Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Our blue planet is a watery world, yet only one percent of earth’s most abundant molecule is both accessible and fresh. Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were most likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds. Internationally, holy “wells” are often sacred springs, but can be any natural source of fresh water that is a focus for ritual practice and engagement with the supernatural. Containing the majority of the earth’s liquid surface fresh water, lakes are sometimes called holy wells, as can be the spring sources of rivers, ponds and swamps. Often associated with also venerated stones, trees and healing flora, sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity.

Water sources were likely the first sites humans venerated and those that cross-culturally and cross-temporally have remained the most common category of sacred natural sites worldwide. Some water sources were selected as sacred because, across the generations, locals realized they seemed to alleviate or cure particular ailments (these actually contain magnesium, iron, sodium chloride or lithium, for example). Those water sources deemed a panacea for aches (of the back, throat, head or teeth) are often near trees with pain-relieving qualities in their bark such as willow trees (from the bark of which came aspirin). Explaining the who, what, where and why of existence, religions everywhere can be viewed as folk science. Important information about stewarding environmental resources and about healing was often enshrined in religious practices and ritual so that it would not be forgotten. Religious traditions that perpetuate biodiversity conservation deserve our attention. This talk identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry and asks how cultural perceptions of water’s sacrality can be employed to foster resilient human-environmental relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century.

Speaker Bio

Celeste Ray is Professor of Environmental Arts and Humanities and Anthropology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of The Origins of Ireland’s Holy Wells and Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans and the American South, and the editor of four other volumes considering Scottish Identities or ethnicity. Her passion for sacred springs and holy wells began as an undergraduate studying in Galway, Ireland in the 1980s and has been furthered in research trips to Italy, Scotland, Cornwall, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Austria and near her institution in Appalachia.

Hosted by Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

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Cunning Libraries: The Magic Books of Early Modern Folk Magicians – Dr Al Cummins

The libraries of cunning-folk – those local village wizards and wise-women of the early modern British Isles – ranged considerably from scraps of spoken and written charms, to a single imposing personal book of secrets, to heaving shelves full of magical tomes. The magics contained in such books ran from pious prayers to more suspicious “black magic” and from the techniques of folk magic and witchcraft to (frequently streamlined versions of) ritual conjurations of angels, devils, and the dead.

Such folk magicians employed a wide range of ephemerides, conjurations, and experiments. The sources they commonly drew on included potent astrological, alchemical, and nigromantic know-how. From Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (an accidental best-seller which provided intricate details of the rituals of which it so disapproved) to (pseudo)Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy – which collected a variety of instructions on divination and spirit conjuring – there was a wealth of printed as well as manuscript sources upon which these practitioners cut their eager teeth and worked their craft. Undoubtedly the most prized texts upon their shelves were the working-books: the collections of spells, recipes, formulae, and correspondences gathered on-the-fly by enterprising and experimenting folk magicians.

The “average” cunning-man and cunning-woman’s reading material still presents substantial evidence to modern practitioners looking to understand our magical forebears and their days and ways better. In this talk, contemporary cunning man and historian Dr Alexander Cummins will offer us a tour of such libraries, and present some key findings about the nature of magic, community, and knowledge along the way.

Speaker Bio

Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning man and historian. His magical specialities are the dead (folk necromancy), divination (geomancy) and the grimoires. He received his doctorate on early modern magical approaches to the passions. Dr Cummins is the co-editor of the Folk Necromancy in Transmission series for Revelore Press and co-host of Radio Free Golgotha.

His published works include An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke with Phil Legard (Scarlet Imprint, 2020), A Book of the Magi: Lore, Prayers, and Spellcraft of the Three Holy Kings (Revelore Press, 2018) and The Starry Rubric (Hadean Press, 2012) as well as contributions to collections by both academic and occult publishers on topics including talismanic objects, geomancy, planetary sorcery, cunning-craft, and nigromancy.

Dr Cummins gives classes and workshops online and in person. The Good Doctor’s work and services can be found at www.alexandercummins.com

Curated and hosted by Dr. Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

Series from Dr Al Cummins on Necromancy and Cunning Craft

Rosemary & Revenants: Necromancy in Early Modern England – 3 Aug 2022

The Excellent Booke: A Manual of Sixteenth-century English Necromancy – 10 Aug 2022

Cunning Libraries: The Magic Books of Early Modern Folk Magicians – 17 Aug 2022

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon 

The Excellent Booke: A Manual of Sixteenth-century English Necromancy – Dr Al Cummins

British Library Additional Manuscript 36674 contains several short treatises, two of which should be of particular interest to necromancers. The Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke is a particularly instructive grimoire of the sixteenth century teaching one how to summon spirits – from the ruler of the dead, to the kings of the spirits, to the ghosts of famous magicians – complete with prayers, conjurations, and various ‘nota’ of injunctions and advice for the aspiring conjuror. The purpose of these conjurations is to make powerful knowledge available to the magical practitioner, whether delivered by subordinate spirit, received text, or express empowerment.

