Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

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]

 

Anthropology and Cryptozoology – Timothy Grieve-Carlson

Anthropology and Cryptozoology

Cryptozoology, or the study of purported animals unknown to Western science, has had a long and complicated relationship with the anthropological sciences. Western biology and zoology developed in a context of European colonial expansion. The ethnographic record—the writings of anthropologists working throughout the world—was a crucial source not only of the diversity of global human culture, but of modern ecological and biological science. In the twentieth century, early cryptozoological researchers began to take note of creatures who were “ethno-known,” that is, they appeared in the anthropological record but did not correspond to any living animal known to Western science. Canonical creatures in the cryptozoological literature, including Bigfoot, the dragon of Ishtar Gate, and the south Asian Buru all had their origins in this unwieldy collision between the anthropological record and modern biology.

A close look at the history of cryptozoology and anthropology shows us how modern science superimposed itself over traditional and local knowledge systems. Contemporary anthropologists offer serious critiques of Western science as a total arbiter of all truth-claims, especially when applied to Indigenous worldviews. Where many modern zoologists saw the anthropological record as a resource, many contemporary anthropologists look to the cryptozoological record as a record of traditional ecological knowledge. Is cryptozoology just a pseudoscience? Or do some cryptozoological accounts contain hidden records of traditional ways of relating to the nonhuman world, lifeways rejected by Enlightenment science?

Bio

Timothy Grieve-Carlson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He earned his doctorate in Religion from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he worked on the Archives of the Impossible Project with Jeffrey Kripal. Timothy was also a 2021-2022 Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between environmental phenomena and religious practice. His book manuscript, American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in Early Pennsylvania, explores environmental knowledge and apocalyptic thought in the early modern mid-Atlantic world.

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The Secret World of Wasps – Prof Seirian Sumner

The Secret World of Wasps – Prof Seirian Sumner

Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee’s evolutionary ancestors – flying 100 million years earlier – and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt. Her book Endless Forms is a work to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.

With endless surprises, this talk might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.

It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth’s major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.

The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects – both custodians and bouncers of our planet – the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.

Bio

Professor Seirian Sumner is a Professor of Behavioural Ecology at University College London, where she studies the ecology and evolution of social insects. She has published over 70 papers in scientific journals, and has received numerous awards for her work, including a L’Oréal for Women in Science Award, a Points of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister, and a Silver Medal from the Zoological Society of London. She is a Fellow and Trustee of the Royal Entomological Society and co-founder of the citizen science initiative Big Wasp Survey. Endless Forms is her debut work of non-fiction for a general audience. She lives in Oxfordshire, England with her husband and three children.

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Tales from The Frozen North – Jonathan Lambert

The (Formerly) Frozen North is a selection of traditional tales gathered in Greenland, on Baffin Island and in Labrador by Danish explorers Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen in the early 20th century and by the American Lawrence Millman in the 1970s and 80s. Their retelling has been further informed by the writings of 19th and 20th century explorers.  The stories reflect the animistic beliefs of the Inuit and Innu peoples and are populated by shamans, shapeshifters, talking animals, spirits and, of course, people. Some explain how the world came to be as it is, while others describe events, real or imagined, which happened in the past. According to Freuchen, who took an Inuit wife and lived among her people in Greenland for many years, the Inuit had no concept of fiction – all the old stories were as true as an account from a neighbour of a recent hunting trip.

Until the mid-20th century the Inuit would be naked or near-naked in their tent, hut or igloo in order to get temporary relief from the lice with which they were plagued. The family group lived in one room and everything happened there. The sun set in the autumn and did not rise again until spring. On occasion it would be impossible to go outside. Privacy was not an option. The stories are very matter of fact with regard to bodily functions, sexual activity, and the need to survive in a hostile environment without the sense of revulsion or salaciousness they might elicit from Europeans. They are littered with bodily fluids, faecal matter, cannibalism and weird sex, often with animals. Western audiences often laugh, perhaps not knowing how else to respond, and it is tempting, when telling them, to play to this, but I believe they are best delivered deadpan. Any humour is in the ear of the listener. Some stories the Inuit, too, would no doubt have found funny, others perhaps not.

If I speak of the Inuit in the past tense it is because theirs is a culture which has all but disappeared since the end of the Second World War. A combination of colonialism, technological advancement, religious conversion and climate change has made their world a thing of the past. These stories provide a fascinating, and entertaining, insight into Inuit life and belief.

