a recording of this lecture will be available to ticket holders for two weeks after the event
Lugh, the Many-Skilled, is the best-known of Irish male deities, and apparently the most popular. Handsome, charismatic, charming, and adept at all that he does, he has been called virtually the ideal designer god. In modern times he is often thought to have originally been identified with the sun. Scholars have linked him with the names of gods and places across Europe to turn him into the Irish version of a single ancient pan-Celtic deity, Lugus. Equally famous today is a sensationally feisty and charismatic Irish goddess, the Morrigan, who is regarded (and often feared) in modern memory as a deity of battle, darkness and terror. She also, however, operated in the medieval stories as a goddess of love, bestowing sovereignty and victory on gods and heroes with whom she mates. The purpose of this talk is to discover what the actual evidence is of both, and to see whether a closer relationship can be made with either in the process.
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
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.
Ronald Hutton’s topic this evening consists of beliefs in witchcraft and magic held by ordinary British people in the period between 1740 and 1940, that often lost, neglected and mysterious time between the end of the witch hunts and the appearance of modern Pagan witchcraft. These years have in fact left a huge treasure trove of evidence for the subject, which has recently at last become a focus for sustained study. Those studies reveal a complex and fascinating world rich in magical tradition, in which cunning folk and charmers flourished in every part of the land, overlapping with learned ceremonial magicians, and the fear of malevolent witchcraft still lay heavily over most communities. Ronald Hutton offers a tour of it, proposing answers to the questions of what sort of people became magicians and why; what practical techniques they used; whether they were pagans; how they took up their skills; whether they worked in groups; how much they were persecuted; and what eventually became of their traditions.
Join Ronald Hutton for an evening devoted to the main form of male divinity found in modern Paganism: the horned god of nature and of fertility. The questions to be answered in it are why this particular expression of the divine masculine came to dominate in contemporary Pagan tradition, and how and when it did so. The result is a tour through the work of poets, novelists and magicians over the past two hundred years, following the hoofprints of the god from remote antiquity through all manifestations of the modern. In the process we encounter him as protector, liberator and lover.
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.
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This evening Ronald Hutton poses and answers the question of how and when the modern Western world came to have its most common image of what a goddess should be, as a divinity representing the natural world and the night sky in combination, often appearing in three forms, as maiden, mother and crone. He looks at the ancient sources for these concepts, and then at the way in which the image of the goddess in this form came to take over poetry and novels, and then visions of the prehistoric past of humanity. He goes on to consider the manner in which it became mixed up in feminist politics in the later twentieth century, with precisely opposite results among American and British radicals. Finally it asks what options, opportunities and personal choices this concept of the divine feminine provides for us.
Join Professor Ronald Hutton on Zoom to find out why the notorious medieval and early modern European witch-hunts took place – in collaboration with Morbid Anatomy New York.
Join Professor Ronald Hutton to find out why the notorious medieval and early modern European witch-hunts took place. Discover what made them different from witch-hunts elsewhere in the world, why they stopped and the impact have they had on witchcraft beliefs and human rights in the present world.
The story of witch-hunting takes us on a journey through the civilisations of the ancient world and early Christianity to a change in mood in late medieval European Christian times. This is when people stopped perceiving witchcraft as a minor problem affecting individuals and started seeing it as a satanic conspiracy directed against the whole of society.
Europe is unique in making this transition and viewing witchcraft as a demonic form of religion. It is also unique in moving from a profound fear of witchcraft to a disbelief in it, officially at least.
How this change came about and how far that fear still presents a problem to the modern world, will be the central issues of this lecture.
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.
Halloween is usually regarded as the creepiest festival of the modern year, a celebration of witchcraft, phantoms and images of fear which comes down to us from a remote and murky pagan past. Some see it in much more positive light as the ancient Celtic New Year and feast of the dead, called Samhain, a time when the veil between the human and superhuman worlds, and those of the living and the dead, grows thin enough for contact to be made between them.
Join Ronald Hutton for an evening which is intended to explain how such differing views of it have come to be held. He will also offer suggestions regarding how traditional each is, and so propose answers to the fundamental question of how old this festival really is, whether it should still be celebrated, and if so, how?
Examining the older, darker, more scary and more serious world of traditional British and Irish peoples who lived alongside fairies, elves, gnomes, brownies and pixies and had to deal with them.
This evening Ronald Hutton takes us to fairyland: not that of Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories, or even that of Shakespeare, but the older, darker, more scary and more serious world of traditional British and Irish peoples who lived alongside fairies, elves, gnomes, brownies and pixies and had to deal with them. His mission is to discover what these peoples believed about these beings and the coping strategies that they adopted towards them: and how these differed from the beliefs and relations found in later literary fairy tales. He also considers the question of the value of telling stories about the traditional fairies and the meanings that these had for the people who told them. Almost everybody knows that traditional fairies were seldom cute, but how dangerous were they? Who were the sorts of people who made relations with them and why? What could those relations feel like? These are more of the issues which will be discussed tonight.
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 lecture
In the modern Western world, dragons occupy a curious dual space. On the one hand for many people and in many stories, they retain a traditional role as terrifying and predatory monsters which must be slain by heroes. On the other, they are as frequently now represented as friends and allies, faithful steeds or embodiments of benign earth energies. Things get more complex and interesting when it is realised that these two aspects are themselves ancient: in the Old World, western dragons have generally been malevolent, and the dragons of the Far East benevolent. So why is this, and why has the western attitude changed in the modern era? Also, did dragons ever exist, and could they exist, and why did so many humans believe in them if they did not? These are the questions which Ronald Hutton sets out to answer in this talk.
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.
