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Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon by Sue Tilley

Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon

Arriving from Australia in 1981, Leigh Bowery soon established himself at the centre of London’s nightclub scene and has remained a cultish, iconic figure in the decades since his death from AIDS in 1994. Remembered now chiefly as a performance artist, his bizarre, outlandish costumes and make-up have influenced generations of artists, from Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen to Lady Gaga.

It was in a club that he met Sue Tilley and the two soon became close friends and party companions. Bowery started the nightclub Taboo, which cemented his status as master of ceremonies and soon became the most notorious and sought after of London’s legendary eighties club nights. Journalist Alix Sharkey wrote – “These days Thursday night in the west end usually means Taboo – London’s sleaziest, campest and bitchiest club of the moment which is stuffed with designers, stylists, models, students, dregs and the hopefully hip”. Stars like Bryan Ferry, George Michael and Paul Young would come in to take a look, mingling with demi-mondaine regulars John Galliano, Michael Clark, Philip Salon, Trojan and Michael and Gerlinde Costiff. Boy George was later to write the story as a musical, creating a part for Tilley.

It was Bowery who took the New Romantic penchant for dressing up to the level of art, attracting the attention of Lucian Freud, who was fascinated by him. Freud painted Bowery and then Tilley herself. His portrait of her, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, went on to be sold at auction in New York in 1994 for 34m, the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time. As one of his closest friends, Sue Tilley has written the definitive biography of the man who came to embody the hedonism and excess of an era, with the intimacy of a true confidante. Told with a breezy warmth and camp humour, a language she clearly shared with Bowery, and with the full cooperation of his family, friends and wife Nicola Bateman, this is not only a portrait of the man but also a riveting tale of the eighties demi-monde and the raffish, but immensely talented, characters who inhabited it.

Bio

Sue Tilley was born in South London in 1957. Although she worked full time in various Jobcentres including 12 years in Soho’s Denmark Street, she became a stalwart of the eighties club circuit, where she met Leigh Bowery. He employed her as cashier at his nightclub Taboo. He introduced her to artist Lucian Freud and his portraits of her, among them Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, broke records at auction for paintings by living artists at the time. In 1997 she published her biography of Leigh Bowery. Tilley carried on working at the jobcentre until 2015 when she retired and moved to St Leonards-on-Sea. She now paints, runs art classes, writes, DJs, gives talks, hosts quizzes and collaborated with Fendi on their menswear SS18 collection. She also has a fashion line which is exclusively available on www.Popstacular.com.

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Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

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Psychedelic Therapy and Depth Relational Process by Maria Papaspyrou

Psychedelic Therapy and Depth Relational Process

As psychedelic medicines are moving towards becoming integrated into mainstream medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy, we face the danger of narrowing down their incredible breadth, depth and potential. How are we to hold the wide net of dialogue between often diametrically opposed disciplines and traditions, such as psychiatry and shamanism, open, active and fertile? How can we maintain a multiplicity of voices and perspectives as the most powerful and often most destructive structures of our societies attempt to assimilate psychedelics as medicines in the traditional western sense?

The integrative approach of Depth Relational Process is an attempt to maintain some core values of psychedelic inquiry through a framework that supports diversity, integrity and meaningfulness in the meeting of these forces with our western disciplines.

Bio

Maria Papaspyrou is an integrative psychotherapist, supervisor, and systemic facilitator based in Brighton, UK. She is a co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy (IPT), and a co-editor of “Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine” and “Psychedelics & Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Expanded States”. You can find out more about her work at towardswholeness.co.uk

This Psychedelic series is Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson and Dr David Luke

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic and parapsychology researcher. Having just graduated from Chelsea College of Arts, her work over the last six years has been informed by her concurrent shamanic training, work with the Wixárika (Huichol) tribe from Mexico, and role as a research assistant under Dr David Luke of Greenwich university in the study of the psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and other worlds. Walking between the worlds of the arts, science and the occult, she combines media and investigative techniques from each to inform and articulate one another in the exploration of ontology, consciousness and altered states, mytholopeia and mythology, ecology, the human condition and its relation to the environment, otherness and mortality. She describes her practise and research as contemporary Memento Mori (‘remember you will die’), and explores what that means in a time of mass ecocide and species extinction.

Follow her on the crooked path on Instagram @maya_themessiah

Dr David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, UK, where he has been teaching an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience since 2009, and he is also Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London, and Lecturer on the MSc Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology for Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including ten books, most recently Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience (2nd ed., 2019). When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting DMT field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans he directs the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon at the Institute of Ecotechnics, London, and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness. He has given over 300 invited public lectures and conference presentations; won teaching, research and writing awards; organised numerous festivals, conferences, symposia, seminars, retreats, expeditions, pagan cabarets and pilgrimages; and has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites. He lives life on the edge, of Sussex

This Psychedelic series is Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson and Dr David Luke

Victorian Hairwork Jewellery Masterclass with Karen Bachman

4-week online course

Tuesdays, 3, 10, 17 & 24th May

6:30-9:30pm Taught via Zoom by Karen Bachmann

PLEASE NOTE: This class requires supplies, a full list will be emailed upon registration.

