Archives: Digital Events

Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence – Dr Pascal Michael – Zoom

Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence

“From Non-human Intelligence (NHI) to Transhuman Intelligence (THI): The Extratempestrial Hypothesis, Evolutionary Psychology, and AI Development

This talk explores the idea that the so-called “aliens” people encounter—especially the classic Greys—might not be extraterrestrial at all, but humans from the future. Anthropologist Michael Masters suggests that if we evolved far enough—larger heads and eyes, smaller bodies—we might look just like them. He argues they could be time-traveling scientists, studying us like we would study ancient human ancestors.

But evolution today isn’t just biological. As we merge with technology—AI, brain-computer interfaces, and more—our future selves may become something entirely new: transhuman. These beings might be part-human, part-machine, and their advanced technologies could even blur the lines between life and death, time and timelessness.

This possibility raises deep questions about consciousness, identity, and why so many of these encounters feel emotionally overwhelming or reality-shattering—what’s sometimes called “ontological shock.” If these entities are us, just much further along, what are they trying to tell us—and are we ready to listen?”

Speaker Bio

Dr. Pascal Michael BSc, MSc (UCL), PhD completed his doctorate in Psychology at the University of Greenwich in 2023 on a comparative analysis of the neurophenomenology of both DMT (& analogous) experiences and the near-death experience (NDE). He has been a lecturer (PT) there since, teaching and researching the phenomenology, psychology & neuroscience of psychedelics, NDEs, alien abduction/UFOlogy, related ‘exceptional human experiences’, and the intersections therein. He was program lead of the professional certificate in Psychedelics, ASCs and Transpersonal Psychology, and is currently a PhD & MSc supervisor, at the Alef Trust.Pascal has presented at many conferences, including the largest European conference on psychedelics, Breaking Conventions, and been invited to give several talks, such as for the privately held Tyringham Initiative, or give keynotes such as for the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy. His invited public talks and interviews number in the 30s. He has published many articles and chapters, including some of the most read articles in Frontiers in Psychology, which have been featured in several major news outlets including The Conversation. He is on the board of advisors for Noonautics and The Tyringham Initiative. He was PA to the chair of the Parapsychological Association, and was the 2020 recipient of the Schmeidler Outstanding Student award. Most lately, he was named one of the top 25 thinkers in psychedelic research.

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 indigenous 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.

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Caterwauling and Demon Raising: The Ancient Rite of the Taghairm? -Andrew Wiseman – Zoom

Caterwauling and Demon Raising: The Ancient Rite of the Taghairm?

The taghairm refers to an ‘ancient’ Scottish rite of divination or prophecy used, presumably only resorted to in extremis, as a practice aimed at gaining knowledge or to foretell future events. Three methods of the taghairm are identified as follows: water-, hide- and cat-summons. Occasionally, the first two methods are found in combination but for the sake of clarity these will be classed separately before considering the last-mentioned method involving cat sacrifice. All three methods are mentioned by Martin Martin (c. 1668–1718), a native Hebridean from the Isle of Skye, whose A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, circa 1695 (1703), provides some of the earliest ethnographical descriptions, and much else besides, of supernatural beliefs, customs, traditions, and ways of life then current in Gaelic Scotland. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the taghairm traditions in their cultural context and, more specifically, to analyse the most bizarre taghairm rite involving cat sacrifice, or feline immolation, rendered by William Mackay taghairm nan cat [summons of cats]. Before discussing the taghairm of cats in greater detail, the other two methods of the taghairm will be analysed and discussed in the light of various antiquarian notices, especially accounts given in both Irish and Welsh traditions as well as those identified in classical sources. In light of this discussion, I hope then to offer some tentative conclusions regarding the origins and cultural development of taghairm nan cat.

Bio

Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest in Scottish Gaelic intangible culture. He is currently editing a number of works and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As editor of the forthcoming titles Your Work Will Remain: Diaries of Calum I. Maclean (1951–1954), From Lochaber, Badenoch, Morar, Arisaig, Moidart, Easter Ross and Sutherland and The Highlands and Selected Writings of Calum I. Maclean, a detailed and engaging account of Calum Maclean’s fieldwork diaries as well as his academic and mainstream publications will offer an opportunity to reassess the legacy of one of Scotland’s most important twentieth-century ethnologists and folklorists.

