#yale library

[mithalan-mithrarin]

THIS IS WHY Y'ALL NEED TO READ DISCWORLD!

This is just The Magnus Institute.

[athenascult]

wear your hair down and your attitude high - lorelai gilmore 𖦹.ᡣ𐭩˚

[arc-hus]

Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Connecticut, USA - SOM

[garadinervi]

Roy DeCarava (photograph), Billie Holiday, [1955] [Langston Hughes papers, JWJ MSS 26, Oversize, Box 633, folder 14226, Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. © Ole Brask]

[lionofchaeronea]

Cabinet photograph of a woman in a plaid dress, shown in three-quarter view. Unknown photographer in the employ of Fisher & Monfort, Plainfield, NJ. Now in the Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.

[wildatheartkinsey]

i 🤍 books

[eurekafranklin]

Pictures from my recent visit to the magical Yale University in New Haven, CT.

[bulllfinch]

Lund University, Sweden, 2023

[dinosaurwithablog]

On a trip to Yale University, I went to one of their museums and saw this. I love it!! ❤️ I love how many animals are integrated within this one piece. I really enjoy going to museums. I, also, enjoy libraries. Next time I go to Yale, I'm gonna have a book reserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It houses really old books. They let the public peruse these ancient tomes!!! They even have the Gutenberg Bible, which is one of the first books to be printed using a printing press. I just want to hold it and feel the pages and smell the history that lies within it's covers.... but I digress. I love visiting Yale University. There's so much available to the public and so much to enjoy learning about. It's a great place!!! 😊😍

[moodboardmix]

Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University,

New Haven, Connecticut, United States,

Gordon Bunshaft, 1963,

Photo: Pete J. Sieger

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Ars Notoria!

This is one of the grimoires of the Solomonic tradition of ceremonial magic. The Ars Notoria is technically part of the Lemegeton, but sometimes it’s treated as a separate text. I was expecting it to be in Latin, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was in English — very readable English, and in beautiful handwriting! It’s a translation of earlier Latin versions, but it has the feel of a personal Book of Shadows. A human wrote this. There are lines crossed off, words squeezed into the margins or added with little carrots.

This book is a great example of the fact that there’s a very fine line between a prayer and a spell. It mostly consists of a series of prayers and psalms, but it has some “voces magicae”-esque recitations of sacred names or multilingual incantations.

Did you know that hydromancy, pyromancy, and chiromancy count amongst the Liberal Arts? The Solomonic grimoires really make it clear how much magic is intertwined with the Liberal Arts (i.e. mathematics, philosophy, theology, grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, etc.). Many of the demons listed in the Ars Goetia teach these subjects (no wonder Faust was a scholar). The Ars Notoria says that you have to study certain liberal arts on specific days, just as you have to perform rituals on specific days and during specific planetary hours and so forth. And recite long mystical incantations before studying philosophy. Just like folk spells, these long prayers are supposed to have specific magical effects, like improving your memory and speech.

The Ars Notoria isn’t nearly as exciting as the Ars Goetia. I only found two magical figures in it. It took me way too long to realize that the mystical figures that surround the second one are, in fact, the alphabet. I guess that’s what you get when your grimoire is in English? Well no, actually. That figure actually demonstrates a handy spell that uses a magnetized needle (that’s what the symbol in the middle is meant to represent) to communicate with a friend at a long distance, using a method similar to an ouija board or one of those pendulum boards that you can get. As the needle turns, it spells out the message that your friend wants to send to you. Kind of interesting that this book includes a whole magical operation for something that we can do with our phones in an instant, and with much greater accuracy.

I looked up who Bernard Zufall was. Zufall was known for his ability to memorize anything, and had the largest collection of books dedicated to mnemonics, which was then donated to Yale University. He was more of a stage magician than a ceremonial magician. I’m not sure how or why he acquired an Ars Notoria, but I’m grateful that he did, because that means I get to see it.

[athenascult]

give me more homework, it’ll keep my mind off my life - paris geller

[oerzttz]

[garadinervi]

Irving Penn (photograph), Langston Hughes, 1947 [Langston Hughes papers, JWJ MSS 26, Oversize, Box 633, folder 14216, Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. © Irving Penn]

[taxi-davis]

Untitled (1959) by Saul Steinberg