The Absinthe Parlour invites your to explore what the future holds with an individual palm reading hosted in our most curious venue.
Individual palm readings will last roughly 15 minutes.
Guests are invited to join us in The Absinthe Parlour for a curious cocktail or two after their reading. Bar reservations can be made via: https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/absinthe-parlour/reservations/
The Absinthe Parlour invites your to explore what the future holds with an individual palm reading hosted in our most curious venue.
Individual palm readings will last roughly 15 minutes.
Guests are invited to join us in The Absinthe Parlour for a curious cocktail or two after their reading. Bar reservations can be made via: https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/absinthe-parlour/reservations/
The Absinthe Parlour invites your to explore what the future holds with an individual palm reading hosted in our most curious venue.
Individual palm readings will last roughly 15 minutes.
Guests are invited to join us in The Absinthe Parlour for a curious cocktail or two after their reading. Bar reservations can be made via: https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/absinthe-parlour/reservations/
Please note this is NOT a ZOOM event but an in person workshop at our museum – tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Absinthe
The Last Tuesday Society is delighted to invite Lucya Starza to host an in-person poppet making workshop at our most curious venue.
This live workshop offers the chance to make a magical poppet for protection and take part in a witchcraft ritual to enchant it for its purpose. Running as part of the events programme alongside Viktor Wynd’s exhibition on poppets, this is a chance to learn more about how they are made and used. Historically effigies and dolls have long been an important part of sympathetic magic to help, heal or harm. Their human-like form adding to their effectiveness whether doing a spell for yourself or to affect another individual. This hands-on class covers the theory, practice and a little history of the subject of magical dolls. All materials and instructions are provided and everyone at the workshop will be able to take home their own protection poppet.
About Lucya Starza
Lucya Starza is an eclectic witch living in London, England. As well as being a Wiccan and having a long-standing interest in traditional witchcraft, she grew up in a family where folk magic practices were part of everyday life. She writes A Bad Witch’s Blog at www.badwitch.co.uk and is the author of Pagan Portals – Poppets and Magical Dolls as well as other books published by Moon Books on candle magic, scrying, guided visualisations and the Wheel of the Year.
Devil’s Botany is London’s first absinthe distillery, founded by Directors of The Last Tuesday Society’s Absinthe Parlour & Cocktail Bar.
Devil’s Botany invites you to channel the powers of nature in a magick candle-making workshop at The Last Tuesday Society. Discover the secrets of magical botany as you create your very own naturally and supernaturally botanical candle.
Learn the art of herbal astrology and candle-making while sipping on Devil’s Botany cocktails. Guests will be guided through the candle-making process from start to finish, harnessing the magical properties of botanicals in their own unique fragrance blend of enchanted essential oils and dried botanicals.
Tickets include a Devil’s Botany London Absinthe cocktail upon arrival & admission to the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities.
Guests will each take home their own finished candle with a personalised botanical fragrance at the end of the workshop.
Event suitable for ages 18+ only.
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About the Host
Allison Crawbuck and Rhys Everett have always shared a passion for unearthing curious tales and rendering them in liquid form. The duo are co-owners of The Last Tuesday Society’s cocktail bar in East London, transforming Hackney’s best-kept secret into the city’s favourite Absinthe Parlour. In 2019, it was voted the Best Bar in London at the 7th annual Design My Night Awards by a public vote of over 180,000 Londoners, and in 2020, their absinthe menu was shortlisted for Imbibe’s Specialist List of the Year.
In January 2021, Allison Crawbuck and Rhys Everett launched London’s first Absinthe distillery: Devil’s Botany located in the city’s east end. They are also authors of Spirits of the Otherworld: A Grimoire of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals, published by Prestel/RandomHouse (Sep 2021 | ISBN 9783791387147).
Refund Policy: Refunds for in-person events are only possible up to 7 days prior to the event date.
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, magic & mixology, Devil’s Botany is unleashing the future of absinthe with bold expressions for the adventurous drinkers of today.
Tarot Design Before and After the Golden Dawn
Tarot originated as a gaming deck in the 1400s and in later centuries became a prop for esoteric practices and a tool for meditation and creative exercises. This diversification of uses was paralleled by a diversification of approaches to Tarot interpretation, design, and artistic style. This talk illustrates these changes with reference to allegory, archetype, and narrative in decks produced before and after the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888.
Bio
Emily E. Auger (MA, MA, Ph.D.) is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews, including Tarot and Other Meditation Decks (McFarland 2004; expanded edition 2023), Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940-2010 (Intellect 2016), Tech-Noir Film (Intellect 2011), and The Way of Inuit Art (McFarland 2004). She edited the multi-author anthology Tarot in Culture Volumes I and II (2014) and is co-editor with Janet Brennan Croft of Divining Tarot: Papers on Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps and Other Works by Nancy-Lou Patterson (2019). She also served as the founder and area chair for the Tarot area at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association conference from 2004–2020.
Image title
Image credits:
Image credits: Pamela C. Smith (artist) and Arthur E. Waite’s The Rider-Waite Tarot. First pub. 1909. U.S. Games Systems The Rider-Waite Tarot® © 1971.
