Archives: Digital Events

One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley. From the moment he watched the multitudes blossom as a mysterious dark flower above the night woods, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. They became for Cocker a fixation and a way of life. In his book “Crow Country” – widely considered the best of the recent boom of nature writers – Cocker goes in search of them, journeying from the cavernous, deadened heartland of South England to the hills of Dumfriesshire, experiencing spectacular failures alongside magical successes and epiphanies. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds’ inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls ‘our landscape made audible’. Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a reminder that ‘Crow Country’ is not ‘ours’: it is a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly. Viktor Wynd is especially delighted that Mark Cocker has so generously consented to speak as for many years, obsessed by Crow Country, he has been trying to persuade Mark Cocker to leave Norfolk and come to London and give a talk. (photo Wynd with pet corvid Perdita .

Taken from her acclaimed book Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, Lisa Morton explores our fascination with talking to the dead in this illustrated presentation. Beginning with how the common perception of the seance differs from the reality, Lisa will also explore the history of this extraordinary practice, all the way from Odysseus seeking otherworldly advice and King Saul defying his own ban on witchcraft, to the horrifying Roman witch Erichtho and the medieval necromancers, to the Victorian obsession with Spiritualism and seances. Lisa wraps up this overview with a few words about contemporary psychics, the most recent seance movies, and the current craze for paranormal investigating.

Along the way we’ll meet Edward Kelley, the medium who helped Dr. John Dee converse with angels; the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by ‘spirit rappings’; Daniel Dunglas Home, the ‘greatest medium of all time’; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. The talk also considers Ouija boards, the Society for Psychical Research, and skepticism vs. belief.

Speaker: Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her recent releases include Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction from Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923 (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger) and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

In this lecture Peter Godfrey-Smith brings his parallel careers as a philosopher of science and a scuba diver together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvelous creatures display remarkable gifts, with each of their tentacles even capable of thinking for itself. What does it mean that higher intelligence on earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind of the octopus is nonetheless so different from our own? Combining science and philosophy with first hand accounts of his cephalopod encounters, Godfrey-Smith shows how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colours and human beings to speak. By tracing the problem of consciousness back to its roots and comparing the human brain to its most alien and perhaps most remarkable animal relative this lecture sheds new light on one of our most abiding mysteries.

Speaker: Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Join The Apothecary’s Daughter on this Vernal Equinox as she touches on the organs of elimination whilst discussing the merits of classic cleansing herbs, from dandelion to milk thistle, that encourage a lightness of being within the body and soul.

An equinox signifies an equal length of time between night and day, and is the ideal time to assess the equilibrium in one’s life: what needs to be eliminated and sacrificed to make way for the planting of new seeds.

This annual rite of spring extends beyond popular notions of detox, and is about living in tune with the seasons, recognising the wonder of weeds, and preparing rituals for self-care and nourishment.

Maria Vlotides began The Apothecary’s Daughter after completing a degree in Herbal Medicine at the University of Westminster in 2007. Having initially read PPE at Oxford University during the dark ages, she found herself hanging out with increasing regularity at the University’s Botanical Garden, fascinated by plant beds and the magic held within leaves and buds. She had a clinical practice until 2016 and has since continued to focus on teaching and writing. Her book Pharmapoetica in collaboration with poet and author Chris McCabe was nominated for the Ted Hughes Award in 2013. Visit www.the-apothecarys-daughter.com