Ancient Egypt is best known for its magnificent temples, splendid royal tombs, and vast cemeteries filled with human interments from all phases of its three-thousand-year history. Less well-known is the wide range of animals, from lions to lizards and baboons to beetles, that were buried in specially created cemeteries. Some species were bred in almost inconceivable numbers specifically to be despatched to order and mummified, before being laid to rest.
This lecture will offer an overview of this ancient Egyptian practice and the significant roles their ‘menagerie’ of animals played in religious beliefs.
Paul Whelan studied Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern History at University College London and Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology UCL. His main research interests and topics of his numerous peer-reviewed published works focus on cult practices in ancient Egypt in the 2nd millennium BCE. He has run Egyptological courses for the universities of Reading and Oxford and lectured in the UK, USA, and Italy. He is a member of the advisory board of the prestigious Middle Kingdom Studies publication series and co-founder of the lecture and course provider Ta-wer Egyptology.
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Plant lore and mythology have a tale for every malaise – including menopause and midlife crisis. Take a dollop of story – whatever is fresh and available. Knead in dates, spices and other choice ingredients. Flambe with goddess philosophy and indulge…
‘Kitchen Kundilini’ is all about vibration. Every ingredient is charged by Tibetan ringing bowls. If you’re into plants, stories and food, this show will shake your chakras, set your taste buds zinging and your molecules dancing.
(warning – contains nuts – of the literal and female kind)
Xanthe’s up-beet, keep calm and carrot-on approach will totally transform your relation-chip to food. Hastings Storytelling Festival
Gresham unfurls each story like the petals of a lotus. At the end you leave with something beautiful created in your own mind. British Theatre Review
Bio
Xanthe Gresham Knight is an international storyteller and author with a specialism in feminist storytelling. During lockdown, she performed Kitchen Goddess and curated The Goddess Lounge series. Her most recent book is Goddesses and Heroines with Thames and Hudson. She has been Storyteller in Residence for the Chelsea Physic Garden, Hastings Storytelling Festival, Harvard University, Blanton Museum Texas, Stoke and Staffordshire Libraries and The Smithsonian.
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The History Of The Vibrator – From Medical Device To Taboo Sex Toy
The British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville invented what we today know to be the first electric vibrator, the so-called “percuteur” in the early 1880’s.
In the beginning it was nothing but a purpose build medical tool used on men to stimulate ailing nerves and muscle aches. Doctor Granville believed that the electromechanical vibrations from the percuteur would relieve any type of muscle related pain. Shortly after Granville’s invention became popular, a group of Victorian doctors who specialized in treating the condition known as “female hysteria” discovered that they could use the device to shorten the time it took to perform a so-called pelvic massage on their numerous female patients. Actually it became the most utilized device after the stethoscope until the late 1920’s. It seemed to work as well; the doctors reported that their female hysteria patients became much less stressed and appeared to be more content after the treatment. After this success, the vibrator became a popular household tool advertised and sold under names such as the “massager” or “manipulator”. Homemakers bought them and had them on display in their homes and they were considered just as ordinary to own as a vacuum cleaner or the sewing machine.
So, when did the view on this once respectable device change? When did it go from being a praised revolutionary invention to a simple and vulgar sex-toy that no one admits owning? Welcome to an evening where we present the interesting history of the vibrator.
Bio
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, maintained an interest in occult phenomena longer than most people realize, conducting thought-transference experiments with his daughter Anna Freud and colleague Sándor Ferenczi late into his life. At the same time, the occult was one of the topics at the center of the split between Freud and Carl Jung in 1914, the other being the centrality of sexuality to human psychology. While Jung felt compelled to delve into the more unexplainable psychical phenomena coming to the fore in his psychoanalytic research and clinical practice, Freud insisted that the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis be considered scientific, not spiritualist, and warned his followers not to delve into the occult, at least not publicly.
Freud’s inner circle was well-aware of his occult experiments and research, however, as he often presented this work to small groups of his closest followers. ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’, for example, was written in 1921 to be presented to the Central Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Freud also penned quite a few papers on occult topics throughout his lifetime. ‘Notes on the Unconscious’ – the preliminary research that informed his seminal work ‘The Unconscious’ (1915) – was published in the journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1912, and ‘The Occult Significance of Dreams’ was published in Imago in 1925. While Freud’s ‘A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled’ was written in 1899, but only published posthumously in 1941.
