Lecture/Presentations:

Ralph Metzner

Alchemical Divination - Remembering the Past, Envisioning Possible Futures

Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. is a recognized pioneer in studies of consciousness and transformation. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, he collaborated with Leary and Alpert in studies with psychedelics at Harvard in the 1960s, co-authoring The Psychedelic Experience. He is a psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is also cofounder/president of the Green Earth Foundation, dedicated to "healing and harmonizing the relations between humanity, Earth and Spirit." His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self and Green Psychology; as well as a new series of short books on The Ecology of Consciousness.

Erik Davis

A Brief History of the Phantasm.

Erik Davis is a San Francisco-based writer, performer, and independent scholar. He is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle), and a 33 1/3 volume on the occult dimensions of Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum,). Davis has contributed to scores of magazines and books, and has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the Maybe Logic Academy, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He wrote the libretto for the Burning Man rock opera How to Survive the Apocalypse, and he posts sometimes at techgnosis.com.

David Beth

A-Mor: A gnostic magician's view on esoteric love and Eros.

David Beth, author of Voudon Gnosis, is a writer and esoteric explorer. He was born to German parents in Luanda, Angola, May 1974. In the course of his life he has spent 16 years in Africa living in Nigeria and Kenya. The unique, rich metaphysical and spiritual climate of especially West Africa has had a huge influence on David from a very young age. During these 16 years he was fortunate to encounter personally many powerful representatives of the local spiritual and metaphysical traditions such as Susanne Wenger, high priestess of Osun and keeper of the sacred groves of Oshogbo. In his years in Africa he has received transmissions and empowerments of various types which he has infused in his magical and spiritual work.

Paul Devereux

Rock Music for Real: Sound at Sacred Places

Paul Devereux is a research associate at the Royal College of Art, London, investigating with Jon Wozencroft (Touch Music) the audio-visual characteristics of the Avebury Neolithic complex, Wiltshire, U.K., and the Preseli area of Wales, U.K., source of the Stonehenge bluestones, and is a founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed publication, Time & Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture (Berg, Oxford). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Research Fellow of International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), Princeton. His research interests focus especially on archaeoacoustics, the prehistoric mind, the anthropology of consciousness, and the origins of art. He is also a painter and photographer.

Philip Farber

Gods, Demons & Imaginary Friends
(Whether You Believe in Them or Not)

Philip H. Farber is the author of Futureritual: Magick for the 21st Century, a manual of neurological exploration and Meta-Magick:The Book of Atem (Weiser Books, 2008). His articles on magick and popular culture have appeared in Green Egg Magazine, The Journal of Hypnotism, Hypnosis Today, Mondo 2000, High Times, Paradigm Shift, Reality Sandwich and other unique publications and web sites. He has produced several DVD packages on magical topics, including Magick for the 21st Century and Meta-Magick INVOCATION. Phil is an instructor for Maybe Logic Academy (www.maybelogic.org), a Certified Hypnotist and a Licensed Trainer of Neuro-linguistic Programming, with a private practice in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley. Visit Phil at http://www.hawkridgeproductions.com.

Aaron Gach

Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Extra-Sensory Perception or:
How to do Magic(k) in a Police State

Co-founder and Director of Operations for the Center for Tactical Magic - Cultivating mirth and mystery in all four hemispheres, the Center for Tactical Magic began in 2000 as a think-tank dedicated to the research, development, and deployment of all types of magic(k) in the service of positive social transformation. By working across barriers of contemporary art, martial arts, magical arts, and community action, the Center for Tactical Magic has endeavored to produce numerous public projects that analyze existing forces and activate latent energies. Embracing magical thinking and unconventional uses of technology, the Center for Tactical Magic continues to mix elements of subculture, social politics, and revelry into a powerful potion. To find out more, check out: www.tacticalmagic.org

Carl Abrahamsson

Size Matters

Carl Abrahamsson (born 1966, Stockholm, Sweden) is a multidisciplinary witness to the current cultural question marks around us. Embarking on a wide-eyed spiritual journey in his early teens, he has since then been churned through a multitude of teachings by various enlightened beings. His metaphysical interests of yesteryear have more and more become integrated in various artistic expressions, mainly writing, music and photography. Art, according to Abrahamsson, has unlimited talismanic potential, which means, perhaps, that it could be high time to start moving and shaking NOW. www.carlabrahamsson.com

Matthew Wiley

Ayahuasca Shamanism and Magick: An introduction to Ayahuasca and Psychoactive Sacraments

Matthew Wiley is a psychonaut and has been teaching Traditional Tantra, Yoga, Western Occultism, and comparative religion for more than 10 years. His spiritual quest has led him globetrotting throughout Asia and Europe. Along with studies in Kaula Tantra, and Shamanism, he has worked with Santo Daime, The Native American Church and has lived in several monasteries as well. As a neophyte ethnobotanist his current focus is on indigenous cultures, the ritual use of psychoactive plants, and their magnitude and importance to the world today. He holds a Yoga Shiromani and is an Initiate in Western Esoterica.

