Objects that look like human faces are a fine way to kill a few minutes on the Internet. The phenomenon of seeing faces or other things in visual displays that are derived from chance is called pareidolia, and there’s a subreddit dedicated to it. The human ability to detect faces is strongly selected for in the Darwinian processes of evolution, as survival often depends on instinctual recognition and assessment of faces.

One of my favorite Peanuts strips ever involves Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown describing what they see in the clouds passing overhead, and hardly a week goes by without the news reporting that someone has spotted Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or Elvis in a bowl of porridge or a misshapen McNugget.
 

Chinsekikan head curator Yoshiko Hayama
 
Only recently, however, has it come to our attention that some remarkable person out there has taken the pareidolia thing and really run with it. A man named Shozo Hayama spent 50 years collecting rocks that resemble human faces, which are called jinmenseki in Japanese, and he founded a museum in Tokyo called Chinsekikan, which means “the hall of curious rocks.” Shozo died in 2010 but his widow Yoshiko Hayama has kept the museum open and serves as its head curator. It’s unclear how many rocks the museum has, but it’s upwards of 1,700.

Oddly, I am writing this post from the city that boasts the most famous rock museum in the world—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
 

 

 
More rocks after the jump…

 
In 1576, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II chose Prague to be his home. More than any other person, Rudolf made Prague a hotbed of alchemical interest. Rudolf lived in the Prague Castle, where he welcomed not only astrologers and magicians but also scientists, musicians, and artists. In addition to noted alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee, Prague was also home to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painter Arcimboldo, the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, among others. Rudolf arguably spawned the most intense period of occult activity in history.

If you want to know more about the reign of Rudolf II, you could do a lot worse than Peter Marshall’s The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague.

Celebrating this alchemical contributions of Rudolf II is the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague, located at Jansky Vrsek 8 on the western side of the Vltava. The museum consists of two levels of displays and tableaux that document Rudolf’s alchemists in Prague, especially Kelley. (There is a sister museum called the Speculum Alchemiae Museum, but that’s on the other side of the river, at Hastalska 1.)

Quoting Altas Obscura,

The main floor has displays and replica artifacts of the trade alongside such fantastical scenes as a failed magician being stolen up into the ceiling by the Devil while cackling sorcerers huddle around the glowing runes beneath. The second floor, which claims to be the actual tower where the real Kelley performed his esoteric experiments if decked out like an alchemists lab, all aged scrolls and stacked grimoires, complete with a half-completed homunculus, the ultimate alchemical achievement.

The museum is more than a little sensational in its presentation, but to be fair these alchemists were likely more than a little bit showmen themselves. What better way to remember and learn about their arcane history than with a little bit of magical realism?

Here’s a peek at some of the treasures within. The first six pictures here come from Altas Obscura; all of the others (including the picture at the top of the post) come from TripAdvisor users. The mechanical model of the solar system is known as an “orrery.” Strictly speaking, you didn’t need to know that, but if you know the word orrery and along comes a reason to use it, you’re damn well going to use it!

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

Photographer Richard Barnes spent ten years going behind the scenes in natural history museums documenting the artificial version of wild and the result is a stunning new monograph called Animal Logic.

Richard Barnes

Animal Logic