The Krampus, a folkloric devil associated with St. Nicholas in Alpine Austria and Germany, has lately been embraced outside his homeland as a sort of icon of a countercultural Christmas. While jarringly out of place with the modern English holiday, in the old world from which he comes, the Krampus fit right in. The Alpine Christmas was a season haunted by ghosts, witches, devilish horsemen, and even murderous incarnations of Catholic saints. Central to this folklore are the Perchten, Alpine demons on which the Krampus is based. In Austria, these creatures were connected to Frau Perchta, a witch-like being who threatened naughty children with disemboweling. In Germany, her peer was Frau Holle, ruler of a fabulous realm hidden beneath a mountain deep within the Thuringian Forest.
Al Ridenour, author of The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas, returns to The Last Tuesday Society for a virtual presentation jam-packed with rarely seen photographs and archival film clips. His book, the only in-depth English-language study of the Krampus and has been praised by LA Times critic Elizabeth Hart as “gleefully erudite,” a work that “deserves to become a classic.” Ridenour also writes and produces the popular folk- horror/history podcast , has crafted Krampus masks and suits for purchase and organized Krampus plays and parades in his hometown of Los Angeles.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was an artist who drew and painted over a period of more than fifty years, across a number of media – pencil, pen & ink, watercolour, pastels, and oil – and through a variety of subjects and styles. Over the decades Spare held many exhibitions, and the development of his rich body of work is fascinating. For instance, there was an outwardly grotesque style which reached the peak of its expression in pictures and sketchbooks in the early to mid 1920s. Siderealism was introduced into his work at the 1930 exhibition; the “Witches’ Sabbath” style was a large part of his 1952 exhibition. In this presentation Michael Staley considers Spare’s work across the decades from the early 1900s until his death in 1956, using many examples of his art to illustrate not only the emerging styles but also the interplay with the development of his occult and mystical philosophy.
Speaker Bio:
Michael Staley lives in north-west London, and has been immersed in Spare’s work for many years now. In 2011 he published two early bookworks by Spare as Two Grimoires, and is planning the future publication of a number of Spare’s sketchbooks from the 1950s. Michael has a life-long interest in the occult, and is particularly interested in how Spare’s work resonates with other mystical and magical traditions.
Kenneth Grant first encountered the work of Austin Osman Spare in 1941 when he came across The Book of Pleasure. He was captivated by it, and by the time he met Spare in 1949 he had thoroughly steeped himself in Spare’s published work. Spare was then writing another book, and soon Grant was typing drafts for him, editing, and collaborating on some of the material. When Spare died in 1956, he left his manuscripts and papers to Grant. The material was eventually collated and edited in the early 1990s, and published by Fulgur in 1998 as Zos Speaks! by Kenneth and Steffi Grant. Drawing on unpublished typescripts and diary entries, Michael discusses Grant’s growing understanding and presentation of Spare across the decades, and the influence of Spare on Grant’s own work.
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was an artist and occultist who over the course of more than fifty years produced a body of art of extraordinary variety. Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) was an English occultist who, from a host of influences catalysed through his mystical and magical experience, distilled a series of books known as the Typhonian Trilogies.
Speaker Bio:
Michael Staley lives in north-west London, and has been immersed in the works of both Grant and Spare for many years now. A colleague of Grant’s from the mid 1970s until his death in 2011, he works through Starfire Publishing to keep Grant’s work in print. In 2011 he published two early bookworks by Spare as Two Grimoires, and is planning the future publication of a number of Spare’s sketchbooks from the 1950s. Michael has a life-long interest in the occult, and is particularly interested in how the work of Grant, Spare and others work resonates with a variety of mystical and magical traditions.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum
a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event
Scrying is the practice of looking into crystal balls, mirrors, water, fire, clouds and other things to see visions, find messages, gain knowledge and see what the future might hold. It can be done to obtain guidance, for inspiration, to discover the answers to questions, to look at distant places or other realms as well as for fortune-telling and prophecy. It is a form of divination that taps into our psychic senses and powers of intuition.
Scrying has a long history. In ancient Egypt, mirrors sacred to the Goddess Hathor were used to divine the true nature of things. Jade balls have been found in ancient Mayan burials and are thought to have been used for divination. The Cup of Jamshid was reputedly used by Persian kings for observing the seven layers of the universe, and Nostradamus obtained his prophesies from staring into a bowl of water while he was in a trance. John Dee’s crystal ball and obsidian mirror, which he and his partner Edward Kelley used to consult angels, can still be viewed in the British Museum. The art of using such devices for fortune telling or other insights has never died out, and crystal ball readers are still consulted today.
In this talk Lucya Starza will reveal the secrets of the scryer’s art, and explain methods that can help you cultivate second sight and hone your powers of intuition. You will learn about working with crystal balls and black mirrors, as well as learning how to divine with water in glasses and bowls of the kind you probably already have in your home.
