Pearly Harvest Festival

On 29th September I went into the City of London to witness the annual Pearly Kings nd Queens Harvest Festival. It's quite  knees-up!

The Warburg Library - Occult on demand

Taken from The Guardian. Feature by Oliver Wainwright. Photos by Huifton & Crow

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A mysterious cosmic emblem hangs over the entrance to a building in Bloomsbury, at the heart of London’s university quarter. Depicting concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs, it represents the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century bishop and scholar of the ancient world, as well as patron saint of the internet. What lies within is not a masonic lodge, though, or the HQ of the Magic Circle, but the home of one of most important and unusual collections of visual, scientific and occult material in the world. Long off-limits to passersby, the Warburg Institute has now been reborn, after a £14.5m transformation, with a mission to be more public than ever. “We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,” says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country. It’s a building filled with literal magic. 

The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space. Long before the algorithms of today’s digital world, he drew unlikely connections between different epochs, regions and media, putting his findings into a sprawling visual diagram of European art. Named the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, it was a kind of analogue internet of photos, reproductions and newspaper clippings pinned to boards, comprising 1,000 images on 65 panels each one metre tall. Unsurprisingly, it was incomplete by the time of his death in 1929. 

Warburg hailed from a wealthy Jewish banking family, so when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, his institute, its staff, and most of the furniture, were evacuated to Britain. The organisation, with its 60,000 books and 10,000 photographs, became part of the University of London, housed in a building designed by Charles Holden in the 1950s, where it has been ever since. But it has never had much of a public face. It has been an essential resource for artists and scholars for decades, but few outside the rarefied ranks of researchers knew the Warburg was there. “I cycled past this building for years without knowing what was inside,” says Elizabeth Flower of Haworth Tompkins, architects of the overhaul. Having worked on the transformation of the London Library and the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre, the architects were well placed to bring their knack for light-touch surgical intervention here. Along with essential upgrades to heating, lighting and energy performance, the project has given the institute a public, museum-grade gallery for the first time, as well as a new auditorium, deftly inserted into the U-shaped courtyard, to host public lectures, conferences, concerts and films. Where once visitors were greeted with an off-putting glass screen and security desk, a new welcoming entrance leads you through to the gallery, where an opening exhibition charts the journey of the institute, alongside artist Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile of books by exiled authors. 

Windows from the entrance foyer provide views down into the new archive reading room – giving a glimpse of the previously hidden inner workings of the institute – and across to the auditorium, which appears to float in the white-tiled courtyard, illuminated by light-wells either side. The joys of cataloguing … inside the Warburg. 

Conceived as the new heart of the place, the lecture theatre is an atmospheric space, lined with warm timber ribs and topped with an elliptical concrete roof light, modelled on the original Warburg Bibliothek reading room in Hamburg. It has a hint of Dr Strangelove, ready to host the high council of wizard-researchers. The ellipse was an important symbol for Warburg, representing concepts of freedom and continuous oscillation between thought and research. “It’s exactly the path our design process followed too,” jokes Flower, recounting the endless circles of options that were considered before the complex 3D jigsaw of rearranging the institute’s spaces was resolved. Advice even came from Albert Einstein: a sketch he sent to Warburg, displayed in the exhibition, shows his calculation of the elliptical orbit of Mars, on which the ceiling was based, adding a further celestial aura to this cosmic place. The scale of ambition of this meticulous revamp was in part prompted by a threat. In 2014, the Warburg made headlines when a long-running, costly legal battle with the University of London over the institute’s future reached the high court. Both sides declared victory, with the Warburg’s independence and funding ultimately safeguarded by the ruling. In 2016, the university allocated £9.5m for a basic refurbishment of the building, which was then increased by £5m of fundraising, and the scope expanded to the present brief. 