This talk will delve into the occult aspects of Freud’s work.
Bio
Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst, artist and occultist based in Sweden. Her books include Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman: From Freud to Lacan and Beyond (Routledge, 2022), The Pathways of the Heart (Trapart Books, 2021), and Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2020). Dr. Sinclair is Senior Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS) and the host of Rendering Unconscious Podcast.
Illustration by Don Punchatz for Playboy Magazine, October 1969
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This talk is an in-depth exploration of the links between shamanism and mental illness. It looks at the traditional role of the ‘shamanic sickness’, whereby the prospective shaman underwent many years of mental distress as part of their initiation, and looks at what this can teach us about mental health. It argues that, in some cases such sickness could actually be a calling to a path of service and healing. Recasting psychological breakdown as a potentially transformational experience, what we label as pathological could actually be an initiation into a better relationship with ourselves and the world.
We will also explore the social and ecological aspects of mental health and how shamanism can help bring us back into balance with nature, providing individual healing alongside planetary change. This includes the very latest research on psychedelic medicines and the potential they are showing in treating and enhancing mental health and looks at the evidence of how unusual states of consciousness have helped us evolve as humans, and the shamanic origins of many of these states.
Bio
Jez Hughes has been on the shamanic path for over twenty years and is the founder of the training centre Second Sight Healing. He works closely with the indigenous Wixarika (Huichol) nation of north central Mexico, as a cultural liaison for their work in the U.K. and also through a ten-year commitment to apprentice with the sacred sites and teachers of their land. His own initiation involved a fifteen-year journey through various mental illnesses before finding a cure in shamanism, hence his passion for this subject. His work has featured all across the national press and on ITV television and BBC radio. He is the author of The Wisdom of Mental Illness- Shamanism, Mental Health & the Renewal of World and The Heart of Life- Shamanic Initiation & Healing in the Modern World.
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Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson and Dr David Luke
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
Dr David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, UK, where he has been teaching an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience since 2009, and he is also Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London, and Lecturer on the MSc Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology for Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including ten books, most recently Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience (2nd ed., 2019). When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting DMT field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans he directs the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon at the Institute of Ecotechnics, London, and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness. He has given over 300 invited public lectures and conference presentations; won teaching, research and writing awards; organised numerous festivals, conferences, symposia, seminars, retreats, expeditions, pagan cabarets and pilgrimages; and has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites. He lives life on the edge, of Sussex.
Hauntings of Barnet and Enfield – Camlet Moat and the Cockfosters Cluster
In the Northernmost tip of London, on the border between Barnet and Enfield, the remnants of an ancient forest and Tudor hunting grounds are the setting for a number of unusual sightings. From medieval knights, grey ladies, moving pillars of light, boggarts and menacing growling entities, this talk presents a visually rich foray into the legends of Camlet Moat, Enfield Chace and the surrounding areas.
With links to the Knights Templar and the Wars of the Roses, this talk is both historical and personal, showcasing old and new cases of unusual paranormal activity in this little-researched suburban hideaway within the bounds of the M25 motorway.
Your speaker for this event is Dr Robert Radakovic, an ex-astrophysicist and ex-management accountant who left the corporate world over a decade ago to study for an MA in Western Esotericism, followed by a PhD which considered the interplay between Science, Religion, Philosophy and the Paranormal in the nineteenth century. He has had a lifelong interest in ghosts, UFOs and psychic phenomena, and undertakes independent research in each of these. He has been a council member of The Ghost Club (1862) since 2019.
Your host and curator for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Nigel Kneale was one of Britain’s most significant screenwriters of the twentieth century. Credited by Mark Gatiss as “the inventor of modern television”, Kneale’s works included the Quatermass serials, The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Stone Tape, Beasts and essential television adaptations of The Woman in Black and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although not as widely lauded in his lifetime as many of his contemporaries, Kneale was a profound influence for many writers and filmmakers, including John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and Ben Wheatley.
Known for his folkloric horror and politically charged science fiction, Kneale works used the past to explain the present and thanks for his uncanny understanding of humanity, made startlingly accurate predictions about the future. In this talk Jon Dear will examine what Kneale understood about humanity, why his predictions over climate change inaction and the rise of reality television reveal deeper and darker commentary on racism and generational conflict, and how his most famous creation, Professor Bernard Quatermass is a distillation of humanity at its best.
