Want to Listen to Spy Broadcasts? Here’s How. The strange transmissions of shortwave numbers stations, by Matthew Gault

Hidden among the squelch and whine of the little used shortwave radio band, mysterious stations broadcast unbreakable code.

Yosemite Sam threatens to blow the listener to smithereens before switching to a different frequency. An upbeat woman delivers nonsensical strings of numbers in Mandarin. A repeating broadcast of a nursery rhyme breaks only for a child to read numbers in German.

These are the numbers stations—a radio station on shortwave that broadcasts some sort of repetitive noise followed by strings of numbers. Amateur tech geeks first identified the stations after World War II. No one is sure what their purpose is.

That hasn’t stopped anyone from speculating. The most popular theory is that the broadcasts are used to transmit coded messages to spies and the military. Shortwave is easy to broadcast globally, hard to trace and free of commercial traffic.

Spies or military personnel tune into the frequency at an appointed time and use a one-time pad to decrypt the message. The spy then destroys the pad and goes about their mission. Anyone else listening hears a random string of numbers with no context.

Listening to numbers stations was once the hobby of a small margin of the population. Only those with shortwave radios and patience to tune them reaped the benefits of the strange broadcasts.

Now—thanks to the Internet—anyone can listen.

The University of Twente in the Netherlands maintains web-based shortwave radio anyone can access here. The interface is simple. Just input the frequency you want in the box below the graphic.

To get an idea of what frequencies to check out, head over to Priyom.org—an international group researching intelligence and military communications via shortwave radio. The site maintains a schedule of active shortwave stations and catalogs interesting activity.

From War is Boring

Also from Lifehacker: How to Listen to Real Spy Broadcasts Right Now

The Conet Project - Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and intonation; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that transmits a female child's voice!

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Why is it that in over 30 years, the phenomenon of Numbers Stations has gone almost totally unreported? What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the Swedish Rhapsody Numbers Station use a small girls voice?

These are just some of the questions that remain unanswered.

Now you will be able to hear this unique and extraordinary phenomenon for yourself, as Irdial-Discs releases THE CONET PROJECT: the first comprehensive collection of Numbers Stations recordings released to the public.

More here

and official site here

Pope Francis and the psychology of exorcism and possession, by Chris French

Last week it was reported that Pope Francis had formally recognised the International Association of Exorcists, a group of 250 priests spread across 30 countries who supposedly cast out demons. The head of the association, Rev Francesco Bamonte, announced that this was a cause for joy because, “Exorcism is a form of charity that benefits those who suffer.” While Pope Francis, who frequently mentions Satan, no doubt agrees with this sentiment, this granting of legal recognition to the concepts of possession and exorcism has come as something of a shock to those who do not share this world view.

Belief in possession is widespread both geographically and historically and is far from rare in modern western societies. A YouGov poll of 1,000 US adults last year found that over half of the respondents endorsed belief in possession and 20% remained unsure. Only 11% said categorically that they did not believe people could be “possessed by the devil”.

Is it possible that the pope is right and demons can sometimes take control of their victims’ behaviour? Are exorcists really bravely battling against the most powerful, evil forces imaginable? Or are possession and exorcism best explained in terms of psychological factors without any need to postulate the existence of incorporeal spiritual entities? I would argue that the available evidence strongly supports the latter interpretation.

Read more here

Book: Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, by Jeffrey Sconce

In Haunted Media Jeffrey Sconce examines American culture's persistent association of new electronic media - from the invention of the telegraph to the introduction of television and computers - with paranormal or spiritual phenomena. By offering a historical analysis of the relation between communication technologies, discourses of modernity, and metaphysical preoccupations, Sconce demonstrates how accounts of "electronic presence" have gradually changed over the decades from a fascination with the boundaries of space and time to a more generalised anxiety over the seeming sovereignty of technology. Sconce focuses on five important cultural moments in the history of telecommunication from the mid-nineteenth century to the present: the advent of telegraphy; the arrival of wireless communication; radio's transformation into network broadcasting; the introduction of television; and contemporary debates over computers, cyberspace, and virtual reality. In the process of examining the trajectory of these technological innovations, he discusses topics such as the rise of spiritualism as a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomised vision of the afterlife. Sconce also considers how an early preoccupation with extraterrestrial radio communications transformed during the network era into more unsettling fantasies of mediated annihilation, culminating with Orson Welles' legendary broadcast of War of the Worlds. Likewise, in his exploration of the early years of television, Sconce describes how programs such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits continued to feed the fantastical and increasingly paranoid public imagination of electronic media. Finally, Sconce discusses the rise of postmodern media criticism as yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet. As an engaging cultural history of telecommunications, Haunted Media will interest a wide range of readers including students and scholars of media, history, American studies, cultural studies, and literary and social theory.

