The Underworld

Bureau of Lost Culture

“Ima­gin­a­tion thrives in dark­ness”

We talk about The Undergound often at the Bureau - not London’s subterranean rail sytem, but the countercultural alternative society of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

But that is just one of the undergrounds - the underworlds - that are the subject of this episode
Dizzying ossuaries, freakish creatures of the deep sea, astounding colors of agates, lava and crystals, mind bending organic structures of mycorrhizal fungi, caverns, crevices, burrows, bunkers, burial chambers, ghistly shipwrecks, religous hellscapes and surrealist dreamscapes, natural and constructed subterranean realms and the imagined and unconscious worlds of dreams and the human psyche.

Image Alchemist Stephen Ellcock came to take us on a deep dive journey down under with his truly astonishing, visually stunning guide book Underworlds, a volume in five sections covering both the real and the imaginary, moving between continents and time periods and disciplines such as philosophy, biology, art history and literature. We talk of how the actual physical world beneath us has fed our fears, visions and imagination – and conversely, provoked us to imagine a mythic, esoteric, mysterious underground - the afterworld of the dead, of the fairies and of the psychogical unconscious. For more on Stephen and his amazing work