Black Magic Code

 "It began with a letter to a dead man..."

My article 'The Black Magic Code' on Trithemius, cryptography and nigromancy published in Abraxas Journal. For more details see http://fulgur.co.uk/shop/abraxas/abraxas-journal-issue-6/

Vampires

Just found this review at http://pelicanist.blogspot.de/2013/08/the-universal-vampire.html:

Another observation that caught my eye was that the start of popularising the vampire was, ironically enough, the Enlightenment. Leo Ruickbie gathers together what was, at that time, impressive testimony as to the actual existence of such creatures, from medical, legal and military sources. By way of a slight aside I love the Voltaire quote on p.75: “Nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735“.

Here's the publisher's page: http://www.fdupress.org/book_descriptions/9781611475807.html.

Ruickbie certainly knows his stuff

From The Vampirologist blog:

It features another excellent article, by Leo Ruickbie. Readers may recognise him as the author of A brief guide to the supernatural (2012).

A brief guide serves as a classic example to why you (ok, I) shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I was expecting a threadbare pop-culture treatment, but it's incredibly well-researched. Ruickbie certainly knows his stuff.

See  http://thevampirologist.blogspot.de/2012/10/belated-anniversary-musings.html

A Brief Guide to the Supernatural featured on The Ghost Club website.

The perfect introduction to the world of all things eerie, inexplicable and otherworldly.

http://www.ghostclub.org.uk/Books.html

Good Ghost Guide

Magonia Review of Books: A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting

With more than 300 pages of text and more than 50 of endnotes, this book is not really a ‘brief’ guide. Combining practical assistance on preparation, equipment and investigation techniques and protocol, including the all-important health and safety advice, with a brief history of ghost hunting and a sociological analysis of ghost hunters, and a roundup of the various theories about ghosts, this is clearly quite comprehensive and remarkable good value for the price.

[...]

This is an interesting and useful book one can recommend to ghost hunters and psychical researchers.

http://pelicanist.blogspot.de/2013/10/good-ghost-guide.html

A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting on YouTube

A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting now has its own youtube video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svGNB4qNvhY

It looks and sounds like a computer generated video for http://www.thebookwoods.com/book3/9780762450770.html

Approved by Egon Spengler

Egon Spengler Would Approve: A Review of Dr. Leo Ruickbie's "A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting"

Dr. Leo Ruickbie may be a specialist in the field of witchcraft, but if A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting is any indication, the man knows he way around a haunted house as well.

[...]

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it doesn't really matter as far as this book goes, because the catalog of information is just a banquet for the imagination.

http://waggingthefox.blogspot.de/2013/10/egon-spengler-would-approve-review-of.html

Britain's Spookiest Places

Just had my first article published in the Daily Express:

THE UK is blessed - or cursed - with the greatest number of haunted places imaginable. From the crumbling battlements of ruined castles and grand royal palaces to cosy country pubs and individual houses, ghosts have been sighted, heard, felt and sometimes smelt the length and breadth of the land.

Read the full story here:
http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/travel/424087/Britain-s-spookiest-places

Call for Chapters

Following on my work on witchcraft accusations against children, I've teamed up with Simon Bacon to work on an anthology exploring the many issues surrounding children/childhood and conceptualisations of monstrosity and evil. We're particularly keen to open up a wide-ranging debate from cinema to the criminal courts. If you've got an idea, send it in!

Book Project. Title:

Little Horrors: Representations of the Monstrous Child

Gone is the Victorian innocence of childhood. We have entered the age of the monstrous child, the little horror.

Each historical period can be seen to have prioritised a different facet of the child, the Victorian era idolised the innocence of the pre-pubescent child, the twentieth century the disaffected teenager, whilst the early twenty-first sems to be that of the monstrous child. Whilst global organisations such as UNICEF and Save the Children promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right, popular culture and empirical, sociological data would intimate something else. Here children are not configured as the wealth of the family and the community, but are seen as an economic burden, a luxury or even a parasite. Far from being the repository of all society holds dear about itself, the child becomes something at once uncontrollable and monstrous, not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. Whether supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being caught outside of normalised categorization; not mature, not socilaised, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostagia over what they should be.