Bio

Jonathan Lambert is a one-time minor league rock musician who became a composer for theatre and other media. He has at various times worked at the British Museum, managed a West End cinema, played sax in a jazz trio and delivered artisan bread in a tiny Fiat. He studied archaeology at Lancaster and music technology in Utrecht. In 2013 he established Hare Moon Storytelling Camp, a small festival in Cambridgeshire, now an annual event, which hosts the cream of Britain’s performance storytellers. His first solo show, Dark Matters, concerns the mediaeval Devil while at the other extreme his new show, The Heart of the Castle, (a collaboration with children’s author and paper engineer John O’Leary) is a feel-good multimedia production for families.

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Vital Objects: The Art and Meaning of Vernacular Altars – Kay Turner

Vital Objects: The Art and Meaning of Vernacular Altars

Brief abstract: Artist and folklorist Kay Turner has been documenting and studying altars for over 40 years. She has written extensively on the topic, including her book Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Thames and Hudson, 1999). Her focus is on vernacular altars, usually made at home, that escape the bounds of institutionalized religion by representing the beliefs and desires of their creators in their intentional assemblage of vital objects. She looks at this folk art form across a wide spectrum of practices including the ancient evolution of altars beginning in the Neolithic period (3500-5000 BCE), Mexican- American and Sicilian women’s traditions and the use of the altar by feminists, queers, and artists as a source for invoking healing, memory, resilience, and identity. She invites the Last Tuesday audience to learn more about this important, long-lasting tradition. Also, please bring a “vital object” of your choosing to the session and we will assemble a virtual altar together!

Bio

 Kay Turner is an artist and folklorist working across disciplines including writing, music, performance, and folklore. Turner holds a PhD in folklore and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the past president (2015-2018) of the American Folklore Society.  From 2002-2022 she taught in the Performance Studies Dept. at New York University, where she initiated courses on gender and queer theory; temporality; ghosts and their ontologies; fairy tale performance; oral narrative theory; and the performative art of the altar. Turner is a noted scholar in the study of vernacular altars and ephemeral memorials, as well as fairy tales and witch lore. She has lectured and written widely on these topics. She created and edited Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night (1976-1983), an early feminist journal on art, feminism, and the goddess. Her books include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars; Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms; and Before and After: What the Witch’s Nose Knows That Andy Warhol’s Nose Doesn’t Know. Turner’s current book and performance project, “What a Witch,” queerly rethinks the witch figure in history, story, and performance. Turner’s musical side is activist and partial to feminist political outrage. She has written songs and performed in numerous bands, most notably Austin, Texas- based rock punk, lesbian-feminist “Girls in the Nose,” active  from1985-1996 and now touring again, on occasion.  Turner continues her musical interests in Brooklyn  with “Kay Turn Her and the Pages,” the band for an ongoing project of original songs called “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song.” Follow her on Instagram @kay__turner and order her books by sending an email of interest to <[email protected]>

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Tudor Folk Tales – Dave Tong

Tudor Folk Tales

In Tudor times the ‘common sort’ were no different from us, laughing together, mocking each other and sharing bawdy tales in tavern yards, marketplaces and anywhere else that people came together. These stories were later collected in the cheap print of the period, and professional storyteller Dave Tonge will tell some of his pages featuring smooth-talking tricksters, lusty knaves, wayward youths and stories of the eternal struggle to wear the breeches in the family, for a sometimes coarse but often comic telling of the everyday ups and downs in Tudor life.  Amongst other stories on offer this night you will hear tell a tragic tale of a beloved gyr falcon, a comic tale of a dagger worth nowt and a plain and simple radish that was worth one hundred gold coins…

Dave will also be telling of some of the real early modern people who are also mentioned within the pages of his book. Men and women whose experiences reflect those of the characters in the folk tales that he’ll be telling. People like the trickster and con man, John Venn who was whipped for making men believe that he could find things that were lost. The woman with no hands who given permission to perform ‘wonderous feats with her feet’, on the market place and Agnes Leaman who was shamed, by being processed about the streets of the city on a cart, before being ducked in the river. What say you?

Bio

Dave Tonge is both an author and storyteller, he has written three books: Tudor Tales (2015) Norfolk Folk Tales for Children (2018) and Medieval Folk Tales for Children (2019) and is working on a forth, Trickster Tales From Many Lands. He has been telling tales since 1999, both as one half of Past -Imagined and now as the Yarnsmith of Norwich. He travels all over the UK telling stories at storytelling clubs, museums, heritage sites, fairs, festivals and in schools. He is always happy to travel anywhere, however far.

Dave specialises in tales from from Saxon and Viking through to Tudor and Jacobean times, although he will be the first to tell you that we storytellers grow new corn from old fields and that many of the tales we now claim for our own were brought over by sailors, soldiers and merchants from far away lands, long ago. Dave is then a teller of world tales and as such he does offer sets of tales from specific regions and places as well as from different times.

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