Edwin Pouncey

Ira Cohen: A Magickal Vision

Born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, Edwin Pouncey has worked as a music journalist since the early 80s where he has been fortunate enough to meet and talk with many important musicians and artists. After joining The Wire magazine in the mid-90s on a freelance basis, he was given the opportunity to speak to some major figures of the 60s and 70s counterculture - including New York poet, filmmaker, publisher and shaman Ira Cohen whose mylar photographs were used for album sleeves by Spirit, John McLaughlin and Pharaoh Sanders and paperback book covers for William S. Burroughs Jr. and science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt. Pouncey's fascination with Cohen's extraordinary life and admiration for his art and ideas produced several articles about him for The Wire, and it is material from these meetings (together with an appraisal of Cohen's magickal vision) that will form the basis of Pouncey's lecture for this year's Equinox Festival.

Paola Igliori

Tammorriate, Pizziche & Tarante

Writer, publisher, filmmaker and poet Paola Igliori is the author of "American Magus: Harry Smith, a Modern Alchemist," the superb biography of an influential film maker, ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, painter, magician. Since 2003 Paola has returned to Italy and founded Villa Lina Bio-Officina a multidisciplinary and multicultural association that holds seminars, conferences and creative activities on her family estate Villa Lina, near Ronciglione in Etruscan Tuscia north of Rome.

Paola continues to film the Italian ecstatic and healing dances "Tammorriate", "Pizziche" and "Tarante" - broadening the research on the ancient snake of ecstatic and healing music which unwinds through Africa and the Mediterranean. Starting in Morocco in 1990, after having being introduced by Paul Bowels to the various fraternities (Sufi et al) of ecstatic dance and of "trance" healing: the "Jillala" which bring to trance through flute music, the Joujouka autoctonous Berbers, which use archaic wind instruments like Pan's Flute, and whose sounds and the goat's skins for the ceremonies recall our Sardinian "Mammutones", then finally the "Gnawas".

Masamba Fall

The Seed of Joy:The Baye Fall

Born in Dakar, Senegal in 1979 Massamba Fall Sy entered the Sufi Confraternity Baye Fall (founded in Senegal around 1882 by the Mystic Sufi Mame Cheihk Ibrahima Fall called "The Light") in 1998. Dedicating his life of "Devotion in Action" to Cheihk Amadou Bamba founder of the Holy City of Touba and powerful spiritual voice against Colonialism. Massamba, left his professional school, to dedicate himself totally to Baye Fall life, beginning to carve prayer rosaries in ebony as "Meditation in Action" & singing the name of God dancing in circle until dawn.

In 2007 Massamba met and married writer and filmmaker Paola Igliori in Dakar and began filming "The Seed of Joy" which previewed in 2008 the Rome Film Festival. Together Massamba and Paola have created a center and guesthouse at Abene, in the forest of Casamance, Senegal : "Keur Baye Fall" which provides ecotourism workshops.

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule

Time, Fate & Spider Magicks

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule is the director of the Australian-based Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co., artist-author of 'CONJUNCTIO', a Graphic Grimmoire from Fulgur Limited (Sept 08), 'The Book of Kaos Tarot' and 'A Brief HIRStory of TimEmiT...' Orryelle is an initiated Tantric Aghori and founder of the HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk.

Robert Ansell

Adventures in Limbo:
exploring the creative sorcery of Austin Osman Spare's magico-aesthetic.

Robert Ansell is widely recognised as a pioneer in the contemporary revolution in talismanic publishing, having co-founded the esoteric fine press Fulgur Limited in 1992. Working closely with Kenneth and Steffi Grant, Michael Bertiaux and the late Andrew Chumbley, he has helped birth some of the most inspirational magical books of recent times. A specialist in the art and sorcery of Austin Osman Spare, his published work includes; AOS Ex-Libris (1988), The Book of Ugly Ecstasy (1996), Borough Satyr (2005) and The Valley of Fear (2008). Rarely seen as a public lecturer, his two recent appearances concerning Spare, AOS: A Celebration (2006) and The Cult of One (2007) were critically acclaimed.

Stephen Grasso

Open Up the Gate

Stephen Grasso is a writer and artist whose work explores the idea of magic, its history and what it means in the context of the 21st century world. His main focus of interest is African and African Diaspora magico-religious traditions; although his work is also concerned with the way in which a living tradition of magic has survived in the margins of western culture as a liminal thread throughout history. His writing appears in the anthologies Generation Hex, Dreamflesh, and Devoted. He is currently working on a book about his personal experiences exploring magic, occultism, Voodoo and related marginalized belief systems. He is a founder and regular contributor to liminalnation.org.

Marco Pasi

Marco Pasi is Professor in History of Hermetic philosophy and related currents. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Milan, and a PhD in Religious studies from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne, Paris). He has focused his research mainly on the relationship between modern esotericism and politics, on the history of the idea of magic, and on methodological issues related to the study of Western esotericism. He is a member of the editorial board of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism and Politica Hermetica.

Robert Wallis

'Remember Mugwort, what you made known': The Nine Herbs Charm, Mugwort Lore and Elf-persons - an animic approach to Anglo-Saxon Magick

Wallis' research interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, including indigenous and prehistoric art, particularly 'shamanistic' art, and the re-presentation of the past in the present, especially by contemporary pagans and neo-shamans, and the implications of such engagements for heritage management.