'Occultism Lite' in Downtown San Jose

I've never made much of a secret of my lifelong interest in things that fall under the umbrella I call "unreality". (Though how real or unreal many of these things actually are is something I waffle back and forth on - what really is 'real', anyway? The label is more or less for aesthetic purposes rather than any judgement as to what I feel is real or not.) Things like the paranormal, the supernatural, cryptozoology, mysticism, magic, occultism...

Some of it I believe in whole hog. The universe is too big for extraterrestrial life to not exist, for example, and I've definitely had experiences with ghosts and what some people would call magic. I am a spiritual person, in my own way that I don't feel obligated to explain on this blog. Some of it I'm skeptical of. Though I've visited the Bigfoot Museum and Loch Ness, I don't exactly buy into tales of sasquatches and lake monsters. Some of it I'm unsure about. But the interest is there no matter what.

And I live in a good place for it, even if I am looking forward to what New York City has to offer in this, too. San Jose has both the haunted Winchester Mystery House, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum with its alchemy exhibit and occult library. There are multiple urban legends about local places such as Dottie's Pond, Hellyer House, and Hicks Road. There have been some alleged local UFO sightings and there's a nice space observatory and a NASA centre, and we're not too far from Santa Cruz/Felton with the Bigfoot Museum and the Mystery Spot. San Jose hosts Pantheacon, and there are metaphysical shops in Campbell, Willow Glen, and Mountain View.

And then there's the Martin Luther King library downtown, the largest library on the west coast.


Now, the King Library is a great place to kill a few hours, and because of its massive size, it does have a large selection of books about ghosts and aliens and magic spells and the occult. But that's noooot why I'm listing it here. The King library also happens to have a number of public art works on display all throughout the library. And while I don't think the artists intended to have occult symbolism on the levels that would make the Vigilant Citizen cry "Illuminati Satanism!!!" one can't deny that if you know where to look, one could make he argument that the symbolism is there.

And so, just for fun, I'm going to demonstrate some of these artworks that someone could, theoretically, take to be signs that the librarians are up to some hardcore occult conspiracy shenanigans. (I'm not accusing them, I just think the imagery is fun)

 The "tree of life" is a design important to esoteric Judaism, and very connected with Kabbalah, though it has been used by certain secret societies as well. It maps out spiritual connections of life, language, and belief. In the King Library, there's a tree of life using lamps as the connected circle bits - right over the storytelling area of the children's section.

It's an interesting design decision, to be sure. Of all places to put it, I'm not sure why they chose to put it over the children's section. I'm pleasantly surprised that certain paranoid jerks haven't tried to accuse the library of indoctrinating kids into being illuminati mind slaves or something. It does make it difficult to get a good photo of it, though.

 On the seventh floor, near the philosophy section, there's a cutout in the wall with an owl statue in it, which the library calls the Owl of Minerva. According to their website, "The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" - meaning that philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away. He had in mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism to nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy. A sculptural cast of a great horned owl, perched within a darkened niche, waits to take flight over the philosophy and psychology sections."

Now I better know "Minerva" as "Athena", a Greek goddess who I've always admired both for her associations with knowledge and her more military qualities - I appreciate a warrior woman. And I more than appreciate a tribute to a Hellenistic goddess in a city named after a Catholic saint.

 This table near the archaeology section is modeled to allude to Olmec art and archaeology, as well as to the large Mexican presence in San Jose, a heritage rightly celebrated all over downtown.

In Mesoamerican societies such as the Olmec, humans were sacrificed on tables like this to the gods. This fact has unfortunately been used to paint these societies as brutal and barbarian even though similar sacrifices were made in cultures all over the world. In reality, while we don't know a terrible amount about the Olmec, later Mesoamerican societies such as the Aztec did so to repay their gods, as a religious rite. The gods had used their own blood to form the universe, and the Aztec thought it only right to repay them in the only way they new how, to keep the universe running smoothly. That's what this table always reminded me of. Human sacrifice. For better or for worse.

 Okay, this Egyptian piece was only part of a temporary exhibit on the fifth floor about African history, but Egyptian mythology and themes have long had a history in occultism. The Rosicrucians - who have a headquarters in San Jose - trace their lineage (rather dubiously) from Pharaoh Akenaten, and both Aleister Crowley (of Golden Dawn fame) and Helena Blavatsky (theosophist author of 'Isis Unveiled') drew influence from Ancient Egypt.

And so of course, though this absolutely had a place in a historical exhibit, one cannot help but look at it and be reminded of such things, especially since "Ma'at" is a religious concept, and not a strictly historical one either, as there are still Kemetic Pagans today who try to live by the principles of Ma'at.

 Speaking of Egyptian themes, there's a full scale replica of the Rosetta Stone right on the second floor of the library. According to the library's website, "The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799. Its trilingual inscription, which made it possible to decipher hieroglyphics, is recognized as an image for the mutual intelligibility of diverse languages. Rosetta's glass face is permanently etched with the inscription from the original Rosetta Stone. Behind the glass is an LED board on which appear fleeting digital messages, including an anthology of multi-lingual writing from or about San José, a bulletin board for public announcements related to the library, and hexagrams from the Chinese classic Book of Changes."

I'm fascinated by the choice of projecting Chinese calligraphy onto a stone associated with Greco-Egyptian culture. This, too, calls back to fraternal orders that drew inspiration from a variety of non-western sources. 

 On the first floor, where the mystery novels are kept, is a rotating bookcase like something out of a mystery novel. This isn't really anything super occult-ish, but it's fun...

More Chinese imagery, this gong on the western wall of the sixth floor. Gongs like this are used in Chinese temples for worship, though I'm loathe to apply the term 'Pagan' to other cultures just because they're non-Abrahamic or polytheistic, if the cultures themselves do not use that term. I don't wanna dip into exoticism or orientalism.

But what makes this gong particularly interesting is that the hammered brass is designed to resemble a parasitic bug called the San Jose Scale, a parasite that nearly destroyed the fruit orchards of the area in the 1880s. Chinese workers were blamed for this pestilence, and thus lead one of America's first labour revolts. The head of the mallet for the gong is modeled after a ladybug, a natural predator of the scale bug. So in a way this can be thought of as both a memento mori, and a form of symbolic ritual where hitting the gong would represent the killing off of a destructive parasite. It's fascinating, no?

I'm only going to get to enjoy this library for six more months. But I'm glad it exists. I'm glad I get to enjoy all these artworks for the time being.

-Nym-