This is the first day of the magic and the sense of place conference.
I'm Diane Perkins, the organiser. It gives me very great pleasure to introduce our fantastic speakers.
The first is Professor Ronald Hutton, an extraordinary and very able historian, not only of the English Civil War,
the restoration and its complications, but also of modern paganism and of witchcraft and of the supernatural in general in every period.
I think it's fair to say that Ronald Hutton is the man who, perhaps more than anyone,
has incorporated into his work all aspects of study of those topics witchcraft, the supernatural in general.
He's someone who's knowledgeable about archaeology as well as wise and knowing about history.
Thank you, Diane, for your generosity. I don't have slides for this presentation and also to keep things as simple as possible.
My title is How Sacred of the Dead, and I start by saying, across the world, human societies which hadn't heard the bodies of their dead matter,
does ceremonially usually attach some sense of sanctity to the resulting graves.
These are regarded by those societies as needing to be respected, to be left undisturbed,
to remove the contents and especially the bodies, is therefore routinely treated by their living descendants as desecration.
Such attitudes were and are held to a similar degree by the Christian Societies of Europe and its extended Western world bodies.
And these are usually expected to be interred whole with a religious service
in specially consecrated ground to await resurrection of the last judgement.
Such worldwide conventions might have been thought to collide with a countervailing impulse among Western scholars from the 19th century onward.
This was a wish to study and understand non-European societies and the ancient European past and wider human past.
Both have their own parts of the world and available for both enterprises.
Graves represent one of the most important sources of evidence provided by the nature and structure of burial places.
The traces of ritual contained within them, of the skeletal material itself, and any accompanying goods.
A solution for this apparent clash of needs was rapidly and spontaneously provided and drew on two very old science,
as we now see it, ugly human impulses.
One was to deny people smugglers, societies and especially other races the same privileges accorded to one there.
The other was to regard practitioners of other religions as lacking the validity of one's self and therefore the right treatment with respect.
There was, however, a significant degree of mitigation of this in the case of still flourishing faiths, which most closely resembled Christianity.
In having sacred writings, a fully developed clergy and impressive religious monuments,
19th and 20th century European colonial authorities therefore took care to avoid disturbing Muslims, Jewish Buddhists and Hindu cemeteries.
Indeed, they had little need to do so because their questions about the history of these religions could be answered readily from written sources.
No such scruples, however,
were applied to the burials of peoples who had lived in the remote past and had practised religions that were no longer extant.
This indifference was extended to those of simple indigenous societies in the extreme European world,
which had been greatly reduced in numbers and territory by colonialism and deprived of all power.
As a result, the European museums filled up with the bones of grave goods so that individuals who fell into these categories
and it must be recognised that tremendous additions were made to general human knowledge by this process.
These exhibits also represented some of the major.
Most popular items at those museums for the general public.
Not only were the goods taken. Graves usually among some of the most impressive and important items on view.
But the human bodies provided a unique opportunity in modern Western cultures to look without restraint from the dead.
As death was increasingly removed from the domestic settings, the institutional and as the bodies of executed criminals ceased to be put on display,
the sight of corpses became proportionately rarer and rarer in Western cultures.
Museums. By displaying prehistoric skeletons,
more Egyptian mummies were increasingly presenting the major opportunity to do so with an increasingly powerful, free soul attached.
The ideological double standard evolved was maintained easily until the late 20th century,
when three different forces began to undermine and challenge that.
By the end of the century, they collectively represented a powerful countervailing pressure upon the traditional policy.
All three forces arose from the same messy and transformative cultural currents sweeping the West in the period
generated by the loss of colonial empire and Christian religious hegemony and the growth of more multi-ethnic,
multi-faith and poorly vocal societies.
While the force was a series of campaigns by native peoples who survived as minorities
within nations dominated by European settlers to repossess their own heritage.
A principal component of these was the demand for the repossession of artefacts and human remains derived from their cultures and held within museums.
This commenced among Native Americans and spread to Native Australians and New Zealanders,
its targeted institutions within the nations which they still inhabited but also saw in colonial borderlands such as Britain.
The second source that undermines the established scholarly ideology was a new concern among museum staff themselves concerning its propriety.
This was a spinoff of a broader movement called the New Museum oLogy,
which should emerge during the 1980s and called for greater self-awareness and questioning among professionals a greater interaction with citizens,
and a recognition that thorough social and political context defined the choice and interpretation of the objects displayed.
This development produced a new discomfort, both with the sheer number of human remains recorded as held in public museums,
amounting to those of 61,000 people by the 2005 islands, with the manner in which they were put on display.
The number of skeletons curated was increasing rapidly because of the growth of rescue archaeology in the path of development.
Most of the bones that us exhumed were actually from Christian periods,
but it was the small minority of pre-Christian corpses which God displayed to the public as it always the custom.
Anxiety burgeoned the battle such professionals as to whether ancient human bodies should
apparently be dehumanised by being a cold had the same status as inanimate objects.
It was increased by the manner in which the display seemed to be treated as an entertainment as well as an education.
A fundamental denial of common humanity seemed to be embedded in such policies.
The third force that changed the traditional situation was the appearance of modern pagan religions.
In most Western nations, these consist of a cluster of recently emerged traditions united by the characteristic of inspiration,
ideas and evidence drawn from the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East.
Although minorities within every nation in which they appeared in English speaking states in particular,
they numbered at least schools of thousands of adherents and formed highly motivated, highly visible and highly articulate pressure groups.
As such, they provided the ancient European Near East dead with the factor that the latter had hitherto lacked a living community.
Within the contemporary world who identified with them and were prepared to speak for them as such,
modern pagans soon revealed a fundamental and in this context, highly relevant contrast with Christian ideology.
As the latter posited the existence of a transcendent divinity who had created the universe but was not part of it.
It included the concept of consecration.
In other words, most Christians agreed that the correct ceremonies could imbue places,
objects and persons with sanctity, and that these entities did not possess that quality naturally.
The obverse of this belief was that places objects and people could formally be
consecrated and so returned to a status in which they possess nothing of the sacred.
Modern pagans, like the ancient peoples whom they admired, had, by contrast, a concept of imminent divinity.
That deity is all part of a spiritualised natural world.
Places, objects and. People could therefore already be sacred by virtue of the natural order and religious attribution only recognise that fact.
Likewise, sanctity continued to adhere in them if they were removed from their original settings.
These three forces in conjunction represented a considerable challenge to the traditional attitudes of archaeologists and museum curators.
They operated together with a special force in Britain in the period between 1990 and 2010,
and that interaction provides the case study, which will take up the remainder of this paper.
The first point to be made on this is the success of the campaigns mounted by
indigenous peoples in reasserting control of the relics of their own heritage.
The landmark here was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
passed in the United States in 1990, which made tribal consent necessary for future excavation of native graves.
It's also required museums receiving federal funding to make inventories of their
collections of native skeletons and goods and allow tribal communities to claim the back.
Similar legislation was that had passed in the British overseas dominions.
These steps encouraged in some applications by the same Indigenous peoples for
the return of bodies and artefacts from their cultures held by British museums.
The human remains concerned totalled those of 15,000 individuals by 2000.
Therefore, discussions were being held by both parties and conferences of museum staff to resolve the issue.
The result was a direction by the Departments of Culture,
Media and Sport in 2005 that museums should inventory all their human remains and publish
their information with the age of the bones and circumstances of their acquisition.
This was expected to make repatriation claims easier, so return with the stipulation that each should be decided on its own merits.
According to a case by case basis simultaneously and in whole sensitivity to the
treatment of human bodies was spreading through the archaeological and museum sectors.
In 2005, English heritage, the main heritage body of England,
cooperated with the Church of England to issue guidelines for the best practice in handling bones remains excavated from former Christian graveyards.
In 2007, oversight of treatment of burials was given to the Ministry of Justice,
which instituted the next year a system by which archaeologists desiring to disinter any needed to complete a form to do so.
This involved an undertaking to treat all human remains unasked with decency, whatever that meant during excavation and curation.
Unwrapped Egyptian mummies were removed from display at the Manchester and Bristol museums during the 2000s.
The idea was spreading rapidly, but handling of human remains required specific and special care.
It was driven not by the government or national heritage organisations but by campaigning museum professionals.
Both the change of attitude towards human bodily material in general and the new emphasis on dialogue with visitors
now opens the way for Pagans to exercise some influence on the acquisition and display of ancient British skeletons.
That this happened in Britain was no coincidence because it had been the birthplace of modern paganism
that had first appeared there and in its early forms had defined the movement internationally.
The branch, which was especially concerned itself with the issue, was Druids.
Pagan Druids groups had been founded in Britain only in the late 1980s and were young, vigorous and self.
Asserting their especial connection with the issue derive naturally from their
particular emphasis on a sacred relationship between humans and the natural world.
This extended to what upon that, between modern humans and their ancient human predecessors who had formed their landscapes.
Their intervention commenced in 1993, when the chief of the British Druid Order, Philip Shallcross,
formed a design to encourage the reburial of ancient human remains held in British museums.
He had been directly inspired with this by the campaigns of the Indigenous peoples to recover the bodies of their own ancestors.
The implication of his initiatives was that modern British pagans could speak for the ancients dead as their legitimate contemporary descendants.
He, in turn, inspired a young druid called Paul DAVIES to launch his own campaign over the issue from the start.
However, there was a difference between the two.
Shallcross called for dialogues with professionals, and DAVIES saw them as natural foes to be forced into compliance.
Both initiatives hung fire for a decade and then suddenly took off in the 2000s with the growing public sensitivity towards curated human remains.
In 2004, Shallcross,
his former partner in running the British Druid Order m arrest or founded a new pagan organisation honouring the ancients dead had.
This represented the main pagan denominations.
It lobbying for a greater sense of the sanctity of all ancient British objects recovered by archaeology and held in museums, especially human remains.
Its disavowed mandatory reburial had respect to the work of archaeologists and curators,
but also claims a general obligation on their part to consult pagans as living representatives of the ancient dead.
Missing from their official publications, but very potent in underpinning their claim, was the fact that Shallcross rest,
or some of their supporters were convinced that they actually were in contact with the spirits of those dead, and so could literally speak for them.
This gave a powerful, emotive force of confidence to their lobbying, but was, of course,
a claim that had absolutely no contraction upon virtually all heritage and archaeological professionals.
But their initiative was timely addressed to law.
In particular, an effective campaigner honouring the ancient dead had accordingly swiftly won collaborations, especially in the Leicester, Ipswich,
Chester and Manchester Museum Service and its representatives were invited to address conferences of archaeologists,
curators and interested collection was planned on the issues surrounding the treatment of the ancient skeletons with contributions from pagans.
Arms professionals had also secured support from a range of pagan groups, especially Druids.
Its activity gave new impetus in turn to Paul DAVIES.
And in 2006, he was a. Opted as the reburial officer of the Council of British Druid Orders.
He promptly launched his own campaign, getting the Council to issue a call for mandatory reburial of ancient British human remains.
He toured museums, hectoring staff on the subject.
He also led to a specific public demand for the reburial of Neolithic skeletons
held in the museum attached to the huge Avery stone circles in Wiltshire.
His activities introduced a confrontational tone to the issue and this was turned into outright hostilities by a fiasco at Stonehenge.
In August 2000, a debate the latter was ironically precipitated by an apparently model example of cooperation between pagans and archaeologists.
Four months before, this consisted of a blessing,
invited from a Druid group by a team of archaeologists opening excavations at Stonehenge to sanctify their work.
The invitation was intended to strengthen collaboration between the two groups.
But some Druids saw it as conferring a prescriptive right upon them so that the worthiness of archaeological projects.
In August, a different team of archaeologists invited the same Druids and friends to repeats the blessing for their own dig at the monument.
This consisted of recovering Neolithic cremations from the site and when challenged by some of the Druids,
its leaders refused to provide a guarantee that they would re bury the bones.
The result was a very angry public altercation and a breakdown of relations between the two sides.
Coupled with the abrasiveness of Paul DAVIES operations.
This noticeably soured the attitude of many academic and heritage professionals towards pagans.
The proposed edited collection of essays was a adapted.
Most Pagans had, in fact, remained unengaged with the issue of treatment of ancient Romans.
And in 2008, Saul formed a national support group for archaeologists honouring the Ancients Dead.
Distanced itself from the day that the Davis campaign and the leaders of the Stonehenge confrontation.
Nevertheless, professionals who still favour its cooperation with pagans now found themselves in a small and increasingly unpopular minority.
It seems to many of their colleagues that Pagans possessed no special qualifications that set them off from the rest of the general public.
The test case was now seen to be that of the bones of Dave.
When DAVIES mounted his challenge,
the two organisations in charge that the National Trust and English Heritage launched a lengthy consultation with all interested parties.
They reported in 2010 and refused Reburial of the Bones and denied that Druids had any special right to speak for the ancient British.
Although they would allow the special access to the museum to perform ceremonies that the government accepted these findings.
And although both honouring the dead, as DAVIES and his supporters condemned them,
the life now went out of the issue of arrest law and Paul DAVIES both withdrew subsequently
from activity over it and have left no successors of similar activity and stature.
So what had been achieved in the previous two decades?
Clearly, indigenous peoples in other parts of the world had established a right to lobby for the return of human remains in British museums,
which had been taken from their cultures.
Nobody, however, had established an equivalent special right to speak for the reburial of ancient British individuals or their goods.
Some pagans had come close to winning one, at least in particular institutions, but then failed nonetheless.
The shift of national feeling and public policy has been significant.
It is now part of government policy to deny that human remains.
However, old, anonymous pre-Christian cannot be regarded any longer as equivalent to inanimate objects.
Before 2010, handbooks of the archaeology and curation of human remains routinely treated them as an aspect of material culture.
Since then, new editions have as routinely represented them as needing a special, ethically informed agenda.
None of this means that the ancients dead or their graves are now regarded as sacred.
It does, however, mean that these dead have become recognised as human.
And as such, for the first time awarded human rights.
This is in itself a considerable cultural shift, the history of which can now be written.
And as my 30th minute clicks into place, I conclude this paper.
Thank you very much. It gives me very great pleasure to introduce Chris.
My colleague for many years at Keble College is Professor of Archaeology and has
recently published an exceptional book on magic from an archaeological perspective.
And he's going to take us through some of that work today.
Thank you very much indeed. I'd like to thank Diane for inviting me.
And the range of expertise in the audience and online is very exciting and good to be part of,
and it's also a particular pleasure to follow Ronald, whose work I've admired greatly over the years.
What I'd like to do in my 30 minutes is spend a few minutes at the beginning talking about some general issues of my approach to magic,
partly because I hope that it might be useful in any sort of general discussion of the topic,
but also slightly selfishly, because given the range of expertise in the virtual room,
I will be very interested in what people have to say, critical or otherwise.
And when I said some general things, then I will go on to more archaeological considerations and how the archaeological evidence,
particularly from Britain, but also from the near continent, might be thought of in terms of magic and magical practices.
On the 16th of April 1872, a group of men were drinking in the Barley Mow pub in Wellington in Somerset,
and a wind blew down the chimney and four objects fell out of the chimney.
This is one of them. This is an idea rather shrivelled due to its age and other things.
And on the onion is pinned a piece of paper and you might just be able to make out that on the paper.
There is some sitting and the writing is of the name of a particular temperance
campaigner who was one of a group that campaigned to have the Bonny Mode Pub closed down.
The four onions each had a different person's name on the fore.
Onions were almost certainly placed in the chimney of the pub.
