These run once a month on a Thursday from 7-8 pm (UK time) by Zoom. Contact info@maryattwood.com for dates.
We know how to read a book and get lost in the other world of the imagination, and we allow ourselves to be moved emotionally and viscerally by music, but have we lost our visionary capacity when it comes to looking at works of art?
Leonardo da Vinci barely needs an introduction. His name is associated with genius, a man whose insatiable desire to discover what lay behind the world of natural phenomena led him to become the archetypal renaissance man equally adept at painting as he was with creating ideas for warfare and entertaining the court. Yet Leonardo was also a human being who encountered his own struggles and worked incredibly hard, incorporating a number of different qualities and cognitive faculties which co-existed alongside each other.
In this seminar, Dr Iain McGilchrist draws on his new work, The Matter with Things, and addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that have a practical urgency for all of us today. Specifically, what has happened to our sense of the sacred and divine? Does it matter any longer?
Is it true that it has been driven out of our world by science and reason? How could an understanding of the structure and function of the human brain even begin to make sense of
what has happened – and is still happening? And should we be concerned?
The phenomena of spirit possession can be viewed and reviewed through the lens of differing fields of study including and most notably religious studies, psychology and anthropology. When reading in this area of research one would expect to encounter discourse giving examples from within the realms of the main world religions such as exorcism, or the more recent practices of the séance within the spiritualist churches. Here we will engage mainly with this phenomenon as presented through shamanic practices and within this conduct a study of the related context including physical space and ritual. Although there will not be a discussion around the use of the term shamanism, engaging in this particular account of spirit possession will undoubtedly highlight some of its core traits.
“Those who have been told,” William Blake pled in his “Descriptive Catalog” of works for sale, “that my Works are but an unscientific and irregular Eccentricity, a Madman’s Scrawls, I demand of them to do me the justice to examine before they decide.” Unfortunately, relatively few people have taken him up on that invitation, which is a shame, because once one starts looking into what he produced, he comes to seem very sane indeed – too sane, perhaps, for his contemporaries, and maybe even for us.
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