Archives: Digital Events

Manawydan and the Enchantment on the Land of Dyfed – Guto Dafis

The Third Branch of the Mabinogi

Two men return from a war, but even in peace time they are not left in peace. How does a family survive when the circumstances of their lives change suddenly and without warning? Manawydan knows the value of forbearance, but only manages to put everything right when his patience finally runs out. What is the significance of the mouse? How does the past affect the present? Guto Dafis delivers this ancient Welsh tale of enchantment with a sense of immediacy and awareness of the relevance of its themes for today – themes of repeated cycles of exile and return, of losses and separations followed by eventual restitution and reunion.

Bio

Storyteller Guto Dafis from Cardiff engages and captivates his audiences with the energy of his performances, his warmth, his humanity and his wry humour. He is also a musician; he punctuates and enlivens his storytelling performances with snatches of melody, and he has a musician’s sense of pace and dynamics in his delivery of a tale.

He has performed many times at the Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival, as well appearing at other festivals in Wales and England. He has often been called upon to entertain visitors at castles and historic sites all over South Wales, and has also delighted audiences as far afield as Brittany, the UAE, Netherlands and Italy.

“a gifted teller … with a relaxed and easy style that is guaranteed to draw you in” (Carl Gough, Swansea Storytelling)

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The Starry Skies – Sarah Rundle

The Starry Skies

As the Nights get longer and the skies get darker… the stars spring to our eyes in all their magnificence. And every cluster has a tale to tell: jealous love, hunting “accidents”, a wicked stepfather, and a 60,000 year-old mystery.

Sarah Rundle will unfold these stories for us, and teach us how to find our way home.

Bio

Sarah Rundle has devised works for the British Council, Wellcome Foundation, Geffrye Museum, Kew Gardens, and the National Trust. She has performed at Stockholm’s Fabula Story Café, the Nivesh Festival in Delhi, Kolkata Literature Festival, Sharjah International Book Fair, and Festival at the Edge.

She loves stories with quirks, plucky underdogs, humour, and unexpected twists.

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The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present – Professor Chris Gosden

The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

Professor Gosden will discuss his book ‘A History of Magic ‘ (Viking 2020) – a remarkable, unprecedented account of the role of magic in cultures both ancient and modern — from the first known horoscope to the power of tattoos.

Three great strands of practice and belief run through human history: science, religion and magic. But magic – the idea that we have a connection with the universe – has developed a bad reputation.

It has been with us for millennia – from the curses and charms of ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish magic, to the shamanistic traditions of Eurasia, indigenous America and Africa, and even quantum physics today. Even today seventy-five per cent of the Western world holds some belief in magic, whether snapping wishbones, buying lottery tickets or giving names to inanimate objects.

Drawing on his decades of research, with incredible breadth and authority, Professor Chris Gosden provides a timely history of human thought and the role it has played in shaping civilization, and how we might use magic to rethink our understanding of the world.

About the Author

Chris Gosden is Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Previously he was a curator and lecturer at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, where he encountered many magical objects, displayed in a scientific manner. Chris is a fellow of the British Academy and the Society of Antiquaries, as well as a trustee of the Art Fund, the British Museum and chair of trustees for Oxford Archaeology. He has written or edited eighteen academic books. This is his first trade book.

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In Search of the Unknown: The Cryptozoological Fiction of Robert W. Chambers – Justin Mullis

In Search of the Unknown: The Cryptozoological Fiction of Robert W. Chambers

This presentation will examine a key early work of cryptozoological fiction in the form of the novel In Search of the Unknown (1904) by the prolific author Robert W. Chambers (1865 – 1933); once regarded as “the most popular writer in America” (Cosmopolitan, April 1911), with over eighty best-selling novels to his name. Today however Chambers work has been all but forgotten apart from The King in Yellow (1895); a slim volume of horror stories which happened to garner the favorable attention of celebrated writer H.P. Lovecraft who praised Chamber’s skill at eliciting terror – some of which is on display in his cryptozoological writings as well.