And you'll be very glad to hear that I did serious ethnographic work in the body mow just to have a look at the chimney concern.
No onions fell out of the chimney while I was there. Unfortunately, the four onions were placed in the chimney of the barley mow by Samuel Porter,
who was the landlord of the pub and as a seventh son was seen to have particular powers.
It's likely that the onions were there and the names placed on them were there to do harm to the
temperance campaigners and might be seen to some degree as part of the weapons of the week.
The Samuel Porter was not as influential within the community as some of the people opposing him.
This quiet in a low cottage ale house comes from IB Tyler.
Phoebe Tyler is often seen as the originator of anthropology in this country and indeed globally.
In the year preceding the onions coming out of the chimney,
he'd published a book which we would now not applaud the title of called Primitive Culture.
And in it he charted the intellectual history of humankind.
And at the heart of his notion of intellectual history was of a movement from magic to religion to science.
This is entirely his view is very definitely a progressive movement.
Religion was better grounded and more thoughtful in many ways.
He saw the magic and of course, science, and he styled himself as a scientist.
Science with its logic, its rigour was in all ways superior to either religion or magic.
Having written this book, it came as a surprise and indeed a shock to time to find a series of magical practices alive and well.
In Somerset, where he lived, his wife came from Wellington, where the Barley Bone Pub is still situated,
and he was given the four onions, three of which are disappeared.
Subsequently, the one I showed you is still in the collections of the Rivers Museum here in Oxford, together with Tyler's attendant documentation.
And he documented a whole series of other things.
And I worked in the Rivers Museum for years, which is one of the things that got me interested in magic in the first place.
Obviously, much of Tony's work is of interest.
There was a lot of gathering together of initial thoughts about the world, the range of cultures that Ronald talked about,
often in a slightly pejorative manner, and Tyler's view of magic as a past survival of older forms of thought and feeling fed through all.
Firstly into Fraser and the Golden Valley and ultimately it must be said in to people like Keith Thomas,
whose religion and the decline of magic we've all read and enjoyed.
So in approaching magic, I've tried to take a more sympathetic view of magic,
and I've used to French definitions as it happens one from an early 20th century,
late 19th century anthropologist Livy Broome, who said that magic is human participation in the world.
People who believe in magic believe that their actions are continuous with the world and that they can practice
modes of cause and effect which aren't allowed for by science or mechanical notions of cause and effect.
So putting an onion up a chimney when it's drying out may then harm the people whose names are attached to the onions.
We should say, as far as we know,
the people whose names were attached to the onions were alive and well quite a while after the onions fell out of the chimney.
The second definition is by Lévi-strauss, one of the major anthropologists of the 20th century,
and lévi-strauss sort of turned the levy brutal notion around and said that magic is a humanisation of the universe.
So for people who believe in magic, the whole of the universe is human in various ways.
One could discuss quite what that means, but it's a very interesting notion.
And for me, following on from these ideas, I would guess many of us gathered here today would agree.
I would very much argue against Tyler's idea of progression and intellectual engagement and magic.
Religion and science are always with us.
They have an entangled relationship. One can't think of many aspects of the history of science, chemistry, medicine,
those sorts of things without thinking of various magical practices and religion and magic in many ways.
So for me, magic has never died out. There has never been the decline of magic.
There's been a rather successful campaign waged by science to say that magic has and should die out.
But that's a slightly different issue.
And of course, everyone's favourite, Isaac Newton, who Maynard Keynes described not as the first of the scientists, but the last of the Magi,
spent a lot of his life engaged in biblical prophecy and alchemy, as well as what is seen to be his more reputable scientific pursuits.
So in Newton's brain, there wasn't an area that thought about magic in an area so much about science.
In some ways,
he was trying to develop a grand theory of everything in which what we would now distinguish as magic and science were very much intertwined.
So a few general issues and I won't go through all of these.
I mean, one can only Somali's and list the various aims of magic.
And it's interesting to think that the benign aims, the protective magic,
the telling of the future, the diagnosing of the past outweigh by and large the malign.
So science is campaign against witchcraft, sorcery, cursing, all those sorts of things as misunderstood.
A lot of magical practice and magical endeavour.
There are obvious technologies of magic. Again, I won't go through these because they're well known to all of us.
Words either written or spoken deposition.
I will talk about this element quite a lot that, particularly in years past,
people have regularly and systematically deposited objects in the landscape,
presumably to make contact with various spirits within the landscape that were then also modes of divination, oracles and so on and so forth.
In the ancient past, magic was an unexceptional.
People wouldn't have thought of a witches. Magic wouldn't have so much.
It is unusual. Magic is a dominant force in many areas of the world, past and present in quite a lot of areas.
The sort of humanisation of magic is important.
So magic is linked to human lineages.
So in ancient China and to a great extent in modern China,
the well-being of the living depends upon the efficacy of the dead, the power of the ancestors to look after the living.
There are periods in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, where magic and religion were equals,
in a sense that was obviously pantheons of gods and so on in many areas, but also very well developed forms of magic.
Then we have periods in which, particularly with monotheism in Israel,
where religion becomes more dominant and magic is a slightly more ambiguous force.
And then in Post-medieval Europe, the ideology of Europeans has been that the scientists,
religious and their magical in that order with the hope that they weren't really very magical at all.
But this is a limited period of time when thinking about the deep human past and.
A terribly limited area of the world. Magic has models of success.
Why do things work equally? Like science has to explain why things don't work.
And the third of these points for me is crucial.
Magic for people like Tyler, again, was seen as a sort of substrate of ancient belief that was unchanging,
was inherited by unthinking, indeed somewhat unintelligent people.
But actually, magic is almost always experimental.
Changeable. Did it work? Well, maybe we could do something different.
So rather than science being the area of experiment and magic as the era of tradition.
I would say that both extremely experimental, thought provoking people trying things and succeeding or not.
So what I do now is a very brief whistle stop tour of some aspects of magic in Europe's past.
Star power images elicit science in the north of England present day Yorkshire 9000 B.C., in which 21 front plates of red deer were found.
And so the front of the skull and bits of the antlers, the horns and these had holes born in them and were almost certainly worn as headdresses.
So whether people were not making any real distinction between humans and deer, that people and animals square where blending in each other,
whether people were appropriating some of the powers of the animals, all those are interesting and unknown questions.
We find similar sort of different looks in Denmark, in northern Germany and so on.
So this was a widespread practice and people often talk about these practices in terms of shamanism.
So personally, I think we have to be careful about making these very long term links between cultures separated in time and space.
I would see the stark practices as being in some way magical.
Whether they were shamanistic, I think is a different question.
And almost certainly Siberian shamanism, as we know it from the last few centuries, has a very particular notion of the cosmos,
which I would doubt whether it was shared in details or even in its broad outline by Mesolithic people.
But again, these are these are things one can talk about.
Ronald mentioned Dave Barry and indeed Stonehenge, which I'm going to go on and talk about.
So come the Neolithic we've left forward in time.
Now to the middle Neolithic, something like 3000 B.C. 5000 years ago.
So across Britain, particularly across southern Britain, there are a whole series of stone circles with all sorts of attendant.
So you've has a large stone circle for me as a value judgement,
but I always prefer going to 83 than Stonehenge, and it also has this very long avenue going up towards it,
outlined by these pairs of stones where people presumably processed across the landscape and did a whole variety of things,
deposited materials in various pits and so on.
And in the medieval period, as Ronald's written about,
some of these stones were destroyed because they were associated with works of the devil and so on.
So things like Avebury had its original set of significance 5000 years ago,
and then a whole series of changing, historical, often broadly magical engagements.
The best known of these stone circles is, of course, Stonehenge,
and we would all now accept that Stonehenge is very much tied to the movements of the sun,
to a lesser extent of the moon and the sun, the middle points of the year, the summer and winter solstice.
As so here we have the sun shining through between the heels, stones and hitting the altar stones in a recreated Stonehenge in midsummer.
There is obviously an enormous amount, one could say, about Stonehenge.
The bluestones in the middle were brought from Wales 120 miles away.
As Ronald also said, there are lots of human dead in various different guises there.
So whatever people were doing there were trying to engage with various powers of the universe,
various powers of human ancestry in a very sort of efficacious and heady mix of things in ways,
again, that we can't easily understand,
but a very thought provoking and for me would fit very much within the sort of levy baru levy stressed notions of human participation in the universe.
People felt in some ways that the movements of sun, moon and stars affected their lives, their wellbeing.
That. Stoney's later than Stonehenge.
So Stonehenge goes out of use as a stone circle, was used in various sorts of ways around 2000 B.C. and hundreds of years later,
in the middle, Bronze Age, roughly 1500 B.C. The landscape is laid out in what appears a much more pragmatic manner.
People create the first field systems is a rather charming recreation of banks and ditches.
People enclose the landscape within the banks and ditches.
They had fields where they grew, crops, kept animals. And as I say, people have described this as a movement from the more sacred,
magical landscapes of the early and middle Neolithic to a more pragmatic world of the middle Bronze Age,
where people are doing more recognisable things.
But actually when you look at the layout of these field systems, so you might be able to just about work out on the left hand side there.
These are preserved field systems today up on Silver Spring Plain, near where Stonehenge is, in fact.
And when you look at the predominant alignment of the field systems, they are also laid out on the midsummer a midwinter, sunrise and sunset.
And they're laid out also in a way that's been described as being to rain blind.
They laid out across the landscape in ways that doesn't make total pragmatic sense,
but does make sense if you're trying to align your predominant alignments on the movement of the sun.
So what looks the first site? A more secular landscape actually has quite a lot of continuity in it with the Stonehenge, with the free landscapes.
And so people's notions of fertility, of fecundity and so on were presumably also linked with more cosmological concerns.
This just gives you a whole series of predominant alignments of field systems that might go through them.
And interestingly, once we get to a Christian landscape,
these Origen furrow fields laid out from something like the ninth century A.D. Then
they're laid out in a way that's completely different to the earlier landscape.
So the predominance of the solar alignment runs through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and into the Roman period.
But in the Post-roman period, the landscape changes fundamentally is still probably, while it is a cosmological landscape,
but now more within a Christian iconography in terms of of the ways in which field systems are laid out.
So this is one of the major changes, I think,
in the ways in which people in Britain have approached the cosmos and the landscape we're going to talk to now is a thing I mentioned before,
which is the position within the landscape.
So this diagram is taken from the work of Richard Bradley, who is one of the doyens of British archaeology.
And Richard pointed out many years ago, and he's developed this along with many other strands in his work.
So what this graph shows you, so if you look at the left hand side, you have a dotted line that says burial finds,
which decline from the period of 1400 B.C. down to about 1000 B.C. So these are finds that accompany the human dead.
And conversely, you have a solid line which says water finds which goes up as burial finds decline.
So people had wondered whether a deep position in the landscape was accidental or proposed.
So were things now found in rivers the result of accidental loss?
People getting in a boat and they lose a sword, piece of jewellery or whatever.
And Richard's argument is that these two modes of deposition are inversely correlated,
a correlation that you wouldn't find if we're just looking at accidental loss.
And Richard has gone on to look at deposition in flowing water in rivers near Springs, points on the landscape far away from water.
And his broad argument is that there is a patterning to the artefacts deposited in different bits of the landscape,
which is appropriate in some way to how people understood the powers of the landscape.
Now just take us across the channel for a second into areas today.
In modern day Belgium and Holland, we have the Rivers, Mercer and Rhine and this is a fantastic study.
There's a very good book called Sacrificial Landscapes by a man called David Fontaine.
And David points out that swords in this area are almost always found in rivers, whereas hoards gatherings of material amount.
Some material are almost always found on dry land.
He also talks about the sort of sacrificial landscape.
So not only are swords found in rivers, but where a big river meets a smaller river,
there is often a big deposition of bronze, but also one can look at patterning across the landscape.
Particular things that are found in remains of houses, but on boundaries of field systems, but then into major rivers.
So you get different forms of artefacts. This is the same thing in different diagrammatic form to give you some sense of what the artefacts look like.
And David also says that where people are buried different ages.
So this is a diagram for men. He produced two similar ones for women.
So if a young boy or a male baby is buried, then they're not buried with very much at all.
Once they get to adolescence state,
then they get a pretty full kit of axes and swords and these are then buried with them carries on through into adulthood.
But if you get an old person buried, then they don't have anything buried with them.
And it's likely that it's their material that is deposited in rivers and in the landscape.
So as people are moving towards and sisterhood, they're depositing things within the landscape.
So the human life course is also linked to these modes of deposition.
Modes of cosmological understanding is one of my favourite objects.
This is the white horse where I was lucky enough to excavate back in the nineties.
The interesting thing about the White Horse is that it is there due to processes of human care.
If you leave the white horse, this chalk figure, it will grow over the grass will grow over it,
and it will disappear in a period of something like 15 or 20 years.
So we know because we dated, it won't go into how the white horse is very surprisingly 3000 years old.
And so that means that every decade or so at least, and possibly more, for the last 3000 years,
people have been caring for the horse within a different set of ideologies, within a different framework of society.
But it is never been forgotten, never something that people have found irrelevant through to the present.
I'm moving now into the Iron Age, the period after 800 B.C. of the great fictional characters get it fixed.
The Druid from the Asterix comics and I spent quite a lot of time thinking, say, about artefacts within the Iron Age.
This is so-called Celtic art. This is a little pin from Germany.
You can see the pin best in the middle, which would have held people's cloaks together.
And the interesting thing about this is that it is an ultimately sort of shape shifting only some may be hard to really tell the details,
but right in the middle is a human head with a long beard and long hair.
Over towards the left hand side is some sort of creature who knows quite what it is.
Big, bulbous nose, not really human, but it morphs into the human being as it moves along.
The fibula, the pin and the base are a pair of creatures which are a game, possibly sort of seahorses or so on.
So the worst thing one could ask about this artefact is what is it?
It's not one thing. It's many has some sort of human attributes, was worn on the human body, but it invokes and evokes a whole series of other things,
some of which may be real, as it were, some of which may be more spiritual.
And one can see a whole range of different forms of these things.
So on the left hand side is this other dragon type creature produced in a piece of bronze fishing from fifth or sixth century B.C. France.
And one question one could ask, Is this two creatures or possibly one creature?
Oh, print out that it's a sort of cubist depiction of this creature.
So you can see it not as you would have been able to see it in reality if you'd ever been able to see this creature in reality.
But you can see both sides at once. And the same may also be true of the ring, the tool on the right hand side, the bottom right.
And you can see Iron Age people playing around with these details of time and space.
So on the right hand side of the top, you can see a detail from an engraved detail from this couch down in the bottom right hand side,
where you can see a person standing on a wagon of some sort.
But the wagon is depicted with the wheels flattened out the person in profile and then to.
The horse is drawing it in profile. So again, this is playing with the dimensions of time and space and interesting on the left hand side.
We're looking at Russian Siberia, very similar period, but several thousand kilometres away where people have the same sort of notion.
So unlike, say, classical art, this is not an art of realism.
It's an art of play, of dimensionality, of transformations, of animals.
And I would say, broadly speaking, this is breaking down the distinctions between people and things,
breaking down species barriers, incorporating aspects of time and space which we wouldn't allow for.
We modern Westerners and our slightly mechanical notions of how time and space work and just around things out.
These are the sorts of things that Ronald knows much more about, but only do in magical practices.
Obviously carry on through into the modern periods, worries about demons and so on,
and how one keeps demons out of one's house or church or a whole range of other things.