Jon Dear is a writer and critic on TV and film. He has written for the BFI, including their Flipside range, Horrified Magazine, Curious British Television and the Fortean Times. He also contributed to We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror and Royal Holloway University’s Forgotten Television Drama project. Jon is the co-host of the podcasts BERGCAST: The Nigel Kneale Podcast and Due Signori in Giallo. His recent work includes commentaries for the Blu Ray Releases of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) and A Warning to the Curious(1972). He is currently writing a book on the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas Series. Twitter:@AccordingtoJonD
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com. Twitter: @edward_parnell
[Image from a publicity poster for Quatermass and the Pit (1967) – private collection]
The Green Man is one of the most familiar images from medieval art. A face radiating or disgorging leaves it can be found in churches and cathedrals across the British Isles and further afield, carved upon roof bosses, capitals, misericords and other architectural features.
In the twentieth century this familiar sylvan face took on a new life, becoming a figurehead of neo-pagan spirituality, representing our connection with nature and the seasonal rhythms of the earth. In this talk we’ll look at who ‘discovered’ and named the Green Man and what the legacy of this has been, before looking more closely at the contexts in which it can be found. Is it possible to trace different meanings and narratives among the imagery, and what might this reveal about medieval art and architecture?
Dr Alex Woodcock is a writer, stonemason and artist immersed in the worlds of medieval architecture and sculpture. Following a PhD on medieval sculpture he trained as a stonemason and worked at Exeter Cathedral for six years. His books include Gargoyles and Grotesques (Bloomsbury, 2011), Of Sirens and Centaurs (Impress, 2013) and King of Dust (Little Toller, 2019). He teaches on the Cathedrals’ Workshop Fellowship degree and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. For more information see: www.alexwoodcock.co.uk or Twitter: @beakheads
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
[Image: a carved boss in Exeter Cathedral depicting the Green Man. Photo taken by/copyright of Mark Ware.]
In 1882 two Victorian gentlemen involved in London’s spiritualist and occult scene set up an informal dining club to meet and discuss matters spiritual and psychical in a relaxed, non-judgmental atmosphere. The Ghost Club was kept strictly private and last for over 50 years, including among its guests literary figures like Arthur Conan Doyle and W. B. Yeats, the Egyptologist Edgar Wallis Budge, and the colonial administrator Sir Harry Johnstone. They also kept assiduous minutes of their meetings (now kept by the British Library), and this talk will introduce some of the early key members and discuss some of their key discussions and controversies. The talk derives from work towards the first ever published selection of materials from the Club.
Roger Luckhurst is a Professor who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written on mummies, vampires, and zombies, and was once welcomed onto Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’ as ‘the go-to guy for the undead.’ His most recent book is Gothic: An Illustrated History, from Thames and Hudson (2021).
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
[Image: an illustration by James McBryde from the 1st edition of M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary]
Cryptozoology, or the study of purported animals unknown to Western science, has had a long and complicated relationship with the anthropological sciences. Western biology and zoology developed in a context of European colonial expansion. The ethnographic record—the writings of anthropologists working throughout the world—was a crucial source not only of the diversity of global human culture, but of modern ecological and biological science. In the twentieth century, early cryptozoological researchers began to take note of creatures who were “ethno-known,” that is, they appeared in the anthropological record but did not correspond to any living animal known to Western science. Canonical creatures in the cryptozoological literature, including Bigfoot, the dragon of Ishtar Gate, and the south Asian Buru all had their origins in this unwieldy collision between the anthropological record and modern biology.
A close look at the history of cryptozoology and anthropology shows us how modern science superimposed itself over traditional and local knowledge systems. Contemporary anthropologists offer serious critiques of Western science as a total arbiter of all truth-claims, especially when applied to Indigenous worldviews. Where many modern zoologists saw the anthropological record as a resource, many contemporary anthropologists look to the cryptozoological record as a record of traditional ecological knowledge. Is cryptozoology just a pseudoscience? Or do some cryptozoological accounts contain hidden records of traditional ways of relating to the nonhuman world, lifeways rejected by Enlightenment science?
Bio
Timothy Grieve-Carlson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He earned his doctorate in Religion from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he worked on the Archives of the Impossible Project with Jeffrey Kripal. Timothy was also a 2021-2022 Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between environmental phenomena and religious practice. His book manuscript, American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in Early Pennsylvania, explores environmental knowledge and apocalyptic thought in the early modern mid-Atlantic world.
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