Archives: Digital Events

Welsh Witches – A Lecture by Richard Suggett on Zoom

On the heels of Halloween/Nos Calan Gaeaf, thoughts will turn, perhaps a little apprehensively, to witches, ghosts and other beings. In Wales, perhaps more so than in other parts of the British Isles, the landscape is full of reminders of the spirit world: many places are associated with witches (gwrach), sprites (bwbach), ghosts (yspryd) and other ghastly beings. To explore place-names associated with the supernatural, simply type in gwrach (or another word) into the Royal Commission’s Historic Place-names in Wales website and view the results.

Witchcraft in Wales

What is the historical background to these place-names? A new book by Richard Suggett, RCAHMW’s Senior Architectural Investigator, explores the documentary evidence relating to witchcraft in Wales.* For the first time, the documentary evidence relating to Welsh witchcraft is published in full. The written evidence surviving from some twenty cases has been fully transcribed in this new book. These texts reveal some remarkable events and personalities that have remained hidden for three hundred years. In these cases we encounter suspected witches, cursers and healers, users of love magic and charms, believers in fairies, and several confidence tricksters who offered wealth and cures through supernatural means.

Welsh Witches

There were some forty prosecutions for witchcraft in Wales and five suspects were tragically hanged for witchcraft. Places and buildings associated with these trials can still be visited. The remarkable Court-house (NPRN 23134) at Beaumaris, where Margaret ferch Richard was convicted of witchcraft in 1655 and afterwards executed, uniquely preserves its instructive and atmospheric interior. The beautiful west window and sixteenth-century roof at Dyserth Church (NPRN 300471), Flintshire, would have been familiar to the witnesses who gave evidence against Gwen ferch Elis, convicted and hanged for witchcraft in 1584. Ffynnon Elian (NPRN 32271), a ‘holy’ well near Abergele, that developed a grim reputation as a cursing well, remains a feature of the historic landscape.

Richard Suggett is a historian, currently senior investigator at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies.

The Magical Mind of Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealist & Occultist – Dr. Amy Hale – Zoom Talk

The Magical Mind of Ithell Colquhoun

Having languished as a footnote in art history for decades, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) is finally gaining recognition as one of the most interesting, dynamic, and theoretically sophisticated women Surrealists. Colquhoun was a visual artist, writer, poet and essayist whose dedication to enlightenment through the pursuit of occult knowledge was the foundation of all of her work.

This richly illustrated lecture will sample the astonishing range of Colquhoun’s occult experiments and theories, ranging from her extra dimensional aspirations and ideas about sex magic, to her magical implementations of the esoteric paradigms of W.B. Yeats.

Dr. Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, and culture. 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 Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave Macmillan).

The History of Halloween with Professor Ronald Hutton on Zoom

Halloween is usually regarded as the creepiest festival of the modern year, a celebration of witchcraft, phantoms and images of fear which comes down to us from a remote and murky pagan past. Some see it in much more positive light as the ancient Celtic New Year and feast of the dead, called Samhain, a time when the veil between the human and superhuman worlds, and those of the living and the dead, grows thin enough for contact to be made between them.

Join Ronald Hutton for an evening which is intended to explain how such differing views of it have come to be held. He will also offer suggestions regarding how traditional each is, and so propose answers to the fundamental question of how old this festival really is, whether it should still be celebrated, and if so, how?

Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea: Witchcraft and Witch-hunting in Early America Professor Leslie Lindenauer

This Zoom lecture will explore witchcraft and witch-hunting in New England in the seventeenth century, in communities shaped by a profound belief in the devil and his minions.

Mention Salem Massachusetts and most people will make an immediate connection to the witch trials of 1692, when the courts sentenced 19 people to hang for the crime of witchcraft and tortured a 20th to death. Salem unofficially, and perhaps a little glibly, calls itself “The Witch City.” Less known, even in the United States, is that dozens and perhaps hundreds of people were tried for witchcraft in New England beginning over four decades before the events in Salem. At least sixteen people were executed for the crime, most of them women. This lecture will explore witchcraft and witch-hunting in New England in the seventeenth century, in communities shaped by a profound belief in the devil and his minions. The talk will also explore the idea that witch-hunting was women-hunting, and the difficulty Americans have coming to terms with dark periods in our history.

Leslie Lindenauer is a Professor in the Department of History and Non-Western Cultures at Western Connecticut State University, where she teaches courses in early American history, gender studies, public history, and American Studies. Her book I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 was published by Lexington Books in 2014. Before her career in academe, Leslie worked for a couple of decades as an educator and administrator at a number of history museums in the Northeast.

Vodún Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power – Timothy R. Landry by Zoom

Tourists to Ouidah, a city on the coast of the Republic of Bénin, in West Africa, typically visit a few well-known sites of significance to the Vodún religion—the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is worshipped, and King Kpasse’s sacred forest, which is the seat of the Vodún deity known as Lokò. However, other, less familiar places, such as the palace of the so-called supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin, are also rising in popularity as tourists become increasingly adventurous and as more Vodún priests and temples make themselves available to foreigners in the hopes of earning extra money.

