Event Category: Folklore

Scottish Highland Second Sight: Its Past, Present, and Future – Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

The mysterious faculty of Second Sight—an apparently involuntary ability to see events in the future or far distant, usually encompassing funerals, death, and disasters—is understood today as quintessentially a Scottish Highland phenomenon.

If we turn to older historical accounts, however, the suspicion grows that in the past the notion of Second Sight (taibhsearachd in Scottish Gaelic) may have meant something altogether different: a more direct, even willed ability to communicate with usually invisible, capricious, and potentially dangerous beings, whether powerful otherworldly creatures such as sìthichean or fairies, or else treacherous spirit doubles of mortal men and women. These beings could impart occult secrets and occult gifts, although little benefit would accrue to their recipients in the long term.

Again, if we examine folklore and popular belief elsewhere in northern Europe, it appears that there may in fact be little that is specifically Highland about ‘Second Sight’. There, similar anecdotes and similar motifs about such uncanny phenomena were pervasive in the past—and are still told today.

This suggests that Highland Second Sight may have a history, an unexpected process by which an already somewhat ambiguous power was transformed—and, perhaps, restrained—into a more passive, spontaneous, innate, and inexplicable ‘sixth sense’. If this is the case, why did Second Sight change, and why has the ability come to be perceived as somehow emblematic of the Scottish Highlands?

An expedition—with some diversions—through four hundred years of Highland folklore and popular belief, in this world and the otherworld.

Bio

Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is a Senior Lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, and Course Leader there for the MSc in Cultar Dùthchasach agus Eachdraidh na Gàidhealtachd (Material Culture and Gàidhealtachd History). He has lectured and published extensively on the history, literature, material culture, ethnology, folklore and popular culture of the Scottish Highlands from the seventeenth century onwards, and is often interviewed on these subjects for radio and television.

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Goddesses of Sex & War – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

This talk is devoted to a particular form of ancient pagan goddess, one who is at the same time associated with love and sex, and with warfare. Though this may seem like a paradoxical linkage, it was actually quite a common one in the pre-Christian European and Near Eastern world, combining two different types of dramatic and often ecstatic human activity, associated with potent bodily fluids. Moreover, some of the most important of these goddesses actually influenced, and helped engender, the others, and the talk considers these in particular, in a divine chain reaction, stretching across the ancient world: the Sumerian Inanna, the Babylonian and Assyrian Ishtar, the Syrian Astarte, the Greek Aphrodite, and the Roman Venus. It considers the development of each one, which can be traced through history, the particular and distinctive forms which each attained, and the powerful influence which they exerted on each other, spanning the most important and pervasive ancient cultures.

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.

Here are some of his other talks you might be interested in https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/digital-events/?cat=ronaldhutton

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The Holy Grail – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Everybody thinks that they know what the Holy Grail is, whether the person in quest of it is one of King Arthur’s knights or Indiana Jones: the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, preserved by his followers and hidden until the right hero, with the right attitude, comes to find it. Some believe that it actually exists in the human world at the present day, embodied in particular vessels preserved at Nanteos in Wales, or at Glastonbury, or concealed at Rosslyn Chapel or Rennes-le-Chateau. Others, conversant with Edwardian British scholarship, think that it is a Christianisation of a pagan Celtic tradition of enchanted cauldrons, ultimately representing the divine feminine. This talk is a quest in itself, for the origins of the story, which can be pinpointed quite specifically, and for the process by which an idea with a precise origin grew into a motif capable of taking so many different forms. It also considers the claims of the Celtic cauldrons to be the ‘true’ grails and those of the vessels revered today by many people as the genuine one.

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.

