dave evans
BSc (Bangor) MA (Exeter) PhD (Bristol)
I am not the guitarist in U2, so you may have the wrong web-page
: )
*from late 2011 i am wandering the globe teaching English for a prolonged period, and may be slow to respond to any queries; thankyou for your patience* It is hugely unlikely that i will be in the UK again, or work in academia.
My dayjob at UWE was researching Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace (following Dame Carol Black's report) as part of a joint project wth other UK universities. Now ended fixed-term contract (as of May 2011) and out of that job, so will alter research interests accordingly soon
My work profile page is here until such point as they take it down: http://bbs-staff.uwe.ac.uk/public/profile.aspx?username=df-evans the @uwe.ac.uk email address to be found there is defunct
*******************************************************************
In my own time as an independent researcher I am (among other things)
A social-cultural Historian of post ww2 British occultism (see http://hiddenpublishing.com/),
An Ethnographer of Rave Culture and Eclectic New Religious Movements,
A World War 2 Historian (see http://www.normandyd-day.com) ,
Researcher of entheogenic religious experience, Researcher of memorialistation/shrines (http://westengland.academia.edu/daveevans/Talks) and Student of Death Studies (http://westengland.academia.edu/daveevans/Talks).
I'm published in some but not all of those areas
Some years ago I co-founded an e-list (and associated Journal http://www.sasm.co.uk/) in the field of academic approaches to Magic, we now have 400+ respondents across over a dozen disciplines and it is a fabulous and friendly resource for any scholarly questions/discussion of occult-magic-paganism subjects; please feel free to join up, via this page http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/research/usrc/sasm/discussionlist.shtml
As well as academic conference I also do public talks, of which one reviewer wrote:
... (Occulture Festival May 2009) Dr Gail Nina Anderson writes in Fortean Times issue 253, p 45 "Occulture did offer other routes of access to topics centred less on belief than on intellectual engagement. Dr Dave Evans, author of The History of British Magic After Crowley, shredded the pedigree of Amado Crowley, self-styled illegitimate son of the great Beast, with wit and vigour"
And I publish both academically and in magazines such as Fortean Times and Pentacle
In other lives i have worked as a pathologist, tree surgeon, civil servant... not enough room here for the whole list
I can be contacted on a webform via http://daveevansuk.reachby.com/
My ESSWE profile page (for esoteric areas of interest) is here http://www.esswe.org/member_detail.php?member_id=269&ref=
Supervisors: (for MA 2001) Dr Jonathan Barry, (for BSc 1999) Prof Nick Ellis, and (was, 2001-4 for PhD) Prof Ronald Hutton (Bristol Uni)
I am not the guitarist in U2, so you may have the wrong web-page
: )
*from late 2011 i am wandering the globe teaching English for a prolonged period, and may be slow to respond to any queries; thankyou for your patience* It is hugely unlikely that i will be in the UK again, or work in academia.
My dayjob at UWE was researching Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace (following Dame Carol Black's report) as part of a joint project wth other UK universities. Now ended fixed-term contract (as of May 2011) and out of that job, so will alter research interests accordingly soon
My work profile page is here until such point as they take it down: http://bbs-staff.uwe.ac.uk/public/profile.aspx?username=df-evans the @uwe.ac.uk email address to be found there is defunct
*******************************************************************
In my own time as an independent researcher I am (among other things)
A social-cultural Historian of post ww2 British occultism (see http://hiddenpublishing.com/),
An Ethnographer of Rave Culture and Eclectic New Religious Movements,
A World War 2 Historian (see http://www.normandyd-day.com) ,
Researcher of entheogenic religious experience, Researcher of memorialistation/shrines (http://westengland.academia.edu/daveevans/Talks) and Student of Death Studies (http://westengland.academia.edu/daveevans/Talks).