In this four week class, students will learn about the history of–and create their own piece of– Victorian Hairwork.

We will explore–via readings, lectures, and making–the ways in which hairwork functions as a “secular relic,” and how this relates to the Catholic tradition of human relics as well as what has been called “the Victorian Cult of Mourning.” We will examine the genesis of Speaking Reliquaries, or Redende Reliquaire, and the transformation of human remains into objects of veneration, power, and sentiment. We will trace this idea to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the fascination with preserving human hair became popular as a means of keeping a physical relic or memento of a loved one—living or deceased—near. We will also examine how this developed in the context of Queen Victoria and the cult of mourning she inspired.

Russia’s Mystical Quest by Dr. Christopher McIntosh

Russia’s Mystical Quest

Since the fall of communism Russia has undergone a remarkable spiritual reawakening. Many are flocking or returning to the Orthodox Church, while others are turning to New Age movements, oriental religions or various forms of Paganism. Bookshops are full of works on the Tarot, magic, astrology and the like. In this talk Christopher McIntosh will give a preview of his forthcoming book on Occult Russia, which explores this many-faceted phenomenon and its antecedents.

Bio

Dr. Christopher McIntosh is that rara avis, a scholar who is also a fiction writer, an artist, a romantic dreamer and a connoisseur of the bizarre and the other-worldly. He was born in England and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and German at London University, later returning to Oxford to take a doctorate in history with a dissertation on the 18th-century Rosicrucian revival. He also has a diploma in Russian from the United Nations Language School from his time in New York as an Information Officer with the UN Development Programme. As a writer he has specialised in the esoteric traditions. His books include The Astrologers and their Creed (1969); Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972); The Rosicrucians (latest edition 1997); The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (1992), based on his D.Phil. dissertation; The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (latest edition 2003); and Gardens of the Gods (2005). His fictional work includes the occult novel Return of the Tetrad (2013), the spy thriller The Lebensborn Spy (2017) and the short story collections Master of the Starlit Grove (2014), The Wyrde Garden (2015) and The Sorceress of Agartha (2017). With his wife, Dr. Donate McIntosh, he produced a new translation of the Rosicrucian Fama Fraternitatis (2014). He also has a long-standing interest in nature-oriented belief systems. Since 1994 he has lived in north Germany.

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The Rosicrucians: Who and What Are They? by Dr. Christopher McIntosh

The Rosicrucians: Who and What Are They?

In the early 17th century some mysterious writings burst like a firework over Europe. They told of a German seeker called Christian Rosenkreuz, his journey through the Middle East in search of wisdom and his creation of the esoteric Rosicrucian Fraternity. Since then the Rosicrucian vision has been kept alive by many different groups and organizations from Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy to the British magical Order of the Golden Dawn. In this talk, Christopher McIntosh, author of two books on the Rosicrucians, will explore this movement and its many-faceted impact.

Bio

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Intro to Chaos Magick 1: Spells and Sigils – David Lee – by Zoom

This mini-course consists of two two-hour sessions.

Part One – Wednesday 4th May 7pm-9pm

Part Two – Wednesday 11th May 7pm-9pm

Ticket is both parts

We need Chaos Magick more than ever since the explosion of magickal thinking that has followed the lockdowns. People are getting into magick without a critical perspective, resulting in the current rash of deranged theories about what is happening. Chaos Magick provides multiple perspectives, a beacon of magickal sanity in a world gone mad.

Join this course and learn about belief as a technique, about the use of extraordinary states of consciousness (gnosis) and discuss theories old and new as to what makes magic work.

But mainly come along to make spells using powerful sigils, in this two-part workshop with me. We’ll talk about what we need to do a spell then explore a variety of approaches to making sigils – including graphic mashups, mantras and the idea of the artwork as hypersigil.

BIO:

Dave Lee’s magickal practice began in the late 1970s with the multi-model approach known as chaos magick. He has spent over four decades exploring consciousness and changing realities, using techniques that include meditation, magick, psychedelics and energy work. He was a founder member in 1980 of the first ever working group of the Illuminates of Thanateros chaos magickal order, and still serves in that community as an Elder. He joined the Rune-Gild in 1996 and was recognized as a Master of Rune-Lore in 2007. His books include the ground-breaking Life-Force: Sensed Energy in Breathwork, Psychedelia and Chaos Magic.

