Automata in the Ancient World

(Image of Hephaestus courtesy of Classics Unveiled)

There were golden handmaids also who worked for him,
and were like real young women, with sense and reason, voice also and strength, and all the learning of the immortals...
- The Illiad, Book 18

I just finished reading an article by Noel Sharkey in New Scientist (a British science magazine, totally worth the exhorbitant yearly subscription), which expanded on Mark Rosheim's wonderful and interesting book, Leonardo's Lost Robots.

Mr. Rosheim's research on Leonardo da Vinci's work suggests that da Vinci's lion automaton (see Wired article here) was powered by a clockwork cart, which was steered via a mechanism "controlled by arms attached to rotating gears." In Rosheim's opinion, it would have been possible to control the lion's movements by changing the position of the arms, which means the automaton was not only clockwork, but programmable. Which is a big deal.

Inspired by Rosheim's work, Mr. Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, decided to investigate some questions this raised: was da Vinci influenced by an earlier design? How far back in history can we trace programmable robots?

Mr. Sharkey is careful to point out that "programmable" means a machine capable of taking instructions. The instructions (the "program") can be written, or they can be hard-wired. The important thing is that the instructions should be able to be changed without taking the machine itself apart. So, for example, an old-fashioned metal-drum music box is reprogrammable because you can take the drum out and put a new one in.

This is what Sharkey says about his search:

"In search of answers I followed the technology back through medieval Europe to the Islamic world, where I have found evidence of an even earlier programmable automaton, made in Baghdad by the brilliant 13th-century engineer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari. He created a veritable boatload of programmable robot musicians effectively a floating jukebox designed to entertain nobles as they drank and lounged at royal pool parties.

"Picture of the internal structure of an automata for serving and arbitrating drinking sessions."
- Courtesy of JC Heuden at Virtual Worlds

Yet the trail doesn't stop there. It led me even further back past the automata of the Byzantine court and ancient Rome to ancient Alexandria. It was here that Hero, one of the greatest Greek engineers, constructed a programmable robot that pre-dates da Vinci's by 1500 years. Its control system turns out to be unique; more like knitting than a computer circuit. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence linking Hero's design to the programming languages used in, say, Honda's latest humanoid robot Asimo."

What Sharkey found was that Hero, who had designed everything from the aeolipile (the world's first steam-engine, see picture above) to "a vending machine that dispensed a shot of holy water in exchange for a coin," had designed a mobile theatre, complete with Dionysus and some female worshippers, all automata, which came in on a sort of self-propelled, self-guided cart. Sharkey saw the similarity to da Vinci's lion at once. But when he looked in Hero's Peri automatopoietikes ("On automata-making"), it became clear: this theatre was actually programmable -- using string for the programming language.

As Mr. Sharkey describes it, "Hero's idea was so elegant that even as I read it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end." Not only did Hero come up with a way of making a machine work in complex, programmable ways, he had essentially invented a programming language. And it's all with the kind of stuff you could put together in your basement. I found it all absolutely fascinating, but too long to recount, so you can read more in this reprint of the New Scientist article if you're interested. And here is a guy from New Scientist who decided to try it:

It's really interesting to me, finding that our mechanical-thinking personalities as humans go back so far. We tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, as if the ancient Greeks didn't have the brains to figure out simple mechanics. We look back and say, "My goodness, how on earth did they build those pyramids?" When in fact, the human brain hasn't changed in a really, really long time. It's only the available materials, the access to information, that have changed: the evolution of technological materials and our knowledge about what kinds of materials work, and the ability for information to move around in a sparsely-populated world full of war and danger - not the actual abilities of our minds. Think about it: Hero's book was probably read by, at best, a few hundred people over the course of several hundred years. Perhaps the reason we find it all so amazing is the way the ancients figured ways to be mechanical despite the lack of materials and access to information.

