The Morbid Anatomy Library houses an extensive collection of image-heavy books exploring  death in art and culture, anatomical art, Latin American art and culture, collectors and collecting, sexology, the uncanny, decadence, horror and atrocity, the gothic, circus and sideshow, and the occult. You will also find an idiosyncratic collection of art, artifacts and curiosities from around the world and a gift shop filled with strange, rare and wonderful objects including signed and vintage books, obscure tarot decks, antique Mexican retablos, and magical and devotional objects from around the world.

Join us at The Morbid Anatomy Library to read some or our many books, marvel at our collection of curiosities, and peruse our gift shop. Today, we also invite you to take part in an informal tarot salon during opening hours, in which we’ll share, enjoy, and discuss readings and interpretations in a friendly and non-competitive atmosphere. This free event is for curious fans, enthusiasts, dedicated scholars, and for those who just want to learn more about tarot from other tarot enthusiasts. Bring your own deck or use the display decks from our tarot shop.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels.Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

Join Elisabeth Brander—Director of the Center for the History of Medicine and Head of Rare Books Bernard Becker Library at Washington University—for an exclusive peek into the hidden treasure of her institute’s collection.

What will happen to us next? Looking into the future has obsessed human beings since written records began. Join writer and art historian Christopher Dell (The Occult, Witchcraft & Magic) for an online talk about his upcoming book Prophecies, revealing the long history of prediction and fortune telling in every human society—from ancient Egyptian oracles, Roman augurs, and Aztec omens to Japanese divination and the active magic of Norse seers. It traces the parallels in different traditions and cultures, exploring the signs and images found in antique documents, rare books, imaginative projections, and divinatory paraphernalia.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

“The Heart Has Reasons” (1993) explores different ways of imagining the human heart—contrasting science and medicine’s idea of this essential but fragile organ as a pump or a piece of machinery that can be fixed, with the image of the heart common to all cultures, as the seat of courage, love and the soul. The film’s main contributor is James Hillman whose essay “The Thought of the Heart” inspired Mark and Susan Kidel to make a documentary that was included in a Channel Four (UK) series about cardiac disease, a film that would take viewers on an less conventional journey, bringing together artists, musicians, writers with a heart surgeon who acknowledges that medical students are taught from the outset to put their “hearts” or their emotions to one side. Join for the film, stay for a discussion with the filmmaker!

The cemeteries of New Orleans are unlike anywhere else in the world. They exhibit a fragile beauty, telling the stories of the countless immigrants who made this city their home. Influenced by European and Caribbean sensibilities, these “Cities of the Dead” are filled with ornate tombs and personalized stones that echo an architectural artistry. From the hauntingly beautiful, tree-lined mausoleums of the Garden District cemeteries to the poignant, lichen-covered monuments of St. Louis No. 1, they chronicle the stories of this rich, multicultural city. This talk with JR Pepper will explore the remarkable cemetery monuments, their cultural influences, and the unique challenges of the cemeteries of New Orleans.

The Morbid Anatomy Library houses an extensive collection of image-heavy books exploring  death in art and culture, anatomical art, Latin American art and culture, collectors and collecting, sexology, the uncanny, decadence, horror and atrocity, the gothic, circus and sideshow, and the occult. You will also find an idiosyncratic collection of art, artifacts and curiosities from around the world and a gift shop filled with strange, rare and wonderful objects including signed and vintage books, obscure tarot decks, antique Mexican retablos, and magical and devotional objects from around the world.

Join author and professor Paul Stob at the Morbid Anatomy Library as we celebrate his newest book, Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind. In this conversation, he'll discuss this absorbing tale of science and showmanship, ideology and enterprise, which provides not just a fascinating history of our country, but also crucial insight into the scientific currents that continue to propel modern life.

Join us at The Morbid Anatomy Library to read some or our many books, marvel at our collection of curiosities, and peruse our gift shop. Today, we also invite you to take part in an informal tarot salon during opening hours, in which we’ll share, enjoy, and discuss readings and interpretations in a friendly and non-competitive atmosphere. This free event is for curious fans, enthusiasts, dedicated scholars, and for those who just want to learn more about tarot from other tarot enthusiasts. Bring your own deck or use the display decks from our tarot shop.