And these days, well, so I suppose that one set of technologies for doing that and these things,
once people have realised that these things still exist and perceptible,
then they're found in surprising numbers of both domestic and church contexts.
So another little bit of indication that Magic has never died out.
Magic is obviously controversial, and I would say it's controversial because it's to do with the nature of reality and human position within reality.
So this is I'm a humble archaeologist. This is going beyond my pay grade.
But these are so-called entangled particles, some representation of subatomic particles and the entangled particles,
as far as I understand them, the quality of one particle, the polarity, the spin, the various things.
If it changes, it's connected.
Particle will change also. But this change occurs faster than the speed of light can move between the two of them.
So physics at the moment has no means of explaining how these particles are entangled.
And some physicists, not many, but some have started to say maybe for a bunch of other language that these particles are conscious of each other.
If we start to say the subatomic building blocks of the universe are conscious, then we're in a territory that a Siberian shaman would understand,
an indigenous Australian would understand, and they would most likely say, Well, keep up, we've been telling you this forever.
So what the nature of reality is, what the nature of human participation in reality is, are obviously extremely fraught, extremely powerful notions.
And magic takes us into these other notions of reality in a very useful and very sympathetic way, and just a shameless plug at the end here.
As Dianne mentioned, I've written this book, so if you want to know more to read this,
but I would be extremely interested and in anyone's comments or so.
So anything that I've said. Thank you. We're set for a second panel.
Who owns this place? The first to speak will be Neil Phillip, the renowned folklorist and Alan Gardner scholar.
For now, let's kick off with Neil. Let's go. Thank you very much, Diane.
The title of this talk is All that He and Alan Garner and the Sentient Landscape.
The question of who owns the land might be thought to be a subtle thing.
Let's see where his name is on the title deeds. But for most human cultures, land rights are much more complicated and subtle thing.
The question of myth and custom and tribal rights.
A book of prime import must one garner the writer whose work I'll be discussing today.
Is the making of the English landscape by WG Hoskins.
Geoffrey Hill in the cinema's offer is described as invested in mother.
The first of Hill's hymns hails the eighth century offer as.
King of the perennial Holly Groves, the riven sandstone.
Overload of the M5. Architect of the historic ramparts and ditch the citadel.
Tam was the Summer Hermitage and Holy Cross guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge contract to secure desirable new estates.
Salt Master. Money changer.
Commissioner for Martyrology.
Just a friend of Charlemagne. I like that they offer seniors again.
Singing and singers play an important role in Ghana's work.
STRAND Labour, for instance, opens with a classical invocation of the muse.
I sing The Eagle. And closes with.
Here is the start of the dream. And how the sweet sorrow is sung.
At the end of Tom Fool's Day, the last novella in the series make up Alan Garner's stoned quartette.
The boy, William, has a moment of transcendent understanding while slashing.
The line did hold. Through hand and I look forward and balloon to the hill and all that.
He and his sledge, sledge, sledge for the black and glittering night and the sky.
Flying on fire. On the expectation of snow.
Formerly owned. It's an unusual thing to say of a boy who doesn't really own anything other than the sledge his granddad has made for him.
But Garner is not using the word in the sense of legal ownership and title deeds in his idea,
let alone means something much more profound, a sense of acknowledging and of being acknowledged.
Of belonging in and to a place.
Many writers have words they use in deeply personal ways that stand at an angle to the dictionary definition.
In Garner's novel, Owl Service set in a claustrophobic Welsh valley that is haunted by the ghosts of the past
and the pent up energy of a mess that must be re-enacted and relived by each generation.
He uses the word in an intense scene between the adolescent queen and the man in green.
Does not yet know. Is his father a gardener who half baked?
Green says abruptly. You don't own a place, man.
Hughes reply is Don't take.
Oh. Their name is on the books of the law. But I own the ground, the mountain, the valley.
I own the song of the cuckoo. The brambles, the berries.
The dark cave is mine. And this passage echoes through Garner's most recent novel, Treacle Walker.
In which the boy Joseph culpa follows the call of a cuckoo into an older bog,
where he meets an emerald bog body who is a kind of ancestral keeper of the land.
St Mirren has been woken by the Cuckoo's Call and lecture,
but Joseph must stake his body back into the log in which Sam dreams all that is and is not.
If he does not do this, then cuckoo shall rule over nothingness.
This magical cocoon has been summoned into being by Joseph playing song on a flute made from the shinbone of an unnamed man that sang.
He plays the flute in the sacred space of the central chimney of the old Mexican house of black and the axis mundi, the heart of all luxuries.
Then he left the coal press and went along the valley of the Common Dene,
following the brook upstream by the old road through the tunnel under the railway,
its arch, curtained with a drape of ivy to the trees of the mole pits.
Here, the world was different.
There was no guzzling bulk green causeway reclaimed by bramble and older sycamore, hazel ash and strays seeded by birds with space and light to grow.
And salendine and season. And the wild garlic smell.
Near either side of the causeway lay the pools of the pitch eyes of Blackwater dug to get
them all the lime rich clay beneath the silt to fetch life to the hungry sons of the field.
This subtlety of observed detail is crucial to a writer whose storytelling is quickened to life by landscape.
Indeed, in his earliest books, the landscape is almost more compelling and vivid than the characters.
It is significant, I think that in Guy's first book, The Weird Son of Christine Gummer, published in 1960.
The first thing the reader encounters is not a descriptive sentence or a character.
But a map. A map of the edge Alderley Edge Gardner's spiritual home.
And the surrounding countryside in which and below which the children in the book experience their thrilling adventures.
These partly involve a precursor of sin and or Gruner that arises from the long lake or black peat stained water of Lindo,
covered from head to foot in a loose habit, dark and greying and ill, concealing a terrible stillness.
And despite a strange personality beneath a deep cowl,
the face skin mittens were on the wasted hands, and the air was laden with the week of foul waters.
In his 2010 introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Weird Stone, Gardner writes.
Gruner is real. You can see him any time you wish.
When we were children, we would sometimes pedal makeshift ropes on a Black Lake of lingo, two miles from the edge.
It's a gloomy and frightening place. And around it is a people.
I never liked it. Then, as I grew older, I became interested in archaeology.
I read about the finding of human bodies in Scandinavia, preserved intact by the acid of the waterlogged peat.
And I knew why I lindow scared me. Here was the ideal place for about 40.
I knew he was there. That was in 1957.
In 1984, Pete Casas founded Grimm.
There is now in the British Museum and is known as Lindow Man.
So important is the landscape to the book. So there have been many attempts to turn the map on the Endpapers into practical instructions for walkers.
Most recently by the archaeologist James Wright, in his meticulously researched weird stone walk, which is available on the Internet.
A sequel to The Weird Stone The Moon of Over US was published in 1963, but it wasn't until 2012 that a third novel appeared both on land.
A very strange little blood test. The boy protagonist of the first book, Colin, is now grown up working as an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank.
The radio telescope is adjacent to black and deeply troubled.
Colin can't remember anything of his childhood adventures, but he is haunted by them and a dim awareness of his lost sister.
It was snatched away to the stars. He lives in a tent in an abandoned quarry because someone has to look after the edge.
There always is. Someone always has been.
In a parallel to Colin's story is that of one of the previous gardeners.
In terms of the landscape, the unnamed workshop was the last to abandon early humans, Neanderthal Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis.
It's not made clear. His and Colin's consciousnesses are fused.
It is the watcher's responsibility to maintain the world, the stars and the round of time.
Mr. Colin must be able to see the edge from wherever I am in order to keep it.
If something isn't looked at, it may go. Or which will never be.
Colin is so brilliant a scientist that he is told you have it in you to go beyond the singularity.
Your vision could take us to our next understanding.
But even that is not enough to escape the unnamed terrors of the past.
The Last Lions. Martin Jones was paying the price and had some relevance here.
Our radio telescopes will reach out beyond the big bang.
And what it will sound like is one question and another.
Well, the silence before it will sound like. The silence after.
Lying beneath the surface of this intricately constructed novel are all Garner's other works, notably his libretto for the Gordon Cross Opera.
Also Thompson, which is in Le Church called Le Croc,
but both Lands Watch live and go on a prefaces by and was epigraph from Galway in the original and in translation.
It had a hole on the end when on either side, overgrown with grass clumps everywhere,
and all was hollow within nothing but an Owen cave or the crevice of an old crag with a dash of William Golding's inheritors in the mix.
These various texts interlink to form the arms around which the text of land itself is constructed.
The sense of place is crucial. Throughout Garner's work, his whole sensibility is tied up with it.
Perhaps the most startling and unsettling example of this is his novel First Pitch.
The name translates as The Valley of the Demon, just as in the Owl Service.
This is a claustrophobic place where bad things happen over and over.
This falls on Garner's doorstep. There are two intertwining stories in the speech.
More than one are willing to call Sal, who is dying from an unnamed neurological disease, and her friend Tom Carrera,
a lover and an ex Jesuit priest and a 19th century one about her pet man, John Turner, and his role in a kind of masquerade cult in the Valley.
But as in other colour roles such as Red Shift in land, different time zones, different stories reflect, echo and even affect one another.
At one point, Sal tells in. But this place knows we're here.
He scoffs that she continues. Most geologists agree about strange landscape.
If you do enough fieldwork, you can't avoid it. Some places have to be treated with respect.
Sal uses different words. Owen She says, I was with the family of the valley and the valley was with many of me.
It's the same understanding. Connor's novel Strangler takes a sense of land and place even further,
allying it with the Australian Aboriginal notion of country in which there is mutual
understanding and respect between the landscape and the people who in common sense own it.
In Strand, Loper, Garner is telling the story of William Buckley,
who was transported to Australia and or in 1881, escaped from prison and spent 31 years living with what?
Tarrant was a man of high degree of shaman.
But the Cheshire landscape of his birth and young manhood is also deeply imprinted in Berkeley.
Garner sympathy with Aboriginal ways of thinking is partly to do with his respect for the complex, many layered concepts of time.
Anthropologist Margaret King Boyce, scholars, friend and advisor on Stanley,
identifies nine different Aboriginal concepts of time, historical time, personal time.
Time as an agent of creation and destruction.
Time. Encapsulation. Natural time.
Synaptic cause and effect. Periodic time.
Revelatory time. On cosmic time.
The traditional Aboriginal society. She writes based its social and cultural organisation on these nine foundations.
So they believed time began when the dreaming was complete and they were left to
care for the social and cultural structures developed by their mythical ancestors.
All of Garner's work can be viewed in the light of the term employed by Alan Robinson and James Rayner in their
co-edited book In Place Miss Space Narrative and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea.
I can't think of a better phrase in place.
SMITH Miss Garner's craft and mystery.
One of the contributors to replace Smith is Debra Byrd, an in her own book, Dingo Makes US Human.
She includes a passage that, if I read it to you, is from a gala novel I think you would all believe to be his work.
Woman has decided to leave her brutal husband.
Her father offered her his strongest and deepest consolation.
He called place names verbally travelling first through his mother's country, which is where his children are grown up, calling each waterhole,
each hill and creek, marking its extent and indicating that dreaming is spoke of places and dreaming in his father's country, calling them by name.
And he punctuated his words of comfort with this assertion.
All that. That's all your country now.
When Mary climbs the church spire with her father in the stone book, Mary could see all of surely the railway and the new houses.
She could have seen home, but the Wood Hill swelled and folded into Clay's Hill betrayed.
She could see this cottage at the end of lifeless moss in the green of the most.
And as she spun, she could see Lord Stanley's with Stockport and Wales and Beasts.
And I am Billinge and Delamere and all the hills and Manchester.
Her father says there, you'll remember this day, Michael, for the rest of your life.
I already have, said, Mary. You might as well have said all that.
That's all your country now. In many of his books.
A feature of Garner's writing is an obsessive naming of elements of the landscape, which is a kind of poetic summoning, a spell being cast.
And a crucial passage in boom land. Colin rode blind by seven sisters, Lane Lindo, Moss, Rose Trees, Brook Lane, London Road and Front Hill.
When William Buckley returned home to mark the end of Strand Lane,
he followed the turnpike through to some past reads mere and over cease fire by Radnor Wood and took the
path up to a long ridge backed by white bonds that help were flattened by Mount Sharp for Castle Rock.
He sat on the brim of the rock and looked down the 400 feet to the fields on the highest below.
It's not at all clear in these last scenes. If Buckley is supposed to be physically or psychically present.
Not even if he is alive or dead. And actually, this is a recurring theme in Guy's work.
At the end of Tree Walker, Joe asks the mysterious Rag'n'bone man to treat a walker who seems to drive the chariot of the sun.
Walker, am I dead? I will not say that you are dead.
Rather, in this world, you changed your life.
I got into another place. These words echo those in Mallory's mortal side denying this death.
Yes, I will not say that it should be so. Rather, I would say here in this world, he changed his life.
And this, of course. Takes us back to the myth of the sleeping king because laying behind ongoing work from the Whetstone through was Thompson and
Byron Land in Gardner's version of The Legend of Alderley first told to him by his grandfather at the beginning of the Whetstone,
the route taken by the Wizard and the farmer with his wife Mare.
So the cavern of the sleeping king and his knights goes by seven first and golden stone to stony points and subtle ball.
This specificity of place names glad to go on a determined local researches into the legend chronicled in his pamphlet by seven firs and Golden Stone,
and in his lecture Oral History and Applied Archaeology in East Cheshire.
In other words, everything in Ghana's world coheres through close attention to landscape.
When attention wavers, chaos threatens, as in a well-known passage in red shift.
My right leg, said Tom. This moment is in the township of Hodge Road.
In the parish of Astbury in the hundred of Northwich, the county and Diocese of Chester in the province of York.
My left leg is in the township of Stanmore, slow in the parish of Will stands in the hundreds of pioneer held in the county
of Stafford and the Diocese of Litchfield in the province of Canterbury.
You see my predicament tone but is skewed towards the castle.
It's worse in there than the map says.
The boundary is undefined. When the boundary is undefined is ritually pronounced.
Place names or instruments of harm, not of comfort.
In his essay, The Edge of the Ceiling, about his childhood illnesses and the hallucinations that sustained him through them.
Garner talks about being born to the edge.
He says, I knew enough geology to become amazed.
I could trace the tidal vortex in the strata the of water swirling for a second under the pool of wind and moon and [INAUDIBLE] for 200 million years.
I felt the white pebbles in the rock and wondered from what mountains they had come by, what river to what sea, and in the fleeting.
I found the vision in knowing the moment of the vortex and of the pebble, which, if I could have watched for long enough, was not rock, but liquid.
I lost all sense of me upon the hill and the universe opened.
I was shown in a totality of space and time, a kaleidoscope of images expanding so quickly that they fragmented.
There were too many too fast for individual detail or recall.
They dropped below the subliminal boundaries. And I felt the tide of the surge and the riptide.
Has remained in that eternal moment.
I partook of the [INAUDIBLE] on the hill.
Partook of me. In that same essay, Garner says of his intimate relationship with his landscape.
It is a subtle matter of owning and being.
And as the novelist Paul Kingsnorth asks in an article in The Guardian, re-imagine how it feels to be a character.
Why can't we imagine how the land feels?
But the very first recorded poem in English Cartman's hymn is a hymn, first and foremost to the beauty and mystery of the natural world,
supposedly composed in a dream by an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd in the seventh century.
It reads in my translation, Sing me the beginning of all things.
All praise now to heavens, protector.
The light of the maker and his mind sinking across the eternal father of glory.
