Archives: Digital Events

What a Fish Knows – Jonathan Balcombe – Zoom

What a Fish Knows

Arguably the least understood, and certainly the most exploited vertebrates on Earth, fishes have been mainly viewed by us in two contexts: as a source of food, and a source of recreation. It is as if they didn’t have lives of their own. Modern science shows otherwise. This eye-opening presentation explores the colourful lives of the most diverse group of vertebrates. We explore fish perceptions, cognition, emotion, social behaviour, and cooperation, all within the context of our evolving relationship to fishes and their vital aquatic habitats.

Do fish think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognise the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water?

Jonathan Balcombe, animal behaviour expert and author of the bestselling What a Fish Knows, will address these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes.

Although there are more than thirty thousand species of fish – more than all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians combined – we rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave. Balcombe’s research upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian – in other words, much like us.

Speaker Bio

Jonathan Balcombe was born in England and raised in Canada where he now lives. He has loved animals since age three when he decided he wanted to be a hippopotamus. Instead, he became a biologist with a PhD in the study of animal behaviour. During a career focused on animal protection, he developed and taught courses in animal behaviour and animal sentience for the Viridis Graduate Institute, and Humane Society University, and served as Associate Editor to the open-access journal Animal Sentience. His main focus these days is researching and writing books, which include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, and What a Fish Knows, a New York Times best-seller available in seventeen languages. His latest book for grown-ups, Super Fly, won the National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature. His first children’s book, Jake and Ava: A Boy and a Fish, was published in 2021. He is currently writing a book that explores cooperation and joy in the wild. In his spare time Jonathan enjoys biking, hiking, birding, baking, snorkelling, and trying to understand the neighbourhood squirrels.

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

Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Chlamydia Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture three – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Chlamydia Through the Ages

Often called the “silent infection,” Chlamydia trachomatis has shaped far more than modern sexual health statistics—it has left its mark on human history, medicine, and even cultural perceptions of disease. In this third part of our series, we trace chlamydia’s journey from obscure ancient ailments to one of the most reported infections worldwide. We will explore its medical recognition, the shifting social stigma surrounding it, and the transformative breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment. Drawing on case studies from archaeology, literature, and public health campaigns, this lecture uncovers how an organism smaller than a grain of dust has influenced law, policy, and intimate relationships for centuries.
Prepare for a vivid, evidence-based exploration that moves seamlessly between the microscope and the macrocosm—where biology meets history, and medicine meets morality.

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

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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

Madness and Decadence in the 1890s – a Zoom talk with Nick Freeman

‘Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten.’

So said W.B. Yeats in 1936, looking back at what he termed ‘the tragic generation’, the writers and artists he had known forty years earlier. His claim is a handy checklist of decadent attributes, but its rhetorical panache disguises the creative achievements and human tragedies of that time.

This talk examines the ways in which madness shaped and haunted English decadence during the 1890s and afterwards, looking at such intriguing characters such as the poets John Barlas and Arthur Symons, and the painter Charles Conder, all of whom experienced incarceration in asylums. It will investigate why madness seems to be so central to the decadent world-view and considers some of the ways in which iit continues to shape our response to creative visionaries.

 

About the Speaker

Nick Freeman teaches English at Loughborough University. He has published widely on decadence, the supernatural and the occult and has also edited a selection of A.M. Burrage’s ghost stories for the British Library’s Gilded Nightmares series.

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. 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. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

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

[Image: An absinthe addict eyeing three glasses on a table; advertisement for film Absinthe. Colour lithograph, ca. 1913. Source: Wellcome Collection.]

Spirits of Dark and Lonely Water – a Zoom talk with John Clark

In 1973 Britain’s Central Office of Information commissioned a film, directed at children, to warn them of the dangers of playing near ponds and rivers. Presiding over it was a sinister Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, voiced by the actor Donald Pleasance. In this presentation we shall look at how a similar approach was adopted by parents in the 19th century, and how they used ‘imaginary monsters’ to scare children away from dangerous waters. Our starting point is a recent Royal Mail stamp depicting just such a monster, named Grindylow. By way of the world of Harry Potter and the writings of 20th- and 19th-century folklorists we shall track Grindylow and her sisters Jenny Greenteeth and Nellie Longarmsto their lairs in the ponds and flooded marl pits of north-west England in the early 1800s.

