Event Category: Folklore

The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland

In Iceland, Christmas does not arrive quietly.

It comes creeping down from the mountains—one figure at a time.

The thirteen Yule Lads, now often softened into mischievous gift-bringers, were once something far less comforting: a band of strange, intrusive beings who descended upon farms in the darkest nights of winter. Each with their own unsettling habits—slamming doors, licking spoons, stealing food—they moved through the household not as welcome guests, but as presences to be endured.

Behind them loomed their mother, Grýla, a monstrous figure said to hunt disobedient children and boil them alive. And beyond her, the vast, silent threat of the Yule Cat, who stalked the snowy landscape in search of those without new clothes to wear.

This lecture explores the darker origins of the Yule Lads within Icelandic folklore: their connection to older troll traditions, their role in seasonal discipline and social control, and the gradual transformation of these figures under the influence of modern Christmas traditions. Through folklore, literature, and cultural history, we will trace how fear, humour, and survival intertwine in one of the most unique festive traditions in the world.

Why thirteen? Why do they arrive one by one? And what do their strange behaviours reveal about life in a harsh and isolated landscape?

This is not the story of Christmas cheer.It is the story of what comes down from the mountains when the nights are longest—and the world feels most fragile.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead

Long before Dracula gave the vampire a cloak, a castle, and a seductive gaze, the undead were something far more troubling: a practical problem.

In the villages of Eastern and Central Europe, the dead did not always stay buried. Bodies were said to rise, to feed, to return to their families—not as spirits, but as flesh that would not decay properly. Livestock sickened. Children wasted away. Entire households fell ill. And in response, communities acted—not with superstition, but with a grim, methodical logic.

This talk explores the historical phenomenon of the so-called “vampire panics” of the 17th and 18th centuries, when officials, clergy, and physicians were drawn into investigations of the undead. Corpses were exhumed and examined. Reports were written. Remedies were prescribed. The boundary between folklore, medicine, and early science began to blur in unsettling ways.

Why did certain bodies become vampires? What did people actually see when they opened the grave? And how did disease—particularly those that distort the body in death—shape the belief that the dead were feeding on the living?

From stakes driven through the heart to sickles laid across the throat, from garlic and fire to the careful repositioning of the corpse, this lecture reveals the ritual technologies developed to contain the restless dead. These were not random acts of fear, but structured responses to a world in which death itself seemed unstable.

Drawing on historical case studies, medical misunderstandings, and the anthropology of death, this talk repositions the vampire not as a figure of gothic romance, but as something far older and more disturbing: a body that refuses to behave.

Because before the vampire became seductive, it was unmanageable.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World

In the deep forests and under the shadow of Norway’s mountains, something watches.

Long before trolls became lumbering figures of children’s stories, they were understood as dangerous, intelligent, and deeply other—beings who lived just beyond the edge of human settlement, in caves, cliffs, and hollow hills. They stole livestock, lured travellers off their paths, hoarded ancient treasures, and, in some tales, hunted human flesh. To meet a troll was not whimsical. It was a risk.

This lecture explores the older, darker layers of Norwegian troll traditions, where the boundary between nature and the supernatural begins to dissolve. Trolls are not merely creatures of myth, but expressions of a landscape that is vast, unpredictable, and not entirely human. They are tied to mountains and weather, to darkness and stone, to the slow passage of time itself.

Drawing on folklore, art, and historical belief, we will examine how trolls were understood across Norway: as solitary giants, shape-shifters, multi-headed beings, or even deceptive figures capable of blending into human society. Particular attention will be given to the work of Theodor Kittelsen, whose haunting visual interpretations captured the uneasy presence of these beings at the edge of sight.

Why do trolls turn to stone in sunlight? What do their stories reveal about fear, isolation, and the limits of human control over nature? And why do they continue to haunt the cultural imagination of the North?

This is not a lecture about fairy tales.

