Zoom Lecture Archives - Page 36 of 80 - The Last Tuesday Society

Chilling ghost stories of the Scandinavian countries – Lena Heide-Brennand

Chilling ghost stories of the Scandinavian countries

Welcome to an evening where we get to know the different ghost stories from the countries in the north. Ghost stories and legends are important parts of the folklore and mythology, as well as the religious history.

The different ghost creatures We cannot verify whether ghosts exist or not, but we will get those goosebumps going when we encounter the eerie ghosts and undead creatures forever wandering between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Stories about the ghosts in Scandinavia date to pre-Viking era, and they were even darker and scarier back in pre-Christian time than what they are today. We find them in the old Icelandic sagas, the old Norse literature, and the numerous stories of the spirits of the undead Mylings, the Utburd , the Deildegast the Dokkalfarand and the numerous different Grey ladies have stirred up many a good night’s sleep through the centuries. The ghosts rooming around the far north are said to be spookier and more evil than anywhere else in the world.

In this lecture, you will be introduced to them all. Spine- chilling doesn’t even cover it- you will after this lecture feel a presence of something in the room with you. But is it one of the more evil spirits haunting you, or is it one of the nicer ones?

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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Clowns through the Centuries – Lena Heide-Brennand

Clowns through the Centuries

In this lecture we will travel back in time to the origin of the clown as an entertainment figure and as the icon of the travelling circuses.

How did the idea of the clown as a comedy character come to life? When was the peak of the popularity of the clown figure? How has the character developed through the ages? Why the red nose and the make up? This, and many more questions about the enigmatic clown character will be answered in this lecture.

We will talk about the different clowns that have amused and amazed their audience through history, and there will be a presentation of different types of clowns from different cultures. There will be old photographs, modern clown characters and the clowns’ place in mythology, society and, of course, in comedy. Warm welcome to this inspiring entertainment lecture

Bio:

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Satan’s Places: In search of Baphomet and the Black Mass – Andy Sharp

Satan’s Places: In search of Baphomet and the Black Mass

We take a chronological trip from antiquity to the kaleidoscopic 1960s following the hoof steps of the Devil, his sacrifices and sacrileges, some apocryphal, others horrifically real. This richly illustrated talk traces an itinerary from the ruins of Mendes in Egypt via the tophets of Tunisia to the hills of Dublin, before heading to Belgium and Paris to luxuriate in the sumptuous robes of 19th-century European decadence, in search of the bona fide Black Mass. We explore the obsessions of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ brilliant depiction of Satanism in his infamous novel Là-bas, and the opulent churches and strange events in Bruges that fired his imagination, before reprising the fictional Mass at the denouement of his book.

Bio

Andy Sharp: is a writer and multimedia artist, best known for his occultural research project English Heretic. His new book, The Astral Geographic, a study of magic through landscape, is published by Watkins in October 2023

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Attendees will receive a discount code if they want to purchase the book

Balkan Folklore and Gender – Margaret Hiebert Beissinger

Balkan Folklore and Gender

Folklore plays a central role in the cultures of today’s southeast European or Balkan countries. This lecture provides an overview of the rich and varied oral traditions and oral literary genres of the central and northern Balkans: Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Romania. Cultural identity in this cluster of Balkan lands is informed by geography (all contiguous nations), history (500 years, starting in the late 15th century, of Ottoman rule followed by the 20th-century chapter of communist governments), religion (mainly Orthodox Christian but also Catholic and Muslim), ethnicity (primarily South Slavic, Romanian, and Romani), and gender (marked divisions in the traditional roles of men and women).

The focus of this talk is on gender and its significant role in Balkan folklore. In traditional society, the domain of women has typically been oriented around the “private” and personal sphere: nurturing the family and home and overseeing the stages of the life cycle. Men, by contrast, have routinely dominated in the “public” and communal arena; they maintain and oversee what goes on in the world outside the home, including agricultural and civic functions. These traditional distinctions strongly color the gender roles that are assumed in Balkan folklore. Women “manage” birth, marriage, and death rites and their customs and oral poetry, while men by and large perform the folklore of the calendrical cycle, centered especially in winter and spring festivities. The performance of oral traditional narrative genres are also typically determined by gender; women tell folktales in private settings while men sing narrative poetry in public. This discussion examines how gender has informed traditional life and folklore in the Balkans for generations as well as how these roles are evolving in the 21st century.