 

Your speaker is John Clark, who was for many years Curator of the medieval collections of the Museum of London (now London Museum). Since his retirement in 2009 he has continued to research and publish on a range of subjects, including medieval horses and their equipment, London legends, and folklore and fairylore. His book on the medieval story of the Green Children of Woolpit, The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, bringing together the results of some 25 years of research, was published in 2024 by University of Exeter Press in their series New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Belief.

Your curator and host for this online event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. 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. He has edited two anthologies of classic ghost stories for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series – Eerie East Anglia (2024) and his latest, All the Fear of the Fair: Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow (pub. Oct 2025). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

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

 

[Image: montage of a still from Lonely Water (Central Office for Information, 1973) and a depiction of Grindylow by Adam Simpson for the Royal Mail’s 2025 ‘Myths and Legends’ stamp series (© Stamp Design Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2025).]

Greek Myth and Religion – Philip Matyszak – Zoom

Greek Myth and Religion

What did the Ancient Greeks actually believe – and how did it shape the way they lived their lives?

Philip Matyszak, a noted scholar of Greek myth and religion and author of numerous books such as A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece (Michael O’Mara, 2021), will guide us through the Ancient Greeks’ belief system, bringing their world to life. He’ll give us an overview of how their religion worked, explaining how their gods embodied concepts and forces – from wisdom to the weather – that were part of their daily reality.

We’ll also learn how their myths, with their complex and flawed heroes, differ from the moralism of popular stories today, exploring and explain the human condition rather than trying to improve it. Matyszak views the Greeks’ many myths as part of one large, rambling story that runs across four generations with a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The same characters interact and pop up in each other’s stories: Theseus kidnaps Helen of Troy, is rescued from Hades by Hercules, who meets Medea and buries Icarus. And its span is immense: from cosmogony, where humans do not yet exist, to Seven Against Thebes, where the gods barely feature, it is a tale that goes from one end of the known world to the other.

Speaker Bio

Philip Matyszak has a doctorate in Roman history from St John’s College, Oxford. He is the author of many books on classical civilization, including Chronicle of the Roman Republic, The Enemies of Rome, The Sons of Caesar, Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day, Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day, Lives of the Romans (with Joanne Berry) and Legionary.

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

Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction – Timmy Davis – Zoom

Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction 

Psychoanalysing the psychedelic phenomena of recovered memories of abuse, birth and alien abduction

From earliest life every one of us is immersed in a world of pure novelty, preoccupied with weaving the fluctuations of experience into a stable and coherent tapestry. We theorise and construct understandings and expectations of space, time, the social world and ourselves within it from the threads of culture we happen upon in our maturation. Yet novelty insists upon us, disrupting all attempts to complete the picture. Protected by only this thinnest of veils, every so often we experience something so apparently novel it creates a hole in the very fabric of our reality. These rips, tears and ruptures can undermine faith in our habitual ways of knowing, our own memories and even our sensory perceptions themselves, demanding suture. In this talk we will draw on contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of trauma, revelation, gaslighting and eye witness testimony to think about some of the more far-out experiences that can be engendered by psychedelics, and one of their unfortunate results, epistemic injury.

Speaker Bio

Timmy Davis is the founder of The Psychedelic Experience Clinic, director of Psychedelic Policy and Regulation at the Centre for Evidence Based Drug Policy (CEBDP), policy director at the Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR) campaign and a trainee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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