I'm published in some but not all of those areas
Some years ago I co-founded an e-list (and associated Journal http://www.sasm.co.uk/) in the field of academic approaches to Magic, we now have 400+ respondents across over a dozen disciplines and it is a fabulous and friendly resource for any scholarly questions/discussion of occult-magic-paganism subjects; please feel free to join up, via this page http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/research/usrc/sasm/discussionlist.shtml
As well as academic conference I also do public talks, of which one reviewer wrote:
... (Occulture Festival May 2009) Dr Gail Nina Anderson writes in Fortean Times issue 253, p 45 "Occulture did offer other routes of access to topics centred less on belief than on intellectual engagement. Dr Dave Evans, author of The History of British Magic After Crowley, shredded the pedigree of Amado Crowley, self-styled illegitimate son of the great Beast, with wit and vigour"
And I publish both academically and in magazines such as Fortean Times and Pentacle
In other lives i have worked as a pathologist, tree surgeon, civil servant... not enough room here for the whole list
I can be contacted on a webform via http://daveevansuk.reachby.com/
My ESSWE profile page (for esoteric areas of interest) is here http://www.esswe.org/member_detail.php?member_id=269&ref=
Supervisors: (for MA 2001) Dr Jonathan Barry, (for BSc 1999) Prof Nick Ellis, and (was, 2001-4 for PhD) Prof Ronald Hutton (Bristol Uni)
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Books by dave evans
Not just the result of extensive book-research, this project involved attending rituals and having meetings with some quite remarkable men and women, who are examined and given a voice in these pages, some of them for the first time. Topics covered include Aleister Crowley and Thelema, How many magicians there actually are in Britain, The claims of Amado Crowley to be Aleister’s son, the work of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian OTO, Blasphemy, Chaos Magick, Gerald Gardner, Ramsey Dukes, Alex Sanders, HP Lovecraft, Satanism, Cursing, The Left-Hand Path, creating the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, plus the work of Ronald Hutton, Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, HP Blavatsky and others, all meshed into a broader philosophical, cognitive-psychological and moral-history framework of the broader Twentieth Century.
Also includes how Academia deals with studying ‘the Weird’, and how Academia deals with having Magicians in their ranks in the first place (aka ‘Reflexivity’), plus a host of tangential issues including Satan in advertising, Drugs, the Millennium Bug and ‘End-Times Fever’, Andrew Chumbley, Sex Magick, Inversion and Carnival, Witchcraft, neoPaganism and Wicca, Harry Potter, Breaking Taboos, Sigmund Freud, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the madness of Montague Summers, Black and White magic, Censorship, how Tolkien and CS Lewis made magical belief the majority view in Britain, Genesis P Orridge, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Thatcherite Politics and Magic, Oscar Wilde and homosexual moral panics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Bela Lugosi, messages decoded from a dead squid and the cabbalistic importance of a cat called Tibbles.
Not just a book about the history of magic, this research places magicians and their work into the broader society that we all live in, and shows how that magic has always been a part of our culture.
Topics covered include Aleister Crowley and Thelema, Dennis Wheatley, Kenneth Grant, Jack Parsons, Tom Driberg, the British spying community, Austin Osman Spare, Gerald Gardner and others. Being a useful biography of Crowley, plus more, this accessible and diverse book can be considered a prequel of, and a seed for the author’s larger subsequent volume The History of British Magic After Crowley
Academic approaches to studying magic and the occult: examining scholarship into witchcraft and paganism, ten years after Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon
A collection of essays edited by Dave Evans and Dave Green
Contributions by: Ronald Hutton, Amy Hale, Sabina Magliocco, Dave Green, Henrik Bogdan, Phillip Bernhardt-House, R.A. Priddle, Geoffrey Samuel, Caroline Tully & Dave Evans
Ten years on from the groundbreaking Triumph of the Moon: A history of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Professor Ronald Hutton, a selection of worldwide scholars, some ‘big names; some newer in the field, with nearly two centuries of hands-on pagan research experience between them, present a collection of researches inspired by, deriving from or just celebrating the immense impact of that seminal book. The topics cover many historical periods, many academic disciplines and it provides a wealth of information of use to academic scholar and interested freelance reader alike. Includes an extended essay by Ronald Hutton on the history of such scholarship, the state of it today and some of his thoughts for the future.
