The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism & The Cosmic Tree

For those experiencing lockdown without a garden or access to a green space, the past couple of months have undoubtedly been tough-going. Now available online, Camden Art Centre presents The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism & The Cosmic Tree, a virtual art programme which will continue to expand in the coming weeks and which offers at least a digital portal into the natural (and mystical) world. 

Hildegarde von Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum (The book of divine works), 13th Century Illuminated Manuscript (detail). By concession of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities - Lucca State Library.

Among the huge variety of artworks are drawings, paintings, videos (including artist Adam Chodzko’s hypnotic ‘O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix’ set to a composition by 12th Century mystic, Hildegard von Bingen), podcasts and thought pieces, and the series incorporates the work of global artists as well as 500 years’ worth of plant discovery. 

Curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark, The Botanical Mind was conceived in a world before Covid-19 and due to open to the public on April 22nd 2020. With the pandemic forcing galleries to shut worldwide, Camden Art Centre made the decision to provide a virtual catalogue of the thoughts and ideas behind the exhibition, with a view to reopening their doors later in the year. In this way, The Botanical Mind has done what all successful living things do and adapted to its environment. Not only that, it feels like a study of our collective slowing down, with its focus on the quiet—but magical—life of plants. The series has been split into six chapters, called The Cosmic Tree, Sacred Geometry, Indigenous Cosmologies, Astrological Botany, As Within, So Without and Vegetal Ontology, and includes microscopic photography by Joachim Koester and complex molecular-inspired artwork by John Dupré and Gemma Anderson. In a single review, it would be impossible to do all the artwork justice, and so I’ve decided to focus on The Cosmic Tree (trees have always had my heart!) and what this symbol invokes.

The tree at the beginning of the world, or the centre of it, spans many cultures and religions; in The Cosmic Tree, it is explained in terms of the Axis Mundi (World Axis). At present, viewers too are rooted (I’m so sorry), and yet thanks to the internet we are able to connect to a world of creativity that shows us just how much we have in common. With wall panels from the Neo-Assyrian Empire and illustrations from Norse mythology, this chapter celebrates the tree as an omnipresent cultural image. It might bring to mind knowledge, snakes, life, fruit, language, family or all of these things, and in The Cosmic Tree, we see how they are captured in art.

Adam Chodzko, O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix, still, screen 1, 2020. Two screen video, Hildegard von Bingen’s lingua ignotae and image recognition algorithm. Image courtesy the artist.

In Carl Jung’s work, the Liber Novus, tree illustrations abound, from The Tree of Life to The Philosophical Tree, both featured on the website. They are vivid, almost mosaic-like, from their roots to their light-filled branches. The illuminations might suggest a gateway between the natural and supernatural spheres, not unlike the shamanic beliefs found in parts of Central and South America. The watercolours of contemporary artist, Delfina Muñoz de Toro, depict lush flora and fauna set against black, and in Vimi Yuvi (Fruit of the Serpent) (2019), a blue snake coils around a flower, reaching up as if to meet the ecliptic sky. To the shaman, the snake is a powerful symbol. To the Western eye, it is inescapably Edenic, and yet the serpent shown here is as beautiful as its fruit, turning the biblical narrative somewhat upside down. Hailing from Argentina, Muñoz de Toro is inspired by the cultural practices of the Amazon-dwelling Yawanawá people, explored further in the chapter, Indigenous Cosmologies. The Yawanawá’s sacred designs, or kené, include textile-work as well as using the human body as a canvas. Footage of the Yawanawá people is available to view, as are Muñoz de Toro’s musical compositions which encompass birdsong and chanting. Whether it’s the remote reaches of the jungle, or the forests of European folklore, the tree once again inspires in us humans both the artistic and the spiritual. It seems to be with a kind of gentle dominance that trees appear in our lives, like the repeated patterns in plants (also explored here) or the meditative infinity of the mandala (also explored here!).

Vimi Yuvi, Fruit of the Serpent, 2019.

The thoughtful and collaborative nature of The Botanical Mind means there is plenty to delve into, and with forthcoming works from Gemma Anderson, Tamara Henderson, Adam Chodzko and Ghislaine Leung, the project promises to keep growing (again, please forgive me) with a calming lifeforce all of its own. Until that lovely time when we can once again see friends, family and art close up, such online projects feel like a good way to transcend the lockdown.

Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Seeing of Music, The Music of Gounod from Thought Forms, 1905. Public Domain.