Is there a relationship between the declining birth rate in the West and the increasing representation of children as an alien other? However, as witchcraft accusations against children in Africa and representations in the Asian horror film genre show, this is not just a Western phenomenon. So just what are the underlying reasons, if any? This volume aims to assemble the evidence from history, psychology, sociology, literature and media studies to map the extent and meaning of this representational development.

Topics to include:

Witch children, witchcraft accusations against children, children using witchcraft accusations
Magical children: children with magical or superhuman powers, the wunderkind
Werewolves and other shapeshifters: children as animals
Fairies and changelings: the folklore of strange children
Undead children: vampires, zombies and others
Ghosts and demonic children: children possessed, children as demons
Child crime and culpability: moral evil and legal responsibility
Monstrous children through history: physical deformity and mental health issues
Children as embodiments of other aspects of supernatural horror
The monstrous as a new role model for children
Children as adults and adults as children
Society and children and public and private spaces Immigration, post-colonialism and foreign adoption
War children and child soldiers

A brief bio and abstract of circa 300 words should be sent to -

For literature and media studies: Simon Bacon (baconetti [at] googlemail [dot] com)
For history and social sciences: Leo Ruickbie (leo [at] ruickbie [dot] com)

Deadline for abstracts: 1st September 2013


There's no project page as yet, but you'll find these same details at http://kcl.academia.edu/LeoRuickbie/Posts

Spiritualism Anthology Details Released

Just arrived in my inbox are the full(er) details of the forthcoming anthology on spiritualism:

the anthology is to be published as:

Christopher M. Moreman (Ed.), The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with
the Dead in American and around the World (ABC-CLIO, 2013). It is
scheduled for release in the summer.

Sub-titles (and authors for each) are:
Vol. 1: American Origins and Global Proliferation (Paper; D. Wilson; Biondi; Sommer; Kragh; Dempsey; Hamilton; Straughan; Crockford; Charet; Moore; Biscop; Cosgrove; Rocha)
Vol. 2: Belief, Practice, and Evidence for Life After Death (Betty; Gutierrez; Singleton; Roxburgh & Roe; Leonard; Kavan; Alvarado; P. Wilson; Schwartz; Roe & Roxburgh; Hageman & Krippner; Meyer zu Erpen; Delgado; Stasulane; Hamilton).
Vol. 3: Social and Cultural Responses (Lynch; Knowles; Ricci; Williams-Hogan; Butler; Ruickbie; Lowry; Manson; Guillory; Troy; McDonald; Kee; Hoeger; Natale)

Magonia Review of The Supernatural

 Magonia Review of Books, review of Leo Ruickbie, A Brief Guide to the Supernatural: Ghosts, Vampires and the Paranormal (Constable and Robinson, 2012), dated 29 March 2012:

The book is well referenced in the form of footnotes and makes a good general introduction.

See the full review at http://pelicanist.blogspot.de/2012/04/shortreviews04.html

Vampire Autopsies

What happens when you cut open a vampire? Read this analysis of the 18th century vampire epidemic and the medical experts who examined the undead corpses in the Fortean Times, issue 288 (Special, 2012). Visit: Fortean Times

For back issues of Fortean Times call +44 (0)844 844 0049

Christmas or Yule? Pagan secrets of the festive season

It's that time of year again. Behind display windows sprayed with fake snow, stores play all our Christmas favorites, endlessly, and bearded men in red suits loiter in grottoes. But as you order your tree and hang up mistletoe, have you ever wondered what any of this has got to do with Christmas?

Read my full story on the real meaning of Christmas in The Sierra Sun, published Thursday, December 15, 2011.

Hallowe'en in the Sierra Sun

Read my article on Hallowe'en in the Sierra Sun: Faith Factor: Hallowe'en then and now.