In Search of the Unknown relates the many adventures of Gilland, a philandering ornithologist who works at the New York Bronx Zoo from whence he is repeatedly dispatched by his boss to go and find various cryptids including living mammoths, anomalous primates, giant birds, amphibious humanoids, and revivified dinosaurs. Published more than 50-years before “Father of Cryptozoology” Bernard Heuvelmans’ now classic non-fiction work On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955), In Search of the Unknown also appeared nearly a decade before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s equally esteemed The Lost World (1912) which inspired Heuvelmans. Published at the very beginning of the twentieth century, In Search of the Unknown aptly demonstrates that cryptozoology already existed as a fully realized set of ideas not only well in advance of Heuvelmans’ work but even prior to the coining of the word itself in the early 1940s. By examining Chamber’s long neglected novel this presentation aims to bring new insights to the topic of the origins and methodology of cryptozoology, while also working to salvage Chamber’s reputation as a foundational writer of science-fiction.

Speaker Bio

Justin Mullis is a PhD candidate at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He has a M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he previously lectured on topics relating to the intersection of religion with science-fiction and horror. His published work includes explorations of the religious aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Japanese kaijū movies, as well as the cryptozoological folk-horror of Welsh writer Arthur Machen and the importance of science-fiction in the formation of cryptozoology. His current doctorial research involves the role of cryptozoology in the life of American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website http://www.amyhale.me.

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Merchants, Pirates and Crusaders in the Medieval Mediterranean – Dr Mike Carr

Merchants, Pirates and Crusaders in the Medieval Mediterranean

The Mediterranean in the Middle Ages was a melting pot of different cultures and religions who fought against one another, but also traded across its waters, exchanging goods and ideas from around the world. For Latin Christians the papacy was the preeminent spiritual power in Europe and the Mediterranean: it launched crusades against its Muslim opponents (and others), in order to expand Christendom and secure the Holy Land. Yet, many Latin Christians, especially merchants from the great maritime cities of Venice, Genoa and Barcelona, accrued huge wealth from trading with the Islamic Levant, the goods from which were highly valued in western Europe. This lecture will explore this supposed contradiction by looking at how religion and trade influenced one another in a time of holy warfare and long-distance trade. Piracy, economic warfare, smuggling and religious zeal all infused to create a region and period of violence and instability, yet also opportunity, vibrancy and surprising modernity.

Speaker Bio

Mike Carr is a lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh. He has written and edited several books on the medieval Mediterranean, the crusades and medieval trade, and has made a number of media appearances, such as for BCC Radio 4’s In Our Time

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website http://www.amyhale.me.

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Christian and Muslim merchants shipping contraband in the medieval Mediterranean, from the Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis of Marino Sanudo Torsello, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 2972C, 11v.

Druids in medieval Irish sources by Dr Mark Williams

Druids in medieval Irish sources

Druids were the magical and religious specialists of at least some Celtic-speaking peoples in the two or three centuries on either side of the birth of Christ. Discussion of the druids tends to start with the classical accounts by Greek and Roman authors, but awareness has grown of the ways in which those accounts are not to be relied upon. People sometimes turn, therefore, to medieval Irish sources, hoping that the vivid and dramatic depictions of druids therein might offer us a more convincing glimpse of druidic practice and ancient Celtic religion. This talk sets out those sources, explaining why they are just as problematic—if not more so—than the classical accounts.

Bio

Dr Mark Williams is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the medieval languages and literatures of Wales and Ireland, and the author of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016), and The Celtic Myths that Shaped the Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is in training as a Jungian psychoanalyst

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‘Fiona Macleod’ (William Sharp) (1855-1905) and the Celtic Revival in Scotland by Dr Mark Williams

‘Fiona Macleod’ (William Sharp) (1855-1905) and the Celtic Revival in Scotland

‘Fiona Macleod’ was the secret cross-gendered pseudonym—really a secondary personality—of the Scottish Celtic Twilight writer William Sharp. Around the turn of the 20th century he posed as a Hebridean seeress and folklore collector, producing under her name a slew of misty, etheral faux-Celtic works on Gaelic folklore. These reached a wide audience, and influenced W. B. Yeats, among many others; they included poetry, occult reportage, and drama based on Irish myth. One work, The Immortal Hour, was even turned into a successful and long-running opera by the composer Rutland Boughton. This talk weighs up Sharp’s deeply peculiar cultural achievement, probing the role that ‘Fiona’ played in his complex life.

