Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Sámi Joik and Shamanism – Lena Heide-Brennand

Sámi Joik and Shamanism

This lecture is dedicated to the bedazzling and fascinating Sámi musical tradition- Joik. What is the story behind the Joik? What position has Joik in today’s society? When are the Joiks sung? And by who? Spiritual, deeply personal, unique, and interesting; the Joik plays a particularly vital role in the Sámi culture and traditions, and it is meant to reflect feelings, people or landscape. The Joik was completely banned during the Christianization, but music researchers believe Joik is one of the oldest continuous musical traditions in Europe, so it has survived through generations even if times were extremely rough for the Sámis. Some of their Joiks were sung during shamanistic rites, and we are also going to take a closer look at Sámi shamanism in this lecture. Their religion is categorized as animistic and polytheistic. The gods and goddesses we briefly were introduced to in the previous lecture on the Sámis will now once again be addressed, but this time in a shamanistic context. It is going to be a fascinating evening where we get to know the shamanistic rituals and beliefs of this very mythical folk whose traditions and religious beliefs and practices have always been linked to the mysterious northern lights. Welcome to a night of mysteries, magic and amazing entertainment.

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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Sámi Gods and Mythical Creatures – Lena Heide-Brennand

Sámi Gods and Mythical Creatures

The mysterious and captivating folklore of the Sámi’s and the polytheistic and animistic religion of the Indigenous people of the north.

The Sámi myths represent a far different idea of the world and its creation. In the 15th and 16th century, the ancient Sami mythology and religious beliefs almost vanished completely due to the invasion of the Christians. Many of the stories about the Sami mythical creatures and characters that appear in the rich and numerous narratives across the Sami area survived the Christianisation because the Sámis through generations were so adamant that they would keep them alive through oral storytelling. In this lecture we will dive into a fascinating world where we will meet the Akka, Stállu, Bieggolmai, Eahpáraš and get a brief but fascinating introduction to the different Sámi gods and goddesses. This lecture will be your portal into the distant past, the arctic world of mysteries and beings as dreamlike as the nature in which they were created. Bures boahtima to all.

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

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

Tales of Hidden Bulgaria, by a Spell In Time

Tales of Hidden Bulgaria, by a Spell In Time

Within the fragrant forests and beautiful mountains of Bulgaria lies a hidden world of ancient myth and folklore – a world of seductive shape-shifting dragons, wild nature nymphs who can heal or harm, and giant-hearted heroes.

Bulgaria’s traditional tales are magical and deliciously dark. They have ancient origins and are largely unknown in the West. Archetypal characters, thrilling narratives and exquisite imagery conjure the intense world of dream and a mythic age of long ago when anything was possible. Beautifully atmospheric and profoundly entertaining, they cross the boundaries of space and time to speak to the heart, mind and soul.

Bio

A Spell In Time is a unique British-Bulgarian storytelling company that brings Bulgaria’s extraordinary myths and folk tales to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Formed in 1995 by storyteller, Moni Sheehan, who is half-Bulgarian, and musician, Ivor Davies, the Company’s work is based on authentic stories translated from old and dialect Bulgarian. With a spellbinding mix of traditional storytelling, evocative music and fascinating folklore, the Company has gained acclaim in the UK and abroad for its passionate and poetic performances.

Image: Krali Marko, painting (1926) by Bulgarian artist, Ivan Milev

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Towards a Philosophy of Magic by J.F. Martel

Towards a Philosophy of Magic by J.F. Martel

When the sociologist Max Weber described our age as one of “disenchantment,” he lent weight to a story that moderns had been telling themselves since the dawn of the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: Whereas once we experienced a magical cosmos teeming with incorporeal entities and moral forces, the maturation of the European intellect has dispelled all such illusions. The acid of reason has stripped the world of its former patina of meaning, leaving it to sparkle meaninglessly in what Samuel Beckett called the “dark vast.” Humans are now the locus of all thought and meaning, and whatever enchantment still exists must be forged in the crucible of isolated minds confronting the blank stare of the unmeaning real.