An appended document, referred to simply as Visions, is a magical journal accounting the experiments and scrying sessions performed alongside the reception of the Excellent Booke between 24th February and 6th April 1567. These scrying records detail the unbidden appearances and teachings of saints, angels, and dead magicians, as well as evidencing the techniques and procedures involved in putting together the Excellent Booke itself. Read together, these interrelated documents are quite simply a unique record of early modern English necromancy, offering vital ‘behind-the-scenes’ perspectives on sorcery, magical texts, and spirits.

This lecture by historian of magic and contemporary cunning man Dr Alexander Cummins analyses some of the techniques contained within this manuscript source: from ways of working with spirits, to the expressly necromantic components of the work, to wider implications for approaches to spirit tuition, texts, and taboos in early modern European conjuration.

Speaker Bio

Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning man and historian. His magical specialities are the dead (folk necromancy), divination (geomancy) and the grimoires. He received his doctorate on early modern magical approaches to the passions. Dr Cummins is the co-editor of the Folk Necromancy in Transmission series for Revelore Press and co-host of Radio Free Golgotha.

His published works include An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke with Phil Legard (Scarlet Imprint, 2020), A Book of the Magi: Lore, Prayers, and Spellcraft of the Three Holy Kings (Revelore Press, 2018) and The Starry Rubric (Hadean Press, 2012) as well as contributions to collections by both academic and occult publishers on topics including talismanic objects, geomancy, planetary sorcery, cunning-craft, and nigromancy.

Dr Cummins gives classes and workshops online and in person. The Good Doctor’s work and services can be found at www.alexandercummins.com

Curated and hosted by Dr. Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

Series from Dr Al Cummins on Necromancy and Cunning Craft

Rosemary & Revenants: Necromancy in Early Modern England – 3 Aug 2022

The Excellent Booke: A Manual of Sixteenth-century English Necromancy – 10 Aug 2022

Cunning Libraries: The Magic Books of Early Modern Folk Magicians – 17 Aug 2022

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon 

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Rosemary & Revenants: Necromancy in Early Modern England – Dr Al Cummins

The early modern age of 1500-1700 was a period of European colonial expansion into the so-called ‘New World’, civil wars, famine, and plague: life could indeed be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. Amidst such fragile mortality, people prayed for their deceased, petitioned elevated Christian martyrs, witnessed ghosts, and whispered of black magic in midnight graveyards.

This talk by contemporary cunning-man and historian Dr Alexander Cummins investigates the roles and powers of the dead in Western occult philosophy and magical practices: from magical funerary customs to corpses as spell components, and from the exorcism and summoning of ghosts and spirits to early sensationalist reports of the customs of various indigenous peoples of the Americas. Finally, this class investigates the diabolical associations of necromancy and “nigromancy” with witchcraft and demonology, offering analysis of a number of pre-modern rituals and techniques involving shades of the deceased, including the many uses of rosemary, sending ghosts to fetch other spirits, and warding one’s home and person against the returned and revenant dead.

Speaker Bio

Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning man and historian. His magical specialities are the dead (folk necromancy), divination (geomancy) and the grimoires. He received his doctorate on early modern magical approaches to the passions. Dr Cummins is the co-editor of the Folk Necromancy in Transmission series for Revelore Press and co-host of Radio Free Golgotha.

His published works include An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke with Phil Legard (Scarlet Imprint, 2020), A Book of the Magi: Lore, Prayers, and Spellcraft of the Three Holy Kings (Revelore Press, 2018) and The Starry Rubric (Hadean Press, 2012) as well as contributions to collections by both academic and occult publishers on topics including talismanic objects, geomancy, planetary sorcery, cunning-craft, and nigromancy.

Dr Cummins gives classes and workshops online and in person. The Good Doctor’s work and services can be found at www.alexandercummins.com

Curated and hosted by Dr. Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

Series from Dr Al Cummins on necromancy and cunning craft

Rosemary & Revenants: Necromancy in Early Modern England – 3 Aug 2022

The Excellent Booke: A Manual of Sixteenth-century English Necromancy – 10 Aug 2022

Cunning Libraries: The Magic Books of Early Modern Folk Magicians – 17 Aug 2022

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

This talk examines the important if overlooked esoteric and feminist contributions of three American women: Alice Bunker Stockham (1833-1912), Ida C. Craddock (1857-1902), and Eleanor Kirk (1831-1908). Building on their experiences struggling for women’s suffrage and women’s rights, all three developed unique practices which sought to perfect human relationships and sexual intercourse–and in so doing, to perfect the world. These three thinkers demonstrate the complex relationships between women’s rights, sex reform, and then emerging esoteric religious ideas. In so doing, they can enrich our understanding of both American history and contemporary spirituality.