Bio:

Margaret Hiebert Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. at Harvard University, specializing in Romanian and South Slavic folklore. Her research and writing focusses on Balkan cultures and oral traditions, oral epic, and Romani traditional culture and music-making, with a focus on southern Romania, where she has undertaken extensive fieldwork especially among Romani musicians. She is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (1991) and is coeditor of Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (1999) as well as Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music (2016). She is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore (forthcoming, 2024).

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Picture: Traditional Bosnian Muslim women preparing the bride for her wedding

The Devils of Loudun: A Case of Demonic Possession in 17th century France – Wayne Perkins

The Devils of Loudun: A Case of Demonic Possession in 17^th century France

In 1952, writer Aldous Huxley published ‘The Devils of Loudun,’ an account of a 17^th century case of demonic possession in an Ursuline Convent, in Loudun, France. A rather more salacious re-telling was filmed by Ken Russell as ‘The Devils’ starring Oliver Reed in 1971. It has proven to be one of the most bizarre and baffling cases of possession in Europe.

In 1617, Urbain Grandier rode into the town of Loudun, France to assume his new role as priest of the church of St Pierre du Marche and canon of Collegiale of Sainte Croixe. Young, handsome and charismatic, he had been an exemplary student and was much feted for greatness by his Jesuit peers.

Yet, seventeen years later, he was found guilty of sorcery, for having made a pact with the devil and responsible for the demonic possession of the nuns residing in the town’s Ursuline Convent. His trial culminated in a period of incarceration and put to such horrific torture that he was left unable to stand. He was eventually burnt alive at the stake before his beloved Sainte Croixe in the town’s market place. Witnesses claimed to have seen demons escaping from the flames.

How could such a turn of fortunes have occurred in such a short space of time?

And how could a man of God find himself accused of maleficium?

It is one of the strangest and most infamous cases of witchcraft in 17^th century France and early modern Europe.

Bio:

Wayne Perkins has been an archaeologist for over 22 years, seven of those spent excavating in France. He is a member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists.

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Get Thee Behind Me, Satan – Carl Abrahamsson

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

Taking a look at some golden era Hollywood films, Carl Abrahamsson ponders the occasional occurrence of Satan in various guises. How come this popular yet stigmatized figure/symbol popped up when and as it did in Hollywood? Expect an infernal rollercoaster through masterpieces like ”Madam Satan”, ”Seven Footsteps to Satan”, ”Angel on my shoulder” and many more. Was Satan merely an entertaining symbol of the Immoral, or perhaps of the Immortal principle of lust for life and proud defiance?

Speaker Bio

Carl Abrahamsson (b 1966) is a Swedish author whose passionate interest in the occult has also made him take creative detours into film-making, music-making, photography, and into founding and running the Institute of Comparative Magico-anthropology.

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Mermaids across the Millennia – a Zoom talk with Professor Sarah Peverley

Elusive, beguiling, dangerous, the mermaid is one of the most popular and long-lived of all the mythical creatures that humans have invented. For over four millennia she has been humanity’s constant companion, swimming through our stories, art and beliefs and appearing in many guises.

This illustrated talk will consider a selection of the most influential, surprising, and less well-known mermaids witnessed around the world. Tracking the development of merfolk across time and continent, it will look at the visual nuances of mermaids depicted by different cultures as well as the expansive mythologies and ideas attached to them. Tapping into religion, politics, art and folklore, the talk is a siren call to all lovers of the sea who want to journey through the fascinating history of the mermaid from her emergence of merfolk in the religions of the ancient Near East right through to the rise of the mermaid economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Professor Sarah Peverley is academic, writer and broadcaster who divides her time between being immersed in the depths of mermaid history and lost in the medieval world. As professor of medieval literature and culture at the University of Liverpool she teaches across English and History and regularly speaks at festivals and heritage events. She has consulted for organisations like Guinness World Records, and has written, presented or appears in over eighty TV, radio and press features. She is currently writing a cultural history of the mermaid. For more information see www.sarahpeverley.com.