“Those engaging in Pagan Studies, provided that they speak and write in sufficiently public a manner, are inevitably going to mould the traditions that they are studying. Whether they are concerned with the history of forms of contemporary Paganism, or with their present nature, their work is going to have a lasting and continuing impact on the identities which Pagans assume and embody, and the manner in which they relate to society as a whole. I hope that this book will be read by people within the university system, and also by both Pagans and curious general readers: and my most important message is that all of them matter to the way in which Paganism is to develop in the next few decades, and probably for much longer: we are all weavers of the tapestry of time”
- Ronald Hutton
Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon, ed. Dave Evans and Dave Green (Hidden
Publishing, 2009), ISBN 978-0-9555237-5-5. © 2009 a collection of essays
inspired by Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon (which is ten years old in
2009), including a fabulous piece by Ronald himself
Just to let you know the book is officially launched now- you can see it on
the publishers website here and there are also links to amazon etc- if you
prefer to use local retailers then please take the ISBN and order locally
http://hiddenpublishing.com/about/ten-years-triumph-moon/
please circulate the link to anywhere relevant
Some healers are believed to base therapy on coherent systems that associate “aura” colours with disease states, and corresponding colour visualisations with treatment. This small study devised a means to test for the existence of any such consistent and coherent scheme across a group of five different healers; it also tested the coherence and consistency of each individual healer’s method over several months.
update- be patient, at very earliest this will be another 12-14 months- so not until 2012 at best
Papers by dave evans
Not just the result of extensive book-research, this project involved attending rituals and having meetings with some quite remarkable men and women, who are examined and given a voice in these pages, some of them for the first time. Topics covered include Aleister Crowley and Thelema, How many magicians there actually are in Britain, The claims of Amado Crowley to be Aleister’s son, the work of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian OTO, Blasphemy, Chaos Magick, Gerald Gardner, Ramsey Dukes, Alex Sanders, HP Lovecraft, Satanism, Cursing, The Left-Hand Path, creating the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, plus the work of Ronald Hutton, Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, HP Blavatsky and others, all meshed into a broader philosophical, cognitive-psychological and moral-history framework of the broader Twentieth Century.
Also includes how Academia deals with studying ‘the Weird’, and how Academia deals with having Magicians in their ranks in the first place (aka ‘Reflexivity’), plus a host of tangential issues including Satan in advertising, Drugs, the Millennium Bug and ‘End-Times Fever’, Andrew Chumbley, Sex Magick, Inversion and Carnival, Witchcraft, neoPaganism and Wicca, Harry Potter, Breaking Taboos, Sigmund Freud, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the madness of Montague Summers, Black and White magic, Censorship, how Tolkien and CS Lewis made magical belief the majority view in Britain, Genesis P Orridge, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Thatcherite Politics and Magic, Oscar Wilde and homosexual moral panics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Bela Lugosi, messages decoded from a dead squid and the cabbalistic importance of a cat called Tibbles.
Not just a book about the history of magic, this research places magicians and their work into the broader society that we all live in, and shows how that magic has always been a part of our culture.
Topics covered include Aleister Crowley and Thelema, Dennis Wheatley, Kenneth Grant, Jack Parsons, Tom Driberg, the British spying community, Austin Osman Spare, Gerald Gardner and others. Being a useful biography of Crowley, plus more, this accessible and diverse book can be considered a prequel of, and a seed for the author’s larger subsequent volume The History of British Magic After Crowley
Academic approaches to studying magic and the occult: examining scholarship into witchcraft and paganism, ten years after Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon
A collection of essays edited by Dave Evans and Dave Green
Contributions by: Ronald Hutton, Amy Hale, Sabina Magliocco, Dave Green, Henrik Bogdan, Phillip Bernhardt-House, R.A. Priddle, Geoffrey Samuel, Caroline Tully & Dave Evans
Ten years on from the groundbreaking Triumph of the Moon: A history of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Professor Ronald Hutton, a selection of worldwide scholars, some ‘big names; some newer in the field, with nearly two centuries of hands-on pagan research experience between them, present a collection of researches inspired by, deriving from or just celebrating the immense impact of that seminal book. The topics cover many historical periods, many academic disciplines and it provides a wealth of information of use to academic scholar and interested freelance reader alike. Includes an extended essay by Ronald Hutton on the history of such scholarship, the state of it today and some of his thoughts for the future.