Vampire Conference Programme

Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future

An International Conference at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

Wednesday, 2 November - Friday, 4 November 2011

Co-Ordinator: Simon Bacon (London)

Programme
Wednesday, 2 November 2011

9.15 Registration

10.00 Simon Bacon (London): Welcome and Introduction

10.15 Plenary Session:
Ken Gelder (Melbourne): 'Our Vampires, Our Neighbours'

11.05 Coffee

11.30 Parallel Session 1a: Memories of Vampires Past (Chair: Sharon Payka)
Leo Ruickbie (UK): 'Vampire Autopsy: Evidence for the Undead'
Ingrida Slepavicute (Kaunas): 'Vampires in Lithuanian Mythology: from Traditional Legends until Netlore of Children'
Michael E. Bell (McKinney, TX): 'American Vampires and the Ongoing Ambiguity of Death'

11.30 Parallel Session 1b: Vampires of the Future (Chair: Alannah A. Hernandez)
Aline Ferreira (Aviero): 'Future Vampires: the Genetically Modified in Octavia Butlers Fledgling'
Stephania Kovbasiuk (Kiev): 'Dracula of the 21st Century: an Intellectual and a Thinker'
Cheyenne Mathews (USA): 'Lightening "The White Man's Burden": Evolution of the Vampire from the Victorian Racialism of Dracula to the New World Order of I am a Legend'

13.00 Lunch (own arrangements)

14.15 Parallel Session 2a: Images of the Vampire I (Chair: Hannah Priest)
Marco Grosoli (Italy): 'The Fearless Vampire Palgiarism: Park Chan-Wook's Thirst'
Victoria Williams (UK): 'Reflecting Dracula: the Undead in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt'
Angela Tumini (Chapman, CA): 'Vampresse: Embodiment of Sensuality and Erotic Horror in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr and Mario Bava's The Mask of Satan'

14.15 Parallel Session 2b: Vampire Transgression (Chair: Ken Hollings)
Stephanie Badziong (Cologne): 'Religious Vampirism: the Elimination of the Church in Perfect Creature'
Judith Schossbock (Vienna): 'Dreading the Normative: the Vampire in the Queer Horror Genre'
Hadas Elber (Tel Aviv): 'Dracula meets Darwin': Contemporary Science Fiction's Demystification of the Vampire'

15.45 Tea

16.15 Parallel Session 3a: Memories of the New World (Chair: Rikke Schubart)
Enrique Ajura Ibarra (Lancaster): 'Vampire Science: the Myths of Dracula and Frankenstein in Medxican Horror Cinema'
Alannah A. Hernandez (Chicago, IL): 'Vampire Migrations: the Long and Winding Road Leading from the Old World to the New'
Ines Ordiz Alonso-Collada (Léon): 'Vampires in Globalized Culture: the Narrative of Adrianna Diaz Encisco'

16.15 Parallel Session 3b: All that Glitters I (Chair: Angela Tumini)
Reni Eddo-Lodge (Preston): 'The Anti-Feminist Character of Bella Swan: Why the Twilight Saga is Regressive'
Karin Hirmer (Regensburg): Female Empowerment: Buffy and her Heiresses in Control'
Thuc Doan Nguyen (Fullerton, CA): 'Of "Cougars" and "Kittens": Vampire Visual Rhetoric in the Last Three Decades'

17.45 Plenary Session: Remembrance of a Symphony of Terror: Film and Performance (Chair: Clemens Ruthner)
Clemens Ruthner (Dublin): 'Introduction to Anglo-German Vampires'
Mark Ferelli (UK): 'Performance: Magic Lantern Performance, "For the Love of Alfred Reginald Natzinck"'
Hannes König (Lind): 'Performance: Revenant Noir: 30-minute Black and White Film with Music (World Premiere/Test Screening)'

