Archives: Digital Events

Tarot Design Before and After the Golden Dawn – Emily E. Auger – Zoom

Tarot Design Before and After the Golden Dawn

Tarot originated as a gaming deck in the 1400s and in later centuries became a prop for esoteric practices and a tool for meditation and creative exercises. This diversification of uses was paralleled by a diversification of approaches to Tarot interpretation, design, and artistic style. This talk illustrates these changes with reference to allegory, archetype, and narrative in decks produced before and after the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888.

Bio

Emily E. Auger (MA, MA, Ph.D.) is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews, including Tarot and Other Meditation Decks (McFarland 2004; expanded edition 2023), Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940-2010 (Intellect 2016), Tech-Noir Film (Intellect 2011), and The Way of Inuit Art (McFarland 2004). She edited the multi-author anthology Tarot in Culture Volumes I and II (2014) and is co-editor with Janet Brennan Croft of Divining Tarot: Papers on Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps and Other Works by Nancy-Lou Patterson (2019). She also served as the founder and area chair for the Tarot area at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association conference from 2004–2020.

Image title
Image credits:

Image credits: Pamela C. Smith (artist) and Arthur E. Waite’s The Rider-Waite Tarot. First pub. 1909. U.S. Games Systems The Rider-Waite Tarot® © 1971.

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.

The Centre of a Thousand Legends: A Brief History of Boleskine House and Aleister Crowley – Dr Andrew Wiseman – Zoom

The Centre of a Thousand Legends: A Brief History of Boleskine House and Aleister Crowley

This presentation offers a brief history of Boleskine House, located on the southern shore of Loch Ness, in the central Scottish Highlands. Commissioned by Archibald Campbell Fraser (1736–1815), son of the infamous Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and completed with Masonic honours in 1809, Boleskine House already had a strange, perhaps even notorious history, and decidedly even more so during and after Aleister Crowley’s tenure.A year after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley purchased the property in 1899 for the ‘sole’ purpose of undertaking a magical rite known as the Abramelin ritual, an operation aimed at coming into contact with his Holy Guardian Angel, or inner genius.Drawing upon extensive research undertaken for a forthcoming publication, I will delve into the reasons why Boleskine House was chosen by a young practitioner of the occult, why it was so important during his formative years and thereafter, and will attempt to disambiguate fact from fiction.

Speaker 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, perhaps even an unhealthy one, in Boleskine House and its long-held association with the iconoclastic occultist Aleister Crowley. 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 author of the forthcoming title Lord Boleskine: Aleister Crowley and the House of the Beast 666, a detailed and engaging account of Crowley’s residence at his Highland home will be offered as well as the controversial legacy which he left in his wake.

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.

Images:

Boleskine House as photographed in 1912

‘With pipe, purity and posture’: Aleister Crowley as explorer and poet, May 1906, New York

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Animal Ghosts Through History: How traditional ghost beliefs navigated non-human deaths – Rebecca Willis – Zoom

Animal Ghosts Through History: How traditional ghost beliefs navigated non-human deaths

Ghosts are a prominent belief shared by many cultures throughout history, often shaped by religious ideas of death and the afterlife. However, these beliefs tend to be overwhelmingly focused on the ghosts of humans and those that manifest in a human form. But death is not a uniquely human experience and for thousands of years people have grappled with the fate of the animals that share our mortality.

While animal ghosts have received notably less attention than their human counterparts throughout history, their presence can be traced back to classical antiquity and continues to feature in ghost stories today.

This lecture discusses key ghost stories through history and explore the continuing (and often contentious) belief in animal ghosts, delving into the complex relationships that exist between humans, animals, and death.

Bio

Ms Rebecca Willis is a current PhD student and casual academic at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research spans across antiquity and into early modern Europe examining how the lens of magic and related belief systems can be used to provide new and comparative insights into the perceptions and interactions between individuals, their own embodied existence, and the natural environment in which they lived.

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.

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Major Arcana – The Tarot of Leonora Carrington – Prof. Susan Aberth – Zoom

Major Arcana – The Tarot of Leonora Carrington

The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. As both a writer and painter, she was championed early by André Breton and joined the exiled Surrealists in New York, before settling in Mexico in 1943. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Drawing inspiration from the Tarot of Marseille and the popular Waite-Smith deck, Carrington brings her own approach and style to this timeless subject, creating a series of iconic images. Executed on thick board, brightly coloured and squarish in format, Carrington’s Major Arcana shines with gold and silver leaf, exploring tarot themes through what Gabriel Weisz Carrington describes as a ‘surrealist object’.

