#spooky Halloween doom prophet

[bereft-of-frogs]

This is the second talk I’ve given about death omens! I gave the ‘fun version’ as the Halloween edition of the grad student association ‘History on Tap’ series. (^^^ that was one of my slides lol) That one was most just going over fun death omens including:

-birds (raven/crow/owls)

-banshee/bean nighe/les lavandières

-Church Grims

-‘death knocks’ and ghostly funeral processions

And then I had this like dramatic reveal moment where I was like ‘all of my sources for these are from the 19th century and here are some more, why are people in the 19th century so obsessed with death omens’ and talked a bit about how folklore was constructed/how death was viewed in the 19th century/etc etc. :-)

And then I went on a bit of a rant about how much I love the trope of ‘the danger is in the looking’ - because with the ghostly funeral procession you’re not supposed to look into the coffin because if you do you’ll die, but if you let it pass you’re safe. And ended with how much I loved Halloween because it’s a sanctioned time where it’s safe to look at the dangerous and the horrifying and encouraging people to take the opportunity to look into the void haha

Yesterday’s grad conference was jointly put on by the religious studies department and social sciences of medicine, so the theme was on the intersection of myth, magic, and medicine. The title of my talk was “Presentiment as Omen and Symptom: A Comparison of Spiritual Custom and Medical Practice” so I looked at how the 19th century stories of people predicting death (either through prophetic dreams or gut feelings) and first culturally contextualized it (seeing your death coming was part of the “Good Death”) but also could be medically contextualized, possibly rooted in a symptom referred to as “a sense of impending doom”.

(It’s normally associated with cardiac emergencies - there was a study done on cardiac tamponade where 71% of patients reported feeling that “something really bad was happening” before the onset of physical symptoms.) And then I talked a bit about deathbed visions (which are really commonly reported by palliative care workers) and how we can view legends like the banshee in the context of these deathbed visions (which we don’t actually quite understand medically yet). (My favorite quote I included was by actual death studies scholar Allan Kellehear in a popular article where he was like “‘Let’s stop with the cheap explanations.” because people always want to blame them on opiates).

Anyways, that in a rambling nutshell was my two talks on death omens/prophecy! They were obviously...slightly better actual writing haha. (Well Halloween was mostly me rambling.) If I end up doing a PhD (which I’m not planning to in the near future) I’d like to develop it further, maybe with some fieldwork. But I’m def taking a bit of a break from academia for a while so I’m putting a pin in it.

Here, have this spooky painting I made a bunch of people look at for the whole talk yesterday:

[Les lavandières de la nuit, Yan Dargent, 1861]

:D