Event Category: Esoteric

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.

A Dark Muse – Writers & The Occult – Gary Lachman Zoom Lecture

Gary Lachman will look at how occult thought and ideas influenced some of the most important and influential writers and poets of the past two centuries, from Goethe’s Faust to the allusive modernist fragments of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, with quite a few illustrious names in between. J.K. Huysmans and the Black Mass, the alchemical experiments of August Strindberg, the Satanism of Arthur Rimbaud, and the psychotic possession of Guy De Maupassant, are only some of the examples of how occult visions led to some of the greatest works of western literature. This lecture will look at some of the ideas behind occultism and at how they found literary form in the works of some of the western canon’s greatest figures.

Gary Lachman is the author of many books about consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, including The Return of Holy Russia, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. He writes for several journals in the US, UK, and Europe, lectures around the world and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In a former life he was a founding member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Lachman studied philosophy, managed a metaphysical book shop, taught English literature, and was Science Writer for UCLA. He is an adjunct professor of Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk, www.facebook.com/GVLachman/ and twitter.com/GaryLachman

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The Ghost – A Cultural History with Susan Owens – Zoom Lecture

Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” –Samuel Johnson Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts–the fears they provoke, the forms they take–are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times. Organized chronologically, this new cultural history features a dazzling range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.

The Unnatural History Museum – NMM Cornwall – Viktor Wynd’s Zoom Tour

A recording will be sent to ticketholders who miss the event

Join artist Viktor Wynd for an intimate tour and walk through of his new Cornish Museum. enter inside his mind, a place peopled by Unicorns, Fairies, Giants, Mermaids, myths, legends and dreams. A voyage to the monsters that live in the depths of his subconscious, from a two headed kitten and a two headed teddy bear to a selkie’s foot, a baby’s caul and a magical jar of moles. Viktor Wynd is a ‘pataphysical artist who uses museum objects in the way that other artists use tubes of paint, a writer who presents his novel on hand written museum labels. Founder and proprietor, since 2009, of London’s infamous & eponymous Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History he invites you to come in, enjoy and exit through The Egress.

the evening will finish with a bedtime story – not necessarily suitable for the squeamish

Viktor Wynd’s UnNatural History Museum is at The National Maritime Museum, Falmouth until the end of 20

The Nazis & The Occult – Zoom Lecture – Michael Fitzgerald

This frightening lecture shows how Hitler and Himmler infected the Nazi Party with the dangerous belief that, through occult skills, the ‘master race’ could gain dominion over the world. Every dictatorship requires a justification, either historical or moral, and Hitler rooted his in anti-scientific mumbo-jumbo, Wagnerian legend and Satanism. Michael FitzGerald’s chilling investigation reveals that Hitler consulted Nostradamus before taking key military decisions; that the Thulists, a weird sect which practised human sacrifice and sexual perversions, founded the German Workers Party; and, that black masses were conducted for an elite SS corps at a ‘Black Camelot’ in Wewelsberg. The Nazi’s even had their own occult bureau, the Ahnenerbe, whose research into bizarre cosmological theory, astrology and UFO’s exhausted more funds than America’s atom bomb. Against this powerful armoury of evil was ranked the benevolent magic of the Allies, both at government and individual level. Psychic advisers were employed by both Stalin and Churchill, and the latter even held high-level talks with the occultist Aleister Crowley. White witches, meeting in the New Forest, attempted to thwart ‘Operation Sealion’ (Hitler’s planned invasion) through coven rituals. In the United States, moreover, whilst research into ‘mind control’ was vigorously pursued, the government, in a shadowy affair known as the Philadelphia Experiment, attempted to dematerialize one of their own submarines. Michael FitzGerald goes behind the war’s public events to reveal a hidden agenda of psychic conflict, fought at the highest level

Michael FitzGerald is a historian of the Third Reich. He is also the author of ‘Adolf Hitler: A Portrait’ which won an award for historical biography, and ‘The Making of Modern Streatham’, written jointly with his Janet. In 2008 he was the principal contributor to the Discovery Channel programme, ‘Dark Fellowships: The Vril Society’, a topic which features in the present book. He has also given numerous talks to a variety of organizations over the years. ‘The Nazi Occult War’ was published by Arcturus in 2013 , he is also the auhtor of ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapons,’ ‘Unsolved Mysteries of World War Two’ and ‘Hitler’s War Beneath The Waves’ published by them over the last four years.

Beatrice de Montevideo P.A. To

image By Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-04051A / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5479574