I could have been at Glastonbury, I could have been at Pride, I could have been watching the Euros, and I could have been sat in the park with a good book and an ice cream but, instead, this Saturday I was at Conway Hall with the London Fortean Society for a whole day of curated talks which they'd called Art/Magic/Lore and if I had a few, very minor, reservations about it beforehand, by the end I knew I'd made the right decision.
It was a great day. I enjoyed pretty much every talk and performance and I even got out to Becks Cafe on nearby Red Lion Street at lunchtime for a rather ambitious cheese omelette and chips with an (accidental) double helping of bread and butter so I could make chip butties. The vast majority of the speakers were female and that was reflected in an audience which I'd estimate was about 75% female. It's not an exact science but I'd say that's a huge increase compared to a typical Fortean crowd.
Kicking things off, at the sensible time of 11.15am were Thomas Sharp, Marc Spicer, and Rosey Trickett with Circling the Square Mile. The three speakers, and several friends, go out and create a 'faery ring' around the square mile of the City of London once every four years. Always on February 29th. Because, they say, city traders are 'the fairy folk the old tales warned us about'.
In 2020 they met at the Royal Exchange, broke up into smaller groups, and placed one hundred bronze mushrooms in a circle that enveloped the entire City. The very next week, global stock markets plunged. The speakers were enough in the real world to admit that the arrival of the pandemic may have played a factor. Certainly when they repeated the act in 2024, nothing really happened.
We were told about a book called The Weeping Cufflinks. (It's about a sad banker called Toby - which is claimed as a generic name for a stockbroker - a bit unfair to Tobys, I know some, they're nice) and another, by WB Yeats, called The Celtic Twilight (as well as some of Martin Parr's photographs of bizarre city traditions) but what I wanted to know is why are city traders deemed to be fairy folk?
The 'proof' comes with the facts that they easily blend in with real people, they are amoral, and they are totally transactional. Think of fairy stories like Jack and the Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin. All of these involve some kind of transaction from buying magic beans to an imp that spins straw into gold in exchange for a woman's firstborn child!
In 2009 there was a huge financial crash and the banks were deemed "too big to tail" so the rest of us had to bail them out. From this we ended up with austerity, populism, and Brexit. Amoral bankers are architects of the current shitshow we're all living in. They're not evil. They simply don't care. They are amoral. Are we all victims of the dark magic enacted by these city hobgoblins?
One to discuss later. Next up was Jennifer Higgie with A Journey Into Women, Art, and the Spirit World which turned out to be excellent. She talked a bit about gender exclusions and women being written out of art history (something many major galleries and institutions are making massive attempts to redress and, I feel, are succeeding in doing so) before taking us on a whistle stop journey through women's art from 35,000BCE to the present day (as well as how that art interacts with mystery, the spirit world, saints and angels, and shapeshifters).
That's quite a journey. From Australian aboriginal art, the oldest known representative statue, and Greek marble statues of Athena - for whom Athens is named (we can't know if these were made by a woman - but they represent women), and on to Minerva (the Roman equivalent of Athena) and artwork by Hildegard of Bingen who not only made art but is the first named music composer in history. She also created her language. She kept herself busy, did Hildegard.
There are renaissance tarot decks that inspired Italo Calvino, Niki de Saint Phalle, the Fox sisters (who played a vital role in creating spiritualism), Sojourner Truth, Georgiana Houghton, Margaret Watts Hughes, Hilma af Klint, Betye Saar, and Ana Mendieta. Two works that particularly grabbed my attention were Houghton's The Flowers of Samuel Warrand and Lavinia Fontana's Assumption of the Virgin. Oh, and Madame Blavatsky (a Fortean favourite) popped up at 1216hrs. Just over an hour into proceedings and my bingo card was stamped.
It was a great talk and so was the next one. Amy Hale's "this current drew you":Ithell Colquhoun's erotic energies and sacred landscapes drilled down deeper into one particular female artist. An artist, who around the time of World War II, created work about erotic energy and sex magick, drew watercolours of humans and angels in couples and even threesomes and incorporated queer desire into her work.
Colquhoun was spending a lot of time in Cornwall as an evacuee and, Hale suggested, perhaps esoteric sexuality was an escape from the horrors of the war or a potential route into a more enlightened future. Colquhoun had quite a life. She was born in India in 1906, was photographed by Man Ray in 1932, and fell in love - scandalously at the time - with another woman in 1934.
