Archives: Digital Events

A Beginner Zoom Course In Conjuring With Oliver Garwood

This Course Will Run over Four Wednesday evenings – the 24th of February, 3rd, 10th 17th of March from 7:30-9pm. Ticket price is for the full course

Join professional magician, Oliver Garwood, for a beginner’s course in the conjuring arts. Learn the secrets of prestidigitation and legerdemain. No need to buy expensive magic props, everything you need is probably already in a draw at home! Over four 90-minute sessions Oliver will teach you sleight of hand and presentation along with a bit of magical history and probably a story or two, or three. Effects taught will include card tricks, coin vanishing and penetration, rubber band magic and the famous cups & balls trick! If you have ever wanted to be able to amaze and amuse your friends then this is the course for you, or even if you don’t want to do that want to know how the tricks are done then this is still the course for you.

Week One – Card Magic

Types of cards – poker/bridge

Holding and shuffling

Injog/ False Shuffles (card controls)/ Breaks/ Double Lift/ False cut

Simple routine – card between jokers

Forcing – slip force, cross cut (time delay)

Reveals and making a routine (narrative) – ‘moment of magic’

Ambitious card – injog card add, false shuffle, double lift, card in centre final reveal.

Alternatives to cards – business cards, slices of cheese?

Week Two – Impromptu Magic

Betcha’s – fun games to win drinks! 3 glasses, impossible knot

Hunters knot – false knot then routine.

Coin vanish – French drop, retention vanish

Palming coins – classic, finger, Ramsay Subtlety

Pen vanish

Pen & Coin routine

Jumping Rubber Band

Week Three – Parlour Magic

Cups & Balls – history, performance, discussion on cups and ball choices

Paddle Move – knife and dry wipe marker

Grandma’s Necklace – shoe laces and handkerchief

Week Four – Balls and Mentalism

Tissue Paper ball vanish, multiply, ten step routine.

One Ahead Mind Reading Routine

Coin Stack Prediction – multiple out

Equipment Required

Pack of Cards

3 cups

Tin foil

Coins – I will advise on the preceding week what coins and sizes etc.

Handkerchief

Pen and notebook

Rubber band

Knife (not sharp!) – butter knife if possible

Shoelaces (pair of, long as possible)

Cotton thread

Tissues

Viktor Wynd met Oliver a few years ago when he took some lessons and found them wonderful. Oliver Garwood has been a professional entertainer for over 20 years. From managing entertainment in hotels and holiday centres across the UK and abroad he has performed for thousands of enthralled audiences, Oliver was also resident magician at a dedicated magic museum. Oliver has been a keen magician since the age of 8 when received a Paul Daniel’s Magic Set for Christmas, his work in various areas of entertainment has helped hone this skill which he is sharing with you in this beginner’s course in conjuring.

Mark Cocker Master Class On Nature Writing

Saturday 20th & 27th Feb 10am – 12 noon. Ticket fee includes both sessions

This is a four-hour seminar, split over two days in one week, to explore some of the techniques of nature writing. We will pay careful attention to language, and also to the power and importance of your initial observations. It is this preliminary work that often determines whether the words you choose will be original, fresh and suggestive.

The other key goal will be to explore how writers select their central theme, create mood and map out the psychological setting and the physical context quickly and in the fewest words. Economy of language is essential, since it is about distilling the essence of a place or season and using a part to evoke the whole scene.

This may be an exercise on nature writing, but it has deep relevance across the genres. All writers draw upon the landscape and the wider environment to create an atmosphere ad to set the scene. The class may be online but we will get as close to the living world as we possibly can.

Mark Cocker is a multi-award winning author and naturalist, whose 12 books include Crow Country, Our Place and Claxton. Over the last four decades he has also published more than 1000 essays on nature in national and international newspapers especially the Guardian.

Herbal Aphrodisiacs & Cures for the Heart with The Apothecary’s Daughter

Let The Apothecary’s Daughter take you on a journey through a lover’s garden, unpicking a carefully curated selection of plants that will soothe a broken heart, alleviate nerves on a blind date or increase fire in the loins. She will offer an illustrated lecture including old favourites like Rose, native gems like Hawthorn, and old legends like Mandrake, and hope that this will make you fall in love all over again with the natural wonders that surround us. You may wish to include these in your potions, but please do so at your own risk.

Speaker: Maria Vlotides completed a degree in Herbal Medicine at the University of Westminster in 2007 and started her life as a herbalist as The Apothecary’s Daughter. Having initially read PPE at Oxford University during the dark ages, she found herself hanging out with increasing regularity at the University’s Botanical Garden, fascinated by plant beds and the magic held within leaves and buds. She had a clinical practice until 2016 and has since continued to focus on teaching and writing. Her book Pharmapoetica in collaboration with poet and author Chris McCabe was nominated for the Ted Hughes Award in 2013. www.the-apothecarys-daughter.com.