It is about what lives in the mountain—and what happens when it notices you.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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Bestiary of Christian Saints: When Holiness Takes Strange Shapes – Sergei Zotov – Zoom

Bestiary of Christian Saints: When Holiness Takes Strange Shapes

This lecture explores how medieval Christian art repeatedly crossed the boundarybetween the sacred and the monstrous, the bestial, and the unsettlingly grotesque. Long before modern debates about blasphemy and provocation, artists freely depicted holy figures as monstrous, hybrid, or disturbingly bodily: Christ as a Lamb with seven eyes, Moses with giant horns, saints with the heads of lions, horses, bulls, or eagles, angels as multi-faced chimeras, sacred scenes now precepted as being with shocking details. Far from being marginal curiosities, these images belonged to the core visual language of medieval Christianity and were deeply embedded in theology and devotion.

By tracing examples from manuscripts, sculpture, and church frescoes, the lecture asks why monstrosity was not a threat to holiness but one of its most powerful tools. We will see how medieval viewers understood these “deviant” images not as mockery, but as ways to think the unthinkable: divine transcendence, incarnation, suffering, and salvation. In doing so, the talk challenges modern assumptions about religious imagery, censorship, and offence – and shows that the Middle Ages were far stranger, freer, and more visually radical than we tend to imagine.

Speaker Bio:

Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.

Curated & Hosted by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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

Votive World: Wax Testicles, Clay Wombs, and Kidney Stones in European Churches – Sergei Zotov – Zoom

Votive World: Wax Testicles, Clay Wombs, and Kidney Stones in European Churches

Early modern churches were not only places of worship — they were also sites of exchange with the divine. People promised a gift in return for healing, survival, or luck, and then paid their debt in objects: money, wax, metal, cloth, chains, crutches, bullets, teeth, bladder stones — and, strikingly often, anatomical models. You still could walk into a major pilgrimage shrine and find it lined with wax eyes and legs, silver hearts, tiny bodies, infants, breasts, hands, or explicitly intimate offerings made for urinary problems, hernias, infertility, and childbirth.

This lecture reconstructs the ex-voto tradition as a material history of fear, pain, and recovery. We will follow how a vow could become an action — pilgrimage, penance, public testimony — and how miracles were recorded not only in written “miracle books”, but also in things themselves: bandages, extracted objects, swallowed items returned by the body, or a stone displayed beside the votive image as physical proof. Why was wax so powerful — and in rural economies, sometimes as good as cash? Why did some shrines begin to resemble anatomical theatres or proto-museums, accumulating not only devotional gifts but also “wonders of nature”: crocodiles under vaults, whale bones, meteorites, “unicorn horns”, and other mirabilia that made the church feel like a cabinet of curiosities. And finally — why did reformers, inspectors, and state authorities repeatedly try to clean these spaces up, even when the objects were clearly doing the work of belief? We will go together on an illustrated tour through Europe’s most visceral archive of devotion.

Speaker Bio:

Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.

Curated & Hosted by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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

The Weirdest Orthodox Icons: Monstrosity, Folk Magic, and Mysticism Against The Canon – Sergei Zotov – Zoom

The Weirdest Orthodox Icons: Monstrosity, Folk Magic, and Mysticism Against The Canon

Orthodox icons are usually associated with strict canons, solemn beauty, and timeless repetition. This lecture reveals a very different side of Orthodox visual culture by exploring some of its most striking, disturbing, and unexpected images: dog-headed saints, three-handed Virgins, six-armed Trinities, mystical labyrinths, folk icons used for healing or protection, and even modern icons featuring tanks, nuclear reactors, smartphones, and footballers. Drawing on examples from Greece, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, the lecture shows how Orthodox imagery absorbed folklore, mysticism, popular belief, and contemporary life in ways that are still largely unknown outside specialist circles.

Rather than treating these images as mere curiosities or deviations from “canon”, the lecture argues that they expose how Orthodoxy functioned as a lived visual culture. Icons operated not only as objects of worship, but also as tools for meditation, divination, moral testing, and negotiating fear, illness, and death. By tracing how church authorities periodically attempted — and largely failed — to regulate this visual imagination, the lecture reconsiders Orthodox iconography as a dynamic field where theology, folk belief, politics, and everyday experience constantly collided.

Speaker Bio:

Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.