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.
The Centre of a Thousand Legends: A Brief History of Boleskine House and Aleister Crowley
This presentation offers a brief history of Boleskine House, located on the southern shore of Loch Ness, in the central Scottish Highlands. Commissioned by Archibald Campbell Fraser (1736–1815), son of the infamous Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and completed with Masonic honours in 1809, Boleskine House already had a strange, perhaps even notorious history, and decidedly even more so during and after Aleister Crowley’s tenure.A year after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley purchased the property in 1899 for the ‘sole’ purpose of undertaking a magical rite known as the Abramelin ritual, an operation aimed at coming into contact with his Holy Guardian Angel, or inner genius.Drawing upon extensive research undertaken for a forthcoming publication, I will delve into the reasons why Boleskine House was chosen by a young practitioner of the occult, why it was so important during his formative years and thereafter, and will attempt to disambiguate fact from fiction.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest, perhaps even an unhealthy one, in Boleskine House and its long-held association with the iconoclastic occultist Aleister Crowley. He is currently editing a number of works, and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As author of the forthcoming title Lord Boleskine: Aleister Crowley and the House of the Beast 666, a detailed and engaging account of Crowley’s residence at his Highland home will be offered as well as the controversial legacy which he left in his wake.
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.
Images:
Boleskine House as photographed in 1912
‘With pipe, purity and posture’: Aleister Crowley as explorer and poet, May 1906, New York
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
Animal Ghosts Through History: How traditional ghost beliefs navigated non-human deaths
Ghosts are a prominent belief shared by many cultures throughout history, often shaped by religious ideas of death and the afterlife. However, these beliefs tend to be overwhelmingly focused on the ghosts of humans and those that manifest in a human form. But death is not a uniquely human experience and for thousands of years people have grappled with the fate of the animals that share our mortality.
While animal ghosts have received notably less attention than their human counterparts throughout history, their presence can be traced back to classical antiquity and continues to feature in ghost stories today.
This lecture discusses key ghost stories through history and explore the continuing (and often contentious) belief in animal ghosts, delving into the complex relationships that exist between humans, animals, and death.
Bio
Ms Rebecca Willis is a current PhD student and casual academic at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research spans across antiquity and into early modern Europe examining how the lens of magic and related belief systems can be used to provide new and comparative insights into the perceptions and interactions between individuals, their own embodied existence, and the natural environment in which they lived.
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.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
Major Arcana – The Tarot of Leonora Carrington
The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. As both a writer and painter, she was championed early by André Breton and joined the exiled Surrealists in New York, before settling in Mexico in 1943. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Drawing inspiration from the Tarot of Marseille and the popular Waite-Smith deck, Carrington brings her own approach and style to this timeless subject, creating a series of iconic images. Executed on thick board, brightly coloured and squarish in format, Carrington’s Major Arcana shines with gold and silver leaf, exploring tarot themes through what Gabriel Weisz Carrington describes as a ‘surrealist object’.
This tantalising discovery, made by the curator Tere Arcq and scholar Susan Aberth, has placed greater emphasis upon the role of the tarot in Carrington’s creative life and has led to fresh research in this area.
Speaker Bio
Susan L. Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College. She received her B.A. from UCLA, M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In 2022 she received a Curatorial Research grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for travel in connection with research into the esoteric traditions in the Americas. Her book publications include The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (2020, reissued in an expanded edition 2022) co-authored with Mexican curator Tere Arcq; Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (2004, Lund Humphries & Turner, Spain). She has contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues: Surrealism and Magic, Guggenheim Venice (2022); Hilma af Klint (Zwirner Gallery, 2022), Olga de Amaral (Lisson Gallery, 2022), Not Without My Ghosts (2020, Traveling exhibition in England); Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Juanita Guccione: Otherwhere (Napa Valley Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos Magicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Journal of Surrealism of the Americas, Artforum, Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, and Black Mirror.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
Rosaleen Norton – the fabulous, one-and-only ‘Witch of Kings Cross’
Rosaleen Norton, dubbed ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’ was a witch, artist, writer and philosopher from the 1930s until her death in 1979. Possessed of an acute intellect, Rosaleen studied and affected a personal and complex system of polytheism, trance magic, and sex magick, which was characterised and caricatured as ‘witchcraft’ and, sometimes, as ‘satanism’ by the Australian popular press.
Let Marguerite Johnson take you on a magical, witchy (broomstick) ride as she discusses Rosaleen – or Roie – and her wonderful legacy on popular and esoteric cultures through her occult and trance-induced art and her enduring dedication to an occult life. Marguerite will also discuss some of the scandals surrounding Roie, and the intense police and media scrutiny, which sometimes led to arrests, court cases and prosecutions.
In this lavishly illustrated talk, Marguerite not only shares the story of her own fascination with Roie, which began in childhood, but also some lesser-known archival material from her personal collection.
This special talk coincides with the exhibition – Four Witches & a Warlock: Magickal Art by Rosaleen Norton, Ithell Colquhoun, Madge Gill, Leonora Carrington & Austin Osman Spare – at The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History (Oct 01st 2024 – March 9, 2025)
Bio
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.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
