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The Legendary Origins of Britain – Zoom lecture with John Clark

Trojans at Totnes and Giants on Plymouth Hoe: The Legendary Origins of Britain

John Clark, formerly curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, investigates the legendary origins of Britain and the reputed landing place in Devon of Trojan refugees after the destruction of Troy by the Greeks.

Our story begins in the 1130s, when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a fraudulent ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, which tells how Trojan settlers, fleeing after the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, arrived in an island then called Albion. They found it inhabited by giants, whose leader was ‘Goemagog’. The Trojans renamed the land ‘Britain’ after their leader Brutus – and slaughtered the giants. Brutus’s comrade Corineus hurled Goemagog to his death from a cliff at a place still called (according to Geoffrey of Monmouth) ‘Goemagog’s Leap’ – but where was ‘Goemagog’s Leap’, and where exactly did the Trojans land? And Geoffrey never explained why the land had been called ‘Albion’, or where the giants came from. For that we have to wait till the early 14thcentury, when an anonymous English poet writing in Anglo-Norman French provided a prequel to Geoffrey’s history, and explained the origins of the name Albion and the giants.

John Clark, for many years curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, has long been interested in byways of medieval history, and in particular the way ‘real’ history relates to and interacts with legends and folklore. His book The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, subject of a previous talk, is due to be published in August 2024.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. 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 folklore-strewn first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you miss or can’t attend the event live on the night – the next day we will send ticketholders a recording that will be valid for two weeks.

[Image: 15th-century image from the Bodleian Library (MS Laud 733) – showing Albina and her sisters arriving in the land she called ‘Albion’.]

The Rowan Tree: Myth, Folklore, Art – Oliver Southall – Zoom

The Rowan Tree: Myth, Folklore, Art

Based on my recent monograph Rowan (Reaktion, 2023), this talk offers a whirlwind tour through the cultural and social history of the common rowan or mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia), a tree with deep roots in the northern European imagination. Setting the scene with a brief overview of the rowan’s evolution and ecology, I offer a series of snapshot studies from the tree’s history, each revealing aspects of its persistent and widespread cultural associations: as a source of magical protection; as a threshold between worlds; as an emblem of idealised motherhood and fertility; as a marker of loving attention to local natures. From the earliest Irish texts to Finnish nationalist paintings based on the Kalevala; from the West Saxon Aecerbot ritual to the forest-binding charms of nineteenth-century Karelian shamans; from skaldic poems about Thor to seventeenth-century witchcraft trials; from Ruskin to rewilding – there is something for everyone in the rich and storied history of this enchanting species.

Speaker Bio:

Oliver Southall is a writer, teacher and naturalist based in West Sussex. His most recent book, Rowan, a cultural history of the common mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia), was published in the Reaktion Books Botanical Series in 2023. Borage Blue, a hybrid text of essayistic fragments, prose poems and lyric verse concerned with nature and embodiment was published by Corbel Stone Press in 2019.

Curated and Hosted by:

Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

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

C. S. Lewis And The Chronicles Of Narnia – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom

C. S. Lewis And The Chronicles Of Narnia

Clive Staples Lewis was an English tutor at Oxford University between the 1920s and the 1950s, who was converted to Christianity by his friend and fellow Oxford academic, J. R. R. Tolkien, and became one of the twentieth century’s foremost defenders and propagators of the Christian faith. He is also, however, remembered and loved by most people today as the author of the stories set in an imagined land called Narnia, which rank among the greatest works of children’s fantasy literature. This talk seeks to explain what sort of man he was, and how and why he came to write the stories. It also looks at the relationship between them and his own, Christian, religious faith, and proposes to answer the question of why they are meaningful to, and appreciated by, people who do not share that faith.

Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.

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

Europe’s Great Witch Hunt – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom Lecture

Europe’s Great Witch Hunt

Between 1424 and 1782 Western and Central Europe, which had been an area of the world relatively little affected by witch hunting (the persecution of people accused of using magic to harm others), was badly convulsed by it. This talk is designed to answer the question of why late medieval Western Christianity lost its nerve so badly and began so much to fear imagined evils. It will tackle the related questions of why the trials peaked in the supposedly more rational era of the Scientific Revolution and European expansion overseas; and why the trials came to an end and have not resumed. It will also seek to explain why witch trials concentrated in particular places as well as times and why the majority of those put to death as a result were female.

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

Friendship in Doubt: Agnosticism and Magick in Aleister Crowley’s Circle – Richard Kaczynski

Friendship in Doubt: Agnosticism and Magick in Aleister Crowley’s Circle

Infidel. Atheist. Rationalist. Agnostic. Freethinker: Not exactly terms associated with the occult. Yet, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the culture of disbelief briefly united magician Aleister Crowley, soldier J. F. C. Fuller, and poet Victor Neuburg as founders of Thelema, one of the most influential movements in Western esotericism. Rebelling against the restrictive religious and sexual dogmas of their upbringing, these three crusaded against Christianity’s grip on public and civic life. They believed the world, and our conduct, should be governed not by dogma, but by evidence and reason. Under Crowley’s charistmatic leadership, they also came to apply these principles to magic.

This talk uncovers the fingerprints of British secularism upon Thelema: from the “Scientific Illuminism” embraced by the A⸫A⸫, their successor to the fragmented Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; their journal The Equinox promoting “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion”; to Crowley’s famous definition of magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”

Bio

Richard Kaczynski has been a lifelong scholar and international speaker on Western esotericism, with a focus on Aleister Crowley and his milieu. He is the author of Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley, Forgotten Templars: The Untold Origins of Ordo Templi Orientis; editor of a critical edition of Crowley’s The Sword of Song and co-editor of the collection The Revival of Magick and Other Essays. This talk is based on his latest book, Friendship in Doubt: Aleister Crowley, J. F. C. Fuller Victor B. Neuburg, and British Agnosticism, released earlier this year by Oxford University Press.

Curated & Hosted by

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