Archives: Digital Events

Rings and Whips: the secret architecture of Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O – Rosemary Thorne – Zoom

Rings and Whips: the secret architecture of Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O

This talk looks at Histoire d’O, both the novel and the film, as a carefully built symbolic system centered on ritual submission, secrecy, and personal transformation. Briefly reviewing Reage’s biography and scandal, it also explores the repeated use of rings, whips, masks, and thresholds as parts of a shared initiatory language. By placing the book and the film within the cultural context of the 1950s and 1960s, the talk sheds light on why the work was so shocking in its time—and what deeper structures and secrets it was revealing.

Speaker Bio:

Rosemary Thorne (she/her) is a bilingual Spanish writer, translator, and researcher specializing in horror and the occult, based in Madrid, Spain. Born in 1968, she became a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) in 2019 and soon thereafter began serving as Co-Chair of the HWA International Chapter, a role she continues to hold. She also served as a juror for the prestigious 2023 HWA Lifetime Achievement Award.

She writes her horror fiction primarily in English, which she regards as the most welcoming language for the genre. Her first novel, El pacto de las 12 uvas, was published in December 2021. She has also translated Edward Lee’s The Bighead into Spanish for Dimensiones Ocultas Press.

An active essayist, her recent work focuses on the analysis of literature, cinema, and visual art through an occult and esoteric lens.

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

Arsenic and Asphyxiation: Deadly Victorian Fashion – Dr Jay Sullivan – Zoom

Arsenic and Asphyxiation: Deadly Victorian Fashion

​The Victorians had a lot of dangerous habits, but their obsession with lethal fashion trends might just be the most terrifying one.

​From catching pneumonia in freezing, sheer Roman-style gowns to romanticising the pale, wasting aesthetic of “tuberculous chic,” the nineteenth century’s blend of strict beauty standards and unchecked chemical innovation produced a wardrobe that was to die for.

​In this online talk, the first of a new six-part lecture series, Dr Jay Sullivan will take you through the history of deadly Victorian dress, from the breathless reality of extreme corseting to the toxic allure of arsenic-laced green ballgowns and matching wallpaper. Meet the socialites who literally suffered for beauty, discover the perilous reality of the gaslit stage, and uncover the tragic truth behind highly flammable ballet gowns. Along the way, we’ll answer some of the strangest questions of the era: Why did women deliberately use makeup to look like they were dying of consumption? How did a trendy shade of green become a silent killer in the drawing room? And just how many ballerinas spontaneously combusted in the name of art?

Victorian Manias! is a six-part lecture series covering the Victorians strange and occasionally deadly obsessions. From ferns to freakshows, across ghosts and the gothics and covering curses, collecting and circuses, Dr Jay Sullivan will take you through a century of curious crazes.

Speaker Bio

Dr Jay Sullivan is a writer and researcher based in South London. She holds a PhD from the University of Roehampton and an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck College. Her research blends museum, sensory, and gothic studies with a focus on the Victorian Egyptianised Gothic genre. Egyptian Gothic 1884-1920, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2025, is her first book.

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

German Black Books, Faust and Forbidden Knowledge – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

THE BOOKS OF MAGIC

2. A Global History of Grimoires, Charms and Forbidden Knowledge

For the past several years, we have been researching and translating magical books from across the world, including manuscripts and printed works that circulated for centuries under a cloud of suspicion. The Books of Magic explores these texts not as quaint curiosities, but as evidence of the human desire to find knowledge beyond the limits of ordinary religion, medicine and reason.

The German-speaking world produced one of Europe’s richest traditions of so-called black books. Georg Conrad Horst’s vast Zauber-Bibliothek gathered together writings on magic, spirits, apparitions and occult belief, while The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses claimed to preserve secret Mosaic wisdom in the form of divine names, seals and magical diagrams. Alongside these works stands the extraordinary Compendium Rarissimum Totius Artis Magicae, a manuscript filled with demonic imagery and the unforgettable warning Noli me tangere, “Touch me not”.

Hovering over the entire tradition is the figure of Faust, the scholar who wanted knowledge no human being was meant to possess. This lecture explores magical circles, spirit conjuration, treasure hunting, divine names, strange alphabets and the peculiar power of the forbidden book itself. In many cases, the reputation of a manuscript became as potent as its contents. A book did not have to contain a terrifying ritual to become feared. Sometimes it was enough that people believed it should never be opened.

Speaker 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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

It Must Be Love: Magic and Divination to Find (and Keep) Romance – Icy Sedgwick – Zoom

It Must Be Love: Magic and Divination to Find (and Keep) Romance

February might be associated with all things love thanks to St Valentine’s Day on the 14th, but if we look throughout folklore, there are plenty of opportunities to divine who a potential partner might be, how to increase your chances to meet someone, and how to hang onto love if you do manage to find it. As it turns out, it’s a year-round effort!