Take, for example, the article in the New Yorker recently (5/14/07) about the Antikythera mechanism (wiki), a fully-formed bronze clockwork mechanism from the first century BC:

"The device is remarkable for the level of miniaturization and complexity of its parts, which is comparable to that of 18th century clocks. It has over 30 gears, although some have suggested as many as 70 gears, with teeth formed through equilateral triangles. When past or future dates were entered via a crank (now lost), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets." - Wikipedia

When it was first opened in 1902, it was noticed that the Antikythera Mechanism had gears with precisely-cut teeth of different sizes, and looked like the mechanism of a clock, which was deemed impossible "because scientifically precise gearing wasn't believed to have been widely used until the fourteenth century - fourteen hundred years after the ship went down." No one wanted to believe it - and so the thing was put down as a sort of astrolabe - and left at that.

The interesting thing about this article, aside from the wonderful detective tale showing the slow unveiling of this device, is the unusual supposition that "early civilizations were much more technically adept than we imagine they were." In fact, let me quote a paragraph:

"Looking back over the first fifty years of research on the Mechanism, one is struck by the reluctance of modern investigators to credit the ancients with technological skill. The Greeks are thought to have possessed crude wooden gears, which were used to lift heavy building materials...but historians do not generally credit them with possessing...gears cut from metal and arranged into complex 'gear trains' capable of carrying motion from one driveshaft to another...It's almost as if we wished to reserve advanced technological accomplishment exclusively for ourselves."

The article goes on to describe how ancient inventors and their descriptions are the cause of much disbelief and furor among scholars, many of whom point to the lack of physical evidence. Hero's works are described by critics as "fantasy," for example. And yet, here is a perfectly fine specimen of ancient technology, sitting in a museum for a hundred years, gathering dust, while people argue about it in a desultory way (with a few, noticeably ignored, exceptions).

There is a quality to this kind of argument, among perfectly reasonable history- and science-types, which smacks to me of the Self-Justifying Three: Manifest Destiny, Social Darwinism, and Positivism. Manifest Destiny was a peculiarly American argument used in the 19th Century to excuse the displacement of indiginous peoples. It ran like this: the (white) American people are virtuous, and have a mission to spread this virtue, as manifestly destined by God (the destiny can be seen in how we are already spreading)...See the excellent, circular logic? Social Darwinism believes that extreme inequalities in wealth are due to the fact that anyone who's got the right stuff will become rich, therefore the poor must be inherently lazy and stupid, and that's why they're poor. Positivism is still alive and well today, and it says that everything is improving through science, i.e. continually getting more rational (read: better - remember "Better living through chemistry?") Apply all this to the ancients, and we have exactly the kind of assumed superiority that gets us nowhere.

"This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she travels; she holds a schoolbook. The different economic activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Indians and wild animals flee." [wiki]

Think about it: why do people always say that Leonardo da Vinci was "ahead of his time?" It's true that he was brilliant, but doesn't that statement imply a certain belief that those people back then were incapable of creation to the degree he worked, that they were not only ignorant but, somehow, less than modern people?

The problem is confusing intelligence with knowledge, and knowledge with information. How many of us remember the "smart" kid in school, the one who knew everything? In reality this kid wasn't much smarter than other people, it was simply that he or she kept all the facts at his or her fingertips. On the other hand that other kid, the quiet one in the corner who never said anything? That kid was actually mechanically brilliant, but no one noticed it because it expressed itself as spending all her time "playing with" her Erector Set (aka Meccano). We have all done it, thinking that knowledge is the product of intelligence - and also that information is knowledge.

The truth is that knowledge is the assembly of information, and it is only through intelligence that we are able to convert knowledge into a coherent world view. If we saw it in terms of Lego (since I'm on a toy theme here), information would be the individual lego blocks - useless on their own. Knowledge would be lego blocks assembled into discrete chunks, which allows the legos to be carried around and exchanged - but they still don't mean much, other than the cachet of personal wealth, until you add in that secret ingredient: intelligence. Then, all of a sudden, you can make all sorts of things happen that have never been done with legos before.

In the world of education, it is becoming more and more commonly believed that intelligence comes in many different flavors, and that, contrary to IQ tests and other ways of quantifying smarts, intelligence has to do with ways of perceiving, ways of processing knowledge. If you look at the fact that there are more than ten times the number of people alive today than in da Vinci's time (and less before that), it is no wonder that this innate intelligence did not catch fire, and Hero's steam-powered aeolipile (for example) remained a curiosity.

