Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Mighty Lewd Books: Pornography in the Eighteenth Century by Julie Peakman

In this talk I will explore popular images emerging in erotica: female flagellants whipping their submissive charges; depraved monks corrupting innocent nuns; libertine rascals seducing young virgins; and rakes carousing with their whores, all of it was becoming increasingly available in Britain in the eighteenth century.

The famous diarist Samuel Pepys secretly admitted to reading pornography. He had got hold of the French original of L’Escole des Filles (translated in English as School of Venus) which had become available in London in 1668. He thought it ‘a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.’ Overcome by guilt, he burnt it. But this feeling of sin among British men was to lessen in line with the rise of the pornography trade.

This talk will explore the erotic book trade in Britain and the types of sexual fantasies being catered for. From salacious prints, erotic poems, obscene satires and graphic sexual novellas, an abundance of pornography was available. It could be found in London coffee-shops, in taverns and on streets corners along the Strand and Covent Garden, while books sellers stood a figure of a naked man outside their shop doors to advertise to clients what sort of book they sold. meanwhile, publishers would come under increasing persecution from the law.

Dr. Julie Peakman is a historian in eighteenth-century culture and an expert in the history of sexuality, erotica and pornography. She is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a frequent contributor to journals, magazines and television documentaries for BBC, Channel 4 and the Biography Channel. Her books include Licentious Worlds. Sex & Exploitation in Global Empires (2019); Amatory Pleasures, Exploration in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture (2016); The Pleasure’s All Mine. A History of Perverse Sex (2013); Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (2004) and Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (2003). She has also edited 6 Volumes of A Cultural History of Sexuality (2011); Sexual Perversions 1670-1890 (2009); and 8 Volumes of Whores Biographies, 1700-1825 (2006-7). She is also biographer of Peg Plunkett, Memoirs of a Whore (2014) and Emma Hamilton (2005). She is currently writing a book on sexual shenanigans in the metropolis, Intimate London, a story of whoring, sodomising, adultery and seduction.

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Vodou and Art : Between the altar and the market by Leah Gordon on zoom

Leah Gordon explores the links between Vodou and art, in both Haiti’s rich art history and contemporary practice. Leah will discuss the use of image and artefact within Vodou ritual and the often, interchangeable role of artist and Houngan (Vodou priest). To conclude Gordon will explore the liminal space that contemporary artists currently inhabit whilst trying to negotiate their ancestral histories and cultural antecedents within a contemporary art market which still has a conflicted relationship toward ethnographic and ritual objects.

Leah Gordon will discuss these issues from her experience of co-curating ‘PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince’ at Pioneer Works, Red Hook, Brooklyn, ‘Kafou: Haiti, Art & Vodou’ at the Nottingham Contemporary, ‘In Extremis: Death & Life in 21st Century Haitian Art’ at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, as one of the directors of the Ghetto Biennale and as an adjunct curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Speaker  Bio

Leah Gordon (born Ellesmere Port, UK) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her work explores the intervolved and intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Enclosure Acts and the creation of the British working-class. In the 1980’s she wrote lyrics, sang, and played for a feminist folk punk band. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK and the Norton Museum of Art, Florida. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; and was the co-curator of ‘PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince’ at Pioneer Works, NYC in 2018 and MOCA, Miami in 2019. In 2022 she will be exhibiting and curating at documenta fifteen, Kassel.

More Treasures from The Museum of Witchcraft & Magic with Simon Costin – Zoom

Join Simon Costin, the museum’s director, live from the museum in Cornwall where he will show and discuss some of his favourite treasures from the collection. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, formerly known as the Museum of Witchcraft, is a museum dedicated to European and world witchcraft and magic, located in the village of Boscastle in North Cornwall, in the south-west of England. It houses exhibits devoted to folk magic, ceremonial magic, Freemasonry and Wicca, with its collection of such objects having been described as the largest and most important in the world.

The museum was founded by the English folk magician Cecil Williamson in 1951 to display his own personal collection of artefacts. Initially known as the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, it was located in the town of Castletown on the Isle of Man. Williamson was assisted at the museum by the prominent Wiccan Gerald Gardner, who remained there as “resident witch”. After their friendship deteriorated, Gardner took over the running in 1954, renaming it the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. Gardner’s Castletown museum remained open until the 1970s, when Gardner’s heir Monique Wilson sold its contents to the Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not company.

Later in 1954, Williamson, who had removed his collection from the Isle of Man opened his own rival back in England, known as the Museum of Witchcraft. Its first location was at Windsor, Berkshire, and the next at Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire; in both cases it faced violent opposition and Williamson felt it necessary to move, establishing the museum in Boscastle in 1960. In 1996 Williamson sold the museum to Graham King, who incorporated the Richel Collection of sex magic artefacts from the Netherlands in 2000. The museum was badly damaged during the Boscastle flood of 2004 but thankfully, due to the quick thinking of Graham and his staff, virtually nothing was lost. In 2013 ownership was transferred to Simon Costin and his Museum of British Folklore.