When the first chief battle all the world's wonders, architect of time starting his shape, the roof of heaven harbour for the bands,
mankind's guardian, eternal God He made middle earth made this world for us to live in the Almighty.
Thank you very much. I think we should move on to Andrew Sneddon's presentation.
Andrew Sneddon, witchcraft historian and fellow of the Royal Society of History and general brilliant
expert of Northern Ireland and Northern Irishness as an identity and the place.
Andrew So I want to discuss my new what she's a Valmiki 1711 project and then she's uses
clear of digital technology to explore the intangible cultural heritage of this tale,
aims to take it to a new national and a national audience, particularly those on lately,
to engage with previous modes of dissemination and impact on TV and radio and in person,
and talks on the historical range of provide the knowledge and skills of people to explore the trail and consider the key themes of the project.
Communicate this empowerment place, isolation, gender control, digital technology, and creative imagination other users,
no matter where they are geographically, to engage with the story of what is under landscape and the community in which it happened.
And along the way, I think I learn a lot about impactful public history and the scary but fruitful
move from the dissemination of historical research to career of Collaboratory.
Co-producer So what about the witchcraft trial itself?
I'm going to have to talk about this. So sorry I've had this one before or one of the first talk of brief.
So on February 1711, now to live with a local minister and hottest day of May after supernatural court months of it on
our host nowhere Thursday only Alan McGee as an eight mile peninsula on the east coast of Kenya.
And it contained at this time 300 people of Skye's descent and the Presbyterians.
After Dan's funeral, our niece, 18 year old Mary Dunbar,
arrived in her post and almost immediately began to display the symptoms of demonic possession,
convulsions, vomit and hazel, and saw objects and the whole gamut that you see in so many other trials and horror movies.
So, Judy and my something, when Dunbar accused a Presbyterian woman of using witchcraft, jataka in spectral form summoned demons to possess a body.
The women were trying to say, 1st of March Springs section of a Carrickfergus county sized court.
So I anticipate plead not guilty.
They were all convicted under the 1586 age witchcraft that sentenced to one years imprisonment for things in the polity.
So unlike most human incarceration to make me remember where.
But she claimed that the husband ordering rascal of a husband of one of the witches and father to another one of the wretches was no bewitching hour.
He had picked up where the other witches had left off. So William was convicted at this summer.
Assizes in September 1711 made Dunbar whoever died a few weeks earlier after the first trial.
And this turned William's felony and capital crime for which when he was convicted, execution was the punishment.
And we can assume that it was carried out, meaning it be one of the few watches executed in Ireland and one of,
if not the only man in this is more headless here on the screen.
So I'm not showing you my CV here.
As you will see, this project is based on research from a number of areas interactive media, cinematic art, music, computer gaming,
virtual reality animation, but just this big and terms familiar to anybody that an impact case study or worked on one one ref as it did myself.
What you see on screen as you understand the historical research both to what went before the public face that I'll talk about on the new project,
The Witches of Ireland dissenting on project So Possessed by a Devil,
which is the main book on that was a accessible,
narrative driven micro Crowhurst on the article on the left hand say looked at how social memory and focus is shaped,
how belief in witchcraft was imagined and experienced there.
And McKee wrote on to the mid 20th century, maybe even further, and along with the book in the right hand side,
represent the magic, the short, heavy non-fiction that an artist shaped,
an excerpt of narrative of of the child that was variously gendered,
politicised and erroneously exceptionalist as the only instance one of the very few of witchcraft belief in Ireland in the law.
My research and analysis shown that was awash with and I don't want to repeat an earlier paper,
but I wanted to update this project that that myself before the prayers and what she's found a key project and this was a kind of public.
Has to project between 2013 and 2020.
And just to provide context, that's part of the regional project straddle two different interpretations of public question.
The first interpretation as one where our publication is based in the form and
nature of transmission of historical knowledge from this story to later audiences.
And the second is where the public participatory element is much greater and all parties and could,
in the professional historian become agents of historical creation.
This dissemination part of the public has strictly the opportunity to it.
We project targeted wider audiences through tours, workshops, talks, and public lectures for heritage,
educational and community groups, both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
I also responded to requests from writers and directors and production companies to work with them on movie scripts,
radio and television projects into which child are now on larger projects on witchcraft itself.
And I, on both approaches, took my historical research to larger audiences.
But my work with TV and radio was more inherently collaborative.
I like producers and directors to move beyond dissemination of interpretations, and I think one of the largest last projects I worked on this one,
and thus the balance further in favour of co-production collaboration was done by me as a historical consultant between 2016,
between 23 to 4 lag in media productions.
And we worked on a six part Irish language series to provide a broad examination in terms of content on chronological spread of Irish witchcraft.
As I said, I was involved censor and this series from pitch to post production and an electorate tweeter.
And many of the episodes were based on my 2015 book, Witchcraft Magic in Ireland.
And this included The Child, the comedy Witches.
But the series, more importantly, reflects the creative output and input of the director producing onscreen contribution.
And this provides a reinterpretation of witch trials in those behind me and gender relations abroad, and a sharper focus on ancient Gaelic cosmology.
Mythology and folklore are definitely given more of a foreground.
Projects like this are really good for historians and me, the forces struggling for control of what the final product will look like.
And it's hard for us to try and push the boundaries of discipline, but we have to acknowledge as faithful and healthy,
the public has to flex different viewpoints, whether they're created fully or partially by academic historians.
The final project that's not your research on screen as a core creation as historians, we don't actually is accurate on historical interpretation.
That's what makes historiography so engaging.
So why then should we expect people outside of academia to agree completely with us if we'd be healthy to not agree with ourselves?
So my collaborative career publication came in the fall and the Hotel and National Project,
which started 2018, and this new project, which is a play on something on project TV, it's a number of ways,
not only because it's often collaborative and co-producing, but it's also really disciplinary and multidisciplinary,
as led by myself and Dr. Victoria MACCALLUM when I was working on one before.
And Victoria is from Cinematic Arts Ulster University and we work closely with co-investigators.
So mostly academic staff at the Melvyn Jackson Supplement are Bright Coyle, who come from game design, cinematic arts, and they're active media music.
They also work with academics in gender studies, namely with Keeley of University College Cork.
It worked with US agents as well, and yoga and drama of media to deliver various aspects of the project.
Interactive Media Students Designed and branded the project site digital talk app.
You can see the landing page on the screen, and this was particularly rewarding for me and for, I think for Jason,
who worked on it because he was from Alan McGee and he grew up with the folk tales
of the McGee watches and these amazing photographs that are displayed on the site.
I think this is a place on the Olympic landscape, and that's one of the pictures he took.
So the project's main outputs are as follows a branded interactive digital toolkit website.
I specifically designed choice driven series game, where the user takes the role of just the piece reacting to accusations.
I call it a graphic novel which tells the story of the Galaxy,
which is a virtual reality application where the users explores the story of the trial and experiences.
What it is like to be bewitched.
Accused of witchcraft in 1711 on a specially commissioned musical score, uses soundscapes to explore various aspects of the trial.
So when we first started thinking of it,
the project Victoria Hale and Elizabeth Knight defend the project aims thus to warm up the public to a neglected part of a social cultural history.
Maybe this is increasingly rare. So in Northern Ireland maybe the public as she's what I think of as.
We have gone by a lot of people 11 years ago because so many people are with our project who are doing things that they want to do.
What's craft and I still help them and engage with that as well,
but also to deepen public understanding about the challenges that make question and to make research findings,
tools and sources more accessible to non-academic users for anything they want to do.
Well, obviously they're copyrighted, but within certain parameters of access.
So to explore and examine as well and of approaches to academic use of engagement and to shorten the distance between cultural spaces and visitors,
an intangible cultural heritage such as our style, and to provide enhanced support,
public and community ownership and engagement with these sorts of hidden histories on stories.
So what's interactive media? As we said, we designed a branded patch to care, and this is where all the project hope will be managed and access.
This is a work in progress but is accessible know via the web address on the screen and nobody work quite extensively during the summer.
You know, I'm going to, you know,
tease out some of the elements and talk about some of the opus and show how they lend themselves to the aims and objectives.
So the first part is a history, and this is obviously one that I was at the beginning most comfortable with,
and that allows users to navigate a story if they only view what's his name.
And they can do this through scholarly articles, images, podcast maps, television, them, anything, features.
And it's really useful, I think, to students and pupils and educational community groups.
And it brings all the educational materials and an easily manageable and accessible way.
They don't have to search through the Internet for them or or through hard copy the role there at the fingertips.
And most importantly for me was the fact that I got an Impact Research award to have their documents digitised,
and I'm going to use them and workshops and local communities and women's groups.
But they're there for everybody to use. They're going to be transcribed.
And we have possible photographs. The original documents are going to be there, too.
And this is for the first thing. These are to be made available in one place.
And they are Mikki which tailors and usually they are documented with regard to primary source material.
There's contemporary reports from 1711 about the trials, a 32 page pamphlet in 1711, but not published until 1822.
There's a five page letter detailing the trial by random as to who was at the trial was
also a two page letter discussing the trial and the aftermath by another attendee,
Samuel Mullen. You most importantly, the pre-trial depositions drawn up by justice, peace of the matter claimants are going to be given as well.
No, I produced the original trial transcripts of another watch after around 1661, and Tony Clark and I probably see these nice historical studies,
and I thought that that was another opportunity there that's sort of saying menopause.
And as nearly finished, you should be out by the end of the summer. As a brand new graphic novel co-written by myself, Victoria McCall.
I'm a graphic artist from the David Campbell. The graphic novel format was chosen in the Victoria Court with this idea and I leapt
out of because I want graphic novels and comics and it was chosen as an open,
flexible space and readers can move forward or it's awesome, diverse and as Victoria has put ourself,
that's very form suggests Ashley Self is fluid,
unstable and constructed and we decided that a visual verbal format would reach the reader's understanding of this power
of Ireland's history and formula it and place the novel as loaded with haunting visuals from my own city at the time.
In order to convincingly deliver the story on the targeted themes of gender, disempowerment,
women and the power of belief, we all agreed that to be a quality product how to work well with any chosen medium.
The graphic novel. We want to avoid all those comics it's produced for our community and our projects,
which have slabs of text which drive the story basically, and this sacrifice style completely for content.
You get the feeling what they've said is, here's my story. I watched it that we wanted a good balance of both.
We want to combine visual storytelling with textual explication dialogue.
The aim was to produce a good graphic novel, and I think most honest to do it was incredibly collaborative effort.
We didn't say, Hey, David, here you go, enlisted us. We all wrote the story together.
We all worked at this and we wrote the dialogue.
And he brought a scowl as a comic book maker and a graphic designer and an illustrator and Victoria are an expertise in cinematic artful colour.
Me, a historian, was about a piece about Lost Mary, so it's fairly cinematic as well.
You can see honestly some examples that show that the complex process of writing
this graphic novel I started with a storyline which I find really hard to study,
the complexity of the style and the unlimited number of pages.
As a historian, I was trying to maintain historical accuracy but condense and then complete in the storyline.
But it's based on historical research. I mean, what really?
Hard to make it truthful and realistic in terms of period detail and storyline as possible and so many the is taking shape from primary sources.
But just like your work with filmmakers, you have to take a step bar and say this is a cultural product and this one right is not possessed,
but it may be based on it and use a lot of it and use it the primary source documents.
But there you go. And it's really hard to re-imagine the story yourself, however,
when you're a historian who's talked about other career or still reimagined the trail and have done so in a dodgy way,
is to back preconceived ideological political positions.
But that's made me painfully aware of what it was portraying and what we were purging and whatnot of choices we took.
So when writing the graphic novel, we had to decide on the themes and the tone and the point of view of taking storylines based on process.
But it does open, as we said, that we had to change it, but we had to take a point of view and we took it on and we did that to challenge a popular
view of what chance that I can be quite aware that there are people who are curious,
hunted or prosecution which didn't really believe in what crossed it, just used as an excuse to target people to get rid of them.
This was undoubtedly true in some cases. I mean, naughty, perhaps.
Oh, it should not obscure the fact that many people in an period fight the majority or convention really of witchcraft,
no matter how they can see that white Qadhafi or what it was under threat, which is pro magic, was harmful and beneficial, was real with them.
And many studies of what's funny involving demonic possession, the dominion the monarch possessed.
People were not authentically Satanists and some of them were.
And where do you draw the line sometimes between simulated and simulated behaviour,
between fake and real physical and emotional symptoms, and often it's really a body wrestling you can't even draw.
So the point of view of the bar may be important, but we have to use as real and with that careful use of dialogue and exposition
to provide the reader with often other explanations as to what happened,
and then leave them to to say to unreliable Mary Dunbar, as a narrator was.
And so after working out the basic story, storyboards and thumbnails and then character sketches and then pencil gossip pages,
first us medium class, fatal, just polish dialogue, exposition, you know, and then we've got a final drop at least on that.
It works more in the, the dialogue on the flattened and process and called images.
So I saw that as an original score and I'll be produced by Ivan Malcolm and recorded by him and other musicians,
and it'll be a stand alone project as orchestrating the noises associated with the What Scarf case.
And he shows us once again how we can relate to the story in an often creative ways.
And it features abstract film recordings from Alan McGee to imply that the landscape is active and wet and then observe observing.
That's part of the project. There's those very play specific, intimately tied and inspired by the landscape in the full caché at the apex.
And so finally, the next hope as a virtual reality application will be available through Oculus headsets, but will play through other words as well.
We'll initially take it to people.
We want to ensure an iconic focus museum and good working to have the first exhibition on witchcraft trial in Ireland next year and
the hope to show this our make available that's out there but hopefully the end game is to have it freely available on VR app stores.
That's the app draws on the research of Dr. Helen Jackson from Interactive Media Ulster University,
and she walks and bring an intangible cultural heritage to wider audiences through air augmented reality and VR.
And as Helen has argued, the project develops a technological led temporal experience that connects art to a sea of intangible cultural heritage.
And we use this to promote new thinking in relation to user engagement and interaction.
And the VR uses the historical research of this trial and the premise of document to create digital storytelling.
And this is framed by a lot of that engage with themes of social marginalisation, dislocation and othering.
As we said before,
they only keep child as thus intangible cultural heritage and can be seen as so because there's very little by way of accessible bricks and mortar,
nor Atos. And I don't agree with it all. Hartmut as inhabited as resided in and as an accessible on the cross and the
prison where the women were incarcerated was demolished in the late 18th century.
There are no landscape markers for this trial at the time of sea lanes on a boat and they're inaccurate.
At Brisbane, Alan McGee and plans to draw up and erect a memorial garden to the convict in which his male McGhie
were challenged and quashed at local coastal level for political reasons and religious reasons.
So VR and not only allows users to remotely access this contested space, but provides a means of commemoration to.
On Parlophone, D three Connect and I draws an expertise of local,
technological and technology and animation companies and once more will aim to meet as professionals.
And the latest drafts I can show you,
these are the really good workshops and training sessions we want to disseminate best your knowledge in digital hands creation to support knowledge,
transfer in higher education and further education and the digital heritage set so more broadly.
So we're training the ceremony as well as a timely project during the rapidly changing technological landscape,
heritage and cultural tourist management are looking to develop their use of digital technologies as a more sustainable future.
And we are currently in a period as well where many countries, including Scotland and Spain,
are rethinking how to commemorate and remember people persecuted and executed and watch trials.
The VR comes to a parts, the first part as a factual training room.
You can see that at the top what a user learns about the tiles and the pack of objects relating to them a watch,
namely a second animated clips that teaches them to the history of the European watch on and the trial itself.
