Event Category: Esoteric

Early Paranormal Theories of the Late Nineteenth Century – a Zoom talk by Dr Robert Radakovic

Beyond Faith and Reason – Early Paranormal Theories of the Late Nineteenth Century

This talk explores the complex culture and history of the late nineteenth century and how the earliest theories of the paranormal were developed.

While considering the fundamental questions of nature and humanity’s place within the universe, many of the key thinkers of the late-Victorian period found science or religion alone as inadequate individual tools with which to help with the answers. Some of them, who were often from the cultural elite – scientists, academics, politicians, clergy, writers – combined these existing domains with research into paranormal phenomena, which they found provided more comprehensive and cohesive theories. This talk takes a historo-cultural look at some of what took place at the time, highlighting the key early paranormal theories, and asks what relevance there is for today’s paranormal researchers.

 

Your speaker for this event is Dr Robert Radakovic, an ex-astrophysicist and ex-management accountant who left the corporate world over a decade ago to study for an MA in Western Esotericism, followed by a PhD which considered the interplay between Science, Religion, Philosophy and the Paranormal in the nineteenth century. He has had a lifelong interest in ghosts, UFOs and psychic phenomena, and undertakes independent research in each of these. He has been a council member of The Ghost Club (1862) since 2019.

Your host and curator 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

Modern Vampires – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Vampires have become key figures in the modern imagination, over three thousand works of literature and film being devoted to them in the last third of the twentieth century. Since then the momentum of that interest has if anything increased. This talk is designed to show why this is, and what forms it takes. Three patterns are very clear. The first is that all modern vampires descend from Count Dracula. The second, that before the 1970s vampire lore was dominated by cinema, and since then it has been by novels. The third is that until the 1970s the development of the mythos was a joint enterprise across the Western world, and that since then it has been driven overwhelmingly from America. These patterns are both illustrated and explained in the talk, and in the process a key question is also proposed and answered: what function do vampires have in the contemporary world, and why are they so important to us?

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 Origins of the Vampire – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Of all fictional characters, only Sherlock Holmes has appeared more often in films than Bram Stoker’s vampire, Count Dracula. Stoker, however, reworked what was already a long literary tradition about vampires, going back to the eighteenth century. Before then, this particular type of monstrous being was a novelty in most of Europe, having only appeared in its imagination from the 1720s. The vampire was in fact an amalgam of two much more ancient monsters, which came together in the Balkans during the early modern period, and broke into the rest of European belief when Austrian soldiers reached that region. This talk is designed to show how it was created, and dispersed, and to reveal the rich literary tradition that it had inspired by the nineteenth century. It will also show what was so different, and so compelling, about Dracula, which made him the most celebrated vampire of all time.

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 

Ancient Pagan Werewolf Cults and Their influence on the ‘witch cults’ of Medieval Europe – Denny Sargent

Ancient Pagan Werewolf Cults and Their influence on the ‘witch cults’ of Medieval Europe

From the 40,000 year old image of a hunting werewolf cave painting to the modern revival of Pagan werewolf magick, shapeshifting and specifically werewolfery, has been an important though often overlooked part of Western Pagan thought and practice. This presentation begins with documented prehistoric werewolf cults and Pagan werewolf shape shifting practices and then follows classical historians such as Herodotus and Livy and their first hand observations of werewolf ritual shapeshifting practices within the primal religious traditions and practices of ancient Greece, Rome, Scythia, among others.

The influence of these deep-seated animistic ‘shamanic’ practices clearly influenced the Pagan survivals in Europe post- Rome and a surprising percentage of ‘witches’ that were persecuted and executed by the Church were accused of being witches and werewolves. The atrocious witchcraft trial documents give clear indications that shapeshifting ‘werewolf’ practices were part of these small Pagan cults as well as later werewolf cult survivals like the Benandanti cult, sometimes called the ‘Wolves of God,’ as well as werewolf warrior cults in Ireland, Scotland and other Celtic countries where even today werewolves (like the Wulvers) are still looked upon favorably.

Note: Full lecture notes, a bibliography and online resources will be provided on my blog at dennysargentauthor.com at the time of the presentation.