Speaker Bio

Christa Shusko holds a PhD in Religion from Syracuse University. She has published numerous scholarly book chapters on American esotericism ranging from Fin de siécle Martian romances to séance spiritualism in the Oneida Community to the importance of beauty in Eleanor Kirk’s newspaper columns. She currently serves as a co-chair for the Western Esotericism Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

Curated and hosted by Dr. Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Touchstones of belief: a rich legacy of Charms and Amulets in Scotland

Charmstones have the power to fascinate and to inspire when we see them in pictures or enshrined in glass cases; we may even have one sitting on the mantelpiece! We understand them as reflections of folk belief or part of a transcendental or even supernatural world. In Scotland, in common with most world communities, we have a rich legacy of charms and amulets existing in many forms throughout our history and guessed at in our prehistory. What does this mean while medicine was as much faith as understanding? Or how can we better understand Saint Columba when he picked up his miraculous stone from the bed of the River Ness? Was this charismatic figure of our earliest history ‘saint’ or ‘seer’? This is the material culture of a supposed ‘otherworld’, offering daily protection from disease and death and tangible evidence of how people faced a pandemic. As the stuff of museum displays, charms and amulets become disassociated from their lifescapes context and, more importantly, from language and belief systems that are still part of our daily experience.

Speaker Bio

Professor Hugh Cheape has devised and teaches a postgraduate programme, MSc Cultar Dùthchasach agus Eachdraidh na Gàidhealtachd (‘Material Culture and Gàidhealtachd History’), at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the National Centre for Gaelic Language and Culture. He holds a Research Chair in the University of the Highlands and Islands. The MSc has grown out of his curatorial and ethnological work during a career in the National Museums of Scotland. He has published widely in the subject fields of ethnology and musicology, including studies in Scottish agricultural history, vernacular architecture, piping, tartans and dye analysis, pottery, charms and amulets and talismanic belief.

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Bewitching of Anne Gunter: England’s Best Documented Witchcraft Case by James Sharpe

In 1999 I published a book entitled The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: a horrible and true Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England (Profile Books). This concerned the alleged bewitchment of Anne Gunter, aged twenty or so, the daughter of a gentleman called Brian Gunter, resident at North Moreton, then in Berkshire, since boundary changes of 1974 in Oxfordshire. Briefly, Anne fell ill in the summer of 1604, demonstrating symptoms which defied diagnosis. It was eventually decided that she had been bewitched, and suspicion fell on three women in the village: Agnes Pepwell, who had an established reputation as a witch, her illegitimate daughter Mary Pepwell, and Elizabeth Gregory, who although largely free from any established associations with witchcraft was apparently the most unpopular woman in North Moreton, regarded as an all-round troublemaker by her neighbours. More specifically, bad relations between Elizabeth Gregory and the Gunters can be traced back to 1598 when Brian Gunter inflicted fatal injuries on two members of the Gregory family in the course of a brawl engendered by a village football match. As Anne Gunter’s sickness continued, suspicions of witchcraft against the three women hardened. Agnes Pepwell ran away, but Mary Pepwell and Elizabeth Gregory were tried as witches at the Abingdon assizes in March 1605 (two of the first people to be accused of witchcraft under the new Witchcraft Statute of 1604) and acquitted.

Matters should, officially at least, have ended there, but Brian Gunter tried to re-open the case when James I, recently crowned king of England, and someone with a known interest in witchcraft, visited Oxford University in August 1605. Another of Gunter’s daughters was married to the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and it was probably though this connection that Brian Gunter was able to set up a meeting with the king. This proved to be a terrible miscalculation on Gunter’s part. James referred the investigation of the case to a team drawn from senior members of the Church of England, who at that time were developing a very cautious approach to witchcraft accusations and the related matters of demonic possession and exorcism. The upshot was that Brian and Anne Gunter were tried at Star Chamber for malicious prosecution, and the relevant dossier provides the richest documentation available for any witchcraft case in England – the standard records of English witch trials, unlike those generated by some continental jurisdictions, are usually very terse and lacking in detail. What I want to do in this talk is reconsider the Anne Gunter case so as to present the audience with some of the perhaps unexpected complications which arise when a witchcraft case is studied in detail, and to examine how the course of a witchcraft accusation could be shaped by a variety of contexts: those of the community in which the initial accusations arose, the legal system under which the supposed witches were tried, and the ecclesiastical politics and theological positions which were so often crucial in determining the course of a witchcraft accusation once it attracted the attention of officialdom.

Speaker Bio

James Sharpe completed his BA and DPhil in Modern History at the University of Oxford. After temporary posts at the Universities of Durham and Exeter he was appointed lecturer at the university of York in 1973, and continued to work there throughout his career, being promoted to a professorship in 1997. He has published twelve books and around sixty learned articles and essays. His initial work was in the history of crime in England in the early modern period, but he has also written extensively on early modern English witchcraft, his first major work on the subject being Instruments of Darkness, published in 1996, and focussing on the history of witchcraft in England c. 1550-1750. He retired in 2016, but remains research active, and is currently Professor Emeritus in Early Modern History at the University of York.

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