Archives: Digital Events

Leonora Carrington. A World Made of Magic – Teresa Arcq – Zoom Lecture

In Leonora Carrington´s oeuvre, fantastic animals and beings inhabit magical worlds. Goddesses and magicians perform rituals in places filled with symbols and references abound to a range of occult traditions dating back to antiquity.

Her paintings bring together Celtic traditions and Egyptian, Hebrew, Mesopotamian and Greek mysteries. There are references To alchemy, astrology, the Cabala, Tarot, herbalism, magic and witchcraft. As Edward James once stated: “her paintings sometimes Seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight. Carrington´s interest in magic and witchcraft began in childhood and expanded with her encounter with the surrealists. Nevertheless, the imprint of Mexico and the Mesoamerican religions and magical rituals has often been overlooked. In this talk I will explore the syncretism of some of the Celtic and British traditions and the ones she encounter once she settled in Mexico where she produced the majority of her work.

Tere Arcq was Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico and Director of an International Art Investment Fund. As an independent curator, she creates and produces exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. Her most recent is Leonora Carrington Magical Tales at Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and MARCO in Monterrey. In 2012 she curated In Wonderland. The Adventures of Women Surrealists in Mexico and the United States, an international project presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec and The Modern Art Museum in Mexico.

Her expertise in the art world includes, teaching; edition of art books and exhibition catalogues; collaboration in the production of documentaries and short films on artists and the design and organization of specialized art tours for collectors. She is a frequent lecturer at museums, institutions and universities worldwide.

Tere Arcq is an Art Historian with a Masters Degree in Museum Studies and Art Management.

Witch Hunting in England and America, 1645–52 by Professor Malcolm Gaskill

After a long period when there were few witchcraft trials in England, in the mid-1640s, during the civil war, there was a devastating outbreak in the eastern counties. Self-professed witchfinders, assisted by midwives and other searchers, rode from place to place investigating rumours and encouraging witnesses. Around 300 suspects were arrested, a third of them executed. Something of the witchfinders’ methods, and the underlying causes of their crusade, drifted across the Atlantic to the American colonies. New England, which had seemed unbothered by witchcraft in the first twenty-seven years of its history, hanged its first witch in 1647. One of the best documented outbursts took place in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1651, when the fear and rage of a frontier community focused upon a labouring couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons. This talk tells their tragic story, and suggests how their fate was rooted in turbulent old England as well as in the unique conditions of the New World.

Grimoires & Magical Books – Owen Davies

No books have been more feared than grimoires, and no books have been more valued and revered. In his book Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies illuminates the many fascinating forms these recondite books have taken and exactly what these books held. At their most benign, these repositories of forbidden knowledge revealed how to make powerful talismans and protective amulets, and provided charms and conjurations for healing illness, finding love, and warding off evil. But other books promised the power to control innocent victims, even to call up the devil. Davies traces the history of this remarkably resilient and adaptable genre, from the ancient Middle East to modern America, offering a new perspective on the fundamental developments of western civilization over the past two thousand years. Grimoires shows the influence magic and magical writing has had on the cultures of the world, richly demonstrating the role they have played in the spread of Christianity, the growth of literacy, and the influence of western traditions from colonial times to the present.

Owen Davies is reader in Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. His main field of research is on the history of modern and contemporary witchcraft and magic.[1]

Mabinogi – the Hanging of a Mouse – Welsh Stories – Hugh Lupton

The Hanging of a Mouse

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi were set down on the page in the early thirteenth century. They are stories that had been told and sung by Welsh bards for centuries before they were written down.

One of the central concerns of the Mabinogi is the uneasy relationship between this world and Annwn, the Otherworld.

In this performance, drawing from the first and third branches, Hugh Lupton unravels a tale of violence, love, enchantment and revenge beginning with a badger in a bag and ending with a gallows for a mouse.

Hugh Lupton has been a professional storyteller since1981. He tells stories from all over the world, but his particular passion is for the hidden layers of the British landscape and the stories and ballads that give voice to them. He is also a lyricist and a novelist and has published many collections of traditional tales. His novel ‘The Assembly of the Severed Head’ explores the moment the Mabinogion moved from being part of a fluid oral culture to becoming a written text.

Open Sesame: Dorothea Tanning’s Bibliographic Surrealism

Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) was an American artist and writer, chiefly known for diminutive surrealist paintings and a clutch of soft sculptures. However, the reach of this centenarian was far more expansive than many viewers and readers may be aware for she also worked on one novella, Abyss or Chasm, for her entire career, as well as poetry and printmaking. Tanning’s prophetic visual and literary imagery, such as the recurrent child-woman, Destina, were often drawn from her childhood reading lists, pre-empting and reflecting surrealism’s literary heritage.

Bio

Dr Catriona McAra is Assistant Director, Heritage Collections and Curation at the University of St Andrews. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history with particular interests in feminist-surrealist legacies. She is the author of A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm (Routledge 2017), and her forthcoming books include Ilana Halperin: Felt Events (MIT and Strange Attractor, 2022) and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (Manchester University Press, 2022).

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The Flying House of Loreto – Dame Marina Warner

When the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation took place and Jesus grew up with Mary and Joseph was threatened by unbelievers, angels picked it up and carried it to safety, finally setting it down on a hillside overlooking the Adriatic, in Loreto. The relic of the Flying House of Loreto, inspired one of the most popular pilgrimages in the world until Napoleon sacked its treasury to pay his army. The holy House itself also appeared In Walsingham, Norfolk, and like its Italian counterpart, also became a huge draw and a very very rich cult site, which was laid waste in the Reformation. Marina Warner will tell the story of this holy house and its ‘wondrous flittings’ in relation to ideas about losing home and remaking it, exile and settlement.