This talk will explore a few notable practices for seeing visions of future partners, how to use plants to boost your odds, and why ordinary items you have around your house can be really helpful when it comes to love magic.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Icy Sedgwick is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating the fascinating world of European folklore with a focus on the British Isles, and the author of Rebel Folklore, Ghostlore, Bring Me Love, and Fate or Fortune. She is fascinated by plant lore, ghost stories, lost gods, and divination. Former ghost hunter Icy also holds a PhD in Film Studies after examining the representation of haunted houses in contemporary Hollywood cinema. https://www.icysedgwick.com

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

Paranormal Poe: Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunting Afterlife – Chris Semtner – Zoom

Paranormal Poe: Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunting Afterlife

Nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe has had quite a busy afterlife. Since his death in 1849, his spirit has supposedly been spotted in seven cities and is a regular in three different bars (one of which reserves a stool for him). Join Poe Museum curator (and author of Haunting Poe) Chris Semtner on the hunt for Poe’s ghost.

Speaker Bio

The curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Chris Semtner is an award-winning, internationally exhibited visual artist whose work can be found in numerous private and public collections. The Webster Award-winning author has written several articles and chapters in addition to eight books about Poe, visual art, horror, pop culture, and cryptography. Semtner has written for Biography.com, Crime Writers’ Chronicle, Resources for American Literary Study, and other publications. He has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, SyFy Wire, and Rue Morgue Magazine, in addition to appearing in documentaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, and Japan. He regularly speaks about strange and macabre subjects at various venues from the Steampunk World’s Fair and GalaxyCon to the U.S. Library of Congress and as far away as Paris, Madrid, and Kyoto.

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

The Devils Library: French Grimoires, Demonology and Forbidden Magic – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

THE BOOKS OF MAGIC

A Global History of Grimoires, Charms and Forbidden Knowledge

1. The Devils Library: French Grimoires, Demonology and Forbidden Magic

For the past several years, we have been researching, translating and reconstructing magical books from around the world, following their trails through forgotten libraries, digitised archives, private collections and historical editions. In 2027, The Books of Magic brings that work together in twelve lectures, each devoted to a different magical culture and to the books that preserved its spells, fears, rituals and forbidden knowledge.

We begin in France, home to some of the most notorious occult books ever printed. Le Petit Albert became one of Europe’s best-known practical grimoires, offering charms, magical curiosities and methods for influencing the world through secret knowledge. La Poule Noire, or The Black Pullet, promised enchanted rings, talismans, protection, treasure and extraordinary powers. Jules Garinet’s History of Magic in France carries us through witchcraft, possession, werewolves, demonology and centuries of superstition, while Paul Lacroix’s Infernal Curiosities, first published in 1886, opens an even stranger cabinet of devils, incubi, succubi, fairies, ghosts, vampires, magical rings, pacts and supernatural disasters.

These books existed in the uneasy territory between entertainment, folklore, belief and genuine occult practice. Some were read secretly, some were condemned, and some were believed to possess a dangerous reputation simply because of the knowledge they contained. This opening lecture enters that shadowy French library and asks why supposedly rational modern Europe remained so fascinated by devils, magic and books that respectable people insisted nobody should read.

Speaker 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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

The Kabbalist’s Recipe Book: Magic, Medicine, and Curious Amulets in Premodern Europe – Agata Paluch – Zoom

The Kabbalist’s Recipe Book: Magic, Medicine, and Curious Amulets in Premodern Europe

What might a premodern Jewish recipe book contain? Alongside household cures, cosmetics, herbal preparations, and alchemical experiments, these handwritten collections preserved instructions for producing amulets, invoking divine names, and protecting people from illness, demons, misfortune, and the evil eye. Drawing on Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts from Central and Eastern Europe, this lecture explores a world in which magic, medicine, religion, and practical craft were closely intertwined. It follows the makers and users of these books—from physicians and practical kabbalists to household practitioners—and asks what their extraordinary recipes reveal about everyday Jewish life, encounters with surrounding Christian cultures, and the enduring human desire to make uncertain worlds more manageable.

Image: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, Ms. 9380. Courtesy of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Speaker Bio:

Agata Paluch is Professor of Premodern Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on Jewish esotericism, magic, and Kabbalah, as well as the history of the Jewish book and material text cultures. She earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from University College London in 2013. Before joining the University of Cologne, she led the DFG-funded research group “Patterns of Knowledge Circulation” at Freie Universität Berlin (2019–2025) and held fellowships from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Herbert D. Katz Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has also worked as a cataloger for the British Library’s collection of Hebrew manuscripts

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

The Viking Kitchen Yule edition – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

The Viking Kitchen Yule edition

Step into the firelight and join me for The Viking Yule Kitchen, a warm, festive online webinar filled with old Norse flavours, winter folklore and a generous helping of Yule magic.