Curated & Hosted by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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

Omens and Superstitions from the Ancient World to the 21st Century – Dr Julia Phillips – Zoom

Omens and Superstitions from the Ancient World to the 21st Century

In the Ancient World, omens often related to important matters relating to the king and the land, such as “[If] a white sheep mounts a she-goat—disagreement in the land.” Today we are more likely to interpret omens such as repeating digital numbers (11:11, 222), finding feathers, tech glitches (like a phone freezing), and unexpected synchronicities, in a personal sense.

Omens are often found in dreams, and superstitions are surprisingly consistent across cultures. “First-footing” at New Year’s Eve can be found in widely different societies, while the famous “red sky at night or morning” changes from shepherds to sailors, depending on whether it is found on the coast or the countryside. Other superstitions are more localised and often depend upon a specific location or community. The one thing they all have in common is a belief that the unseen world can shape and inform our lives, predicting events and warning of future misfortunes.

Join Dr Julia Phillips on this fascinating glimpse into a supernatural world, filled with omens, dreams, and superstitions.

Speaker Bio

Julia Phillips is Hon Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. She received her PhD for her research examining how witches and witchcraft were featured in newspapers in Victorian Britain. Her primary research interests are the study of witchcraft in the nineteenth century and the development of modern Pagan Witchcraft in the twentieth century. Julia is author of the forthcoming book, The Persistence of Witchcraft in Victorian England (April 21, 2026 by Routledge).

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Caption: CC0 Public Domain

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Mermaid Spells: Sea Alchemy, Seiðr & the Goddess Mysteries of the Deep – Helena B. Scott – Zoom

Mermaid Spells: Sea Alchemy, Seiðr & the Goddess Mysteries of the Deep

Mermaids are archetypal initiators of transformation; liminal beings of sea and soul who embody Lady Alchemy, guiding us to unite opposites within and awaken the full, integrated self. As symbols of deep change, they help us reconcile shadow and light, matter and spirit, conscious and unconscious, opening the way to expanded awareness and spiritual renewal.

This rare and original talk invites you into the depths of ancient sea magic through the lens of archetypal and depth psychology. You will explore how the living energies of the ocean awaken intuition, inner magic and the divine feminine, while engaging with historic rituals and practical approaches to working with oceanic currents, ancestral memory, creation and rebirth.

The journey moves through ancient goddess traditions and living practices of sea magic, beginning with Isis—inventor of all things marine, Light bringer as Isis Pharia and known as Our Lady of the Seas,a title she later shares with Mary. From her waters, we descend into Norse oceanic sorcery and the legacy of Freyja, golden-haired goddess of love, war and witchcraft, and the first völva to initiate Odin into seiðr, the art of foresight and fate-weaving. The talk also weaves in sacred knotwork with Mesopotamian, Sámi and Norse roots, alongside the modern Blue Mind concept, revealing water as both a mirror of the soul and a powerful force for inner renewal and transformation.

Are you ready to answer the call of the deep? Book your place on this unique ocean-themed talk now and step into the tide of transformation.

Speaker Bio:

Helena B. Scott is a Jungian writer, linguist, historian, and cultural heritage specialist whose work in historical revisionism bridges medieval history, esoteric symbolism, and depth/archetypal psychology through a multidisciplinary lens. She specialises in the Knights Templar, the Grail tradition, and the sacred feminine, with research exploring spiritual alchemy, symbolism, and ancestral archetypes—particularly mermaids, Mary Magdalene, and sacred feminine mysteries preserved within Gnostic andesoteric medieval European traditions.

She was recently awarded an MA (Hons) in Public History & Cultural Heritage (2025) by the University of Limerick, following an MA internship with Waterford Medieval Museum, and in 2009 her work played a pivotal role in a UNESCO campaign that successfully declared falconry as intangible cultural heritage. Helena has also undertaken extensive training in Depth and Archetypal Psychology, including with Laurence Hillman, son of US psychiatrist James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, and holds several diplomas from the Jung Centre (Dublin), including a Diploma in Jungian Psychology.

