Morbid Anatomy

Greek Shadow Puppet, 1969 #shadow #shadowpuppet #puppet #death #angel #angelofdeath #skeleton

Give the gift of Morbid Anatomy with one of our digital gift cards! Available at www.morbidanatomy.org/shop. Whether they’re particular, hard to shop for, or they have a taste for the uncommon, give your loved one access to our wide array of unique books, art, antiques, and ephemera, as well as our wildly popular virtual lectures and online classes! Purchasing this digital gift card creates a unique code. The gift card recipient can enter this code at checkout to subtract the gift card value from their order total. This gift card never expires. #morbidanatomy #giftcards #giftguide

Free online talk! 🥀 August 28, join us for Super Natural: Plants Behaving Weirdly with Sandy Masuo of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Click the link in our bio and select EVENTS or visit www.morbidanatomy.org/events to learn more and register. Once upon a time, "weird" referred to the supernatural—anything eerie, fantastic, or mysterious. Today, it still connotes the unconventional. Plants are conventionally perceived as passive organisms that serve human culture by being decorative and/or productive. But nature is rife with weird plants that defy this concept. Some upend the natural order by eating animals. Others are parasites or produce treacherous narcotics. Most survive by manipulating animals (including humans) for their own purposes. Meet some botanical rebels that demonstrate all plants are wonderfully weird. Sandy Masuo is an editor, educator, author, and conservationist on a mission to enlighten and to inspire wonder in the world around us. She currently serves as senior writer at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Prior to that she was the associate editor in the Los Angeles Zoo publications division for 18 years. From 2010 to 2014, Sandy served on the Southern California Horticultural Society board of directors, and was an active member of the Association of Zoological Horticulture from 2010 to 2019. In 2016, she published her debut novel (as Rosana DuMas)—the story of a horticulturist detective investigating the dubious death of a zoo docent. She teaches fiction and business writing as well as a variety of classes from succulent gardening and birding at local community colleges. She holds a BA from Brown University and an Ed. M from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Image: Valentine Cameron Prinsep, Medea the Sorceress, 1880 #morbidanatomy #planets #plantlove #plantloversofinstagram #botany #naturalscience

How can the images we choose or create possess potency and be infused with power? Can Art become our magical ally? This September, join @laetitia.cartomancy for Artomancy Circle: Using Art as a Mantic Mirror! Our second session will be under the aegis of Marjorie Cameron, and we’ll look at the talismanic power of art. In this Artomancy class serie, designed to harness the power of visual art as a tool for self-transformation, we’ll choose one artist per session, explore their visual world, and use it as a springboard for introspective and creatives games, simultaneously engaging our spirit, mind, and body. By diving into the archetypal themes underlying their work, we’ll playfully gain insights about who we are and where we are at. Each session will include parlor games, journaling practice, creative assignment, Tarot work, free association, image scrying, image-making and more! Four months, 8 Sessions, 8 artists. We’ll do Hieronymus Bosch, Marjorie Cameron, David Lynch, Toulouse Lautrec, Pierre et Gilles, Louise Bourgeois, William Blake and Gustav Klimt! Image: Marjorie Cameron #tarot #tarotcards #tarotreading #tarotreadersofinstagram #antique #art #nyctalope #art #museum #collection #painting #nocturnal #library #night #thenight #stars #dream #sleep #artomancy

Detail from a Naval Surgeon’s Trephination Kit, 17th century #trephination #trepanation #brainpan #surgery #release #diy

Do you love games as much as we do? This Saturday, August 26, join our friends and new neighbors @brooklyngameknight for their grand opening in @industrycity! Brooklyn Game Knight is located in Industry City's Building 6 (right above @barrowsintense), 68 34th Street, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11232 The crew at BKGK has planned a whole day of excitement for players of all ages: 2:00 pm: Free Open Play & Tutorials | Birchguard Quest hosted by Chess At Three: Got a would-be hero who dreams of lands filled with giants, dragons, and adventure? Want a fantasy game everyone can play? Chess@3 will host a session of Birchguard Quest, a tabletop roleplaying game created with the family in mind. With a focus on puzzles, team-based communication, and fun, it's a great starting point for young adventurers. 4:30 pm: Jigsaw Puzzle Races: Ready. Set. Puzzle! Put your skills to the test in a timed race as you and your team attempt to piece together a jigsaw puzzle faster than your competitors. Buy in is per player for a team of up to 4. Winners get prizes and every team gets to take their puzzle home as well! 6:00 pm: Strange Jason's Wild Werewolf Bash: Are you ready to howl at the moon? Strange Jason of Get Weird NYC hosts a session of Werewolf, as villagers try to find out who's the werewolf amongst them before it's too late! With a version of the game that can have up to 35(!) players, everyone can join in on this weird, wacky, and wolfy fun. 8:00 pm: Tabletop Gaming In Ancient Egypt: Gaming existed long before Chess, Uno, and Monopoly. Renowned Egyptologist Ava Forte Vitali will present, in association with Morbid Anatomy, a look at Tabletop Gaming In Ancient Egypt. There will also be a demonstration of Mehen, Senet and the Royal Game of Ur. 9:00 pm: "Rollin' With Rotsko": Hosted by Nathaniel Rotsko, this $1 Bingo will be a raucous way to close out the night! It’s about time for some beer, booze and BINGO in Distiller’s Row… grab some fine drinks from our neighbors at Fort Hamilton Distillery, Gun Hill Publick House, or any of the lovely Industry City establishments and come back quick to play and win prizes! Enjoy 200+ games available after all, it is a PARTY!