The result makes Holden’s building look better than ever. Suspended ceilings have been removed, blocked windows opened up, bringing natural light into the library (harmful rays safely filtered by UV film), and woodblock and terrazzo floors restored to their former glory. Fluted timber columns in the reading room are complemented by new sapele joinery that echoes Holden’s style, while harsh strip lights have been replaced with in-keeping globes and the collection space extended to allow for at least 20 years’ future growth. The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – “uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,” as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century. “It’s a building filled with literal magic,” says novelist Naomi Alderman, who has spent much time writing here. “A place to sit amid books that are almost definitely emanating auras of sorcery … One brief stroll through the shelves and I always find some new wyrd inspiration.” 

The reading rooms themselves are still limited to card-carrying researchers, but through the new exhibition and event programme, the public can finally get a taste of Warburg’s weird and wonderful world for themselves.

Miscellaneous Meander 77 and 78

 

Does this mean that Stonehenge is a safety deposit box??

Originally posted by Robert Michael Poole 3rd May 2018 at BBC Travel _______________________________________________________________________ 

Arriving on the tiny Micronesian island of Yap will fill even the most jaded traveller with a sense of awe. The single daily flight comes in over dense forests, taro swamp, shallow lagoons and a web of mangroves, all surrounded by fringing reef. But the real wonderment doesn’t come from the idyllic scenery, nor from the greeting by a Yapese girl in a traditional hibiscus skirt. It’s when you first come face-to-face with a piece of giant stone money. 

Hundreds of large stone discs can be found across the Micronesian island of Yap (Credit: Robert Michael Poole) 

Hundreds of these extraordinary, human-sized discs of rock are scattered all over the island; some outside the island’s few hotels, others in rows close to the beach or deep in the forests. Each village even has a stone money bank where pieces that are too heavy to move are displayed on the malal (dancing grounds). “My family owns five stone money of a good size,” said Falmed (Yapese just use one name), a taxi driver I flagged down to take me to Mangyol stone money bank in Yap’s eastern province of Gagil. Five, it turns out, is a good haul, since many islanders don’t own any stones. 

The Yapese people have used the rai stones as currency for centuries (Credit: Robert Michael Poole)

The unique stone currency has been in use here for several centuries, although no-one is quite certain when the concept began. What is known is that each one is different, and they are as heavy with meaning as they are in volume of limestone, carved and voyaged by the Yapese all the way from Palau, an island nation 400km to the south-west. The very first pieces were used as gifts and shaped like a whale – thus named ‘rai’ stones – but they’ve evolved to become currency, including holes carved through the centre to make them more transportable across the oceans. “My forefather Falmed, he is the one who started to go to Palau first by canoe, and make this connection between Palau and Yap. So I carry his name,” Falmed told me as we hurtled along dirt roads past the sleepy capital of Colonia. Despite his sun-worn T-shirt and rickety car, his lineage is surprisingly significant. His distant forefather Falmed was a high chief powerful enough to commission a boat to Palau where he met with locals and gained access to a quarry site. “He came back and called a meeting where he told the village to gather tuba, the local alcohol, to trade,” Falmed said. Within a month, he was back in Palau to start carving the stone as money. 

The Yapese travelled 400km across the sea to carve the limestone discs from quarries in neighbouring Palau (Credit: Robert Michael Poole) 

The issue was that Yap had no durable rock or precious metals with which to make coins. Instead, experienced Yapese sailors, commissioned mostly by wealthy high chiefs, would sail to Palau on bamboo rafts, and eventually, schooners, to load up with limestone from their quarries. Initially small, as techniques and tools improved, the coins became even larger than the people who would painstakingly carve them. When metal tools were introduced by European traders in the late 19th Century, quarrying was made easier, and reports from the 1880s claimed 400 Yapese men could be found working in just one quarry in Koror, Palau – a significant proportion of the population, which would have then been about 7,000 in total. On their return from Palau, the sailors would give the carved stone money to the high chiefs who would gather from different villages to welcome back the sailors and the stones. The chiefs would keep the larger ones and two fifths of the smaller ones. They would also give names to some stones, usually choosing their own name or that of relatives, and confirm the stones as legitimate by giving a value based on an even older currency system: yar (pearl shell money). The stones could then enter circulation and be bought by anyone. “If the chief says OK, 50 shell money for each stone money, if I have that I will make the trade and own one,” explained Edmund Pasan, a canoe builder from the northern province of Maap. 

