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Witchcraft in Poland – Professor Michael Ostling – Zoom

Witchcraft in Poland

Outside the imagination, witches don’t exist – but in early modern Poland, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. Professor Michael Ostling of Arizona State University reveals the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes.

Having studied many accusations and confessions while researching his book Between the Devil and the Host, Ostling will also discuss how witches viewed themselves and their own religious lives. The accusations they faced of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us the deeply pious Catholic culture of Poland at the time. With it came a complex folklore of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptised babies.

Through the dark glass of witchcraft, Ostling will explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Bio

Michael Ostling is a religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft. His published works include a general history of witchcraft in early modern Poland, an edited volume on Christian understandings of goblins and fairies globally, and work in the history of emotions, the ethnobotany of witchcraft, the demonization of Jews and witches, and the millenarian roots of religious toleration.

He also writes on theories of religion, often by way of pop culture studies, with work on Harry Potter (and secularization theory) and the Wizard of Oz (and theories of myth).

Ostling’s current work is taking him in a new direction: critical pedagogy, with an emphasis on the educational philosophy of the 20th-century Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń.

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Twilight of the Godlings – Francis Young – Zoom

Twilight of the Godlings

Throughout the recorded history of Britain, belief in earthbound spirits presiding over nature, the home and human destiny has been a feature of successive cultures.

From the localised deities of Britannia to the Anglo-Saxons’ elves and the fairies of late medieval England, Britain’s godlings have populated a shadowy, secretive realm of ritual and belief running parallel to authorised religion.

Bio

Francis Young, author of the acclaimed Twilight of the Godlings, will take us deep into the elusive history of these supernatural beings, tracing their evolution from the pre-Roman Iron Age to the end of the Middle Ages.

Arguing that accreted cultural assumptions must be cast aside in order to understand the godlings – including the cherished idea that these folkloric creatures are the decayed remnants of pagan gods and goddesses – this bold, revisionist lecture traces Britain’s ‘small gods’ to a popular religiosity influenced by classical learning. It offers an exciting new way of grasping the island’s most mysterious mythical inhabitants.

Francis Young studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and regularly appears on BBC radio.

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Shadows & Ecstasy: Introduction to BDSM & Kink for modern relationships LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture. Tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Absinthe.

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

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Songs of Shadows and Ecstasy: Introduction to BDSM & Kink for modern relationships

BDSM and Kink: Differences, Overlaps, and the Language of Expansive Desire”Though often used interchangeably, BDSM and kink are distinct yet deeply intertwined terms that describe different dimensions of erotic exploration.An engaging, inclusive, and non-judgmental talk mixing history, theory, and lived experience — accessible to all, whether you’re kink and/or BDSM-curious or simply looking to expand your understanding of human sexuality and Eroticism.What Is Kink?What Is BDSM?So What’s the Difference?And Where Do They Overlap?Why Does This Matter?Understanding the distinction and the nuance helps us:Name our desires more clearlyCommunicate boundaries and needs more effectivelyAvoid assumptions about others’ practices or identitiesReduce stigma, both internal and societalCreate safer, more fulfilling, and more connected relationships, hotter, creative, expansive, ecstatic sexuality. It is Erotic!Both kink and BDSM are languages of erotic creativity. They are tools for play, expression, healing, ecstasy, rebellion, transgression, and transformation. They challenge shame. They centre consent. And they return us, over and over, to the body, to presence, to power, and to pleasure.”

Nuit d’Or

At 65, Nuit d’Or is a rare and respected voice in the fields of conscious kink, BDSM, and erotic education. A certified Transformational Coach, mentor, and inclusive sex educator, she supports individuals, couples, and collectives in reclaiming their erotic intelligence and creating conscious, life-affirming relationships.

With a professional background in ballet, contemporary dance and the visual arts, Nuit d’Or brings a unique blend of creative discipline, somatic intelligence, and psychological insight to her work. Since 2009, she has led professional and lifestyle BDSM sessions following an immersive apprenticeship with Mistress Fiore, refining an approach that is trauma-informed, soulful, and erotically attuned.

Her coaching draws on shadow work, mental fitness, archetypal astrology, and Jungian principles to help clients reclaim inner authority, explore desire without shame, and build intimacy rooted in trust and agency. She also mentors Dominants, submissives, and couples looking to deepen their dynamics with clarity and integrity.

