Time: 5:30 pm New York Eastern time, 10:30 pm UK time
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The uncertainty of our Covid times inspired tonight’s Underworld guide, sculptor Eleanor Crook, to look back to the Ancient world for clues as to how we might gain an insight into that which is forbidden to mortals to see…their own future. Unlike our present-day where prophecy is esoterics or statistics, in ancient Greece and Rome, society had numerous reliable ways of predicting the future. Indeed prophecy was entwined in the mainstream decision-making of politics, military strategy, and personal life. Specialists (and charlatans of course) could be consulted to divine what was to come from watching birds, throwing bones, scrutinizing offal, or cannily reading natural and anatomical signs in the bodies of sacrificial victims. The landscape was thick with notable oracular shrines where inspired priests and priestesses would pronounce ambiguous fortunes, intoxicated with divine zeal and curious drugs and vapors.
Classical epics tell of heroes braving the Land of the Dead to consult their ancestors and other prized ghosts about urgent problems: Odysseus in The Odyssey questioning the gender-fluid priest Tiresias at the entrance to the land of the Dead, Aeneas in The Aeneid visiting the wispy soul of his father in the Underworld. Less well known is that the ancients built harrowing replicas of The Underworld that you could actually visit: for seekers of knowledge about the future, they recreated Hades, excavating and illuminating underground caves and rivers to give the experience of visiting Hell and meeting with oracles and spirits of the deceased, a theme park of the mythical Afterlife which offered a terrifying experience of descent, disorientation, lamentation and, if the celebrant were lucky, prophecy. The archaeological remnants of these religious sites of death and afterlife enactment can be visited today, and have offered riddles and tantalizing glimpses of how the Underworld was made accessible to the living, and the kind of psychedelic adventures the petitioners may gone through to inspire awe and credulity.
Tonight, join sculptor and lapsed classicist Eleanor Crook for a journey into archaeology, art and literature in search of the lived experience of those who voluntarily crossed the River Styx in search of a fearful descent, shadowy caverns, inexorable priests and priestesses, perhaps the odd three-headed dog and the utterances of the Oracles of the Dead, and places these enactments in the context of ancient oracular practice and beliefs about the afterlife - and the clues we are given about the future life.
Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and wax modeler who works between the UK and several international medical museums. Long ago she studied Classics before the attractions of antique statuary turned her steps away from the library and towards the art studio. She is an art tutor at a number of the UK's major art schools and an art educator in various European medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam. Her work is in the collections of the Science Museum London, Gordon Museum of Pathology Guy's Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her specialism is handmade effigies, baroque bronze and eerie lifelike waxes.