The Horned God – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Join Ronald Hutton for an evening devoted to the main form of male divinity found in modern Paganism: the horned god of nature and of fertility. The questions to be answered in it are why this particular expression of the divine masculine came to dominate in contemporary Pagan tradition, and how and when it did so. The result is a tour through the work of poets, novelists and magicians over the past two hundred years, following the hoofprints of the god from remote antiquity through all manifestations of the modern. In the process we encounter him as protector, liberator and lover.

Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

The Making of Magical Cornwall with Dr Amy Hale

Cornwall has a reputation as a place where magic exists just under the surface. Its history includes a tapestry of Druids, witches and Arthurian legend, set amidst dramatic, sweeping, landscapes and mysterious stone monuments. Today it is a modern Celtic Otherworld that is both genuinely potent and sometimes exploited. This talk will explore the historical development of magical Cornwall in the cultural imagination. We will reach back to its early status as a liminal setting for medieval Continental legend, explore the antiquarian and folklore studies of Cornwall emerging alongside early modern Celtic identities, and finally look at how post-industrial tourism has shaped perceptions of a Cornwall that is lost in time.

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.

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

Encounters with The Uncanny with Helen Cornish

The Unnatural History of Cornwall – curated by Dr. Amy Hale brings stories of the weird and wonderful from Cornwall to a wider audience, with an emphasis on Cornish voices from the past and the present.

There is a web of sites around the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, that are often seen as places where the veil between the worlds is thin. The waterfall at Nectan’s Glen, the carved labyrinths at Rocky Valley, and the memorial stone to Joan Wytte, reputed nineteenth century Bodmin witch, where genius loci (spirits of place) dwell. One way of thinking about experiences at these sites is to think of the uncanny – the prickle on the back of the neck, the feeling of being watched by other-than-human persons, the sense of time slippage or dislocation from the everyday. Rather than see these feelings of the uncanny triggered by primal fears, I use this map of a magical Cornwall to think about how the uncanny may also be an invitation – although not necessarily benign – towards encounters with animated and live otherworlds.

Speaker: Dr Helen Cornish (Anthropologist, Goldsmiths): I have carried out anthropological fieldwork with British witches and Pagans on histories of modern witchcraft since 2000. Most of my research has been in Sussex and at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. I am completing a book that looks at how witchcraft histories have been negotiated over the last twenty years. Some photos of the Cornish sites can currently be found at the Shared Sacred Landscapes online exhibition at https://www.sharedsacred.com/helen-cornish.html

Curator: 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.

Bedtime Stories with Viktor Wynd: Irish Fairytales

This winter 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. In this first session Mr.Wynd will tell you some of his very favourite fairy tales from Ireland, featuring a talking corpse, a Merrow (which is very similar to a mermaid, but not at all the same), the good people (who may be fairies, and may not be that good), a changeling child (or possibly two) and the very devil himself.

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.

Mr.Wynd will be drinking Malmsey Wine (Madeira) this Sunday evening and strongly recommends you do too – or perhaps a glass of Marsala Wine or even Whiskey. That said if you would rather have a cup of cocoa or chamomile tea that would also no doubt be delightful, though you may find that not only will an alcoholic drink help you enjoy the stories, but, certainly if you ahve enough, help you to slip into a deep sleep as well

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

Grimm Tales from The Brothers Grimm – Zoom Bedtime Stories from Viktor Wynd

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 verisons and may not be suitable for the tenderist ears.

This evening Mr.Wynd will choose some of his favourite tales, Princesses will suffer strange enchantments, evil stepmothers will plot and scheme, shapes will change, magic, madness and evil beasts galore.

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, Ireland, Africa, Papua New Guinea & North America – so far.

Mark Cocker on Crows – Zoom Lecture

One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley. From the moment he watched the multitudes blossom as a mysterious dark flower above the night woods, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. They became for Cocker a fixation and a way of life. In his book “Crow Country” – widely considered the best of the recent boom of nature writers – Cocker goes in search of them, journeying from the cavernous, deadened heartland of South England to the hills of Dumfriesshire, experiencing spectacular failures alongside magical successes and epiphanies. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds’ inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls ‘our landscape made audible’. Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a reminder that ‘Crow Country’ is not ‘ours’: it is a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly. Viktor Wynd is especially delighted that Mark Cocker has so generously consented to speak as for many years, obsessed by Crow Country, he has been trying to persuade Mark Cocker to leave Norfolk and come to London and give a talk. (photo Wynd with pet corvid Perdita .