Jean-Léon Gérôme – Truth emerges from her well to shame mankind 24 September 2025 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Shame , 1 Comment Late in his life, classical French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) painted a series of canvases on the topic of truth, depicted as a nude woman, trapped in or emerging […]
The ‘Lost Words’ exhibition reveals our deepening mother wound 16 May 2023 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Mother wound , 1 Comment I recently visited the National Trust’s Ightham Mote property in Kent. (It’s pronounced ‘eye-tam’ in case you stalled out on that tongue-twister.) As well as the property’s usual displays, there […]
Into the unconscious in search of the miraculous 27 April 2023 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , 1 Comment In the opening to his classic spiritual text In Search of the Miraculous, Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky writes: “I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false […]
Tentacle Manga – Japan’s victim/victimizer dynamic in comics 3 November 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Patriarchy , Pornography , No Comments In a blog titled The Alien inside us – the lower masculine victimizer, I used Ridley Scott’s mandible and tentacle armed creature as a metaphor for patriarchy’s structural dynamic where […]
The Sect of the Disgraced – humanity’s secret society of shame 29 September 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Shame , No Comments Humanity has had a long love affair with secret societies. The Illuminati, the Masons, the Knights Templar, the Order of Sion, the Rosicrucians—the sense of missing out, the frisson […]
BBC’s The Repair Shop – the trauma also needs repairing 1 September 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Generational trauma , 1 Comment In recent months I’ve been binge-watching the BBC’s long-running heirloom restoration show, The Repair Shop. “What’s in the box?” asks impresario Jay Blades as each new—well, old and badly […]
‘I remember, I remember’ – all our childhoods are imaginary 8 April 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Generational trauma , No Comments I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day, But […]
The Architect of Desire – generational trauma from the Gilded Age 9 December 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , Generational trauma , History , 2 Comments On the night of 25 June 1906, architect Stanford White was murdered at the rooftop restaurant of New York’s Madison Square Gardens. The subsequent trial revealed […]
Edward Carpenter and Covid-19 – civilization is the disease 2 December 2020 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , History , Mother wound , No Comments In 1899, Edward Carpenter wrote a book called Civilization: its cause and cure, in which he argued that civilization is a disease no society has ever survived. Civilization […]
Traumatisation of the feminine created patriarchy, not the other way round 30 November 2019 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Arts , History , Patriarchy , No Comments In a post a few months ago I posed the question, Does patriarchy traumatise the feminine? At the time, I was pretty certain that it did—that patriarchy […]