New in-person class! ✨ September 17, join us for Embodied Mediumship: How To Use Common Techniques for Talking to the Dead as Tools for Self-Knowledge with Medium Tiffany Hopkins. Click the link in our bio and select CLASSES or visit www.morbidanatomy.org/classes to learn more and register. Spend a few hours in the Morbid Anatomy Library learning the basics of mediumship and applying them to your personal development process. Foundational skills include discernment, imagination, relationship building, habit formation, access to altered states of consciousness, and psychic communication. We'll explore these topics conceptually and in practice through exercises, meditations, demonstrations, and conversation. Please dress comfortably. Tiffany Hopkins (she/her) began studying mediumship after moving into her great-great grandmother's cottage in Lily Dale, the world's largest community of Spiritualists. This class stems from her research into channeling for writing, art- and music-making. She's also a technology strategist and uses her rational side to help make mediumship more accessible to everyone. She has a weekly show on Lily Dale Radio, and she'd like you to join her over at Normalize Talking to the Dead. Image: Wolfgang Paalen, El toisón de oro, 1937 #morbidanatomy #mediumship #divination #creativity #artmaking #spiritualism

Looking for a fun and unique summer activity? 🪲 August 29, join us at the Morbid Anatomy Library in Brooklyn, NY for an insect diorama making class with Ann Seymour Vergara of the @the_beetles_dilemma! Click the link in our bio and select CLASSES or visit www.morbidanatomy.org/classes to learn more and register. All materials for your one-of-a-kind creation will be provided, including a selection of several different weevil species and some wee tchotchkes to use in composing your dioramas. Seymour will teach you how to position and pin an insect, then guide you through the process of assembling your diorama. While all of the elements for the piece are included, you are welcome to bring a small charm or token (NO LARGER than a quarter) if you would like to use something personal in your diorama. The completed dioramas are 3.25 inches tall. Ann Seymour Vergara has been creating tiny worlds populated with insects for the better part of a decade. A self-taught beetle enthusiast, her work has been shown at multiple gallery shows in NYC and beyond. #morbidanatomy #insectart #naturalhistory #entomology #oddities #darkdecor

Chamber of Psyche, Giulio Romano, 1528 #pan #psyche #satyr #goatgod

Meet Maria Molteni, a queer transdisciplinary artist, educator, and mystic whose practice incorporates research, ritual, and play-based collaboration! Shop @strega_maria's work in person at the Morbid Anatomy Flea Market and Creative Fair on September 17 in Brooklyn! Click the link in our bio and select EVENTS or visit www.morbidanatomy.org/events for tickets. Maria Molteni (they/them, based in MA) is a full time contemporary artist, educator, mystic and designer with heavy emphasis on collaboration and research in their interdisciplinary practice. With formal training in painting, dance, and printmaking their research utilizes many publication formats to anchor, bolster and expand their artwork. Molteni’s experimental product lines Infinite Goddetc and Free Bleed Press offer zines, artist books, prints, apparel original tarot, and playing cards, and limited editioned art objects that embrace the margins. They center queerness, intersectional feminism and gender expansive mysticism via a playful framework for editioned multiples called “Counting to Infinity”. Molteni is particularly excited to debut their original Stelle Scopa deck of cards, Games Are Magic zine, and a brand new publication MEDUSA: Myth, Memory, (Anti)Monument, which features essays by Molteni, Morbid Anatomy’s own Liz Andres and other artists who study Medusa closely. #morbidanatomy #tarot #tarotreadersofinstagram #mementomori #fleamarket #makersmarket #madeinny #womanownedbusiness #smallbusiness #shopsmall #antiques #oddities #contemporaryart

New online class! 🧠 Beginning September 10, join us for Imaginology: The Science and Spirituality of Imagination with Professor Stephen T. Asma. Click the link in our bio and select CLASSES or visit www.morbidanatomy.org/classes to learn more and register. Join author, illustrator, musician, and Professor Stephen Asma for an exploration of the imagination. Asma is an internationally renowned scholar and practitioner of the imagination. Imagination is intrinsic to our inner lives. You could even say that it makes up a ‘second universe’ inside our heads. We invent animals and events that don’t exist, we rerun history with alternative outcomes, we envision social and moral utopias, we revel in fantasy art, and we meditate both on what we could have been and on what we might become. Imagination is the possibility maker. It’s the home of hope and regret. Animators such as Hayao Miyazaki, Walt Disney and the makers of Pixar Studios are masterful at imagination, but they’re only creating a public version of our everyday private lives. If you could see the fantastic mash-up inside the mind of the average five-year-old, then Star Wars and Harry Potter would seem sober and dull. So, why is there so little analysis of imagination, by philosophers, psychologists, scientists, and even artists? In this course Stephen Asma will follow up on Charles Darwin’s claim that “the Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results … Dreaming gives us the best notion of this power…the dream is an involuntary art of poetry.” Over the course of five weeks, we will learn about the latest neuroscience and cognitive psychology findings on imagination. We will look at imagination through the lens of Plato, Freud and Jung, as well as the art and thought of William Blake and the Surrealists. We’ll take a deep dive into the relationship betweenimagination and altered states of consciousness, and end with a look at monsters in religion, cryptozoology in literature, and imaginative transformations in film. #morbidanatomy #imagination #creativity #artmaking #science

Alchemy, Leonhardt Thurneysser zum Thurn, 1574 #alchemy #alchemical #skeleton #dragonlashing