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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 Infected Museum – Viktor Wynd – Book Launch

a Free Glass of Devil’s Botany Chocolate Absinthe to the first 100 people on the night

The Infected Museum

Book Launch & Devils’ Botany Absinthe Regalis Launch

at

The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History – 11 Mare street, London, E8

 

Viktor Wynd, Allison Crawbuck & Rhys Everett Request

The Honour, Delight & Pleasure of Your Company

 

For The Launch of

The Infected Museum – Viktor Wynd at The National Maritime Museum Cornwall

& Devil’s Botany Absinthe Regalis

Tuesday September 20th 6 – 8pm

 

 

A fully illustrated hardback catalogue of our pop up Cornish Museum with essays by Art Historian Adrian Dannatt, artist Marki Dion, Historian of Museums Arthur MacGregor & Richard Pell, Director of The Center for The Study of PostNatural History

 

Available now from all good bookshops for £10 & on our website , Pre-order a signed copy for £4 on the night

 

Directors of The Last Tuesday Society’s Cocktail Bar, Allison Crawbuck & Rhys Everett, Release Devil’s Botany Absinthe Regalis, Resurrecting London’s Untold Absinthe History 

 

RAISING THE SPIRITS WITH DEVIL’S BOTANY

Produced by London’s first absinthe distillery, the inspiration for Devil’s Botany Absinthe Regalis arose from a curious elixir discovered in the recipe books of London’s 18th century apothecaries. Published in 1719 London, the instructions for this once-forgotten botanical spirit reveal a key to the origins of absinthe that had previously remained unknown. Nearly a century before the first absinthe distilleries opened in Switzerland or France, it turns out London’s dram-drinkers were already enjoying an early precursor to absinthe made by the city’s apothecaries. Praised for its revitalising flavour, this noble aperitif has been found most effective in raising the spirits for over 300 years.

 

Traditional, yet mysteriously exotic, Absinthe Regalis’ holy trinity of grand wormwood, green anise and sweet fennel is enlivened by warming spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom—all once highly sought after symbols of luxury. The resulting distillate is then coloured naturally to achieve its emerald green hue from a new mix of botanicals, including white dead nettle and milk thistle which can be found growing wild throughout London.

The Long Lost Friend: An American Grimoire – Dan Harms

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

The Long Lost Friend: An American Grimoire

Two centuries ago, in a valley near Reading, Pennsylvania, a man wrote a book of charms, incantations, and recipes taken from German tradition. Although he received condemnation for revealing magical secrets, his book became an instant classic. It became a sourcebook of spells for German-speaking immigrants, and its promises of invulnerability brought it wider success – until its reputation was stained with bloody murder.

This talk explores The Long-Lost Friend, an American grimoire that became a sensation in its native Pennsylvania and far beyond. We will explore its author, John George Hohman, the culture in which he lived, and the spells in the book itself – and why it is no longer used within that community.

Speaker Bio:

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

Curated and Hosted by Dr Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

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

The Untold Chapter Of British Traditional Wicca – Julia Phillips

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

The Untold Chapter Of British Traditional Wicca

‘Julia Phillips is one of the best current historians of Wicca and is breaking genuinely new ground in tracing the way in which the religion developed.’ (Ronald Hutton)

Modern pagan witchcraft commonly known as Wicca, or British Traditional Wicca, emerged publicly in England in the 1950s, influenced by the notion promoted by Margaret Murray of a continuing tradition of a Pagan religion that had survived centuries of persecution. Retired civil servant Gerald Gardner (1884-1964) claimed that had been initiated into such a cult in Hampshire, England, in 1939 and in December 1950 he met Cecil Williamson (1909-1999), whose childhood encounters with practitioners of a traditional style of English rural witchcraft inspired a lifelong passion for witchcraft and magic. In 1951 Williamson purchased a farm on the Isle of Man, which he turned into a Museum of Witchcraft and invited Gardner to take up a role as the ‘resident witch.’ Using original sources, Julia Phillips tells the story of this significant chapter in the story of the establishment and development of Wicca, placing Williamson and Gardner, and the Museum of Witchcraft, within the context of post-war Britain.

Speaker Bio

Julia Phillips is a post graduate researcher in the Department of History at University of Bristol. Her interest in occultism began in the 1970s, when she attended lectures at the Society for Psychical Research in London. Over the past fifty years Phillips has studied and written on many different subjects related to the occult and magic and her research about this untold chapter of British Traditional Wicca was published in Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, (University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2021).