The access occurs by picking up folk songs and putting them and to a model projector.
The whole room has been 3D model by the developers. I scripted each of the short films spoken by actors,
and these short films have been animated or well built in the summer by a leading animation company.
And are these short films represent a more linear form of narrative,
but use a control of what they play and when the play and their scripts have been made to allow this to happen.
So what I'm going to show you, that's the Oculus headset on the last.
What I'm going to show you here is not what's going to happen.
This is actually just a draft. Think of a first draft of an article and it's just showing you the CD model.
In this I'll show you interacting with the objects of the sounds that will come up.
It's just showing you the room and it's showing you that when you're in this kind of training room,
you will exit through the cotton and this will take you to the cliff edge.
And Mickey and the old Rock and Stone all looking for his place.
And you can see it there. There's no objection. But somewhere there, that's for sure, you've got about three months ahead of us.
So this takes you to their Autumn Stone, where Folklore told me in our frame that one of the witches left claw marks I just dragged off the court,
people avoided it and they in that it shows a site because of this folklore and because of the meaning embedded in it by the local community,
it became a place of informal, local, almost dark heritage.
So the Watchtower. So it was a perfect way to tell the story of what you do to the landscape.
So when you read The Rock is stone and you don't see the make up of Santa Fe any subject to the child and once interacted with various consequences.
This allows the user to experience what it feels like to be accused of being a witch and also appealing to watch themselves.
And this will include visual effects, ambient sound and voice over recordings.
These will be recorded next and produced by Melvyn.
Many of the ambient sounds and actual sounds of the interaction that you pick up the glass jar or whatever have been recorded on,
say, in the landscape and tie everything together.
So for example, when you touch the Babel, you're presented with many game and you have to chime through the Lord's Prayer and the collect order.
This is not gamification. Avoid a gamification.
I went towards experiential on this, but that has every game and we chose this game in the last prayer because it was a test commentary on Mickey,
which is to establish a goal and various obstacles are placed in your way to ensure that this is a good test.
We wanted I want you to specifically to show the cultural and social obstacles that lots of women made to undertake this test laboured under.
And once you feel you are placed in a darkness and you hear the noises of society to present life when these again produced and mixed by Melvin,
for example, again, when you touch upon it, that is how Mate Empire actually became demonically possessed.
You start to become demonic possession yourself and you see spectral images coming in.
You levitate here, retching sounds and the rainbow, for example, it reflects accusations that gossip,
which solidified reputations for witchcraft in local communities and is are in therapy and most cases from the source material.
So by incorporating the children room for the experiential park,
we are balanced and historical explanation of fact by national experience, an experience upon judgement to what it feels to be possessed.
But let's make use of witchcraft again. It poses back to this point about the you know,
the fact that people will believe in witchcraft must be an the shape their fears and fears
and actions they are I think is a brilliant way to show what it was live in appeared.
We are for witchcraft was a fact of life albeit one in the back then, but one that sometimes had to be negotiated and occasionally dealt with.
So I know it and we've been working on a serious video game and this has the power to determine who in the local community are, what she's based on.
Historical events and most of the time you take the role of dashing characters, but they're all approximate and the justice of peace.
Who was the English common law system at that time? And Ireland and Ian Magee.
And he was the one who looked at 1711, for example, said Clements, who produced the depositions on the website.
So it takes you to a range of scenarios based on real prosecutions.
But these are effective, but they are based on the harm that Ireland in the late 17th and 18th century.
So players are required to send people accused of being a witch after trial or to set them free based on the evidence presented to them.
We've developed systems that nudge players to make hard decisions they might
not have otherwise made and to look at how social aspects of the thing fared.
And in this dimension. And that's the session.
Maintain social status and experience points around by achieving convictions but also penalised for sending the wrong person.
Players are able to question people, read witness statements and inspect potentially incriminating evidence and then
use the rules and laws to determine which people should stand trial or not.
We had shared goals for the game. Make the player empathise with those being persecuted.
Historical can say player choices should have consequences.
If you don't have consequences, how does that work? Again, this was completely collaborative.
Obviously developing and recording is done by people, not that sort of thing.
But the initial concept was or was drafted by Victoria and we all work together.
They have various scenarios and I worked on the watch.
I was in particular the way we worked and all the decisions were made by Sabrina and by himself and Victoria.
But all credit to the individual or they took the step to request that the trials and say are to be informed,
to provide them the context, the boundaries of what the case would be.
They wanted, they told us to take issue liberties with the content as possible, but to make it engaging for the player.
And this is where it's hard to make a serious game as a game and as playable and you want to go back.
So this is an early age after the game.
Ignore the content message just fella and the work in the context will be a bit different and then remains to be finalised,
but it just gives you a flavour of water or be the people come in you read the
their possessions against the media have to they say you've got descriptors
of them and those factors are going to influence your decision on whether they should influence your decision on who is accused of witchcraft.
So there you have at the same time you each project as multifaceted, truly to support them.
And I think another way to approach creative, collaborative public publication is let me in my limits as made me think about
history in different ways is definitely be I take my views on public history.
It's also made me think about how I should write history in the future.
I always ask my parents, though I was raised by they playing, they kept messing about with VR, with comics.
Watch all this. But I don't think I would I could have engaged with this process and the way adults are enjoyed it is so much.
And for those want to get rid of humanities departments and you have actually time for just content.
So as it is, you can have all the technology in the world, but you need content and you can have all the content in the world,
but I think you need technology as well to disseminate it.
So thank you very much for the lesson. I think we should now move on to Michael Austin's presentation.
Michael Austin, fantastic cultural historian.
He's written on Nature Spirits, who's worked on landscapes and shoes, also offered thoughts to the world's on witchcraft in Eastern Europe.
Michael, thank you so much. Dan, it is a little ironic that this conference takes place in the place this limbo of zoom in cyberspace,
but this might be appropriate, at least in the case of my paper,
since it will be among my conclusions that magic depends not on a sense of place, but on displacement, a sense of being foreign to the landscape.
But let me first and place myself. I join you from the ancestral lands of the coast Miwok Pomo and whacko indigenous peoples
who have been stewarding and maintaining relationship on this land for millennia.
I begin with this land acknowledgement not only because it is the right thing to do.
Not only because it is the custom of my people. That is to say, American academics in the early 21st century to begin meanings in this way,
but also to make a perhaps obvious theoretical point the places that we live and work.
If we are not. And so ourselves, indigenous have prior inhabitants, prior owners.
Subtler economies, extractive economies, imperial economies, modern economies depend on the displacement of those owners,
on evicting the landlords and denying those landlords their claims to the land and its care.
This is true everywhere in the Americas and the other former colonies of Europe, but also in Europe itself,
where modernity emerged concomitantly with what Marxists used to call primitive accumulation,
the expropriation of Commonwealth forests, meadows streams which had previously been held in common by the people.
The foundational philosophical justification of extractive private property.
John Locke's second treatise on government from 1692 begins with an imagined situation of pure commonwealths,
everything owned by everybody, or at least by every man, and thus, in a certain sense, by nobody.
God that, Locke asserts, has given the world to men in common such that the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men,
at least until some men, through their diligent labour, crafty trade and above all inheritance,
come down most of the land, and with it the right to exploit those who had lost their tenure.
Elsewhere.
In the same text, Lott claims that, quote, In the beginning, all the world was America, which means that all the world, including Europe, was once,
as he inaccurately and tendentious the understands America to be in his own time thinly populated,
underused, virgin wild not yet owned open to civilised extractive exploitation.
So far, so old hat. Surely we already know all of this.
And what does any of this have to do with magic in the sense of place?
Here, let me make the first of several very large claims.
There are no not yet owned landscapes such as like mountains, and there never have been cross-culturally.
And through most of human history, the landscape has been owned not just by indigenous folk or commoners,
but by what we would now call fairies, nature or spirits.
Guinea like preternatural prior inhabitants, prior owners.
Locke begins his account of private property with an individual man alone in the forest, mixing his labour with nature by taking nuts from a tree.
True, Locke says, if he wastes these nuts, he acts illegitimately offending God.
But compare Locke's imagined scene to another hypothetical scenario, as told by people of the Madame Lu culture to the anthropologist Simon Harris.
But supposing that a man cut down an breadfruit tree for its fruits, or that he harvested and threw the unripe fruit on the grounds,
the fathers would see this and be angry, saying to themselves, Why has he damaged the tree?
It is not just a tree. It is a man. It has a name, a father, a mother and a mother's brother.
And the fruits are his children. The fathers will call the secret name of the tree and tell it to stop bearing.
Whereas Locke's man alone in the forest has only to worry about offending his faraway God in heaven.
An analogous man emblem man worries about offending the tree itself and its owners.
The quote fathers who look after it. Above all, the man and woman is not alone in the forest.
Could never possibly be alone in the forest. A subject among objects in Marshall Sahlins terms.
Such a person's relations to the world like that of most people in most places throughout most of history,
was, quote, largely one of person to person otherwise put, rather than a sense of objectivity.
Such a person relates to the world in a condition of intersubjective beauty.
Max Weber's still useful, if much contested phrase.
Such a person lives in an enchanted world, which is to say, a world inhabited by, owned by other than human subjects.
And just as extractive exploitation requires the expropriation of human owners.
Even more so, it rests on the expropriation of these other than human landlords,
at least ever since till Dimension Enkidu fought the monster whom baba in order to steal cedar beans from his forests,
with which to build the Great Temple of Europe. Imperial economies have required such expropriation from preternatural beings.
So far I am saying nothing really new, nor is my reference to Gilgamesh.
Hardly a modern man should make plain. Am I really talking about modernity or capitalism?
It's been more than 70 years since Merchant Elliott claims that archaic religions are characterised by
a domestication of the wild landscape as narrated in cosmic ionic battles between Gods and monsters,
ram against Ravana, Marduk against TMA, suits against the Titans, Yahweh against Leviathan.
And it's been more than 50 years since Jonathan dismissed his star sized Elliot as claims locating such combat
myths in a topology of locative religions characteristic above all of city dwellers and early empires.
Extractive economy is certainly economies of considerable remove from the reciprocal intersex subjectivity,
typical of animist relations to nature, but not yet settler onto economies.
And as Jane Snyder notes in her foundational, provocative, out of date,
timely essay Spirits in the Spirit of capitalism, in such cosmology of good spirits,
fighting evil spirits of gods and monsters for the parameters of equity consciousness,
typical of indigenous relations to nature are not necessarily broken, only stretched.
Modernity is the condition of such parameters having indeed been broken.
In what follows, I help to consider Schneider's central claim that capitalism dependent on the eviction of
preternatural prior owners who had upheld and maintained peasant economies of reciprocity,
equity and stewardship. For the most part,
I will be advocating return to Schneider's large claim above all her central claim following Lyn way the Christianity
exorcise the spirits from the land and quote made possible a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects.
I hope to read popularise this framework for thinking about the relations between reformation, the exploitation.
The nature and the expulsion are encompassed or naturalisation of various societies seeking to break ties with the past,
to feel free to treat one another,
and the natural world instrumentally have simultaneously sought to get rid of fairies which uphold and enforce relations of care.
Reciprocally, recent local movements of resistance to globalising,
modern environmental exploitation have found in the fairies a potent idiom for articulating their concerns.
Universalising generations are always dangerous.
So let me make a few. In a vast and diverse range of situations,
either pre-Christian or free reformed people have conceptualised their landscapes and its resources as owned,
governed or guarded by beings already in place before the arrival of humans.
When needed, go back 4000 years to Babar and Gilgamesh to argue that such ownership of the natural world by spirits.
What I have been calling fairies is extremely widespread for the white people of Papua New Guinea.
Spirit crocodiles predate people in the land. People farmed relations of reciprocity with these spirits as they colonised the land.
Relations which imposed limits on human exploitation.
For Hesiod in ancient Greece, nature spirits such as cedars and Dryads are the ghosts or phantoms of the men of the Golden Age.
Later, Ovid takes up this theme.
This gave the wild lands to quote rustic powers the nymphs, the Fons and Satyrs and sultans of the hills in 20th century Highland Sulawesi.
The play on the forests and humans use these resources on with their permission.
Medieval Norse colonisers of Iceland understood that land to already be populated by nature spirits land faster.
These are perpetuated by offerings of food left under a flat stone reciprocated with fortune in farming the land.
The people of Honduras traditionally understood water resources and other features of the landscape to be owned by the analyst.
The latter, a generous but easily annoyed spirits punished with failed crops, are bad luck in the hunt.
Those who take too much or otherwise disrespect Irish fairy tradition rests on early medieval myths of the imperfect,
incomplete conquest by humans of a pre-existing race.
But to have that done, and who retreat underground to become the Shea,
the people of the Hollow Hills among the river peasants of the lower Amazon in the 21st century.
The freshwater dolphin acts as a fairy like intermediary between the enchanted and the visible world,
reminding the people of the river that they do not own the environment, nor are they the dominant party.
According to the 17th century Scottish fairy theorist Robert Kirk.
The fairies were primaeval inhabitants of Scotland for the prince of whose furrows do yet remain to be seen on the shoulders of very high heels,
which was done when the champagne ground was waiting for us and returning once more to modern times and to Papua New Guinea for the common people.
Spirits possessed for many things cliffs, large bodies of water, large trees, domestic pens, certain swamps and some mountains.
One could make similar claims about the legacy of the Russian forests, the workers of the Andes, the them as well as Pyrenean France.
Although these beings vary widely in their ascribed appearances, powers, behaviours and attitudes towards humans.
They are united as prior owners of natural resources, reminding people that, as Joel Robin says about Roman myths,
quote, The institution of ownership predates human culture and is thus part of nature.
Human claims on nature come only later, and for this reason are weaker than spiritual ones for labour.
Disenchantment is, above all, an epistemological disposition or presumptive attitude, but that there are no mysterious,
incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can in principle, master all things by calculation.
The disenchanted world is a world in which all techniques can in principle be mastered through methodological and disciplined inquiry.
Disenchantment is primarily an aspect of science,
but disenchantment can also signal a practical rather than an epistemological attitude having to do with relations to the world and its agents.
As Schneider emphasised in spirits, in the spirit of capitalism three decades ago,
disenchantment can apply a move from reciprocal to rationalised relations between people and between people
and nature for ambitious and somewhat speculative reconstruction of European peasant ontology suggests that,
quote, beliefs in Earth, spirits and spirits of the dead betray a philosophical concern with the cosmos,
its forces for good and evil and with equity, the reciprocity of give and take in the spiritual as well as actual social relations.
In particular, the animus emphasis on delicately balanced relations in constant need of maintenance supports an ethic of hospitality,
fulfilment of obligations, and the provision of loans without interest.
Good fortune is fraught with the danger that it may be undeserved or have been gained at the cost of others,
human or preternatural, others who may seek just vengeance.
This worry encourages an ethic of restraint and a fear of overstepping legitimate bounds or taking more than one's fair share.
Schneider did not suggest that participants in such a material and spiritual economy are empathetic or humanitarian,
only that, to quote, we see them looking over their shoulders as.
Seek health and good fortune, honour and possessions for themselves and their families, for it is important to conciliate those who are left behind.
The undoing of this equitable social modality is facilitated by disenchantment, as Snyder sums up, an ethical system in which equity is paramount,
induces caution in the exploitation of natural resources,
and makes it difficult to conceptualise labour except the labour of outsiders or slaves as free of constraints against dislocation.