After all, he was unable to broadcast what he did except in the most limited way, lacking a printing press or a postal system.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who rebutted the presiding Cartesian view that all things must be verified through observation by observing that "the realms of verifiable truth and human concern share only a slight overlap, yet reasoning is required in equal measure in both spheres" [wiki], said that history is cyclical. His analysis was that civilization repeats the same cycle every time: a "divine" age, where culture relied on metaphor to understand the world; a "heroic" age, feudal and monarchic and dependent on idealized figures, and the final age, which is characterized by democracy and reflection on the world via irony (which era do you suppose we are in?). "...in this [final] epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era" [wiki]. Needless to say, he got a poor reception for his ideas, because no one wanted to believe that civilizations always rise and fall again. Everyone wants to believe that they are the pinnacle of history, and that it will carry on this way forever.

The truth is, even when people came up with great ideas, they might not have had the means to disseminate information. And even if they did, the ideas had difficulty going far. And even then, you were always in danger of running into a dark age, when all your ideas were burned or lost or, well, suppressed.

So here we are, with our internet and our intense crowding, where ideas fly around like bees. When someone invents something it is disseminated within minutes. Can you see the advantages we have over the ancients? We must be careful we do not assume an evolutionary advantage over those who have gone before - that we, with all our gear, are actually more intelligent than our ancient forebears, who when you think of it, did the most amazing things with the materials at hand. Perhaps the sign of a truly advancing culture is one who can overcome the urge to diminish those who have come before. Perhaps, when articles like this come out in the New Yorker and other popular broadcasting mechanisms, we have some hope; a Rennaissance of sorts.

Or perhaps we should be on the lookout for that coming Dark Age.




Links:

July 31st the History Channel is running a show on Ancient Robots, in which they have interviewed Mr. Sharkey. The dates for this in the UK start, I think, on the 24th - look it up depending on your area. I have no idea about the rest of the English-speaking world, sorry...

Thanks to the Automata/Automaton blog for the unexpected link to YouTube!

Automata Everywhere

I just found a bunch of automata videos on YouTube, and it's wonderous and mind-boggling. (NB: these take awhile to come in and sometimes only come when you scroll around - sorry; there's just so many!)

In particular, my own obsession is with "mechanical people", that is, clockwork mechanisms that emulate people doing realistic, organic-seeming things - generally called "androids" at the time they were popular. It is stunning to me to see automata which can actually write, or draw, or paint, because they seem so aware of the paper, and their touch is so amazingly delicate. And, that after more than 200 years, they still can be so accurate and beautiful.

There are a series of these French videos (not in English, unfortunately, I wish I understood it better) of these 18th-century automata, which makes me think there's a full-length French documentary out there. If anyone knows what it is, I'd like to know what it is and where I can get it. This one is called The Drawer:

Here is The Writer:

And, in case you were wanting to see (like I did) the insides of the Writer:

This one was made in Paris in 1880 by Vichy, and is unrestored. This comes to us courtesy of the folks at Automatomania, a husband-and-wife enterprise in the UK who restore old automata:

Here is another 18th Century one from somewhere else:

Lastly, here is an amazing animation of a truly amazing wooden robot (from?) the 19th Century - Karakuri Ningyo, in Japanese (thanks to an anonymous reader for the translation) :

Cat's Out of the Bag

It's funny how you go through life in your little bubble, and then your bubble collides with someone else's bubble and does that bubble thing, you know where they look like one bubble, but really there's this wall down the middle. Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of a cluster, surrounded by friends (or, if you prefer the negative, walled in all around). Or sometimes you are simply all alone, lonely but floating gently over the world, with good fat perspective all around.

Okay, enough of the bubble analogy.

The truth is, though, we carry our little reality around with us everywhere. I looked up "reality" on wikipedia (which struck me as an amazingly odd thing to do); I highly recommend the entry. It's fascinating seeing how many different things can be discussed under that one-word heading. Among other things was this:

"On a much broader and more subjective level, the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true."

