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

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!