Speaker Bio
Lucya Starza is an eclectic witch living in London, England, and grew up in a family where fortune telling and divination, as well as 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 – Scrying as well as other books published by Moon Books on candle magic, poppets, and guided visualisations.
The occultist, artist and writer of international importance, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) showed a lifelong commitment to contesting the distinction between apparently different or opposing states. In this talk I shall explore the significance to her of the boundaries that normally define such differences. As a prime example, I shall focus on one particular boundary, that between land and water, the conjunction of which defines an island. I shall explore the personal significance of islands as a theme in her work and how this came about. I shall identify the spiritual meaning that earth and water held for her as well as their relevance to a specifically female spirituality. I shall give examples from her writings as well as her paintings and drawings.
Speaker: Dr Richard Shillitoe spent his working life in the NHS. Publications include Ithell Colquhoun: Magician Born of Nature (2010), Colquhoun’s unpublished novel I Saw Water, (in conjunction with Mark Morrisson, 2014) a new, illustrated, edition of her first novel Goose of Hermogenes (2018), Medea’s Charms, a volume of her selected shorter writing (2019) and Desination Limbo, her final novel in 2020. He maintains the website ithellcolquhoun.co.uk.
Host: 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.
The idea that the earth might be hollow was first put forward in the 17th century. It soon fell out of favour among mainstream scientists but on the fringes of pseudo-science it continued to find followers. Many Vril Society members believed in it. What makes the theory important is that Peter Bender, a German prisoner of war, discovered the theory during his time as a POW and converted Goering to it. With the powerful patronage of Goering behind him, the theory was allowed to be taught and even given State resources to fund it. Senior German naval officers also believed in the theory and between 1933 and 1942 it was as acceptable as orthodox science. Then it fell out of favour after an expensive operation in the middle of the war designed to prove its truth failed spectacularly. Bender was thrown into a concentration camp and the theory banned.
Michael FitzGerald is a historian of the Third Reich. He is also the author of ‘Adolf Hitler: A Portrait’ which won an award for historical biography, and ‘The Making of Modern Streatham’, written jointly with his Janet. In 2008 he was the principal contributor to the Discovery Channel programme, ‘Dark Fellowships: The Vril Society’, a topic which features in the present book. He has also given numerous talks to a variety of organizations over the years. ‘The Nazi Occult War’ was published by Arcturus in 2013 , he is also the author of ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapons,’ ‘Unsolved Mysteries of World War Two’ and ‘Hitler’s War Beneath The Waves’ published by them over the last four years.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon
The Occult Foundations of Nazism: The Thule Group and the Vril Society:
These two groups were relatively small but their influence on history was profound. It is not too much to claim that without them Hitler would never have come to power in Germany. Most of the early leaders of the Nazi Party belonged either to the Thule Group or the Vril Society or, in many cases, both. Their influence on Hitler’s thinking and the subsequent course of the Third Reich was enormous. The two organisations were steeped in occultism and while Thule mainly believed in the existence of a lost continent whose descendants became the ancestors of the Aryan race Vril believed in the existence of superior beings who lived in an underground world at the centre of the earth and possessed the secret of a mysterious force called Vril power. The society’s members attempted to learn the mastery of Vril so that when the subterranean beings emerged on to the surface of earth its members would be their equals rather than their slaves. Claims have also been made that the groups received telepathic messages from Aldebaran and were able to build flying saucers.
Michael FitzGerald is a historian of the Third Reich. He is also the author of ‘Adolf Hitler: A Portrait’ which won an award for historical biography, and ‘The Making of Modern Streatham’, written jointly with his Janet. In 2008 he was the principal contributor to the Discovery Channel programme, ‘Dark Fellowships: The Vril Society’, a topic which features in the present book. He has also given numerous talks to a variety of organizations over the years. ‘The Nazi Occult War’ was published by Arcturus in 2013 , he is also the author of ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapons,’ ‘Unsolved Mysteries of World War Two’ and ‘Hitler’s War Beneath The Waves’ published by them over the last four years.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A LIVE SEANCE AND WILL NOT BE RECORDED AND TICKETHOLDERS WILL NOT RECEIVE A RECORDING.
IF YOU BUY A TICKET AND ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND PLEASE REQUEST A REFUND.
Spirits are all around us. You do not have to be a psychic, medium or witch to communicate with the other side. But, there are some definite rules and guidelines you need to follow for safe, effective and powerful communication with spirits.
This intimate online seance will be limited to 24 people, giving everyone the opportunity to request summoning a specific spirit. Patti cannot guarantee every spirit will be willing to communicate, but they most always do, due to her gentle and respectful technique and amazing ability to “lift the veil” between the two worlds. Lasting around two hours, Patti will give an explanation and lesson in her proven techniques for safely and respectfully doing seances. Then, she will conduct a full séance, lift the veil and give everyone who wants one an opportunity to speak with their beloved deceased.
