Time: 2 pm EDT / 7 pm UK
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

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For over a hundred years, early modern anatomists pared away the filth, the stench, and the putrescence of the human body in search of the soul. In 1540 the anatomist Andreas Vesalius claimed to actually demonstrate the ‘wonderful net’, that organ of the soul, and one of his students believed he had touched it. 

This talk follows the dark involutions of that story, ones as strangely twisted as the veins and arteries of the wonderful net itself, down to the age of Thomas Willis, the Restoration Father of Neuroscience. Along the way, it throws us into the baffled and anxious minds of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the age, all equally dissatisfied with orthodox theories of body and soul. Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes all ventured into forms of heresy in order to know the embodied soul. Just how did the soul get into a foetus? How did it leave the body at death? And what uncertain fate awaited it, in the shadowy limbo between burial and the Final Resurrection? 

Although the embodied soul now seems to have long since smoked into the ether, we will consider also some compelling modern evidence for survival of consciousness in the present day.

Dr Richard Sugg is the author of twelve books, including Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Cornell, 2007), A Century of Ghost Stories (KDP, 2017), Our Week with the Juffle Hunters (KDP, 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: the History of Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Falun Gong (KDP, 2020), The Smoke of the Soul (KDP, 2020), and Bloodlust (KDP, 2020). He and his work has appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Lancet, BBC History, Der Spiegel, and the New Yorker, and on international television and radio. He is currently working on Talking Dirty: the History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump, and Ghosts: a Personal and Global History. He has lectured at the universities of Cardiff and Durham (2001-2017). You can read some of his work at his homepage, and watch a 2019 lecture on fairies, ghosts and poltergeists here. If you have a ghost or poltergeist story, he would love to hear it. Follow him on Twitter @DrSugg.