In October 2025, Helena founded Ireland’s first public Templar history festival, Waterford Templar Historical Day, developed as part of her MA research and framed under the UNESCO Historic Urban

Curated & Hosted By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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

Deathbed Visions: What do we see at the edge of life? – Stuart Gray – Zoom

Deathbed Visions: What do we see at the edge of life?

As the body begins to fail and consciousness loosens its grip, many people report experiences that are anything but ordinary. In the final hours or moments before death, the dying often describe vivid visions: encounters with long-dead loved ones, journeys, presences, lights, messages—scenes that feel emotionally charged, coherent, and deeply real. These are known as deathbed visions.

Drawing on over sixty years of scientific research, we will explore the recurring patterns behind these extraordinary experiences. We will introduce four common categories of deathbed visions and examine the leading naturalistic explanations offered by neuroscience, psychology, and medicine—asking where they succeed, and where they fall short.

From there, we turn to a more provocative question: why has deathbed vision research itself so often been treated as scientifically suspect? When examined closely, attempts to exclude DBVs from legitimate science begin to unravel—revealing uncomfortable fault lines that would also undermine accepted areas of contemporary research.

Rather than a fringe curiosity, deathbed visions emerge as a rich, methodologically serious, and urgently under-examined body of data. The material is already here. The question is whether we are prepared to look at it—and what it might ask us to rethink about consciousness, dying, and the limits of scientific inquiry.

Speaker Bio:

Stuart H. Gray works as a freelance writer and trainer in the technology sector. He has a Bachelor of Science (Honours)degree in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde, and a Diploma of Higher Education in Theology from the University of Gloucestershire. More recently, he received Highest Honors in both the Master’s Degree in Christian Apologetics and the Master’s in Science and Religion at BIOLA University. His thesis isentitled“Deathbed Visions: The Development of a Christian Apologetic Argument and An Assessment of Naturalistic Counterarguments.” He co-edits the Evangelical Philosophical Society’s Web Project called “Philosophical Issues in ‘Afterlife Apologetics’” with Dr J Steve Miller. He is embarking on a PhD to study deathbed visions amongst Hindu people. He is also currently writing a book assessing common deathbed experiences in the light of secular and non-secular worldview expectations.

Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuarthgray/

EPS Web Project: Philosophical Issues in ‘Afterlife Apologetics’

https://www.epsociety.org/articles/web-project-philosophical-issues-in-afterlife-apologetics/

Curated & Hosted by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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

Witch Fulfilment: The Witch as Theatrical Type – Jane Barnette – Zoom

Witch Fulfilment: The Witch as Theatrical Type

What wishes do performances fulfill when they include witchy characters onstage? My research centers the Witch as a theatrical type on twenty-first century North American stages and screens, with attention to casting and adaptation dramaturgy.

Witch representation matters because witches are not figments of imagination or inhuman monsters. Understanding the humanity of witches suggests that if the Witch can be analyzed as a theatrical type reiterated through performance, then those of us who make theatre and other kinds of popular performance culture have a responsibility to represent witches humanely.

In this discussion, we will review iconic examples of Witches onstage, considering both the character and the actor playing the role. From depictions of the Wicked Witch to Medea to the Weird Sisters and beyond, the representation of Witches in the contemporary adaptations I examine all reveal crucial insights about the fears and desires we have about the hidden powers of minoritarian subjects.

Bio:

Jane is the Head of Dramaturgy and a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas (KU). Her recent book Witch Fulfillment: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Casting the Witch for Stage and Screen (Routledge 2024) explores the Witch as a theatrical type, using feminist, queer, and adaptation dramaturgy methodologies. She is also the author of Adapturgy: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (SIU Press 2018). A freelance dramaturg and director, Barnette directed a double-cast version of John Proctor is the Villain in March 2025 at KU’s Inge Theater. Barnette’s next book, co-authored with Henry Bial, The Dramaturgy of Musical Revisal, is forthcoming from Routledge later this year.

Image:

Image: Cavendish, Morton (1909). The Art of Theatrical Make-up, London: Adam and Charles Black. Public Domain.

Curated & Hosted by:

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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