Urim and Thummin

Urim and Thummin produced by Mississippi artist after decades of work.

Urim and Thummin

The ancient Hebrew texts refer to a type of divination tablet called "Urim and Thummin."

I began gathering materials to make an Urim and Thummin when I was in the fifth grade. The Urim and Thummin would allow me to write a book that would "explain everything or whatever I was supposed to write." That's all I knew at the time.

Mostly I focused on finding the stuff I would need for the Urim and Thummin once I figured out how to make it. I had shoeboxes full of stuff: Blobs of melted glass, horse's teeth, old bottle necks. Green copper wire and an ancient chunk of brass. Arrowheads and a jar of snake bones from a fireant mound. Anything else I could find by walking around junk yards and fields and fence lines by myself.

Quickly I accumulated more than I could ever use or keep hidden in and around our house. My mother complained, so I began to keep up with only two drawers of the most important things I had ever come across. At first this was easy: If I found the fifth-most-interesting spark plug I had ever seen, I put my previous fifth-most-interesting back in the dirt where the barn used to be behind the welding shop.

Then the years went by and everything got to be unique in its own right: a rock-hard blob of clear orange sap with a wasp inside. A snapping turtle jawbone as big as any horseshoe. A string of fossil crinoid segments, hollow in the middle like lifesavers, like natural beads. A small jar holding owl and hawk skulls.

After college, I brought the stuff with me as I moved from job to job. I lived like a student and went "walking" on weekends. I owned no television for long periods and kept no more furniture than could fit in a studio or one bed-room apartment. There was a bed and a table and some shelves and an old armoire that held the collection of special stuff. I always liked arranging it every six months or so, handling it and remembering where I had found each piece.

After the armoire, there was an old wooden chest of drawers that someone had thrown out on the curb. The drawers were missing but the chest was solid. At first I converted it into a shelf for the pieces I handled the most. I cut out the frame that held the drawers in the front and put in shallow shelves for old bottles holding smaller findings. The hollowed out chest of drawers looked like an alcove.

I arranged my favorite pieces on the shelves of the alcove. I always had to kneel to view and access the shelf, and eventually I found a square plywood platform about four foot square that someone had made as a base for something. The platform was about two feet high, and I put the shelf up on that, and I pushed it to the back so that the rest of the platform stuck out front and could be used as a shelf as well.

Then I found a square wooden packing case the same size as the plywood platform, but lighter in weight. I put the case on top of the alcove like a roof that extended out in front like a porch. I used square wooden fence posts to make columns to hold up the roof of the porch. The alcove now looked like the front of an old Greek temple or shrine with columns supporting the upper section and roof. The proportions and symmetry were so right that there wasn't much I could do to improve it by tweaking over the years.

The arrangement of objects in the shrine grew strong as well. It felt complete or right. I tried not to gather new things which might destroy the symmetry or overload the shrine, but I had problems because it was difficult to walk by a glassy honey-red agate or a giant fossil molar or a melted silver crucifix and at least not pick it up and admire it.

Over the years, the shrine gradually overflowed onto the floor and into curved rows that grew into the rings of a mandala in front the shrine. The mandala was a medicine wheel of larger objects of significance placed at key points: the ancient iron lock plate and doorknobs of a tumbled down house placed at 6 o'clock, for example.

The mandala also had concentric rings of smaller items arranges in rows: rings of teeth, rings of agates, rings of brass buttons and coins. The key items were stuck like islands in the rings; they marked points or nodes.

The mandala grew until the shrine itself became a node in the mandala. The mandala grew until it took up half the floor. The room became a walk-in closet to another dimension.

I arranged the mandala in different perfect configurations that evolved over time. At first it was about how everything related as a whole.

Then I began to see different swirls or centers of interest in the mandala more distinctly than I had in the past. I saw other ways I could configure the items, make smaller arrangements and make them separately from the master device I had created.

I attempted to pull items out for use in separate creations, but I didn't have much success. Each item was well known to me, each was a physical representation of the memory of collecting the item from the fringes of the human world. I remembered them by associations with each other. They were a sequence in calendar of memories, a map of locations.