A couple weeks ago, finally, I visited the Power of Poison exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I’d been conniving and dreaming of ways to get myself there ever since it opened last November.
And it was worth all my plotting. Smart, physically beautiful in the way a good museum exhibit can be, engaging. I sat with a crowd of high school students, all of us leaning forward, during a live performance that revolved around a 19th century poison murder. I wandered from the blue-lit vapors drifting out of a witch’s cauldron to the twilight glimmer of amethysts in a glass case, learning that the Greeks regarded them as a charm against the evils of ethanol. Or to put that another way, against drunkenness. Amethyst almost literally translates from that ancient language as “not intoxicated.”
Too bad it doesn’t work.
But one of my favorite things about the exhibit is its cleverness in challenging us to see and ponder the way that poisonous chemistry winds through our history and our mythology. So you’ll find the curious legends of gemstones – amethysts (opals, which turned pale in the presence of poison) the bubble of a witch’s brew from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (photo at bottom), the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with its backstory of mercury-induced madness among 19th century hat makers, the catalogue of poisons in the inventive murder mysteries of the early 20th century.
So I found myself hanging out with the grade-schoolers in front of a glowing exhibit of the fairytale princess Snow White, pale in her glass coffin under a shadow of trees (photo at top). As anyone raised in the age of Walt Disney knows, this is the story of an evil queen who holds a princess captive in order to control the kingdom. The princess escapes and in the classic version of the tale finds a happy home with some woodland dwarfs. Until, of course, the queen hunts her down and tricks her into eating a poisoned apple. Whereupon the princess collapses into a frozen, coma-like sleep until later awakened by true love’s kiss – or possibly some other antidote.
The exhibit doesn’t focus on antidotes though.
It asks different kinds of questions. What was the poison that paralyzed the princess? No fairytale here – there are real world possibilities to consider, toxins known back in the days that people were spinning such tales of magic and murder.
Could it have been a plant poison like hemlock? That poison, used in the 399 B.C. execution of the Greek philosopher Socrates, caused a creeping paralytic numbness in his body as he died. Or an extract from the black henbane plant, known since the 1st century A.D. to induce sleep and numb pain. A pinch of opium, a dusting of mandrake root, that twisted member of the deadly nightshade family?
As you stand there, in the faint blue light of the museum version of a fantasy setting, you won’t necessary find a definitive answer. But you will walk away, into the concrete and sunlight outside, with a far better appreciation for the beautiful, intricately woven, fantastical poisonous nature of the natural world.
And that is far better than a fairytale ending.