In this special seasonal session, I’ll be cooking live from my book The Viking Kitchen, making a selection of Viking-inspired Yule sweets while we explore what winter feasting may have looked, smelled and tasted like in the Norse world.

Expect honey, warming spices, dried fruits, nuts, oats and other ingredients inspired by the Viking-age kitchen, alongside stories of Yule celebrations, gods, spirits, feasting, midwinter customs and the long northern nights when food, fire and good company mattered more than ever.

This is part cook-along, part history, part folklore and part gloriously cosy pre-Christmas gathering. You can simply watch with a cup of something warm, or gather the ingredients beforehand and make the sweets along with me from your own kitchen.

There may be sticky fingers. There will almost certainly be honey. Odin may or may not be invited.

So light a candle, pour yourself something festive and join me around the virtual hearth for an evening of Viking Yule sweets, stories and seasonal magic.

The Viking Yule Kitchen
An online festive cook-along and illustrated talk with Lena Heide-Brennand
Based on recipes and research from The Viking Kitchen – Recipes from the Norse Gods’ Table.

Speaker 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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

Fairies, Witchcraft, and Magic at Prehistoric Sites – Paul Robichaud – Zoom

Fairies, Witchcraft, and Magic at Prehistoric Sites

The folklore surrounding barrows, stone circles and other prehistoric sites in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany suggests that local inhabitants experienced them as uncanny places where dangerous and powerful beings might be encountered. In Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, hill forts and burial mounds are home to the fairies and best avoided, while in Brittany megaliths are inhabited by korrigans who might invite you to join their revels (don’t accept!). In England and Scotland, several standing stones and dolmens were seen as places where witches gathered or that they built. The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire have an especially rich tradition of witch folklore, and the modern occultist William Gray developed an elaborate ritual to be performed there. In this talk we’ll, explore the world of fairies, witches, and magic in the folklore of ancient monuments.

Paul Robichaud

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaker Bio:

Paul Robichaud is a writer and scholar whose interests include modern and medieval literature, mythology, and folklore. He is the author of Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany (Reaktion, 2026) and Pan: the Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion, 2021). He has contributed articles to Hellebore and published essays on a variety of modern poets, including David Jones, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Cohen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. His own poems have appeared in print and online magazines in Canada, the US, and the UK. A native of Toronto, he is Professor of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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

Where Places Become Strange: Liminal Spaces, Abandonment and Uncanny Folklore – Steph Lay – Zoom

Where Places Become Strange: Liminal Spaces, Abandonment and Uncanny Folklore

Why are we drawn to the places we are not meant to linger?

An underpass after dark. An empty office awaiting demolition. A railway bridge between neighbourhoods. A deserted shopping centre, an overgrown path or a house standing abandoned with traces of its former occupants still inside.

These are places in transition: caught between destinations, purposes or identities. Some are designed only to be passed through. Others have lost the function they once possessed but have not yet become something new. Often described as liminal, they can feel thrilling, melancholy and full of possibility, but also curiously unsettling.

In this talk, psychologist, writer and photographer Dr Steph Lay explores why abandoned and in-between places exert such a powerful hold over the imagination. Drawing upon psychology, psychogeography, folklore and her own experiences of walking and photographing neglected urban landscapes, she asks what happens when the ordinary rules of a place begin to loosen.

Why does an empty building invite us to invent stories about what occurred there? Why can a familiar footpath become uncanny at dusk? What makes thresholds, bridges, roadsides and the edges of settlements such persistent settings for supernatural encounters? And when a place loses its official purpose, who gets to decide what it means next?

Throughout the talk, Steph will return to Milton Keynes, the modern planned city at the centre of her ongoing paranormal research. Its redways, underpasses and new estates all layered over older landscapes reveal how even the most rationally designed environments can produce their own mysteries, myths and haunted spaces.

Some places belong firmly to the world we know.

Others seem to wait somewhere in between.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Steph Lay is a writer, researcher and cognitive psychologist based in Milton Keynes. Her doctoral research explored the uncanny valley and why certain near-human faces can feel so unsettling.

She is the creator of City of Secrets and its ongoing Revenants on the Redway project, gathering local stories of the unexplained and exploring the hidden histories, folklore and uncanny possibilities of Milton Keynes.

Behind the scenes, Steph also works with Peter Laws on the YouTube channel Into the Fog. She curates first-hand paranormal accounts submitted by viewers and creates atmospheric artwork and visual storytelling to help bring those stories to life.

Across her work, she brings together psychology, place, folklore and the paranormal, exploring not only why strange experiences unsettle us, but why they matter to the people who live through them.

Curated & Hosted by

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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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