Bio

Dr Mark Williams is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the medieval languages and literatures of Wales and Ireland, and the author of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016), and The Celtic Myths that Shaped the Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is in training as a Jungian psychoanalyst

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Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: Faerie and the Fate of England by Dr Mark Williams

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: Faerie and the Fate of England

Described by Neil Gaiman as ‘the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last 70 years’ Susanna Clarke’s 2004 international bestseller broke records for a fantasy novel. It charts the lives of two magicians, the young, gregarious, and confident Jonathan Strange, and the bookish and reclusive Mr Norrell, as they navigate the politics of an alternative Regency England in which ‘English Magic’ and the unsettling world of Faerie are alarmingly real forces. It was made into a BBC TV series in 2015. This talk aims to examine the themes and structure of the novel, leading to a deeper understanding of Clarke’s enthralling alternative past.

Reading: Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)

Bio

Dr Mark Williams is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the medieval languages and literatures of Wales and Ireland, and the author of Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016), and The Celtic Myths that Shaped the Way We Think (Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is in training as a Jungian psychoanalyst

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Keening or Ritual Lament in the Scottish Highlands – Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

For hundreds of years in the Scottish Highlands, ritual lament was a central custom of funeral wakes and burials. Old widow women, in tattered clothes, covered in dirt and ashes, with hair streaming in the wind, led other women, relatives and friends of the dead, in group keening, or caoineadh.

This highly dramatic expression of grief would once have been a common sight and sound across the region. Keening women would chant rhymes praising the dead and cursing their enemies, alternating with choruses of wailing cries, screaming, tearing their hair, and rending their clothing.

But keening was far from being a random emotional outpouring. Rather, it was a skilled, highly choreographed, demanding and sensitive task, expressing personal pain and anguish on behalf of the community, arranging that the deceased could cross over into the community of the dead.

In this talk, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart will discuss the evidence for keening in Scottish Highlands, examine how, why, and when the custom began to die out. He will investigate disorder, violence, and bagpipes at Highland funerals, and examine how not only keeners, but all women came to excluded from burials. Finally, he will trace the introduction of new standards of respectability and self-control, according to which ritual lament was seen as something hypocritical, old-fashioned, even primitive. The art of keening became forgotten or misunderstood, a cause of shame for a younger generation.

Bio

Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is a Senior Lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, and Course Leader there for the MSc in Cultar Dùthchasach agus Eachdraidh na Gàidhealtachd (Material Culture and Gàidhealtachd History). He has lectured and published extensively on the history, literature, material culture, ethnology, folklore and popular culture of the Scottish Highlands from the seventeenth century onwards, and is often interviewed on these subjects for radio and television.

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On the Need for Metaphysics in Psychedelic Therapy and Research – Dr Peter Sjostedt-Hughes

On the Need for Metaphysics in Psychedelic Therapy and Research

It will be argued that psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences should be integrated and evaluated with recourse to metaphysics in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

The case will be put forward that there is a potential extra benefit to participants in psychedelic-assisted therapy if they are provided with an optional, additional, and intelligible schema and discussion of metaphysical options at the integrative phase of the therapy.
Metaphysics is not mysticism, despite some overlap; and certainly not all psychedelic experience is metaphysical or mystical – all three terms will be defined and contrasted.

In psychedelic-assisted therapy one sees the potential fusion between reason-based philosophy and practical therapy – it is where the Psychedelic Turn and the Metaphysical Turn meet

Speaker Bio:Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is philosopher of mind & metaphysics who specialises in the thought of Whitehead, Spinoza, Bradley, and Nietzsche, and in fields pertaining to altered and panpsychological states of consciousness. He is a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Exeter where he has co-founded the Exeter Psychedelic Research Group, the ambit of which includes taught modules, conferences, workshops, and publications. He also works for Psychedelic Press, Breaking Convention, and Dreamshadow Group. Peter is the author of Noumenautics, Modes of Sentience, co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics volume, the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness’, and he is inspiration to the recreation of inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.

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This Psychedelic series is Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson 

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic and parapsychology researcher. Having just graduated from Chelsea College of Arts, her work over the last six years has been informed by her concurrent shamanic training, work with the Wixárika (Huichol) tribe from Mexico, and role as a research assistant under Dr David Luke of Greenwich university in the study of the psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and other worlds. Walking between the worlds of the arts, science and the occult, she combines media and investigative techniques from each to inform and articulate one another in the exploration of ontology, consciousness and altered states, mytholopeia and mythology, ecology, the human condition and its relation to the environment, otherness and mortality. She describes her practise and research as contemporary Memento Mori (‘remember you will die’), and explores what that means in a time of mass ecocide and species extinction.

Follow her on the crooked path on Instagram @maya_themessiah

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