Brought up in Switzerland to French and Spanish parents, and based in East London, Nuit d’Or works internationally through her private practice, workshops, and her podcast In Praise of Shadows. Her work champions modern relationships that are self-aware, consensual, and radically alive.

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

We are unable to give refunds for in person events with less than 7 days notice in any circumstances.

Drawing Fairy Land – Luciana Nedelea

An exhibition of all the original illustrations to Viktor Wynd’s Dark Fairy Tales featuring Good People, Trolls, Leeches, Mermaids, Pixies, Shapeshifters, Ghosts, Corpse, Anthropophagi, Bestiality, a toad, fornicating horses, a changeling, Witches, Serpents and many more nasty things

Luciana Nedelea

Luciana Nedelea is an illustrator from Transylvania specializing in heavy metal-style imagery. She holds a PhD in ancient history and archaeology.

https://www.instagram.com/luciana_nedelea_artworks/?hl=en

Welcome to Fairy Land – Tessa Farmer

Fairies will emerge from the shadows, intent on sabotage and warfare in order to reclaim their museum: their fairyland

Put on Your Fairy Wings and come to The Private View – Wed Nov 12th 6-8pm

RSVP HERE

The fairies have been quietly lurking in the museum for over a decade. They consider this their realm, happily  feasting upon (sometimes breeding) insect pests, entertaining themselves with a little, subtle vandalism, in competition with carpet beetle and clothes moth larvae (Mr.Wynd never notices). Other ‘fairies’ appear from time to time, but they don’t last for long. However, these ‘dark fairies’ and other invasive  creatures like Mermaids, Djinn, Trolls, Pixies and the like recently called into the museum by the publication of Viktor Wynd’s Dark Fairy Tales  pose a distinct threat to their habitat.Therefore they will emerge from the shadows, intent on sabotage and warfare in order to reclaim their museum: their fairyland.

 

Tessa Farmer – http://www.tessafarmer.com/ –  was born in 1978 in Birmingham and  lives and works in London. She is the great granddaughter of the influential writer of supernatural horror Arthur Machen. She studied at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, The University of Oxford  where she received a BFA and an MFA. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is in many collections including those of The Saatchi Gallery, London, The David Roberts Collection, London and The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania.

In 2007 she was artist in residence at the Natural History Museum in London and was nominated for The Times/ Southbank Show Breakthrough Award. In 2011 she was awarded a Kindle Project ‘Makers Muse’ Award and in 2015 won the British Science Fiction Association BSFA Art Award.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Kafka: Making of an Icon’ at The Bodleian’s Weston Library, Oxford, ‘Reimag(in)ing The Victorians’, Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, ‘Insect Odyssey’, Salisbury Museum, Salisbury and ‘NatureMAX’, Giant Gallery, Bournemouth. Her work can be seen in the permananent collections of MONA, Tasmania and The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, London.

‘In Fairyland: The World of Tessa Farmer’ was published by Strange Attractor Press in 2016. Edited by art historian and curator Catriona McAra, In Fairyland consists of eight carefully crafted chapters by Giovanni Aloi, Gail-Nina Anderson, Gavin Broad, Brian Catling, Jeremy Harte, Petra Lange-Berndt, and John Sears.

Dark Fairy Tales by Viktor Wynd on Zoom

Dark Fairy Tales 

Let Viktor Wynd share a nightcap with you, tuck you into bed and tell you Fairy Tales to send you into a deep sleep of strange dreams. Be warned these are not the Ladybird or Disney versions and may not be suitable for the tenderist ears.

This evening Mr. Wynd will tells some his favourite tales heard around the world, from nasty Germans chopping up people and eating them to disgusting, macabre and delightful tales from Borneo, learn of the birth of the leeches, the reason mosquitos are always buzzing human ears, why it is best not to suckle caterpillars – or indeed strange babies and something about bedbugs that might give you nightmares. Giant Octopuses, man eating pigs and a buried moon from Papua New Guinea, or possibly shapeshifting magickal creatures from Wales – the world will be your oyster.

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.

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film – Dr Murray Leeder – Zoom

Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film

To celebrate Halloween, the Last Tuesday Society is hosting a presentation on the role of dreams in horror films.

