Upcoming Talks, Conferences & Classes
(Calendar updated as talks are added or have already occurred!)
January 2025
Book of the Science of Nigromancy Live Online Course
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Tuesdays 14th, 21st, & 28th January | Time: 7pm (ET)
Location: Live Online Course Series
A live three-part course series investigating the pact-based spiritwork and spellcraft of the Science of Nigromancy, a sixteenth-century English manual of goetic conjuration.
The Boke of the Sience of Nygromansie is a relatively short but eminently practical sixteenth-century grimoire found in the second part of Sloane MS 3853. This concise handbook of unclean spiritwork offers instructions on pacting with ‘chapters’ or working-groups of spirits considered ‘enclosed’ by the ancient and senior shedim and later devil, Asmoday (aka Ashmedai or Asmodeus), demonstrating further ancient roots of early modern goetia.
This goetic manual teaches how to utilize various materia, gestures, and the nigromancer’s very book of calls and characters to deploy a range of ‘Applied Conjurations’ for tangible practical magical influences and effects with its working spirits. These spirits named in both familiar and unfamiliar manners, and variously found in other grimoiric works listed as both demons and fairies: spirits of woods, the airs, and rivers, as well as fortifications, forges, and dungeons. They offer a range of practicable sorceries, from going invisibly to destroying enemies, from healing physick to hunting game, and from constructing magical items and garments to effecting prison-breaks.
Significantly this text also includes notae and advice attributed to Saint Cyprian of Antioch, that infamous patron of sorcerers, concerning the conduct of goetic magic; and can thus certainly be considered a further example of the practices of early modern English Cyprianic nigromancy.
In the course of this series, we will investigate and contextualise the protocols, pacts, and procedures of this nigromantic Science, offering not only a foundation in the fundamentals of operating with this lesser-studied yet still potent grimoire, but also investigating application and experiment with its techniques and craft-logics in other grimoiric work, especially that of the Grimoirium Verum and the Faustian corpus of German nigromancy.
Cost: $125 (tickets available here)
February 2025
March 2025
April 2025
May 2025
June 2025
July 2025
On the Very Viscous: In Defense of the Material and Immaterial Magical Oil (Lecture)
Speaker: Jesse Hathaway Diaz
Date: 17 July- 21 July 2025 | Time: TBA
Location: In Person at the Viridis Genii Symposium
Through the centuries, magical oils have often followed a similar maxim as incense- sweet for fair things, noxious for foul things. However, such over-reliance on scent as the primary importance is a fallacy that has led to oil as secondary support rather than an oil as the magic itself. Much like traditional suffumigations, scent is a secondary, often collateral quality, of a traditional oil. So too are its constituent physical ingredients. An oil itself is a bottle-spell, containing the essences of plant, fungi, animal, mineral, place, human, and things subtler still–whereby the physical oil is the carrier of the combined essence and force of these ingredients delivered through the menstruum of a given oleum. They may come from inspired recipes brought forth from intellect or spirit communication; found in or inspired by ancient texts; and others the children of established tradition or any combination of such. Some oils can take years to make, being buried, stored away for certain tides of the year, or are merely prohibitive in their ingredients and can be made with ease once these are procured. Some are simple macerations and infusions, others given to the art of distillation, many combine both techniques. Some may address simple purposes, and others may be spirits unto themselves. But the Oil is more than the sum of its parts, and knowing all the ingredients will not, and should not, make the same oil. In this lecture, Hathaway Diaz will explore how the immaterial demands relationality that enhances the often over-commodification of the material and how, as magicians and witches, we should nurture and defend both the material and the immaterial oil.
Cost: Part of the Viridis Genii Symposium (tickets available here)
By Slick, By Grease, By Fat and Sap: The Devil’s in the Details (Workshop)
Speaker: Jesse Hathaway Diaz
Date: 17 July- 21 July 2025 | Time: TBA
Location: In Person at the Viridis Genii Symposium
Building upon this exploration of the immaterial and the material oil, workshop attendees will explore a variety of materia- botanical and mineral, by which to construct their own magical oil. Using traditional and personal exemplars, we will discuss and explore seven different oils (four traditional recipes and three personal) detailing their construction, use, and care. Examples of empowerments and ensouling will be given as means of empowering the oil to life and purpose. Each participant will leave with a newly constructed ‘condition’ oil an oil used to aide a specific purpose. Further means by which each oil may be empowered and animated further will be detailed in further instructions should each participant choose to do so.
Cost: Part of the Viridis Genii Symposium (tickets available here)
August 2025
Bedeviling Cunning: Traditional Folk Magic for Modern Resistance
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Friday 22nd August 2025 | Time: 4pm
Location: In Person at the Salem Witchcraft & Folklore Festival
Folk magic has always been the preserve of empowering working folk: those who live close to the breadline, under the weather, and at odds with the agendas of the landed and privileged. It should be no surprise that the cunning-crafts of early modern European professional sorcerers and the communities they served present a multitude of sorceries, spirit-works, and charm-crafts for socio-political resistance which offer potent historical exemplars for today’s struggles.