So there you have it: all your feelings, beliefs and interests, all tied up neatly in a nutshell. Or, as I said, a bubble.

If you look up the science on neurons and reality, you will get so many diverse opinions that it becomes clear that reality, for these scientists, is really a matter of opinion, just like the rest of us.

To me it seems that good friends are people who are able to share your reality. They may not agree, but they are willing to "get inside your head" (not a neuroscientific term) and be there, in your reality, with you for awhile. Good authors are able to make friends of us all by giving us a chance to share some head space with them - which of course fools those of us known as "fans" (also not a neuroscientific term) into feeling that we do, indeed, know this person, and, having shared reality with them, they must be our friend too - right? Which is, unfortunately, not true, because really, they are carefully crafting a piece of their reality and presenting it to you - a worthy occupation and wonderful to experience, but not what good friends do with each other. When you are with someone you really get on with, you are passing bits of your reality back and forth between you with the minimum of crafting and editing, and this, this is why we sometimes get fits of the giggles: we are passing things back and forth too fast and they are spiralling out of control, and it's fun as hell.

In any case it's fun sharing my extremely weird bubble with you all. I sometimes get the giggles, anyway.

And thanks muchly to Mr. Neil Gaiman for his kind words on his blog Thursday. I only heard about it today, but was very pleased, having perused many of those carefully-crafted reality bits of his, myself.

...And welcome to those new readers who followed his link here!

A Bit of Fluff: Late Baroque Fashions

Marie Antoinette, in her youthfully extravagant days. Contrary to rumor, she did not say "Let them eat cake".

When I was young and attending design school to learn about clothing design (yet another of my many guises: the Garment Industry Professional), I had to take a class in the History of Fashion, taught by a woman named DeWitt. This class was one of the most memorable classes I've ever taken, discussing not only fashion throughout history but the political and social influences which caused certain fashions to become popular.

For example, did you know that King Henry VIII was six foot four? His waist grew to more than 45 inches, later in his life, and so he developed these sleeves padded with sawdust so as to broaden his shoulders and distract from his waistline, so he could go on looking massive and kinglike. Thus the Tudor fad for stuffed sleeves.

Or: the lace industry, in pre-Revolutionary France was so in demand that it was a major cottage industry; a dress for one of the two hundred or so courtiers who attended a ball took six months to make, was worn once, and then discarded. Dozens of people worked on the lace, or the embroidery, for those dresses, working under (of course) unpleasant conditions - damp, cramped quarters without enough light - to produce the textiles required, not to mention the actual intricate assembly of the clothes. Apparently, younger and younger people were employed as the older ones went blind and demand went up. The pay was, of course, horrible (not only for the workers, but for the tailors - sometimes the Palace didn't pay their bills) and so everyone was hungry as well. I am quoting this all from the back of my head. There is some question as to how much the textile industry's woes fed the unrest, but I'm certain it didn't help the royals' cause.

This was not too far off the mark, surprisingly

This was one of the periods I was most interested in, of course: the 1760s and 70s, when huge wigs, embroidered cloth, and layers on layers of lace were the fad for both women and men. I think what fascinates me about this era is the sheer constructedness of it. Both women and men wore wigs, which were pomaded thickly with grease and then powdered. If you were very rich, you had it re-done quite often; if not, well, you simply...lived with it. For a long time, with interesting results. Yech.

Yazbukey's modern take on the 17th century wig, courtesy of StyleBubble.

Women's wigs were much taller and more elaborate than men's during this time (though men's wigs did have a spate of relative tallness). Wigs were often up to three feet high, and had elaborate carapaces underneath of wire and wool, over which the hair was drawn. At the height of this fashion, women would have ornate themes woven into their wigs: the famous model ship in full sail, for example, or stuffed-bird-and-flower arrangements. Marie Antoinette was said to have come to a ball with a birdcage, complete with live bird, in her hair.