Join us for a Sunday afternoon edition of the Silent Book Club of Death NYC as we gather in the magical galleries of the Met Cloisters for an afternoon of reading and contemplating mortality. Facilitated by Lauren Seeley, death care worker and death literacy advocate, the program will begin with silent reading followed by a game of The Death Deck and open discussion among participants. Books will be provided, but you are welcome to bring your own.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein to discuss The Origin of Satan by historian of religion Elaine Pagels, which provides, as its official copy describes, “a dramatic interpretation of Satan and his role on the Christian tradition. With magisterial learning and the elan of a born storyteller, Pagels turns Satan's story into an audacious exploration of Christianity's shadow side, in which the gospel of love gives way to irrational hatreds that continue to haunt Christians and non-Christians alike.”

The activist, writer, and publisher Zoe Anderson Norris was a Kentucky belle who reinvented herself in Manhattan c.1900 to, “fight for the poor with my pen.” She published her own magazine, The East Side, focusing on immigrant poverty and calling for the world to help. To draw more people into her causes, she made sure to have fun, too; she partied with her fellow bohemian reformers, known as the Ragged Edge Klub, and became known as a Queen of Bohemia. Norris also documented her own paranormal experiences. In 1914, she mailed out an East Side issue with a description of a dream that she would die soon, and days later her heart failed at a Ragged Edge Klub dinner. Join author Eve Kahn to hear about the accomplishments and paranormal writings of Zoe, based on Kahn’s new book Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Danse Macabre ($10/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

We hope you’ll join us for a Morbid Anatomy Show and Tell cocktail party! Get a rare peek at the private collections of Founder and Creative Director Joanna Ebenstein. We also invite you to share an object or artifact of your own, while meeting and enjoying a virtual cocktail with others in the Morbid Anatomy Community.

Please join us at The Morbid Anatomy Library in Brooklyn for an evening of writing, wine, and community. From the curious to the serious, writers of all levels of skill are welcome. Using the library collection for inspiration, try your hand at prose or poems that draw from the shadow worlds of the imagination. The Sip & Scribe Salon, facilitated by longtime writing teacher Jocelyn Lieu, includes enspiriting writing prompts, writing time, and opportunities to share. Writing materials and refreshments are provided.

The Morbid Anatomy Library houses an extensive collection of image-heavy books exploring  death in art and culture, anatomical art, Latin American art and culture, collectors and collecting, sexology, the uncanny, decadence, horror and atrocity, the gothic, circus and sideshow, and the occult. You will also find an idiosyncratic collection of art, artifacts and curiosities from around the world and a gift shop filled with strange, rare and wonderful objects including signed and vintage books, obscure tarot decks, antique Mexican retablos, and magical and devotional objects from around the world.

This online workshop will lead attendees to design their own personal solstice ritual that they can manifest on Midsummer night or the following day. Building on rituals created for the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, this session will help you use myth and metaphor to mark the turning of the year. Throughout, we will take inspiration from stories such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tale of the Holly King and the Oak King, The Green Knight, and several Trickster stories about stealing the Sun.

Free to members of the Morbid Anatomy Patreon at Joanna’s Psychopomp level, Oracle Level and above. Become a member here.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

Hope to see you at this free, informal, online monthly meetup devoted to open and non-judgemental conversations about death with likeminded people from around the world. Any related topic is welcome.

At Death Cafe people gather to "eat cake, drink tea and discuss death." For this free online event, join death midwife Lisa Cox on Zoom with a snack and beverage in hand, along with questions or stories and a thoughtful ear. There is no agenda, except as arises among those in attendance. Death Cafe is a worldwide non-profit movement to allow non-judgmental space for people to talk about death, online or in person.

Join us at The Morbid Anatomy Library to read some or our many books, marvel at our collection of curiosities, and peruse our gift shop. Today, we also invite you to take part in an informal tarot salon during opening hours, in which we’ll share, enjoy, and discuss readings and interpretations in a friendly and non-competitive atmosphere. This free event is for curious fans, enthusiasts, dedicated scholars, and for those who just want to learn more about tarot from other tarot enthusiasts. Bring your own deck or use the display decks from our tarot shop.

Dionysos emerges as one of the most enigmatic and enduring figures of ancient Greek religion, a mystery cult deity whose presence stretches from Minoan civilization around 1700 BCE through the Roman era. Associated with women, snakes, goats, bulls, wine, and women's madness, Dionysos dissolved boundaries. Carl Kerenyi famously described him as “the archetype of indestructible life,” a being whose mythic pattern centers on death and miraculous resurrection. Following Kerenyi as a guide, this talk will trace the figure of Dionysos back to Minoan religion, where the god’s epiphanies co-evolved with ancient matriarchal goddesses who later shaped the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

