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Magic mushrooms – Robert Dickins – Zoom

Magic Mushrooms

In this talk, Robert Dickins explores the history of Psilocybe mushroom picking in Britain and the events that eventually led to their change in legal status in 2005. Beginning with the accidental ‘poisonings’ of the nineteenth century, and the slow systemization of the Liberty Cap by mycologists, he describes the post-war history of Psilocybe pickers emerging from obscure origins. Including, where and how knowledge spread, scientific research, pitched battles with farmers in fields, and the emergence of grow kits, all of which is set against the many methods the authorities used in order to shut down the nascent mushroom culture in Britain.

Speaker Bio:

Robert Dickins, PhD, is a historian and publisher, whose works examines the social and literary history of psychoactive substances and altered states of experience. He is the author of Cobweb of Trips: A Literary History of Psychedelics (2024) and Psilocybe Pickers: A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons (2025), and is currently researching the connection between tripping and gardens for a forthcoming book project.

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 Mystic Wizard of Oz – John Bucher – Zoom

The Mystic Wizard of Oz

While many know The Wizard of Oz as a work of noted literature and a classic of the American film canon, few are familiar with its mythological significance. Creator, L. Frank Baum was involved with the burgeoning Theosophy movement of the era and included numerous symbols, motifs, and themes in his story that also found their way into the film. Heavily influenced by ancient wisdom traditions, The Wizard of Oz functions as a portal into a world of esoteric wonder.

Speaker Bio:

John Bucher is an American mythologist, historian, and award-winning public speaker specialising in comparative mythology, folklore, and the enduring power of ancient stories in the modern world. With a background in both history and education, he is particularly known for his ability to bring mythic traditions vividly to life for contemporary audiences.

John’s work explores how myths function as cultural technologies — shaping identity, morality, and collective imagination across time. His research and lectures range widely, encompassing Greek and Roman mythology, Norse and Celtic traditions, folk belief, ritual practice, and the survival of mythic archetypes in modern literature, film, and popular culture.

An engaging and highly sought-after speaker, John Bucher has lectured internationally at universities, museums, festivals, and cultural institutions, where his talks are celebrated for their clarity, humour, and narrative richness. He is also the author of several books on mythology and folklore, written with both scholarly insight and an accessible, story-driven style.

At the heart of his work is a conviction that myths are not relics of the past but living frameworks through which humans continue to understand fear, wonder, transformation, and meaning. Through teaching, writing, and public engagement, John Bucher invites audiences to rediscover mythology not as distant legend, but as a vibrant and vital force still shaping our world today.

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

Comic Books as Modern Mythology – John Bucher – Zoom

Comic Books as Modern Mythology

Comic books and graphic novels have become significant cultural artifacts that reflect, influence, and shape modern society’s myths, values, and collective psyche. From their roots in the early 20th century to their evolution into a diverse and complex medium that addresses a broad range of themes — the mythic underpinnings of comics have evolved from being subtextual to textual.

Speaker Bio:

John Bucher is an American mythologist, historian, and award-winning public speaker specialising in comparative mythology, folklore, and the enduring power of ancient stories in the modern world. With a background in both history and education, he is particularly known for his ability to bring mythic traditions vividly to life for contemporary audiences.

John’s work explores how myths function as cultural technologies — shaping identity, morality, and collective imagination across time. His research and lectures range widely, encompassing Greek and Roman mythology, Norse and Celtic traditions, folk belief, ritual practice, and the survival of mythic archetypes in modern literature, film, and popular culture.

An engaging and highly sought-after speaker, John Bucher has lectured internationally at universities, museums, festivals, and cultural institutions, where his talks are celebrated for their clarity, humour, and narrative richness. He is also the author of several books on mythology and folklore, written with both scholarly insight and an accessible, story-driven style.

At the heart of his work is a conviction that myths are not relics of the past but living frameworks through which humans continue to understand fear, wonder, transformation, and meaning. Through teaching, writing, and public engagement, John Bucher invites audiences to rediscover mythology not as distant legend, but as a vibrant and vital force still shaping our world today.

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

Horror Movies and Psychology with Katie Evans – LIVE

Horror Movies and Psychology with Katie Evans

Whether you’re just beginning to peek into the shadows of the horror genre or you’ve been a lifelong fan, many of us are drawn to horror for reasons we don’t fully understand. What is it about these films that we love and how do they unsettle us so deeply.

Join spooky psychotherapist Katie Evans for a fascinating exploration of how horror movies tap into our core human fears, make use of our psychological makeup, and can even help us confront the darkest parts of ourselves. This talk delves beneath the surface of jump scares and gore to uncover the psychoanalytic ideas that underpin many of our favourite horror films.