By contrast, the ethical systems of the Salvationists, religions, Christianity above all, allow for circumventing these constraints.
Schneider understands disenchantment to be primarily a top down phenomenon, a movement created by the elites.
And she locates it as the developer and the has have amongst others in the reformations.
I should like to suggest that disenchantment is less a specific event, or as of a specific historical moments, the reformation, enlightenment,
global capital than it is an always available, sometimes intentional move, a motivated reorientation to the world and to its inhabitants.
I'd like to supply a few examples from several periods and places to get a feel for what such disenchantment entails.
First, in a brilliant but unpublished essay, the scholar Rebecca Sheldon traces what she calls an alternative demonic motif in early Christianity.
Instead of a central concern for individual salvation and avoidance of sin,
this alternative demonic motif focuses on making space for a civilisation in,
quote, a world crowded with humans and other semi spiritual beings, each with their own territories and rates.
The Christian rejection of these beings, rights and territories and their consequent exorcism of the landscape was considered by
many contemporaries to be an essential or even defining aspect of christianisation.
Sheldon masterfully reconceptualize as many early church fathers such as Theodora of Sikkim or Anthony of Egypt as,
quote, Christian champions of human colonisation, exorcising demons not from sinning Christian bodies,
but from the landscape itself,
of which they are natives chasing demons into caves and tombs and sealing these up so that humans can exploit the landscape in peace.
Another example from Western Europe about a thousand years ago when Richard of Worms railed and his decree against trees consecrated
to demons that the people worshipped in which they venerate to such a degree that they do not dare to cut off a branch or twig.
Such trees, Richard says, must be rooted out and burned a few hundred years later.
STEFAN The Bible attempted to eradicate what he understood to be the peasant worship of demons at such a forest grove,
unofficially consecrated to the Greyhound, saying for protector of children.
Stefan was, needless to say, neither a Protestant nor a capitalist.
But he did seek, by cutting them down the grove to exercise a network of reciprocal relations of people to
places and to each other and to fairies whom they feared but with whom they could negotiate.
He sought to replace horizontal relations of reciprocity with a single vertical relationship of submission to God.
This is not a move from religion to the secular Celeste from paganism to Christianity.
It is a move, however, or at least an attempt to move toward disenchantment in Christian theological terms.
Stefan emptied out the preternatural realm, exorcising the fairies and leaving only God's supernatural power in their place.
Not incidentally, opening the forest for exploitation third in the late 20th and early 21st century, when they were common people,
as Papua New Guinea became very excited to get rid of their fairies to the mortal,
they're now reconceptualize as Christian devils and at least theoretically banished permanently to [INAUDIBLE].
In the traditional cosmology, the Montebello or forest spirits owned the forests and human beings, hunted,
gathered gardens and collected timber in such forests only in limited ways,
accompanied by negotiations with these spirits and respect for their taboos.
Now, however, European Pentecostal Christianity teaches, quote that God owns everything and has given the forest to human beings for exploitation.
A literal return of Locke's state of nature,
freed from the need for reciprocity with them to build their Atman hope to take their place in the modern world by clear cutting the forest for cash,
or even better, by creating an open mind to exploit the mineral wealth beneath the soil.
Disenchanted forests in the land are open for business. Similar examples can be multiplied.
But let me add just one more. In Niger, proving that Christianity has no monopoly on the phenomena here traced.
Muslim reformists purification efforts can be described as having encouraged
people to see the landscape as an inert backdrop against which human agency,
with God's support, can be deployed. Above all, this means that trees the homes of Djinn can now be cut down with an.
Unity allowing for rapid deforestation.
In response to such disenchantment, one might place the moves towards re enchantment initiated by the romantic movement,
by poets who reacted to the demonic mills of industrialising Europe by looking back nostalgically,
albeit from a safe distance on a nymph haunted past and spoilt by, in Kate's phrase called philosophy, which emptied the haunted air and gnomic mind.
And one might think of contemporary modern pagans who, as Sabina, Mahler, Yoko has shown,
have returned to fairies and goblins to articulate their desire to reconnect to a natural world they feel again with nostalgia to have been lost.
But as Mahler Yoko has also shown, modern pagan interaction with fairies is domesticated.
Even disenchanted pagans today. Feel free to interact with these beings because they are tame, posing no real danger.
So instead, I should like to invoke some examples from pupils whose relations with fairy like beings remain alive and real,
or at least real enough to be used descriptively in ecological resistance.
As recently as 1959, Irish workers refused to lay a motorway through a fairy hawthorn tree.
The road had to be rerouted in respect to local opposition.
The same has happened several times in 20th and 21st century Iceland.
Most recently in 2013, when environmental protesters invoked worries over the habitat of the Hold the folk to block a new highway.
Nearly a thousand years after Brigitte of worms complained of trees concentrated to demons.
Such trees still stand in Europe. Their taboos still intact, at least rhetorically, at least as marshalled by polemical political debate.
The landscapes of Ireland and Iceland are thus not yet to this day, entirely disenchanted.
They contain places favoured by the fairies and the special folly marked us unavailable for rationalised economic exploitation.
Birches head of fairy groves that they must be rooted out and burns a strategy of
power encounters still employed by 21st century Christian missionaries in Melanesia.
But the rhetorical potential of Fairy Grove's remains polyvalent ready to be redeployed in discourses of nostalgia or them after conversion,
after freeing themselves from the need to negotiate with respect the Eastern spirits after in consequence,
their once taboo forests had been clear cut by foreign loggers. The castle.
The people of Papua New Guinea look back with nostalgia to their pre-Christian animism.
In a devastated landscape, they seek to return to the fragile but productive rapprochement with the forests and its spirits,
which had characterised their previous cosmology.
Like Icelandic suburban environmentalists half ironically invoking the hold of folk to stop runaway development,
the castle are turning back toward the conflict's dangers of an enchanted world
in preference to the terrifyingly simple logic of modern instrumental ism.
Freedom from the Fairies carries with it a new subjugation to the now freed forces of capital to Weber's parentage.
But as the Icelandic pyrenean and castaway examples suggest, a return to enchantment might remain possible and have real effects.
Nostalgia, as Daphne Berdahl insists,
is about the production of a present rather than the reproduction of a past as recent nostalgia as have made plain,
I think, for example, of the attempt to make America great again.
Nostalgia can be terribly dangerous,
but some nostalgia can sometimes motivate good relations with the good neighbours and thus with the landscape itself.
Thank you. Let's launch with Andrew Kass, not the world expert on September tape and a fantastically determined, thoughtful folio scholar.
Many thanks to you, Professor Fergus, for organising this wonderful workshop.
A talk today is entitled Holy Days in Times of Pestilence.
Santa muerte de the New US Plague Saint. Across the world.
As of early 2020, many countries announced a lockdown.
Some even declaring a state of emergency due to coronavirus.
Citizens in most countries across the globe have been encouraged to maintain social distancing,
namely to keep two metres space between themselves and people other than those within their households at all times.
They have also been ordered to stay home and in some countries,
businesses other than those considered essential, have been instructed to close their doors.
These and other measures have been taken as governments and citizens seek to quell the virus's.
Although effective somewhat effective in preventing widespread contagion,
such actions have severely impacted the economies and the livelihoods of many.
All living beings, of course, must inevitably perish.
Nevertheless, across the ages, human beings have seldom accepted their mortality, nor that of their loved ones.
And religion has long served as a means to seek to avoid disease and death or to come to terms with it,
whether in Mexico, Brazil or elsewhere in Latin America.
One of Jesus's principal roles was. Healer.
One could even term him a shaman, as Crawford has positing that his main roles were curing, mediating and prophecy.
This paper stresses the importance of looking at religion in times of pandemic as a coping mechanism.
Additionally, focusing on Santa muerte day at the Saint of Death and Times of Coronavirus,
it demonstrates that even death as a perceived supernatural power can heal and prolong life.
This is an ancient idea, but one that has received scant recent academic attention.
Furthermore, the idea has often been at odds with those from within Christian traditions for whom death is about finality.
Nevertheless, in Mesoamerica, the idea of death as a rejected tribe of life is ancient in Mexico.
Many pre-Hispanic death deities, although also symbolising the realms of the underworld or acting as psychopaths,
were proportionate or appears to delay death and even bring sanitation.
Push was a mayan death deity found in the choruses associated with Pestilence.
In pre-Columbian times in Death visited a mayan household.
It was believed that whaling would prevent a push from taking their soul.
Centuries later, death is still being perpetuated for protection healing from COVID 19, this time in the form of Santa muerte.
De a modern day female folk saint of death.
In a country where the state does not have a lid on the plague of narco violence, let alone the coronavirus pandemic,
those who worry about falling ill have few options but to turn to death for life.
I think the last figure I've seen is there have been 600,000 coronavirus deaths in Mexico as purveyors
of religious paraphernalia have been quick to respond to the robust new market for Santa marta,
prayer cards and candles that feature petitions of protection against COVID 19.
We considered death as doctor in these tumultuous times.
We begin by describing Santa muerte, these attributes, after which we consider her origins.
We argue that they derive not only from pre-Hispanic Santa ontology, but also hail from the dark days, the Black Death and 14th century Europe.
Without such an understanding of not only her European, but also her indigenous origins,
the duality of her powers of life and death cannot be comprehended.
We then outline praxis and belief in devotion to death.
In turn, ethnographic evidence is proffered detailing Santa muerte his role in the coronavirus pandemic.
This underscores not only her role as a holy healer, countering claims she is merely a narco saint,
but also attests to the saints plasticity and adapting to their the tall weather in the form of a silver pendant,
a plaster statue or a votive candle or a gold medallion.
Santa More Day is always nearly represented as a grim repress.
She has a skull instead of a fleshy face, as garbed in a long gown and wields a large sign in her left hand.
The name Santa muerte de reveals her identity.
Y Day, of course,
means death in Spanish and sanitised reference in both Her Holiness and her role as saint in their rituals such as the rosary of Santa muerte.
The devotees often call her Santi Mama Day, which literally translates as most holy death in English.
She is usually referred to either as Saint Death or Holy Death.
Santa muerte is a folk song unlike Catholic Saints, who have been canonised by the church.
Folk saints are spirits of the deceased who have not obtained Vatican recognition,
but are believed by the local populists to possess supernatural powers and be able to deliver on miracles, as Frank Graziano points out.
And I quote The world of folk saint devotion is one in which supernatural beings are a prominent presence in everyday life.
They intermingle with humans and have causal influence.
Magical and miraculous and quote, folk.
Saints in Latin America have often been appealed to by devotees to cure their ailments
in Mexico and Latin America in general vernacular saints like Casas McGregor today,
who now has a new Netflix series in Mexico, which I think is the number three most popular series, 80 episodes.
As soon as my where they neno financier André Pasquale are frequently favoured over
Catholic Saints and this close to 10,000 Catholic Saints and prayers for well-being.
God may seem to be a remote figure, although powerful is aloof and uninvolved,
therefore making him difficult to perpetuate or enter into an intimate relationship with Catholic saints.
And of course, Latin America is the most Catholic region on earth.
40% of the 1.3 billion Catholics on the planet are Latin Americans.
Catholic Saints, the great majority of whom lived centuries ago in Europe,
are far removed from the average Latin American and are often difficult relate to them.
However, St Jude, patron of lost causes I'm currently researching down here in Mexico, has become wildly popular in Mexico.
In fact, he's the most popular Catholic saint in Mexico today.
Folk saints, literally. Saints of the folk are typically deceased.
People who lived out their lives on local soil and who shortly after their death are believed
to have been gifted supernatural powers due to cultural affinities and familiar life stories.
And they're often working class, like most of their devotees.
They are perceived as being more likely to listen, to understand and resolve the problems of their.
Most Western Europeans and Americans would immediately recognise Santa muerte date as a sort of female grim reaper or as I call her in my book,
Grim, Repressed with origins in medieval Catholicism.
Spaniards would not even have to make allowances for her gender since their own personification of death known as La Parka.
Literally, the past one is a female skeleton.
Mexican devotees, however, are more likely to regard the skeleton saint as an adopted version of an indigenous goddess of death.
Whether Aztec, Mayan or perhaps as odd as this may seem to foreign observers, for many Mexicans,
the realities of indigenous history and the myths of nationalism converge together.
Folks at a local birth place in pre-Columbian Mexico.
In Mexico City, the most common version of the story of the Saints indigenous identity highlights four purported Aztec origins.
More specifically, Santa muerte is thought to have originated as Mixtec seawater, the Aztec goddess of death, who,
along with her husband, make land acutely ruled over the underworld, makes land like Santa muerte de the death.
The couple was typically represented as skeletons or human bodies with skulls for heads.
Aztecs not only believed that those who died of natural causes ended up in the clan,
but also invoked the gods supernatural powers for earthly causes such as healing.
With its persecution of indigenous religion, the Spanish conquest and colonisation drove devotion underground and end to syncretism with Catholicism.
Thus, according to this version, her Spanish styled tunics and dresses and her European accoutrements,
the size and the scales of justice are but a facade, thinly veiling her true Aztec identity.
The Grim Reaper originated during a pandemic, not entirely dissimilar to the one we are now experiencing,
albeit with today's advanced medical care and knowledge of how diseases spread.
We are somewhat better equipped to deal with the latest epidemic.
Of course, that's still being played out.
The Black Death, also known as the bubonic plague and the pestilence, was a deadly disease that attacked the lymphatic system,
causing buboes swollen lymph nodes caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and eventually attacked the lungs, leading to a rather gruesome death.
It devastated Europe and Asia and the mid 1300s.
The Black Death had claimed more than 20 million lives in Europe, I think an estimated one third of the population of Western Europe.
The bubonic plague that's made death and dying a familiar presence for 14th century Europeans.
During this time when at least one third of the populace died from the plague.
Death became ubiquitously personified in Europe.
As a skeletal figure, we know today. For some, this figure was synonymous with the devil.
Spanish clergy employed the figure of the grim Repris la Barca in a similar didactic fashion among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
When they arrived in the new world. They sought to convert locals to Christianity and thus save their souls.
They brought figures with them of Jesus, Mary and the various saints, as well as left Barca as pedagogic tools,
interpreting Christianity through their own cultural lens and drawing on their own traditions of venerating not only the spirits of the deceased,
but also perpetuating death deities for earthly needs.
Some indigenous groups such as the Highland Maya and the State of Chapels and in Guatemala and the Guarani in Argentina and Paraguay,
took the church's skeletal figure of death for a saint in its own right and began worshipping it.
Across pre-Hispanic, Mexico, indigenous peoples from the Aztecs to the Zapotec to or from here in Oaxaca,
practice, ancestor worship and also venerated death deities and pre conquest iconography,
their imagery and skeletal deities from push the cadavers Mayan death God to the put out by check goddess of birth and demise quite out by Perry,
whereas a skull for a head, an empty death like eyes.
Many of these death deities from make that can see go to show Nashik and Goya
not only acted as psychopaths but also had the power to gift and foment lives.
And indeed, many death goddesses were depicted in late pregnancy, signifying the second city of death as a source of life.
Death, rather than spelling finality as in Christian theology, was linked across indigenous mythologies with the regeneration of life,
as in the Mayan ballgame, which is an analogy and action of death and rebirth.
And the New World. La Parka was conceived by some indigenous people through the lens of their own background to logical traditions,
who, rather than seeing Jesus as victorious over death,
viewed death as a creed, potent or even fused the two together, seeing bald as mystical personages wishing to gain access to death.
Awesome power, which, as we have seen in indigenous Anatolia, is linked to life.