Here are some of his other talks you might be interested in

https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/digital-events/?cat=ronaldhutton

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Robin Hood – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Robin Hood is the most famous outlaw in the whole of world fiction, and during the modern period his popularity has only increased. This is largely because he reflects both sides of the traditional social order, as a decent English gentleman, unjustly outlawed, who fights his way back to respectability with the help of ordinary people. In his original, medieval, form, he is actually even more remarkable, as a man of the common people himself, from the greenwood, who blatantly flouts the social and religious order while upholding a basic humanity and goodness. This talk is intended to show what was so different about him that made him so famous in world culture while other outlaws, fictional and real, have disappeared. It is also, however, a quest for his origins. Was he a forest god or spirit, or was there a real, remarkable, human being, who inspired the legend because he did something really outstanding? It will be concluded that there actually is good historical evidence that suggests an answer to this question.

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.

Here are some of his other talks you might be interested in https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/digital-events/?cat=ronaldhutton

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

Scandinavian love magic: divination and curses – Tommy Kuusela

How can one find true love? Who will it be and will it be a happy marriage? These questions have been asked time and time again throughout the ages by young unmarried women. I say women as most records mentioning different types of love divination concern women. In a time when much was uncertain and love could be a luxury, many dreamed of a decent marriage, a good partner and supportive husband. Men practiced another, more sinister magical technique. There are many examples, stretching as far back as the Viking age, of how different curses and other magical traditions have been used for love and for forcing the opposite sex into having intercourse. We can find examples of this in early written sources (for example in The Poetic Edda, Runic inscriptions and the Icelandic Sagas). Evidence of similar traditions have also been found in the archeological material. Many later folklore sources, now stored in folklore archives, mention the same tradition. The latter was a magical tradition primarily used by men, while young and unmarried women instead relied on divination techniques and other rituals for finding out who their future husband would be. In this talk, I will present and discuss types of love divination and curses in myth and folklore from pre-industrial Scandinavia moving from the Viking Age up until early 19th century.

Bio

Tommy Kuusela earned his PhD in History of Religions at Stockholm University in 2017. He has written more than 50 articles on Old Norse religion and Scandinavian folklore and is a well-known folklorist in Sweden. Kuusela works in one of Sweden’s largest folklore archives and is a board member of several academic societies. He is also one of the hosts of Sweden’s biggest podcast on folklore, När man talar om trollen (a saying in Swedish for ‘Speaking of the Devil’).

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The Irish Goddess Morrigan – Lora O’Brien

The Irish Goddess Mórrígan

The Irish Goddess Mórrígan is a popular but still often enigmatic or misunderstood deity, associated with battle, death, and prophecy in Irish mythology. This presentation will answer the questions: Who is She?; When and where did Her stories take place?; What does She do?; Why and how might people work with Her in the modern age? You will experience the unique perspective of an indigenous Mórrígan Priestess who has studied the lore directly, and lived right by the Mórrígan’s ‘fit abode’ for over a decade; guiding people – both physically and spiritually – on a daily basis to seek the presence of the Great Queen at the Síd ar Cruachán in Rathcroghan, County Roscommon.

Speaker Bio:

Lora O’Brien is a modern Draoí – a practitioner and priest of indigenous Irish magic and spirituality. She has been consciously following a pagan path for 30 years, and dedicated specifically to the Irish Goddess Mórrígan in 2004. She managed one of Ireland’s most important sacred sites – Cruachán/Rathcroghan – for a decade, and is a co-founder and legal celebrant with Pagan Life Rites Ireland. With her partner, Jon O’Sullivan, she is the co-founder of the Irish Pagan School. Lora is currently a candidate for a Masters Degree in Irish Regional History (2023).

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The Magical Women of Ireland by Dr. Gillian Kenny

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The Magickal Women Ireland

A look at how women have engaged in (or been rumored to have engaged in) magical practices over thousands of years in Ireland. Ranging across time from the battle queens of mythology to the nineteenth century wise woman and healer Biddy Early this talk will introduce listeners to the links between women and magic in Irish history and how women may have used ritual/spells and material goods to affect the world around them. Gillian will talk about various aspects of Irish women’s magic including

1. Protective magic

2. Cursing in Irish practice

3. The belief in the evil eye

4. Love magic and magic to control fertility and birth

5. The Christianisation of magical practice

6. Imported magical beliefs

Bio

Dr. Gillian Kenny is an Hon Research Associate at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies in Trinity College Dublin. Her specialism is women’s lives in medieval and early modern Ireland and Europe. She is also interested in the lives of those considered outsiders in the medieval world and is currently researching that topic. She has taught in both UCD and TCD and has published extensively on women’s history. She has also appeared in and written on various historical topics on TV/podcasts and in newspapers/magazines.