Witch Hunting Old & New: A Lecture by Ron Hutton

Join Professor Ronald Hutton on Zoom to find out why the notorious medieval and early modern European witch-hunts took place – in collaboration with Morbid Anatomy New York.

Join Professor Ronald Hutton to find out why the notorious medieval and early modern European witch-hunts took place. Discover what made them different from witch-hunts elsewhere in the world, why they stopped and the impact have they had on witchcraft beliefs and human rights in the present world.

The story of witch-hunting takes us on a journey through the civilisations of the ancient world and early Christianity to a change in mood in late medieval European Christian times. This is when people stopped perceiving witchcraft as a minor problem affecting individuals and started seeing it as a satanic conspiracy directed against the whole of society.

Europe is unique in making this transition and viewing witchcraft as a demonic form of religion. It is also unique in moving from a profound fear of witchcraft to a disbelief in it, officially at least.

How this change came about and how far that fear still presents a problem to the modern world, will be the central issues of this lecture.

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.

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The Celestial Bed of Dr. James Graham, Sex Therapist with Author Lydia Syson

Dr.Graham guaranteed both ecstasy and fertility to the users of his infamous 18th Century Celestial Bed, Zoom lecture with Lydia Syson.

Dr Graham set out to bring the sublime into the sex life of every married couple. Widely considered the world’s first sex therapist, he guaranteed both ecstasy and fertility to the users of his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption which harnessed all the most exciting developments of the Enlightenment. Electricity, magnetism, mind-altering gases and music all played a part in this astonishing invention, luxuriously designed to produce pleasure and perfect babies.

Graham’s medical career took him from his native Edinburgh to America and back again, and he crossed paths with many of the most famous individuals of his day. The doctor’s well-publicised efforts to overturn medical orthodoxy provoked both admiration and ridicule. He was crowned “the King of Quacks”.

Lydia Syson will give a portrait of this remarkable eighteenth-century celebrity, revealing a character of great complexity: startlingly progressive, extraordinarily arrogant and touchingly humane. He was the epitome of his era, yet utterly one of a kind.

Lydia Syson, author of MR PEACOCK’S POSSESSIONS, (aTimes and Sunday Times Book of the Year 2018, the YA historical/political novels LIBERTY’S FIRE, THAT BURNING SUMMER, A WORLD BETWEEN US, & the biography DOCTOR OF LOVE: DR JAMES GRAHAM AND HIS CELESTIAL BED.

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The History of Perverse Sex by Historian Julie Peakman

In Collaboration with New York’s Morbid Anatomy join Julie Peakman to find out all about The History of Perverse Sex.

Homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, sado-masochists, necrophiliacs – all of these have been, or still are, considered ‘deviants’. Concomitantly there has been almost universal acceptance that unembellished vaginal penetration, performed by one man and one woman, is ‘normal’ sex. This is now contested. But what is perverse sex and what isn’t? Julie Peakman explores the gamut of sexual activity that has been seen as strange, abnormal or deviant over the last 2,000 years, examining an abundance of original sources – letters, diaries, memoirs, court records, erotic books, medical texts and advice manuals – and shows how, for ordinary people, different kinds of sex have always offered myriad different pleasures. There never was a ‘normal’. Almost all sexual behaviours have travelled to and fro along a continuum of proscription and acceptance. Attitudes have changed towards masturbation, leatherwear, ‘golden showers’ and sado-masochism.From the specialized cultures of pain, necrophilia and bestiality to the social world of plushies and furries, and lovers of life-sized sex dolls, some previously acceptable behaviour now provokes social outrage, while activities as diverse as sodomy and wife-swapping have moved on the spectrum of acceptance from sin to harmless fun. Each ‘perversion’ is explored from the time it was first visible in history, to how it is viewed today, and along the way she asks why we can be so intolerant of other people’s sexual preferences.

Julie Peakman is a historian in eighteenth-century culture, sexuality (all eras) and pornography. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and popular magazines, as well as academic journals. She has worked on television documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and the Biography Channel.
Her books include Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2003), Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (Atlantic Books, 2004) and The Pleasure’s All Mine. A History of Perverse Sex (Reaktion, 2013)
Her biographies include two eighteenth-century women, Emma Hamilton (Haus, 2005) and Peg Plunkett, Memoirs of a Whore (Quercus, 2015). She has also edited a 6 volume set A Culture of the History of Sexuality (Bloomsbury, 2011) and an 8 volume set Whores’ Biographies 1700-1825 (Pickering & Chatto, 2006-7).

Chaos Magic Workshop with Julian Vayne

23rd Feb & 2nd March 7-830pm tickets include both sessions.

This approach to magic blends influences from punk DIY culture, Discordian crazy wisdom, contemporary science and the western esoteric tradition. Come us on a journey into the theory and practice of chaos magic where we’ll learn about its history and try some of its methods. Participants will learn centering the banishing practices, techniques of raising and directing magical energy, how to work with spirits and much more! These two workshops of 1.5 hours each will also include an opportunity to take part in an online ritual.

Try to wear comfortable clothes for the sessions as we are likely to do a little bit of gentle stretching to help us prepare for the practices. Please have a pen and paper to hand, and a glass of water too. If you can ensure a low-ish light level in your space and a comfortable place where you can lie down while listening to a guided meditation that would be great. Looking forward to seeing you in the magic circle!

Julian Vayne is a British independent scholar, occultist and author with over three decades of experience within esoteric culture: from Druidry to Chaos Magic, from indigenous Shamanism through to Freemasonry and Witchcraft. He is the author of numerous works including the celebrated Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony. Since 2011 he has been sharing his work through The Blog of Baphomet. Julian is a senior member of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros and widely recognized as one of Britain’s leading occultists.