Simon Costin studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon School of Art and since leaving in the mid 80’s, Simon has grown to become an internationally respected art director, set designer and curator. Costin’s artwork has been displayed in many exhibitions worldwide, at venues as diverse as a forest in Argyll, the ICA in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His lifelong passion for Folklore has resulted in the launch of the Museum of British Folklore, a long-term project which aims to establish the UK’s first ever centre devoted to celebrating and researching the UK’s rich folkloric cultural heritage. Since 2013 he has also been the owner and director of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall.

Welsh Fairy Tales by Viktor Wynd on Zoom

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.

Wales has some of the richest, most marvellous and most wonderful fairy tales – Viktor Wynd will tell you some more of his favourites, replete with supernatural beings and strange happenings.

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.

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

Cornish Bards and Witch Hunting in Cornwall in the early Twentieth Century

Still widely consulted and appreciated, the works of the nineteenth century Cornish folklore collectors Robert Hunt, William Bottrell, and Margaret Courtney were published against a background of profound upheaval within Cornish society, as its traditional industries collapsed and a third of its population emigrated to the American continent and to the antipodes. Their successors, the folklorists of the early to mid twentieth century, are less well known, but their collections were of similar scope and likewise amassed during a period of societal change. Two of the most significant of them were William Henry Paynter and Barbara Catherine Spooner, both of whom were active as folklore fieldworkers during the inter-war period. This talk sets their practices in context, using archival and published sources, and explores beliefs in the supernatural at a time when such beliefs were in retreat.

Speaker: Jason Semmens, M.A., is the Director of the Museum of Military Medicine and an independent scholar with particular research interests around the history of vernacular beliefs in the supernatural in the South West of England from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

Your host for this even is 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.

 

Alexandrian Witchcraft: an Ascent to the Numinous by Sharon Day

Following the decades of controversy that have surrounded the late Alex Sanders, “Ascent to the Numinous” might not at first be the term that springs to mind when considering his heritage and, more specifically, the type of wiccan practice associated with him.

He has been labelled, among other things, a ‘showman’, a ‘plagiariser’, a ‘fascinator’, a ‘teller-of-tall-tales’, usually backed by accounts, purportedly based on personal experience, of his darker side. All, to varying degrees may well contain some element of truth.

Less common or at least less public are the innumerable accounts of his unbridled generosity; his knack of diverting unwanted attention from those loyal to him; and, most important of all perhaps, his intuitive grasp of the Mysteries, not to mention his ability to impart what he learned to his students and, through them, those initiates who to this day yearn to experience them.

Thanks to him, what today is known as Alexandrian witchcraft, its name associated with his own, was adapted – without ever betraying – those wiccan traditions that Gerald Gardner and others did so much to revive. By doing it, he fostered an approach that was at once both contemporary and fully respectful of the past, mindful of those traditions which all witches, irrespective of label, cherish and keep alive to this day.

The presenter will expand on these themes in her discourse.

Sharon Day Bio

American by birth and British by marriage, Sharon’s academic career included one year in Japan as an exchange student in 1980. She would return there, having graduated from law school in New York City in 1992, with her husband, also a lawyer, when he took up a post in Tokyo years later.

After repatriating to London in 1997, Sharon felt drawn to esotericism and the occult, subsequently discovering what she felt was a vocation within Alexandrian witchcraft. Her search for suitable training and practical experience took her from London to Australia, the United States, and finally back to London, where she became the personal student of Maxine Sanders, co-founder of the Alexandrian Tradition.

Today, she leads the Coven of the Stag King in London under the eldership – and discreet guidance- of Maxine.

Sharon is also the founder of Rose Ankh Publishing Ltd, a book publisher of unique occult, historical, philosophical, and biographical works (www.roseankhpublishing.com) as well as an online historical archive dedicated to the Alexandrian witchcraft tradition (www.alexandrianwitchcraft.org).

Fairy Belief in Modern Pagan Culture by Professor Sabina Magliocco

Fairy beliefs and narratives are very much alive among contemporary Witches and Pagans; in fact, they are undergoing a revival. In this presentation, based on my research since 2015, I explore how modern Witches and Pagans narrate and interact with these other-than-human beings. I argue that fairies behave differently in Pagan narratives than the way they behave in traditional legends; they have undergone a process of “taming” which makes them friendlier and easier to interact with. Witches and Pagans interact with fairies in ways that enhance their belief in them, and make them feel real. In modern Pagan/ Witchen folklore, fairies are spiritual helpers, healers, and nature spirits who offer evidence of an enchanted world and warn of environmental destruction.