This was cause for much adjustment in domestic arrangements: wig dressers, called "mackerel" due to their floury appearance, were one type of servant employed solely for this purpose. Mackerel stood on special stools to be able to reach the heights of hair, and the women involved had complex garments that they put on to protect them for the final powdering. I saw a picture somewhere of carriages that were designed (or possibly re-designed) to have trap-doors in their tops that folded back from the edge of the door to allow a person with an extremely tall wig to enter.

A new look came out in the 1740s which, in most places, was abandoned by the 1760s: flat, wide dresses with cages built up over the hips. These "panniers," as they were called (yes, I know, the bicyclists have co-opted them), were often wider than the length of the woman's arm. Doors were an issue, to answer your unspoken question, and were negotiated either by squeezing the sides or by simply turning sideways and going through that way. Most places dropped this style pretty quickly, but the French kept on wearing them well into the 1770's.

Looks like a torture device, doesn't it? Some might say it was.

Fashions this extreme will always be made fun of.

In any case, I could make a long comment about how much better constructed fashion is than imposed fashion - i.e. fashion that doesn't allow for discreet corsetry, but insists that you change your actual body...but I won't.

Editor's note: I did have a section in here about the Draughtsman's Contract, a film by Peter Greenaway, which I love, but one of my perceptive readers has pointed out that it actually takes place in the 1690s...This is what happens when you try to blog away from home. Nonetheless, I'm leaving the reference in because I love the movie so much.

Gone this week

Despite my best intentions of doing something ahead of time, I don't have a post this week as I am at a writer's conference all week. Sorry, folks, and see you next week...!

Weird Stones

Bezoar stone from India

My first conscious awareness of lodestones magical stones was in a horrific scene in Susan Cooper's The Grey King, from the Dark is Rising series (If you have not read this, you should; or at least buy it for someone young in your life, and watch them get all interested). In this scene, the main characters can't find their dog. They search and search, if I remember rightly, and finally find him in an abandoned building, flattened against the floor in a terrible, unnatural position. They realize, after a moment of horror, that there's a lodestone warestone pinning the dog to the floor. No one can move it; it's stuck fast to the ground.

I don't, unfortunately, remember what they did about the situation, but the image has stuck vividly in my mind, a reminder of a deeper reality.

The books have a wonderful memory for the kind of tale-telling that was done in historic Britain, especially the kind of tricks that evil spirits might visit upon their enemies, and a kind of lowering, glowering landscape behind and between the usual holidaying sunshine of a proper British adventure book. Really great stuff, and metaphorically very apt, as the darkness behind the light is so true of those isles: the modern (as in post-Victorian) English image, for example, being one of bramble jelly and short pants, seaside holidays and cricket and tea on the lawn of half-timbered houses in suburban villages. Or second World War images like those in The Chamomile Lawn, by Mary Wesley (another great author). Behind this lays the old Britain: woad-painted warriors and unhappy Romans, Saxons and witchcraft and sprites both evil and beneficent; the evil eye, the hollow hills; Stonehenge. ...All of which, unfortunately, have been exploited within an inch of their lives in recent years, resulting in a zeitgeist of mass-market Lord-of-the-Rings-driven mythological consumption. The darkness is lost in the endless discussion pigeonholing each relevant part into fantasy role-playing and alternative realities.

If you really look at some of the old stories, you see a lack of unified cosmology; what you have instead is a clear, if uncohesive, sense of other beings living side-by-side with the rest of us. These beliefs, these myths and stories were not an alternative reality, a game to play: they were entirely real, entirely contextual to regular life; they often involved malevolent beings and influences living in one's house, in one's village. Think of Calvinist witch-hunts: look, if you can, at the transcripts from those trials, the kinds of things those poor wretches were accused of. People were more isolated then, more frightened of the power of the natural world all around them. To quote Thomas Hobbes, their lives were "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." And their magic was dark, hairy, and very local.

