Date: Monday, November 15
Time: 7 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5 pm EST the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to [email protected]. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 5:30 pm EST on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add [email protected] to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

Leviathan, trickster, predator, hermit, explorer, lock-picker, maze-negotiator, playmate, escape artist, clown, hunter, glutton, sex-pest – the octopus is many things. Squishy as infinity itself, mercurial through cracks and openings, rippling out into manifest portal-crossing; they are slippery customers indeed.

In this illustrated lecture, Dr Alexander Cummins – historian of magic, poet, and keen amateur teuthologist (someone who studies cephalopods) – considers the creature as a living mandala. We will trace kraken sightings upon the ocean, into museums, and across fiction, as well as charting the totemic power of the octopus in Western Magical Traditions, Hawaiian creation myths and healing magic, Japanese spirit-work. We will also explore accounts of cephalopod escape artists from Seattle aquariums all the way back to the early first century CE. And yes, we’ll even talk about Cthulhu.

So if you are a fan of these tentacled wonders, and want to know which Major Arcana of the Thoth Tarot displays their Mysteries in plain sight, please join us for an evening of eight-handed marine occultism.

Dr. Alexander Cummins is a magician, diviner, historian, and poet whose work focuses on magical books, demonology, geomancy, and folk magic as well as love divination and enchantment. His doctoral research centered on magic and the emotions in the pre-modern world.

Image: "Le Poulpe Colossal" by malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort, 1801, from the descriptions of French sailors reportedly attacked by such a creature off the coast of Angola.