M.J. Rose

A 19th century exploration into “forces unrecognized by our senses” —

Detail from a depiction of thought-transference, the man behind dictating the movement of the other, from Magnetismus und Hypnotismus (1895) by Gustav Wilhelm Gessmann

From The Public Domain Review,

Worlds Without End
“At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”.

Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy…”

For the rest, click here.

These photographs speak for themselves…

King Tut’s excavation, in color (1922)

From Dangerous Minds,

“You’ve probably seen these photos of Tutankhamun’s excavation a million times already. But, whether you saw them in school, National Geographic magazine, books or on TV, they’ve always been in B&W. Well, some of the more iconic images from the discovery have been colorized by Dynamichrome for the exhibition The Discovery of King Tut which opens in New York City at Premier Exhibitions on November 21, 2015.

I’m normally not a fan of colorized photos, but these are different for some reason. They’re almost like Dorothy leaving her B&W Kansas and stepping into Oz for the first time or the doors opening up to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Glorious eye candy…”

Click here for the rest of the gallery.

A peek into history…

Maria Rasputin as an animal trainer at a London circus in 1934. (Photo: Planet News Archive/Getty Images)

The Many Lives of Maria Rasputin, Daughter of the ‘Mad Monk’

by Hadley Meares (Atlas Obscura)

“I was born in 1899 in the village of Pokrovskoe in the county of Tobolsk. My parents are peasants, simple people. Our family consists of: father, mother, grandfather (my father’s father), my brother, sister and myself. We all live happily together but sometimes I get cross with my brother and sister, but with my sister I get cross all the time. My father plays an important role because the Sovereign knows him and loves him.”

“Maria Grigorievna Rasputin wrote the simple words above as a young teenager in unpublished diaries. But from the beginning of her life in rural Siberia to its end in sunny Los Angeles, nothing about Maria’s life would ever be simple or easy.

Maria spent her early childhood in a relatively well-off family of peasants. Her mother was a practical, hardworking woman. Her father Grigori, was a Starets, an un-ordained holy man who traveled the country preaching and comforting those in need. From the start, Maria seems to have had a healthy sense of skepticism. She and her brother and sister dreaded the long hours of enforced prayer and fasting “for which everything, anniversaries or penitence’s, served as an excuse.”

In 1906, the family’s life was transformed when Grigori, who would become known to history simply as “Rasputin,” was introduced to the royal family in St. Petersburg. He was soon credited by the Empress Alexandra for saving the life of Alexi, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne. In 1910, Maria and her sister, Varvara, were sent to live with their father in St. Petersburg so that they could be transformed into “little ladies.”…

For the rest, click here.