The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism & The Cosmic Tree; Camden Art Centre online 6th May – July 31st 2020 Curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark. The Botanical Mind Podcast Series, developed and produced with Matt Williams and Alannah Chance

Sabrina: A (Satirical) Homage to the History of the Western Occult

If spoilers aren’t your thing and you haven’t watched the third season of Netflix’s Sabrina, don’t read this. 

In Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, there are plenty of references to excite readers of occult literature, mythology and folklorists. Many of the names derive from the history of the Victorian occult revival, literary figures, and old grimoires. The name Stolas, Lilith’s crow, for instance, is straight from The Lesser Key of Solomon, while Blackwood has inherited the name of occultist Algernon Blackwood. Tarot is explored as a means of getting closer to what lies in our unconscious mind, while astral projection and necromancy are also used as plot devices. In season three, Blackwood goes to Loch Ness, once the home of Aleister Crowley, who is often mentioned in passing. Hell is informed by Dante’s descriptions of it in his Divine Comedy. 

But this show goes beyond namedropping, and season three, more than the two preceding it, reveals the writers’ knowledge of the Western Occult. 

‘We are not devil worshippers,’ said many who identify as witches when the first season of Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina first aired. 

By season 3 we learn the writers draw from an ongoing discussion in occult circles about the ‘authenticity’ of practices and lineage, and the shape-shifting nature of the witch archetype. 

What exactly is a witch? In the time of the witch trials, witches were thought to convene with the devil, sometimes with the assistance of familiar spirits—supernatural entities, often under the guise of a household pet (like Salem). The infamous Malleus Maleficarum, published in the late 15th century, endorsed the elimination of witches, followed by James I’s Daemonologie in the 16th century which helped create the witchcraft reform that ‘discovered’ witches and condemned them to die. The European witch trials entailed a mass scapegoating of women, and some men, blamed for crop failures, illness, adultery and other kinds of unexplainable misfortune. In some parts of the world today, including more conservative regions in the US, Christians still believe that witchcraft is connected to devil worship. It must be said that historically these accusations have no base in reality; the people condemned as witches were likely innocent of all charges. 

For most of us, the idea that witches worship Satan is now laughable, and the show runner’s decision to frame the coven like this can’t have been made without irony. In the centre of the Academy of Unseen Arts is a statue dedicated to Baphomet, its image lifted from a real statue designed by the Satanic Church in the US, who, by the way, tried to sue the producers for its inclusion. In the documentary Hail Satan?, the same Satanic cult was introduced to the world. (Those who belong to the church emphasised they don’t believe in god, nor satan, but they come together with a common cause to promote religious plurality, to ensure all faiths are represented and that the state remains secular; they value community and miss the rituals associated with religion, but tend towards an anarchic stance on institutions, tend to be atheistic and among their tenets, emphasise that beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. Anyway, I digress.)

In season 3, we see Sabrina’s Satanic witch coven turn their backs on Satan and turn instead to Lilith. Soon they seek answers even further back in history, finding a new source of power in the worship of the Greek goddess of sorcery, Hekate. The worship of and resonance with Hekate and Lilith bring to mind another modern form of witchcraft: the feminist resurgence of witchcraft as something political—a means for female emancipation and solidarity with the marginalised or othered. 

The coven, with its new cosmology, invoke Hekate’s three forms—the mother, maiden and crone. This triple goddess is not of classical origin, but a modern and creative interpretation of the past; Robert Graves helped popularise this idea in his book The White Goddess.

With creative license, again Sabrina hearkens back to the history of the Western occult in Britain. In 1951, the witchcraft act in Britain was abolished and Gerald Gardner introduced the world to Britain’s first ‘homegrown religion’: Wicca. He, like others before him, including Margaret Murray, imagined an uninterrupted witchcraft tradition that had nothing in common with Satan worship, as accusers of Witchcraft believed. The idea was that this tradition preserved the practices and beliefs of pre-Christian pagans. People who held onto these beliefs were condemned, Murray asserted, as heathenry was considered at odds with the Christian worldview. These witches believed in the old gods or an all-encompassing mother goddess figure. Or perhaps not. 

