The woman in the print is dressed like a flapper and hoisting a cup of what the artist surely intended to be “abominations and filthiness of her fornication,” just like it says in the Book of Revelation.

A banner across her head reads, “Mystery Babylon the Great.” She’s riding a seven-headed beast.

Victor Houteff, a dissident Seventh-day Adventist, former Maytag washing machine salesman and self-proclaimed divine messenger, drew the image in 1931 as a teaching tool, a key to his own idiosyncratic reading of the Bible’s end times riddles.

The artist Jim Shaw bought it and other Houteff prints at the Pasadena City College Flea Market in 1994, a year after dozens of Houteff’s spiritual descendants — a group known by then as the Branch Davidians — died in the fire that destroyed their compound outside Waco, Texas.

Two years ago, he sold it to Michigan State University's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum as part of a collection of oddball religious ephemera and teaching tracts that he started building as a teenager in Midland five decades ago.

The collection includes the tiny salvation-minded comics produced by Jack Chick and the modernist medical illustrations from Dr. Frank H. Netter, educational children's books about pebbles and physical fitness and the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. There are Christian T-shirts (“Jesus loves pancakes”) and Masonic memorabilia, tarot decks and Richard Shaver’s hollow Earth stories, the ones he began to publish after he started hearing other men’s thoughts transmitted through an arc welder at the Detroit factory where he worked.

It’s an archive of mostly marginal ideologies, an alternative history of American artistic creativity and a deep bibliography for Shaw’s work, which has mined strata of popular culture that his contemporaries never touched.

“I’ve been fascinated since I was a teenager with crackpot ideas,” Shaw said.

Marc-Olivier Wahler, the Broad’s former director, thought Shaw had amassed something worth exhibiting in its own right.

Changing identity

Wahler first encountered the collection packed into boxes in Shaw’s Los Angeles studio.

It has been "a kind of secret between artists," Wahler said.

He convinced Shaw to make it the basis for an exhibit called “The Hidden World” that opened in Paris in 2013.

“I was always obsessed by this idea that something can suddenly be seen as an artwork without changing identity,” said Wahler, who brought both the exhibit and the collection to MSU before his departure in early 2019. “It’s like a science fiction film. You see someone as a human and in the middle of the movie suddenly he’s an alien. It works well in science fiction, but in art people say, ‘No, either it’s an object or an artwork.’”

Shaw’s work flattens those distinctions, he said, operates in the gray areas between object and art.

“When you see this collection, you see where Jim is fishing, getting his inspiration,” Wahler said.

'I am known as an Avatar'

The book opened with a greeting: "To the planet Venus I bid you welcome for my people and for myself. I am known as an Avatar and I would show you some of our ways of life and some of the wonders of the spiritual realms."

"The Voice of Venus" was one of several books Ernest L. Norman, co-founder of a UFO contactee religion called Unarius, would claim to channel from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Shaw picked up a copy in high school. That was the start, he said, the first flowering of his interest in "crackpot stuff."

Which hadn't been easy to find in Midland. But he went away to the University of Michigan and then, in 1976, to the California Institute of the Arts. And Los Angeles was different.

"I started haunting used book stores looking for things about the hollow earth and stuff like that," Shaw said in a 2018 interview.

Part of it was a fascination with odd ways that humans make meaning of the world, whether that's Protestant religion or Pizza-gate conspiracies.

A lot of it was an ecumenical fascination with aesthetics that ran a gamut from abstract expressionism to horror comics to baseball cards.

"I’m interested in the aesthetics of a tree root that has to grow around a sidewalk or the way certain stains look," Shaw said. "I’m interested in the aesthetics of Rose Parade floats, anything where things form sort of secondarily."

And so he bought UFO magazines, gathered up Christian pamphlets from laundromats, sifted through Mormon thrift stores, collected cartoons by the likes of Basil Wolverton and Ad Reinhardt and work by the Polish artist Stanisław Szukalski, who posited that human beings were locked in millennia-long struggle with the Sons of Yeti.

Miss Velma and witchcraft

One of the only pieces of the collection presently on display at the Broad is a photograph of Velma Jaggers, an early Los Angeles televangelist better known as Miss Velma.

While her husband, Orval Lee Jaggers, preached the possibility of alien abduction, Miss Velma focused on the restoration of youth and held Christmas services that the Los Angeles Times once described as "St. Peter's Basilica combined with 'Holiday on Ice.'"

The photo from Shaw's collection shows her in a tiara and high-collared blue cape with an artificial sunburst sending out rays of white light behind her. She holds a single rose.

Nicola Imbracsio found the photo "delightful in its whimsy." But she chose to include it in a small exhibition called "Art to Truth" on display in the Vitrine Gallery in the museum's basement because she's teaching a course on women and witchcraft.

Evangelical Christian or no, Miss Velma fit the bill.

"She’s receiving messages. She has divine inspiration. She speaks in tongues. She says she can foretell the future," said Imbracsio, who is the assistant director of assessment for MSU's College of Arts and Letters. "At another time, a woman claiming those things would be hung, but she claims they’re God-given gifts."

Miss Velma is a good starting point for talking to undergraduates about how an individual can embody "two opposing realities," Imbracsio said.

It doesn't hurt that, in the photo, she looks like Glinda the Good Witch from "The Wizard of Oz.

'Basically propaganda'

The collection, Shaw said, is "all basically propaganda of one sort of another," but the believers' conviction, the earnestness of it all, is part of the appeal.

"You've got the extra bonus of there being a genuine desire on the part of the artists or whoever is in charge of assigning this information to go out," he said.

And, for those familiar with Shaw's work, it's not hard to see where the collection intersects.

"My Mirage," a series of more than 150 works that follow a character named Billy from a middle-class childhood through the cultural cacophony of the 1960s and '70s counterculture, includes encounters with the devil, comic book stigmata, psychedelic neo-paganism and end with the character finding refuge in fundamentalist Christianity.

"As a young ex-hippie, I started seeing several of my friends going down the path of born-again Christianity," Shaw said. "At the time, I thought of it as sad, losing friends in a way."

He doesn't anymore.

"Now, I feel like, well, they’re happy with what they believe and I’m not that happy with what I believe, so maybe they’re better off."

His public wrangling with belief may be best represented in Oism, a fictional religion Shaw started creating in the 1990s, complete with rituals, sacred stories and a manufactured history that puts its founding in the mid-19th century America.

Oism was inspired by Christian Science and Mormonism and Scientology. It preaches that time moves backward and that the supreme deity is female. Its aesthetic pulls a lot from New Age movements and a little from 1970s exercise videos.

But he doesn't feel like he's done.

"I might do some things that involve Masonic symbolism," he said, "because that’s another wellspring of crazy imagery."

Contact Matthew Miller at mrmiller@lsj.com or (517) 377-1046. Follow him on Twitter at @MattMillerLSJ.