POSTPONED. Communes, Occultism and Modernity

 This lecture will be rescheduled for later in the summer. In the meantime, those with tickets will receive a refund.

___________________________________________________

Spiritual communes, so popular in the 1960s hippie era, were a phenomenon which also flourished seventy years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century. In this lecture, Dr. Christian Giudice looks at how the arrival of modernity made occult practitioners seek to create social utopias governed by occult-influenced laws. Examples explored will include Lomaland, Lily Dale, Fontainebleau and Cefalù.  The lecture will unpack the ideas which drove each of these occult experiments, and look at their founding, height and demise, focussing particularly on communes founded under the aegis of Theosophy, Spiritualism, the Fourth Way, and Thelema. 

This lecture is part of the 'Occultism and Modernity Series'. Dr Chris Giudice gained his doctorate from University of Gothenburg, and now lives in London; he is the head of the new Kamuret Press and is a regular Treadwell's speaker.