Maya
maya

Paganism: From Ancient Myths to Modern Realities – Ethan Doyle White – Zoom

Paganism: From Ancient Myths to Modern Realities
Ethan Doyle White Who or what, exactly, is a pagan? “Paganism” is one of these words that is slippery and imprecise, continually shifting and taking on new meanings. Were the ancient Greeks or early medieval Vikings “pagans”? And if so, why? Moreover, who exactly are those people who call themselves pagans today and what is their relationship to the religions of the distant past?
Helping to cut through the confusion, this talk explores the history of paganism as a concept, examining how it arose among fourth-century Christians as a means of designating everyone and anyone not venerating the God of Abraham. From there, it looks at how the term has entered the modern world as a label embraced by tens if not hundreds of thousands of living people, among them Wiccans, Druids, and Goddess worshippers.
Bio
Ethan Doyle White is a historian and scholar of religion with a PhD from University College London (UCL). Among his research interests are modern Paganism and related forms of esotericism, early medieval religion, and modern uses of archaeology and folklore. He currently teaches courses at City Lit, London and was previously a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. Among his publications are Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Sussex Academic Press, 2016), Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals (Thames and Hudson, 2023), and The New Witches of the West: Tradition, Liberation, and Power (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He is also the lead director for interviews at the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) and sits on the editorial boards of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies and the American Academy of Religion’s “Reading Religion” website.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene.
IMAGE: Raphael, ‘The Council of Gods,’ (c.1517). Villa Farnesina. 
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The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen – Lena H Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen

Long before Disney and Pixar, there was Hans Christian Andersen—a poor shoemaker’s son from Odense whose imagination would enchant the world. In this lecture, we journey through the extraordinary life of Denmark’s most celebrated storyteller, from his humble beginnings and restless travels across Europe to his friendships with royalty, artists, and literary greats.

We will uncover the inspiration behind timeless tales like The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, and The Ugly Duckling, exploring how Andersen’s own triumphs, heartbreaks, and unrequited loves found their way into his fables. Alongside his fairy tales, we will meet the man himself—eccentric, romantic, and endlessly curious—through his diaries, letters, and the anecdotes of those who knew him.

Blending biography, history, and literary magic, this talk invites you to step into a 19th-century world of candlelit parlours, grand salons, and windswept northern shores, where every life holds the seed of a fairy tale—if only we learn how to tell it.

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

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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

Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture Two – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages

From the physicians of ancient Greece to the virologists of the 21st century, herpes has fascinated, frustrated, and stigmatised in equal measure. In this second lecture, we unravel the complex story of the herpes simplex viruses—agents of an infection so old that it is woven into the DNA of human civilisation itself. We will examine its earliest written descriptions by Hippocrates, its curious role in Renaissance court scandals, the myths and moral panics it sparked in the 20th century, and the scientific breakthroughs that reshaped both treatment and public perception.

Through an interdisciplinary lens—combining medical history, epidemiology, and cultural analysis—we will explore how herpes has been portrayed in art, law, literature, and the media, and why its social stigma endures despite its ubiquity. This is the story of a virus that is both commonplace and culturally charged, told with the precision of history and the intrigue of human drama.

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

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine – Giorgia Gaia – Zoom

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine

Over the past six years, this ongoing investigation into the paranormal dimensions of psychoactive experiences has continued to identify Ketamine journeys as uniquely significant. Ketamine remains a profoundly paradoxical substance at once celestial and infernal. Its remarkable psychedelic capacities intertwined with its well-documented potential for dependence. Nonetheless, accounts of deep Ketamine “breakthroughs” stand out as particularly compelling for the study of anomalous and paranormal phenomena. The substance seems to grant access to liminal territories where conventional understandings of reality and unreality, as well as time and space, can be dismantled and reconfigured in unexpected ways.

This lecture revisits and expands upon the “magical” qualities attributed to Ketamine, emphasizing its capacity to open hyperdimensional experiential spaces that, although sharing affinities with other psychedelics, remain strikingly distinct. Over the years, Ketamine has gained increasing prominence within an underground psychonautic occulture, a community drawn to the esoteric and metaphysical potentials of altered states, as well as within the broader field of contemporary psychedelia.

The ethnographic material presented reflects an evolving archive: a continually expanding collection of interviews, uncanny experiences, and reports of alternate or “alter(n)ate” realities shared by adventurous psychonauts across diverse sets and settings. Together, these accounts trace a living, open-ended inquiry into the ways Ketamine continues to shape, distort, and illuminate the boundaries of human perception.

Speaker Bio

Giorgia Gaia is an independent researcher, with MA degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology and in History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Since her early twenties she has been involved in the underground scene of rave culture, as a DJ and cultural producer. Her academic research has focused on countercultures, esoteric communities, occultism and psychonautic. Being herself continuously involved in the creation of alter(n)ate realities and magickal experimentations, since 2013 she is co-curator of Ozora Festival’s cultural area. In 2018 she founded Occulture Conference, a Berlin based festival exploring occultism and esoteric arts.

https://occultureconference.com

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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