Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
Guided tours of London’s Famous – nay InFamous – Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, first drink your Devil’s Botany Absinthe (included in ticket price) – then see Dodo’s Bones, Erotica from Around the World, Real Fairies, Mermaids, Creatures of The Deep. Occult Masterpieces by Austin Osman Spare, Surrealist Minorpieces by Leonora Carrington, Pailthorpe & Mednikoff, Old Master Etchings, Magick, The Gnostic Temple of Agape, Dead Dandies, Gian’t’s Bones, The Naughy Nun, Unicorns, Voodoo Fetishes from Benin, Masks from New Guinea and The Congo, Entomological Displays, The Cabinet of Monsters with Two Headed Lam, Piglet and Kitten, 4 legged Chicken, Eight Legged Lamb, Two Headed Snake, Skeletons, Taxiermy, Dead People, Spirit Drawings, Old Dolls, Human Hair Art, a Magic Teacup, Magick Soap, Skulls Taxidermy and more – all underground in a tiny, claustrophobic basement that looks like the inside of Viktor Wynd’s Mind
Tours with Vadim Kosmos – Emeritus Director of the Museum on the dates below, tickets £10 including a glass of Absinthe
The Dark Side of Psychedelics – Reporting on the dark side of the psychedelic renaissance
As a journalist reporting on the psychedelic world at the same time as having his own experiences, for both research and as part of a personal quest for growth, Mattha Busby has seen it all. Ceremonies bathed in love and light, and rituals steeped in darkness. Through all of this, he has witnessed and experienced both the benefits of psychedelics and their serious potential for harm. To tell this story, Mattha embarks on a rip-roaring journey through a brave—and profoundly weird—new world in which psychedelics are more available than ever before in human history. Retreat organizers are paying for targeted ads on Instagram, and giving celebrities free trips in exchange for positive testimonials. Illegal psychedelic dispensaries have popped up on high streets, and vendors are selling psychedelic toad venom on tropical beaches and in hotels, often without adequate safety measures.
For many, these psychedelic experiences have provided welcome relief from a near-constant sense of anxiety, but others have been left dazed and confused, or worse, and with few avenues for support. In rare cases, people have even died at psychedelic retreat centers, and at clinics, though we often do not hear about this until someone investigates. Some of these incidents have highlighted the folly of erasing the reality of the darker aspects of shamanism in popular representations and denying the sometimes radical cultural differences between those who serve psychedelics and those who receive. There has been scant discussion of how many of the traditional uses of ayahuasca were for sorcery and other nefarious purposes.
Ultimately, it can be difficult to deduce good psychedelic facilitators between the less well-intentioned until you’ve spent time with them. But increasing numbers of people around dinner tables now tell of destabilising journeys and touchy shamans. There are no easy answers to all of this — but the first step would be leaders in the psychedelic industry accepting this fact and not dismissing critiques as ill intentioned tellings of isolated incidents.
Speaker Bio
Mattha Busby is a journalist specialising in health policy, drugs/psychedelics and (sub)culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Rolling Stone, WIRED, and elsewhere. In 2024, he was a Ferris-UC Berkeley fellow in psychedelic journalism. He has published two slim book volumes, on drug policy for Thames & Hudson in 2022 and on psychedelics for Hoxton Mini Press in 2025.
Curated and hosted by
Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.
Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.
She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.
Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.
maya
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
‘My father, Peter Hand, who passed away in 2024, was Head of Modelling at MGM in Borehamwood during the 1950s and ’60s,’ says Richard Hand. ‘He worked on a number of movies and built the various scale models – and the “man-in-suit” versions – for Gorgo (1961), Britain’s B-movie answer to Godzilla, after which he left the film industry. Before he died, he published his memoirs, A Spear Carrier in Search of a Role (2021), and they offer a fascinating, first-hand glimpse into a neglected corner of film history: the model studio.
‘Remarkably, I didn’t even know about my father’s work on Gorgo until years later. He was never interested in horror or pop culture, so while my older brother and I were obsessively building glow-in-the-dark Aurora monster kits, collecting issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and making our own scare attractions and Super-8 horror epics, I had no idea about my father’s dark cinematic secret… One day, my brother turned to me and said, “Did you know our dad actually made a monster?” I didn’t believe him, but it was completely true – and it changed the way I thought about our family and about the culture we grew up loving.
‘This talk reflects on my father’s story and the unexpected intersections of family memory, horror fandom, and lost film craftsmanship.Drawing on his memoirs and my own memories, I’ll explore how model work like his has been largely written out of official film histories, even as the monster he helped design and build – and others like it – have gone on to become cult icons. I’ll also consider how this story connects to wider patterns of horror fandom and culture: from model kit mania and magazines to the music of Frank Zappa, who in songs such as ‘Cheepnis’ famously celebrated low-budget monster movies.’
Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Head of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has a particular interest in historical forms of popular culture, especially horror, and is the author of two books on horror radio drama; the co-author (with Michael Wilson) of four books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre; the co-editor (with Jay McRoy) of two volumes on gothic/horror cinema; and the co-editor (with Mark O’Thomas) of a collection of essays on American Horror Story. As well as an academic, he is a theatre director and award-winning radio writer, including as lead dramatist for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air podcast drama which, in 2020, was archived by the Library of Congress for its ‘historical and cultural significance’.
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, 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. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: an adapted film promo poster for the 1961 British sci-fi movie Gorgo.]
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