In his Triumph of the Moon, historian Ronald Hutton shows that witchcraft and Neo-Paganism don’t have an uninterrupted lineage with the past, but borrow from the past and grow through creative invention. He also debunks the myth of the mother goddess, instead revealing those we remember as ‘the Pagans’ had a more polytheistic cosmology, and likely worshipped several deities. Despite these conclusions, Hutton remains sympathetic toward Neo-Pagan religions, emphasising the creative imagination of these new religions and their ability to inspire people and to be progressive. With what little archaeological evidence there is from a time when written documentation is scarce, we have a framework with which to create something new. He proposes a form of creative world-building where we can borrow, invent and constantly review. 

The Netflix series also proposes this non-dogmatic, adaptive approach to magic and the occult. There are so many different ways of looking at the world and navigating it, of bettering it, of inspiring creativity or wonder; all somehow valid, but all susceptible to being corrupted by hierarchies or the power-hungry.  

In Sabrina, we see false prophets and gatekeepers of “the hidden knowledge.” Many make false claims and are not really in communion with Satan, or any other powerful force or being, for that matter. The culture of magical orders who work on the basis on concealing and revealing knowledge is put into question. 

Today many people identify as witches, Neo-Pagans, or druids, but these archetypes and labels are constantly evolving and shapeshifting. Disillusioned by the lack of historical accuracy in the Wiccan story, some practitioners neglected Gardnerian Wicca. Still inspired by the archetype, some created a new witchcraft, or witchcrafts, based on cunning craft, or looked to classical deities like Circe and Hekate. Some go even further into the past, in pursuit of the ever-elusive truth, looking at our earliest written texts in Babylonia. 

Sabrina represents many different types of practice and identity. The work of cunning-folk is alluded to with Ros, who goes blind but gains a new type of vision—the cunning. Cunning-folk initially sought magic through the medium of fairies, and in the earlier modern period this moved to books; they were, for the most part, Christian and generally accepted as integral members in their communities, though some were also sentenced to death as witches. 

Meanwhile, in the Netflix show, a new enemy appears in season 3. To the frustration of some viewers, I’m sure: the Pagans. Among their ranks: the nature god Pan, the Greek witch Circe, who in The Odyssey turns men into pigs, and Medusa, whose eye contact will turn you to stone. This might infuriate some peace-loving Neo-Pagans, but it’s a reminder that nature was viewed as something terrifying in ancient times. Whether true or political propaganda, Tacitus wrote that druids in Britain were involved in blood sacrifice. This is not the practice of Neo-Pagans today, but a reminder that re-connecting with nature also means coming to terms with the more terrifying part of nature—of our own natures too—and of finding ourself face-to-face with the wildness and uncertainty of Pan, in the dark woods, which over the centuries we have tried to eliminate too. (And come on, it’s a bit funny, the idea of a Satanic witch coven being persecuted by nature-loving Pagans.)

In Sabrina, we also meet the hedge witches, who derive their magic from someplace other than the Pagan gods or Satan. They are solitary, with their own gifts; some draw from an eclectic mix of traditions. Marginalised even by other witches, when they are called to join forces with those who have forsaken them, they unite for a common cause. 

We are also reminded that our way isn’t the only way, that there are other traditions which do things differently from which we have a lot to learn. Mambo Marie introduces the Greendale coven to Hoodoo, the folk magic tradition often mistaken for the religion voodoo. Both were born in a culture of oppression, in Haiti, and are the result of a syncretic fusion between Catholicism and beliefs from the Congo. 

Neo-Pagans and occultists might spend a lot of the time arguing, like other religions, about which way is right. In this binge-worthy series, we are reminded there are many paths in the forest, many of which lead to the same place. By choosing creativity over dogma, maybe we’ll get closer to some penultimate truth that transcends dualities and the limitations inherent to words; because as Mambo Marie says, the mèt-téts are another word for guardian angels, limbo is just our name for a place that exists in every religion and spiritual practice. 

Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has said season 4 will be a ‘demonic’ version of ‘The Crown’ with an ‘HP Lovecraft vibe’. As we spiral further back through history we enter the speculative area of prehistory, where only imagination can fill in the gaps. Already we have seen Lovecraftian themes introduced via the Eldrich Horrors. Will the strange egg Blackwood lifted from Loch Ness contain Cthulhu? What’s clear is that for all our differences, Pagans, Wiccans, Thelemites, Hedgewitches, those who practise Hoodoo, Christians, sceptics, muggles, etcetera: we all need to forget (or better, embrace), our differences, learn from one another, and unite for a bigger battle, soon to come. 

