Showing posts with label Alchemy Quack Mad Science Woo. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

The Crazies - George Romero (1973)

Monday, August 11, 2014

Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht (1939)

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein Notebooks

Frankenstein Notebooks.

"We present here for the first time in digital form all the known manuscripts of Frankenstein, perhaps the most famous and widely reproduced work of British Romanticism. These manuscripts consist of the now disbound pages from five notebooks once the property of Mary Shelley, purchased by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 2004, from her descendant, Lord Abinger."

Saturday, July 19, 2014

"Occult Forces" (1943) - National Socialist Anti-Freemasonry Film

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

History of Prosthetics

The History of Prosthetics Reveals a Long Tradition of Human Cyborgs

Creepy Medicine

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The Fairy Tales of Science by John Cargill Brough (1857)

Source. A book that decides to tell some lessons of elementary science in the language of alchemy, magic and fairy stories.

"In the year 1746, an ingenious Dutchman actually managed to coax him into a glass bottle, coated within and without with metal, but the Spirit soon escaped from his narrow prison by passing through the limbs and body of the experimentalist, who received such a violent shock that he was compelled to take to his bed. This incident, however, did not deter the philosopher from prosecuting his inquiries, and his endeavours to construct a secure prison were eventually crowned with success.

Six years after this, an American sage summoned the now docile Spirit from the clouds during a thunderstorm, by means of a boy's kite, and thus proved the identity of lightning and that force which for two thousand years was regarded as an emanation peculiar to rubbed amber.

The nineteenth century was heralded in by the announcement of a still greater fact. A learned Italian now found that he could dispense with all the old machinery of incantation, and evoke the Amber Spirit by the action of acids upon metals. He piled up alternate disks of zinc and copper, kept separate by the interposition of moistened pasteboard, and with this simple apparatus he obtained absolute control over the movements of the Spirit. He compelled him to travel along metal wires of any length; to force asunder the elementary atoms of water; to bring to light substances hitherto unknown, and to perform a hundred other feats equally wonderful. The Spirit was vanquished—the lightning was chained—and man reigned supreme."

Friday, January 17, 2014

The American Policy Player's Guide and Dream Book (1892)

Policy, also known as a numbers racket, was an illegal lottery played mostly in poor neighborhoods (black, Italian, latin) in the US, wherein a bettor attempts to pick three digits to match those that will be randomly drawn the following day (Source). The book below--which could pass as a book on dream interpretation--has a secondary purpose. To associate winning policy numbers with the dreamer's dream. More context: see, Herbert Gladstone Parris: Professor Konje Policy Players Dream Books and Policy Pete’s Dream Book (1933) | Digital Harlem Blog.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Houdini

Source.

A COMPLETE EXPOSE' OF THE MODUS
OPERANDI OF FIRE EATERS, HEAT
RESISTERS, POISON EATERS, VENOMOUS
REPTILE DEFIERS, SWORD SWALLOWERS,
HUMAN OSTRICHES, STRONG MEN, ETC.

HOUDINI

AUTHOR OF "THE UNMASKING OF ROBERT HOUDIN," ETC.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO MY LIFE'S HELPMATE,
WHO STARVED AND STARRED WITH ME
DURING THE YEARS WE SPENT
AMONG "MIRACLE MONGERS"
My Wife

c/f - The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Angel or Alien?

A customized search engine to shed light on which manner of cosmological visitor.

Drawing on various Judaic, Christian and Muslim primary sources as well as fan wikias, message boards, Dante, X-File script archives, various Spielberg scripts, Neon Genesis Evangelion scripts, Scientology, The Chariots of the Gods, Guardian Angel and Alien Abduction testimonials, Sacred Texts dot org and the Folk Texts site.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Phenomena of Materialisation by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing (1923)

Source.

"English translation of Phenomena of Materialisation, a book by German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing which focuses on a series of séances witnessed between the years 1909 and 1913 involving the French medium Eva Carrière, or Eva C. Born Marthe Béraud, Carrière changed her name in 1909 to begin her career afresh after a series of seances she held in 1905 were exposed as a fraud. Her psychic performances as Eva C gained the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery series, who believed she was genuine, and also Harry Houdini, who was not so convinced. Another researcher who became interested in her case was Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. A series of tests he devised between the years 1909 and 1913 convinced him that Eva C was the real deal and in 1913 he published his Phenomena of Materialisation detailing the sessions and the reasons for his belief.

It has been noted that these sessions with Schrenck-Notzing verged on the pornographic. Carrière’s assistant (and reported lover) Juliette Bisson would, during the course of the séance sittings with Schrenck-Notzing, introduce her finger into Carrière’s vagina to ensure no “ectoplasm” had been put there beforehand. this would be followed by Carrière stripping nude at the end and demanding another full-on gynaecological exam. Whether the audience members were obliging is up for debate, but reports that Carrière would run around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience suggests perhaps so. One can imagine that this deliberate eroticisation of the male audience might go some way to explaining the ease with which these “investigators” believed the psychic reality of the seances. A decision of fraud on their part would distance their involvement somewhat from the special and heightened context of the séances and so cast their complicity in, or at the least witnessing of, sexual activities in the sober (and more judgemental) cold light of day.

The spiritualist debunker Harry Price wrote that the photographs taken by Schrenk-Notzing, rather than proving the reality of Carrière’s mediumship, in fact did just the opposite. In 1920 Carrière was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in London and an analysis of her ectoplasm revealed it to be made of chewed paper and the ghostly faces as cut from the French magazine Le Miroir. Back issues of the magazine matched some of Carrière’s ectoplasm faces, including Woodrow Wilson, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the French president Raymond Poincaré. This is something Schrenk-Notzing tries to address in his book, but with not much success. A 1913 newspaper article explained how “Miss Eva prepared the heads before every séance, and endeavoured to make them unrecognizable. A clean-shaven face was decorated with a beard. Grey hairs became black curls, a broad forehead was made into a narrow one. But, in spite of all her endeavours, she could not obliterate certain characteristic lines.”

Visit our post – “Photographs from a séance with Eva Carrière” – in the Images section of the site to see a selection of the photographs featured in the book."

Monday, December 9, 2013

How to Be a Witch

Meet the Witches, Lesbian Separatists, and Other Brave Feminists Who Shook Up the '60s and '70s | Mother Jones

Monster Parade Magazine, 1958. Source.

c/f ‘The Power Of The Witch’ - super rare British witchcraft documentary from 1971

1971

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Treasure of Heaven by Marie Corelli

Source

Sunday, February 19, 2012

On the Sacred Disease

Source.
Wikipedia article for some context.

A document attributed apocryphally to Hippocrates, this is one of the earliest discussions of what is likely epilepsy, until then attributed to sacred possession.