust succeeded in recreating the Globe, just a short distance from the original location. Opening in 1997, three-hundred and fifty-five years after the first Globe closed, the new Globe Theatre recreated all of the original’s architectural elements.
The stage projects into the circular courtyard, designed for standing spectators and surrounded by three tiers of seats. While the stage itself has an elaborate painted roof, and the seating is protected from the weather by the only thatched roof in London since the 1666 Great Fire, the theater’s courtyard is open to the sky. However, where the original Globe held about 2,000 standing and 1,000 seated playgoers, the recreation, notes Time Out London, holds only about half that number.
Still, theater-goers can “get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the standing rabble at the front of the stage) in the circular, open-air theatre.” Short of that, we can tour the Globe in the virtual recreation at the top of the post. Move around in any direction and look up at the sky. As you do, click on the tiny circles to reveal facts such as “Probably the first Shakespeare play to be performed at the Globe was Julius Caesar, in 1599.”
If you don’t have the luxury of visiting the new Globe, taking a tour, or seeing a performance lovingly-recreated with all of the costuming (and even pronunciation) from Jacobean England, you can get the flavor of this wondrous achievement in bringing cultural history into the present with the virtual tour, also available as an app for iPhone and iPad users. This interactive tour supersedes a previous version we featured a few years back.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, but none have made such an indelible stamp on our collective imagination as the Frenchman Gustave Doré.
Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decided to create a series of engravings for a deluxe edition of Dante’s classic. He was already the highest-paid illustrator in France, with popular editions of Rabelais and Balzac under his belt, but Doré was unable to convince his publisher, Louis Hachette, to finance such an ambitious and expensive project. The young artist decided to pay the publishing costs for the first book himself. When the illustrated Inferno came out in 1861, it sold out fast. Hachette summoned Doré back to his office with a telegram: “Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!”
Hachette published Purgatorio and Paradiso as a single volume in 1868. Since then, Doré’s Divine Comedy has appeared in hundreds of editions. Although he went on to illustrate a great many other literary works, from the Bible to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Doré is perhaps best remembered for his depictions of Dante. At The World of Dante, art historian Aida Audeh writes:
Characterized by an eclectic mix of Michelangelesque nudes, northern traditions of sublime landscape, and elements of popular culture, Doré’s Dante illustrations were considered among his crowning achievements — a perfect match of the artist’s skill and the poet’s vivid visual imagination. As one critic wrote in 1861 upon publication of the illustrated Inferno: “we are inclined to believe that the conception and the interpretation come from the same source, that Dante and Gustave Doré are communicating by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this Hell plowed by their souls, traveled, explored by them in every sense.”
The scene above is from Canto X of the Inferno. Dante and his guide, Virgil, are passing through the Sixth Circle of Hell, in a place reserved for the souls of heretics, when they look down and see the imposing figure of Farinata degli Uberti, a Tuscan nobleman who had agreed with Epicurus that the soul dies with the body, rising up from an open grave. In the translation by John Ciardi, Dante writes:
My eyes were fixed on him already. Erect, he rose above the flame, great chest, great brow; he seemed to hold all Hell in disrespect
Inferno, Canto XVI:
As Dante and Virgil prepare to leave Circle Seven, they are met by the fearsome figure of Geryon, Monster of Fraud.Virgil arranges for Geryon to fly them down to Circle Eight. He climbs onto the monster’s back and instructs Dante to do the same.
Then he called out: “Now, Geryon, we are ready: bear well in mind that his is living weight and make your circles wide and your flight steady.”
As a small ship slides from a beaching or its pier, backward, backward — so that monster slipped back from the rim. And when he had drawn clear
he swung about, and stretching out his tail he worked it like an eel, and with his paws he gathered in the air, while I turned pale.
Inferno, Canto XXXIV:
In the Ninth Circle of Hell, at the very center of the Earth, Dante and Virgil encounter the gigantic figure of Satan. As Ciardi writes in his commentary:
He is fixed into the ice at the center to which flow all the rivers of guilt; and as he beats his great wings as if to escape, their icy wind only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice. In a grotesque parody of the Trinity, he has three faces, each a different color, and in each mouth he clamps a sinner whom he rips eternally with his teeth. Judas Iscariot is in the central mouth: Brutus and Cassius in the mouths on either side.
