Room 207 Press Webinars #12: The Atrocity Tour

Few things are as synonymous with the pop culture idea of the cult as the great cult atrocity stories: the Manson Family murders, the cult massacre at Jonestown, and the siege at Waco have become irresistible gravitational forces of narrative. 

They have defined the idea of what being in a cult is, have become pop culture artefacts in their own right. And they have inevitably influenced film and TV, both in the sense of film adaptations of the stories, and in films inspired by them. 

But of course, the mythology of these stories isn't the whole deal. We talk about “drinking the Kool-Aid”, we talk about Manson and Waco and what happened in those places, but the stories we know aren't necessarily the truth. To what extent then can fiction really give us an in-road to understanding these real-world tragedies? Should we even attempt to approach them?

In this part of the Cult Cinema lecture series, I’m going to look at how these events have become part of the cultural lexicon and how their transformation from fact into legend has been portrayed on the screen, and what this can tell us about the conditions that make these abuses become part of oour mythology. 

The event is going to be conducted via Zoom, as ever, and it is going to be held on Monday 14th September, twice, at 8pm UK time, and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). Although tickets are £10, subscribers to my Patreon, which also gives you access to videos of previous talks and other patron-exclusive content, get in free.

You can become a Patron here. 

Tickets can also be booked here:

Room 207 Press Webinars #11: Evangelical Horrors – the cinematic politics of fundamentalist Christianity

When Jerry Falwell Junior hit the news recently, it came as a surprise to some and no surprise whatsoever to many. The son of the notorious televangelist of the same name (only, you know, Senior) had been the President of Liberty University since his dad died in 2007, but unlike his dad, who as televangelists go was at least some variety of sincere, Falwell Jr has been prone to doing stuff like posting pictures of himself on Instagram with his pants down, and recently it's come out that he was involved in a specific sort of poly triad with his wife and a hot pool boy or something. The evangelical world has predictably been going crazy about this, as you'd expect. 

Don't worry about the Boy Falwell – he's going to be fine, and sure, Liberty have finally managed to get shot of him. But consider this: Falwell was blackmailed about this poly thing in 2016, because when you're a big proponent of family values stuff and hating on queer people, being poly (albeit poly in one of the most depressingly vanilla ways you can be, of course) is not an optic you want to get out there, and Donald Trump's people made it go away. And in return, Falwell did not endorse Ted Cruz – an awful human being to be sure, but a committed and sincere evangelical believer – and instead endorsed Trump. And the evangelical vote went to Trump. 

I don't think that this is going to make any difference at all to how evangelicals vote in the US in November. Why is that? Why is it that the only people who seem to think that Falwell Minor feeding his entire faith community to a man who conforms closely to the Biblical descriptions of the actual freaking Antichrist are not the people who you'd think would be bothered?

There's a question. 

It's a subject close to my heart, since I spent several years in the thrall of the evangelical version of Christianity and got to know

On Monday 7th September, I'm going to be looking at the prominence of American evangelicalism and its history through the lens of how modern evangelicalism is presented in cinema and TV, and how that illuminates the power, influence and reach of a faith that can be quite persuasively be argued to have departed from historical Christianity. From Righteous Gemstones and Greenleafs to gay conversion camps and Biblical archaeologists, we'll be tackling the religion of the American Empire, and interrogating its flaws.  

It's going to be held twice at 8pm UK time, and again at 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada) via Zoom. Backers of my Patreon get in as part of their subscription, but regular tickets can be purchased from this link or via the widget thing below. 

Room 207 Press Seminars #10: Your Move, Darwin – humanity, hope and meaning on the Planet of the Apes

Some science fiction franchises are more evolved than others. 

When Disney announced the acquisition of Fox, one of the big surprises was the announcement that plans were afoot to revive the Planet of the Apes franchise. First very loosely adapted from Philip “Bridge on the River Kwai” Boulle's novel La Planete des Singes, the story of an idealistic misanthrope stranded on a planet where evolution had taken a sideways lurch became notorious for having one of the greatest twist endings in history, a genre-defying mindbender that turns boilerplate space opera into something strange, disturbing and thought-provoking. A run of poetically scripted sequels and two TV series followed, both retreading the original tale, but more pertinently exploring how we get from a planet of humans to here. Revived by Tim Burton in 2001 and then with a run of three perverse, thrilling and hairy prequels from 2014 through 2017, the enduring low-key popularity of the series seems to defy all received wisdom: with a movie series that invites us to root for the end of human rule is anything but monkey see, monkey do. 

