The spread of ideas

[Clivedurdle]

Caught a lunchtime talk in the British Museum on the Enlightenment today - superb.

When Captain Cook was at Vancouver Island looking for the North West Passage, he got a small club for killing fish that was inlaid with otter's teeth and Murano glass from Venice!

It seems the glass had been traded from Venice to China and then taken by Russian traders to Vancouver! It is now in the British Museum.

John Dee the magician and proto scientist to Elizabeth 1 had a piece of obsidian - volcanic glass from South America, that had been used in religious rituals. He used it to invoke angels.

I wonder if religious ideas may have been imported into Europe along with the potato, tomato, chocolate and tobacco?

[gagundathar]

You think that there was some exchange of ideas from the North American shamans to the Europeans? It is entirely possible that some of the Algonquin magic-users did influence some of the more 'mystical minded' members of the Europeans and that some of these ideas percolated into what eventually became the Western Esoteric Tradition. Do you have any supporting evidence for this (outside of what you have already presented?)

[Clivedurdle]

This beautiful book reproduces in full the celebrated but rarely seen British Museum collection of watercolours by John White, who was sent in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh with a group of English settlers to found a colony in ‘Virginia’, along the tidewaters of coastal North Carolina. White’s duties included making visual records of everything then unknown in England, including plants, animals and birds as well as the human inhabitants, especially their dress, weapons, tools and ceremonies. The British Museum collection also includes his watercolours of Florida and Brazilian Indians, and the Inuit encountered by Martin Frobisher, as well as ancient Britons and the flora and fauna of the West Indies. In this landmark catalogue, each work is reproduced in colour opposite a thorough description, supplemented by the engravings of Theodor de Bry and other comparable works. An introduction sets the scene, followed by specially commissioned chapters covering John White himself, the indigenous inhabitants, and their historical context. The book explores White's various roles as a colonist, surveyor and artist who not only recorded the natural history but also provided Elizabethan England with its first glimpse of a now lost Native American culture and way of life.

http://www.britishmuseum.co.uk/Product.aspx?ID=1196