Carl Jung on Noise in Modern Times (September 1957)

Dear Professor Oftinger:

Unfortunately I am so old and tired that I am no longer able comply with your wish. You maybe assured, however, that I have every sympathy with your project and understand it only too well. I personally detest noise and flee it whenever and wherever possible, because it only disturbs the concentration needed for my work but forces me to make the additional physic effort of shutting it out.

You may get habituated to it as to over indulgence to alcohol, but just as you pay for this with cirrhosis of the liver, so in the end you pay for nervous stress with a premature depletion of your vital substance. Noise is certainly only one of evils our time, though perhaps most obtrusive.

The others are gramophone, the radio, and now the blight of television. I was once asked by an organization of teachers why, in spite of the better food in elementary schools, the curriculum could no longer be completed nowadays.

The answer is: lack of concentration, too many distractions. Many children do their work to the accompaniment of the radio. So much is fed into them from outside that they no longer have to think of something they could do something from inside themselves, which requires concentration. Their infantile dependence on the outside is thereby increased and prolonged into later life, when it becomes fixed in the well-known attitude that every inconvenience should be abolished by order of the state.

Panem et circenses-this is the degenerative symptom of urban civilization, to which we must now add the nerve-shattering din of our technological gadgetry. The alarming pollution of our water supplies, the steady increase of radioactivity, and the somber threat of overpopulation with its genocidal tendencies have already led to a widespread though not generally conscious fear which loves noise because it stops the fear from being heard.

Noise is welcome because it drowns the inner instinctive warning. Fear seeks noisy company and pandemonium to scare away the demons. (The primitive equivalents are yells, bull-roars, drums, fire-crackers, bells, etc.) Noise like crowds, gives a feeling of security; therefore people love it and avoid doing anything about it as they instinctively feel the apotropaic magic it sends out. Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters anxious dreams, it assures us that we are all in the same boat and creating such a racket that nobody will dare to attack us. Noise is so insistent, so overwhelmingly real, that everything else becomes a pale phantom. It relieves us of the effort to say or do anything, for the very air reverberates with invincible power of our modernity.


Read more here

Is the sound of silence the end of the self? by Tim Parks

Years ago, in my novel Cleaver (2006), I imagined a media man who is used to frantic bustle and talk going in search of silence. He flees to the Alps, looking for a house above the tree line – above, as he begins to think of it, the noise line; a place so high, the air so thin, that he hopes there will be no noise at all. But even in the South Tirol 2,500 metres up, he finds the wind moaning on the rock face, his blood beating in his ears. Then, without any input from his family, his colleagues, the media, his thoughts chatter ever more loudly in his head. As so often happens, the less sound there is outside, the more our own thoughts deafen us.

When we think of silence, because we yearn for it perhaps, or because we’re scared of it — or both — we’re forced to recognise that what we’re talking about is actually a mental state, a question of consciousness. Though the external world no doubt exists, our perception of it is always very much our perception, and tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the world. There are times when a noise out there is truly irritating and has us yearning for peace. Yet there are times when we don’t notice it at all. When a book is good, the drone of a distant lawnmower is just not there. When the book is bad but we must read it for an exam, or a review, the sound assaults us ferociously.

If perception of sound depends on our state of mind, then conversely a state of mind can hardly exist without an external world with which it is in relation and that conditions it — either our immediate present environment, or something that happened in the past and that now echoes or goes on happening in our minds. There is never any state of mind that is not in some part, however small, in relation to the sounds around it — the bird singing and a television overheard as I write this now, for example.