On Christmas Day in 1913, while deeply immersed in his experiments with active imagination, Carl Gustav Jung experienced a visionary metamorphosis: he was transformed into a lion-headed deity encoiled by a serpent. This was the enigmatic figure of Aion, the god of Eternal Time from the ancient Mithraic mysteries. In this lecture, religious studies scholar Dr. Hereward Tilton explores the occultist inspiration of this harrowing experience of ego-death. Above all, the influence of G. R. S. Mead allows us to accurately situate Jung’s work within the Western gnostic traditions.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

Across the ancient world, cultures independently constructed monumental, pyramidal, and vertically oriented structures—ziggurats, stepped temples, mounds, and artificial mountains that continue to dominate their landscapes thousands of years later. Why did humans everywhere feel compelled to build up? Join Art Historian Brenda Edgar as she uncovers these these structures not only as tombs, temples, or symbols of power, but as monumental expressions of a pan-human capacity for altered states of consciousness.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

Hope to see you at this free, informal, online monthly meetup devoted to open and non-judgemental conversations about death with likeminded people from around the world. Any related topic is welcome.

Between 1968–69, the Zodiac Killer struck fear into the hearts of the public, claiming at least five victims and taunting the police. He was never caught. Tonight, join author and former police officer Eddie McNamara as he peels back decades of myth and sensationalism to reveal a shocking truth: The Zodiac Killer never existed. Rather than a single, unstoppable predator, he was an urban legend—one amplified by media frenzy and public imagination. Drawing on his new book Zodiactually—and the original police files, newspaper archives, and court records that shaped it—McNamara shares the hidden stories behind the murders and reveals how media frenzy, public hysteria, and myth-making created one of true crime’s most enduring (and imagined) figures.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Danse Macabre and above levels; eligible members will receive a Zoom invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member HERE.

Grab a drink and join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein to share your own—or listen to others’—mysterious encounters, whether ghost stories, uncanny synchronicities, or unusual happenings.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

At Death Cafe people gather to "eat cake, drink tea and discuss death." For this free online event, join death midwife Lisa Cox on Zoom with a snack and beverage in hand, along with questions or stories and a thoughtful ear. There is no agenda, except as arises among those in attendance. Death Cafe is a worldwide non-profit movement to allow non-judgmental space for people to talk about death, online or in person.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

This film—by Mark and Susan Kidel and James Hillman—defends the notion that being blue isn’t to be avoided at all costs, but embraced, as the Ancients and pre-scientific philosophers and healers had done, realizing that going “down” offered a pathway to wisdom and wholeness, an experience of life in which darkness suffering had as much of a place as light and well-being.  Arising out of the writings and lectures of James Hillman—and threaded around an interview with the renowned and iconoclastic archetypal psychologist—the film evokes the melancholy mood with the help of a rich variety of images—works of art by Rembrandt, Munch, Picasso, Giorgone, Cranach, Dürer and others, and the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Bartok, Bach, Beethoven, Geoffrey Oryema, and the Irish ulleiann piper Liam O’Flynn. There are allusions to mythology—Saturn and Innana in particular—and contributions from two manic depressive writers. stay for a discussion with the filmmaker!

In Jesi Bender’s new experimental historical novel, she explores Victorian girlhood in the burned-over district of upstate New York, where death hovered close and people learned became conduits between this world and the next. Thirteen-year-old Ambrétte Memenon connects to her parents through their interests: Spiritualism for her Maman and electricity for her Papa. In her pursuit, Ambrétte is drawn into a deep abyss of the unknown as she learns more about both death and the electric spark of the human spirit. In this talk, author Jesi Bender will share her extensive research about the so called burned over district in Upstate New York, and its connection to spiritualism, and read from the book.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

The Psychopomp Salon is a thematic presentation/meetup that will explore—via images, words, and group discussion—areas of our founder Joanna Ebenstein's research and travels. This month, we’ll focus on Ebenstein and her husband Bryan Melillo’s recent trip to India, and especially her month spent in Varanasi—one of the oldest cities on earth and the center for death rituals in that country.

Hysteria was once the only mental disorder exclusively attributed to women. According to feminist theory, it functioned as a tool to control women’s health, behavior, and expression. Though no longer a medical diagnosis, the label “hysteric” still lingers, often used to describe women who defy patriarchal norms. In this talk, research-based artist Lucy Bink will discuss portraits of women diagnosed with hysteria. Focusing a series of photographs taken between 1876 and 1880 at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, she will reflect on the negative repercussions of the era’s treatment and the influence these portraits had on Western representations of femininity.

