London Fortean Society

7.45pm Thursday 27 July 2017 This event is sold out. Sorry. We shall try and book Andrew the next time he is in the UK. The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page Viva La Muerte ! Santa Muerte, Folk Saint and Holy Personification of Death, Healer and Protector. The leading expert on the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas, Dr. Andrew Chesnut will explain how Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte (Saint Death), has gone from only a few thousand devotees in 2001 to some 12 million today. Andrew is Professor of Religious Studies and holds the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He authored the first and only academic book in English on the Bony Lady, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (OUP, 2012).  7.45pm Thursday 27 July 2017 This event is sold out. Sorry. We shall try and book Andrew the next time he i...

£5 This event has sold out. We are sorry, please contact Conway Hall to join the waiting list. Thursday 20 July 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page Americans have believed in conspiracy theories since before the United States united. A ceaseless array of conspiracy accusations have demonized witches, Freemasons, foreigners, red coats, black helicopters, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, fifth columns, the government, and more recently, Vladimir Putin. The common assumption is that conspiracy theories are nothing more than the delusions of paranoid minds trying to make sense of an ever more complicated world. However, the evidence tells a different story. In this talk, Professor Joesph Uscinski will show that conspiracy theories follow a strategic logic: they are tools used by the powerless to attack and defend against the powerful. Conspiracy theories must conform to this logic, or they will not be successful. In th...

£8 This event has sold out. We are sorry, please contact Conway Hall to join the waiting list. Tuesday 18 July 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page London Fortean Society, in partnership with Conway Hall, present a night marking the centenary of the Cottingley Fairies case. In July 1917 Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, 16 and 9 years old, took a photograph. It showed Frances in their garden with four fairies dancing in front of her. In 1920 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about them in the Strand Magazine: The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life. The Cottingley Fairy photographs were not revealed as a hoax until Elsie and Frances confessed in 1983. But they still claimed that they did find fairies at the bottom of the garden. Michael Terwey of the National Scien...

7.45pm Thursday 29 June 2017 This event has now sold out. We are sorry. Please let us know if you missed out and we will rebook Madeleine. The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page This evening Madeleine Ledespencer will present the notorious heretical priest and accused satanist, Abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan (1824- 1893), who came to be known as a bogeyman of the 19th century Paris magicians who misrepresented his occult Catholicism. In his lifetime, Boullan went from a rising star within the church of Rome to a defrocked priest running his own ministry of mystical Catholicism in which women were consecrated bishops and preparations were made for a coming new age of Luciferian feminine power. He was hugely famed in his day, and served as an inspiration for artists and occultists as varied as JK Huysmans, Michael Bertiaux, and Maria de Naglowaska. Tonight we will look at the life, work, and impact o...