“Those engaging in Pagan Studies, provided that they speak and write in sufficiently public a manner, are inevitably going to mould the traditions that they are studying. Whether they are concerned with the history of forms of contemporary Paganism, or with their present nature, their work is going to have a lasting and continuing impact on the identities which Pagans assume and embody, and the manner in which they relate to society as a whole. I hope that this book will be read by people within the university system, and also by both Pagans and curious general readers: and my most important message is that all of them matter to the way in which Paganism is to develop in the next few decades, and probably for much longer: we are all weavers of the tapestry of time”
- Ronald Hutton
Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon, ed. Dave Evans and Dave Green (Hidden
Publishing, 2009), ISBN 978-0-9555237-5-5. © 2009 a collection of essays
inspired by Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon (which is ten years old in
2009), including a fabulous piece by Ronald himself
Just to let you know the book is officially launched now- you can see it on
the publishers website here and there are also links to amazon etc- if you
prefer to use local retailers then please take the ISBN and order locally
http://hiddenpublishing.com/about/ten-years-triumph-moon/
please circulate the link to anywhere relevant
Some healers are believed to base therapy on coherent systems that associate “aura” colours with disease states, and corresponding colour visualisations with treatment. This small study devised a means to test for the existence of any such consistent and coherent scheme across a group of five different healers; it also tested the coherence and consistency of each individual healer’s method over several months.
update- be patient, at very earliest this will be another 12-14 months- so not until 2012 at best
editor is here http://ntnu-no.academia.edu/JesperAagaardPetersen
Book Synopsis:
The Church of Satan was founded by Anton LaVey on April 30, 1966. In his hands, Satan became a provocative symbol for indulgence, vital existence, natural wisdom and the human being's true animal nature. At present, religious Satanism exists primarily as a decentralized subculture with a strong internet presence within a larger Satanic milieu in Western culture. Though most are inspired by LaVey, the majority of contemporary Satanists are not members of the Church of Satan. The various expressions of modern Satanism all navigate in today's detraditionalized religious market through the creative appropriation of popular culture, philosophy, literature and religion. The concrete solutions are varied; but they all understand the power of transgression allying oneself with a most powerful symbol of resistance, namely Satan. Thus, contemporary religious Satanism could be understood as a complex negotiation of atheism, secularism, esotericism and self: A "self-religion" in the modern age.
Despite the fascinating nature of religious Satanism, it has attracted little scholarship until relatively recently. This book brings together a group of international scholars to produce the first serious book-length study of religious Satanism, presenting a collection that will have wide appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. The first part contains broader studies of influential groups and important aspects of the Satanic milieu, especially regarding historical developments, the construction of tradition and issues of legitimacy. The second part narrows the view to regional variations, especially with studies on Northern and Eastern Europe. The third part consists of primary documents selected for their representational and informational value.