The Everlasting Season of Lana Del Rey

When you find a good cover song it’s not always similarity you’re getting attached to, it’s usually a marked specialness brought over the collaboration with another artist’s work. A certain sense that something is recognisable but just slightly off, just slightly mysterious. All things that Lana Del Rey, even when she’s not covering 60s classics, seems to inhabit all day, everyday.

But even when it’s the little differences that might be what entice us to cover songs, Donovan’s clicky, cloudy, “Season of the Witch” with Lana works because the fit is perfect. Who could be a more witchy, flowy contemporary singer than the gangster Nancy Sinatra who never seems fulfilled while never putting a foot wrong.

Elizabeth Grant, in her persona as Del Rey, encapsulates everything about the witchy world that is grabbing people’s attention more and more now. Not only is she an independent woman who holds a secret, individual power, there’s also always something missing. Something about Del Rey is, planned or not, inherently unknowable (read: near magical).

It’s a trick the best writers often talk about: that ability to use the negative space. While Del Rey pours out stories and emotions and angst in her songs, you get a tingle of a sense that there’s still things she’s not telling us. It’s all one big hint and she knows something and she’s going to let you figure it out on your own.

It might explain the continuing interest and discussion of her in the insta-stargazer camp. When Del Rey tweeted her birth time at astrologer and writer Randon Rosenbohm, it prompted a whole VICE article: ‘Lana Del Rey Is a Cancer, Not a Gemini,’ the headline told us. ‘Lana Del Rey is actually a Cancer, so do with that what you will,’ the Fader yelled out. Cancer makes more sense, the Fader told us, as it’s “decidedly the most sensitive and emotional sign of the zodiac.”

But while Del Rey’s sensitivity comes across in her work it never comes across as weakness. There’s drama but it’s her drama. There’s hardship but it’s her hardship. She is always, somehow, in control - she’s hurt but she likes it; she’s bleeding but it’s stylish. The power is otherworldly, a word that is used fairly constantly in any articles about Del Rey.

There was a hint at this great withholding once, a few years back. In 2012, still high off the strength of Born to Die, Del Rey was named GQ’s Woman of the Year. In the accompanying interview, Del Rey, sitting on the floor in a Monte Carlo hotel suite, told us one of the secrets that writers keep from their readers. 

“A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I'm writing about New York. And when I write about the thing that I've lost I feel like I'm writing about alcohol because that was the first love of my life. Sure, there have been people, but it's really alcohol."

The interview itself was overshadowed at the time by a small furore over the accompanying photoshoot, depicting the men in suits and Del Rey naked. Despite Jezebel’s half-joking headline “GQ Ran Out of Clothes for Its Woman of the Year,” It didn’t dull her power. If anything, it’s just another example of it.

Del Rey knows that we want her and she’s fine with that - she’ll never want us in the same way. Maybe alcohol is in the way, maybe it’s her changing zodiac sign, maybe it’s the withheld mystique that just makes you want to keep listening over and over until you finally figure out what it is she’s keeping from you.

Del Rey’s upcoming album ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ is out today and contains songs that have already captured us: “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it”; “Mariners Apartment Complex”; her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” (covers; magical, unknowable covers). It truly is the Season of Lana Del Rey.

Ritual Of The Moon

Rituals creep into our lives in all sorts of different ways. I’ve been thinking about rituals a lot lately and what makes them different from routines or habits that we all have. It’s partly because I’m about to move in with my girlfriend, the first time I’ve lived with a serious partner and partly because for the last twenty-eight days I’ve been playing a game about just that, called Ritual of the Moon. 

I’m not even sure you would call it a game, it’s more like a meditation tool, or something akin to the wave of astrological apps taking over our phones. But Ritual of the Moon is different in that it has its own narrative to tell and unique way of experiencing it. It’s an examination of love, forgiveness, loneliness, and revenge. And of course, rituals. 

Here’s how it works: the narrative follows a witch who has been exiled to the moon by the Earth and is separated from her lover. You “play” once a day and the game takes 28 days in real-time to complete. You control the witch and each day are given a new snippet of the story, followed by a sort of memory game as you select objects in the order they have appeared (a crystal, a mushroom in a glass, a photograph — small totems of a spell) and then draw a shape in the sky connecting up the dots (these can be as straightforward or complex as you like). Doing so gives you a mantra for the day. After this, a comet appears and heads towards the Earth. As the witch, you have the power to control the comet, choosing to either sending it crashing to Earth (by doing nothing) or by changing its trajectory to fly off into the sky. The game records what you do each day, either saving the Earth of allowing it to be damaged, on an astrological wheel and there are several different endings depending on what outcome you choose. Having to play once a day means that it soon becomes a ritualistic act, imbued with meaning. 

