M.J. Rose

Happy Halloween to our dear Museum-goers!

From news.com.au,

Mummified cats, ‘witch marks’ and children’s boots in your walls: The secret objects and hidden magic symbols used to trap evil spirits

by Candace Sutton

“IT STARTED off with the discovery of an old shoe and a lace collar hidden in the dark recesses of an 1830s house in one of the oldest parts of Sydney.
Next it was a tradesman’s boot in a chimney breast of a country house in the NSW town of Mudgee.

Soon Ian Evans was finding mummified cats, children’s shoes and anti-witch symbols known as hexafoils and merels, and ritually burnt marks hidden on and in the walls of homes and other buildings around Australia.

The Newcastle University historian knew he was on to a great hidden secret about an unspoken but widespread ritual of magic in Australia that has no recorded history.

But it was all confirmed by the spine tingling moment he was called to an isolated Tasmanian farmhouse where five members of the same family had died in a month in 1860, and the family had concealed 38 shoes, children’s toys and dolls clothes in the building’s voids.

“They were absolutely terrified,” Dr Evans said.

All the houses had been built before 1935 and secret marks and “ritual magic” objects were part of a terrible secret held by early Australian settlers.

They were deliberately concealed under floorboards, in roofs and the voids of houses by a population gripped with a fear that there was an underworld of evil spirits bringing death and destruction into their lives.

As part of a story which Dr Evans believes has its roots in medieval times, the objects were hidden and the symbols inscribed to decoy witches and devils….”

For the rest, click here.

What do Shakespeare, the Bowery gangs, and the train have in common?

From Atlas Obscura…

The Forgotten Entrance to Clinton Hall
Hidden in one of New York’s oldest subway stations is the final remnant of the site of the bizarre Shakespeare Riots.

“This blocked up doorway on a subway station holds a secret that is still felt on the streets of New York today.

The Astor Place subway station on the IRT Lexington Avenue line is home to some of the most distinctive tile work on the New York metropolitan subway system. One of the original 28 subway stations, the walls are decorated with plaques depicting beavers, in honour of the pelt trade in which John Jacob Astor made his fortune.

But often overlooked on the south bound entrance is a bricked up doorway which recalls the tale of one of the most unusual events in New York history. Above the blocked off door is a lintel inscribed “Clinton Hall.” At one point this led directly into the old New York Mercantile Library in the former Astor Place Opera House. The library, known as Clinton Hall, at 21 Astor Place, was created for the growing number of clerks in the city. With a membership of 12,000, the library held over 120,000 volumes, one of the largest periodical subscriptions in the city, cabinets of curiosities, and held lectures by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain.

But the address, named after America’s once-richest man, was the site of one of the most bizarre events in New York history…”

For the rest, click here.

Ah! These make for a most fantastic guessing game!

From which book does this meal hail? (Clue in the caption)–

From ‘Fictitious Feasts’, work about food scenes in literature. Here the memory of the avocado crabmeat salad, with the bell jar, symbol of death and despair, from the American novel…

From Featureshoot.com,

Spellbinding Photos of Meals from Classic Books
by Ellyn Kail

“Paris photographer Charles Roux describes his boyhood self as “a lonely kid that filled his life – and his voids- with literary fiction.” In this way, you could say Fictitious Feasts began in the artist’s early years, when he was curled up with a book, turning the pages and imagining the worlds inside them.

Growing up, he always had a vivid and visceral picture in his head of Alice’s tea party in Wonderland, the dinner table at the Ramsay house in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Gregor Samsa’s wretched pile of rotting food, left on the floor each morning by his sister Grete in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. As an adult and still life photographer, he had the means to bring these scenes to life.

Food, Roux suggests, has a hallowed place in the literary realm. Meals become metaphors; the real magic is in the mundane. For Fictitious Feasts, the photographer started with the books. Some, like the madeleines from Remembrance of Things Past and the porridge stolen by Goldilocks from the Three Bears, popped into his head instantly. Others took more time to recall and dig up. He read and reread the classics, jotted down notes, and sketched out table settings…”

For the rest, click here.