Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen – Lena H Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen

Long before Disney and Pixar, there was Hans Christian Andersen—a poor shoemaker’s son from Odense whose imagination would enchant the world. In this lecture, we journey through the extraordinary life of Denmark’s most celebrated storyteller, from his humble beginnings and restless travels across Europe to his friendships with royalty, artists, and literary greats.

We will uncover the inspiration behind timeless tales like The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, and The Ugly Duckling, exploring how Andersen’s own triumphs, heartbreaks, and unrequited loves found their way into his fables. Alongside his fairy tales, we will meet the man himself—eccentric, romantic, and endlessly curious—through his diaries, letters, and the anecdotes of those who knew him.

Blending biography, history, and literary magic, this talk invites you to step into a 19th-century world of candlelit parlours, grand salons, and windswept northern shores, where every life holds the seed of a fairy tale—if only we learn how to tell it.

Speaker 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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture Two – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages

From the physicians of ancient Greece to the virologists of the 21st century, herpes has fascinated, frustrated, and stigmatised in equal measure. In this second lecture, we unravel the complex story of the herpes simplex viruses—agents of an infection so old that it is woven into the DNA of human civilisation itself. We will examine its earliest written descriptions by Hippocrates, its curious role in Renaissance court scandals, the myths and moral panics it sparked in the 20th century, and the scientific breakthroughs that reshaped both treatment and public perception.

Through an interdisciplinary lens—combining medical history, epidemiology, and cultural analysis—we will explore how herpes has been portrayed in art, law, literature, and the media, and why its social stigma endures despite its ubiquity. This is the story of a virus that is both commonplace and culturally charged, told with the precision of history and the intrigue of human drama.

Speaker 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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine – Giorgia Gaia – Zoom

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine

Over the past six years, this ongoing investigation into the paranormal dimensions of psychoactive experiences has continued to identify Ketamine journeys as uniquely significant. Ketamine remains a profoundly paradoxical substance at once celestial and infernal. Its remarkable psychedelic capacities intertwined with its well-documented potential for dependence. Nonetheless, accounts of deep Ketamine “breakthroughs” stand out as particularly compelling for the study of anomalous and paranormal phenomena. The substance seems to grant access to liminal territories where conventional understandings of reality and unreality, as well as time and space, can be dismantled and reconfigured in unexpected ways.

This lecture revisits and expands upon the “magical” qualities attributed to Ketamine, emphasizing its capacity to open hyperdimensional experiential spaces that, although sharing affinities with other psychedelics, remain strikingly distinct. Over the years, Ketamine has gained increasing prominence within an underground psychonautic occulture, a community drawn to the esoteric and metaphysical potentials of altered states, as well as within the broader field of contemporary psychedelia.

The ethnographic material presented reflects an evolving archive: a continually expanding collection of interviews, uncanny experiences, and reports of alternate or “alter(n)ate” realities shared by adventurous psychonauts across diverse sets and settings. Together, these accounts trace a living, open-ended inquiry into the ways Ketamine continues to shape, distort, and illuminate the boundaries of human perception.

Speaker Bio

Giorgia Gaia is an independent researcher, with MA degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology and in History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Since her early twenties she has been involved in the underground scene of rave culture, as a DJ and cultural producer. Her academic research has focused on countercultures, esoteric communities, occultism and psychonautic. Being herself continuously involved in the creation of alter(n)ate realities and magickal experimentations, since 2013 she is co-curator of Ozora Festival’s cultural area. In 2018 she founded Occulture Conference, a Berlin based festival exploring occultism and esoteric arts.

https://occultureconference.com

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence – Dr Pascal Michael – Zoom

Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence

“From Non-human Intelligence (NHI) to Transhuman Intelligence (THI): The Extratempestrial Hypothesis, Evolutionary Psychology, and AI Development

This talk explores the idea that the so-called “aliens” people encounter—especially the classic Greys—might not be extraterrestrial at all, but humans from the future. Anthropologist Michael Masters suggests that if we evolved far enough—larger heads and eyes, smaller bodies—we might look just like them. He argues they could be time-traveling scientists, studying us like we would study ancient human ancestors.

But evolution today isn’t just biological. As we merge with technology—AI, brain-computer interfaces, and more—our future selves may become something entirely new: transhuman. These beings might be part-human, part-machine, and their advanced technologies could even blur the lines between life and death, time and timelessness.