Photo: Cecil Williamson 28 January 1951, Sunday Mercury

Curated and Hosted by Dr. Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

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

The Magical Women of Ireland by Dr. Gillian Kenny

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

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

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

Suffolk Ghost Tales – Kirsty Hartsiotis

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

All places have ghost stories. Laurie Lee, in Cider with Rosie, says, ‘There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and every field and hill had several.’ He’s talking about Gloucestershire, but, even now, a hundred years on from when Lee was a boy, it still holds true across the country. But of all counties, Suffolk is a little bit special when it comes to ghosts…

The low cliffs, pebble beaches and faded hotels of his home county have become fixed in our minds as subtly dangerous places with a hint of folk horror. All those lost places… Visit Dunwich to see the last grave of All Saints teetering on the edge of the cliff, visit Aldeburgh and see the House in the Clouds bright and distant across the marshes, go to lonely Minsmere and see the ruined chapel, all that remains of a monastery and village abandoned, go to Covehithe … if it’s still there.

Suffolk is, after all, the home county of one of the greatest tellers of ghost tales – M R James. James moved to Suffolk aged three, when his father became rector of Great Livermere, up near the Norfolk border. His family lived there from 1865 until 1909, so James had a foot in Suffolk for much of his life. Several of his tales, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, my Lad; A Warning to the Curious; The Ash-tree and more, are set in Suffolk, and develop the disquieting aesthetic we now recognise in the landscape.

These fictions tap into the folk tales of the county, and there is no shortage of tales of ghosts, both true and tall, recorded in Suffolk. Most of the ghost tales still told seem to date back to no earlier than the 17th century – one of the earlier ghosts is Jonah Snell, whose story was possibly revived due to the uncovering of his gibbet post in the 1950s. Likewise, there are ghost stories about 17th century figures associated with the county’s sad history of persecution of witches, such as Amy Denny and Rose Cullender in Lowestoft. But Suffolk does have earlier ghosts recorded in its monastic chronicles. Now off Mildenhall Road in Bury St Edmunds, the site of Babwell Friary is right on the edge of today’s town. Before the friary was founded in the 13th century, Babwell was a marshy, fenny area, and there was found the county’s earliest named ghost: Leofstan, a luckless sheriff in Bury who fell foul of St Edmund.

As a storyteller who has come to specialise in local tales, I’ve been telling ghost stories for a good many years. One of the things I’ve noticed is that it’s these ghostly tales that people most respond to – because they have stories of their own. Of all the categories of local folk tale, it’s ironic that the ghost tale is the most living! Many of us know someone who has had a strange experience of a ghostly nature, or may even have had one ourselves. When I tell local ghost stories to audiences ranging from local WIs to school groups, I generally get some back.

I should say that I’ve never had much in the way of supernatural experiences myself – probably the scariest thing that’s happened in my researches was accidently standing next to a bird-scarer in a wood I wasn’t supposed to be in when it went off… I imagine they heard my shriek a mile away! Although, I will confess that we found there was a distinctly edgy atmosphere in Potsford Wood by Jonah Snell’s gibbet post. But we’ve been a bit naughty – we’ve gone visiting these ghostly locations in the middle of the day. What would have happened if we had visited by night? Probably the only ghost locations we’ve visited at night have been those hotbeds of supernatural activity – pubs!

With the season turning to midwinter and Christmas, there is more night than day, despite the lights being lit in our towns and cities. Christmas trees and other decorations are starting to go up in our homes. So, it’s time to tell these winter tales, these stories of ‘spirits and ghosts that glide by night,’ as Christopher Marlowe says in The Jew of Malta. It’s long been the tradition to tell ghost stories at Christmas, for at midwinter the night holds sway, and in the words of an early 11th century German abbess, Brigid, ‘the night is the domain of the dead.’ It’s a time to gather with friends and family and share stories, and it’s a time to remember those who have gone before, even as we look forward to a fresh new year and new possibilities.

M R James was aware of the tradition of telling ghost tales in the dark of the year, writing in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904: ‘I wrote these stories … and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas…’ So, pull up a chair, stoke the fire, turn on the fairy lights and start telling winter tales of ghost and spirits – and if they are Suffolk tales, so much the better! Did I tell you the one about the man who tried to get buried treasure from the county’s ghosts and met the monk-headed dog? Ah well, that’s another story!