Some began to venerate the skeletal figures brought by the Spanish curses and Mexican folk epistemology or often perceived to lead tales.
By the 1990s, the Saint of Death had developed into a multifaceted miracle worker who could be
proficient in for any number of favours from financial success to health problems.
At this time, small and large scale effigies of the Saint began to be sold in Mercato,
Sonora, the so-called witchcraft market and located in the Mexican capital.
One of the people who bought a statue was a son of a woman known as Angélica Romero.
Earth actually called Donya at that. She is now a legendary figure among Santa muerte devotees,
as she is the person who took what was previously a cogat religious folk faith from the shadows and thrust it into the public light.
When she established a street altar to them where day in front of her home in the notorious Mexico City barrio of Tepito.
In late October 2000,
while the lifesize effigy of Santa marta that graced the sidewalk outside her home quickly became a devotional icon for thousands of Zealanders,
which is slang for residents of Mexico City. And I have spent countless hours there interviewing scores of devotees.
The effigy stood in the corner of Dunya Cantor's kitchen, where she sold case ideas to locals seeing the statue.
Many locals asked to leave devotional offerings such as flowers and votive candles.
This smoke from the myriad burning flames of the candles became so thick and impressive
that Donia had to decide to move the effigy kerbside on the first day of November 2000.
While since that time, devotion to death has gone public with Santa marta says, openly acknowledging their faith.
And it's estimated in the last decade the folk saint has acquired some seven and a half million devotees in Mexico alone.
As to the main,
there's a total of some 12 million devotees making Santa muerte the fastest growing new religious movement in the entire Western world.
The Saints astonishing adaptability to the Mexican religious marketplace and her important
role as Dr. Death is visible by browsing the paraphernalia with her image on them.
Even before the pandemic erupted,
hundreds of shops selling esoteric items across the country were kept afloat by brisk sales of Santa marta paraphernalia.
And I have just reconfirmed that during my visits to Botanica across Mexico in the past few weeks,
manufacturers and retailers of Saint Death products have responded with
impressive rapidity to the new market for protection and healing from COVID 19.
The latest of these are the coronavirus candles,
with Santa Martin's picture on them and the wording protection on their coronavirus protection from coronavirus.
Yuri Mendez from Cancun has been praying weekly to send them word and giving her offerings.
She has supplicating the saint not only for protection for herself and her family from coronavirus, but also petition for global healing.
Jodi dressed her numerous effigies of the skeletal folk saint in gowns and translucent bales of mauve and lemon.
As well as gifting the saint blooms and vessels of these colours associated with sanitation, such as yellow gourds and purple eggplants.
After lighting purple, white and yellow candles of healing and wafting burning bundles of rosemary and sage leaves in her chapel,
which she states are her purifying,
she decided the following prayer, which we have translated from Spanish Santa muerte de Lady of the Light before God and before you.
I kneel so that you intercede for me and for the entire world to eliminate all evil virus or bacteria.
Cleanse with your purifying mantle. Lady, listen to my pleas.
Helping give bread and shelter to those who need it and seek and use strength.
Lady, in the end times protect us so that we are not infected and do not infect those we love.
Sweep COVID 19 away from our path and grant us shelter, food and support.
I ask you to never fail me. Amen. Vivian is and is a nurse from Bear Cruz who works on the.
Frontline with COVID 19 patients daily, she dons a silver chain with a pendant that takes holiday.
She believes that this shields her.
She has an altar in her house that consists of three statues the white Santa martin fencing the gold, Santa muerte, the riches and abundance,
as well as a black sanctum where they statue all around it, are offerings which she renews every two weeks to every month.
Vivian told us that she is aware that she is at risk of catching COVID, given that all day she tends to those ailing from it.
She said, When I feel something weird in my throat, I drink a shot of tequila at the altar with her.
This, she believes, cleanses her body, ridding it from the virus.
The belief that we all have an appointed hour of death is common in Mexico.
And so Vivian told us they talk, talk, talk.
When it's your time to go, it's your time to go. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Now let's hear from Dan Klein.
What is the most interesting, the evillest on the planet and one of the only ones to be working on indigenous
knots and the sense of place and using that to inform medieval studies.
Thank you. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay. Let me go ahead and share the screen.
I'm going to be talking from PowerPoint. And there's been a little bit of a change from the time that Diane invited me to join this conference.
And when I proposed this paper, this was looking forward to what I wanted to do.
But it's since become kind of a valediction because I resigned my position back in
December and I'm now an emeritus professor gathering to see the slides and everything.
Okay, there's my contact information.
I would love to hear from any or all of you who are working in similar areas or just if you have suggestions and ideas.
And I almost changed the title to the enchantment of a medievalist because Alaska has had such an effect on me and many of you know,
especially in Australia and the US and Canada, that land acknowledgements have become an important part,
maybe just a tiny first step, and acknowledging those of us who were settler colonists in our place on Unceded
Indigenous lands in many cases in Alaska is unique because it's different.
The historical development is different from the lower 48 and especially contact from the Russians who settled much earlier.
There's a really distinct and interesting history there that I'll talk only a little bit about,
but a number of us began to just put an acknowledgement before the university even thought about it.
In the important part here is that just my university has five or six, depending how you count them indigenous peoples as part of our service area.
So again, a reminder, Alaska is really big. I mean, it's really, really big, but the population is really small.
Only about 700,000 people and most of those folks live on what's called the rail belt,
which is from the Seward Peninsula down here through Anchorage up to Fairbanks.
But there's more paved road in the county that holds Seattle, Washington, than there is in all of Alaska.
It's a very rural environment.
And you can see the the different peoples of Alaska and Anchorage is right down here, that little kind of peninsula that's triangular.
And so we have the domain, Athabasca and beyond the basin, a peak down to Haida and Klink.
It's within our service area and there are 20 official languages now recognised as part of the state apparatus.
So just a quick overview. I want to talk about four different things here and I appreciated Dianne's note about my being an interesting medievalist.
And of course that can be taken in lots of different ways.
But thankfully there are there are some bipoc scholars who are beginning to emerge from different indigenous traditions in the Lower 48,
as well as Canada and Alaska, who were doing work in both middle English and old English.
And it's just really it's just really exciting and terrific stuff.
So looking, listening, letting go and then finally learning.
And the basic idea is that Alaska has attracted me because I think it has attracted a lot of folks who live there.
So much of what I want to say can be encapsulated in this picture right here.
This is Mount Sioux setting up in everyone. See the outline of this figure here.
It almost looks like it's a woman or a person laying on her side.
So one of the first things I heard from locals was, oh, that's mountain sitting, a sleeping lady.
And there is an old Alaska Native story about a princess of her tribe.
Again, that's not a term used in Alaska, was engaged with a prince who went off to fight a war and she laid down on her side.
And over the years, the flowers covered her in the snow until she became a huge mountain.
And when he's done fighting this war that he has left to fight, [INAUDIBLE] return.
And then she'll. Come back to welcome him. I heard this from tons of folks.
I told the story myself. The students knew it. It's just one of those things.
This is great. Here's an ecological story. A story of origins.
And I can plug right into that and do that and use that for all sorts of different teaching and other activities that I would be involved in.
And this is right across the Cook Inlet, another name that has some controversy attached to it.
About ten kilometres, six and a half miles from Anchorage.
Problem is, it's not true. Not a word of it.
This is this legend is from a children's story that was written and circulated beginning in the seventies.
There's not one hint of Alaska Native authenticity to it at all.
There are those who claim that maybe they heard it from an elder at some point, but there's nothing about it.
It's from a story called The Sleeping Lady, and it's actually a pretty good children's story if you'd ever want to take a look at it.
But it's not true. Hoodwinked I was, but fell for it completely.
And again, there's in a nutshell, there's a lot of my lesson, and this is just a little bit extra a viral tweet that went viral in 2020.
This was Sleeping Lady. This is supposed to be just sitting up from the air.
And you can see it's the outline of a woman who is laying there in the snow.
No, that's Photoshopped. Someone just created that. So that's a pretty to me, that's a medieval ism reflection there.
And so looking at amounts is sitting there.
And in the work that I have done over the years and listening to my Alaska Native friends and faculty and staff,
some work I did around general education as our first gen ed director.
And I and many of you know, in Alaska or in the U.S. system, there's that breadth requirement of courses that an undergraduate would take.
That was actually called The Little Mountain, and it was a place that was sacred to the denied Athabaskan people.
And here you can see another view of that.
And this ridge right here was called the morning place because it was easily accessible by the domain of Athabascan people.
And you can see basically their entire home territory from there.
And so it would allow them to look at the top admins, write the place names and recount their histories.
And anyone who was a or is a domain.
Athabascan knows that Little Mountain is in contrast to the big mountain, which is Denali.
And here's just a pretty nice shot of Denali that I took because I like it and I thought I put it in there.
But here's what the two mountains look like from Anchorage.
So here is the is Little Mountain Galicia.
And you can see the route there, the little the big mountain.
And so all the way on the right, you've got Denali and then Mount Hunter and Mount for Acre.
So Denali here is about 200 kilometres from Anchorage.
It's enormous. It creates its own weather. It's so huge.
And then Pete was the Athabaskan culture bearer who actually witnessed the founding of Alaska in 1912.
He saw Steamship Sail Up and the city that became Anchorage to be founded,
and he was interviewed over a number of years by University of Alaska anthropologists
who began to trace again token and rate the place names around the Upper Cook Inlet.
And he has one of the greatest geographical ranges of anyone ever interviewed and knowledge about the place names.
I think it's more than 600 square miles and 600 place names.
And from his from the scholarship associated with Shem Pete,
I heard a couple of scholars talking about the idea, if you know the language, you can survive in the land.
So there would be no possibility in Alaska Native culture or many indigenous cultures.
I think of naming something after a person because that has no value what happens in the list.
So the Alaska Native and I think in many other places the naming system is consistent, conservative and stable over hundreds of years,
and the places are named after or for seasonal migration that the peoples would take and food availability.
So the Cook Inlet is the big saltwater Stickleback Creek or what's called Ship Creek now is where the Stickleback would run.
That anchorage was built around that kind of creek where we spend the spring.
And so a subsistence lifestyle means that you move to take advantage of the food of the Talkeetna River,
which is a famous place that a number of people have visited.
What's called food is stored river. There are three rivers that come together.
And so they could put fish. It's a handmade baskets and it would stay fresh over the summer and wouldn't decompose.
Those kinds of things feeling like something is clubbed in it.
The salmon is so thick that you could just basically go and harvest.
As it became more aware of my colleagues and this alienation from their own land that I, as a settler colonialist, was sort of actively propagating.
I began looking around campus and here's a map of my university, and you're familiar with many of them.
And there's a nice little creek that runs through the middle. That's lovely.
And you can see all sorts of wildlife. It's called Chester Creek, but that is a corruption of the word church now, which means Grass Creek.
And so as I was looking around, I could find dozens of different kinds of maps.
And here's one with the parking and buildings, and there's a usage map.
And there, you know, colleges and universities and labs and all that kind of stuff, but nothing that would identify any of them.
I have a Bascomb place names and I began again over 20 or more years to really listen to my students, especially those that came from rural Alaska.
And the transition to a big city like Anchorage is so disorienting when you've lived in a
village of 200 people where everybody is related and perhaps you don't have running water,
you don't have an interior toilets, everything is [INAUDIBLE], and you've never been on an escalator or an elevator.
And then you're thrown into this huge Byzantine bureaucracy that's almost impossible to navigate.
And as I began to get involved in different administrative efforts and other kinds of things,
we began to try to address this problem of why were our Alaska Native students not being successful?
We would lose almost half of our Alaska Native students before the end of the first semester, and this just was no good.
So I began to listen and I'll tell three quick stories here and come back around to them.
I wish I had had the wherewithal ahead of time to take notes along the way,
but I began to notice as I was teaching the old English and middle English texts,
my Alaska Native students had wildly different reactions to the texts that I had never even considered,
but they had a kind of sense to them that was really profound.
It was rather naive in some ways.
But for my students who came from the interior of Alaska, especially on the far side of Denali, what we call interior Alaska,
where the weather is really severe, it's 50 below zero and in the winter and 90 degrees during the summer, for example,
those folks who came from these people who have a very hierarchical clan structure, they have the most amazing insights into texts like Beowulf,
where they could talk about what it meant to live in a large house according to what their grandparents had told them.
They would talk about how those outside their clan were being viewed.
And now there's a really robust strain of scholarship that talks, for example, about Beowulf as a colonial tale.
And Grendel and Grendel's mother. Are those excluded others at the margins of society?
My students were telling me the same thing. Those who were from the seagoing peoples, the Haida Cricket Super Boy,
they could talk about texts like The Wanderer and The Seafarer with a kind of emotional intensity that was just stunning, right?
That whole idea of being on the divine called sea and wanting to be back home.
But when you're back home, you want to be on the sea or what it means to be exiled from your home place.
I don't know that a lot of Americans or Westerners have that same sense of exile from a home place.
And then in some of the middle English, the man of Wars tale, which is about migration and into religion,
they would tell stories about the early Russian presence and attempts of colonisation.
And then of course boarding schools and things like that come up.
They look at the life of bear, you know, that's a wonderful opening where friars, in limited words, that crowd crowded out to the fairies and such.
They can talk about that in ways that were just astonishing and regulatory, and I just didn't have the smarts to write that stuff down.
I wish I did. The physician's tale. The Prioress is tale, patriarchy, religious strife, conflict, sacrifice, violence.
All right, there. So that's one set of stories. A second set is in one of these student success meetings.
You won't have heard that term. I had a good colleague who was teaching a basic composition course specifically for Alaska Natives,
that would incorporate indigenous pedagogies and ways of knowing and those kinds of things.
And we were brainstorming on our different. Things that we could do to create a more welcoming environment.
And this was a couple of years ago when the terms, grit and resilience were sort of the buzzword buzzwords of the day.
And someone unfortunately said Native students lack grit and resilience.
My colleague, I had to keep her from jumping out of her seat and she slammed her palm on the table and said,
I have students who can't do bowhead whales in an open 16 foot dory in the North Pacific in the wintertime.
And you're telling me they don't have great resilience? It's a difference.
But it points to this clash of cultures. We were not doing a good job in meeting them and their strengths.
And then finally, a third story that I'll tell where things came together for me in a way I had not anticipated was we were one of three museums.
Anchorage was one of the three that had a full exhibition regarding the Franklin expedition back in September of 2019.
I think one was event in Ottawa and then another maybe Vancouver or Toronto and then Anchorage.
And we had experts from all around the world on the Franklin expedition,
and there was a Q&A afterward that had David Woodman, who unravelling the Franklin mystery.
He was the first one who went and compiled the Inuit oral tradition around the Franklin expedition and the remains of the terror and the Erebus.
And I guess what turns out the Inuit testimony was accurate and correct.
They knew exactly where those wrecks were. But of course, there was a century of those barbaric natives really don't know what they're talking about.
They don't really have a history, you know, all that terrible stuff,
which Dickens I didn't know was a purveyor, but they knew exactly where those were.
And so Woodman talked about his experience.
Then Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, not for this book, but for another one.
He was on one of the exploratory vessels that the Canadian government sent up when I think it was the terror that was found first in 2014.
And he talks about that.
And then a friend of mine, Paul Hunter, who's Yup'ik man from Nome, and then there were two other folks who I was there as well.
And Watson told a really interesting story he had befriended and Inuit historian and culture baron named Louis Comics,
who himself had spent decades interviewing elders from from his area.
