An Eight Week Online Class
Dates: Thursdays, September 2 through October 21
Time: 7-9 pm ET
(4 pm - 6 pm California time, 12 am - 2 am London time, 1 am - 3 am Paris/Amsterdam time)
Admission: $165 ($145 for $5/a month and above Patreon members)

PLEASE NOTE: ALL CLASSES WILL BE RECORDED FOR THOSE UNABLE TO ATTEND

From Egyptian mummies to animated Classical statues, miracle working body parts to crying statues, mediumship to exorcism, the biblical Adam to The Golem, the idea that physical objects—from statues to rocks to human bodies—might serve as containers for soul, spirit or deity was once extremely common around the world. Traces of these ideas live on in the numinous presence of The Work of Art, the mysterious charge of the uncanny, the persistence of miracle working statues, and the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers.

All of these ideas point to the mystery at the heart of life and the life force itself. The enigma of what, exactly, animates us, enlivens us into more than inert matter, and leaves us at bodily death.

This class will explore these ideas, and investigate some big questions: Was the idea of enchanted matter or ensouled objects a universal aspect of human belief before being discredited by our scientific worldview? What commonalities exist between different beliefs and traditions? And, perhaps most importantly, what can all of this teach us about ourselves, our material bodies, our historical moment, and what it means to be alive?

To delve into these questions, we will examine seven traditions via readings, class discussion, and illustrated lectures by scholars and practitioners: Witchcraft and European folk traditions with Steven Intermill, occultist and the director of The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick; Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitalli on mummies and statues as containers for souls in Ancient Egypt; The uncanny and the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of animated statues with sculptor and “lapsed Classicist” Eleanor Crook; Statues and photographs as containers for deity in Southern Indian Hinduism with Bhakti yoga practitioner Bryan Melillo; The syncretism of Pre-Columbian and Spanish notions of ensouled matter in the Andean Americas with art historian Maya Stanfield-Mazzi; Automata created to aid religious devotion with medieval history professor Elly R. Truitt; and the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers with Patricia Llosa, Jungian analyst and board member of ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism).

As a final project, students will be invited to create an artwork or written response inspired by what we have learned, or deliver a presentation delving into a tradition not covered, integrating what they have learned over the course of this class.

BIOS FOR SPEAKERS AND INSTRUCTOR

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor in wax, bronze, and lifelike media who makes work about anatomy and mortality. She studied Classics and ancient art history which instilled a fascination for statues, effigies and mummies which she found was better explored by making them. Whilst studying sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools she learned anatomy from medical museums and sculpting from Victorian textbooks, adopting neglected techniques. Later she trained as a medical sculptor alongside medical students at Guy’s Hospital. She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum, teaches classes and workshops for Morbid Anatomy and Camberwell School of Art, and works internationally with medical museums such as the Science Museum London, Vrolik, Amsterdam, La Specola, Florence, GUM Ghent, Hunterian London, and various wax collections. She has a special interest in learning the expressive techniques of former times whilst employing contemporary technology to bring her creatures to a kind of life. 

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist. writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was co-founder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion, Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.

Steven Intermill is the director of The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland, OH. As a lifelong occultist, Intermill spends much of his time delving into the museum's archives and book collection.

Patricia Llosa, MFA, LP, is a Peruvian-American Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. She earned her undergraduate degree in archaeology and art history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and did graduate work at The School of Visual Arts. For more than 20 years she worked as an administrator and educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A graduate of Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Rhythms® Leadership Training Program and has taught her workshops in Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Peru and Spain. A member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis she serves on their Gradiva Awards Committee. She is also on the board of ARAS, the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism.

Bryan Melillo has studied meditation in the Jñana and Bhakti yoga traditions for the last 23 years. In the esoteric traditions Bryan studied on ashrams in Southern India, he was responsible for what is called puja. This is the practice of readying a statue or photo of a god to be inhabited with the spirit of the god itself.  Bryan recently completed an End of Life Doula certification training as his goal is to integrate eastern understandings of death with the growing western end of life care, death with dignity movement. Bryan has an active art studio and is an assistant professor at NYC’s Parsons School of Design.

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi is an art historian specializing in art of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, especially that of the colonial Andes. She focuses on the ways in which Indigenous peoples of the Americas contributed to creating new forms of Catholicism. She has published articles in Current Anthropology, Hispanic Research Journal, Colonial Latin American Review, Religion and the Arts, and The Americas. She also wrote bibliographic essays on painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru and Andean textiles for Oxford Bibliographies Online.

Elly R. Truitt teaches medieval history, including courses on medieval medicine, the history of magic, intellectual history, the crusades, global networks in the Middle Ages, and courtly culture. Her research interests are in the history of science, medicine, and technology. Truitt has published articles on the history of astronomy, pharmacobotany, timekeeping technologies, and the history of automata, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, The Huntington Library, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. She is the author of Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitali aims to bridge the gap between the educated, academic community and the eager, interested public. She was the Egyptologist-in-Residence at the Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum in Brooklyn, New York, from 2014-2016, where her series "Death and the Occult in the Ancient World," was a Time Out NY's 'Critics Pick." Ava has excavated in both Egypt and Turkey, and completed her Master's Degree at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she focused on domestic cult and magic in Ancient Egypt. She is an adjunct professor at Adelphi University, where she teaches Intro to Egyptian Art.

SCHEDULE

WEEK 1 (September 2) Occultist and director of The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland, OH Steven Intermill on Fetishism, Animism and Magical objects

WEEK 2 (September 9) Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitali on mummies and statues as containers for souls in Ancient Egypt

WEEK 3 (September 16) Sculptor and “lapsed Classicist” Eleanor Crook on the animation of statues and idols ( in Greek, Eidola) in Greece and Rome, and the idea of the animate idol/doll

WEEK 4 (September 23) Art historian Maya Stanfield-Mazzi on Miraculous Statues and Paintings in Andean Catholicism

NO CLASS SEPTEMBER 30

WEEK 5 (October 7)) Bhakti yoga practitioner Bryan Melillo on statues and photographs as containers for deity in Southern Indian Hinduism

WEEK 6 (October 14) Medieval history professor Elly R. Truitt on Automata

WEEK 7 (October 21) Patricia Llosa, Jungian analyst and board member of ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), on the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers

WEEK 8 (October 28) Final project presentations

IMAGES

Image 1: Photo by the instructor of a statue of the Virgin Mary in her invocation as the Mourning Mother (Mater Dolorosa) in Puebla, Mexico.

Image 2: Italian Automaton of The Devil, carved in wood, 15th and 16th centuries, from the Wunderkammer owned by Ludovico Settala. It could, in the words of the Cosmodromium Blog, "roll its eyes and move its tongue, emit a noise and spit smoke from the mouth."

Image 3: Two poppets from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, probably from around 1954 . Said to have been crafted by a jilted builder, whose wife ran away with another woman.

Image 4: Egyptian mummies and coffins from Chicago’s field museum.

Image 5 & 6:: Human relics of Italy, photos by the instructor.