London Fortean Society

7.45 Tuesday 5 July 2022 £5 / £2 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page  London Fortean Email List I dreamed I was paying a visit to London. It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume. Aleister Crowley Philip Baker combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London. Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn. Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blit...

7.15pm Tuesday 28 June 2022  £12 / £7  concessions ( Advance tickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page '.... magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities.  ' Mat Osman (founding member of Suede, author of The Ruin s) and world-renowned image hunter Stephen Ellcock discuss with Cathi Unsworth (and some special guests) the anarchic magic of their collaboration England on Fire. Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. Forget the tired gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England’s psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched. On these fabled shores we are all castaways. Ma...

7.45pm Tuesday 21 June 2022 We are really sorry but, due to the tube strike, we are postponing this talk. We hope to bring Roger and his talk back from the beyond in the autumn. All ticket holders will be refunded.  Join our Mailing List The Ghost Club is one of the oldest organisations in the world associated with psychical research. It was founded by William Stainton Moses and AA Watts in 1882 and ran as a private gentlemen’s club until 1936, dedicated to telling “true” ghost stories. Members and visitors included Sir Laurence Oliphant, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, Egyptologist Ernest Wallis Budge and colonial administrator Sir Harry Johnston. Its members, alive or dead, were counted as members. Gothic specialist Prof Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck, University of London, has been exploring the Ghost Club’s archives and minute books, and reveals what they got up to in their early meetings as a club, and their overlap with the Society for Psychical Research. 7.45pm Tuesday 21 Jun...

Presented with Rewierding: Statler and Waldorf from  The Muppets  meet the Ancient of Days. 7pm doors Tuesday 7 June 2022 £5 / £3 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page   London Fortean Email List The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of William Blake's most extraordinary works - at times outrageous, radical, heretical, profound, bewildering and very funny. Come and join John Higgs - the author of William Blake Vs The World - for a reading of this magnificent little book, as he attempts to understand both the text and what it reveals about William Blake himself. John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. In the words of MOJO magazine, “Reading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything beco...

 7.45pm Tuesday 31 May 2022 £5 / £3 Concessions  Advance tickets The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook Page Join our Mailing List In the 18th and 19th centuries artists like William Hogarth, James Gillray and George Cruikshank created political and social satire, often with blatant rudeness, to ridicule the high and mighty and to highlight social issues. In a highly-illustrated talk award-winning political cartoonist Martin Rowson (the Guardian etc) discusses their work and shows how they have inspired his own scathing and often extremely graphic work. In a full-page editorial in 2017, in response to one of his Guardian cartoons, the Daily Mail denounced him and his work as “disgusting, deranged … sick and offensive”. Not for the faint-hearted!   7.45pm Tuesday 31 May 2022 £5 / £3 Concessions  Advance tickets The Bell,  50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverp...

7.15pm Wednesday 25 May 2022  £8 / £5  concessions ( Advance tickets ) £5 Live Stream (T ickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page The brain can misfire in extraordinary ways… Where do delusions come from and what do they mean? For centuries, delusions have been dismissed as something for doctors to sort out behind closed doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks: they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. The King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter…and he wasn’t alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France’s asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we’ve dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – th...