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Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Magician in the World – Gary Lachman – Zoom

A Short History of Modern Occultism in three lectures, each lecture will be sold separately, see below for details of the other lectures in the series (if missed, these will be available on demand)

1. Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society – 11 Jan 2022

2. Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Magician in the World – 8 Mar 2022

3. C.G. Jung, Lord of the Underworld – 27 Mar 2022

Aleister Crowley, the 20th century’s most infamous magician, was known in his day as “the wickedest man in the world” and “the man we’d like to hang.” Today his portrait hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery and in 2002 he came in at no. 73 in the BBC’s Top 100 Britons poll, beating out J.R.R. Tolkien, Johnny Rotten, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Crowley swaggered through the fin-de-siecle, climbed Himalayas, was polymorphously perverse before the phrase was even invented, and took more drugs than anyone I know. But he was also a remarkably serious and devoted practitioner of the dark arts and took as his mission their revitalization in the modern world. After his death in 1947 Crowley sank from view, only to be resurrected in the 1960s as a poster boy for the psychedelic, sexual, and social revolutions of that decade, his philosophy of “Do what thou wilt” informing the acid-fueled guruship of Timothy Leary, and the psychedelic sounds of the Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Today Crowley’s religion of “excess in all directions” continues to inform popular culture, from heavy metal and gangsta rap, to the tepid sounds of the Jonas Brothers

Gary Lachman is the author of many books about consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, including The Return of Holy Russia, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. He writes for several journals in the US, UK, and Europe, lectures around the world and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In a former life he was a founding member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Lachman studied philosophy, managed a metaphysical book shop, taught English literature, and was Science Writer for UCLA. He is an adjunct professor of Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk, www.facebook.com/GVLachman/ and twitter.com/GaryLachman

Folklore and Strange Tales of Cornwall’s Seas – Joan Passey

Cornwall is surrounded on water by three sides, fractured from Devon by the length of the Tamar. No where in Cornwall is further than 17 miles from the sea. Those who weren’t mining were making their living fishing, and throughout history Cornwall’s waters have been important to its status as a global trading port, enabling the export of its world-class ores despite the relative difficulty of accessing much of the county by land. Cornwall has been, and continues to be, shaped by its seas, and this paper explores the importance of the seascape to Cornish culture, identity, and history. In the nineteenth century in particular Cornwall was infamous for its number of shipwrecks, and the seas that gave so generously were alternately imagined as places of death, fear and violence. This tension between Cornwall’s reliance on and fear of its waters led to an abundance of strange tales of maritime disaster, deep sea monsters, and haunted coasts. We will explore the folklore – and folkhorror – of Cornish seas, from biting mermaids to phantom ships gliding across the moors.

Joan Passey Bio

Joan Passey is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She completed her PhD on Victorian Gothic Cornwall in 2020 at the University of Exeter and her monograph, Cornish Gothic, is upcoming with University of Wales Press. She has released an anthology, Cornish Horrors: Tales of the Land’s End with the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series and has spoken on BBC Radio 3 about haunted shores and nineteenth-century Cornwall. She has additionally published on Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, and Shirley Jackson, and is co-founder of the Haunted Shores Network. Please feel free to contact her on [email protected], @JoanPassey or joanpassey.com

New Orleans Voodoo, A fully illustrated lecture by Dr Louise Fenton

When walking around the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, in New Orleans, there is the sound of Jazz, steamy heat and Voodoo. In this lecture Dr Louise Fenton will take you on a journey through the history of Voodoo, explaining how it evolved in this part of the USA. She will introduce you to key figures such as Dr John and Marie Laveau, show you key sites both within the French Quarter and beyond, take a look at Voodoo dolls and how Voodoo permeates the very soul of New Orleans. This lecture will introduce some of the practitioners in the Quarter now and discuss how people incorporate Voodoo into their daily life. By exploring literature, tourist guides, shops and Museums Louise will also show how Voodoo has been represented and how the authentic Voodoo can be differentiated from the tourist version.