Chinese lodestone "spoon" compass, circa 2nd c. CE; the Chinese understood lodestones to be trying to return to their mother stone. They also believed lodestones to be an important factor in geomancy, otherwise known as feng shui

In any case, I've spent many years thinking of lodestones as this magical thing, this alchemically deep side of an everyday object, something from that dark crack in the sunshine of reality. Even if they are not the magical stone that I remember from the Grey King, they have a long history in alchemy and other places of being deeply, magically meaningful in the order of the universe. However, looking through all the references on the Web, I find no mention of lodestones in this context. The relevant information has been reduced to just that: information, a scientific description, a history of nautical navigation. Magnetism and geology. Gone is the magic that lodestones once held in the minds of the public.

Lodestones are "a magnetic mineral form of iron(II), iron(III) oxide Fe3O4, one of several iron oxides. A piece of intensely magnetic magnetite... was used as an early form of magnetic compass [since] iron, steel and ordinary magnetite are attracted to a magnetic field, including the Earth's magnetic field. Only magnetite with a particular crystalline structure, lodestone, can act as a natural magnet and attract and magnetize iron." wiki


If you peer under the surface of all the factual writing, sift it all and look back into the depths of history, starting in 1st century China, what you will see is a magical phenomenon: the discovery of a rock which moves on its own. Not only moves, but has this attraction to things. And even more magical: sometimes the rock doesn't do this - only certain ones actually work. The rock seems to want to point to a star. Perhaps it is in league with the star; perhaps it is the influence of spirits. As the Chinese discovered, the rock had a life of its own, no matter where you are in the world.

Curiously, at the opposite end of the universe from geology are bezoar stones, or bezars, which are stones of mineral and hair found in the digestive tracts of ruminants such as goats, sheep, llamas and deer. Originally, bezoars were found in goats living in the mountains of Western Persia. They came to Europe from the Middle East around in the 11th century, and their believed usefulness against poison made them magical: European people went on using them until the 18th century, their supposed powers becoming more and more complex until they lost credibility entirely.

A hairy bezoar, one without much calcification

"Many persons of status accepted potential poisoning as a chronic threat and armed themselves for battle against it. Medicine of the time was often practiced by improperly trained and unlicensed "surgeons" who could often do more harm than good. Those who were wise would take preventive action to avoid having to depend on unreliable "cures." Because wine and other drinks were often laced with arsenic, the most popular poison of the period, many magical devices were employed to negate its deleterious effects before it was consumed. Amethyst, crushed emerald and "unicorn horn" (often narwhal tusk) were all immersed in suspect beverages in the belief that they would render them safe. The most common and effective of these amulets was the bezoar stone...

"Discoveries on the wreck of Nuestra Señora de Atocha show that, in colonial Spanish-America of 1622, bezoar stones were certainly popular, and relied upon. Bezoars were rare, and the extravagant contexts from which they were found on the wreck show the power and esteem that was ascribed to them. The most spectacular item to reflect this belief is the gold "poison" cup, which once held a permanently mounted bezoar in its interior to absorb the poison from any drink it may have held. Another, chicken-egg sized bezoar is beautifully mounted in an engraved and enameled gold framework that was apparently designed to be suspended from a chain. This stone could then be immersed in any drinking vessel to remove toxins. A group of ten unadorned bezoars was found in a silver canister, apparently being shipped to Spain for more formal treatment. Because the Atocha primarily traded in South America, it is assumed these bezoars were extracted from llamas or alpacas, although there are accounts of the Spanish taking them from deer in the New World."

Bezoars were commonly thought to be an old-wives' tale until recently:

"Modern examinations of the properties of bezoars by Gustaf Arrhenius and Andrew A. Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have shown that they could, when immersed in an arsenic-laced solution, remove the poison. The toxic compounds in arsenic are arsenate and arsenite. Each is acted upon differently, but effectively, by bezoar stones. Arsenate is removed by being exchanged for phosphate in the mineral brushite, a crystalline structure found in the stones. Arsenite is found to bond to sulfur compounds in the protein of degraded hair, which is a key component in bezoars.

By the eighteenth century the marriage of magic and medicine was coming unraveled. Too many ailments, such as epilepsy, jaundice and plague were said to be treatable by bezoars, and people began to grow wary of such claims. The popularity of the bezoar soon faded."