It seems bananas that Planet of the Apes might have endured for so long. What is it about these adventures that strikes such a chord with viewers? Why do these films tell us so much about ourselves? 

On Monday, I'l be asking just that in the next Room 207 Press Seminar. As ever, backers of my Patreon get a free ticket to this, and access to the videos of all previous seminars. 

It runs twice, as usual, at 8pm BST and then at 8pm Eastern Daylight Time (US/Canada). The ticket gets you into either or both sessions.

Room 207 Press Webinars #9: Sects Education: The Dark-Eyed Stepchildren of Mainstream Christianity

If you've ever walked past the Jehovah's Witness stand, or closed the door on them, ot had a strangely intense conversation with a pair of clean-cut young men with “elder” written on their badges, you know that the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints exist. And they're not alone. What about the Seventh Day Adventists, the Christadelphians and the Exclusive Brethren? 

How do you feel about them? And what does cinema tell us about these sometimes secretive, isolated offshoots of Protestant Christianity? Can we gain insight through film? 

 This week's Zoom seminar is about just that, as I provide an introduction to Christian Sects and look at how they're portrayed in everything from serious dramas to quirky comedies. Find out what The Children Act has in common with Napoleon Dynamite and Son of Rambow.  

The talk is as ever going to be held twice, on Monday 17th August, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). Ticket cost is £10, but Backing my Patreon for as little as $1US a month not only gets you a season ticket to all the talks, including this one, but access to videos after the fact, along with all the other benefits.  

Sects Education: The Dark-Eyed Stepchildren of Mainstream Religion

Room 207 Press Webinars #8: Sex On-Demand – sex with robots in film and TV

Ever since Fritz Lang made Metropolis in 1927, science fiction cinema has been the home of the fembot, the sexualised woman-machine who fulfils heterosexual desires in ways both threatening and unthreatening. As the technology advances, the idea of the sex robot weirdly becomes a possibility – RealDolls are a thing – and in this week's Zoom lecture, I'm going to look at the idea of how the sexy robot has developed in film and TV, and the meaning of them for what it is to be human.

Expect difficult conversations on issues of consent and sexual politics.

(And also some discussion of why I found this so funny)

The talk is as ever going to be held twice, on Monday 3rd August, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). It's Pay What You Want, meaning that although the suggested donation is £5-10 you can if you want come for free, and you are very welcome to do so. If you back my Patreon, you not only get automatic invites to all my lectures, but access to the videos after the fact, early access to my writing and some exclusive content from time to time.

Room 207 Press Webinars #7: Lectio Infernalis – spiritual practice, trauma and horror as a healing text

Film writing saved my life.

That isn't an exaggeration, it's not dramatic. A three-year struggle with a precipitous and destructive mental illness whose effects on my relationships and self-identity were profound and lasting was alleviated by the meditative response to horror and writing a 150,000 word book about it.

And I know I'm not alone in that. There's been quite a lot written about the therapeutic – even spiritual – value of the horror movie, and for me, the most curious thing has been that the more blasphemous and traumatic the film is, the more capacity for healing it provides.

In Polish auteur Andrzej Zuławski's one real horror film, Possession, we have a moment where Marc (Sam Neill) is told that there is nothing to be afraid of but God. And he replies, “God is a disease.”

There's so much to unpack there; quite apart from the New Atheist idea of God as a toxic and contagious psychological construct,  a sort of communal mental plague, the idea of God in sickness, as immanent in the illness and the illness itself, challenges us, forces us to confront whether faith has any point at all. And what if anything, can bring us healing when we are forced daily to confront the void.

In Martyrs (2008), a film so extreme the BBFC used it a case study for traumatic violence, the supposed God-shaped hole in the human soul becomes all there is. But when you're living in a state of anxiety, emotional pain and overwhelming misery, while the contenplation of the void seems inevitable, approaching it through stories can help. The extremity of horror can be a release. It's not the cure, but it can be an aid to healing.