Must we continue to tell ourselves this story? Is there even any coherence in it? In this talk, J.F. Martel proposes another way of looking at reality, one rooted in strange insights that lie just beneath the surface of the modern worldview. These days, many thinkers are sensing the latent nihilism of modern disenchantment and trying to find ways out. For Martel, the way in is the way out. The problem may not be that we are too modern. It may be that we are not modern enough.

Bio

J. F. Martel is a writer on culture, philosophy, and religion. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-hosts the Weird Studies Podcast.

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Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft – Zoom lecture by Anna Björg Þórarinsdóttir

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft by Anna Björg Þórarinsdóttir

The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft is located in the Westfjords of Iceland, in a small town called Holmavik. This lecture by the director of the museum,

Anna Björg Þórarinsdóttir, will introduce you to the museum and the exhibitions. The European Witch-craze swept across Iceland in the seventeenth century, with over 200 cases and 21 executions. The Museum combines the history of magic with knowledge of magic in Iceland and how it appears in folklore. Join Anna as she talks about the Museum and the spells and objects that are on display. At the Museum, the downstairs gallery represents how magic arts lived in folklore and what people imagined could be achieved with the help of supernatural powers; the upstairs gallery shows who prosecuted and judged the witchcraft cases in Iceland. Also, hear about Jón lærði who is now considered the most significant folklorist of the 17th Century, he left behind a number of publications and drawings that shed light on the spirit of the times. Join us for an evening of Icelandic Magic.

Bio

Anna Björg Þórarinsdóttir has been the manager of the NPO Strandagaldur which runs the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Tourism from the University of Iceland where she wrote her final thesis about rural development and how tourism can create new opportunities and researched how the case was for the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. After that she worked for two summers at the museum and then stepped in when the former manager and one of the founders passed away at the end of 2018.

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In the Fort Archive: Charles Fort and the Making of the Twentieth Century

Secreted within the New York Public Library’s collections are the Charles Fort archives: literally thousands of small scraps of paper, loosely indexed, each containing small notes written in smudged pencil by the uncategorizable writer, Charles Fort. Crumbling and largely illegible, they nonetheless tell a hidden story of human culture, an alternative picture of how the world works.

Fort’s four books – The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents, published between 1919 and 1932 – arrived at a time when scientific pursuit had been largely institutionalized, removed from amateur naturalists and dilettantes to university labs and government funded research. And while science had once been aligned with religion (for centuries, scientific inquiry had been understood to be a means of better understanding the works of God), by the twentieth century these two realms were firmly opposed to one another.

Fort’s interest in rains of frogs and fish, of ball lightning and inexplicable meteorological phenomenon, or the strange and unsettling, resisted this binary between science and religion; Fort focused intensely on those things which seemed to fall between the cracks, events which had neither easy scientific explanation nor theological import. By focusing on stories that were “damned,” outside of the bounds of science and religion, he set the stage for much of the twentieth century’s obsessions, from cryptids to UFOs, from the Bermuda Triangle to spontaneous human combustion.

Colin Dickey has spent many hours in the Fort Archives of the New York Public Library, and far more hours trying to decipher what Fort wrote on those tiny slips of paper in his illegible pencil scribblings. In this talk he will not only report on the archive and some of the unpublished writings of Fort contained therein, but also situate Fort’s work in the larger context of the twentieth century and its systems of belief.

Colin Dickey is the author of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, and Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, among other books. His next book, on secret societies and conspiracy theories, is due out in fall of 2022.

 

Your 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

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Candle Magic as Practical Spellwork – Lucya Starza

Candle Magic as Practical Spellwork – Lucya Starza

Candle magic is a basic and central skill in the repertoire of witches and anyone who practises magic as well as being a part of many folk customs. Who hasn’t made a wish over a birthday cake? Candle spells are among the easiest yet also the most effective to perform. They are perfect for anyone who wants to have a go at casting a spell for the first time and for the solitary witch with a busy life. This talk is aimed at all who want to use candle magic, from beginners to those experienced in the craft. It’s easy to learn, handy, and many people find it a favourite method. Lucya Starza will demonstrate a basic candle spell and you will have a chance to do one yourself using a tealight if you want to. The talk will then explore ways of expanding the art using moon phases, colour, anointing oils, scent and other magical symbolism.