Purgatorio, Canto II:
At dawn on Easter Sunday, Dante and Virgil have just emerged from Hell when they witness The Angel Boatman speeding a new group of souls to the shore of Purgatory.
Then as that bird of heaven closed the distance between us, he grew brighter and yet brighter until I could no longer bear the radiance,
and bowed my head. He steered straight for the shore, his ship so light and swift it drew no water; it did not seem to sail so much as soar.
Astern stood the great pilot of the Lord, so fair his blessedness seemed written on him; and more than a hundred souls were seated forward,
singing as if they raised a single voice
in exitu Israel de Aegypto. Verse after verse they made the air rejoice.
The angel made the sign of the cross, and they cast themselves, at his signal, to the shore. Then, swiftly as he had come, he went away.
Purgatorio, Canto IV:
The poets begin their laborious climb up the Mount of Purgatory. Partway up the steep path, Dante cries out to Virgil that he needs to rest.
The climb had sapped my last strength when I cried: “Sweet Father, turn to me: unless you pause I shall be left here on the mountainside!”
He pointed to a ledge a little ahead that wound around the whole face of the slope. “Pull yourself that much higher, my son,” he said.
His words so spurred me that I forced myself to push on after him on hands and knees until at last my feet were on that shelf.
Purgatorio, Canto XXXI:
Having ascended at last to the Garden of Eden, Dante is immersed in the waters of the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and helped across by the maiden Matilda. He drinks from the water, which wipes away all memory of sin.
She had drawn me into the stream up to my throat, and pulling me behind her, she sped on over the water, light as any boat.
Nearing the sacred bank, I heard her say in tones so sweet I cannot call them back, much less describe them here: “Asperges me.”
Then the sweet lady took my head between her open arms, and embracing me, she dipped me and made me drink the waters that make clean.
Paradiso, Canto V:
In the Second Heaven, the Sphere of Mercury, Dante sees a multitude of glowing souls. In the translation by Allen Mandelbaum, he writes:
As in a fish pool that is calm and clear, the fish draw close to anything that nears from outside, it seems to be their fare, such were the far more than a thousand splendors I saw approaching us, and each declared: “Here now is one who will increase our loves.” And even as each shade approached, one saw, because of the bright radiance it set forth, the joyousness with which that shade was filled.
Paradiso, Canto XXVIII:
Upon reaching the Ninth Heaven, the Primum Mobile, Dante and his guide Beatrice look upon the sparkling circles of the heavenly host. (The Christian Beatrice, who personifies Divine Love, took over for the pagan Virgil, who personifies Reason, as Dante’s guide when he reached the summit of Purgatory.)
And when I turned and my own eyes were met By what appears within that sphere whenever one looks intently at its revolution, I saw a point that sent forth so acute a light, that anyone who faced the force with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes, and any star that, seen from the earth, would seem to be the smallest, set beside that point, as star conjoined with star, would seem a moon. Around that point a ring of fire wheeled, a ring perhaps as far from that point as a halo from the star that colors it when mist that forms the halo is most thick. It wheeled so quickly that it would outstrip the motion that most swiftly girds the world.
Paradiso, Canto XXXI:
In the Empyrean, the highest heaven, Dante is shown the dwelling place of God. It appears in the form of an enormous rose, the petals of which house the souls of the faithful. Around the center, angels fly like bees carrying the nectar of divine love.
So, in the shape of that white Rose, the holy legion has shown to me — the host that Christ, with His own blood, had taken as His bride. The other host, which, flying, sees and sings the glory of the One who draws its love, and that goodness which granted it such glory, just like a swarm of bees that, at one moment, enters the flowers and, at another, turns back to that labor which yields such sweet savor, descended into that vast flower graced with many petals, then again rose up to the eternal dwelling of its love.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in October 2013.
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.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
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