The Benedictine practice of Lectio Divina mean “divine reading”; this week, though, I'll be offering some of my own experiences as a way into talking about Lectio Infernalis, a reading in hell, which is, I think, the use of horror as a way of approaching and working through our trauma, anxiety and mental health issues – the things that can parasitise our lives in a way far too redolent of horror – in a positive way, and a lens through which we can explore cathartic and healing approaches to our past traumas.

The Zoom seminar Lectio Infernalis: Spiritual Practice, Trauma and Horror as a Healing Text is ran on Monday 20th July (8pm UK time and again at 8pm Eastern Time US/Canada). My $10+ Patreon backers got automatic access, as well as access to videos of this and all the previous talks, along with early access to my writing, an archive of audio readings and occasional exclusive goodies.

See the whole programme for the rest of the Summer here.

The Room 207 Press Summer Webinar Series – a mid-season relaunch

So towards the start of the lockdown season, I started thinking about what I could do workwise. It's a brutal time for a freelancer. But then I got asked to do a talk for a lovely place in Nashville, and then I thought, you know what, I may not be good at everything but I do have a way with a useless but fascinating fact. So I thought, I'll have an online seminar series. And this has been fun, if exhausting. So far I've explored folk horror, faked ecctoplasm, explained how to brainwash someone and invented a whole genre of horror. But we're not quite halfway through the series, so there's a lot more to come.

The Details

When?
Seminars run on Mondays, and each one runs twice: the first is at 8pm, British Summer Time; the second at 8pm, Eastern Daylight Time (which is 1am BST). If you're in the UK or in a similar time zone, you'll probably want to book for the BST session; if you're in the US or Canada, you'll likely want the EDT session. But anyone can go to either if they can make it.

Where?
The seminars are going to run online, using Zoom, because that's what everyone uses, and honestly, it's about the easiest way to do this. Before the talk I'll mail everyone with meeting links and passwords (because there will be passwords).

How much?
Backing my Patreon not only gets you a season ticket to all the talks, but access to videos after the fact, along with all the other benefits. If you don't want to commit to a subscription, each class is available on a Pay-What-You-Want basis (input how much you want to pay in the checkout box), and is limited to 50 attendees, because bandwidth (so please register, even if you decide to come for free). Suggested range for a ticket is £5-10, but seriously, if you can't afford it and you want to come, there's no guilt attached.

Here's a schedule of what's to come. 

Room 207 Press Webinars #6: The Color Turquoise

In late 2018, celebrated author Alice Walker was asked by the New York Times to do one of those regular “books I have on my bedside table” pieces that fill a few inches in the weekly book review supplement. And that quickly got weird, because one of the books she waxed lyrical about was by David Icke, and this quickly got picked up by people who pointed out that Icke's book was really antisemitic, in that it blamed all the ills of the world by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Who were in fact extraterrestrial lizards who have been ruling the planet for millennia.

And this reminded everyone that David Icke – prophet of conspiratorial, antisemitic extraterrestrial doom – existed. Every so often he pops up and we get that poisonous, vaguely ill feeling that Icke brings with him. Recently, he's been back with the whole “link between the novel coronavirus and 5G” question (spoilers: there isn't a link between the novel coronavirus and 5G), shortly before getting his YouTube removed.

But how do you get a David Icke? Where do ideas like his come from? What is the secret history that causes an idea to metastasise into a state where a professional goalie turned sports commentator turned Green Party politician becomes the visionary king of the conspiracy theorists? 

In my next Zoom seminar, The Color Turquoise, I'll be explaining the strange origin of the ideas that led to David Icke, and the trajectory that led from the early origins of the New Age movement into its wildest fringes, and how a semingly benign New Ager could become one of the most popular antisemitic conspiracy theorists in history.

The talk was held twice on Monday 13th July, at 8pm BST (UK time) and 8pm EDT (Eastern US/Canada time). Patreon backers automatically get in, and get access to the videos afterward, so if you missed it, there's still the Patreon.

Faking Ectoplasm: A Practical Demonstration

So the other day, for the seminar I did about the Gordon Higginson controversies, I decided to conjure some ectoplasm, the way the old school mediums did it. Here's what happened.

After having done ectoplasm, I decided to try spirit manifestation.