And he lives right in that area where the Franklin expedition was tracking the ice.
And then the survivors attempted to escape. And he told the story of how he had befriended this listening,
what scholar and shaman who had collected a number of these stories and how Louie had told him a story about when he was a young man,
when they were in their winter headquarters, that he had been pulled from the large house by a mysterious figure.
I don't want to use the term supernatural,
but you get the idea and that his mother pulled him back into the lodge when Louis was going to be taken as a child,
and his mother warned him never to speak of it again. And as Waldman was talking about this,
he went on to mention that somehow Louis had taken offence at something he had said and Watson had told the story in this book here, Ice Ghosts.
And he was really shaken by it because Carmichael had this trove of documents and testimony about the Franklin expedition.
My friend Paul Hunter, who was raised 3000 miles away in Nome, told some stories that his grandmother had told him.
That certainly reflects the stories about the survivors of the Franklin expedition.
One of them involved a piece of Royal Navy silverware that had been fashioned into a spear,
pointed all the way and known again, which was thousands of miles away.
And a second story was about how these cousins had in the past encountered these men whose faces were white like bleached seal skin,
and that the indigenous people were amazed because their hoods were not attached to their parkas.
And that little detail just stuck with me. Of course, no self-respecting Inuit would ever have a detachable hood because you would die.
But these men did it. And then Paul went on in the most beautiful way to tell us.
And Mr. Watson, that among my people, some stories are only to be told by certain people at certain times,
in specific places, and for a specific person.
And he left it at that and then went on and the sense there was this is a sacred story and you broke that trust.
Okay, I just have a few more things to cover. This is the meat of it.
So what that what that meant for me is over the last 5 to 8 years,
I've blown up all my courses in a medieval survey course that's over there on the left.
I had students research a traditional Alaska Native story,
and then go and tell it to one of their friends who comes from rural Alaska and get their feedback.
And another was Take one of. The ladies of Marie de France and rewrite it in Alaska in context.
And those were really fun. But the really cool course that really fell in love with what's my literary criticism course?
And so we would go from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through last week,
but I began adding Lynda Tui Smith and others on indigenous methodologies and Indigenous research.
And then also until I actually had them reading Alaska Native Tales and then reading their shared literary texts that I have listed.
And I had some of the most amazing work where students were actually doing the theorising with Alaska Native texts.
So if you know the story everyday use, it has a quilt.
And people would read that in relationship to the comedy agreement in which a number of
five Protestant denominations cut Alaska up into territory so that they could evangelise.
So just really to wrap it up here,
what I began to turn to was learning from my Alaska Native students and colleagues and begin building in indigenous methodologies and pedagogies.
And the most telling one for me is that in Indigenous cultures, as in many traditional cultures,
you respect your elders and you listen what is the primary thing?
But often what we do in an academic study is to overthrow our elders.
That's one of the things we do. So you can see some of the ideas here pedagogical, relational, reciprocal.
I want to get to a phenomenology, a story that's not conditioned by Aristotle or Augustine, and I'll come around to two things.
Conceptualisation itself is a problem that actually separates us in ways that are not helpful.
It's interesting the way indigenous people have always already identified theoretical concerns like eco criticism, critical animal studies.
Hey, when your life depends on a dog team, you know about that kind of stuff.
And then finally to come back around because the history of colonisation of the boarding schools and others is still very present, right?
It's within historical memory.
The medieval is not something that's over there or back then, it's something that I actually have occupied and been a part of.
So I have to end with a meme. Yeah. No, not Plato.
Maybe analysis is better. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Absolutely fascinating.
Now we're going to hear from Will Badger, my former doctoral student who's explaining Roanoke to us all.
Thank you. My name is Will Badger. I'm going to be speaking today about one of the Roanoke expeditions to the so-called New World.
There were three an expedition in 1584, a sort of reconnaissance and first encounter with the natives,
and then the 1585 expedition about which I'll be speaking.
And then the so-called Lost Colony in 1587, that landed about 150 men, women and children on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina.
I will be speaking on metallurgy and magic at the world margin, your team,
guns and the Roanoke colony during his tenure as governor of the first Roanoke settlement in the new colony of Virginia.
Ralph Lane wrote a letter to the colony's patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, outlining the geography,
native demography and mineral wealth of the regions reached by his expedition in the year 1585.
Lane's letter was first published in Richard Hartley, its principal navigations, voyages and discoveries of the English nation,
describing the mineral wealth of the Virginia natives, most prominently including copper.
Wainwright's touching the mineral dust of Mubin affirms that though it be about copper,
seeing as the natives are able to melt it, it is one of the richest minerals in the world.
Close quote. Metallurgical. This patronising assertion seems to make little sense, since richness or purity correlates directly with melting point.
Pure copper has a higher melting point 1984 degrees Fahrenheit than any of the common copper alloys.
Brass, copper and zinc melts at 1710 bronze, copper and tin at 1675.
Was this observation of Lane's merely a throwaway line, a denigration of native capability as a matter of course,
on the way to praising Virginia's Merrill wealth, the shareholders most invested in the colonies success?
Or was the usage advised?
Perhaps drawing upon the amassed copper smelting expertise to the aforementioned Master Dubin, the expedition's chief metallurgist?
Lane's You can also recorded in the unstable orthography of the period,
as Douglas or Dubin almost get a sort of Irish tint to it that Duggan refers to Joachim or Haim Ganz,
a bohemian Jewish alchemist and metallurgist, and very likely the first Jewish person to set foot in the so-called New World.
Gans had come to England four years before.
In 1581, one of dozens or even hundreds of miners and mining specialists from the Germanys to arrive between the 1560s and 1580s,
answering the need of the newly established company of the Mines Royal.
Among this cohort, Gans strongly distinguished himself by streamlining the English process for smelting copper,
taking it from 16 weeks to just four days.
I'd heard something of the Jewish and even mineralogical experts that were involved in the Roanoke Expeditions.
But passing by this recently with with my partner Maria, I was struck by the mention of Prague because,
of course, with my interest in the early modern period, I thought immediately of Rudolph the second's court.
And that led into a deep dive into Kansas life. What we know of it and resulted in the presentation today.
His presence in the expedition at all is remarkable. He seems an obvious choice due to his metallurgical expertise,
the unlikelihood of a Jewish expert's inclusion in an important enterprise in
a moment when Jews were still officially proscribed from settling in England.
While it is possible that Gandhi's inclusion in the expedition anticipates the shift towards Fila
Semitic millenarian ism and he racism discernible among English attitudes in the middle 17th century.
The tragic turn in Kansas later career illustrates just how tenuous his position actually was.
In September 1589, while residing at or passing through Bristol, Ganz was involved in religious disputation with a local minister,
Richard Curtis, on the subject of Christ status as the Son of God.
According to the subsequent charges of blasphemy brought against him, Gans asked Curtis what needed the Almighty God to have a son.
Is he not Almighty?
Before the City Council on the 15th September, Gans declared himself to be a Jew, born in Prague, in Bohemia, a non-believer in Christianity.
Having not been brought up there in Abraham's notes that the good and able alderman of Bristol felt, quote,
constrained owing to the prejudices of their day to join in arresting a man who had rendered real service to England simply because,
when challenged or in a moment of unguarded liquidity, he had proclaimed himself a Jew.
Close quote. Bristol was far from the dark corners of the realm.
A bustling merchants port and had been one of the centres of English overseas trade prior to the Armada and would be again.
But even in this cosmopolitan port town, acknowledging his origins imperilled Gantz's liberty and potentially his life.
The Bristol alderman referred the case to the Privy Council, probably because of his reputation on the 17th of September.
And it is at this point that Johann Ganz passes out of our Ken for Gary Grassle.
The fact that Ganz is Jewishness went unremarked during his service on Roanoke is due to his putative decision.
Quote, That wisdom was the better part of the ballot, close quote, and his willingness to silently bow instead like the rest.
During Laine's weekly readings from the Book of Common Prayer in the Bible.
Of course, this imagined circumspection on the part of Ganz, however plausible, merely postpones the difficulty.
Gospel storytelling must become more elaborate to account for Ganz unwillingness
several years later to duck his head during his run in with Curtis the Bristol Divine.
According to Grasso, Ganz, quote, fell into Curtis's trap because the strain of living a double life may become too much for him,
close quote, driving him to, quote, manifest his Jewishness and defend the true religion, close quote.
In terms of character, however, it would seem likely that the bold figure who upended English metallurgy as a young man
would not arrive only slowly at a willingness to share his origins and faith on his sleeve.
Furthermore, if we suppose that Ganz became willing to engage in religious controversy only once his reputation and career were established,
that would be true also of his time on Roanoke. There's no easy way to account for this shift to unguarded liquidity.
For FOIR, he's a possible relation of the astronomer David Ganz, who had worked for a time with the great Kepler.
For Grassle, it's a settled matter. Quote, Yale. He was a relative of the famous Prague scholar David Ganz was quote,
While the Bristol application fixes Kansas origins, his family connections are less certain.
For Foir, he's a possible relation of the astronomer David Ganz, who had worked for a time with the great Kepler.
For Grassle, it's a settled matter. Quote, Yale. He was a relative of the famous Prague scholar David Ganz was quote, Israel.
Abrahams posits geochemist David Sun finding it highly improbable that there
were at the same time two families of Jews resident in the same city Prague,
bearing the same surname Ganz, and imbued with the same taste for scientific research.
It is tempting to accept this connection based primarily on an intimate, shared community and sphere of intellectual activity in Jewish Prague.
After all your handguns, erudition was in full flower by the time of his 1581 arrival in England.
Whether related to David Gans or not, in attaining such expertise, you would doubtless have studied under and among the elite cadre of philosophers,
mathematicians and alchemists who constituted the Elgar Gans as close acquaintance.
And while Johann Gans is anachronistically referred to as a scientist,
a metallurgist by some historians, he was certainly known to his contemporaries as an alchemist.
In fact, George Needham's detailed report to Walsingham.
To the contrary, Gandhi's interventions at the Mines Royal in Keswick were generally understood to be alchemical in nature.
At least one source describes his smelting method as a process of transmutation from one metal to another.
Quote, Right. Iron ore being by roasting brought into the perfection of iron is by the water and the strength of vitriol converted into copper.
Plus, quote, Finally in the prison notebooks of the debtor and amateur alchemist Clement Draper,
we find reference to alchemical recipes derived from Johann Ganz, his work.
And here's a picture of David, Kansas tome and Youssef in Prague in the old Jewish cemetery.
Guns in German and Yiddish, of course, goose.
And you can just make out of the top of the tombstone, a little goose.
And then I'm again David, a star of David. Below that, guns, in addition to authoring astronomical works and his work with Kepler,
wrote that David which is a sort of doubled history summer is is shoot the shoot of David and half the
work describes Jewish history until the end of the 16th century and the other half secular history.
And so he's remembered for both of those things.
As a relative of David Ganz, Joachim would have had access as a young man to some of the brightest minds in Europe,
possibly even to the Court of Rudolf,
the second one of the greatest early modern centres of mathematics, conjuring alchemy and astronomy with David as a father acculturation.
Young Joachim brought up, according to his deposition of Bristol, quote, on the Talmud of the Jews, close quote,
but probably also have enjoyed discourse with Rabbi Judah, Oliver and Bezalel, the morale of Golem crafting renown during the king's boyhood.
I was resident Miku of in Moravia, but David has been his student and lover,
undoubtedly continued to interact with the great and good in the community of Prague.
The the migrated away from Rudolph's Prague as it was about to reach its conjuring zenith with the arrival of
John D and Kelly and in advance of its greatest astronomical achievements under are Tycho Brahe and Kepler.
He nevertheless arrived in England bearing both our chemical expertise and personal connections to the arcane,
quote unquote, Kabbalistic masters of the Bohemian Court and its Jewish counterpart.
Could these Bohemian connections have influenced Raleigh's decision to include Ganz in Lane's Roanoke expedition?
Apologies for the presence of a Bohemian Sea coast in Robert Greenspan.
Dust off AT&T eight and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale have sometimes pointed to the imaginary bohemia within
Elizabethan and Jacobean England as a locus of a heterogeneity where the unexpected might be expected.
Andrew Gurr suggests that the addition of a sea coast further underlines the unreality of place in the play.
This is speaking of Shakespeare's Winter Tale. John Pitcher, editor of The Winter's Tale for Arden three,
identifies the seacoast of Bohemia as a recurring early modern joke when employed by Shakespeare and presumably also by GREENE,
to alert early audiences to the unreality and make believe that was to follow Bohemia
and the Habsburg Crown lands more generally were also places where Catholicism,
various Protestantism and Islam sat often uncomfortably alongside one another.
Some critics, including Pamela Smith, have seen Rudolph the second's interested in alchemy and his assembly of his so-called magic circle.
As attempts to resolve these conflicts on such an account,
alchemy becomes a humanist search for a universal language that could unite disparate political, religious and social forces.
All his contemporaries were displaying an ability to employ foreigners and experts in ways
which fostered the bottom line of political and increasingly commercial enterprises.
As has been noted minds, royal shareholders, including Lord Birley and Sir Francis Walsingham,
brought a numbers of Germans to help the Kazakh works flourish.
Walsingham also employed Iberian crypto Jews or Conversos resident in England and his machinations against the Spanish.
It is possible then that poor Raleigh, Kansas Jewish Bohemian origins were no bug but a feature.
After all,
the Roanoke expedition was targeting a continent upon whose shores striving Catholic and Protestant nations would enter into further conflict.
And one where concerns about native diavel ism and the desire to save native souls would feature centrally.
Hereto. An alchemical universal language might serve not only in amassing physical riches, but also in achieving metaphysical harmony.
Thomas Harriot, mathematician of the land expedition, connects economic with spiritual motives.
In his description of a native idol, quote unquote, discovered in Virginia.
The people of this country have an idol,
which they call Koussa has a chain about his neck of white beads between which are other round beads of copper,
which they esteem more than gold or silver. These poor souls have none of the knowledge of God, although I think I'm very desirous to know the truth.
For one, as we kneel down on our knees to make our prayers and to God, they went about to imitate us.
And when they saw we moved our lips,
they also did the like where father is very likely that they might easily be brought to the knowledge of the gospel.
As if imitating sympathetic magic on a grand scale. The presence in the expedition of the bohemian mineral man suggests the organisers may
have engaged foreigners in order to encounter and counter such anticipated foreignness.
An Elizabethan outsider in terms of his Jewish religion and German tongue, as well as in terms of his professional occult expertise.
Gans brought a liminal identity with him to the very edges of the early English world scape.
In his person, he connected the magical courts of Rudolf,
the second and rabbi lover with the native peoples in, quote unquote, wild geographies of the new colony.
It would be difficult to find a better metaphor than Ganz as alchemy with the violence of its
successive roasting in washings for the fraught attempts to transmute the new again in quotes,
landscapes, native populations and natural resources of Virginia into economic, political and spiritual opportunities for the English colonists.
Ganz was a man known to be capable of conjuring from the landscape something impossible,
a merger of materials to yield a substance purer and more powerful than the original's magic, though, always has a cost.
Neither scientific genius nor long service could forever obscure his hyphenated identity.
While Ganz was abused to his patrons gaining access to occult resources in Roanoke, his label, Personhood,
would need to be controlled once he returned from the edges and attempted to reintegrate himself into Elizabethan society.
Thanks very much. Well, I just want to say what a fantastic panel this was.
All the papers were great. We should thank all the panellists for a fantastic, fantastic set of papers.