This possibility raises deep questions about consciousness, identity, and why so many of these encounters feel emotionally overwhelming or reality-shattering—what’s sometimes called “ontological shock.” If these entities are us, just much further along, what are they trying to tell us—and are we ready to listen?”

Speaker Bio

Dr. Pascal Michael BSc, MSc (UCL), PhD completed his doctorate in Psychology at the University of Greenwich in 2023 on a comparative analysis of the neurophenomenology of both DMT (& analogous) experiences and the near-death experience (NDE). He has been a lecturer (PT) there since, teaching and researching the phenomenology, psychology & neuroscience of psychedelics, NDEs, alien abduction/UFOlogy, related ‘exceptional human experiences’, and the intersections therein. He was program lead of the professional certificate in Psychedelics, ASCs and Transpersonal Psychology, and is currently a PhD & MSc supervisor, at the Alef Trust.Pascal has presented at many conferences, including the largest European conference on psychedelics, Breaking Conventions, and been invited to give several talks, such as for the privately held Tyringham Initiative, or give keynotes such as for the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy. His invited public talks and interviews number in the 30s. He has published many articles and chapters, including some of the most read articles in Frontiers in Psychology, which have been featured in several major news outlets including The Conversation. He is on the board of advisors for Noonautics and The Tyringham Initiative. He was PA to the chair of the Parapsychological Association, and was the 2020 recipient of the Schmeidler Outstanding Student award. Most lately, he was named one of the top 25 thinkers in psychedelic research.

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indigenous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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Caterwauling and Demon Raising: The Ancient Rite of the Taghairm? -Andrew Wiseman – Zoom

Caterwauling and Demon Raising: The Ancient Rite of the Taghairm?

The taghairm refers to an ‘ancient’ Scottish rite of divination or prophecy used, presumably only resorted to in extremis, as a practice aimed at gaining knowledge or to foretell future events. Three methods of the taghairm are identified as follows: water-, hide- and cat-summons. Occasionally, the first two methods are found in combination but for the sake of clarity these will be classed separately before considering the last-mentioned method involving cat sacrifice. All three methods are mentioned by Martin Martin (c. 1668–1718), a native Hebridean from the Isle of Skye, whose A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, circa 1695 (1703), provides some of the earliest ethnographical descriptions, and much else besides, of supernatural beliefs, customs, traditions, and ways of life then current in Gaelic Scotland. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the taghairm traditions in their cultural context and, more specifically, to analyse the most bizarre taghairm rite involving cat sacrifice, or feline immolation, rendered by William Mackay taghairm nan cat [summons of cats]. Before discussing the taghairm of cats in greater detail, the other two methods of the taghairm will be analysed and discussed in the light of various antiquarian notices, especially accounts given in both Irish and Welsh traditions as well as those identified in classical sources. In light of this discussion, I hope then to offer some tentative conclusions regarding the origins and cultural development of taghairm nan cat.

Bio

Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest in Scottish Gaelic intangible culture. He is currently editing a number of works and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As editor of the forthcoming titles Your Work Will Remain: Diaries of Calum I. Maclean (1951–1954), From Lochaber, Badenoch, Morar, Arisaig, Moidart, Easter Ross and Sutherland and The Highlands and Selected Writings of Calum I. Maclean, a detailed and engaging account of Calum Maclean’s fieldwork diaries as well as his academic and mainstream publications will offer an opportunity to reassess the legacy of one of Scotland’s most important twentieth-century ethnologists and folklorists.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child – Dr Jen Baker – Zoom

Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child

This talk examines the transformation of the ghost-child figure from oral folklore and legends to their literary incarnations in Anglophone cultures of the long nineteenth century. They are mostly found as a small but concerted sub-genre of the emerging literary Ghost Story of this period, but also appear sporadically in elegies and in images from spectral photography to illustration. We will see how the ghost child of this period occupied a liminal space not only between life and afterlife, but between puritanical and liberal forms of Christianity, between images of innocence and sin, between pity and terror, between oral tradition and textual manifestation, and between the ethereal and the corporeal. (Please note that there may be a few images of real (historical) child death shown).

