an amethystine hatchet

“Thoreau is . . . rapturous at times about cool blues and azures, but these tints, found predominantly in the sky above and in the waters which reflect it, are often wedded to meditation. These color suggest a limitless space to Thoreau and serve as a stimulus for far-reaching thoughts. For example the sight of his ‘elysian blue’ shadow on snow causes Thoreau to reflect about the nature of his own being: ‘I am turned into a tall blue prussian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in raptures at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?’”

domesticity and witchcraft

“Touch, taste and smell. The sensory bases of both domesticity and witchcraft. One of the horrors of witchcraft, in fact, was that it made use of the domestic instruments and practices that were intended to keep women safely at home to transgress the social and cosmic order. A pot might be used for cooking dinner or for brewing a spell, a needle might be used for sewing clothes or for piercing an effigy, a broom might be used for sweeping the floor or for flying out the window. The tactile, gustatory and olfactory practices which were expected to keep women confined to close quarters, were transformed by witchcraft into media for mastering the world.”

—Constance Classen, The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.