Speaker Bio

Sabina Magliocco, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the interdisciplinary Program in the Study of Religion at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, SSHRC, Fulbright and Hewlett fellowships, and an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, she has published on religion, folklore, foodways, festival and witchcraft in Europe and North America, and is a leading authority on the modern Pagan movement. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Two Madonnas: the Politics of Festival in a Sardinian Community (1993, 2005), Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (2004), Neopagan Sacred Art & Altars: Making Things Whole (2001), and with filmmaker John M. Bishop produced the documentary film series “Oss Tales,” on a May Day custom in Cornwall and its reclamation by American Pagans. Her current research is on nature and animals in the spiritual imagination. https://anth.ubc.ca/faculty/sabina-magliocco/

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

Dark Folklore – an illustrated Zoom talk by Mark Norman

How did our ancestors use the concept of demons to explain sleep paralysis? Is that carving in the porch of your local church really what you think it is? And what is that odd tapping noise on the roof of your car…

The fields of folklore have never been more popular – a recent resurgence of interest in traditional beliefs and customs, coupled with morbid curiosities in folk horror, historic witchcraft cases and our superstitious past, have led to an intersection of ideas that is driving people to seek out more information. 

Dark Folklore (The History Press, Oct 2021) is the latest title from Mark (co-authored with Tracey Norman – author of the acclaimed play WITCH). It’s a book which leads us on an exploration of those aspects of our cultural beliefs and social history that are less ‘wicker basket’ and more ‘Wicker Man’. Dark Folklore has been consistently in the top 10 bestsellers chart for its genre on Amazon and ranked in the first few thousand of the over 8 million titles listed by that site for sale.

Mark Norman is a folklore author and researcher, creator of The Folklore Podcast which has enjoyed almost 1.5 million downloads since its launch, council member of the Folklore Society and Recorder of Folklore for the Devonshire Association. He is the author of a range of folklore books and the curator of the Folklore Library and Archive.

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

[Illustration: Tiina Lalje]

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

Magical protection marks in medieval and later buildings – a Zoom talk with Brian Hoggard

In old buildings many subtly carved marks can be found on stone, plaster and timber with a variety of meanings and purposes. There are masons’ marks, carpenter’s marks, merchants marks, shipping marks, historic graffiti (covers a wide range) and then there are protection marks.

In this short presentation Brian Hoggard will explain the differences between those broad categories of marks and then focus on the range of protection marks you might come across in churches and other buildings. These include: Marian marks, Christograms, daisy-wheels and circles, burn marks, shoe outlines, hand outlines, mesh marks and pentagrams. The thinking required to understand them will require the suspension of some of your logic and science knowledge.

Brian Hoggard has been studying history, archaeology and folk beliefs since his teens; his Twitter account enigmatically states that he has been a ‘Researcher of strange things found in walls and under floors since 1999…’ Brian’s undergraduate dissertation focused on folk beliefs and witchcraft, when he noticed there was a huge amount of further work that could be done to explore the archaeology of witchcraft. At that point his research escalated into a major project which has culminated in the publication of Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft (Berghahn 2019).

For more information see: www.apotropaios.co.uk www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HoggardMagical

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

 

The Seed Sistas – Passion Potion Workshop

The Seed Sistas’ Passion Potion Workshop

“Drops of Desire” Feel more alive, sensual, sexier; ignite your passions…

Welcome to one of our most beloved subjects…. herbal aphrodisiacs

Discover our favourite erotic flowers and foliage

Passion Potion unleashes the sensual dragon within. Us Seed Sistas developed this potent magical potion as a party adjunct but soon realised harboured within, was something with a whole lot more potential that just some mindless fun.

Over the years we’ve weaved wonders with this potion, igniting passions between couples, personal passions or even to attract someone sexy! Warning…. This potion is powerful, so be careful who you give it to.

During the evening we will –

-Discuss herbal aphrodisiacs

– explore the individual plants and preparations in the passion potion

– touch on herbal energetics

– look at practical applications

– practice some exercises, affirmation and breathwork that enhances our Passion Potion

We cordially (and a little wildly), invite you to this fun, exciting evening.

The Seed Sistas are community herbalists, have practiced and taught herbalism and yoga for over 20 years they combine their creativity and study to bring a broad spectrum flavour to everything they do. They re-define what it means to be successful, connecting people to their own local plants and more autonomy in health-care. They have run apprenticeships in Sensory Herbalism for 15 years as well as spoken at international events on specialist subjects such as passion, psychedelics, myth and story all through the lens of being herbalists. They run a community interest company promoting the development of community medicine gardens.