This Halloween week, a devilish dive into our archives to unearth some supernatural treats: including woodcut witches, Babylonian spells, Japanese ghosts, and much much more...
Some of the many wonderful shapeshifting "monsters" from Japanese folklore featured on a painted scroll known as the Bakemono zukushi (18th or 19th century). See more here of its ghoulish delights here:
Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions (1865), a wonderful book of Victorian hi-tech ghost conjuring which allows the reader to summon, as the sub-title proclaims, “ghosts everywhere and of any colour”. More here:
Cleopatra tableau in New Zealand, 1914, captured in the subtle hues of an autochrome, early colour photo technique. See more autochromes from early 20th-century New Zealand in the collection of the Te Papa museum:
Can a person’s experiences on earth alter how they perceive the stars? In “Marxist Astronomy” @lacollee peers through the telescope of Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer whose politics informed his human approach to studying the cosmos:
In 24 stages, a frog morphs into the god Apollo — an etching commissioned by the physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater from Christian von Mechel in 1795. More on the image and its history here: https://buff.ly/3qd3aDZ