A ritual is defined not solely by the action one undertakes but by what meaning it holds and its purpose. Brushing my teeth twice a day is not a ritual, it’s a habit, a chore even, a necessary part of being alive. Checking Twitter the moment I wake up is not a ritual either but a habit, some might say bordering on an addiction. For me, a ritual is something which holds symbolic meaning and for which I have to be fully present to undertake. It is performative, but only for myself. Part of moving in with someone is learning each others rituals. This is my first serious relationship as an adult and as such, I am fascinated by the ways in which my girlfriend and I have merged our lives. Routines and rituals included. How is it that I went from casually messaging someone to texting my girlfriend good morning and goodnight whenever we are not together? When did that change happen? When did it become a seamless part of the rhythm of our shared life together? These rituals seem to have effortlessly emerged, a collage of different parts of our lives, made up of whatever we have around us. 

I’ve started keeping bottles of water in the fridge because that what my girlfriend does. My girlfriend makes tea now the way that I make tea: honey in first, the teabag quickly whooshed around and then fished out. I watch my girlfriend get ready for the work in the morning and her skincare routine is a ritual in my eyes: the same order each day, the same gentle patting of cream onto her skin, the spritzing onto a cotton pad and dabbing, describing the same pattern across her face as she moistures and does other things that I don’t understand. (Needless to say, perhaps to my peril, I do not have a skincare routine). Saying “I love you” every day to each other has become another kind of ritual, a symbol of our feelings for one another. Love is strange and changeable and hard to express, saying it in words each day makes it feel more solid. To say what we feel, even if those words we are expressing are inadequate or overly simplistic, is nevertheless important. Despite my girlfriend’s uncanny ability to predict the start of my period down to the almost exact hour, she is not a mindreader. Unless we tell each other what we feel we’re both in the dark. I know it sounds mushy and obvious, but saying “I love you” every day (even on the days we argue; especially on the days we argue) has become an important ritual, a marker in our relationship, a moment to realise the now. 

The creator of the game, Kara Stone, describes Ritual of the Moon as, “sparking self-reflection rather than escapism” asking the player to think about their relationship to personal technology and take a more active role in understanding their emotional state. Playing this game on my phone felt significant. Even where to place the app on my screen felt important. Looking at the layout of someone’s phone is a divination tool in itself, a reflection of personality. Mine (Virgo) is mostly on one screen and arranged into folders of specific categories, my girlfriend’s (Pisces) is for some unholy reason arranged by colour, meaning apps are found by memory, a combination of swipes and taps required to arrive at the intended destination. 

The app for Ritual of the Moon went on a special spot on the second page of my phone, unfiltered by a folder so I could find it easily. It felt like it deserved its own space. As intended, playing it became a ritual, even having to turn my phone sideways felt like its own tiny spell, signalling a need to slow down and put me in the right frame of mind for playing. I like how analogue the action was and the sense of something otherworldly coming from a device that I usually use for very worldly things (I’m mostly talking about Twitter). The artwork and sound design fit perfectly with this sense of the otherworldly, from the real and drawn objects painstakingly imported into the game, to the dramatic swell of music every time the comet appeared. I started to value using my phone as a tool to think about myself more deeply instead of a gateway to other people’s thoughts and opinions.  

I’m not very good at living in the present. I am constantly impatient: on the tube, on Twitter, in conversation, always wanting to know what’s coming next. It’s a trait I dislike in myself. My girlfriend and I planned to move in May, then July, now it’s September. I am so impatient to move it’s consuming the days I have left in my flat. I hate waiting. Ritual to the Moon forces you to live in the present moment, if only for ten minutes, as you can’t skip ahead to the next part of the game. Instead, you have to wait for the clock to reset. Playing it forced me to slow down if only for a little while and concentrate on what was in front of me. For me this is also what writing does. Writing requires me to focus on the words in front of me, myself and my thoughts and what I want to construct with them. You can’t think about the future when you’re writing (or no further than the next sentence at least). Writing is my way of bringing myself back to myself and of processing my emotions. I have kept a journal for the last five years; a collection of sketches, notes to myself and quotes from others (basically  an IRL version of the notes app) and it has charted the course of my life in a way that I find invaluable.