Silence, then, is always relative. Our experience of it is more interesting than the acoustic effect itself. And the most interesting kind of silence is that of a mind free of words, free of thoughts, free of language, a mental silence — the state of mind my character Cleaver failed to achieve despite his flight to the mountains. Arguably, when we have a perception of being tormented by noise, a lot of that noise is actually in our heads — the interminable fizz of anxious thoughts or the self-regarding monologue that for much of the time constitutes our consciousness. And it’s a noise in constant interaction with modern methods of so-called communication: the internet, the mobile phone, Google glasses. Our objection to noise in the outer world, very often, is that it makes it harder to focus on the buzz we produce for ourselves in our inner world.

Read more here

Humanity's deep future, by Ross Andersen

 Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos). It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a victim of the Biblical flood. He was wrong, of course, but he had the conceptual contours nailed. The bone did come from a species lost to time; a species vanished by a prehistoric catastrophe. Only it wasn’t a giant. It was a Megalosaurus, a feathered carnivore from the Middle Jurassic.

Plot’s fossil was the first dinosaur bone to appear in the scientific literature, but many have followed it, out of the rocky depths and onto museum pedestals, where today they stand erect, symbols of a radical and haunting notion: a set of wildly different creatures once ruled this Earth, until something mysterious ripped them clean out of existence.

Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I was there to meet Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who has made a career out of contemplating distant futures, hypothetical worlds that lie thousands of years ahead in the stream of time. Bostrom is the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective tasked with pondering the long-term fate of human civilisation. He founded the institute in 2005, at the age of 32, two years after coming to Oxford from Yale. Bostrom has a cushy gig, so far as academics go. He has no teaching requirements, and wide latitude to pursue his own research interests, a cluster of questions he considers crucial to the future of humanity.

Read more here

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lectures series presents: Talking with the spirits: Mediumship and possession

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon presents:

TALKING WITH THE SPIRITS: MEDIUMSHIP AND POSSESSION

Jack Hunter & Dr David Luke with special guest Don Santos

Tuesday, 29th, July, 2014. Entry £7 /£5 Concessions (on the door) Wine available October Gallery Theatre

Anthropologist Jack Hunter and psychologist David Luke will be discussing some of the material from their new edited book, Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds – a collection of a dozen ethnographic studies of trance possession cults and mediums from around the world.

Talking With The Spirits: A Brief Introduction To The Anthropology Of Spirit Possession - Jack Hunter

Jack will give a brief overview of the historical development, and contemporary state, of the anthropology of spirit possession, exploring the many theoretical paradigms that have been applied (not always satisfactorily), to this perplexing human phenomenon.

Psychedelic Possession: The Growing Incorporation of Incorporation Into Ayahuasca Use – Dr David Luke

Shamans the world over use mediumistic techniques and commune with the spirits of the dead, and many use psychedelic plants, but strangely rare is it that anyone ever uses psychedelics and spirit possession together. David will explore why that may be, and why this unique practice is now growing in parts of the world.

Huichol Cosmology: A Mara'akame Shares The Wirraritari Cosmovision And Mythology - Mara’akame Paritemai (Don Santos)

In Wirraritari society the Mara’akames are medicine-men and leaders. There are different types of Mara’akame; those who simply sing and communicate with the spirits, those who do treatments with energy, extracting disease and materialising it as it is sucked out by the mouth, and those who sing and heal as Mara’akame Santos does.

Please RSVP on Facebook (afraid so) so that we can anticipate numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/events/241539126052207/

Free entry for anyone buying a copy of the Talking with the Spirits book (at reduced price of £15) at the door!

More here

The ultimate comeback: Bringing the dead back to life, by David Robson

When you are at 10C, with no brain activity, no heartbeat, no blood – everyone would agree that you’re dead,” says Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “But we can still bring you back.”

Rhee isn’t exaggerating. With Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland, College Park, he has shown that it’s possible to keep bodies in ‘suspended animation’ for hours at a time. The procedure, so far tested on animals, is about as radical as any medical procedure comes: it involves draining the body of its blood and cooling it more than 20C below normal body temperature.

Once the injury is fixed, blood is pumped once again through the veins, and the body is slowly warmed back up. “As the blood is pumped in, the body turns pink right away,” says Rhee. At a certain temperature, the heart flickers into life of its own accord. “It’s quite curious, at 30C the heart will beat once, as if out of nowhere, then again – then as it gets even warmer it picks up all by itself.” Astonishingly, the animals in their experiments show very few ill-effects once they’ve woken up. “They’d be groggy for a little bit but back to normal the day after,” says Tisherman.

