4 week online course
January 12, 19, 26 & 2 February 2022 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.
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.
Traditional ballads and the tunes that go with them can be quite separate entities that connect and part company as they travel through time. There is a sense in which both carry the stories and interpretations of the people and communities with which they engage. Indeed, these stories and meanings will often tell us more about these people and their social milieu than the origins of the tradition. During the course of its travels the story of the Pencarrow Hunt and Black John has connected with some interesting characters and provides the perfect study for an “unnatural history”.
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 September 11,18,25 and October 2nd
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.
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.
Speaker: Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels arrived in St Ives, Cornwall in 1958, a hopeful and ambitious young artist. For a few years his painting career went well, but he grew impatient with the limitations of abstract art. Instead, emboldened by Dada and Surrealism, his life became stranger and more magical. He displayed the disembodied head of an Egyptian princess, sawed a woman in half, and carried out some bizarre monster-raising stunts involving Morgawr the Cornish sea serpent. He included his wife, children and friends in many of these exploits and, indeed, after appearing in the national media, in the mid-1970s they became briefly known across Britain as ‘The weirdest family in the land’.
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.
Lilith – From Demon to Feminist Icon
The talk follows Lilith’s trajectory from her origins as an evil entity in Jewish folklore and demonology, to being a feminist icon today. We get to meet the Pre-Raphaelite poets, romantic painters, and lesbian Luciferians who all helped shape the image of her. We delve into the work of 19th-century occultists like Eliphas Lévi and Madame Blavatsky. We encounter the early feminists who saw a kindred spirit in rebellious Lilith. We examine her role in present-day political activism, Jewish feminist theology, Satanism and esoteric groups. Drawing on this multitude of voices, the talk also discusses broader mechanisms of counter-reading, mythical reinvention, and cultural subversion.
Per Faxneld is Associate Professor in History of Religions at Södertörn University (Stockholm), author of “Satanic Feminism Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth Century Culture” and a devotee of weird antiques, ominous music, and sinister sartorialism. He is the author of three monographs, two edited volumes, and numerous articles on Satanism, occultism, and esoteric art. In 2020, Faxneld made his literary debut with “Offerträdet” (“The Tree of Sacrifice”), an illustrated collection of folk horror tales set in 19th-century northern Sweden.
From Fantômas to the murderous delirium of the Papin Sisters, the criminal imaginary of modern Paris formed the basic cultural material from which the surrealist movement first stitched together its political and intellectual priorities. The surrealists established many of the basic coordinates of their poetic universe according to the images of violence and atrocity that formed the dramatic and often documentary core of modern popular culture. Ardent readers of the press and active consumers of popular culture, the poets and artists of the surrealist movement were also champions of real-life killers, particularly women: this included the anarchist Germaine Berton, who gunned down the managing editor of the reactionary right-wing newspaper L’Action Française in 1923, as well as the patricide Violette Nozière, who poisoned her father in 1933 in retaliation, she claimed, for a lifetime of sexual abuse. Such figures were criminalized by the popular press, yet for many surrealists their violent acts were counterstrikes against pervasive structural violence, which the surrealist group extended to colonialism, bourgeois morality, and, most of all, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Western Europe. Understanding crime—and distinguishing systematic violence from sudden, perverse outbursts— was fundamental to the surrealist movement’s responses to pressing political and intellectual events of the twentieth century.
4-week online course
Tuesdays, 5, 12, 19 & 26th October
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.
Introduction to Rune Magic / Runic Sorcery
Two Day Workshop
Day One Wednesday 6th October 6-8pm
Day Two Wednesday 13th October 6-8pm
(tickets are for both events)
What are runes?
How do we use them for spellcasting?
How can we tell if a rune in a reading is positive or negative?
Learn the basics of the Elder Futhark so you can makes spells for anything you wish – prosperity, health, security, inspiration, success, justice, concealment, communication and more – and that’s just the start!
Ghosts I have Nearly Seen
A Natural History of Ghosts tells of my attempts since childhood to see a ghost: a full-fat apparition rather than simply noises and feelings. I still have not seen one. Rather than do the usual talk about Christmas and ghost-stories I thought – why don’t I talk about my most personal experiences of the supernatural and uncanny? It was touched on at the beginning of the NHOG, but not really followed up since I didn’t want to skew the believing/sceptical balance of the book. In truth I have had alarming Ouija-board experiences in Oxford Colleges and the house of the former dictator of Cuba, have experienced JOTTS, have witnessed friends plagued one Christmas at the residence of a famous Screaming Skull, been subject to hypnopompic hallucinations for decades while on the verge of slumber (and subsequently had to attend an NHS Sleep Clinic earlier this year).
How does one navigate the subject when you heart believes, and your head does not? This is the story of my close-shaves with the ghostly.
Roger Clarke lives in Shoreditch, London. A published poet, librettist and short-story writer, he paid the bills as a literary critic on the Sunday Times and wrote three film columns a week for The Independent Newspaper. A Natural History of Ghosts has been translated in many languages including Japanese and Korean.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
CABARETS OF DEATH – Playing with Death and the Afterlife in Popular Amusements
A Live, Illustrated Zoom Talk with historian Joanna Ebenstein
Cabarets of Death: Playing with Death and the Afterlife in Popular Amusements: By Joanna Ebenstein, editor of Mel Gordon’s “Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth-Century Paris”
From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in Paris’ Montmartre district enraptured tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.
This illustrated talk will tell the story of the death themed cabarets of Paris, and situation them within the context of the history of death themed amusements—from phantasmagoria shows to Grand Guiginol to Coney Island’s disaster spectacles—in the age of rationality and beyond.