Speaker Bio:

Denny Sargent – A Seattle writer, artist and university instructor whose extensive global travels and esoteric studies informed the backbone to numerous published books. Involved for decades with numerous esoteric traditions, the author has published works on Alternative Religions, Hermetic Magick, Taoism, Animism, Shinto and Tantra. Published books include: Global Ritualism, The Tao of Birth Days, Your Guardian Angel And You, Clean Sweep, The Book of the Horned One, Naga Magick, Dancing With Spirits, Werewolf Magick. He regularly presents lively online workshops and lectures and previously hosted at conventions and gatherings. He teaches university classes on Linguistics, Methodology and Pedagogy in TESOL, is an artist and has a dog named Faunus. He is very eclectic.

Curated and Hosted by Dr Amy Hale

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.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Forgotten Alchemists, Ritual Magicians, and Balloonists of London: Introducing Margaret and George Graham – Dan Harms

Forgotten Alchemists, Ritual Magicians, and Balloonists of London: Introducing Margaret and George Graham

The husband and wife duo of Margaret and George Graham were two of London’s most famous balloonists. Their exploits in the heights captured Britain’s imagination, but their occult fascinations remained unknown until recently. Astrology and alchemy! Balloon crashes! The secrets of the Mercurii! More balloon crashes! A mysteriously altered Key of Solomon! Did we mention balloon crashes? Author and librarian Dan Harms speaks on these fascinating figures of late Georgian-era London.

Speaker Bio:

Dan Harms is a librarian and author from upstate New York, and editor of the Llewellyn annotated edition of The Long-Lost Friend. He has also edited The Book of Oberon, Angels, Demons, and Spirits, and the Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia. His research interests include early modern grimoires, nineteenth-century ritual magic, and roleplaying games.

Curated and Hosted by Dr Amy Hale

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.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England – a Zoom talk by Sean O’Connor

Borley Rectory, an ordinary-looking (some would say ugly) red-brick Victorian house, perched on a ridge near the north Essex–Suffolk border, is to this day spoken of in hushed tones – even though it was demolished more than three-quarters of a century ago. Completed in 1863, the signs were unpromising from the start, with the death of a 17-year-old labourer – who drowned in the local river during the house’s construction – setting the tone for what was to come, and causing mutterings among the superstitious locals about bad omens. 

Classic English haunting tropes soon became associated with the house: a ghostly horse-drawn coach driven by two headless men was seen; the grounds were allegedly the site of an ancient plague pit; and a spectral nun was said to promenade through the garden… 

In 1928, Eric and Mabel Smith arrived from India to take over the lonely parish of Borley, 60 miles northeast of central London. Soon after moving into Borley Rectory, Mrs Smith made a gruesome discovery in a cupboard: a human skull. Before long, the house was electric with ghosts. And within a year, the Smiths had abandoned it and the Rectory became notorious as the ‘most haunted house in England’.

When the next incumbent of the Rectory, the Reverend Lionel Foyster, moved into the house, he experienced a further explosion of poltergeist activity – with an increasing violence seemingly directed at his attractive young wife. Marianne Foyster was a passionate woman isolated in a village haunted by ancient superstition and deep-rooted prejudice. She was to become the key figure at the heart of the haunting, alongside the Rolls Royce-driving ‘psychic detective’ Harry Price. 

Borley was the case that was to make Price’s name as the most-celebrated ghost-hunter of the age. And the case that, later, would cast that hard-earned reputation into serious doubt…

Sean O’Connor is a writer, director and producer who has worked in theatre, radio, television and film. He has worked as showrunner on several major TV series including EastEnders, Hollyoaks and Minder. He produced Terence Davies’ film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. Handsome Brute, a study of the 1940s murderer Neville Heath, and The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award (2020), were both published by Simon & Schuster, as is The Haunting of Borley Rectory, his most-recent book. 

 

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

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Cottingley Fairies – Merrick Burrow

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Cottingley Fairies

When Frances Griffiths (aged 9) and Elsie Wright (aged 14) took photographs of ‘fairies’ in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley in the summer of 1917 they meant simply to play a practical joke on their parents. But when, three years later, prints of the photographs found their way into the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, they ignited a controversy that led to the most enduring photographic hoax of all time.

Many have since wondered how the creator of the supremely rational Great Detective could have been so deceived and why he would have risked irreparable damage to his reputation by giving his endorsement to the photographs. Some point to Conan Doyle’s public conversion to spiritualism as a sign that he had turned his back on facts and reason in later life. Others have suggested that his judgement was impaired by the impact of personal tragedies during the Great War. But neither of these explanations fully explains the facts of the case, and neither gets to the heart of the accidental conspiracy at the heart of the mystery. In this talk Dr Merrick Burrow, Head of English and History at the University of Huddersfield and an expert on Conan Doyle, will explore the details of this fascinating story and attempt to answer the puzzling questions it poses.

