a recording of this lecture will be available to ticket holders for two weeks after the event
Brigid (or Bridget, or Bride) is the most popular Irish goddess in the modern world. This is partly because of her bountiful and gentle nature, as a patroness of handicrafts (especially smithwork), poetry and healing, and partly because she is also revered as a major Christian saint, the patroness of Ireland, with a rich heritage of stories attached to her. She thus acts a a connecting point between the religions. The general supposition is that the goddess had an equal importance in pre-Christian times, and evolved into the saint. If that is so, however, why are the pagan and Christian figures so different, and why are there so few actual references to the goddess in medieval texts? This talk is designed to look at the evidence for both goddess and saint, and the possible relationships between them.
Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.
a recording of this lecture will be available to ticket holders for two weeks after the event
Freemasonry is the most important Western tradition of a network of closed initiatory societies, with ceremonies, special signs or names and a secret membership. It is also the oldest. Many have noted that it has exerted a great influence on closed initiatory groups in general in the modern Western world, including those in the world of occultism, and of some of the most important branches of Paganism. This talk is intended to discuss the origins of Freemasonry, and the development of its ritual, and its relationship with the occult and with Paganism throughout its history.
Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.
– a recording will be available to ticket holders who miss the event for two weeks
‘I Could Not Call Her Mother’: The Wicked Stepmother in Early America
This is the story of the stepmother. It is a story that intersects with women’s history and the history of motherhood. Intersects, but skews; reflects, but like the mirror in Snow White (particularly the trippy one in Walt Disney’s 1939 version) warps the reflection even as it brings it into sharper focus. She is always there, the stepmother. The “substitute mother.” The other mother. Her stories infused popular culture for centuries before this American story begins, and continue to do so today. She plays a substantial role in our collective imagination, whether we are a part of a step family or not. This Zoom lecture explores the role of the evil stepmother in early American popular culture (with a glance into later pulp fiction and film noir!). With her origins in fairytales and folklore, the evil stepmother was often portrayed as jealous, grasping, and greedy. She was vain, selfish, and cold. Above all else, she hated children (a quality she shared with early popular representations of the witch). What made this image so pervasive in early America that it infused a wide range of popular genres, from poetry and novels to news stories and prescriptive literature?
Leslie Lindenauer is a Professor in the Department of History and Non-Western Cultures at Western Connecticut State University, where she teaches courses in early American history, gender studies, public history, and American Studies. Her book I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 was published by Lexington Books in 2014. Before her career in academe, Leslie worked for a couple of decades as an educator and administrator at a number of history museums in the Northeast.
London has harboured many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956).
A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said “Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man.”
But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.
Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologised since his death. This talk will offer insights into Spare’s art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists and monstrous owls and examine the strange inner world that this most enigmatic of artists inhabited, shedding new light while allowing just a few shadowy corners to flourish unspoiled.
Phil Baker’s previous books include the definitive biography of Austin Osman Spare, London, City of Cities, a critical study of Samuel Beckett and a cultural history of absinthe. He is currently working on a book about Crowley, lives in London and walks everywhere.
Since the origins of our own species, birds have been at the heart of human cultures as food, as feather adornments and as all manner of practical artefacts. Sailors fashioned albatross feet into purses or tobacco pouches, Italian children wore penduline tit nests as socks. Penguin oil was once used to light our city streets. Hummingbird feathers are exchanged as love tokens and owl hearts are part of African black magic even today.
Birds have also been deployed as symbols of our most sacred values – as metaphors for love, truth, freedom and immortality – while avian flight has captivated the human imagination so that birds are woven into culture and art worldwide. Award-winning author Mark Cocker draws on examples explored in his massive and massively acclaimed book Birds and People. He considers the nature of this key relationship and explores why birds remain central ambassadors in our entire relationship with nature.
Speaker: Mark Cocker is a multi-award winning author and naturalist, whose 12 books include Crow Country, Our Place and Claxton. Over the last four decades he has also published more than 1000 essays on nature in national and international newspapers especially the Guardian.
Images courtesy of the speaker
Birds Britannica was described as ‘a triumph’ and ‘a bird book like no other’ when it was published in 2005. The contents have been much used by conservation professionals and a fellow writer once wrote to its author Mark Cocker: ‘thank you for a thousand cribs’. The people using Birds Britannica’s pages might be environmentalists, but the book is not a conservation handbook, nor is it only about the lives of birds.
Almost uniquely among modern ornithological literature Birds Britannica is a cultural study that explores how we feel, think, respond, act and have loved and lived alongside birds for a thousand years. It charts our historical fear of owls and our modern superstitions about magpies. It describes how we once hounded ospreys and eagles to extinction and have brought both back in modern times as icons of conservation. Did you know that goldfinches were once trapped where Paddington Station stands? And did a nightingale ever sing in Berkerley Square?