She had a long held desire to become part of a cult order, or several cult orders, and in the 1950s she finally came good on that desire and joined orders devoted to Celtic Christianity and others inspired by the Golden Dawn. She believed there were vital energies both in human bodies and in the Earth itself and was interested in union, yes - that type of union, with deities. The vital energies of course would arrive, and be received, via human orifices and as women have one more orifice than men that meant, to Colquhoun, they were more divine.
She took an interest in transitioning to androgynous states, riffed on Gustave Courbet's infamous L' Origine du Monde (turning it half into a landscape), and made work inspired by the old belief that stone circles were women who had been turned to stone for dancing on the sabbath! Here's some of her work so you can have a look yourself. You may notice a theme (although you can even go to back to Lavinia Fontana's work for that):-
For some reason I felt quite hungry so it was time for lunch with Dewi, David, and Liberty before returning, just in time, for a site specific performance by Aliki Karveli. One of the bits of the day I had misgivings about but in the end the only bad thing that happened was the Aero I'd bought after lunch melted in my pocket. I felt it would be rude to start eating an Aero when somebody's doing a site specific performance.
These things can, of course, be wildly pretentious and even uncomfortable. It was quite pretentious but not uncomfortable. Not even when the heavily tattooed Aliki Karveli took a thread and wound it round people in the audience including your clueless narrator. Elsewhere the performance took in bells, shakers, chains, a shawl, a kind of bodhran, some flute playing, and, best of all, some rather soothing drone music which could have sent me to sleep after my big lunch. But didn't. I ate my what was left of my melted to fuck Aero and considered myself lucky not to have experienced anything like the Rainbow Rhythms episode of Peep Show.
Maybe it was the post lunch slump but I found Hayley Lock's talk, An Altered Self, the least interesting of the day. Lock has been regularly going under hypnosis to explore her altered self (she'd be back to do just that at the end of the day) and she talked, at some length, about this. I must admit I zoned out a few times but I made some notes and they go more or less like this:-
Esoteric and occult studies of female otherness, historically generated divisions of power, magical thinking, Antonin Artaud, John Dee, cosmic fields, psychological topography, Buckminster Fuller, ancient oracular mythologies, future future experiences, tensegrity, ancient Mexican shamanism, silent invisible energy from dead stars, mining the interior architecture of one's psyche, obsidian mirrors, Carl Sagan, quantum mechanics, local chthonic power sites, the vernacular of Essex, sexualised scenes in medieval literature, and a performance event called Witches Teat that took place in Suffolk in 2017. A lot of it was, sadly, beyond me.
If Lock's talk was the one I struggled with the most (and it wasn't boring, just a bit confusing and went on a tiny bit too long) then the next talk was probably my favourite of the day. Kathryn Atherton with Mary Neal and the Suffragettes Who Saved Morris Dancing. The morris dancing revival didn't take off, as you may imagine, in rural communities but in London and the person behind it, now mostly forgotten, is one Mary Neal.
Neal was born to money from a wealthy button making family in Birmingham, She was an organiser and she had spiritual beliefs. With her fellow Methodist friend Emily Pethick (from Weston-Super-Mare) they volunteered in the slums of St Pancras at a time when poverty was believed to be either God's will or punishment for having a bad character and, therefore, not many people were trying to change it.
Life was particularly dangerous for poverty stricken women who would often fall into prostitution. Neal and Pethick had gotten into socialism and moved into the slums themselves. Once embedded, they brought culture to the young women who lived there and took them on trips to the countryside where their lives were transformed. Many of them had never seen a cow before, or even a dewdrop.
Lives changed by contact with nature. Neal and Pethick opened a hostel in Cambridgeshire where the girls could stay. Labour bigwigs of the time like Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie visited and soon Neal, Pethick and their charges were supporting unions and strike action. A co-operative was set up, Mission Esperance, and a dressmaking business that didn't exploit its work force was formed as part of it. Other dressmaking work paid so badly that often women took sex work to supplement their meagre wages.
Neal and Pethick contacted Emmeline Pankhurst from the Women's Social and Political Union (later to become the Suffragettes) and Pethick launched Victory For Women magazine. In 1906, Mary Neal approached legendary folklorist and song collector Cecil Sharp who was delighted to provide folk songs to the young women through his various contacts.
Morris dancing had almost completely died off years before but the young women loved to perform the dances (which Mary Neal attributed to an ancestral memory of their rural heritage) and were soon performing hugely popular shows in London and touring various country estates. Even the then Home Secretary came along and was taught how to morris dance. Imagine James Cleverly having a crack at it!