This lecture will invite you to join author Nathalie von Zelowitz in her journey into the dark and extreme psychology, perspectives and emotions of Bernard, who was discovered at a crime scene the next morning, repeating the phrase “I Ate His Heart,” over and over. Zelowitz also interrogates society, the law, insanity, incarceration, taboos and psychology. Bernard arrived at the Château-Thierry prison—where von Zelowitz works as a psychologist and criminologist—which marked the beginning of a unique psychotherapy and led her to write the new book I Ate His Heart: Interviews with a Cannibal.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

The name “Aleister Crowley” instantly conjures visions of diabolic ceremonies and orgiastic indulgences—and while the sardonic Crowley would perhaps be the last to challenge such a view, he was also much more than “the Beast,” as this authoritative biography shows.  Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein to discuss Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, Richard Kaczynski’s rigorously researched biography of the controversial founder of modern magick, as well as a study of the occult, sexuality, Eastern religion, and more.

In fifteenth-century Flemish painting, some of the most important moments in Christian history take place not in churches but in bedrooms. This lecture with Art Historian Brenda Edgars examines the late medieval bedchamber as a charged visual site where theology, domestic life, and embodied experience collide. By reading Annunciation scenes alongside secular interior paintings, we will explore how artists navigated the uncomfortable implications of the Incarnation.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels. Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

Hope to see you at this free, informal, online monthly meetup devoted to open and non-judgemental conversations about death with likeminded people from around the world. Any related topic is welcome.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

What can we learn from studying how people in other cultures ritualise death and dying? Naomi Westerman was an anthropologist who travelled the world studying how people in other cultures use ritual to come to terms with death, when her entire family died suddenly. Now, Naomi is a death acceptance activist and author of the UK best-seller Happy Death Club. This talk covers her years working as a death anthropologist, covering diverse death rituals past and present, from the double burial practice in rural China, and mortuary endo-cannibalism in the Amazon jungle, to Mexico's Day of the Dead, Irish wakes and Jewish shiva ceremonies.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

Join artist Kate Samworth for this introduction to the art of natural history. We will explore how the spice trade, the Greco-Arabic translation movement, and the printing press shaped Renaissance artists and scientists, and how images of the era reveal their scientific, artistic, social, political, economic, and religious motives—as well as the challenges they faced in sorting fact from fiction. Frenzied collecting of natural and man-made objects became a primary occupation of 16th-century nobility, merchants, apothecaries, and natural philosophers. For some, such collections displayed wealth; for others, they offered opportunities for spiritual contemplation. Natural philosophers used them to study connections between organic beings and to find order in the natural world, helping to lay the foundations of modern science.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here.

In this edition of Morbid Anatomy Book club, join our founder Joanna Ebenstein as we discuss Caliban and the Witch, a provocative and fascinating book in which Italian‑American feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were not simply medieval superstition but a political project that destroyed communal ways of life, criminalized forms of female autonomy, and normalized unpaid reproductive labor in the home. By pairing “Caliban” (a figure for colonized and enslaved peoples) with the “witch,” she shows how racialized and gendered violence were tightly intertwined in the making of modern capitalism. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, she traces how enclosure, colonial conquest, and the mass persecution of “witches” reshaped gender, the family, and the body from the late Middle Ages onward.

Are you doula curious? Have you heard of end-of-life or death doulas and wonder if this may be a path for you to explore? Did you know that doulas provide complementary non-medical physical, emotional and spiritual support to the dying and their families, and that planning can begin any time, not just when someone is aging or terminally ill? Tonight, join Wyoming's Death Midwife Lisa Cox to learn more about this path of service. Through lecture, questions, discussion and role play, we will explore the doula model of care, specific soft and hard skills employed by doulas, and tips for getting started.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

Before the rise of modern medicine, disease was experienced as physical, spiritual, moral, and social all at once—and healing required more than physical treatment. Across medieval and early modern Europe, this worldview produced a vast and remarkably specific system of healing saints, each invoked against particular ailments: diseases of the eyes, childbirth, plague, cancer, and countless other bodily threats. Drawing on art history, religious practice, and the history of medicine, join Art Historian Brenda Edgar to explore how saints became specialists, why particular illnesses were paired with particular bodies.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein for a richly illustrated talk celebrating The Art of Fairy Tales, her stunning new book exploring how master artists have brought these timeless stories and figures to life. Spanning fairies to monsters, witches to mermaids, and drawing on artworks from across continents and centuries, the book invites us into enchanted realms that are at once awe-inspiring and unsettling. From the haunting visions of Golden Age illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Maxfield Parrish, to the Pre-Raphaelite romanticism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the symbolist shimmer of Gustav Klimt, and the dreamlike surrealism of Leonora Carrington, the book gathers a breathtaking array of works that reveal the enduring power of fairy tale imagery.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

The Morbid Anatomy Library will be closed until September 26th while we install our new collection of Victorian Hair Art! Find out more about the collection here.