Join Dr Murray Leeder as he examines the role of dreams in horror films and proposes “dream horror” as a mode for horror. The nightmare functions for horror sort of as the fairy tale does for the romantic comedy: as a kind of ur-signifier. Dream sequences have often represented a point of contact between horror and art cinema, since they license moments of avant-garde experimentation couched within narrative. They also represent moments where horror irrupts into other genres (e.g. the dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1955)). But, as we shall see, dreams are also often representations of occluded truths about patriarchal capitalism that need not be woken up from but woken up to. As Rosemary yells in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), ‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’

Bio

Murray Leeder is ATS Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Arts – English & Film Studies Department, University of Alberta. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

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

Daisy Wheel, Hexfoil, Six-Petal Rosette & Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Daisy Wheel, Hexafoil, Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey

The six-petal rosette is well known to graffiti hunters, sometimes referred to as a daisy wheel. To geometers it is known as a hexfoil (or hexafoil) and to the adherents of the New Age as the ‘Flower of Life.’

It is first recorded as a solar symbol in Near East in the 8th century BC, flanking a Syrian solar deity – although there are claims that it can be seen in the symbolic art of earlier cultures.

It appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron; an object melding Celtic, Thracian and Near Eastern mythical symbolism. Two rosettes flank a Goddess, surrounded by exotic creatures which seem to be elephants, winged griffins, and a large feline.

The symbol was carried west by the Roman Legionnaires where it often appears on their headstones. The Merovingians of the 5th century deployed the symbol alongside pagan imagery on their grave slabs. By the 8th century, it was adopted by the Carolingians and embedded within their sacred architecture.

In early Medieval Europe it was used to invoke the protection of the Virgin, sometimes placed as a ‘crown’ in holy sculptures from the Mediterranean. By the time it arrived in England, it was considered to be the motif most appropriate for the pilgrim ampullae of Our Lady of Walsingham, the second most important shrine in England after Thomas Beckets shrine Canterbury.

Following the Black Death, the symbol was appropriated by the new elite class to adorn and protect their high-status buildings in the Tudor age. To show its durability, it even went on to have a further life as a motif used on headstones in the New World.

This talk will follow the symbol’s journey of appropriation by ancient cultures, up to the point when it becomes part of the  repertoire  of symbols sacred to Christianity. The talk  will focus upon the corpora of medieval graffiti, where it was often associated with fonts and follow it through to the Early Modern Period, where it was adopted by the elites to protect their grand residences and fortifications.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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

Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence

History has shown us that the Witch – as conceived of as the broom-riding hag stereotype –   was essentially the delusional construct of the misogynist cleric Heinrich Kramer.

His insidious ideas were perpetuated via the publication of  ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ (Hammer of the Witches) in 1486, a propagandist tract which came complete with fake approbations from his Faculty in Cologne. Condemned on release, numerous reprints over the years continued to disseminate his ideas, contrary to intellectual thought elsewhere.

As Kramer’s assertions were fantasy, it would be therefore safe to assume that no one had ever been harmed by so-called ‘maleficium.’

And yet, Kent’s Assize Court Records are full of indictments of those accused of practising malignant witchcraft and the subsequent judgements which led to their execution. Following the Witchcraft Act of 1562, indictments for murder by witchcraft had begun to appear in the historical record.

This illustrated talk uses a combination of survey, local case studies and the examination of the key witchcraft trials in the county to paint a picture of 17th century Kent. It was second only to Essex to have the highest number of witchcraft indictments in England

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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

 

John Schorne, Gentleman Born, Conjured the Devil into a Boot – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

John Schorne, Gentleman Born, Conjured the Devil into a Boot

‘Master,’ ‘Maister’ or ‘Sir’ John Schorn(e), Rector of North Marston, Buckinghamshire died in 1314, reputed to have possessed miraculous powers of healing sickness in both animals and humans.

His most infamous miracle was when he conjured the devil into a boot! A second legend recounts the time when struck the ground with his staff from which a spring gushed forth. The water was said to be excellent for curing the ‘ague’ (malaria) and gout!

Following his death in the 14th century, his shrine became the third most popular after Canterbury & Walsingham – yet, mysteriously, he remained uncanonised!

This talk will seek to illustrate the circumstances for his non-canonisation, of how his bones were ‘translated ‘to St George’s Chapel at Windsor and how his ‘territory of grace’ spread out to encompass the south of England.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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