19.15 Sessions end

Thursday, 3 November 2011

9.30 Plenary Session:
Milly Williamson (London): title to be announced

10.20 Coffee

10.45 Parallel Session 4a: 'Fangdom' and Popular Memory (Chair: Sorcha Ni Fhlainn)
Maria Mellins (London): 'Fangtasia London: The True Blood Franchise and Vampire Lifestyle'
Malin Isaksson (Umea): 'Traces of Carmilla in Femslash Fan Fiction: Contemporary Female Vampires and their Possible Futures'
Rosemary Candelario (Los Angeles, CA): '"I want to be the one": Vampires and Virgins in Popular Culture'

10.45 Parallel Session 4b: All that Glitters II (Chair: Nadine Farghaly)
Nancy Schumann (UK): 'Women with Bite: Tracing Vampire Women from Lilith to Twilight'
Christine Feichtinger (Graz): 'The Vampiric Body of Plenitude: Reflections on the Role of the Body in Stephanie Mayer's Twilight Series'
Batia Stolar (Ontario): The Gender Politics of Reproduction in the Twilight Series'

12.15 Lunch (own arrangements)

13.30 Parallel Session 5a: 'Our Vampires, Ourselves' (Chair: Maurizio Cinquegrani)
Catherine Strong (Wagga Wagga, NSW): 'Vampire as Celebrity, Celebrity as Vampire': the Uncertain Boundary between Reality and Myth in the Twilight Franchise'
Nadine Farghaly (Salzburg): 'Vamp No More: When Bloodsucking Friends Just Aren't Enough'
Ivan Phillips (Hatfield): 'The Vampire with a Tousand Faces': Towards a Physiognomy of the Undead'

13.30 Parallel Session 5b: All that Glitters III (Chair: Malin Isaksson)
Celia Jameson (London): 'Edward Cullen is a controlling and abusive boyfriend': Twilight and the Discourse of Control and Coercion in Heterosexual Relationships'
Katharina Rein (Germany): 'Father, Brother, Child: the Posy-Familial Vampire Society in True Blood'
Maria Lindgren Leavenworth (Umea): '" I wanna do bad things with you": Fear and Desire in The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood'

15.00 Parallel Session 6a: Mis-Un-Dead (Chair: Ivan Phillips)
Catherine Wynne (Hull): 'Notions of the Home in I am Legend and its Adaptations'
Maurizio Cinquegrani (London): '"Spectral Wanderers of Unholy Night": the Vampire and the Cinematic City'
Raul Rodriguez-Hernandez and Claudia Schäfer (Rochester, NY): 'Sublime Horror: Transparency, Melodrama and the "Mise-en-scène" of Three Mexican Vampire Films'

15.00 Parallel Session 6b: Vampires of the Future II (Chair: Bernhard Unterholzner)
Kristin Burnett and Judith Leggatt (Ontario): 'Bloodsucking Colonizers and the Undead Anishinaabe in Drew Hayden's The Night Wanderer'
Karma Waltonen (Davis, CA): 'Octavia Butler's Fledgling: Postmodern Revisioning of the Vampire'
Georgina Colby (London): Political Bloodsuckers: Neoliberal/Neoimperial Vampires in Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers and Imperial Bedrooms'

16.30 Tea

16.50 Parallel Session 7a: Memories of Vampires Past II (Chair: Grainne O'Brien)
Hannah Priest (Manchester): 'Vampirs in those Days: Interrogating Master Narratives'
James Doan (Fort Lauderdale, FL): "For the blood is the life": Myths and Rituals of Vampirism in Southwest and Plains Indian Cultures'
Achamma Alex (Chengannur): 'Vampire Myths: Offering Resistance to the Dominant Culture'

16.50 Parallel Session 7b: Images of the Vampire II (Chair: Katharina Rein)
Denis Liboni (Iasi): 'Dracula between Myths and Reality, Universe and Homeland'
Yakut Oktay (Istanbul): 'Vampire as the Victorian Aesthete: Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula'
Sharon Payka and Jane Nickerson (Washington, DC): 'Developing a Course with Bite'