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

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

TV Adaptations of Dracula – a Zoom talk with Jon Dear

ENTER FREELY AND OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL – TV Adaptations of Dracula

There have been over 80 Dracula films made in the last 100 years but there have been relatively few adaptations of Bram Stoker’s most famous novel made for television. It’s not hard to see why: it’s a grand tale told on an epic scale, and few TV companies have the resources to lavish on such a production. But for those that did, what challenges did they face? What did they decide to focus on, and leave out? And why start in 1968?

In this talk Jon Dear will examine the social factors in play that make bringing Dracula to the small screen a viable option; what it means to bring horror out of the cinema, and its self-selecting audience, and into the intimacy of the family living room; and what Dracula really represents to audiences and how that has changed through time. What really happens when you invite the vampire into your home?

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 and is producing a live reading of The Quatermass Experiment at Alexandra Palace for its 70th anniversary. 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

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

Looking East: From Folk Horror to Horror of the Folk in Thai Cinema – Katarzyna Ancuta

Looking East: From Folk Horror to Horror of the Folk in Thai Cinema

Folk horror is often said to be about the fear of regression, the fear of going back to ‘the old ways’ and the anxiety that ‘the old ways’ may be right. But what if the old ways and the new ways were very much the same? How does folk horror adapt to animist cultures, where old-age rituals and modern beliefs go hand in hand? Where does it find its ‘monstrous tribe’? Thai horror films reflect the animist orientation of Thai culture but do not situate animism in opposition to official religion and modernity, since animistic beliefs and practices are commonplace in today’s Thailand. Prevalent across the country and practised across all social strata, Thai animism and related with it folklore cannot be used as a designator of difference in the Thai context. If Thai folk horror produces its monstrous tribe, their monstrosity is not the result of regression, evidenced in arcane rituals, but rather a commentary on the existing inequality within Thai society. Thai folk horror is thus primarily invested in representing the rural-urban divide and its profound implication in tensions related to ethnicity and class.

Bio:

Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contributions to The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023), Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (2023) and The Transmedia Vampire (2021). She also co-edited two collections – Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2016) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022).

Photo 1: Hoon Payon (dir. Phontharis Chotkijsadarsopon), 2023

Curated by

Ruth Heholt is Professor of Literature and Culture at Falmouth University in lovely Cornwall.

Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

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England’s oddest fairy encounter: the Wollaton Gnomes – Zoom talk by Dr Simon Young

The Wollaton Gnomes was a classic anomalous encounter. On the 23 September 1979 – 44 years ago today – a half-dozen primary school children went for an evening walk in Wollaton Hall Park in Nottingham (in the English Midlands). A number of these children were then chased by thirty gnomes in small cars!

It’s a fascinating incident not least because it is so well documented. We have an interview transcript of the children recorded less than 48 hours after the sighting and two pictures drawn by witnesses. There were newspaper reports with interviews: a couple of the kids even got on the TV on John Craven’s Newsround. Later a report was written by the Fairy Investigation Society.

On the 44th anniversary of this famous run in with the impossible, British folklore historian Simon Young unpicks the Wollaton encounter, and puts it in a broader context: an overlooked rash of gnome sightings in the area. Had Nottinghamshire’s Generation X read too many Noddy books? Is this a case of Midland social contagion? Or were there really supernatural gnome drivers among the trees in Wollaton Hall Park?

Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) are both due out in 2022. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, the Second World War in Italy and Italian Renaissance History.

Your 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 first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make it live on the night – the event will be recorded for ticket-holders and a link sent out valid for the next two weeks for you to watch at your leisure.

[Image generated by Craiyon.com, before being adapted.]