By the end of the 18th century, European cities had grown to such an extent that the tradition of burial in local churchyards had become a major health issue. In London, scandals erupted about overcrowding in pauper burial grounds and a corpse fire once burnt for a week, casting a pall of the ashes of the dead over the whole city. This illustrated lecture by professor Roger Luckhurst—author of Graveyard: A History of Living‍ with the Dead—will look in detail at the scandals that prompted reform in London in the 1820s and 1830s and how the campaigner George 'Graveyard' Walker got the law changed after decades of lurid reporting about the crush of the dead in the modern city.

Free to members of the Morbid Anatomy Patreon at Joanna’s Psychopomp level, Oracle Level and above. Become a member here.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

Join Morbid Anatomy for the grand re-opening of our library and exhibition space at Industry City—and be the first to encounter a remarkable new installation of the legendary Leila Cohoon Hair Art Collection. This special evening celebrates the arrival of nearly 50 extraordinary works from Cohoon’s collection, with special guest Lindsay Evans, Cohoon’s granddaughter, who will speak to her grandmother’s incredible work and impact during a tour of the collection. Come explore the new space, view the collection up close, and celebrate the next chapter of Morbid Anatomy with fellow lovers of the curious, the beautiful, and the macabre.

Morbid Anatomy is partnering with ARAS in New York City to present a symposium around our Founder & Creative Director, Joanna Ebenstein’s latest publication: The Art of Fairy Tales. This symposium invites audiences into the beautiful and unsettling world of fairy tales through the lens of art. Inspired by the book’s exploration of masterworks spanning centuries—from the haunting visions of Arthur Rackham to the dreamlike imaginings of Leonora Carrington—the program will gather artists, scholars, writers, and storytellers to examine why fairy tales continue to enchant, disturb, and transform us.

Join visual artist and doctoral researcher Quinn Jacobson for a talk on his recent book Glass Bones, an interdisciplinary exploration of mortality awareness and the fragile structures humans build to live with the knowledge of death. Drawing from Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, existential philosophy, and decades of studio practice using 19th-century photographic processes, Jacobson examines how creative work can function as a site of metabolization rather than defense. Moving between psychology, philosophy, photography, painting, and memoir, the lecture explores the idea that art is not merely expressive but epistemological: a way of knowing that emerges when inherited structures of meaning begin to fracture.

Gargoyles and grotesques occupy one of the most unsettling positions in the history of art and architecture. Emerging in the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, these distorted and often monstrous figures were not merely decorative. True gargoyles served a functional purpose, channeling rainwater away from stone walls, while their purely sculptural relatives—the grotesques—were designed to confront viewers with fear, excess, and bodily instability. This talk will trace the afterlives of the gargoyle and grotesque in modern architecture, including their revival in nineteenth-century restorations and their surprising persistence in twentieth-century skyscrapers such as New York’s Chrysler Building.

Join us for a deliciously Gothic event with Dr Alessandra Pino, co-author of A Gothic Cookbook. From Frankenstein to Dracula and Jane Eyre to Rebecca, Alessandra will explore the strange and fascinating role food plays in Gothic fiction. From lavish banquets to unsettling acts of consumption, the event explores how food reveals themes of desire, power, memory, and fear.

Across history, some of the most ambitious monuments to death were never meant to be built—or never could be built. Designed on paper at impossible scales, these visionary tombs reveal how artists and architects grappled with mortality, memory, and the limits of civilization itself. This lecture will explore a series of unrealized funerary projects from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when architects pushed monumentality to its conceptual extreme.

For centuries, artists and makers have sought to reach beyond the everyday in order to create in communion with the depths of the unconscious, the divine, and the dead. Join Tiffany Hopkins, author of Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide To The Dead, for a seasonal art-making circle that begins with meditation to shift us into a receptive state. We’ll then create in our chosen mediums, and close each session with the opportunity for participants to share outcomes, experiences, and observations.

From ancient Egypt to modern astronomy, the Sun and Moon have been more than just celestial bodies — they’ve been living gods and goddesses. This lecture will explore the history of solar, lunar, and planetary deities, and the complex roles they played in shaping human understanding of the cosmos, body, and gender. We’ll focus on the patterns and anomalies in the way deities are depicted from the rigid, masculine sun-gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, to the mysterious moon deities in Greco-Roman and indigenous traditions.