Event Category: Esoteric

Autumn Magic at the Equinox – Lucya Starza

Autumn Magic at the Equinox

In the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, as described by Keats in his poem To Autumn, join witch Lucya Starza to find out more about the enchantments of this time of year. The equinox is on the 23rd of September in 2023 and is a time when day and night are equal length before we head into the dark half of the wheel of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Lucya will talk about customs and rituals for the equinox as well as folklore and the natural world as the seasons turn. She’ll also be offering some practical magic for after the equinox, as the nights get longer, and we look towards the festivals of Samhain and Halloween.

Bio

Lucya Starza is an eclectic witch living in London, England. As well as being a Wiccan and having a long-standing interest in traditional witchcraft, she grew up in a family where folk magic practices were part of everyday life. She writes A Bad Witch’s Blog at www.badwitch.co.uk and is the author of Pagan Portals – Candle Magic as well as other books published by Moon Books on scrying, poppets, and guided visualisations.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

The Green Children of Woolpit: fairies or lost children? – Zoom talk with John Clark

In this illustrated Zoom lecture, John Clark, formerly curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, investigates the story of the two ‘Green Children’ who suddenly appeared ‘as if out of the ground’ in the Suffolk village of Woolpit in the middle of the 12th century.

The story of the Green Children of Woolpit was reported as fact by two medieval historians. It has often been treated as a ‘Suffolk folktale’, and mined for information on medieval beliefs about the nature and appearance of ‘fairy-folk’ and the location of an ‘otherworld’. Medieval historians have not been concerned whether it really happened, but have seen it as a key to understanding the motives of the two chroniclers who recorded it. Other recent researchers have tried to find a core of historical truth – their explanations range from the down-to-earth to the extraterrestrial.

The tale has been popular ever since an English translation of Ralph of Coggeshall’s original Latin account was published by Thomas Keightley in his The Fairy Mythology in 1850. It has been retold many times, from collections of Suffolk folktales and stories for children to modernist poetry, from a village pantomime and school plays to psychedelic rock music. In the 1950s Benjamin Britten planned an opera on the subject, but never completed it. It has inspired modern novelists, who have reworked the story in settings ranging from Ukraine in the 17th century and northern England in the early 19th century, to modern Arizona.

Why is this story so endlessly fascinating? Were the children really strays from a subterranean otherworld where the sun never shone? Why were they green?

John Clark, for many years curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, has long been interested in byways of medieval history, and the ‘wondrous events’ that serious medieval chroniclers recorded. He has a forthcoming book on the subject of this lecture in preparation, which has the working title: The Green Children of Woolpit: Strangers in a Strange Land.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward 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 folklore-strewn first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you miss the event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording that will be valid for two weeks.

[Image adapted from an illustration in Randolph Caldecott’s 1879 ‘Babes in the Wood’.]

Service magic in the age of the witch hunts – Dr Tabitha Stanmore

Service magic in the age of the witch hunts

In November 1635, a woman named Margery Paule was invited into the house of a Mistress Godfrey of Ely. Godfrey wanted to know whether she was with child and she hoped that Margery, who was well known as a cunning woman, would be able to tell her. However, Margery got more than she bargained for as she settled herself in Godfrey’s front room. Godfrey’s husband Thomas was home, and he wasn’t happy to see Margery. Indeed, he took ‘her by the shoulder and asked her what shee did there you witche, and kicking her once or twice, did fflinge her against the threshold’. Margery fled the house while Thomas yelled threats at her back.

This vignette of violence is what we might expect from England in the seventeenth century, when witch trials were part of the norm. What might surprise us, though, is what happened next. After Margery limped home, bruised and shaken, she resolved to take Thomas Godfrey to court for assault. And her neighbours rallied round: they came forward to testify that although Margery was a skilled fortune-teller, she didn’t deserve Thomas’ ill-treatment.

In a time of religious fervour and heightened fear of witches, how is it that Margery felt empowered enough to prosecute her attacker? Using her case as a starting point, this talk will take us through the murky world of service magic – practical magic performed for a client in return for a fee – in the early modern period. We will see what role service magic played in everyday life and explore how it was treated at the height of the witch hunts. In doing so, we will discover more tolerance – even celebration – of magic than you might expect.

Bio:

Dr Tabitha Stanmore is a historian of medieval and early modern magic. She is a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme Seven County Witch Hunt Project, investigating the so-called Matthew Hopkins trials in 1640s England. He first book, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service magic in England from the later Middle Ages to the early modern period, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2022 and Cunning Folk: Life in the era of practical magic will be published with The Bodley Head in 2024.

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The History Of The Vibrator – From Medical Device To Taboo Sex Toy – Lena Heide-Brennand

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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Freud and the Occult by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair  

Freud and the Occult by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair  

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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Shamanism and the Wisdom of Mental Illness – Jez Hughes

Shamanism and the Wisdom of Mental Illness

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

Maya

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.

David Luke

North London Hauntings – a Zoom talk with Dr Robert Radakovic

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

 

Quatermass at 70 and humanity’s future – a Zoom talk with Jon Dear

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]

Inventing the Green Man – a Zoom talk with Dr Alex Woodcock

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.]

Introducing the Ghost Club (1882–1936) – a Zoom talk with Roger Luckhurst

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]