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.
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
This winter let Sam Lee & Viktor Wynd share a nightcap with you, tuck you into bed tell you Fairy Tales, sing you ballads and a sweet lullaby to send you into a deep sleep of strange dreams.
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.
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 .
Taken from her acclaimed book Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, Lisa Morton explores our fascination with talking to the dead in this illustrated presentation. Beginning with how the common perception of the seance differs from the reality, Lisa will also explore the history of this extraordinary practice, all the way from Odysseus seeking otherworldly advice and King Saul defying his own ban on witchcraft, to the horrifying Roman witch Erichtho and the medieval necromancers, to the Victorian obsession with Spiritualism and seances. Lisa wraps up this overview with a few words about contemporary psychics, the most recent seance movies, and the current craze for paranormal investigating.
Along the way we’ll meet Edward Kelley, the medium who helped Dr. John Dee converse with angels; the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by ‘spirit rappings’; Daniel Dunglas Home, the ‘greatest medium of all time’; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. The talk also considers Ouija boards, the Society for Psychical Research, and skepticism vs. belief.
Speaker: Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her recent releases include Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction from Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923 (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger) and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.
Simon Costin, the museum’s director, will talk on the history of The Museum of Witchcraft & Magic, and look at some of the museum’s collection. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, formerly known as the Museum of Witchcraft, is a museum dedicated to European witchcraft and magic located in the village of Boscastle in Cornwall, south-west England. It houses exhibits devoted to folk magic, ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, and Wicca, with its collection of such objects having been described as the largest in the world.
The museum was founded by the English folk magician Cecil Williamson in 1951 to display his own personal collection of artefacts. Initially known as the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, it was located in the town of Castletown on the Isle of Man. Williamson was assisted at the museum by the prominent Wiccan Gerald Gardner, who remained there as “resident witch”. After their friendship deteriorated, Gardner purchased it from Williamson in 1954, renaming it the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. Gardner’s Castletown museum remained open until the 1970s, when Gardner’s heir Monique Wilson sold its contents to the Ripley’s company.
In 1954, Williamson opened his own rival back in England, known as the Museum of Witchcraft. Its first location was at Windsor, Berkshire, and the next at Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire; in both cases it faced violent opposition and Williamson felt it necessary to move, establishing the museum in Boscastle in 1960. In 1996 Williamson sold the museum to Graham King, who incorporated the Richel collection of magical regalia from the Netherlands in 2000. The museum was damaged and part of its collection lost during the Boscastle flood of 2004. In 2013 ownership was transferred to Simon Costin and his Museum of British Folklore.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum
In this lecture Peter Godfrey-Smith brings his parallel careers as a philosopher of science and a scuba diver together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvelous creatures display remarkable gifts, with each of their tentacles even capable of thinking for itself. What does it mean that higher intelligence on earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind of the octopus is nonetheless so different from our own? Combining science and philosophy with first hand accounts of his cephalopod encounters, Godfrey-Smith shows how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colours and human beings to speak. By tracing the problem of consciousness back to its roots and comparing the human brain to its most alien and perhaps most remarkable animal relative this lecture sheds new light on one of our most abiding mysteries.
Speaker: Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.
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.
Ireland has some of the richest, most marvellous and most wonderful fairy tales – Viktor Wynd will tell you some more of his favourites, replete with supernatural beings and strange happenings.
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.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum
Two Part Course
Part One – Sunday 14th November 7pm-9pm
Part Two – Sunday 21st November 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 conspiracy theories. 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 learn what things we need in order to do magick, and then to do some!
This mini-course, two two-hour sessions, will include banishing, formulating magickal intentions, gnosis, evocation and invocation. Sigils are covered in the separate, complementary course Sigil Magick.
Dave Lee is a magician, breathwork coach and writer. He has spent over four decades exploring consciousness and changing realities, using techniques that include meditation, magick, psychedelics and energy work. He is a leading light in the Chaos Magic organization the Illuminates Of Thanateros and a Master of Rune-Lore in the Rune-Gild.