Twitter – @medievalgill

www.medievalgill.com

medievalireland.blogspot.com

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Zombies: The New Dead – a Zoom talk with Roger Luckhurst

In 1968, medical science radically re-defined death. It was no longer marked by the cessation of the heart, but by the absence of brain activity. This was a product of new technologies, which could sustain the physical body for prolonged periods on support machines in Intensive Care Units, but without the hope of a recovery of brain function. It produced early on a weird state between physical death and actual death occupied by profoundly anomalous beings. A kind of undead…

It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1968 George Romero released his Night of the Living Dead and launched the modern zombie story – beings somewhere between life and death, best dispatched by a shot to the head, not the heart. Since then, the number of types of people who occupy this shadowy position between life and death, or between two deaths, has only expanded. This talk will explore some of these conditions, and also examine how they pop up in horror fiction and film.

 

Roger Luckhurst is a Professor who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written on mummies, vampires, and zombies, and was once welcomed onto Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’ as ‘the go-to guy for the undead.’ His most recent book is Gothic: An Illustrated History, from Thames and Hudson (2021).

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. 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

[Image: a scene from Night of the Living Dead (1968). Direction and cinematography both by George A. Romero, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

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The Boggart – a Study in Shadows: a Zoom talk by Dr Simon Young

The boggart was a much-feared, little-studied supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds, it survives today, whether in place-names or in works of fantasy literature – not least the Harry Potter books.

Dr Simon Young’s research into this mercurial and mysterious figure pioneers two methods for collecting folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from digitised ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories that derive from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years.

Through a radical combination of this new information and an interdisciplinary approach – involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies, sociology and more – it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales.

The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a ‘goblin’. Rather, this was a much more general term encompassing all solitary, and often ambivalent, supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms to shape-changing ghouls. In the same period that boggart beliefs were dying, folklorists continuously misrepresented the boggart and the modern fantasy version was born of these misunderstandings.

Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) are both due out in 2022. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, the Second World War in Italy and Italian Renaissance History.

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward 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

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An introduction to Arthur Machen – a Zoom talk by James Machin

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was an author, journalist, occultist, and thespian. He grew up among the ancient woods and ‘wild-domed hills’ of south Wales before moving to London to establish himself in literature.

After initial literary success – in particular with the long short story ‘The Great God Pan’ (1894) – Machen fell out of favour along with other ‘decadents’ in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial. After a spell as a strolling player in the Benson Shakespeare company, he settled begrudgingly into a decades-long career on Fleet Street. Machen’s re-emergence into the popular consciousness came towards the end of 1914, with his story ‘The Bowmen’ becoming his own piece of unintentional Great War myth-making.

Despite being considered as an obscure and peripheral figure, Machen’s work has enjoyed consistent attention, and his influence on H. P. Lovecraft in particular has led to him being regarded as a major figure in horror. Machen’s reputation is built on such contradictions: he was the quintessential starving artist of the fin de siècle, shivering in a New Grub Street garret, who also imported wine from his own vineyard in the Touraine. He is a ‘lost’ writer whose work is perhaps more widely available than ever, under respectable Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics imprints. He is the Golden Dawn member and formative influence on countercultural psychogeography who was also a sceptic and a High Tory. In this talk, James will explore these and other puzzles about Machen’s life, writing, and times.

James Machin is co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen. His book Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880–1939 was published by Palgrave in 2018. Other recent publications include Of Mud and Flame: A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook (Strange Attractor, 2019) and British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893-1937 (Handheld Press, 2020). He teaches at the Royal College of Art and the University of Bedfordshire, and is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

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