In this zoom lecture Timothy R. Landry examines the connections between local Vodún priests and spiritual seekers who travel to Bénin—some for the snapshot, others for full-fledged initiation into the religion. He argues that the ways in which the Vodún priests and tourists negotiate the transfer of confidential, sacred knowledge create its value. The more secrecy that surrounds Vodún ritual practice and material culture, the more authentic, coveted, and, consequently, expensive that knowledge becomes. Landry writes as anthropologist and initiate, having participated in hundreds of Vodún ceremonies, rituals, and festivals.

Examining the role of money, the incarnation of deities, the limits of adaptation for the transnational community, and the belief in spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft, Vodún ponders the ethical implications of producing and consuming culture by local and international agents. Highlighting the ways in which racialization, power, and the legacy of colonialism affect the procurement and transmission of secret knowledge in West Africa and beyond, Landry demonstrates how, paradoxically, secrecy is critically important to Vodún’s global expansion.

Timothy R. Landry teaches anthropology and religious studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

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Traditional Fairies – Professor Ronald Hutton Zoom Lecture

Examining the older, darker, more scary and more serious world of traditional British and Irish peoples who lived alongside fairies, elves, gnomes, brownies and pixies and had to deal with them.

This evening Ronald Hutton takes us to fairyland: not that of Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories, or even that of Shakespeare, but the older, darker, more scary and more serious world of traditional British and Irish peoples who lived alongside fairies, elves, gnomes, brownies and pixies and had to deal with them. His mission is to discover what these peoples believed about these beings and the coping strategies that they adopted towards them: and how these differed from the beliefs and relations found in later literary fairy tales. He also considers the question of the value of telling stories about the traditional fairies and the meanings that these had for the people who told them. Almost everybody knows that traditional fairies were seldom cute, but how dangerous were they? Who were the sorts of people who made relations with them and why? What could those relations feel like? These are more of the issues which will be discussed tonight.

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.

Carl Hoffman on the Death of Michael Rockefeller – Zoom Lecture

Carl Hoffman will talk about his book – Savage Harvest – The mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea in 1961 has kept the world and his powerful, influential family guessing for years. Now, Carl Hoffman uncovers startling new evidence that finally tells the full, astonishing story.

Despite exhaustive searches, no trace of Rockefeller was ever found. Soon after his disappearance, rumors surfaced that he’d been killed and ceremonially eaten by the local Asmat—a native tribe of warriors whose complex culture was built around sacred, reciprocal violence, head hunting, and ritual cannibalism. The Dutch government and the Rockefeller family denied the story, and Michael’s death was officially ruled a drowning. Yet doubts lingered. Sensational rumors and stories circulated, fueling speculation and intrigue for decades. The real story has long waited to be told—until now.

Retracing Rockefeller’s steps, award-winning journalist Carl Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea, immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals, secret spirits and customs, and getting to know generations of Asmat. Through exhaustive archival research, he uncovered never-before-seen original documents and located witnesses willing to speak publically after fifty years.

In Savage Harvest he finally solves this decades-old mystery and illuminates a culture transformed by years of colonial rule, whose people continue to be shaped by ancient customs and lore. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure, and ethnography, Savage Harvest is a mesmerizing whodunit, and a fascinating portrait of the clash between two civilizations that resulted in the death of one of America’s richest and most powerful scions.

Carl Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest, which was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a NY Times best seller, one of the Washington Post’s 50 notable books of 2014, a Kirkus best book of 2014 and the number one non-fiction book of 2014 on Amazon.com. The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s ten best books of 2010. He is a former contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired magazines and his narrative pieces have also appeared in Smithsonian, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure and many other magazines. He has traveled on assignment to eighty countries and is the father of three young adults. He lives in Washington, D.C

Zoroastrianism and the Parsis – Professor Almut Hintze – Zoom Lecture

Zoroastrianism and the Parsis

This illustrated talk highlights some aspects of the history, teachings and religious practice of a little known religion, Zoroastrianism. Once the official creed of mighty Persian Empires, Zoroastrianism probably had an influence on the religious ideas of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It survives to the present day as the faith of small but influential minorities in Iran, India and diaspora communities around the globe.

Professor Almut Hintze

Almut Hintze is Zartoshty Brothers Professor of Zoroastrianism at SOAS, University of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. She specialises in Zoroastrianism and the tradition of its sacred texts, of which she has published several editions. She currently directs a collaborative project on the Multimedia Yasna, funded by European Research Council (2016–2021), to produce an interactive film of a complete performance of the core ritual of the Zoroastrian religion, the Yasna, electronic tools for editing Avestan texts, and an edition with a translation, commentary and dictionary of the Yasna.