This tantalising discovery, made by the curator Tere Arcq and scholar Susan Aberth, has placed greater emphasis upon the role of the tarot in Carrington’s creative life and has led to fresh research in this area.

Speaker Bio

Susan L. Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College.  She received her B.A. from UCLA, M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  In 2022 she received a Curatorial Research grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for travel in connection with research into the  esoteric traditions in the Americas. Her book publications include The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (2020, reissued in an expanded edition 2022) co-authored with Mexican curator Tere Arcq; Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (2004, Lund Humphries & Turner, Spain). She has contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues: Surrealism and Magic, Guggenheim Venice (2022); Hilma af Klint (Zwirner Gallery, 2022), Olga de Amaral (Lisson Gallery, 2022), Not Without My Ghosts (2020, Traveling exhibition in England); Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Juanita Guccione: Otherwhere (Napa Valley Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos Magicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Journal of Surrealism of the Americas, Artforum, Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, and Black Mirror.

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Rosaleen Norton – the fabulous, one-and-only ‘Witch of Kings Cross’ – Marguerite Johnson – Zoom

Rosaleen Norton – the fabulous, one-and-only ‘Witch of Kings Cross’

Rosaleen Norton, dubbed ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’ was a witch, artist, writer and philosopher from the 1930s until her death in 1979. Possessed of an acute intellect, Rosaleen studied and affected a personal and complex system of polytheism, trance magic, and sex magick, which was characterised and caricatured as ‘witchcraft’ and, sometimes, as ‘satanism’ by the Australian popular press.

Let Marguerite Johnson take you on a magical, witchy (broomstick) ride as she discusses Rosaleen – or Roie – and her wonderful legacy on popular and esoteric cultures through her occult and trance-induced art and her enduring dedication to an occult life. Marguerite will also discuss some of the scandals surrounding Roie, and the intense police and media scrutiny, which sometimes led to arrests, court cases and prosecutions.

In this lavishly illustrated talk, Marguerite not only shares the story of her own fascination with Roie, which began in childhood, but also some lesser-known archival material from her personal collection.

This special talk coincides with the exhibition – Four Witches & a Warlock: Magickal Art by Rosaleen Norton, Ithell Colquhoun, Madge Gill, Leonora Carrington & Austin Osman Spare – at The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History (Oct 01st 2024 – March 9, 2025)

Bio

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.

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An Uncanny Valentine’s Day – Australia 1900 – Prof. Marguerite Johnson

An Uncanny Valentine’s Day – Australia 1900

On Valentine’s Day, 1900 a group of young ladies and their teachers from Appleyard College, Victoria head into the Australian bush, to Hanging Rock, to enjoy a picnic. What happened on that day was to become the stuff of legend. Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay and made famous by Peter Weir’s 1975 film, now a cult classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the story of the ethereal schoolgirl, Miranda, and some of her companions, has sometimes been insisted upon as fact – a strange case of fiction taking on a life of its own. This was not helped by Joan Lindsay’s cryptic and ambiguous comments in interviews following the publication of her novel in 1967. In this talk, Marguerite Johnson shares an alternative Valentine story – a story far removed from cupids and love hearts – but one of deep-seated fears of the Australian bush, legends and realities of missing children, sentient landscapes, and the gothic uncanny.

Bio:

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.

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Levitation, Seances, Ouija Boards, and Other Kinds of Dark Play – Professor Elizabeth Tucker