Coffin Trust Lecture

18.20 Reception
18.50 Sir Christopher Frayling (Cambridge): 'The Nighmare of Bram Stoker'

Sponsored by the John Coffin Trust of the University of London

Friday, 4 November 2011


9.30 Plenary Session:
Stacey Abbott (London): 'How to Survive a Vampire Apocalypse, or What to Do when the Vampires are Us'

10.20 Coffee

10.45 Parallel Session 8a: Memories of a Forever Youth (Chair: Simon Bacon)
Kelly Doyle (Okanagan, BC): 'Childish Monsters, Monstrous Children: Boundary, Transgression, Posthumanism, and the Child as Monster in Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In'
Allison Moore (Birmingham): '"I'm twelve, but I've been twelve for a long time": Representations of Childhood in Let the Right One In'
Rikke Schaubart (Denmark): '"Be me for a little while": Border-Crossing and Vampire Pedagogy in Let the Right One In (2008)'

10.45 Parallel Session 8b: Theory of the Undead I (Chair: Judith Schossbock)
Christine Knight (Edinburgh): 'Synthetic Blood and Vegetarian Vampires: the Ethics of Consumption in 21st-Century Vampire Texts'
Odelia Barkin (Jerusalem): 'Current American TV Vampires and Trauma'
Hannes König (Lind): 'Vampire in the Mirror: the Psychoanalysis of Immortal Narcissism'

12.15 Lunch (own arrangements)

13.15 Plenary Session:
Catherine Spooner (Lancaster): '"Dressed in a silken robe of white": Fashioning the Vampire from Page to Screen'

14.15 Parallel Session 9a: Vampire Evolution (Chair: Aline Ferreira)
Karin Preuss (Germany): 'Subversive Aesthetics of Transgression: Vampires in Literature and Film'
Naomi Segal (London): André Gide, Nosferatu and the Hydraulics of Youth and Age'
Karen Leeder (Oxford): '"The empty looking glass": Metamorphosis of the Vampire in Heiner Müller'

14.15 Parallel Session 9b: Vampires in Popular Memory (Chair: Allison Moore)
Erika Grendelova (Prague): 'Vampires in Comics: Transformation of the Myth as Represented in 30 Days of Night'
Burcu Genc (Istanbul): 'The Vampire from an Evolutionary Perspective in the Japanese Animation Blood +'
Grainne O'Brien (Limerick): 'Where's the Blood? Marginalised or Trivialised? Vampires in the Harry Potter Series'

15.45 Tea

16.10 Parallel Session 10a: Theory of the Undead II (Chair: Hadas Elber)
Marius Crisan (Timisoara): 'Vampires and Stereotypes: Post-Stoker Imagined Transylvania'
Sarah Horgan (Canterbury): 'The Anglo-Irish Vampire: Constructions of a Conflicted National Identity in the 19th-Century Gothic Text'
Bernhard Unterholzner (Gießen): 'Tracing Translation: Vampires, Media, Enlightenment'

16.10 Parallel Session 10b: Mis-Un-Dead II (Chair: Cheyenne Matthews)
Ken Hollings (London): 'Gothic Machines'
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Dublin): '"Old things, fine things": of Vampires, Antique Dealers, and Timelessness'
Isabella van Elfren (Utrecht): 'Music that Sucks and Bloody Liturgy: Catholicism in Vampire Movies'

17.40 Closing Discussion

17.55 Conference ends

Further details and registration
To obtain further information and register for the conference, contact Christopher Barenberg (tel: 020 7862 8738). Please note the closing date for receipt of registrations is Friday, 21 October 2011.

From http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences-workshops/vampires-myths-of-the-past-and-future.html

Harry Potter and Witchcraft

Satanist to some, saint to others, why have the religious reactions to Harry Potter been so contradictory?

Plus, just how do you make a Horcrux?

