PEDIAMENOPET'S FUNERAL CROWN

This crown (though oversized in diameter) looks like it could be a headdress for Lady Crawley.  The era of Downton Abbey saw the opening of Tutenhkamun's tomb in 1922, reviving Egyptomania and impacting the burgeoning Art Deco style.  Unbelievably this piece is over 2000 years old and was worn around the mummy bandages of Pediamenopet (Petamenophis).

The Louvre is the home of this artifact and there is a discrepancy between their didactic text and the internet, but from what I can gather, Pediamenopet was a high priest and official serving multiple Pharaohs around the 25th and 26th dynasties (760-525 BC).  His tomb (#33 in the Theban Necropolis) is massive, with multiple levels and 330 meters of corridors inscribed with important texts such as the Book of the Dead. His resting place is larger than many Pharaohs and this crown, evoking a myrtle wreath, is a symbol for a person of great social importance. 

Myth has it that Pediamenopet was a renowned magician and left a curse. While exploring the tomb, both a French scholar in 1798, and a German archaeologist in 1874, fell down the 7 meter long shaft that leads to Pediamenopet's burial chamber.  Recently an Egyptian archaeologist made the same fall but survived with considerable injury.  The metal plate intended to cover the shaft seemed to have disappeared....

Story of Pediamenopet's curse : http://www.aawsat.net/2010/09/article55249244
Reopening the tomb : http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/petamenophis.htm

PERFECSCOPE

As a child, I was supposedly introduced to the miracle of three-dimensional pictures via a gift from Santa Claus of a GAF Viewmaster, a plastic stereoscope-like device that wheeled around brand-name entertainments for youngsters. My sets of Viewmaster slide-card discs included the TV series Flipper, Batman and (curiously, given its essentially flat rendering) The Flintstones. However, our household still had black-and-white television: the miracle that captivated me was seeing popular characters in vivid colour. And in the thrall of colour, I defeated the 3-D illusion. I would squint shut my right eye to enjoy a more authentically TV-like monocular splendour.

I do not remember when I first encountered a nineteenth-century stereoscope, perhaps at age ten, eleven or twelve, when, many broken toys later, I was ready to trade the designed obsolescence of plastic for sturdier wood and bygone craftsmanship. Until The Wardens sent me back their pictures for this entry, I never noticed that the one I acquired twenty years ago has its own brand name: The “Perfecscope” (patented U.S.A. 1895). Aside from availability and price (still the determining factors when I purchased mine some one-hundred years later from an antiques pedlar) I have no idea what would have made it distinguished or preferable in its own time.

What I gravitate toward in the stereo cards that I have very occasionally collected over the years are its vistas into a lost way of looking at the world, indeed worlds now otherwise lost to human imagination. The cards depicted below are particularly special in that respect. I found them this past spring at the St. Lawrence Antiques Market in Toronto. They are American in origin (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York) and date from the 1870s, when there was a fashion for funerary photography, perhaps a combination of high mortality rates and the lingering pall of the U.S. Civil War. These floral crosses, wreathes and other heraldic totems to death and afterlife confront one by their very absence of colour. Quite possibly many of these cards were custom-made for bereaved clients. A hand-scripted clue can be found on the reverse of one wreath card: “John Massey, Died Aug. 8, 1878, Aged 8 mo. 9 days.”

However there is also a special format that was meant to be mass-produced and collectable, alternately termed Phantom Leaves or Skeleton Leaves. These cards portray a mournful genre of bouquet made from desiccated leaves in which only their foliate veins remain intact. Such arrangements would, of course, be entirely drained of colour and so appear especially spectral when viewed through the stereoscope, which also brings out their gauzy translucence and creates an effective sculptural illusion of vanishing life.

-Ben Portis

WOOD CHARGER

I purchased this hand carved charger at the Cabbage Town garage sale from a serious collector.  All it needs to become visually complete is the head of John the Baptist (or a rustic cake dressed with figs and other fruits, nuts, flowers).

Matthew 14:8 
And she [Salome], being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger.

-King James Bible, Cambridge edition

Images below are pulled from various online sources.