Alma Hirsig’s My Life in a Love Cult….
What’s New: Di Lasso motet partbooks
The Harvard Theatre Collection has just purchased a pair of bound volumes of Orlando Di Lasso motet partbooks, printed in 1588. At this time, music was printed note by note in movable type. Due to the extreme complexity of lining up four, five, or eight parts in a score using this process, most works were…
A Deal with the Devil
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The book of ceremonial magic; the secret tradition in Goëtia, including the rites and mysteries of Goëtic theurgy, sorcery, and infernal necromancy was written by Arthur Wedward Waite and published in 1961. Ceremonial magic includes material…
New Digitization January-March 2014
Here are the complete works and collections we’ve digitized in the last three months. Highlights include one of our most spectacular medieval manuscripts, the Emerson-White Hours, a 17th century manuscript on magic tricks, a sonata by Handel, and a 19th century book of paper dolls. Account of Miss Pastrana, the Nondescript; and the Double-bodied Boy,…
The “Lady Adventurer”
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Grace Thompson Seton was many things, a feminist, a suffragette, a poet, a mother, a designer, a crack shot, and most relevant to this post a travel writer. She was married to Ernest Thompson Seton who…
Unmodified sexuality
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We return to the occult in this week’s feature from the Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s author is Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, writer, and occultist active in the first half of the twentieth century. While Spare’s finely-wrought…
Ghost Detective
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. There are many spin-offs of Sherlock Holmes, and some excellent ones from the early 20th century are Jean Ray’s Harry Dickson, le Sherlock Holmes Americain. This series of pulp dime-novel’s originally started in Germany 1907 and continued until…
The Vetālapañcaviṃśati, A Manuscript Divided
The Vetālapañcaviṃśati, or the twenty-five tales of the corpse-possessing spirit, is an Indian story collection dating back to at least the 11th century CE. The framing narrative tells the story of a king who is tricked into helping an ascetic perform a necromantic ritual in a cremation ground. The king is tasked with the fetching…
New on Oasis in April
Finding aids for eight newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of rebuses created by Dorothea Dix, and a bit of Houghton history which marks our 2500th online finding aid….
Whodunit and howdunit?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Alexandre Lacassagne was a French physician and criminologist in the 19th-century. He founded the Lacassagne School of Criminology which was based in Lyon, France and focused on medical jurisprudence and criminal anthropology. He quite famously gave…