New pages on the website exploring my recent work on Harry Potter from fundamentalism to the concept of the external soul. Read it all here http://www.witchology.com/contents/harrypotter/articles.php

Spiritualism and the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most important magical society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was established on the basis of spirit communication with supernatural entities. Known as the ‘Secret Chiefs’, these entities provided the source of authority for the leaders of the Order as well as later becoming the subject of dissension, functioning in a similar way to the contemporary Theosophical ‘Mahatmas’. However, the Golden Dawn is generally not considered in relation to the Spiritualist Movement. This chapter will re-examine that perspective by investigating the historical importance of alternative forms of mediumship within this magical society and its off-shoots.

Prof. Christopher Moreman, California State University, is editing a major three volume series on Spiritualism and has just accepted my proposed chapter on Spiritualism and the Golden Dawn.

About the book (from the original call for papers):

Modern Spiritualism as a religious movement finds its roots in mid-nineteenth century upstate New York during a time of great spiritual fervor in New England. Since then, Spiritualism has flourished and spread world-wide. Studies of Spiritualism have largely focused on the movement’s relationship to emergent feminism and gender issues or on its relationship to the paranormal and psychical research. The present series­ a 3 volume edited collection titled, The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World to be published by Praeger seeks to broaden the scope of the study of Spiritualism, and to bring together diverse perspectives on this American-made global religion.

The book will cover a broad range of subjects:

• American origins of the Spiritualist movement and its cultural and political ramifications
• Feminist perspectives on the Spiritualist movement and its leadership
• In-depth overviews of important figures in the history of Spiritualism (i.e. the Fox sisters, Patience Worth, Arthur Conan Doyle, William James, Frederic Myers, Harry Houdini, or William Lyon Mckenzie King)
• The spread of Spiritualism and the Spiritualist movement in
non-American contexts (i.e. Iceland, England, Brazil, Europe, East Asia)
• Ethnographic studies of Spiritualism
• Evidence-based claims made by Spiritualism and Spiritualists
• Debates over the findings of psychical research and parapsychological studies of mediums
• Mediumship as a phenomenon of human experience throughout history and across the globe.
• Spiritualism in relation to other new religious movements like the Theosophical Society, the Thelemic Orders, or Wicca
• Spiritualism and mediums as portrayed in popular media and the popularity of the movement generally
• Death, grief, and the role of Spiritualism in bereavement
• Christian and other dominant religions’ responses to Spiritualism

Paranormal is now Supernatural

My forthcoming book The Paranormal has now been renamed The Supernatural following negotiations for a US deal. Part of Constable & Robinson's Brief Histories/Guides series, the book is scheduled for publication on 19 April 2012, although that change. Already there's been a lot of interest and I'll be posting some advance reviews in the coming months.

Vampire Conference Paper Accepted

'Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future' - An interdisciplinary conference organised by Simon Bacon, The London Consortium in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

From the conference description:

Myths of vampires and the undead are as old as civilisation itself, wherever humans gather these ‘dark reflections’ are sure to follow. Whether as hungry spirits, avenging furies or as the disgruntled dearly departed, they have been used to signify the monstrous other and the consequences of social transgression. Embodying the result of a life lived beyond patriarchal protective proscription that quickly changes from dream to nightmare and from fairy tale to ghost story.

Sir Christopher Frayling, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Catherine Spooner and Dr Milly Williamson will be giving papers, and there'll also be the world premiere of a short film on vampires.

I'll be presenting a paper on the 18th century vampire epidemic and its consequences.

See the website for more details on the full programme http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences-workshops/vampires.html
And put 2-4 November 2011 in your calendars.

Reinventing the Renaissance Occult

Review of 'Reinventing the Renaissance Occult in Modern and Postmodern Culture' now available at http://jwmt.org/v2n20/reinventing.html

Five hundred years ago the occult – what we think of as ‘the occult’ – was taught in university and practised by many of the foremost personalities of the age. Still it was persecuted. Dangerous. Between the Church and the deep blue sea: Scylla and Charybdis. It was the high point of ‘the occult’ and also its low point. To some it promised to reveal the secrets of the universe, to others it automatically meant a pact with the Devil and damnation. Such contrasts have thrown long shadows that still play across the present.

Published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 20, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2011.