Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New)

by Michaud, Philippe-Alain

Publisher: MIT Press

Binding: Paperback

Book ID: 9781890951405, 1890951404

$25.00

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Description

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art historians of the twentieth century as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the interpretation of symbolic material. As Phillippe-Alain Michaud shows in this important book, Warburg's own project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.

Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using "montage-collision" to create textless collections of images, he brought together pagan artifacts and masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, ancient Near East astrology and the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals and the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was the discovery within the art work itself of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Challenging normative accounts of Western European classicism, Warburg located the real sources of the Renaissance in the Dionysian spirit, in the expression of movement and dance, in the experience of trance personified in the frenzied nymph or ecstatic maenad.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion is not only a book about Warburg but a book written with him; Michaud uses Warburg's intuitions and discoveries to analyze other categories of imagery, including the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loie Fuller. It will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the origins of modern art history and the visual culture of modernity.

Philippe-Alain Michaud is the Film Curator at the Musee national d'art moderne at the Centre Georges-Pompidou.

The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Watts, Alan W
New World Library

In describing the effects of mescaline, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception literally opened a door. Watts walked through it with this classic account of the levels of insight consciousness-changing drugs can facilitate "when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding." Watts and peers including foreword authors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (then Harvard professors) anticipated physicists recognizing the individuals "inseparability from the rest of the world," the work of New Age thinkers who combine scientific findings and spiritual experiences, and federally funded clinical trials utilizing psilocybin to treat a variety of conditions. More than an artifact, The Joyous Cosmology is both a riveting memoir of Watts’ personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred.

Includes Watts's article "Psychedelics and Religious Experience"

Price: $14.00

Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality
Harner, Michael
North Atlantic Books

In 1980, Michael Harner blazed the trail for the worldwide revival of shamanism with his seminal classic The Way of the Shaman. In this long-awaited sequel, he provides new evidence of the reality of heavens.

Drawing from a lifetime of personal shamanic experiences and more than 2,500 reports of Westerners' experiences during shamanic ascension, Harner highlights the striking similarities between their discoveries, indicating that the heavens and spirits they've encountered do indeed exist. He also provides instructions on his innovative core-shamanism techniques, so that readers too can ascend to heavenly realms, seek spirit teachers, and return later at will for additional healing and advice.

Written by the leading authority on shamanism, Cave and Cosmos is a must-read not only for those interested in shamanism, but also for those interested in spirituality, comparative religion, near-death experiences, healing, consciousness, anthropology, and the nature of reality.

Price: $19.95

The Chaldean Oracles: Translation, Text, and Commentary
Majercik, Ruth
Prometheus Trust

The Chaldean Oracles hold a special place in the development of the Platonic tradition - they gave a new impetus and inspiration to a number of philosophers now known as neoplatonists. The extant fragments of the Oracles have been the subject of several studies in the modern era: since its publication in 1989 this presentation of the Chaldean Oracles in parallel text and translation with Ruth Majercik's detailed notes and analysis has established itself as the modern baseline for scholarly work upon the Oracles. This is a facsimile edition of that publication. 272pp

Price: $34.00

Arcanum Bestiarum: Of The Subtil And Occult Virtues Of Divers Beasts
Fitzgerald, Robert
Three Hands Press

Written in the great tradition of the medieval bestiaries, Robert Fitzgerald's long-awaited new work Arcanum Bestiarum re-imagines the animal menagerie in the context of bestial mystery and atavistic power. Written for the modern magical practitioner and zoophile, the 272-page volume examines the occult virtues and totemic majesties of fifty animals, theriomorphs, and their kindred. Correspondences with deific powers, atavistic wisdom, and mythopoetic emanation are examined, especially in light of the tutelary powers all animals possess.

The Tetramorph -- essentially an animalic ‘crown of creation’ -- is here transformed into the far broader and innovative concept of the ‘Theriomorph’, or, the Zodiak Entire of Creation as an apotheosis of the animal form and zoötype… One of the greatest of virtues possessed by the Human is its bestial heritage, both spiritually and genetically. These attributes are often seen as primitive, chaotic and dangerous to civilized culture by the custodians of moralism and religion today, but the fact remains that it is our animal heritage that makes us what we are, or, more accurately, what we should and can be.

Special attention is given to the zoomorphic aspects of alchemy, which historically used the bestial emblemata as veils of the stages of the Great Work, as well as shamanism and witchcraft, bodies of knowledge particularly rich in the lore of animals as spirit-helpers. The work is an emergent strand of magical investigation long part of the author’s private life, where he has worked in the ecological field of wildlife rehabilitation, especially raptors.

The text is graced with fifty-five original woodcut illustrations by artist Liv Rainey-Smith, prepared especially for this title in close collaboration with the author. Amongst the more ambitious renderings in the work are the occult cryptofauna Homunculus, Manticore, Ouroboros, and Basilisk, as well as animals prominent in the ancient dawn of magick: the Bear, Goat, Viper, Peacock, and more. Completing the design elements is an original typeface designed for the work by calligrapher Gail Coppock, serving to illuminate this grimoire of the Magician’s Primal Eden.

The book is 272 pages, printed in two colour ink on heavy stock, and illustrated throughout.

Standard Edition: 1400 copies, in hardcover with dust jacket.

Price: $75.00