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7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, July 6, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a MemberHERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Across the ancient world, cultures that had no contact with one another independently constructed monumental, pyramidal, and vertically oriented structures—pyramids, ziggurats, stepped temples, mounds, and artificial mountains that continue to dominate their landscapes thousands of years later. Why did humans everywhere feel compelled to build up?
This lecture proposes an interpretive framework that understands these structures not only as tombs, temples, or symbols of political power, but as monumental, architectural expressions of a pan-human capacity for altered states of consciousness—particularly ascent-oriented experiences associated with the “Upper World” in shamanic traditions. Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, cognitive science, and architectural history, we will explore how pyramidal and vertical monuments function as fixed, public “departure points”: visible to entire populations, shaping perception and cosmology even for those who never entered them.
Using images from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Asia, and beyond, we will consider how architecture operates as a technology of vertical transcendence—training attention, orienting the body and imagination heavenward, and making non-ordinary experience culturally legible. The talk will conclude by briefly tracing the afterlives of this vertical logic in later sacred architecture, including Gothic cathedrals, whose soaring interiors democratize perceptual ascent for anyone who enters their space.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, July 6, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a MemberHERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Across the ancient world, cultures that had no contact with one another independently constructed monumental, pyramidal, and vertically oriented structures—pyramids, ziggurats, stepped temples, mounds, and artificial mountains that continue to dominate their landscapes thousands of years later. Why did humans everywhere feel compelled to build up?
This lecture proposes an interpretive framework that understands these structures not only as tombs, temples, or symbols of political power, but as monumental, architectural expressions of a pan-human capacity for altered states of consciousness—particularly ascent-oriented experiences associated with the “Upper World” in shamanic traditions. Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, cognitive science, and architectural history, we will explore how pyramidal and vertical monuments function as fixed, public “departure points”: visible to entire populations, shaping perception and cosmology even for those who never entered them.
Using images from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Asia, and beyond, we will consider how architecture operates as a technology of vertical transcendence—training attention, orienting the body and imagination heavenward, and making non-ordinary experience culturally legible. The talk will conclude by briefly tracing the afterlives of this vertical logic in later sacred architecture, including Gothic cathedrals, whose soaring interiors democratize perceptual ascent for anyone who enters their space.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.