Women Surrealists with Professor Dawn Ades on Zoom

Whitney Chadwick’s pioneering study Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985) transformed the position of the women associated with the movement. It was controversial – Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini both felt being singled out would perpetuate their ‘exile’, and Meret Oppenheim refused permission to reproduce any of her work in the book. They were not alone in questioning the legitimacy of separating their work from that of male surrealists, rejecting the implication that it was conditioned by their gender, and insisting that the creative spirit is androgynous. However, there is no doubt that since the publication of Chadwick’s book artists like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, all closely associated with Surrealism at some point in their lives, have become hugely popular and if anything more familiar than their male colleagues.

It’s pleasing to see justice done, of course, but the question remains, why were the many women associated with the movement ignored or sidelined for so long? It used invariably to be the male faces that defined the movement. What might it have to do with one of the central paradoxes of Surrealism, that Woman was elevated as the muse and object of desire, given a central and revolutionary role in the aim of transforming the world, but women were often in practice denied a voice? What has the vastly increased visibility of women artists and their work in recent years added to our understanding of Surrealism? I propose to take a sideways look at the issues, and focus on some striking female alliances, and one instance of discord: the long friendship, shared ideas and occasional collaborations between Carrington and Varo; the union of the artist Alice Paalen (Rahon) and the poet Valentine Penrose; the joint work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore; and the curious and one-sided rivalry between Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo. These will throw light on different ways in which women artists responded to, challenged or ignored the male surrealists’ attitudes to Woman and women.

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex. She writes about Dada, Surrealism, photography, and women artists among other things, and has organised or co-curated many exhibitions, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: the Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp, (Royal Academy and the Dalí Museum 2017-18). Apart from the catalogues associated with these exhibitions, publications include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D.Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006) and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015).

Charles Waterton, Ecentric Taxidermist by Dr. Pat Morris, Live on Zoom

Charles Waterton used his skill to fabricate imaginary creatures, forming three-dimensional religious and political cartoons that lampooned issues and people that attracted his ire.

Charles Waterton was a ‘larger than life’ person, a notable 19th century naturalist and an inventive taxidermist, now regarded as one of Britain’s great eccentrics. Few of his contemporaries engaged in such a variety of mischief and adventure. His activities, and the aggravation he caused, continue to fascinate, inspire and amuse even 150 years after his death. His famous book Wanderings in South America, published in 1825, excited acclaim, argument and derision in equal volume. It featured a mischievous taxidermy fabrication (The Nondescript), a new species of mammal or a tiny human; Waterton wouldn’t say. Instead, he confided to his physician “I do enjoy a bit of stuffing” and went on to create a collection of weird creatures as well as ‘normal’ specimens. Taxidermy was his passion and he was rudely dismissive of contemporary taxidermists. He used his skill to fabricate imaginary creatures, forming three-dimensional religious and political cartoons that lampooned issues and people that attracted his ire. His surviving specimens offer an insight into the mind of a controversial and idiosyncratic nineteenth century naturalist. This talk focuses on his taxidermy, a topic that has never been critically examined in any of the many published biographies, despite the key role it played in Waterton’s life.

Dr Pat Morris was Senior Lecturer in Zoology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and retired (early) in 2002 to spend more time with his taxidermy. He taught many students who now work in wildlife conservation, and also taught evening classes for adults for 20 years. He is well known for his studies on mammals, especially hedgehogs, dormice, water voles and red squirrels. He is a past Chairman of the Mammal Society and holder of its Silver Medal. He was a Council Member of the National Trust for 15 years and Chairman of its Nature Conservation Advisory Panel. He is President of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, a former Vice President of the London Wildlife Trust. He served on a Government Enquiry into aspects of the badgers and TB problem and for 3 years was co-Director of the International Summer School on the Breeding and Conservation of Endangered species, based at Durrell Zoo in Jersey.

He has published over 70 scientific papers, mostly on mammals and written about 20 books on bats, dormice, ecology of lakes and general natural history, with total sales of around 250,000. His popular book on hedgehogs has remained in print since 1983, his New Naturalist monograph on the hedgehog was published in 2018. He was a consultant to major publishers and the BBC Natural History Unit, for whom he also contributed radio and TV programmes for 20 years. He has travelled to more than 30 countries, including five expeditions to Ethiopia and 19 visits to the USA covering 47 of the States.

In his spare time he has pursued a longstanding interest in the history of taxidermy and was appointed the first Honorary Life Member of the Guild of Taxidermists. He published papers and 8 books on this topic and serves as one of the Government’s taxidermy inspectors for assessing age and authenticity of antique taxidermy in connection with CITES controls. The Society for the History of Natural History awarded him its Founder’s Medal and he was made MBE by the Queen in the 2015 New Year’s Honours List and has a devoted (biologist) wife, married in 1978.

He speaks in a purely personal capacity and not on behalf of any of the organisations with which he is involved, past or present.

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