Together we will exploring how horror tropes and characters act as mirrors to the self, and how these stories allow us to safely explore thoughts and feelings we might otherwise avoid bringing into the light.

Katie Evans is a private practice therapist and self-confessed horror nerd, giving lectures across the UK and Ireland on topics such as the psychology of horror movies, sexuality in horror and vampires. Her passion for all things spooky began in childhood and continued through her studies in music, film, and media at Liverpool University, before moving into the field of mental health. She holds advanced accreditation in GSRD Therapy (Gender, Sexuality, and Relationship Diversity) and is a BACP-accredited therapist. Katie has presented at conferences across Europe and has spoken for organizations including The Maudsley, the British Psychological Society, The NHS, LGBT Foundation, and HMPPS, among others. She is also a registered guest lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. An advocate for using pop culture in psychotherapy, Katie previously hosted The Mental Health Monsters Podcast and continues to explore how fictional narratives—especially those from the horror genre—can help us better understand ourselves and the world that we live in.

Devil’s Botany is the UK’s first absinthe distillery, founded by Directors of The Last Tuesday Society’s Absinthe Parlour. Celebrating spirit’s connection to art, literature, magic & mixology, Devil’s Botany is unleashing the future of absinthe with bold expressions for the adventurous drinkers of today.

The venue opens at 18:30. Doors will close at 19:00 to avoid disrupting the speaker. We kindly ask that all guests arrive before 19:00. Refunds are not possible for in person events with less than seven days notice in any circumstances.

 

 

 

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

The Chimeric Imagination: From Japanese Shrines to P.T. Barnum – May Ho – Zoom

The Chimeric Imagination: From Japanese Shrines to P.T. Barnum

The Lens: Archaeology & The Biography of Objects

Drawing on May’s background in Applied Landscape Archaeology, this session treats the Fiji Mermaid not as a hoax, but as an artefact with a complex stratigraphy of meaning. We begin in Edo-period Japan, analysing the ‘Gaff’ through the lens of yōkai folklore and spiritual protection, before following its migration to the West. May will deconstruct how P.T. Barnum commodified ‘wonder’, transforming a sacred talisman into a work of the ‘experience economy’. We will ask: How does the museum display’s context change an object’s ontological status

Speaker Bio:

May Ho is an interdisciplinary researcher whose research integrates landscape archaeology, business management, and sustainability. She holds an MSc in Applied Landscape Archaeology (Distinction) from the University of Oxford and an MA in Managing Archaeological Sites (Distinction) from University College London. This academic background underpins her critical analysis of artefact biography, cultural stratigraphy, and spatial contexts.

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

On Collecting as a Psychological Condition – Viktor Wynd – Zoom

On Collecting as a Psychological Condition

A Live Online Conversation with Viktor Wynd and Lena Heide-Brennand

In this newly reimagined online event, Viktor Wynd turns his formidable curiosity back upon the question that has shaped his life: what does it mean to collect — and when does collecting become a condition rather than a choice?

Presented as a lively conversation rather than a solitary lecture, the evening opens Wynd’s extraordinary world of objects to dialogue and audience Q&A. His collections range from natural history to relics of the dead, from surrealist masterpieces to children’s toys, from ethnographica to occult art, orchids, ferns, spirit drawings, extinct birds, tropical fish, magic stones, mammoth bones — and the improbable, the beautiful, and the faintly disturbing in between.

A dodo’s bone beside an ostrich skeleton.

An Asmat death mask beside a painting by Leonora Carrington.

A giant crab sharing psychic space with thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of other curiosities.

But spectacle is only the surface.

Beneath the accumulation lies a more disquieting inquiry:

Why do some individuals experience possession not as pleasure but as necessity?

What inner architecture compels the acquisition of one more relic, one more fragment, one more charged object?

Is collecting preservation, devotion, taxonomy — or something closer to obsession?

Together, Wynd and Heide-Brennand will explore collecting as ritual practice, cabinet theatre, existential strategy, and psychological terrain. They will question whether the cabinet of curiosity is a proto-museum, an anti-museum, or a deeply personal cosmology constructed against chaos.

Expect intellectual mischief, rigorous thought, eccentric digressions, and an engaged audience Q&A.

Some people collect things.

Some people create worlds.

Speaker Bio:

Viktor Wynd, proprietor of London’s eponymous (nay infamous) Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History has spent the last twenty five years telling stories to audiences across the globe. Fascinated by traditional fairy tales his repetoire includes tales from The Brothers Grimm, The Arabian Nights, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Irieland, Africa, Papua New Guinea & North America – so far.

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

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