Thanks to my lifelong love of Avebury stone circle, I've been a fan of John Aubrey, the seventeenth century antiquarian who first put it on the map. Natural philosopher, lover of magick and the unexplained, gossip and wit, it's hard not to like this disorganised polymath. There's a small but rather wonderful exhibition about Aubrey at Oxford's Bodleian library at the moment and I went to see it this afternoon.
Highlights were: a handwritten grimoire, containing a spell for trapping a spirit in a crystal; a camera obscura, with a fine view of the Bodleian quadrangle; some of Aubrey's original drawings of Avebury; and an edition of the first ever science fiction novel, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), in which the hero flies to the moon using a kite pulled by geese!
It's free and runs till the 31st October.
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