Read more here

How extreme isolation warps the mind, by Michael Bond

Sarah Shourd’s mind began to slip after about two months into her incarceration. She heard phantom footsteps and flashing lights, and spent most of her day crouched on all fours, listening through a gap in the door.

That summer, the 32-year-old had been hiking with two friends in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they were arrested by Iranian troops after straying onto the border with Iran. Accused of spying, they were kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell. She endured almost 10,000 hours with little human contact before she was freed. One of the most disturbing effects was the hallucinations.

“In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there,” she wrote in the New York Times in 2011. “At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realised the screams were my own.”

We all want to be alone from time to time, to escape the demands of our colleagues or the hassle of crowds. But not alone alone. For most people, prolonged social isolation is all bad, particularly mentally. We know this not only from reports by people like Shourd who have experienced it first-hand, but also from psychological experiments on the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation, some of which had to be called off due to the extreme and bizarre reactions of those involved. Why does the mind unravel so spectacularly when we’re truly on our own, and is there any way to stop it?

Read more here

Danse Macabre

La Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, janvier 2004
Film réalisé par Jérémy Nedjar - www.jeremynedjar.com
Poupées et Voix - Michel Nedjar
Conception et Mise en scène - Allen S. Weiss
Bande sonore et Voix supplémentaires - Gregory Whitehead
Marionnettisme et Scénographie - Mark Sussman
Marionnettistes - Claude Bétron, Souleyman Sakho, Mark Sussman
Eclairage - Boualem Ben-Gueddach
Productrice - Holly Golden
Remerciements - le French-American Found, la Directrice de La Halle Saint Pierre Martine Lusardy, le Great Small Works (New York).

More here

Read more here

Richard Crow - Imaginary Hospital Radio

Imaginary Hospital Radio mimics and subverts conventional hospital radio and its aim to relieve its listeners/patients through the collaging and dissecting of the visceral and surgical sounds associated with illness and disease. The hospital’s unwanted sounds and noise provide an unexpected artistic source, as a kind of sonic tableau – an invisible operating theatre in which the sonic/audio auscultation/surgery occurs ‘live to ear’.

Richard Crow is an inter-disciplinary artist with a strong background in experimental audio work, photo based media, live performance and site-specific installation. He utilises sound and noise in a performative way, for its spatial and subjective qualities and above all for its psycho-physical implications for the listener. Over the past two decades his solo and collaborative site-specific installations and performances have consisted of highly conceptualised interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the project The Institution of Rot.

Crow has collaborated, performed, and recorded with many leading musicians and sonic artists including Joe Banks, Adam Bohman, The Hafler Trio, Clive Graham, Michael Prime, Dean Roberts, Kaffe Matthews, Michael Morley, Sandoz Lab Technicians, & dy'na:mo.

Listen here

The Case of Glossolalia. Lecture by Vincent Barras

UCL/British Psychological Society History of the Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series
Monday 28th July
Professor Vincent Barras (University of Lausanne)

Plays between Reason, Language and Gods:
The Case of Glossolalia 19-20th Centuries

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, plays a surprisingly important role in discussions between theologians, psychologists, and psychiatrists at the turn of the 20th century on the relationships between religious psychology, mental automatisms, subliminal processes and inner language and in the formation of modern psychology itself. Its role in the formation of modern psychology will be reconstructed, with particular emphasis on the debates around the Swiss theologian Emile Lombard’s masterpiece of 1910, “Concerning glossolalia in the early Christians and similar phenomena.”
Time: 6pm to 7.30 pm.

Location: Arts and Humanities Common Room (G24), Foster Court, Malet Place, University College London.

Jane Bennett - Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter

How can objects sometimes be vibrant things with an effective presence independent of the words, images, and feelings they may provoke in humans? This question is posed by Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of "Thingness," the nature of matter. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center's programs will focus on the material conditions of our lives.

Jane Bennet is a professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. In her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010), she asks how our politics might approach public concerns were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things but the things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects and manifest traces of independence and vitality? Following the tangled threads that link vibrant materialities, human selves, and the "agentic assemblages" they form, Bennett examines what hoarders, people who are preternaturally attuned to "things," can teach us about the agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff. Professor Bennet is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman's materialism.

*Location:Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor Tuesday, September 13, 2011 6:30 p.m.