While playing this game I kept a diary every day, recording the mantras I received and my responses to them, as well as general thoughts on my mood. Reading over that diary at the end of the 28 days revealed just how blindsided I am by my own emotions. I can see how tired I am one day, how annoyed one day I am at my girlfriend (which is hindsight is no big deal) how one day I feel hopeless reading about forest fires in the Arctic and the next day I’m optimistic about moving and my work and where my life is heading. It’s tiring being alive, but taking the time to put into words how I felt each day was a quiet, privately, powerful act. In that way, the game acted like the perfect prompt, a way to force myself to make a ten-minute space in my schedule. Ritual of the Moon taught me that looking up to the stars for solutions doesn’t work for me (I am a practical, earthy Virgo after all) but that looking to language, and writing in particular is the key to understanding myself, my relationships to others and my place in the world. A ritual of writing daily is one I can get on board with.

Maverick Women And The Moon At The Moon Festival

At the time of writing, the moon is almost full. It is in fact now waning. Mythology and folklore have long looked to the moon for inspiration, and to explain life on earth. We know it controls our ocean’s tides. But what does its cycle mean for we who live in its light?

A highlight at the inaugural Moon Festival in London is Maverick Women and the Moon, curated by Irenosen Okojie. Five speakers spoke (and sang) about the moon from multidisciplinary perspectives. Highlights of this highlight were for me the talks from Angela Chan and Margaret Atwood, and the operatic performance by Janet Fischer.

Today is 20th July—the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Though the moon landing was iconic, it was not without controversy at the time. Civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy called the moon mission “an inhuman priority” while poverty was rife in the US. Gil-Scott Heron also criticised Nasa’s space programme in his song “Whitey on the Moon.”

Angela Chan, curator of the online platform Worm, discussed the exploitation of minorities that still occurs with space missions, from the mining of fossil fuels to the misdirected use of resources. The moon, like other planetary bodies and space, cannot be owned by anyone, and thus belongs to everyone. May we remember this as we begin to colonise other planets.

Chan also considered the environmental impact of moon missions, peppering her discussion with the story of the Chinese moon goddess Chang’e, also the namesake of the Chinese lunar exploration programme. I had no idea that China has plans to build a second, artificial moon and hang it above the city of Chengdu. The intention is to complement the light of earth’s existing moon. There are concerns however about how this will impact upon animals, who are highly sensitive to the moon.

We know that the moon affects wildlife—how does it influence human behaviour? It’s often thought the menstrual cycle is governed by the moon cycle. “The jury’s out on that one,” said Margaret Atwood earlier this evening, in conversation with Irenosen Okojie. While many women, myself included, notice that the full moon coincides with our menses, there has been little controlled research to date. “Everyone’s energies are at a higher point [during the full moon],” she continued, careful to emphasise that it’s not only women’s behaviour that is likely influenced by the moon cycle.

Is lunacy a myth—or behind all myths is there a grain of truth? Studies have shown that the full moon coincides with increased crime rates (mercury is also in retrograde until the end of the month. Hold tight.) Researchers put this down to the moon’s illuminatory power that historically made crime easier when the streets were dark at night. Some research does indicate increased levels of aggression in schizophrenic patients around this time. The same study showed that other mental illnesses were not affected by the moon cycle. While more research is needed, folklore has long viewed the moon as a heavenly body or entity which holds sway over our behaviour. The werewolf is the most obvious manifestation, the man that becomes a beast only when the moon is full.

“O Fortuna, as inconsistent as the moon.” These are translated words from the 13th century Latin Goliardic poem, O Fortuna, which Margaret Atwood read to introduce the changing nature of the moon in mythology. Atwood set the scene by telling us about her childhood in rural Canada, where there was no electricity and people used the moon to predict the weather. She recalled the gatherings of the great northern diver birds on the lake and their calls during the full moon, and those of wolves and other animals. “That was the sound of my childhood.”

After a vivid recollection of her early years, the author spoke about the folklore and mythology revival, which she became fascinated with reading Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Women’s divine powers were taken away from them from the bronze ages, diminishing even further with monotheistic Christianity, which pushed out the many deities worshipped in ancient Pagan pantheons. The one god in this new cosmology was male. Atwood recalled the triple goddess, the subject of Graves’s book. Viewed as a trinity of three separate aspects of the divine, each aspect of the trinity is paired with a different moon cycle and a different stage in the female life cycle: the maiden, the mother and the crone. “I’m now in the crone phase,” she said, smiling. The crone is wise, gathers herbs, and dispenses advice; the crone is also often neglected in modern narratives. The author went on to describe the moon card in the Marseille tarot deck, associated with dreams, intuition, the unconscious mind and illusion. Water, like the moon, is illusionary in that it reflects.

