Warburg Institute

So all the images are owned by different people or libraries or universities all over the world.

The Warburg Institute, Christopher Francis Yates worked, the Vatican, Hermetic libraries in the Netherlands, all this sort of stuff.

We contacted all of them.

because their pictures are in the book, but they're terrible.

The Hubbard material.

And when he put that in the Warburg Institute, um, he got a, an angry solicitor's letter from the Scientologists saying, how dare you publish material, which really is sort of belongs in whatever legal way belongs to the Scientologists.

And, um, What Gerald York did was he wrote back to this Scientologist lawyer saying, could you please give me an exact description of what it is I'm supposed to have published and what, you know, what material you don't want, which meant, of course, they would have to write down legally the stuff that they don't want their child to try to cover up.

And so in that way, he got rid of them.

So we go back, he knows me from my Black Audio Film Collective days.

He gets a gig at the Warburg Institute and he says, we should come along, we should come in because there's a guy who's kind of like you.

And Matthew shows me the library.

This library works completely by association.

So there's these sort of tweaks- To the way that they approached them.

I haven't seen the Morgan show, but I did see a really similar show in London last year called Tarot Origins and Afterlives at the Warburg Institute, and it kind of went also through that kind of evolution of just the imagery that was used.

And I thought what was so interesting to me is that the Warburg Institute was founded by art historian A.B. Warburg, and I think he himself was really interested in just the images and how they kind of change shape over time from, like, an art historical perspective.

And he dedicated himself to this study of how these archetypal images reappear across millennia in kind of very new guises, and he called this theory the survival of the antique.

And he was trying to, like, chart the passage of what he called, like, survivor images and whatnot.