That second video took about seven takes. Not shown is the take where the spirit emerges from the curtains, trips over its own ectoplasm and falls flat on its face with an unghostly crash. 

I mean, obviously, what you're looking at is a person with a sheet on their head, pretending to be a ghost. Don't underestimate that – in a dark room full of people who are expecting to see dead loved ones, and hear dead loved ones, there's a much higher chance than you would think that they will in fact see a spirit, even they were looking at a person with a sheet on their head. But where's the sheet? When parapsychologist Barrie Colvin investigated Gordon Higginson in 1974, he couldn't figure out where it was either. And then realised that one chair in the room was different to all the others. And that was the chair that was moved into the manifestation cabinet after each meeting started.

And he looked at the chair, and within 20 seconds found what was hidden in it. 

Cheesecloth (or muslin if you prefer)is great stuff. It's light, it's got a loose weave and it's absorbent (which is why it's absolutely the best thing to mop up baby sick, fact fans).

When it's wet, it bunches up really tightly, and you can mould it. Here's the same amount, wet.

The old school physical mediums would sort of get it wet and scrunch it up into a tight sausage and feed it down their throats. As you can see from the video, I, not an expert at this, had a great deal of trouble keeping it down. The vomiting of the ectoplasm was only half-theatrical.

And that's how you make ectoplasm. 

Anyway, this is one of the many subjects I'm talking about in my seminar series this Summer. On Monday 29th, I'm dealing with Identity Horror, as I approach The Question in Bodies. 

You can find the whole program here and support my Patreon (which gives you season tickets, archive videos of past talks and advance views of my other work) here.

Room 207 Press Webinars #5: The Question in Bodies

Recently, I decided that I should seek a diagnosis of adult ADHD. As I've gotten older, my weird neurological tics have gotten more entrenched, and I thought, You know what? Either I'm weird or there's something here that needs support. Well, it turns out I do in fact have ADHD, in spades, but what I wasn't expecting was to be told that I'm autistic too.

A lot of people, when they find out late in life that they're neurodivergent, find it a hugely positive experience, a sudden revelation that makes their lives make perfect sense. I am sorry to say that any gaining of sense was subsumed by intense anger, and crushing grief, and, most of all, the terrifying, vertiginous feeling that I had spent so many years masking who I really was that I had no idea of who I was. I suppose at this point, given how it wasn't all that long ago I finally came out as genderfluid (“they”/“them”, please. Thank you) that you might think it's starting to get to the point where I'm pretty much playing Labels Bingo, but the fact is, this is going to take some processing.

And, well, I process through horror.

The point of that, I guess, is that it makes a sort of sense that I'd be so interested in the idea of identity horror. “Identity horror” is a genre label that I made up myself a few years ago, but which I am more or less 150% certain I was not the first to come up with. I suppose that Identity Horror admits body horror, and overlaps with some (but not all) of the body horror classics. But it's more than that.

It's about the fluidity of the self, and, because it's horror, about how trauma changes that, and, also because it's horror, it allows a frank assessment of that fluidity, and the terrors it might hold. Sometimes we need to be allowed to be monsters.

Identity horror is often queer, and sometimes trans (and hence admits queer and trans discourse). Often it approaches in metaphor the experience of women and minorities in a world not constructed for them. Sometimes it's about new sorts of personhood, new orders of being. Sometimes it's about parenthood and the way we create new lives in bodies and minds. Sometimes about how relationships change us (for the horrific). Sometimes it's seductive; it approaches kinks, and taboos. Sex in identity horror is often transgressive and perverse. In identity horror, the horror of personal annihilation

David Cronenberg and David Lynch are the genre's patron saints, but it goes way back. Think about Tod Browning's unsung masterpiece Freaks (1932), or Georges Franju's wincetastic face-swap horror Eyes Without a Face (1960). Andrzej Zuławski gave us Possession (1981), which is surely my favourite horror film, period, and which is all about sex and death and fractured selves. Shane Carruth's Upstream Color (2013) deals with what might happen people who do not know who they are; Almodovar's queasy and distressing The Skin I Live In (2013) turns a cisperson into a transperson; and Jordan Peele's diptych of Get Out and Us (2017, 2019) approach black identities in Trump's America.

But let's talk about books too. Sure, we can bring in Clive Barker and Poppy Z Brite, but what about Carmen Maria Machado and Gwendolyn Kiste?