When drawing inspiration from the moon, which deities should writers turn to? Atwood recommends Apollo for order or structure, or Hermes if you’ve hit a roadblock and don’t know where to go next. She asked the interviewer if she writes to a moon calendar, and in an interesting digression spoke about her interest in the Neolithic structures that were made with the moon in mind rather than the sun. As one would expect from the author of at least seventeen books, Atwood’s knowledge is wide-ranging. So was her keynote lecture.

To round up the evening, Janet Fischer, with her powerful, expressive operatic voice, sang songs about the moon, including Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon.” In between songs, Fischer told folk tales from the Haida people in Alaska and the Appalachian realms of Tennessee. She also read a stanza from Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” a poem which so poignantly expresses the melancholic aspect of the moon:

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a Knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.”

Whether it provokes madness, romance, creativity or sadness, it’s clear that humanity has long been fascinated with this space rock which reflects the sun and illuminates the darkness. We see ourselves and our current mood mirrored in it. We still have much to learn about its influence on our lives, whether we’re changed by it or just guided by its light.

Joseph Campbell said in The Power of Myth that we need new myths and rituals in modern times, a sentiment echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in Homosapiens and Adam Curtis in an interview in the Economist. The moon, ever present and ever changing in our night skies, has been the centre of myths for thousands of years. It seems as good a time as any to create new stories and new traditions that centre around our natural satellite, which still has around it an aura of mystery and magic, which in its immensity reminds us there are still natural forces at work in the world bigger than ourselves. At the start of her keynote lecture, Atwood said “a venerable tradition might just have been established right here, before your very eyes.”

The inaugural Moon Festival runs 19-26 July 2019 in various London locations. Artists, scientists, and spiritual practitioners come together to talk about the moon across cultures and disciplines. Tickets are available on the official festival website.

The Invisible Forest exhibition at Gallery 46

The Invisible Forest at Gallery 46 brings together work from Peruvian-Amazonian artists, including Brus Rubio Churay, Santiago Yahuarcani, Lastenia Canayo, and Elena Valera. Curator Patsy Craig hopes viewers learn by example the importance of environmental stewardship.

Encuentro con los aliados, 2018. Brus Rubio.

The Amazon rainforest, often described as ‘the lungs of our planet’, is thought to generate around 20% of the world’s oxygen. Through the forest runs the mighty Amazon River, the life blood whose tributaries feed the region’s incredible flora and fauna and the remote communities who call it home. It’s little wonder that nature plays such a vital role in these cultures’ cosmologies.

“The forest is currently invisible,” says artist Brus Rubio Churay, “but we need to make it visible.” Brus is currently the artist-in-residence at Gallery 46, Whitechapel. His paintings are being exhibited there alongside work from fellow Peruvian-Amazonian artists, in the aptly named group show, The Invisible Forest.

Evident in many of the works on display is the importance of environmental stewardship to these communities, and their connection to nature. Plants are a vital part of their daily lives, which they rely on for nourishment, medicine and knowledge. The Murui use coca powder, a pure form of the plant, while the Shibipo are known for taking ayahuasca to gain greater clarity and vision.

Untitled. Santiago Yahuarcani.

Brus is from Pucaurquillo, a community in the basin of the Ampiyacu River in Loreto, Peru. Growing up near the river, he remembers the stories his family told him while fishing and at home under the starry Amazonian sky. These stories helped him foster a sensitivity towards nature, and reflect on the mysteries of life. “The Invisible Forest represents that respect towards the force of nature, that we hope to make visible through artistic expression.”

Three of Brus’ paintings are on display in this group exhibition. They depict a man’s transfiguration to jaguar. “This story is part of the learnings imparted to me by my uncle Alfonso, who was the kuraka (chief) of our community. This work is also about expressing respect for our ancestors.”

In 2002, the anthropologist Jürg Gasché visited Brus’s community to do fieldwork and learn about ancestor veneration. In turn, Brus learnt about Western anthropological thinking and the importance of conversing with different cultures. In the process, he discovered his passion for painting as a means for bridging those cultural divisions.

“Latin American art is usually closer to Andean art or pre-Hispanic iconography, but my art instead is from the perspective of my people, the Murui-Bora.” The artist is self-taught. He grew up in a remote part of the Amazon, and learnt about European art history from encyclopaedias and other books that started arriving when he was a child. “This made it easier to communicate more directly with a non-Indigenous audience.

