The Séance of Mysticism with Dr Kirsten Norrie and Prof. Simon Critchley

This event will be chaired by John Mitchinson.

John Mitchinson is the head of research for the British television panel game QI, and is also the managing director of Quite Interesting Limited. He is co-writer of the QI series of books with the show's creator John Lloyd.

An American Book of the Dead: A Wild West Séance

An American Book of the Dead: A Wild West Séance is a unique Acid Western set in the mid to late 1800s whose psychedelia stems not from drugs but from the spirit world. When spirit photographer, Ebenezer Elijah Henry is confronted by an enigmatic stranger late one night in his Kansas studio, a peculiar tale is summoned through an impromptu séance that culminates in one of the most arresting photographs ever taken. This is the story of Robert McGee: possible scalping survivor, possible fraud, and how his image was invented by an ambitious photographer already imaging Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

Mysticism

Why mysticism? It has been called "experience in its most intense form," and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the reader: Wouldn't you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.
Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It's not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. A rough and ready definition of mysticism is that it is a way of systematically freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Mysticism is the practical possibility of the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.

Both writers will read excerpts from their work and discuss the implications of contemporary myth-making as fiction, poetry, philosophy and being.

Host or Publisher Blackwell's, Broad Street Oxford