This groundbreaking exhibition, one of the Chicago Cultural Center’s largest to date, showcases over five hundred artworks and other artifacts from the personal collection of Chicago-based collector Richard Harris. Amassed over several decades, Harris’s collection explores the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years, and includes works by some of the greatest artists of our time.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

Death and the Young Woman (detail) Jacques-Antony Chovin 18th Century

(via cccisforcunt)

Shinnyokai-Shonin’s “living mummy” sits in eternal contemplation at Dainichibo Temple in Japan.

The process of Buddhist Masters becoming mummified while still living was a custom that was practiced until late into the 19^th Century with documented cases still occurring in the 20^th century. The custom was to create kind of “living” idol of a buddhavista or incarnation of Buddha who would reside permanently in a Japanese temple.

The revered Shinnyokai-Shonin was one such mummified monk. In 1784, a terrible famine raged in the central Japanese Island of Honshu. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead or dying of starvation, malnutrition and diesase.

Shinnyokai, 96 years old at the time, believed that Buddha needed a sign of great compassion to end the famine. He dug a pit on a hill near Dainichibo Temple and with the help of others, sealed himself in a wooden coffin that was then lowered into the pit and buried. With a thin bamboo breathing tube in place the monk sat in total darkness, awaiting the inevitable. Three years after his death, his body was exhumed in 1786. The people were astonished to find that the monk had been completely mummified.

By end of the famine a 1792 government census reported 4.5% of the total population of Honshu dead - a total of 1,119,159 people.

Shinnyokai’s mummification methodology was refined for many years after his death. The first step being for a prospective mummy monk to spend 1,000 days (over 3 years) eating a strict diet of nuts and seeds and engage in rigorous physical training to strip the body of fat.

Step two, involved another 1,000 days of eating only bark and roots in gradually diminishing amounts. Toward the end, they would start drinking tea made from the sap of the urushi tree, a poisonous substance normally used to make Japanese lacquer bowls, which caused further loss of bodily fluid. The tea was brewed with water from a sacred spring at Mt. Yudono, which is now known to contain a high level of arsenic. The concoction created a germ-free environment within the body and helped preserve whatever meat was left on the bone.

Finally, the monks would seal themselves in a small underground chamber connected to the surface by a tiny bamboo air pipe. There, the monks meditate until the point of death - at which point they were sealed in their tomb. After another 1,000 days, they were dug up and cleaned. If the body remained well-preserved after this 10-year process then the monk was deemed a living mummy.

Unfortunately, most who attempted self-mummification were unsuccessful, but the few who succeeded achieved Buddha status and are still enshrined today at temples. As many as two dozen of these living mummies are in the care of temples in northern Honshu.

(via midnight-gallery)

(via the-temple-of-algolagnia)

(via theblogofdeath)

(via affairemortal)

The ’Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion being performed at the Cabaret du Néant, Paris.

Pepper’s Ghost was invented by Professor John Henry Pepper and English engineer Henry Dircks in the 19th Century.

Introduced into theatres in the 1860’s, Pepper’s Ghost startled theatre goers with an effect that allowed live people or objects to slowly materialize into a scene.

(via someghostsarewomen)