The cosmology of Brus’s community is not well-documented, though often classed as animistic by anthropologists. “We believe in a great respect towards nature, towards animals—we are conscious of what nature provides us. That’s what we believe—in the force of nature itself. What I want to do is reach out to the West—the “rational” world which tries to understand much more about our intuition than we can actually say—and re-introduce this force of nature.”

Another objective of the group show is to tell the history of colonial bloodshed from their own perspective. “I’m from two ethnic groups —my father is Murui and my mother is Bora. The Murui and Bora peoples are known internationally for having been victims of the massacre taking place around the Amazon Rubber Boom (1879 to 1912), during which the London-based Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company massacred the Indigenous Amazonian peoples. This part of Amazonian history has not been told by Indigenous people, by us, but rather by people like British diplomat Roger Casement. It has not been given much attention by politicians or the Peruvian press. I aim to give these stories an Amazonian voice.”

La Astucia, 2017. Brus Rubio.

Curator Patsy Craig spent years living with Brus in his small Amazonian community. She became an advocate for Indigenous people’s rights after standing in alliance with Native American people over the water protection movement at Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016. “I thought I had to listen to what Indigenous people have to say. My mother was Peruvian and my father American. I have Native-American heritage on my father’s side and Indigenous blood from my mother’s side, so these issues are really close to me. The experience inspired me to learn more about Indigenous culture and provide more platforms to amplify Indigenous worldviews and knowledge.”

The Invisible Forest is part of the curator’s Flourishing Diversity Series, conceived in collaboration with the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability at the University College London, and the UK-registered conservation charity Synchronicity Earth. Their goal is to provide Indigenous people with a platform to speak about their relationship with the environment. “The dominant culture - the Western world - is destroying the environment,” continues Patsy. “How do we recover that relationship with nature, if there ever was one in our culture? One thing is really clear for me: Indigenous people are part of the solution to the climate crisis. Respect for nature is intrinsic to their worldview, and it has been for thousands of years. We need to start listening.”

The Invisible Forest is at Gallery 46 in Whitechapel, London, from Friday 1 June to Saturday 29 June 2019. Entry is free.

Hombre Garza. Rember Yahuarcani.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection

Rapping Hand, a life size model of a female hand which was probably controlled pneumatically with concealed rubber tubing. Courtesy of Senate House Library

As a child I hated magic tricks. Make someone feel they are duped, and they’ll forever fear being deceived again.

The Psychology of Magic exhibition at the Wellcome Collection examines the recent history of trickery, and the close history between magic and science. For centuries, magic tricks have entertained us. We want to have our rational minds shaken, as evidenced in the way we seek that suspended sense of disbelief in stories.

The exhibition is broken down into three themes. The Medium explores the mass appeal of seances and spiritualism in the Victorian era, and their key role in establishing psychology as a scientific discipline. Expect curious items such as Victorian ouija boards, Harry Houdini’s ‘Bell Box’, doctored images and video tapes. Misdirection exposes the ways magicians ensure you are distracted from their methods, while mentalism shows how magicians can influence people, revealing the universality of cold readings. Regular performances from magicians, psychologists and neuroscientists reveal how magic tricks work.

In an in-gallery performance, Professor Christopher French, Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths and fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, spoke about how cognitive biases shape our perceptions. He cited as an example reverse speech therapy, the pseudoscientific belief that unconscious messages are delivered when speech - or songs - are reversed. After playing Lady Gaga’s ‘Pararazzi’ backwards, he asked a large crowd what we thought the reversed lyrics sounded like - everyone shrugged. It sounded like gibberish. He then showed us the purported “real” message: "evil save us... The star above he model on the arts of Lucifer.” When he replayed it, with this new information we could at least hear some of the words.

This is an example of top down processing, the idea we form our perceptions starting from a larger, general picture before working our way to a more detailed picture as we’re given contextual information. Another example of top down processing can be seen when the Latin O Fortuna is misheard and wrongly subtitled in English. Once you’ve read the misheard lyrics, you can’t really unhear them.

It’s good to think critically when you approach magic - or anything unknown. Especially when deception can be so lucrative. But importantly, at the end of his demonstration, Professor French cautions: “sometimes we can be too skeptical, and we can miss things that are really there.”

Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic is at the Wellcome Collection, London, from 11 April to 15 September 2019. Free admission.