Bio

Dr Jen Baker is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests are childhood, death studies, the Gothic, short form and illustration from the late c18th to the present on which she has published a range of articles and chapters and is currently working on her monograph Spectral Embodiments: Anxious Manifestations of Child Death in the long c19th. She is compiler and editor of Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (2021) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Caption: Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “The Lost Ghost”, Everybody’s Magazine, May 1903.

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Witchcraft in Poland – Professor Michael Ostling – Zoom

Witchcraft in Poland

Outside the imagination, witches don’t exist – but in early modern Poland, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. Professor Michael Ostling of Arizona State University reveals the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes.

Having studied many accusations and confessions while researching his book Between the Devil and the Host, Ostling will also discuss how witches viewed themselves and their own religious lives. The accusations they faced of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us the deeply pious Catholic culture of Poland at the time. With it came a complex folklore of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptised babies.

Through the dark glass of witchcraft, Ostling will explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Bio

Michael Ostling is a religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft. His published works include a general history of witchcraft in early modern Poland, an edited volume on Christian understandings of goblins and fairies globally, and work in the history of emotions, the ethnobotany of witchcraft, the demonization of Jews and witches, and the millenarian roots of religious toleration.

He also writes on theories of religion, often by way of pop culture studies, with work on Harry Potter (and secularization theory) and the Wizard of Oz (and theories of myth).

Ostling’s current work is taking him in a new direction: critical pedagogy, with an emphasis on the educational philosophy of the 20th-century Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń.

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Twilight of the Godlings – Francis Young – Zoom

Twilight of the Godlings

Throughout the recorded history of Britain, belief in earthbound spirits presiding over nature, the home and human destiny has been a feature of successive cultures.

From the localised deities of Britannia to the Anglo-Saxons’ elves and the fairies of late medieval England, Britain’s godlings have populated a shadowy, secretive realm of ritual and belief running parallel to authorised religion.

Bio

Francis Young, author of the acclaimed Twilight of the Godlings, will take us deep into the elusive history of these supernatural beings, tracing their evolution from the pre-Roman Iron Age to the end of the Middle Ages.

Arguing that accreted cultural assumptions must be cast aside in order to understand the godlings – including the cherished idea that these folkloric creatures are the decayed remnants of pagan gods and goddesses – this bold, revisionist lecture traces Britain’s ‘small gods’ to a popular religiosity influenced by classical learning. It offers an exciting new way of grasping the island’s most mysterious mythical inhabitants.

Francis Young studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and regularly appears on BBC radio.

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Dark Fairy Tales by Viktor Wynd on Zoom

Dark Fairy Tales 

Let Viktor Wynd share a nightcap with you, tuck you into bed and tell you Fairy Tales to send you into a deep sleep of strange dreams. Be warned these are not the Ladybird or Disney versions and may not be suitable for the tenderist ears.

This evening Mr. Wynd will tells some his favourite tales heard around the world, from nasty Germans chopping up people and eating them to disgusting, macabre and delightful tales from Borneo, learn of the birth of the leeches, the reason mosquitos are always buzzing human ears, why it is best not to suckle caterpillars – or indeed strange babies and something about bedbugs that might give you nightmares. Giant Octopuses, man eating pigs and a buried moon from Papua New Guinea, or possibly shapeshifting magickal creatures from Wales – the world will be your oyster.

Viktor Wynd, proprietor of London’s eponymous (nay infamous) Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History has spent the last twenty five years telling stories to audiences across the globe. Fascinated by traditional fairy tales his repetoire includes tales from The Brothers Grimm, The Arabian Nights, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Irieland, Africa, Papua New Guinea & North America – so far.

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film – Dr Murray Leeder – Zoom

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film

To celebrate Halloween, the Last Tuesday Society is hosting a presentation on the role of dreams in horror films.

Join Dr Murray Leeder as he examines the role of dreams in horror films and proposes “dream horror” as a mode for horror. The nightmare functions for horror sort of as the fairy tale does for the romantic comedy: as a kind of ur-signifier. Dream sequences have often represented a point of contact between horror and art cinema, since they license moments of avant-garde experimentation couched within narrative. They also represent moments where horror irrupts into other genres (e.g. the dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1955)). But, as we shall see, dreams are also often representations of occluded truths about patriarchal capitalism that need not be woken up from but woken up to. As Rosemary yells in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), ‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’

Bio

Murray Leeder is ATS Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Arts – English & Film Studies Department, University of Alberta. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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