-- Quotes from the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society

"The scarcity of bezoar stones by the 17th century led a group of Portuguese Jesuits working in Goa to come up with a man made version. These so called 'Goa Stones' were a mixture of bezoar as well as other precious objects believed to have curative powers. Until the beginning of the 18th century, when medical authorities began to debunk the belief in these stones, they could sell for more then their weight in gold and were often contained in cases such as the example offered here."

-- from Columbia University's website on South Asian Studies



The question I have, after all this, is: does something have to have no pragmatic use for it to be remembered as magical? It's clear that bezoar stones are now thoroughly explained (like a pearl, bezoar stones - as opposed to another kind of bezoar, like a hairy bezoar - are usually caused by the initial introduction of some irritant into the digestive tract). Yet their magic lives on. They continue to weird us out. We see them and they feel alien, something not-normal. You can see them in museums, on display in their original, sanctified splendor.

Lodestones, however, have been co-opted by their usefulness. As soon as magnetism was fully explained, and people began being able to make imitation lodestones (magnets), the basic mystery about their actual status as weird stones seems to have lost its power. Why? They are still found in the ground, the only stone on the earth which is naturally and permanently magnetic. To me that's like a little crumb of the universe, a bit of the True Earth showing up. Like holograms, a piece which shows the whole, though it be the tiniest fragment. When did they lose their mythological status? Think about the incredible fact that you can rub a bit of metal against these stones, and the metal will come away with the same properties as the rock. If that's not magical, what is?

Here is more than you could ever want to know what has been written throughout history on bezoar, or bezar, stones.

For a revolting example of a hairy bezoar you can try Neil Gaiman's Sandman book #3, "Calliope"

And, if you want a kind of repellent example of how magic has been turned into corporate commerce, check out this website, where a big-money diving company sells treasure at exhorbitant prices. Now you too can sit in the comfort of your own home and purchase real treasure, including gold-encrusted bezoars, online.

Wunderkammer Alert

Brief news flash:

A friend of mine just came back from Washington, DC and tells me there is a really interesting exhibit at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, titled "Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries," on until September 16th. The show is about Portugal and exploration, and the effect it had on the culture of the times.

To look at Henricus Martellus's 1490 map of the world is to behold a strange, unsettling planet. Europe seems vaguely familiar, but beyond the Mediterranean everything dissolves wildly into myth. Africa is a squarish blob, connected to Asia by a long strip of land. A huge island called Taprobana dominates the Indian Ocean, and there's no hint of the Americas or the Pacific Ocean; the map simply stops at China. Half the world is a confused jumble, and the other half is not yet even imagined.

But jump ahead a half-century to Pero Fernandes's map of 1545 -- and the planet is utterly transformed. A huge wave of exploration has brought the world into focus for the first time: Africa has taken on its distinctive shape, India is no longer an insignificant bump, the Pacific is there in all its vastness, and the Americas have appeared. Guesswork has given way to knowledge: A new world, with all its complexities and possibilities, has suddenly come into being.

.."It's hard for us to imagine how transformatory this period was," says Julian Raby, the director of the Smithsonian's Sackler and Freer galleries. "It's the first moment of globalization -- information about the variety of the world, in terms of its peoples and cultures, was just pouring in. And part of what we want to get across is that sense of wonder at the complexities and textures of the world."

-- from the Brooke's review in the Washington Post

Here's a secret, though: If you go down to the lowest basement level of the gallery, near the back somewhere, there is a room full of pieces from a Wunderkammer. My friend says it's not set up or organized like one, but there are some really marvelous pieces: a rhinoceros horn wrapped in gold, a bezoar the size of your fist (also decorated with gold), and a number of other really interesting, wonder-ful things.

And of course the show has maps. Lots of cool maps.


"When Ferdinand Magellan set out on the expedition that would circumnavigate the globe (1519-1521), he was looking for a route to the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia. Magellan was killed en route, but his navigator Antonio Pigafetta survived. This map, which includes a clove tree, is a from a 1525 French copy of Pigafetta’s journal."

-- From Smithsonian Magazine online.