Ultimately Birds Britannica is as much about the British people as it is about the country’s avifauna. For the first time Mark Cocker talks candidly about the eight years it took to assemble the contents and produce what poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion called ‘the great delight of my year, the book that made me feel I’d been waiting for it all my life.’
Speaker: Mark Cocker is a multi-award winning author and naturalist, whose 12 books include Crow Country, Our Place and Claxton. Over the last four decades he has also published more than 1000 essays on nature in national and international newspapers especially the Guardian.
Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival – Mon 14 March 2022
This third talk turns to writers in English, and looks at how the Irish gods were resuscitated and reimagined in modernity as symbols of national identity. We will be focusing on the poet and magician W. B. Yeats and his friend the mystic George Russell (‘AE’), who attempted to contact the ancient divinities of Ireland in vision and to found an occult order which would persuade them to intervene in a conflicted present.
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
Further Reading
W. B. Yeats, ‘Rosa Alchemica’ in Mythologies (many editions)
George Russell, ‘The Legends of Ancient Eire’ https://www.teozofija.info/Russell_Legends.html
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Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
Pagan Ireland – From Cult to Conversion – Mon 17 Jan 2022
Irish Gods – The Túatha Dé Danann – Sun 13 Feb 2022
Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival – Mon 14 March 2022
Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
Irish Gods – The Túatha Dé Danann – Sun 13 Feb 2022
This second talk takes listeners through a magnificent saga from the ninth century, The Second Battle of Moytura, in which the Irish gods—the Túatha Dé Danann—fight to reclaim Ireland from a race of oppressive enemies, the Fomorians. This may be a reflection of a genuinely ancient myth, but it features a lively cast of characters, including the war-goddess, the Morrígan, and the pot-bellied father of the Irish gods, the Dagda, who is nearly forced to gorge himself to death on porridge. It has one of the most sordid sex scenes in all medieval literature.
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
Further ReadingMark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (2016), Ch 3 http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/moytura/moyturatale.html
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Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
Pagan Ireland – From Cult to Conversion – Mon 17 Jan 2022
Irish Gods – The Túatha Dé Danann – Sun 13 Feb 2022
Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival – Mon 14 March 2022
Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
From Cult to Conversion – Mon 17 Jan 2022
This first talk introduces what we know of Irish pre-Christian religion through archaeology, before turning to the process of conversion to Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries. We will look at how at least some pagan deities were ‘reincarnated’ as literary characters in the new cultural landscape of a Christian Ireland, focusing on the mysterious mist-cloaked sea-god, Manannán mac Lir, who gives his name to the Isle of Man.
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
Further Reading
Edel Bhreathnach, Ireland in the Medieval World, 400-1000 (Dublin, 2014)
‘The Voyage of Bran’, trans. Kuno Meyer
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/vob/vob02.html
‘The Adventure of Connlae’
https://sejh.pagesperso-orange.fr/keltia/version-en/connla-fair.html
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Talk Series: The Gods of Ireland: Ireland’s native pantheon in literature and lore
Pagan Ireland – From Cult to Conversion – Mon 17 Jan 2022
Irish Gods – The Túatha Dé Danann – Sun 13 Feb 2022
Occult Nationalism and the Irish Revival – Mon 14 March 2022
Join award-winning drinks writer Henry Jeffreys for a journey through history and alcohol. His book Empire of Booze charts the rise of Britain from a small corner of Europe to global pre-eminence, each chapter unveils a drink which originated during a period in British imperial history.
Along the way, you will learn how we owe the champagne we drink today to 17th century methods for making sparkling cider; how madeira and India Pale Ale become legendary for their ability to withstand the long, hot journeys to Britain’s burgeoning overseas empire; and why whisky, a drink indigenous to Britain, became the familiar choice for weary Empire builders who longed for home.
Empire of Booze traces the impact of alcohol on British culture and society: literature, science, philosophy and even religion have reflections in the bottom of a glass. Filled to the brim with fascinating trivia, amusing stories and recommendations for how to enjoy these drinks today, we recommend that you bring a bottle or two to enjoy during this talk.
Henry Jeffreys worked in the wine trade and publishing before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster. He was wine critic for The Lady, and his work has appeared in the Spectator, the Guardian, the Oldie and BBC Good Food magazine. He has been on BBC Radio 4, Radio 5 and Monocle Radio, and featured on TV programme Inside the Factory (2020) on BBC 2. He was a judge for the BBC Radio 4’s Food & Farming Awards and for the Fortnum & Mason food and drink awards 2018. His debut book Empire of Booze: British History through the Bottom of a Glass won a Fortnum & Mason award. Since then he has written The Home Bar (2018) and The Cocktail Dictionary (2020). He currently works as features editor for the Master of Malt drinks blog.