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 on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child – Dr Jen Baker – Zoom

Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child

This talk examines the transformation of the ghost-child figure from oral folklore and legends to their literary incarnations in Anglophone cultures of the long nineteenth century. They are mostly found as a small but concerted sub-genre of the emerging literary Ghost Story of this period, but also appear sporadically in elegies and in images from spectral photography to illustration. We will see how the ghost child of this period occupied a liminal space not only between life and afterlife, but between puritanical and liberal forms of Christianity, between images of innocence and sin, between pity and terror, between oral tradition and textual manifestation, and between the ethereal and the corporeal. (Please note that there may be a few images of real (historical) child death shown).

Bio

Dr Jen Baker is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests are childhood, death studies, the Gothic, short form and illustration from the late c18th to the present on which she has published a range of articles and chapters and is currently working on her monograph Spectral Embodiments: Anxious Manifestations of Child Death in the long c19th. She is compiler and editor of Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (2021) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series.

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 on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Caption: Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “The Lost Ghost”, Everybody’s Magazine, May 1903.

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Witchcraft in Poland – Professor Michael Ostling – Zoom

Witchcraft in Poland

Outside the imagination, witches don’t exist – but in early modern Poland, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. Professor Michael Ostling of Arizona State University reveals the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes.

Having studied many accusations and confessions while researching his book Between the Devil and the Host, Ostling will also discuss how witches viewed themselves and their own religious lives. The accusations they faced of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us the deeply pious Catholic culture of Poland at the time. With it came a complex folklore of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptised babies.

Through the dark glass of witchcraft, Ostling will explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Bio

Michael Ostling is a religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft. His published works include a general history of witchcraft in early modern Poland, an edited volume on Christian understandings of goblins and fairies globally, and work in the history of emotions, the ethnobotany of witchcraft, the demonization of Jews and witches, and the millenarian roots of religious toleration.

He also writes on theories of religion, often by way of pop culture studies, with work on Harry Potter (and secularization theory) and the Wizard of Oz (and theories of myth).

Ostling’s current work is taking him in a new direction: critical pedagogy, with an emphasis on the educational philosophy of the 20th-century Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń.

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Twilight of the Godlings – Francis Young – Zoom

Twilight of the Godlings

Throughout the recorded history of Britain, belief in earthbound spirits presiding over nature, the home and human destiny has been a feature of successive cultures.

From the localised deities of Britannia to the Anglo-Saxons’ elves and the fairies of late medieval England, Britain’s godlings have populated a shadowy, secretive realm of ritual and belief running parallel to authorised religion.

Bio

Francis Young, author of the acclaimed Twilight of the Godlings, will take us deep into the elusive history of these supernatural beings, tracing their evolution from the pre-Roman Iron Age to the end of the Middle Ages.

Arguing that accreted cultural assumptions must be cast aside in order to understand the godlings – including the cherished idea that these folkloric creatures are the decayed remnants of pagan gods and goddesses – this bold, revisionist lecture traces Britain’s ‘small gods’ to a popular religiosity influenced by classical learning. It offers an exciting new way of grasping the island’s most mysterious mythical inhabitants.

Francis Young studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and regularly appears on BBC radio.

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Dark Fairy Tales by Viktor Wynd on Zoom

Dark Fairy Tales 

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.

This evening Mr. Wynd will tells some his favourite tales heard around the world, from nasty Germans chopping up people and eating them to disgusting, macabre and delightful tales from Borneo, learn of the birth of the leeches, the reason mosquitos are always buzzing human ears, why it is best not to suckle caterpillars – or indeed strange babies and something about bedbugs that might give you nightmares. Giant Octopuses, man eating pigs and a buried moon from Papua New Guinea, or possibly shapeshifting magickal creatures from Wales – the world will be your oyster.

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.

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film – Dr Murray Leeder – Zoom

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film

To celebrate Halloween, the Last Tuesday Society is hosting a presentation on the role of dreams in horror films.