On Monday, I'll be talking about identity horror. I'll be staking my claim to it being a real genre and talking about what it can illuminate when we think about ourselves.
 

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To support my work, gain access to the seminars and the seminar archive and read my work early, please consider donating to my Patreon. No donation too small.

Room 207 Press Webinars #4: Are You With Us, Mr Higginson?

In 1976, Britain's most influential and powerful spiritualist medium, coming out of what should have been an average presentation of his powers in a Bristol church, was accused of faking supernatural phenomena. A two year long controversy ensued, involving not only ordinary spiritualists, but parapsychologists and the mainstream news, which climaxed with an extraordinary and nationally reported public trial. But how did a figure as complex as Gordon Higginson – a man who never earned a penny from his psychic practice, and who maintains a fearsome reputation for accuracy even to this day – wind up cheating? Was he cheating at all? What could he hope to gain? 

In my next online seminar, I'll be presenting the result of five years of research into what really happened in that little Bristol spiritualist church in February 1976, and why it became the last great scandal of Spiritualism. I'll be putting it in the context of the history of Spiritualism and its eventual decline, and how that relates to where our culture was in the 1970s.

I will also be supplying a practical and exclusive demonstration of how to fake ectoplasm, which you can witness in the comfort of your own homes.    

Pictured: the author faking ectoplasm in 2019.

If you back my Patreon for more than $10/per month, you get to come to this and all the other talks I'm doing from now until September, along with access to the recordings if you miss them.

Room 207 Press Webinars #3: How They Get You: a primer on cults, brainwashing and deprogramming in film

We're afraid of cults. We're afraid of our kids and our friends getting tangled up with them and winding up joining. We're afraid that they might get us too.

But what does that even mean? What does it mean to be brainwashed? What's the difference between getting brainwashed and a legitimate religious conversion? Does brainwashing even exist as a thing? Can it be undone? Do you even want to?

Well, hang in there because I've spent literally 23 years writing about this sort of thing — and longer even than that experiencing it first-hand.

This seminar ran twice on Monday 15th June, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (USA).

It referenced:
Get Out (2016)
Our Man Flint (1966)
Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh (2018)
Doomsday (2016)
American Horror Story: Cult (2017)
The Invitation (2015)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
The Path (2016-2018)
Sound of My Voice (2012)
Safe (1995)
Ticket to Heaven (1981)
Split Image (1982)
Holy Smoke (1999)
Faults (2014)

...and sex-cult leader Keith Raniere's YouTube, but you can Google that, because ew. 

For more talks, go check out my Patreon, where you can get a dirt-cheap season ticket, as well getting access to the other content over there or see the list of upcoming talks.

Room 207 Press Webinars #2: The Second Haunted Generation

[Before I start: even if you don't want to give me money to listen to my talks (and maybe also if you do), please consider donating to one of the bail funds currently being managed to get protesters out of COVID-19 incubating jail cells. Here's a list. You don't have to live there or know these people, or even put in that much, and you won't get any real thanks, or even really get a medal for it. Don't make a deal of it, do it anyway. It's just the right thing to do.]

Yesterday, amidst the deluge of horrors that the news cycle bestowed upon us, I saw a Facebook link for a think piece about folk horror that described The Wicker Man as something like the “1970s version of  Midsommar”. Part of me wishes I'd saved that link, if only as a demonstration of how folk horror as a thing has become enough of a cultural phenomenon to produce godawful clickbait thinkpieces and folk-horror-themed Funko Pops. It'd be glib to say that folk horror is here to stay, because obviously it isn't, pop cultural movements are ephemeral, but it's here and it's visible and it's making money.

Wouldst thou like a piece of shoddy plastic tat?

So over the last few years, I've been writing a lot about folk horror. There was that project about the folk horror and that turned into a book that got nominated for an award (which was nice), and my big thing has actually been why folk horror has become a thing, why you had movies and TV like that made so much in the 1970s, and why it has not only been retrospectively turned into an aesthetic, but why it is happening again. I wrote about this specifically a few months ago. In this week's seminar I'll be looking at how this is, what sort of cultural conditions produce this sort of media, and specifically examining what makes new folk horror a unique genre, separate from its 1970s origins, with special reference to the works of Ben Wheatley, Robert Eggers, Peter Strickland, Ari Aster and Jordan Peele.

