Archives: Digital Events

A World on The Wing – Bird Migration with Scott Weidensaul

A World on The Wing – Bird Migration with Scott Weidensaul

Bird migration remains perhaps the most singularly compelling natural phenomenon in the world. Nothing else combines its global sweep with its inherent ability to engender wonder and excitement.

The past two decades have seen an explosion in our understanding of the almost unfathomable feats of endurance and complexity involved in bird migration – yet the science that informs these majestic journeys is still relatively in its infancy.

Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted writer and ornithologist Scott Weidensaul is at the forefront of this cutting-edge research, and he will talk about some of the most remarkable flights undertaken by birds around the world.

His own voyage of discovery sees him sail through the storm-wracked waters of the Bering Sea; encounter gunners and trappers in the Mediterranean; and visit a forgotten corner of northeast India, where former headhunters have turned one of the grimmest stories of migratory crisis into an unprecedented conservation success.

As our world comes increasingly under threat from the effects of climate change, these ecological miracles may provide an invaluable guide to a more sustainable future for ourselves. This is the rousing and reverent story of the billions of birds that, despite the numerous obstacles we have placed in their path, continue to head with hope to the far horizon.

Scott Weidensaul is one of the most respected natural history writers in the country. Among the more than 30 books he’s written are Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is a contributing editor to Audubon Magazine, and a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest. Weidensaul is an active field researcher specializing in bird migration. He is a co-director of Project Owlnet and directs Project SNOWstorm. He has been given numerous awards including the Audubon Award for Environmental Writing and was recently honored as a prestigious elective member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Weidensaul is a highly sought-after speaker at universities, museums and birding festivals.

Sigil Workshop With Chaos Magician David Lee – By Zoom

Learn how to make and use powerful sigils, in this two-part workshop with chaos magician Dave Lee. Starting with Austin Spare’s introduction of free-form sigilization, we’ll explore a variety of approaches to making sigils – including bindrunes, collage, graphic mashups, automated sigil generators and the idea of the artwork as hypersigil.

We’ll also cover the audial equivalent – mantras, and talk about how to get the best phrasing of your intentions. We’ll take a peek at the theory behind such magic and you’ll learn a few simple but powerful techniques for entering appropriate extraordinary states of consciousness.

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.

His books include the ground-breaking Life-Force: Sensed Energy in Breathwork, Psychedelia and Chaos Magic.

Make your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Joanna Ebenstein

4 week online course

April 7, 14, 21, and 28 7:30- 9:30 pm GMT

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

Taught interactively via Zoom to a small class by Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein

Text Book: Death: A Graveside Companion (PDF to be provided)

Death is the great mystery of human life. Each of us – barring some medical miracle – will die. Foreknowledge of our own death is a defining characteristic of humanity; the ancient Greeks reserved the word mortal – meaning ‘subject to death’ – for humans alone. Some people believe that it is foreknowledge of our own death that drives all human culture, from religion and philosophy to mythology and art.

Death and Resurrection As Muse: 4-Week Tarot Course with Laetitia Barbier

Death and Resurrection As Muse: Stirring Your Creativity in Times of Crisis with Tarot’s Forgotten Iconography, Symbolism and Storytelling Power

4 week online course

Saturdays 6, 13, 20 and 27 March from 3 pm to 5 pm

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

Taught via Zoom by Morbid Anatomy Programing Director Laetitia Barbier

Why isn’t the Death card the last card of the tarot deck? Does the devil card announces damnation or celebrate irreverence? Is the Magician a creator, a shaman, a con-artist, or all of the above? The twenty two cards forming the Tarot’s major arcana have, for centuries served as a visual oracle, an iconic and adaptable muse to seekers, artists, occultists, film makers, pop-stars and high fashion, with influence stretching from the artworks of the Surrealists to TV’s Twin Peaks.

Mark Cocker Master Class On Nature Writing On Zoom

This is a four-hour seminar, split over two days in one week, to explore the techniques of nature writing. It builds on a previous, similar nature-writing course (on 6th & 13th March), but each 2-part session is entirely free-standing and independent. In these current sessions we will pay special attention to another of the essential parts of all good writing.

Nature is full of stories but how do you choose what to focus upon? How do you order the material to make it engaging, understandable and full of impact. The sessions will look very carefully at fixing your subject and setting the scene. It will look at how the writer creates a relationship with their reader and with their subject matter. Finally it will consider how you choose words to create the deepest emotional connection between those two parts.

This may be an exercise on nature writing, but it has relevance across the genres. All writers draw upon the landscape and the wider environment to create an atmosphere, to illuminate character and to move the narrative along. The class may be online but the aim will be being indoors as much of the outdoors as possible.

Instructor: 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.

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