Bio

Kirsty Hartsiotis, who is originally from Suffolk, has been a storyteller for more than twenty years, both solo and with her group Fire Springs. She came to storytelling with a lifelong love of stories and history, and a background in drama, heritage and education. She’s also a writer, and is the author of Suffolk Folk Tales and, with Cherry Wilkinson, Suffolk Ghost Tales, as well as a number of other folk tale collections. With her other hat on, she’s a museum curator, curating the Designated Arts and Crafts Movement collection at a Gloucestershire museum, and an Accredited Arts Society lecturer in art history – and folklore.

Photo Credit: The Potsford Ghost © Kirsty Hartsiotis

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]

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

New Orleans Voodoo, A fully illustrated lecture by Dr Louise Fenton- with Devil’s Botany Absinthe LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture at our museum – tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Absinthe

Doors open at 6:30pm and lecture starts at 7pm

When walking around the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, in New Orleans, there is the sound of Jazz, steamy heat and Voodoo. In this lecture Dr Louise Fenton will take you on a journey through the history of Voodoo, explaining how it evolved in this part of the USA. She will introduce you to key figures such as Dr John and Marie Laveau, show you key sites both within the French Quarter and beyond, take a look at Voodoo dolls and how Voodoo permeates the very soul of New Orleans. This lecture will introduce some of the practitioners in the Quarter now and discuss how people incorporate Voodoo into their daily life. By exploring literature, tourist guides, shops and Museums Louise will also show how Voodoo has been represented and how the authentic Voodoo can be differentiated from the tourist version.

Speaker Bio

Dr Louise Fenton is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and a cultural and social historian. She teaches contextual studies in the School of Art and supervises PhD students; she is also an artist and illustrator and uses drawing within her research. Her interest in New Orleans Voodoo began when studying for her PhD which she was awarded from the University of Warwick in 2010. Most recently Louise has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Beyond Belief’ and is a consultant on a new drama for BBC 3. Her research covers Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo and Witchcraft, especially curses and cursed objects.

City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley by Phil Baker- with Devil’s Botany Absinthe LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture at our museum – tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Absinthe

Doors open at 6:30pm and lecture starts at 7pm

“I dreamed I was paying a visit to London,” Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, “It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume.” Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.

Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and finds himself down on his luck in Paddington Green–and yet never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: the abiding rapture, he wrote in his diary, which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!

Bio

Phil Baker’s previous books include the definitive biography of Austin Osman Spare, London: City of Cities, a critical study of Samuel Beckett and a cultural history of absinthe. He lives in London and walks everywhere.

Alexandrian Witchcraft: an Ascent to the Numinous by Sharon Day – LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture at our museum – tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Absinthe

Doors open at 6:30pm and lecture starts at 7pm

Following the decades of controversy that have surrounded the late Alex Sanders, “Ascent to the Numinous” might not at first be the term that springs to mind when considering his heritage and, more specifically, the type of wiccan practice associated with him.

He has been labelled, among other things, a ‘showman’, a ‘plagiariser’, a ‘fascinator’, a ‘teller-of-tall-tales’, usually backed by accounts, purportedly based on personal experience, of his darker side. All, to varying degrees may well contain some element of truth.

Less common or at least less public are the innumerable accounts of his unbridled generosity; his knack of diverting unwanted attention from those loyal to him; and, most important of all perhaps, his intuitive grasp of the Mysteries, not to mention his ability to impart what he learned to his students and, through them, those initiates who to this day yearn to experience them.

Thanks to him, what today is known as Alexandrian witchcraft, its name associated with his own, was adapted – without ever betraying – those wiccan traditions that Gerald Gardner and others did so much to revive. By doing it, he fostered an approach that was at once both contemporary and fully respectful of the past, mindful of those traditions which all witches, irrespective of label, cherish and keep alive to this day.

The presenter will expand on these themes in her discourse.

Speaker Bio – Sharon Day

American by birth and British by marriage, Sharon’s academic career included one year in Japan as an exchange student in 1980. She would return there, having graduated from law school in New York City in 1992, with her husband, also a lawyer, when he took up a post in Tokyo years later.

After repatriating to London in 1997, Sharon felt drawn to esotericism and the occult, subsequently discovering what she felt was a vocation within Alexandrian witchcraft. Her search for suitable training and practical experience took her from London to Australia, the United States, and finally back to London, where she became the personal student of Maxine Sanders, co-founder of the Alexandrian Tradition.

Today, she leads the Coven of the Stag King in London under the eldership – and discreet guidance- of Maxine.

Sharon is also the founder of Rose Ankh Publishing Ltd, a book publisher of unique occult, historical, philosophical, and biographical works (www.roseankhpublishing.com) as well as an online historical archive dedicated to the Alexandrian witchcraft tradition (www.alexandrianwitchcraft.org).