In this class we will examine traditional places of resistant empowerment: the refuge of the Forest, wherein arrows may be fletched for tomorrow’s ambushes; the Crossroads where deals may be struck; and the Graveyard where the returning dead may help us right injustices and foretell the battles to come.
We will explore cunning means of affecting locales and casting an area of influence: from the burial of planetary number squares under occupying enemy encampments, to the sprinkling of sigilated powders to lend peace, privacy, and protection. We will consider traditional folk magical means of thwarting patrolling sherifs and bailiff collection bullies, and besting the law courts of gentry magistrates: from powders and charms to chewed roots and more.
We will pour over the grimoiric catalogues and popular ballads of unclean spirits, and acquaint ourselves with the redistributing clans of goetic corvids who carry gold out of the counting-houses of kings; alongside formulations of the infamous Hand of Glory, and the many good devils that teach lock-picking, jail-breaking, and invisibility from authorities.
Likewise we will celebrate the folk heroes and folk saints of grassroots inspiration: the merry legends and revolutionary lore of Robin Hood and the many warriors who emerge from the woods to strike at tyranny and stand up for the downtrodden; the guileful trickeries of Reynard the Fox outwitting King Leo and greedy Isengrim the Wolf; and the drunkenly heretical hagiography of St Monday, patron folk-emblem of informal striking and working-class revelry and mutual aid.
Finally, we will rehearse various dirt sorceries of disruption, binding, community networking, and transformation through the magics and mysteries of geomantic divination, amulets, spellcraft, and sorcery.
Cost: $30. Register here.
A Dance without End: The Allure of Herodias, Queen of Witches
Speaker: Jesse Hathaway Diaz
Date: Saturday 23 August 2025 | Time: 4pm
Location: In Person at the Salem Witchcraft & Folklore Festival
Queen of Judea, Mother of Salome, Wife of Herod Antipas, and instrumental in the death of John the Baptist, the Biblical Herodias is an infamous figure who by the Middle Ages was named as the principal figure of a witch cult pervasive across Europe: a teacher of diablerie and mistress of magic and leader of the Wild Hunt. At once the cursed but immortal ancient queen, Herodias was considered a gifted magician and teacher and revolutionary in Leland’s “Aradia”, perhaps a survival and weaponization of pagan magics in a Christian world. Inspiring many great works of art and music and theatre, Herodias proves to be an enigmatic figure whose lore and practice are sadly less talked about. Tracing her history and influence from the historical figure through Mediterranean and Iberian folk expressions as well as literary and artistic explorations, come learn about and pay homage to the “Daughter of Babylon”, the Witch Queen Herodias!
Cost: TBA
A Folk Necromancy Power Hour with Radio Free Golgotha
Speakers: Jesse Hathaway Diaz & Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Saturday 30 August 2025 | Time: 9.15am
Location: In Person at TempleFest 2025
Necromancy can have a bad rap sometimes. In older times, it has been framed as the preserve of creepy magicians skulking about graveyards disrespecting the restful slumber of the dead…
Yet outside of accusations of ghost-bothering and other such harmful stereotypes about “black magic”, many if not all world traditions hold important regard in their folk magics for honouring the beloved dead, communicating with benevolent ancestors of both blood and chosen family, venerating lineage-founders and other such “Mighty Dead”, and finding empowering and life-affirming ways of working with wise tutelary souls.
In this two-headed presentation, Dr Alexander Cummins and Jesse Hathaway Diaz, co-hosts of the Radio Free Golgotha podcast and avid proponents of folk necromancy, will consider a range of wonderful ways we can explore and celebrate helpful interactions and engagements between the living and the dead from a variety of folk magical perspectives, cosmo-visions, and practices.
Geomancy for Cartomancers: Sixteen Spreads of the Elements & Planets
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Sunday 31 August 2025 | Time: 10.45am
Location: In Person at TempleFest 2025
The sixteen answer-figures of European Renaissance geomancy are found throughout pre-modern occult philosophy as well as traditional (and very practical) forms of divination, talisman-craft, and sorcery alike. They form a set of elemental Quartets (much like the elemental Triplicities of the twelve Zodiacal signs) and each figure is also considered governed by at least one of the seven classical planets. What is more, the four-part binary structure of these figure’s forms can be usefully employed in spreads for reading Tarot and playing cards!
In this workshop, contemporary cunning-man and geomancer Dr Alexander Cummins will guide participants through sixteen such card spreads – useful for all manner of questions, concerns, and meditations: including finding inspiration for creative projects, structuring research and study, emotional reflection and regulation, designing rituals, working with spirits, warding off misfortune, and many other forms of weighing options and making decisions.
This workshop assumes a basic background knowledge of card-reading, but no previous experience of geomancy is required. It is suggested you bring a deck of cards along to this workshop.