The Spiritualism Symposium, curated by Shannon Taggart
About this series
Spiritualism, the American-born religion based on the belief in communication with spirits of the dead, was once a popular movement that influenced Western culture. Yet Spiritualism’s legacy has often been censored or neglected by academia and the media. The Spiritualism Symposium examines the surprising path from the séance room to the history of science, medicine, technology, politics, and art. It also explores topics related to mediumship and the study of the supernatural. This series presentations are drawn from past symposium’s hosted annually by Shannon Taggart in Lily Dale, New York, USA—home to the world’s largest Spiritualist community.
Each lecture will be sold separately, see below for details of the other lectures in the series (if missed, these will be available on demand)
Spirit – Vibration – Form: The Study of Cymatics, with Steve Bass
About this event
How could spirits incarnate into physical bodies? An answer provided by the ancient Pythagoreans and Platonists was that number and geometry could be intermediaries between spirit and matter and may be considered ‘disembodied ideals’ that could manifest as waves or vibrations. Since the seventeenth century, a tradition of actualizing this relationship has existed. First called Chladni patterns, they were pursued in the mid-twentieth century by German esoteric researcher Hans Jenny who called the subject ‘Cymatics.’ In its most basic form, the technique involves a ‘medium’—such as sand or mud—placed on a metal plate and subjected to controlled vibration. The ‘medium’ assumes a wide variety of shapes including those found at all scales of the physical world from atoms, to landscapes, to cells, to complex creatures such as plants and animals. Cymatics not only provides a narrative of coming into form, but supports an alternative to materialistic Darwinism. In this presentation, architect Steve Bass will illustrate these possibilities.
Steve Bass is an architect in practice in New York City since 1974. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute, 1970; a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art, London, 1991, where he studied under the direction of Dr. Keith Critchlow; and was a participant in the initial Prince of Wales’s Summer Course in Architecture, 1990. Steve is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in New York City where he teaches on the theoretical and applied aspects of proportion and geometry in design. He has also taught at Notre Dame University, the Grand Central Academy of Art in NYC, the New York Open Center and other venues. He has written for ICAA’s journal ‘The Classicist’, ‘Traditional Building’ magazine, and ‘American Arts Quarterly’. His book, ‘Beauty Memory Unity – A Theory of Proportion in Architecture and Design’ is available from Lindisfarne Books.
Shannon Taggart is an artist and author exploring the intersection between Spiritualism, photography, and the representation of belief. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally, including within the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine, Discover, and Newsweek. Taggart’s monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press, 2019), was named one of TIME’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’ https://www.shannontaggart.com/
The Spiritualism Symposium, curated by Shannon Taggart