BANNED BOOKS WEEK 2024

For Banned Books Week we are pleased to dust off some books from our library, present some online readings and host some online talks with Treadwells London.

Banned Books Week is an annual initiative of the American Library Association, who campaign for the universal freedom to read with Unite Against Book Bans in the USA. A wider coalition includes in the UK Index on Censorship.

Read the Index on Censorship report of August 2024 on the increasing pressure put upon librarians and educators in the UK to restrict and ban texts. 

Book bans are not something to be taken lightly and we are joining in this year, with an election in the USA as well as in the UK, to celebrate the right to read.

Free webcasts

 ZORA NEALE HURSTON:

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Credit:Wikipedia

> Play Webcast >  ZORA NEALE HURSTON

https://www.zoranealehurston.com/

The Life of Herod the Great will be published by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollins, on 7 January 2025. It would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday.

Dr Louise Fenton’s webcast introduces Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s extraordinary work on Haitian and Jamaican Voodoo,TELL MY HORSE – was not actually the work which got her banned from the bookshelves – that honour went to her equally extraordinary (and previously published)  novel, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. Hasten to read both! A controversial and uncompromising figure in her lifetime, in 1948 Hurston was falsely accused of a crime she could not have committed as she was finishing a novel at the time in Honduras. “My race has seen fit to destroy me” she said at the time; long since repatriated she is seen today for what she was: a distinguished anthropologist, film maker and a writer of poetic and most insightful prose. 

 

DIVINE FEMININE:

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ANGEL GALVAR

> Play Webcast > THE ANGEL GALVAR

14th June 1583 – Trithenius is put in his place by the female angel Galvar… who takes the form of a far from ‘weak or feeble woman’, unlike the Queen described herself. John Dee explained that the angel takes male or female form depending on the gender which best serves its purpose. Galvar is quite clear that women and men are indeed equal. Trithenius claimed that angels could never take female form, because of their inherent weakness and ‘impurity’. That makes this passage thus possibly one of the earliest feminist treatises to appear in the English Language. John Dee’s conversations with angels were made possible through the use of scrying, rather than via elaborate ritual process; the one piece of magical apparatus that Dee and Kelly did have was a ‘shew-stone’ through which the scryer saw the visions of angels. Following the transcription of the conversations with angels, the documents were buried and hidden from public view, and self-censored. 

 

BOOKS IN FLAMES:

THE SUPPRESSION OF MAGICAL TEXTS

FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY

> Play Webcast > BOOKS IN FLAME

Steve Patterson writes on complex subjects and speaks in plain easy to understand prose.  In this rather wonderful talk touching on The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the self-censorship of Mary Anne South and our obedience to the new gods of technology,  Steve Patterson discusses not only these details but the history of the book in general, the dissemination & suppression of magical literature, and the operation of power in relation to the publication of hermetic and magical texts from the early medieval period to the present day. 

IN 1930, OXFORD UNIVERSITY FAMOUSLY TRIED TO BAN ALEISTER CROWLEY’S LECTURE ON GILLES DE RAIS, THE MEDIEVAL OCCULTIST. LISTEN TO OUR TALK ON WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THEY DID!

 

> Play Free Webcast > THE BANNED LECTURE

Gilles de Rais was framed, as far as Aleister Crowley, writing in 1930, was concerned; and we think so too. Crowley’s  Banned Lecture was published immediately after the Catholic Chaplain of Oxford University forbade the presentation to the Oxford University Poetry Society. In essence an attack on the medieval establishment and an explanation of how the Orthodoxy had always suppressed free thinkers, the lecture posits that Gilles De Rais was as a result of his homosexuality and individualisim attacked, imprisoned and convicted firstly for that and secondly as an occultist. It seems absurd to us that he could have concealed the physical evidence of murders of upwards of 500 children; and we suggest that his confessions (obtained under torture) were in fact given partly as a mercy to those he would have potentially indicted by maintaining his innocence on the latter charge. Contemporary historians in France now begin to suggest that he was wrongfully executed. Joyce’s discussion connects to the theme of the success of the controlled narrative, an observation which runs through our Banned Books Week programming. Alternative discourses present a threat to this hegemonic privilege. Crowley’s lecture also did this in 1930, and does now today. 

 

 

• Let’s talk about Down There… Là Bas was considered so outrageous that it was banned from sale everywhere on the Paris Metro at the time of publication. Read all about it!

> Play Free Webcast > LÀ BAS – HUYSMANS

The Damned ( Là-Bas ) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1891. It deals with the subject of Satanism in 19th C France. The novel created outrage on its first publication, and was banned throughout Paris from being sold in public, at train stations or on the Metro. Durtal, the protagonist, is researching the life of Gilles de Rais, the alleged child-killer who was in addition the producer of an extraordinary pageant on the subject of the Siege of Orléans, and as he proceeds with his research becomes more and more embroiled himself in the demi-monde of fin-de-siècle Paris. Gilles de Rais was incidentally the subject of Aleister Crowley’s Banned Lecture.   Simon Costin reads from Huysman’s novel the outrageous finale, which describes a satanic black mass in a church in Paris, with the all the lurid embellishments of the grand-guignol… 

 

DR SHAI FERARO:  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF

BRITISH OCCULT AND ‘MYSTICAL’ BOOKSHOPS

BETWEEN C. 1890 AND C.2000

Hear how The Sorcerer’s Apprentice bookshop in Leeds was targeted as a second Leeds branch of the bookshop was fire-bombed by Christian Fundamentalists on Sunday August 13th 1989.