These girls from the slums were now hobnobbing with the elites. It was them who published the first book of morris dance and it came out about the same time as the Suffragette movement was becoming more militant. Dances reflected this shift as they became about political events and the women's struggle. Mary Neal even suggested a festival of music and dance and proposed a site near Glastonbury.
That never happened because World War I broke out but somebody should follow her up on her idea. Imagine a music and dance festival in Glastonbury of all places! Sadly, that's not all that the war stopped. When the war finished, the Mission Esperance never returned and though women got the vote, morris dancing became a male bastion and remained that way for decades and decades. It's still only slowly changing back now. This was a vital history for lesson for anyone, like me, interested in music, progressive politics, and heritage.
From the most interesting talk of the day, via a short break - my ageing bladder needs these breaks, to the most fun performance of the day. The phone cameras were out for Huginn & Muninn and their progressive two person Bedlam Border Morris from South London. Dressed as giant crows (or are they ravens?) with plague masks, they did some very sprightly, energetic, and enthusiastic morris dancing to some very good folk music - played by Holly and Jess. While occasionally taking time out to tell us about the history of morris dancing and explain a few of the dances.
It was like goth morris dancing but with good percussive chops and the stories about Odin, nickelharpa players, Portuguese fire dancers, The Monkees, Wet Leg, and Cecil Sharp (again) were all interesting but the highlight had to be when they each put a giant black balloon on their heads and did a potentially injurious stick dance. It was like something from It's A Knockout and it was very funny. It was also quite moving when they ended their performance by reminding everyone that morris dancing, any dancing I'd say, is about friendship more than anything else.
The organisers had scheduled that performance just right as well, perking us up for the final section of the day. Which began with more morris dancing related shenanigans. Lucy Wright's Start A New Tradition Today! begins with our speaker in the inauspicious location of the Stevenage Holiday Inn on 30th April 2023. She was away on a work trip but she was determined to dance the sun up on Mayday.
So she did. Alone. Wright had grown up in Macclesfield and her father had been a morris dancer but, as can happen, life got in the way and dancing fell by the wayside for years. But, I find this happens a lot, as we get older we reengage with the passions of our youth and so it was for Lucy Wright. She made a brilliant, and extravagant, outfit, and she went into the centre of Stevenage and danced like nobody was watching.
For an audience of curious street cleaners, early morning commuters, and fellow hotel guests. Lucy Wright went on to talk about how not everyone can join a side (geography or disability could make it difficult, people may feel they're the wrong age, race, or gender - sadly) so she came up with a name for solo morris dancing - hedgedancing.
Named after Rae Beth's book Hedge Witch. A few others soon joined in - primarily remotely - and Wright thought of reviving an older and less well known tradition (though one that Terry Pratchett has written about it). Dancing the sun down during the winter solstice. Then on 31st October 2023 the sun was danced down by over one hundred people all over the world. Wright named it 'dusking'.
It got her to thinking about traditions and how so many English folk traditions seem to be male based (the honourable exception is the annual Buckinghamshire pancake race which looks fun). So she came up with a few of her own and showed us some photos to illustrate them. They were pretty impressive and seemed to involved wearing antlers, smoking out fools, waving a dildo in the air, and wearing furry knickers!
Good on her. There was just time for Hayley Lock to appear on stage again. This time with her hypnotist who had already hypnotised here before they reached the stage (he didn't want us, he said, all doing the funky chicken) and, for some reason, she was wearing a long black gown like the ones barbers put on you before they cut your hair.
Lock and her hypnotist were aiming, vaguely, for a past life regression. Ideally to the moment, after birth, when she was just energy! The aim was to go through an ancient door into a past life but that's not quite how it panned out. Lock described standing on soft wood chippings and there being 'presences' there as well as being spun in a nice soothing way. As if, keeping with the afternoon's overriding theme, dancing.
Next she was floating (not in reality, obviously) in a green ether and going towards some kind of shapeshifting structure and then bouncing off its jelly like walls. All the while she was drawing pictures, scribbles really, of what she was experiencing. She even spoke of smelling warm biscuits and being given a glass of milk.
As well as there being another person there, that person holding out a very big silver plate, and her spinning on that plate, After that she describes being in cold war and then, a bit more worryingly, dividing up into several parts. Before ending up on a cushion so big she can't see the sides of it. Then she's gently clicked out of her hypnotic state and we all go to the Enterprise pub for a very enjoyable debrief.
Thanks to Dewi, David, Liberty, Scott, and Michael for joining me and thanks to Conway Hall, the London Fortean Society, and all the speakers and performers at this curious and fascinating event. It might be time to take up morris dancing.
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