In search of perfect sound – introducing Britain’s largest horn loudspeaker

A long black metal tube, slightly tapered and almost 9-foot-long lay on a row of filing cabinets at Blythe House, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The object was pointed out by John Liffen, the Museum’s Curator of Communications, who guided me during a research visit of the collections in 2008. It was all that remained of a mighty horn loudspeaker that was demonstrated in the Museum during the 1930s, John explained. A demolition accident had almost totally destroyed it in 1949.
Now the tube assumed a more fascinating form, like a fossil or a dinosaur bone as we delved into audio archeology.

The story of the horn, researched in great detail by John, sparked an interest in me. Four years later in 2012, on being appointed as the Museum’s first-ever sound artist-in residence, I was given a wonderful opportunity to initiate its reconstruction.

The exponential horn loudspeaker was designed in 1929 by the Museum’s curator of  ‘Electrical Communication’ R. P. G. Denman who also personally built a radio receiver to run in tandem with it. The purpose of this new sound system was to provide the public with demonstrations of the highest quality broadcast sound that was obtainable at the time. Denman saw it as setting a benchmark for audio quality, his aim was, in his words “to provide a standard by which commercial apparatus could be judged”.

The horn measured 27 feet (8.23m) in length with a cross section that curved exponentially from 1 ^1/16 inches (27mm) to a massive 7-foot-1-inch square (2.16m sq.) at the horn mouth. The science and theory of how horns propagate sound had only begun to emerge in the mid-1920s. It was found that a horn with an exponential shape was the most effective means of converting the sound energy from high pressure, low velocity vibrations produced at the narrow end of the horn, into low pressure, high velocity vibrations at its mouth, then radiated into the outside air. However, in order to reproduce the lowest sounding frequencies, this type of horn has to be very long with a correspondingly large opening.

More here

and here

Derelict London

This website has now been around for 11 years. In that time my random wanderings around London have often been described as psychogeography and that little known penchant for walking around derelict buildings with a camera has been branded urban exploration (aka urbex).  This site  doesn't fit into any category or belong to any forum. There are no rules. 

This is not a compilation of familiar tourist sights, as another of those is hardly needed, but a depiction of an (often un-picturesque) view of everyday life in London

The site is obviously not taken to illustrate London at its most beautiful or most successful, the name derelict London is a memorable name for a website though not everything within this site is of derelict areas and everyone has their own definition of derelict......99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of travelling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London. (ie just stepping back and looking at buildings and people). I've enjoyed putting this site together and will continue to add more pics. Try not to be too critical because I'm no professional photographer. Neither is this some trendy art student project..............Any places you think should be on this site? Let me know! Also info (however trivial) or stories/personal memories on any of the buildings would be appreciated.

Apart from the odd tip off most of the locations on this site are on here because I randomly stumbled upon them when walking down the street.

More here

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis (Party)

[ Voudon | Art, Uprising & Gnosis ]
http://nnnnn.org.uk/doku.php?id=voudon

After navigating the pathways of Voudon, it's time to shake out the daemons

spirit servants::

DUNGEON ACID https://soundcloud.com/dungeon-acid

XENOGLOSSY https://soundcloud.com/xenoglossix

RYAN & LUKE JORDAN http://ryanjordan.org/ http://l-r-jordan.blogspot.co.uk/

BROOD https://soundcloud.com/broodexperiments

projection::

ORPHANDRIFT http://orphandrift.com/

screening::

ACHANTÉ (2008) by Emily McMehen and Sautner/Mazibel Productions
http://emilymcmehen.com/
http://mazibel.com/

BOUNDA PA BOUNDA (2008) by Leah Gordon
www.leahgordon.co.uk

8pm - 3am Saturday 5th July 2014

£5/3 on the door - rough bar

Top Floor, Unit 73a Regent Studios, 8 Andrew's Road, Hackney, London E8 4QN

This is the after-party for http://voudon.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1412487765681234/

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis (Conference)

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon presents:

Voudon: Art, Uprising & Gnosis

2pm-7pm, Saturday, 5th July, 2014 (1:30pm for a 2pm start)

The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N3AL
http://voudon.wordpress.com/

Ticket sales IN ADVANCE only – via:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/voudon-art-uprising-gnosis-rhythm-tickets-878057293


Presenters/performers include:

David Beth

The Gnostic Science of Esoteric Voudon: Cosmos, Deity and Gnosis in the Work of a Voudon Secret Society

In this presentation David Beth, offers a rare glimpse into the Metaphysics and Modus Operandi of an initiatic Voudon Secret Society. Unique teachings on the soul, the esoteric dimensions of the cosmos and its primordial deities, form a powerful and complex system of Voudon; providing its adepts with the keys to attain magical powers, creative freedom and Gnostic liberation. Elaborating on these, and other central themes, the speaker takes us through some of the most hidden realms of Inner Voudon.