Contents: Introduction: embracing Satan, Jesper Aagaard Petersen; Part I Broader Studies: History, Tradition, Legitimacy: Satanism: performing alterity and othering, Graham Harvey; Infernal legitimacy, James R. Lewis; Darkness within: Satanism as a self-religion, Asbjørn Dyrendal; Self-conscious routinization and the post-charismatic fate of the church of Satan from 1997 to the present, Maxwell Davies; Embracing others: the multiple Princes of Darkness in the left hand path milieu, Kenneth Granholm; The devil''s down in Dixie: studying Satanism in south Georgia, Kathleen Lowney. Part II Regional Studies: The peculiarities of Lithuanian Satanism: between crime and atheism in cyberspace, Milda Alisauskiene; Satanism in Estonia, Ringo Ringvee; Cyber-Satanism and imagined Satanism: dark symptoms of late modernity, Rafal Smoczynski; Social democratic Satanism? Some examples of Satanism in Scandinavia, Didrik Søderlind and Asbjørn Dyrendal; With my art I am the fist in the face of God'': on old-school black metal, Gry Mørk; Italian martyrs of ''Satanism'': Sister Maria Laura Mainetti and Father Giorgio Govoni, Andrea Menegotto; Speculating on the point 003 percent? Some remarks on the chaotic Satanic minorities in the UK, Dave Evans. Part III Primary Documents: Reflections on Satanism, Vexen Crabtree; Excerpt from Lords of the Left Hand Path: a history of spiritual dissent, Stephen E. Flowers; Dark doctrines: 2 examples, Tani Jantsang; The Satanic politic, Nathan Wardinski; The culture cult, Ole Wolf; Index.
I’ve just come back from helping at a ‘meet the veterans’ event at a major museum. I am privileged to count several WW2 vets among my friends, and what I am thinking, as we approach the 65th anniversary of the end of that war, and the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, is that soon we will only have mute witnesses to those days. Our museums are full of the silent machinery of war, the voiceless ephemera, the black and white photographs etc., but our greatest and most precious national treasure, our people, in this case are becoming older and fewer. A World War two veteran who saw it all is going to be ninety or so at the youngest now, and even those who were in at the end part of the war are in their mid eighties, and many of them have lingering health issues.
It has been my honour to stand with veterans on Normandy beaches and in the many war cemeteries, to sit with them in gardens in the British countryside and around displays in formal museums, to eat and drink with them and to hear their stories. I have recently helped one vet to find the grave site of a friend who he last saw on the eve of D-Day, and who was among the very many who did not live to see June 7th 1944.
What am I thinking? I’m thinking how my generation simply cannot conceive what these men and women went through, and I’m thinking that I have no way to truly know what that time can have been like. I’m thinking that I never want to know what that feels like, and yet I want to know everything, so that I can pass on these stories.
I’m thinking how the fields that Tom, my late father (a WW2 vet, of course, like virtually all of his generation) played in as a child have now been concreted over and built on, and how the world he fought to keep free is soon going to forget what he and his mates achieved, when they are all passed away. I’m thinking that by an accident of birthdate I missed being a participant in all the major conflicts in the 20th century.
I’m thinking how lucky I am.
Dr Dave Evans, historian
www.normandyd-day.com
Kenneth Grant - the Elder Statesman of Magick
Kenneth Grant (1924- ) is perhaps unique in the history of modern British magic in that he had close dealings with three hugely influential modern occultists: Crowley, Spare and Gardner. This very brief article gives an overview of the man and his involvement with Aleister Crowley.
This document is a draft series of remarks around some issues in this area, to stimulate discussion.
Although the exact location of Joan’s grave is unmarked, the surrounding area has become a site of pilgrimage for various pagan groups and individuals. This tale has since become the subject of a folk music mini-opera (Spirit in the Storm), the performance of which stirs strong emotions in the neopagan world, giving Joan Wytte the identify of a semi-martyr among both neopagans and feminists, when it is likely that she was neither of these in life. This paper outlines Joan’s life, the Museum events, Joan’s subsequent reburial, the folk music performances (with sound file extracts to be played during the talk) and discusses the wider moral issue of museum’s roles in exhibiting human remains at all, and outlines some other recent cases of long-held (often originally stolen) remains being repatriated to their tribal or religious groups.
This paper contrasts some of the claims of Amado Crowley, who portrays himself as psychic link, pupil and biological son of Aleister, with the work of Kenneth Grant, who was Aleister’s pupil, literary executor and secretary, is possibly a distant relative of Crowley and runs a magical order based on Crowley’s work.
If you would like to subscribe to the mailing list for other events at Treadwells and general London occult information and booky things, please go to http://www.treadwells-london.com/mailinglist.php.