This seminar ran on 8th June 2020. 

Films referenced: 
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)
Blood on Satan's Claw (Piers Haggard, 1970)
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Ghost Stories for Christmas (BBC, 1971-1978)
Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (John Hancock, 1971)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Lonely Water (Central Office of Information, 1973)
Charley Says (Central Office of Information, 1973) 
Jigsaw (BBC, 1979-84)
Bagpuss (Smallfilms, 1973)
Tottie (Smallfilms, 1984)
Jim'll Fix It (BBC, 1975-95)
Rolf's Cartoon Club (BBC, 1989-95)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)
A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013)
High Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)
Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2013)
The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)
In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)
The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016)
February AKA The Blackcoat's Daughter (Oz Perkins, 2015)
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Oz Perkins, 2016)
The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)
Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Room 207 Press Webinars #1: The Scam From Atlantis

Madame Blavatsky will never not be judging you.

The Scam from Atlantis, Monday 1st June 8pm BST and 8pm EDT

So I've gotta eat. And more specifically, I've been asked a bunch of times if I'll be doing more talks, because talks are a thing I do. Hi, by the way. If you've not come here before, I'm Howard David Ingham, and I've written professionally about occult history, religion and, most recently, movies for twenty years, and a couple of years ago I wrote a book called We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror (obligatory Amazon UK link) which got nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, which is nice.

I'm starting on 1st June with The Scam from Atlantis: the occult roots of fake archaeology, which deals with an abiding lifelong obsession of mine: Atlantis.

This is personal to me, has been since I was a kid, and my dad used to keep his books on the occult on a high shelf and one day I balanced on a stack of wobbly chairs and got them down, and there was this one about Atlantis, only I'm not talking about your Plato Atlantis or your Robert E Howard Atlantis, your Graham Hancock Atlantis or even your Doug McClure Atlantis, I'm talking about the dream Atlantis of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, William Scott-Elliot and Charles Leadbeater. The Hyperborean age of the Lhas. The Lost Lemuria.

This was a world invented by and for psychics. Mystics. Dreamers. Not filtered through any lens of pulp fantasy, either. I wouldn't read the American writers who riffed on this stuff until well into adulthood, and that was probably a good thing.

I was about eleven, and I'd discovered Dungeons and Dragons about the same time (I still have the box, purple sides, Erol Otus dragon, acquired second hand from some older lads down the road who couldn't make head or tail of it, at a time when everyone else had the Elmore dragon), and in my lonely head the blurry second-hand fragments of theosophical imaginations turned into lost ancient worlds full of psychic three-eyed beastmen who domesticated dinosaurs (and when you are eleven nothing catches your imagination like a giant with a dinosaur on a lead. Nothing), and tribes of sad blue giants who walked through lands scoured by the depredations of airship fleets commanded by crazed tyrant witch-kings. This was in the books. This was all there, I swear to God, with Chris Foss paintings of Sky-Chariots and diagrams of the concentric islands of Poseidonis and discussions of cosmic memory and theosophical root races. All there.

From my Dad's Atlantis book.

But the problem is, the more you read about it, the more you see the problems with it. As time went on, the magical Atlantis of my childhood began to exist in tension with horrific undercurrents. When you realise that the root races of man corresponded with the late 19th/early 20th century orthodoxy that humans had subspecies, and that the Lemurians were Black, and the Atlanteans were Asian, and they were replaced by the fifth race, and the fifth race are the Aryans... and that the history of Atlantis was tied up with this, it gets a little concerning.

Click to see the big version of this. It's from a family encyclopedia, dated 1927.

The Atlantis that mystics like Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce invented came from Ignatius Donnelly, and he had this whole “pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in South America – what are the chances?” thing going on, a basic error of misapplied imagination that has inspired a whole history of wannabe archaeologists – Graham Hancock, Erich von Däniken, and the others – who all work on the assumption that the Black and Brown people who yet live in the places where these awe inspiring monuments were built couldn't possibly be the descendants of the ones who built them, and that they must have been built by people from Somewhere Else.

This seminar ran on 1st June 2020. 
 
You can buy tickets for all the seminars in the series on the main seminar page.