Since March 2020, Patti Negri has been regularly conducting on-line seances. Since spirits exist outside time and place, she has found that the internet turns out to be the perfect medium!
Patti Negri has been communicating with spirits since she could talk. She did her first séance when she was just seven or eight years old. She sat cross legged on the floor and I started asking the spirits to enter the room. She created her first chant – and low and behold – the room filled with orbs of bright light. They started in the corner and quickly began filling the room. It was amazing. She ran screaming out of the house… but had never been so excited. She had actually and consciously contacted the other side – and was able to control it. Her journey had begun. Since then she has studied religion, metaphysics, science, occult sciences and cosmologies and belief systems of all kinds and combined the truths within to create surefire and safe techniques to raise the veil between the worlds.
Patti Negri is a Psychic-Medium and “Good Witch” best known for her recurring role on the Travel Channel’s #1 show GHOST ADVENTURES. She is the international best-selling author of OLD WORLD MAGICK FOR THE MODERN WORLD: TIPS, TRICKS, & TECHNIQUES TO BALANCE, EMPOWER, & CREATE A LIFE YOU LOVE. Patti’s body of work includes appearances on such shows as MASTER CHEF, AMERICA’S GOT TALENT, WIPE OUT! and A LITTLE LATE WITH LILLY SINGH. Patti has a popular weekly podcast called THE WITCHING HOUR and can also be heard on nationally syndicated radio with Adam Corolla, Jason Ellis, Mancow Muller and Coast to Coast with George Noory. Patti was voted number one psychic, medium, trance medium, tarot reader, witch / magical practitioner in the world in an Internationally competition by Times Square Press. She has graced numerous magazine covers, contributed to over 20 books and conducted seances on radio, film, and TV working with such legends as Emma Stone, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, Martin Sheen and Gregory Hines.
In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend – from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales. Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge romancing.
Warner interprets the history of old wives’ tales from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter. And with fresh new insights she shows us the real-life themes in the famous stories, which, she suggests, are skillful vehicles by which adults have liked to convey advice, warning, and hope – to each other as well as to children.
Marina Warner‘s study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic (2011) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2013; in 2015 she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities and was made DBE. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon
Magic mushrooms – mushrooms that contain the psychoactive tryptamine psilocybin – are going mainstream. Once the sole preserve of hippies and a psychedelic underground, now they’re helping us understand the inner machinery of the brain; they’re being used as a potential cure for depression and other mental illnesses; and they may even bring us into closer relationship with the non-human world, at a time of profound ecological crisis. But how did this happen?
In this talk Dr Andy Letcher takes a critical look at how an innocuous mushroom came so dramatically to affect modern culture. Did the ancient Druids trip out at Stonehenge? Which Oxford Professor of Poetry had a magical mushroom ride? And who were the freak brothers who conversed with a UFO and cracked the secret of how to cultivate magic mushrooms at home? All these questions and more will be answered!
Speaker Bio:
Dr Andy Letcher is a Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College, where he is programme lead for the MA Engaged Ecology. He is the author of Shroom. A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, as well as many papers on subjects as diverse as fairies, eco-magick, psychedelic experience, mysticism and animism. He is currently researching the use of psychedelics by contemporary Druids, and the use of the Fly Agaric mushroom in contemporary culture.
Andy portrait
This Psychedelic series is Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson and Dr David Luke
Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic and parapsychology researcher. Having just graduated from Chelsea College of Arts, her work over the last six years has been informed by her concurrent shamanic training, work with the Wixárika (Huichol) tribe from Mexico, and role as a research assistant under Dr David Luke of Greenwich university in the study of the psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and other worlds. Walking between the worlds of the arts, science and the occult, she combines media and investigative techniques from each to inform and articulate one another in the exploration of ontology, consciousness and altered states, mytholopeia and mythology, ecology, the human condition and its relation to the environment, otherness and mortality. She describes her practise and research as contemporary Memento Mori (‘remember you will die’), and explores what that means in a time of mass ecocide and species extinction.
Follow her on the crooked path on Instagram @maya_themessiah
Dr David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, UK, where he has been teaching an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience since 2009, and he is also Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London, and Lecturer on the MSc Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology for Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including ten books, most recently Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience (2nd ed., 2019). When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting DMT field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans he directs the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon at the Institute of Ecotechnics, London, and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness. He has given over 300 invited public lectures and conference presentations; won teaching, research and writing awards; organised numerous festivals, conferences, symposia, seminars, retreats, expeditions, pagan cabarets and pilgrimages; and has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans and Shivaites. He lives life on the edge, of Sussex.
This Psychedelic series is Curated by Maya Bracknell Watson and Dr David Luke