Join Dr Murray Leeder as he examines the role of dreams in horror films and proposes “dream horror” as a mode for horror. The nightmare functions for horror sort of as the fairy tale does for the romantic comedy: as a kind of ur-signifier. Dream sequences have often represented a point of contact between horror and art cinema, since they license moments of avant-garde experimentation couched within narrative. They also represent moments where horror irrupts into other genres (e.g. the dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1955)). But, as we shall see, dreams are also often representations of occluded truths about patriarchal capitalism that need not be woken up from but woken up to. As Rosemary yells in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), ‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’

Bio

Murray Leeder is ATS Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Arts – English & Film Studies Department, University of Alberta. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

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 on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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Daisy Wheel, Hexfoil, Six-Petal Rosette & Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Daisy Wheel, Hexafoil, Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey

The six-petal rosette is well known to graffiti hunters, sometimes referred to as a daisy wheel. To geometers it is known as a hexfoil (or hexafoil) and to the adherents of the New Age as the ‘Flower of Life.’

It is first recorded as a solar symbol in Near East in the 8th century BC, flanking a Syrian solar deity – although there are claims that it can be seen in the symbolic art of earlier cultures.

It appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron; an object melding Celtic, Thracian and Near Eastern mythical symbolism. Two rosettes flank a Goddess, surrounded by exotic creatures which seem to be elephants, winged griffins, and a large feline.

The symbol was carried west by the Roman Legionnaires where it often appears on their headstones. The Merovingians of the 5th century deployed the symbol alongside pagan imagery on their grave slabs. By the 8th century, it was adopted by the Carolingians and embedded within their sacred architecture.

In early Medieval Europe it was used to invoke the protection of the Virgin, sometimes placed as a ‘crown’ in holy sculptures from the Mediterranean. By the time it arrived in England, it was considered to be the motif most appropriate for the pilgrim ampullae of Our Lady of Walsingham, the second most important shrine in England after Thomas Beckets shrine Canterbury.

Following the Black Death, the symbol was appropriated by the new elite class to adorn and protect their high-status buildings in the Tudor age. To show its durability, it even went on to have a further life as a motif used on headstones in the New World.

This talk will follow the symbol’s journey of appropriation by ancient cultures, up to the point when it becomes part of the  repertoire  of symbols sacred to Christianity. The talk  will focus upon the corpora of medieval graffiti, where it was often associated with fonts and follow it through to the Early Modern Period, where it was adopted by the elites to protect their grand residences and fortifications.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence

History has shown us that the Witch – as conceived of as the broom-riding hag stereotype –   was essentially the delusional construct of the misogynist cleric Heinrich Kramer.

His insidious ideas were perpetuated via the publication of  ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ (Hammer of the Witches) in 1486, a propagandist tract which came complete with fake approbations from his Faculty in Cologne. Condemned on release, numerous reprints over the years continued to disseminate his ideas, contrary to intellectual thought elsewhere.

As Kramer’s assertions were fantasy, it would be therefore safe to assume that no one had ever been harmed by so-called ‘maleficium.’

And yet, Kent’s Assize Court Records are full of indictments of those accused of practising malignant witchcraft and the subsequent judgements which led to their execution. Following the Witchcraft Act of 1562, indictments for murder by witchcraft had begun to appear in the historical record.

This illustrated talk uses a combination of survey, local case studies and the examination of the key witchcraft trials in the county to paint a picture of 17th century Kent. It was second only to Essex to have the highest number of witchcraft indictments in England

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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John Schorne, Gentleman Born, Conjured the Devil into a Boot – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

John Schorne, Gentleman Born, Conjured the Devil into a Boot

‘Master,’ ‘Maister’ or ‘Sir’ John Schorn(e), Rector of North Marston, Buckinghamshire died in 1314, reputed to have possessed miraculous powers of healing sickness in both animals and humans.

His most infamous miracle was when he conjured the devil into a boot! A second legend recounts the time when struck the ground with his staff from which a spring gushed forth. The water was said to be excellent for curing the ‘ague’ (malaria) and gout!

Following his death in the 14th century, his shrine became the third most popular after Canterbury & Walsingham – yet, mysteriously, he remained uncanonised!

This talk will seek to illustrate the circumstances for his non-canonisation, of how his bones were ‘translated ‘to St George’s Chapel at Windsor and how his ‘territory of grace’ spread out to encompass the south of England.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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