Crystalline Mechanics of the Soul—with Jessica Adams

With the advent of evolutionary theory, biological science set its eyes on a strange conquest: the soul that had been the possession of Christian thought. The man who led the charge, Darwin’s favorite acolyte, was the German morphologist Ernst Haeckel, whose writings and fantastical illustrations exhort that our spiritual contents take on the flesh. In his last book, Crystal Souls, Haeckel proposed that the soul is physiological and, moreover, its dominion is not limited to organic matter. By the evolving lives of crystals, he worked to reveal the mechanism of the soul. Tonight, we will explore Haeckel’s theory and see what crystallographic science has to say about the anima mundi.
Jessica Adams is an artist and aspiring historian of science from Alabama. Her work uses psychoanalytic and allegorical methods to uncover the effects of religious disavowal in the making of objective knowledge. She currently resides in Oregon, where she works as a special education tutor.