A Guest Blog by researcher Helen Earl Fraser
Walking through the foundations of Akrotiri, a prehistoric ruin on Santorini, I was overcome with awe. A feeling often overlooked when recounting the spectrum of human emotions. Research indicates awe is one of the most unifying human emotions with far reaching consequences for long term health and wellbeing. Akrotiri inspired awe that I was a small part of something incomprehensibly larger, complicated, and wonderful.
Akrotiri was abandoned, mid repair, bed frames had been dragged into the streets. Valuable objects and supplies had been left inside homes and shops tools and construction materials lay by earthquake damaged buildings. Lying in situ, a perfect snapshot of prehistoric life, preserved in the covered ruins and the Museum of Prehistoric Akrotiri’s destruction pre-dates Pompeii by more than a millennia. In approx. 1500 BC the Volcano at the centre of the modern day archipelago erupted and buried the town leaving the artefacts of lives, cultures, and languages as yet undeciphered untouched and meticulously preserved under a bed of soft ash for the following three millennia.
Archaeologists filled plaster into the moulds left behind where organic artefacts had decayed; rendering 30 replicas of ornate woodwork reminiscent of skilled baroque carvings. Even more remarkable is the engineering revealed in the multistorey stone built homes and streets -subterranean sewage systems! A flushable first floor toilet! Pre-dating Roman plumbing by thousands of years. The brightly painted frescoes suggest seasonal agricultural rituals, beautiful women of all ages, adorned in gold jewellery, picking saffron. Blue monkeys dance across the walls, and in one room an epic fresco retells the voyages and misadventures of the ancient Aegean trade ships to lands filled with palm trees, large birds of prey, herds of antelope and a cheetah.
The site fills many with awe, and the frescoes celebrating the natural world of the ancients demonstrate the timeless production of human art inspired by awe of natural beauty. The creation of these beautiful social spaces in homes demonstrate the direct relationship between awe and the production of art. The benefits of experiential awe are not limited to creativity though: Research carried out at UC Irvine by Paul Piff and Dachner Keltner invited participants to experience awe inspiring scenes from the BBC’s Planet Earth series and then measured the relationship between awe experienced and resulting pro-social behaviour. The study demonstrated that pro-social behaviour, which demonstrates the diminishment of the self and entitlement while increasing generosity and ethical decision making, had a direct correlation with the amount of awe experienced. “Awe empowers sacrifice… and inspires us to give time” (Dachner 2023).
Juyoung Lee at the University of California Berkley conducted a study where participants were exposed to awe inspiring plants, and then offered the voluntary opportunity to fold paper cranes for victims of tsunami “awe inspires the better angels of our nature” as the willingness to help with this voluntary creative endeavour increased with participants experiencing more awe offering more time towards the creation of the cranes.
The spaces we experience awe in need not be contained to the great outdoors. Awe can be experienced when observing human endeavour and material culture, participation in the arts and community activities. When we experience as a group in what Durkheim described as “collective effervescence” a sense of community excites individuals and unifies a group. This has ramifications for collective wellbeing and unity. Jessica Luke writes in “Feeling awe at the museum” (2021) the “Faces and human figures, animal features, and very large scale objects” drew in viewers at the museum, perpetuating the sense of awe by creating a “sense of community across language and cultural divides”.
Not only does experiencing awe in a museum draw communities together since the spaces themselves are often free to enter, and the experience of awe has the potential to ”jump start the learner out of a comfortable state of mind and into a state of productive uncertainty”.
As the paper crane folding produced new objects of cultural and communal significance a museum collection precipitates a “dialogue with the objects, spaces and people within it” (Wallis and Noble, 2022). Children interacting with material culture in a museum are engaged in “imagined and created imprints of themselves and others in the places they had been.” We refer to awe as a childlike state of wonder because of this dropping of barriers and boundaries between the self and the greater sphere of natural environment and our seamless place amongst a culturally rich and phenomenologically diverse species. The value of Museums and galleries as places of awe for all ages and backgrounds cannot be underrated for our personal and communal well being.
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