London Fortean Society

£5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Wednesday 11 May 2016 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn / Directions . Facebook event page John Dee’s central lie about his life is still uncritically accepted: that under Queen Mary, like other Protestants, he had been persecuted. This talk will outline the true story, which shows how Dee’s angelic magic affected not only his own life but those of the most prominent Elizabethans who shared much of his ‘occult philosophy’. Professor Glyn Parry is the author of The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee (Yale University Press, 2011) £5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Wednesday 11 May 2016 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn / Directions . Facebook event page

7.45pm Thursday 28 April 2016 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advance tickets ) The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page   Hypnotism has fascinated people since the mid-1800s, when entertainers and medical professionals enthusiastically took up this Far Eastern practice. It inspires many questions, mostly of a personal nature such as: “Can I be hypnotised?” and “Will I lose control?” Christopher Green tackles the (relatively) reputable aspects of the subject - brain imaging, clinical trials and hypnotherapy - alongside the smoke and mirrors of stage hypnosis. He has uncovered intriguing stories about the larger-than-life characters that inhabit the world of hypnosis. From Professors of Mesmerism to Princes of Necromancy, this book explores the different guises of hypnotism as portrayed by pseudo-scientists and showmen alike. Christopher, who is trained in both hypnotherapy and stage hypnosis, examines ...

London Fortean Society in partnership with Conway Hall present Cathy Ross:  Designing Utopia: John Hargrave and the Kibbo Kift £5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Wednesday 13 April 2016 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn / Directions.  Facebook event page Cathy Ross, Honorary Research Fellow at Museum of London, has collaborated on the first detailed account of the remarkable British writer and artist John Hargrave and his three creations The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, The Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit and The Social Credit Party of Great Britain. Combining art, politics and design to visually stunning effect, Hargarve and his followers created a maverick but uniquely English form of modernism. Emerging from the turbulence of the twentieth century, this colourful Utopian youth movement has strong resonances with the twenty-first-century world. Cathy Ross will discuss this fascinating organisation with us. £...

London Fortean Society in partnership with Conway Hall present Subterranea: Myths, Mysteries and Magic of the Underground World £8 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Saturday 9 April 2016 2.30-5.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn / Directions .  Facebook event page We are all lying in the gutter but some of us are gazing at the sewers.   Beneath our feet echoes another world of folklore, magic and the dead. Join the London Fortean Society for three talks on terra incognita : the world of tunnels, caves, caverns and underground labyrinths from English folklore to occult secrets to urban legends of the London Underground. Urban Legends of the London Underground: Scott Wood Just as fairy tales warn of the dangers of going in to the woods alone London’s urban legends are often horror stories about going alone down in to the London underground. Plague pits seethe beneath your feet in the most unlikely places, corpses ride o...

7.45pm Thursday 31st March 2016 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advanced tickets ) The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page This event has sold out. We are very sorry and we hope to re-host it at a later date. 

London Fortean Society in partnership with Conway Hall present Joe Mellen: Bore Hole: “ How I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high ” £5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Monday 29 February 2016 7.30pm Change of Venue:  The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook event page Travelling to Morocco and Ibiza, then back to the first spring of swinging London, Joe Mellen  discovers the pleasures of hashish, is captivated by the visionary intensity of LSD and, after meeting the Dutch psychedelic guru Bart Huges, attempts the ultimate head trip, the bore hole. Strange Attractor press have released a heavily expanded edition of Joe Mellen’s auto-trepanation memoir: Bore Hole which takes us deep into the dawning of the UK’s psychedelic counter culture, and into a mind breaking free from the confines of a traditional English upbringing. Joe discusses this memoir with us t...

7.45pm Thursday 25 February 2016 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advanced tickets ) Please note new venue:  The Pipeline , 94 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EZ. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page This event has sold out, please come and see us at The Pipeline for returns.  The 500-year-old Voynich Manuscript is renowned as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript” and “the Everest of historical code-breaking”. Over 200 pages of unfathomable text, strange diagrams and numerous drawings of impossible plants and tiny naked women, some find it beguiling; others think it totally mad.  The harder we seek for explanations for its countless oddities it seems the less we know. Is it insanely brilliant, or brilliantly insane? The only category it truly fits is Charles Fort’s “Damned Data” – phenomena for which science cannot comfortably account.  A plethora of Voynich theories ranges across a reassuringly Fortean panorama from conspir...