Bio

Merrick Burrow is Head of English and History at the University of Huddersfield. He is a literary and cultural historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. His publications include book chapters and journal articles on detective fiction, Conan Doyle and spiritualism. Merrick curated ‘The Cottingley Fairies: a Study in Deception’ to mark the centenary of Conan Doyle’s publication of the photographs in the Strand Magazine in 1920, which was the first major public exhibition of materials from the archive held at the Brotherton Library. He is currently writing a book on the history of deception.

Hosted by

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 http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Stone Club: Rediscovering Ancient Sites – Lally MacBeth and Matthew Shaw

Founded by artists Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, Stone Club was set up as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones. Stone Club believes the journey is as important as the destination and encourages people to pause and think about place in new ways; connecting ancient sites through community and conversation Stone Club aims to bring new perspectives to prehistory in a collaborative and inclusive way.

In this talk Lally & Matthew will take you on a journey through the history of Stone Club exploring along the way the resurgence of interest in ancient landscapes, stones and what it means for our collective futures.

Bio

Lally MacBeth is an artist, writer and researcher living in Cornwall. She founded The Folk Archive in 2020, and co-founded Stone Club in 2021. Lally’s work wanders the line between the real and the imaginary, taking in history, folklore, performance, ritual, and artifice along the way. She is interested in the links between high and low cultural artefacts and how these lines are often blurred in archives. Lally is currently working on her first book.

Bio

Matthew Shaw is an artist, author, composer and producer. Alongside solo composition Matthew has worked with a series of collaborators including The Pop Group, & Richard Norris as well as Shirley Collins & Brian Catling on Crowlink, with an EP released by Domino Recordings, & an audio installation that premiered at the Barbican followed by a week at Charleston house in Sussex. Atmosphere of Mona, a book of poetry and photography was published by Annwyn House in 2020. Matthew is the co-founder of Stone Club.

Hosted by

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 http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Supernatural Tales from Scotland – Allison Galbraith

Allison shares stories from the River Clyde. Known as Clutha, an ancient Pagan goddess worshipped for her cleansing powers by the Celtic tribes who settled along her banks. Wraiths, mermaids, wizards and a multitude of demons feature in these little-known tales of the Scottish supernatural.

Bio

Allison Galbraith grew up with storytelling. Her mother, an actress, taught her stagecraft. Her sea-faring father nurtured her curiosity for unusual and tantalizing tales. Allison honed her storytelling skills through various guises, including directing Live Art shows, training to trapeze, teaching rave dancing in the 90s, and performing in theatre, TV and radio. With a Master’s degree in Scottish folklore, Allison has spent the last ten years collecting, writing and sharing traditional folktales. Her books include: Dancing With Trees, Eco-Tales from the British Isle, co-author. (2017 The History Press), Lanarkshire Folk Tales (2021, THP) and Funny Folk Tales for Children (2023, THP). She lives in the Clyde Valley of Lowland Scotland, surrounded by mythical landscapes, alive with magic and ancient lore.

Hosted by

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 http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Sekhmet: The Revival of an Ancient Egyptian Goddess – Ronnie Pontiac

In the 1970s the only places to encounter Sekhmet were museums, ancient Egyptian ruins, scenery in old movies, Egyptology tomes, and John and Yoko’s apartment in NYC. Today online we can buy Sekhmet icons, jewelry, statues, books, throw pillows, fine art, and a beer. A lineage of priestesses, tattoos. game and movie characters, band names, a temple in Nevada, yet many of her followers report first meeting her in a dream.

Informed by research that has included interviews with devotees we’ll contrast ancient and modern visions of Sekhmet. Reports of Sekhmet statues moving in museums are common so we’ll look to Iamblichus for insights into the possible existence of living statues. We’ll ponder the nuances of deities, metaphors, egregores, and archetypes, and how they relate to what Robert Anton Wilson called reality tunnels.

Bio:

Ronnie Pontiac‘s new book American Metaphysical Religion (Inner Traditions) is both a comprehensive menagerie and a curio cabinet of esoteric Americana. Manly Hall’s research assistant, screener, and substitute lecturer for seven years, he has produced award winning documentaries, and has written for Invisible College Magazine, Metapsychosis, Occult of Personality, and the original Reality Sandwich.

Hosted by

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 http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day