David Beth is an internationally respected spiritual and esoteric teacher. Born to German parents in Angola, Africa he has been initiated into several lineages of Afro-centric Gnosis, as well as Western forms of Esotericism. Amongst other accolades, David Beth is the founder of La Société Voudon Gnostique, a selective group of initiates and artists dedicated to manifesting the more powerful, inner revelations and transmissions of the Gods of Esoteric Voudon. SVG aims to push evolution and research of Voudon freely beyond all frontiers of orthodoxy. David has authored a range of authoritative books and essays on Voudon and related topics. He has recently established the esoteric publishing house: Theion Publishing. University educated in Germany and the USA, David has travelled and lived all over the world from Nigeria to Hamburg and Los Angeles to London, studying and teaching spiritual and esoteric systems for over two decades. David currently lives and works between Europe and Jets to Brazil

John Cussans

Voudon and the Haitian Revolution

John Cussans discusses the role of Vodou in anti-colonial struggles in Saint-Domingue/Haiti such as the famous Bwa Kayiman ceremony that inaugurated the Haitian Revolution and in resistance struggles against the USA occupation from 1915 to 1934. Attention is paid to the particular loa associated with these struggles and the colonial authority's responses to them.

John Cussans is an artist, writer and independent researcher whose current work examines misrepresentations of Haitian Vodou in popular culture, its association with moral panics within the mass media and its role in anti-colonial struggles. In 2009 and 2011 John participated in the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince and continues to work with the Ti Moun Rezistans artists’ community there. He is currently a visiting research fellow in the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths College.

Leah Gordon

Vodou and Art: a Border Culture

Leah Gordon explores the multifarious links between Vodou and art in both Haiti's rich art history and contemporary practice. Leah will discuss the use of image and artifact within Vodou ritual and the often-interchangeable role of artist and Houngan (Vodou priest). To conclude Gordon will explore the liminal space that contemporary artists currently inhabit whilst trying to negotiate their ancestral histories and cultural antecedents within a contemporary art market, which still has a conflicted relationship toward ethnographic and ritual objects

Leah Gordon is an artist, curator and writer who explores the boundaries between post-colonialism, religion, folk history and art. Her practice investigates the ruptures between Haiti and Britain's intervolved histories and cosmologies. Leah's work has been exhibited internationally including in the National Portrait Gallery, UK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Dakar Biennale. Leah Gordon co-curated 'Kafou: Haiti, History & Vodou’ at the Nottingham Contemporary, was the adjunct curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and was on the curatorial team of 'In Extremis: Death & Life in 21st Century Haitian Art' at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles and the Musee de la Civilisation, in Quebec City.

Gabriel Toso

Drapo Vodou: Sacred Flags of Haiti

In this lecture Gabriel Toso presents his research on Vodou flags or Drapó Vodou, an essential element and integral part of Vodou ceremonies. Traditionally made of sequins or beads in the oum’phor (temple) by the houn’gan (priest), they are intrinsically connected with the lwa they represent and are therefore considered powerful magical tools. The Drapó incorporates African elements, Catholic imagery and Masonic symbols becoming a reflection of the unique syncretic nature of Vodou itself. The lecture focuses on the flags’ forgotten African origins, their key ritualistic use and multifaceted iconography. Due to their visual appeal and the strong interest from Museums and art collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, Gabriel also explores their inevitable transformation from sacred objects to art objects.

Gabriel Toso is an art historian born in Venice by Italian-French parents. He now lives in London where he works in the art market and he is collaborating with the Learning, Volunteers and Audiences department at the British Museum. Having traveled in Haiti, he has developed a strong passion for Haitian culture and a keen interest in Vodou and ‘Vodou sacred art’. He is currently researching the place and role of the LGBT community in the Vodou religion.