A chalice veil, #English make, c. 1600-1629 (V&A Museum, London) With note: "Purchased .. for £7 7s in 1914 from Mrs. Parker of Uppingham, Rutland. Mrs. Parker claimed it had been obtained by her father some 50 years before from an old lady who had been using it as a duster".

By separating beauty and life, the world objectifies & determines what is beautiful. We're thus content to live lives largely deprived of beauty, happy to occasionally glimpse it at museums & on screens. Grasping the beauty in/of life is nothing less than a refusal of this world.

Very placid serpents. Possibly drugged. Or slain in the spirit. Hard to tell..

“If Moral Virtue was Christianity Christ’s Pretensions were all Vanity. The Moral Christian is the Cause Of the Unbeliever & his Laws. For what is Antichrist but those Who against Sinners Heaven close.” WILLIAM BLAKE

Lobby Main Elevator in Sinclair Building 512 Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas (1930) Architect: Wiley G. Clarkson

“‘All reification is a forgetting.’ Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance.” Herbert Marcuse, “The Aesthetic Dimension.”

Top 10 of this year's most read pieces — no.4: A. D. Manns' essay on the speculative origins of Aradia, "the Gospel of the Witches": https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/roma-lister-aradia/ (Full Top 10 here: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/12/top-10-most-read-pieces-from-2025/)

William Blake. Frontispiece. Songs of experience.

Leonora Carrington

Jacopo Ligozzi. 1604.

Watch Patti Smith’s New Tribute to the Avant-Garde Poet Antonin Artaud

The conceptual tungsten cube of kindness and love has been allocated to your designated holiday receptacle. Its metaphysical density is substantial. Handle with care.

Sprite lightning

My latest for Mindplex

Marie Wilson (1922-2017), “Spirit of the Desert” (1959-1960), oil on canvas, 38 x 48.5 cm.

Robert Fludd. 1617.

This exceptional silk miyamairi kimono, used for initiating a baby boy in a Shinto ceremony, displays intricate yuzen-painting with freehand painting highlights. The back of this remarkable kimono features a dominant image of a Noh actor performing the auspicious 'Sambaso'. 1900-1930, Japan

Pondering the design choices that led to James McCoy's cover art for Atlantis (1970) by Sun-Ra And His Astro Infinity Arkestra. Title references to lost continents/ancient structures (Mu, Lemuria, Yucatan, Bimini, Atlantis) with artwork that's all submerged eyes and mouths(?)/tentacles(?).

Kazimir Malevich. "Black square". 1915.

O Everlasting! [Sino-Islamic scroll with one of the 99 names of Allah written in Arabic calligraphy] https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/70462

Citipati

When that void stares back

Bladstanden A.A.Van Voorn (date c. late 1800's) From the collection of botanical wall charts at Stichting Academisch Erfgoed (no longer online)

Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto Hall of Thirty-three Bays, 1995 (Silver gelatin print mounted to paper) #Photography

Jacques Houplain. From Maldoror. 1947.

Naples Dioscurides. 7th century.

Photographs of Japan taken by Wilhelm Burger as member of the Imperial Austrian Expedition to East Asia in 1870. Held by the British Library.

Blemmyae. 1618.

Ingrid Rekers

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

"Sixteen Remarkable Revelations About the Virgin of Guadalupe" My latest @patheos.com piece on the eve of her feast day on December 12 www.patheos.com/blogs/theglo... #Mexico #Catholic #AcademicSky #Guadalupe

The Plum Tree Branch (Umegae), Calligraphic Excerpt from Chapter 32 of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/199463

Chhinnamasta

Mannequin de cire au musée Grévin, Paris, c.1935 by Gaston Paris

Magical Relief https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/47426

The bones of Santa have been leaking liquid for 1,700 years.

"The image of the moon … is the form of a man who has the head of a bird, and he holds a stick above him, and he has a tree before him." - Picatrix Bk II Ch 10, p.105, trans Greer & Warnock #occultsky #jewelry #occultart #bsnm #queerartist sorcerersworkbench.etsy.com/listing/8385...

The Warbler’s First Song (Hatsune), Calligraphic Excerpt from Chapter 23 of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/200000

A small comic about god coming into being. Inspired by golden dawn material

This silk hitoe kimono transforms into a living aquatic tableau. Swimming through this liquid landscape are wild carp (nishikigoi), rendered with much technical skill using silver metallic thread inserts that catch and reflect light like actual fish scales moving through water. 1940-1960, Japan

The Ultimate Outsider: A 1995 Interview with Gypsy Lou Webb www.frenchquarterjournal.com/archives/an-... 'In the 1960s, out of a tiny French Quarter apartment, Gypsy Lou and John Webb published a journal called "The Outsider," with ground-breaking work by beat writers like Charles Bukowski, Henry...

Pages from Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine’s Gobolinks (1896). More on the microgenre of "inkblot books" in our latest books post, including the original in the genre, Justinus Kerner's Kleksographien (1857) — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/inkblot-books

The Night Walker, William Castle, 1964.

Giant pair of 19th c. Japanese prayer beads with baseball-sized bead-shrines housing tiny Buddhist icons. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.