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.

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Dion Fortune’s Literary Initiations – Georgia van Raalte

Dion Fortune’s Literary Initiations – Georgia van Raalte

Abstract: This talk will explore the fictional and magical work of Dion Fortune (1890-1946), one of the most prolific British occult authors of the interwar period. In her 1936 article ‘The Novels of Dion Fortune’ Fortune claimed that her occult novels—The Winged Bull (1935), The Goat-Foot God (1936), The Sea Priestess (1938) and Moon Magic (published posthumously in 1956)—had an initiatory quality and that reading them, and meditating on their contents, could produce a lasting change, both in personal consciousness, and in the ‘group soul’ of the British people.

Based on Dr van Raalte’s doctoral research, this talk will explore Fortune’s radical initiatory project in the context of interwar Britain. Highlighting Fortune’s innovative use of literary eroticism, this talk will reveal the ways that Fortune’s occult novels both describe changes in consciousness and have the potential to cause them in the reader, through their skillful weaving of polarity, desire and the imaginal world. This talk will further show the potent influence Fortune’s work has had upon modern occultism, interrogating the connections between fiction-based religion, fantasy, and the rise of witchcraft in the contemporary occultural moment.

Bio:

Georgia van Raalte holds an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Literature from the University of Surrey. Her PhD research explored the initiatory potential of literature, with a particular focus on the occult novels of Dion Fortune. She has published articles on the divine feminine in 20th century British occultism and on the epistemological foundations of the Study of Esotericism.

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Somerset Folk Tales – Sharon Jacksties

Sharon Jacksties will tell tales from her collection of Somerset Folk Tales published by the History Press

These Somerset tales, newly collected or retold with a strong sense of the land and the waters that shaped them, reflect our enduring interest in the natural landscape. Let these stories from the Summer Lands take you on a journey: across wind-wild moors that plummet to treacherous tides traversed by sea morgans; on a scramble from gorges shaped by the Devil’s spite to caves dwelled in by bitter witches. Discover ancient mines and dragons’ haunts, and emerge into forests and fields to be befriended by bees or bedevilled by fairies; then stroll beside ancient waterways, where willows walk and orchards talk. From Gwyn ap Neath to Joseph of Arimathea, your travelling companions will meet you from legend, history and living memory – from the places where they were once known best. Sharon Jacksties has a sharp eye for the landscape of Somerset and the seen and unseen stories that it holds, a sympathetic ear for the dialect of the South West, and a playful wit that brings this collection of tales to vivid and delightful life.

Bio

Sharon Jacksties www.sharonjackstories.co.uk has been a professional storyteller for over 30 years. She runs storytelling projects with all kinds of groups in Somerset, London and Romania. Sharon was up until recently UK’s ambassador for the Federation of European Storytelling Organisations, until Brexit stopped play. She has won the national Crick Crack Grand Lying competition twice and is also the author of three subsequent folk tales volumes.

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The Hidden History of British Girls’ Horror Comics: Magic, Mystery, Monsters… and Mothers? – Julia Round

The Hidden History of British Girls’ Horror Comics: Magic, Mystery, Monsters… and Mothers?

British girls’ comics dominated children’s entertainment in the last century but have been all but forgotten today. When remembered, they are often characterised as all about horses, ballet and boarding schools. But nothing could be further from the truth! – these comics were not for the fainthearted, and told tales of Nazi soldiers, cursed choirs, deals with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, parallel worlds, monsters, possession, criminals and more..

This talk looks closely at two supernatural British girls’ comics: Spellbound (DC Thomson, 1976-77) and Misty (IPC/Fleetway, 1978-80). It reveals the background to the launch of both titles and explores the relationship between them, looking closely at their key characters, most shocking stories, and most dramatic artwork. In honour of Mothering Sunday, it also shows how these comics challenged male authority, particularly through their treatment of parents and depiction of motherhood.

Bio

Julia Round’s research examines the intersections of Gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014), Comics and Graphic Novels (2022), and the award-winning Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (2019). She has published over forty book chapters and articles on aspects of comics and Gothic and is an Associate Professor in English and Comics Studies at Bournemouth University, UK.

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