Dr Louise Fenton is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and a cultural and social historian. She teaches contextual studies in the School of Art and supervises PhD students; she is also an artist and illustrator and uses drawing within her research. Her interest in New Orleans Voodoo began when studying for her PhD which she was awarded from the University of Warwick in 2010. Most recently Louise has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Beyond Belief’ and is a consultant on a new drama for BBC 3. Her research covers Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo and Witchcraft, especially curses and cursed objects.

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Galen: most-celebrated physician in the ancient world – Vivian Nutton /Zoom

Join Vivian Nutton to learn about the most-celebrated doctor in the ancient world: Galen of Pergamum (129-ca. 216 CE). Galen was Greek by birth (Pergamum is close to the present-day city of Bergama, Turkey) but spent most of his career in Rome, where he was the personal physician to three Emperors. Galen was one of the most prolific authors of his age, and around a sixth of all surviving ancient literature in Greek was written by him. Celebrated in his own lifetime, he was regarded as the preeminent medical authority for centuries after his death, both in the Arab world and in medieval Europe, with much of our later medical knowledge stemming from his pioneering work. It was only the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance that removed Galen from his preeminent position in the pantheon of medicine.

Professor Vivian Nutton is a medical historian, specialising in the history of the classical tradition in medicine, from antiquity to the present. He is perhaps best known as a historian of the life, works and influence of Galen, but his research interests extend into broader areas of the history of medicine, and of the classical tradition in Europe and the Islamic world. Much of his recent work has also focused on the history of anatomy in the sixteenth century.

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell 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 first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Tammy Blee’s Cabalistic Agency – Jason Semmens – Zoom

The Unnatural History of Cornwall – curated by Dr. Amy Hale brings stories of the weird and wonderful from Cornwall to a wider audience, with an emphasis on Cornish voices from the past and the present.

Although much has been written about the historic folk-magic practitioners known as cunning-folk in recent years, in-depth accounts of individual conjurors are few owing to a paucity of documentary materials. Some cunning-folk, however, are better attested in the historical record, allowing for a more detailed reconstruction of their practices and the social contexts of the complaints their clients brought before them. More archival material for Thomasine Blight (1793-1856), the Cornish cunning-woman, otherwise known as “Tammy Blee,” survives than for any other folk-magic practitioner in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Treating her as an exemplar of the cunning-person’s trade, this talk sets out to explore Blight’s milieu as a provincial conjuror in early Victorian Britain.

Speaker: Jason Semmens, M.A., is the Director of the Museum of Military Medicine and an independent scholar with particular research interests around the history of vernacular beliefs in the preternatural in the South West of England from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

Curator: 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 Ravenmaster – The Corvids of The Tower of London – Chris Skaife – Zoom

For centuries, the Tower of London has been home to a group of famous avian residents: the ravens. Each year they are seen by millions of visitors, and they have become as integral a part of the Tower as its ancient stones themselves. But their role is even more important than that – legend has it that if the ravens should ever leave, the Tower will crumble into dust, and great harm will befall the kingdom.

One man is personally responsible for ensuring that such a disaster never comes to pass – the Ravenmaster. Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife,

His book The Ravenmaster is a fascinating, entertaining and touching look at life behind the Tower’s ancient walls. It memorably describes the ravens’ formidable intelligence, their idiosyncrasies and their occasionally wicked sense of humour.

Over the years in which he has cared for the physical and mental well-being of these remarkable birds, Christopher Skaife has come to know them like no one else. They are not the easiest of charges – as he reveals, they are much given to mischief, and their escapades have often led him into unlikely, and sometimes even undignified, situations.

