A polysaccharide extracted from sphagnum moss as antifungal agent in archaeological conservation

On the basis of the well-known preservative properties of Sphagnum moss, a potential opportunity to use moss polysaccharides (Sphagnan) in art conservation was tested. Polysaccharides were extracted from the moss (S. palustre spp.) in the amount of 4.1% of the Sphagnum plant dry weight. All lignocelluloses were removed from this extract as a result of the treatment of the moss cellulose with sodium chlorite. The extracted polysaccharide possessed a strong acidic reaction (pH 2.8) and was soluble in water and organic solvents. The extract was tested on laboratory bacterial cultures by the disk-diffusion method. The antibacterial effect was demonstrated for E. coli and P. aeruginosa (both gram-negative) while Staphylococcus aurelus (gram-positive) was shown to be insensitive to Sphagnum polysaccharides. The antifungal effect of Sphagnum extract was tested by the disk-diffusion method on the spores of seventeen fungal species. These fungi were isolated from ethnographic museum objects and from archaeological objects excavated in the Arctic. Twelve of these isolates appeared susceptible to the extract. The inhibiting effect of the extract was also tested by the modified broth-dilution method on the most typical isolate (Aspergillus spp.). In this experiment, in one ml of the nutritious broth, 40µl of 3% solution of polysaccharides in water killed 10,000 fungal spores in 6 hours. The inhibiting effect was not connected to the acidity or osmotic effect of Sphagnum polysaccharides. As an example of the application of Sphagnum polysaccharides in art conservation, they were added as preservative agents to conservation waxes. After three weeks of exposure of microcrystalline wax to test fungi (Aspergillus spp.), 44% of wax was consumed. When, however, ~ 0.1% (w/w) of Sphagnum extract was mixed with wax, the weight loss of wax was only 4% in the same time interval. On the basis of this study it was concluded that Sphagnum moss and Sphagnum products can be recommended for use in art conservation as antifungal agents.

"The Black Imprint of Sandals in White Mosaic Floors": H.D.'s Mythomystical Poetics

My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle occultism and a collective psyche troubled by the eschatological distress that, as Susan Acheson writes, “was widespread amongst modernist writers grappling with …world events and with the implications of Nietzsche’s inaugural annunciation of modernity in terms of the death of God” (187), her later oeuvre is dedicated to the same work of soul undertaken by the “secret cult of Night” in Vale Ave. Here, her thematic scope faces two ways: backward to ancient Greek mystery cults and their palingenesic rites and forward to depth psychologists searching for the Soul of the World. Vale Ave plays a pronounced role in my study as symbolic guide; in its seventy-four sequences the layering of time in the “trilogy” of past, present, and future that H.D. had explored during the years of the Second World War in order to get behind the fallen walls of cause and effect collapses into two distinct phases of human origin—“meeting” (evolution) and “parting” (involution)—and the poem invites Lilith and Lucifer to be its archetypal guides. My method for the study is imaginal, entering such disciplines as history, philosophy, and theology and bringing psychological understanding to them. John Walsh’s introduction to Vale Ave notes H.D.’s theme “that the human psyche exists in a dimension outside of time and space as well as within them. In Vale Ave, H.D. presents the extremity of this dual-dimensionality: metempsychosis” (vii). However, the concept that H.D. investigates is more than a literary processus of characters who adopt different masks and appear at various junctures in a chronological unwinding of history. I explore H.D.'s works as part of a Modernist tradition of writing “books of the dead” designed not to guide the soul after death, but to draw the gaze upon “a nearer thing,” as H.D. writes in Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me In Caelum, the wisdom intrinsic in the spirit of life itself.