He publishes a newsletter very month or two with details of his forthcoming events and publications. All his public-facing links including the newsletter signup are here: https://linktr.ee/david23lee

Madeline Montalban: Magus of the Morning Star by Julia Phillips

Madeline Montalban: Magus of the Morning Star

Madeline Montalban occupies an important place in the story of twentieth century occultism. Publicly she was known as the author of articles about tarot, astrology, and other esoteric subjects that appeared in mainstream magazines from 1933 to 1982; within the esoteric community, however, she was respected as a talented and forceful magician who founded and ran the Order of the Morning Star, a correspondence course and Order that was focused upon angelic magic and especially Lucifer, the Lightbringer.

During her life Montalban occupied a highly visible place within the occult world and wrote many thousands of words more than her contemporaries, but her work was published primarily in mainstream magazines, which are an ephemeral medium, and familiarity with Montalban and her work declined after her death. This illustrated talk looks not only at her published work, but also her angelic course material and personal anecdotes from her students, and places Montalban firmly within the circle of other influential magical women in the occult world of the 20th century.

Bio

Julia Phillips is a post graduate researcher in the Department of History at University of Bristol and author of the chapter about Madeline Montalban in Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses edited by Amy Hale (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her interest in occultism began in the 1970s, when she regularly attended lectures at the Society for Psychical Research in London and encountered the work of Madeline Montalban in Prediction magazine. Over the past fifty years Phillips has studied and written on many different subjects related to the occult and magic and likes nothing more than sharing her passion with others.

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Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and the Fourth Way by Gary Lachman

Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and the Fourth Way

In 1915 a mysterious figure appeared in Moscow and soon gathered a core of devoted followers, students of his strange system of esoteric doctrine and psychological development. This remarkable man Gurdjieff had travelled in the east in search of ancient wisdom, and by his own account had found it. When the journalist and theosophist P.D. Ouspensky came into Gurdjieff’s orbit, one of the most compelling and dramatic narratives of spiritual adventure began, played out against the backdrop of WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. When Ouspensky arrived in London in 1922, he was feted by literary lights such as T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, and when Gurdjieff opened his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, much of the cultural crème de la crème crossed the Channel to be put through his particularly strenuous mill. What is the Fourth Way and is it true that we are, as Gurdjieff, said, really nothing but machines? Make a super-effort to attend and see

Book: In Search of P.D. Ouspensky

Bio

Gary Lachman is the author of many books about consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, including The Return of Holy Russia, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. He writes for several journals in the US, UK, and Europe, lectures around the world and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In a former life he was a founding member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Lachman studied philosophy, managed a metaphysical book shop, taught English literature, and was Science Writer for UCLA. He is an adjunct professor of Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk, www.facebook.com/GVLachman/ and twitter.com/GaryLachman

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The Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius – The Occult 1960s by Gary Lachman

The Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius – The Occult 1960s

The 1960s saw many revolutions: social, political, sexual. But one revolution in that frenetic decade may have made the biggest impact of all: the magical revolution. In 1960 a book appeared in Paris that quickly set the Seine on fire and had the existentialists tearing off their berets. The Morning of the Magicians was like a technicolour UFO landing in St. Germain de Pres. Alchemy, magic, occult Nazis, and much more set the tone that would dominant those swinging years. Soon Timothy Leary and LSD provided the canapes for the psychedelic generation, and by 1967, the most famous people in the world, the Beatles, had hopped on the occult bandwagon. Music, film, television, comics: practically all of 60s popular culture was saturated with mystical, magical, occult ideas, with a revived Aleister Crowley overseeing the proceedings. Yet darker sprouts soon shot up among the flower children, and by the end of the decade, with the Manson murders and the squalor of Altamont, something had clearly gone wrong. How did the Morning of the Magicians turn into the Night of the Living Dead? Come and dig it, man!

Book: The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind

Bio

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Rudolf Steiner – Spiritual Scientist by Gary Lachman

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist

The most successful figure of the early twentieth century occult revival was also its most enigmatic, the ‘spiritual scientist’ Rudolf Steiner. Before emerging in the early 1900s as a remarkable esoteric philosopher and leader of a new spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, Steiner kicked around Vienna, Berlin, and points in between as an all-purpose Germanic professor, lecturing on Hegel or Nietzsche at working men’s colleges, loitering in cafes, and for the most part keeping under wraps his strange ability to see spirits and speak with the dead. Starting out as a Goethe scholar, after a lecture to the Berlin Theosophical Society, Steiner re-invented himself as the charismatic, inspiring herald of a modern mystery school, that would have remarkable practical results in agriculture, architecture, education, medicine, the arts and even politics. Who was Rudolf Steiner? My lecture will go some way to answering that question.

Book: Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work

Bio

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