Now, in the first intimate behind-the-scenes account of life with the ravens of the Tower, the Ravenmaster himself shares the folklore, history and superstitions surrounding both the birds and their home. The result is a compelling, inspiring and irreverent story that will delight and surprise anyone with an interest in British history or animal behaviour

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

Village Witchcraft & Magic – Professor Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton’s topic this evening consists of beliefs in witchcraft and magic held by ordinary British people in the period between 1740 and 1940, that often lost, neglected and mysterious time between the end of the witch hunts and the appearance of modern Pagan witchcraft. These years have in fact left a huge treasure trove of evidence for the subject, which has recently at last become a focus for sustained study. Those studies reveal a complex and fascinating world rich in magical tradition, in which cunning folk and charmers flourished in every part of the land, overlapping with learned ceremonial magicians, and the fear of malevolent witchcraft still lay heavily over most communities. Ronald Hutton offers a tour of it, proposing answers to the questions of what sort of people became magicians and why; what practical techniques they used; whether they were pagans; how they took up their skills; whether they worked in groups; how much they were persecuted; and what eventually became of their traditions.

Leonora Carrington, My Mother – Gaby Weisz – Zoom Lecture

Since her death in 2011, the legendary Surrealist Leonora Carrington has been reconstructed and reinvented many times over. In his new book, Gabriel Weisz Carrington draws on remembered conversations and events to demythologise his mother, revealing the woman and the artist behind the iconic persona. He travels between Leonora’s native England and adopted homeland of Mexico, making stops in New York and Paris and meeting some of the remarkable figures she associated with, from Max Ernst and André Breton to Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. At the same time, he strives to depict a complex and very real Surrealist creator, exploring Leonora not simply in relation to her romantic partners or social milieus but as the artist she always was. A textured portrait emerges from conversations, memories, stories and Leonora’s engagement with the books that she read. Using the act of writing to process and understand the death of his mother, the author has produced a moving and fascinating account of life, art, love and loss.

Leonora Carrington is one of Viktor Wynd’s most enduring obsessions, her work is in his museum and surrounds him at home.

These are extraordinary times and the plague has hit some harder than others, tickets are by donation – if you possibly can £10 is much appreciated, but £2 is also much appreciated. Thank you for your support.

Watch a recording of This Lecture, & 100s of others, for free when you join our Patreon www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum

Tony ‘Doc ‘ Shiels – Reenchanted Landscapes of Cornwall – Dr.Rupert White

Speaker: Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels arrived in St Ives, Cornwall in 1958, a hopeful and ambitious young artist. For a few years his painting career went well, but he grew impatient with the limitations of abstract art. Instead, emboldened by Dada and Surrealism, his life became stranger and more magical. He displayed the disembodied head of an Egyptian princess, sawed a woman in half, and carried out some bizarre monster-raising stunts involving Morgawr the Cornish sea serpent. He included his wife, children and friends in many of these exploits and, indeed, after appearing in the national media, in the mid-1970s they became briefly known across Britain as ‘The weirdest family in the land’.

Lilith from Demon to Feminist Icon – Per Faxneld

Lilith – From Demon to Feminist Icon

The talk follows Lilith’s trajectory from her origins as an evil entity in Jewish folklore and demonology, to being a feminist icon today. We get to meet the Pre-Raphaelite poets, romantic painters, and lesbian Luciferians who all helped shape the image of her. We delve into the work of 19th-century occultists like Eliphas Lévi and Madame Blavatsky. We encounter the early feminists who saw a kindred spirit in rebellious Lilith. We examine her role in present-day political activism, Jewish feminist theology, Satanism and esoteric groups. Drawing on this multitude of voices, the talk also discusses broader mechanisms of counter-reading, mythical reinvention, and cultural subversion.

Per Faxneld is Associate Professor in History of Religions at Södertörn University (Stockholm), author of “Satanic Feminism Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth Century Culture” and a devotee of weird antiques, ominous music, and sinister sartorialism. He is the author of three monographs, two edited volumes, and numerous articles on Satanism, occultism, and esoteric art. In 2020, Faxneld made his literary debut with “Offerträdet” (“The Tree of Sacrifice”), an illustrated collection of folk horror tales set in 19th-century northern Sweden.