Dark Play

Not everyone is willing to take a close look at dark play, a genre that is meaningful for many adolescents and adults but worrisome for parents and teachers. Levitation, seances, “Bloody Mary,” Ouija boards, and the Charlie Charlie Challenge offer opportunities to explore the supernatural and to challenge oneself to overcome fear. Folklorists who have studied dark play include Iona and Peter Opie, Linda Dégh, Bill Ellis, and myself. Both folklorists and medical researchers have published articles about breath-control games, which can be extremely dangerous. Stories about Ouija board experiences explain amazing results that seem unlikely to have occurred without supernatural intervention. Levitation rituals, first recorded in the diary of Samuel Pepys, have taken various forms. Now that YouTube lets us watch young people’s self-generated performances of dark play, we can see the international transmission of this kind of folklore. YouTube has restrictions on dangerous content, but new kinds of videos are always popping up. For example, dangerous challenges for young people continue to take different forms. The Tide Pod Challenge, Cinnamon Challenge, and other variants are entertaining but may be lethal. Although the childhood underground of dangerous, challenging play tends not to be shared with adults, folklorists’ and physicians’ research and YouTube performances make it possible to gain insight into this significant kind of behavior.

Bio

Libby Tucker, Distinguished Service Professor of English at Binghamton University in New York, specializes in folklore of children and adolescents as well as folklore of the supernatural. She enjoyed levitation, séances, and Ouija boards so much as a teenager that she is still studying dark play now. Her six books include Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (2007) and Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook (2018, co-edited with Lynne S. McNeill. She studied with Linda Dégh at Indiana University and was happy to receive the Linda Dégh Lifetime Achievement Award for Legend Scholarship from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research last summer.

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.

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All Hallow’s Eve and the Scandinavian Witches Tradition – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

All Hallow’s Eve and the Scandinavian Witches Tradition

Join us for a chill-spining and fascinating historic journey into the mystical world of Scandinavian folklore and ancient witchcraft with the Norwegian historian and folklorist Lena. In this spellbinding lecture, we’ll delve into the rich magical traditions surrounding All Hallow’s Eve or the old Norse Àlfablòt. We will be exploring its connections to the dark and fascinating Völvas- the witchcraft legends of the North. From eerie tales of powerful shamans and spirit worlds to the ancient rituals that shaped the Viking culture Lena will talk about all the mysteries of how these Scandinavian traditions have influenced modern Halloween. Discover the hidden lore of witches and enchanted spells and prepare to be surprised about the magical practices that still echo through the forests and fjords of Scandinavia today..

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

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The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World – Jennifer Higgie – Zoom

The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World

It’s not so long ago that a woman’s expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men – including lauded modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee – without repercussion. The fact that so many radical women artists of their generation – and earlier – also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has for too long been sorely neglected.

Jennifer Higgie will talk about her book – THE OTHER SIDE, and explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim broke all attendance records; the ‘Desert Transcendentalist’, Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California; the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients; and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions.

Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalised group of artists, THE OTHER SIDE is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography and art history.

Bio

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine, and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, she is the author and illustrator of the children’s book ‘There’s Not One’; the editor of ‘The Artist’s Joke’ and author of the novel ‘Bedlam’, about the 19th century fairy painter Richard Dadd. Her book on women’s self-portraits, ‘The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women’s Self Portraits’, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in March 2021. ‘The Other Side: Women, Art and the Spirit World’, is published 2 February 2023.

Jennifer has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize and the John Moore’s Painting Prize. She also writes screenplays and her paintings are in collections in Australia. She is also the host of ‘Artist’s Artists’ a new podcast for the National Gallery of Australia.

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Mary Magdalene: From the New Testament to the New Age – Prof Philip Almond

Mary Magdalene: From the New Testament to the New Age

Mary Magdalene is a key figure in the history of Christianity. After Mary, the mother of Jesus, she remains the most important female saint in her guise as the first witness of the resurrection of Jesus and ‘the apostle to the apostles’.

This lecture focuses on the many ‘lives’ of Mary as these have been imagined and reimagined within the Christian tradition. It explores the ‘idea’ of the Magdalene in the New Testament, her cult and her relics in the Medieval East and West, and her legacy in the modern West.

In so doing, it illuminates the many different Marys across the centuries: penitent prostitute, demoniac, miracle worker, symbol of the ascetic and the erotic, feminist icon, the wife and lover of Jesus in The Da Vinci Code, and most recently in the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s wife’ hoax. The story of Mary Magdalene leads to some reflections on the relationship between myth and history within the history of religion.

Bio

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Western Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. Among his most recent works are The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Antichrist: A New Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), God: A New Biography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), and Afterlife: A History of Life After Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016).

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.

Image from Wiki Commons (public domain)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Mary_Magdalene_01.jpg

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