Some rai stones measure more than 3m in diameter (Credit: Robert Michael Poole) 

Today, shell money has been replaced by the almighty US dollar for day-to-day transactions like grocery shopping. But for more conceptual exchanges, like rights or customs, stones remain a vital currency for Yap’s 11,000 residents. Falmed’s family has only used its money twice, and one was as an apology. “We used it for one of my brothers who made trouble for another family,” Falmed revealed remorsefully. His brother’s marriage had failed. “One of the chiefs, his daughter got one piece of stone money as an apology, and they accepted it. When it comes to high ranks, you have to use stone money.” When it comes to high ranks, you have to use stone money The value of stone money has always been fluid, challenging the Western concept that currency value is pre-determined and fixed. The coins are valued by their size – they range from 7cm to 3.6m in diameter – as well as their ornateness and even for the sheer difficulty in obtaining the rock. How much a coin is worth also depends on who you give it to, and what for. In addition, Yapese factor oral history into each stone’s value, as there’s no written record of what belongs to who. Families rarely move from their villages, and the tribal elders from the around 150 villages pass down information of each piece, meaning they act as a reminder of the past and help to reinforce relationships and transactions that date back to times of warriors and clans. In some cases, the stones have engravings marking battles from more than 200 years ago. 

Each village has a stone money bank that displays pieces too large to move (Credit: Robert Michael Poole) 

Falmed and I finally arrived at the Mangyol stone money bank after a 40-minute drive from Colonia. From large to small, the few dozen stones were lined up in front of a p'ebay, an open structure in the village centre where the community comes together to do their trade, celebrations and sometimes their schooling too. Falmed explained that the rai are specifically placed, each encoded with secret connections, village relationships, and stories of marriage, conflicts and deep apologies that have seen the stones change hands over centuries. It’s those stories that only the local villagers know that truly determine which is most valuable. There’s no need to make more rai since the island essentially has a permanent number in circulation, and few are ever moved. Even broken ones retain their oral history that give them more value than a new piece. New pieces are occasionally made, though, simply to ensure the skills of past generations are not forgotten. It’s those stories that only the local villagers know that truly determine which is most valuable But if the stones are so valuable and so public, I wondered, what’s to stop someone making their own, or simply stealing one? “Most matters are common knowledge and secrets among local people are rare; thus theft of rai is relatively unknown,” writes Cora Lee C Gilliland of the Smithsonian Institution in her paper The Stone Money of Yap. Not that some haven’t attempted it. “They tried to do that in Yap, and they laughed about it because they broke,” Pasan later told me with a chuckle. “Then they did it with the stones in Guam, but they are not that strong and are more difficult to get at – it’s much easier to quarry in Palau.” 

Each stone’s worth is determined by its size, ornateness and history (Credit: Robert Michael Poole) 

Yap’s neighbours, Guam, Palau and Chuuk, are all heavily affected by European and American colonisation, and all bear conspicuous scars of World War II. Guam remains a US territory with a significant military base on the island that has shaped its culture, while Chuuk Lagoon is home to around 60 sunken wrecks, a result of the devastating Operation Hailstone in 1944. Yap, though, was largely bypassed by US bombing as the early 20th-Century Japanese occupation came to an end, and the rai stone’s sturdiness and longevity seem to represent the long-lasting authenticity of Yapese culture over the centuries. “In Yapese culture, if something [important] is going on, and there is nothing else suitable to use, then you use stone money,” said Falmed, who has already ensured the next generation retains his wealth by passing one piece to his son at his first-birthday ceremony. 

No matter its location, the Yapese know to whom each stone belongs (Credit: Robert Michael Poole)

“When my girlfriend was pregnant, we [came here] from Hawaii,” he explained. “On a child’s first birthday, if a clan is of high rank and has some small stone money, they will cut a chicken and drain the blood on the boy’s head to recognise the moment. It’s a gift, and a lot of people came [to the ceremony].” Falmed’s son is 12 now and lives in Hawaii. But the stone is in his family house in Yap. And even without written record, everyone already knows whose name is on it.

Making a Shamanic Spirit Rattle