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.

Dr. Carl Jung’s Red Book is one of the most mystifying books of the 20th century. In this free lecture, we will explore several questions which will serve as entry points into both The Red Book and Jung’s psychological theories

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.

Writer, artist, and wilfully dissident surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) invested her unique works with magical learning, esoteric lore, and a palpable sense of mystery. Despite having published widely on occult topics during her lifetime, Colquhoun was never to produce a single book-length edition of her magical writings. As a result, many of her essays were lost or neglected.
Join folklorist and anthropologist Dr Amy Hale and writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe as they discuss the multi-dimensional character of Colquhoun’s writing in anticipation of A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun, published by Strange Attractor Press.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this special online gathering, we will explore the mythology and symbolism of lunar eclipses across cultures, from celestial dragons and cosmic serpents to stories of descent, shadow, and transformation. Drawing from mythology, depth psychology, and ritual traditions, we will consider what it means when the light of the moon is veiled and what such moments can teach us about change, release, and renewal.

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.

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.

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 for a book club session devoted to Lolly Willowes or the Loving Hunstsman (1926). Written by the fascinating bisexual Briwriter Sylvia Townsend Warner, this gentle, thoughtful, and slyly subversive novel focuses on the midlife journey of a woman who dares to dream of something beyond traditional family life. As she settles into a new life in the countryside, the book moves into the territory of the supernatural and transgressive, exploring radical freedom and the importance of creating a space of one’s own.

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.

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.

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.

Join us in as we inaugurate a new iteration of the Morbid Anatomy Library, now in a larger space and featuring a collection of nearly fifty pieces of Victorian hairwork donated by Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri!

Leila’s Hair Museum, founded by Leila Cohoon in 1986, was the only museum in the world dedicated to artworks made with human hair. When Leila passed away in 2024, her family chose Morbid Anatomy as one of the spiritual homes for these gorgeous pieces, and—with the generous support of our community—we were able to bring part of this incredible collection to our home in Brooklyn.

Today will be the general public’s first chance to experience this incredible collection! Our founder and creative director Joanna Ebenstein will also be in attendance, signing copies of her new book The Art of Fairy Tales, which will be available for purchase.

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.

Tonight, Andrew Lampert—editor of the new book Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal—will share the story of Gleason's astonishing book collection and his deep fascination with subjects like psychic phenomena, life after death, and UFOs. Comedian Jackie Gleason (1916–1987) was a television pioneer, spiritual searcher, and insomniac who spent his nights reading esoteric books. Ranging from scholarly to crackpot, his 3,000-volume library spans the fringes of speculative thinking and reveals a man as concerned with the mysteries of the universe as with getting a laugh.

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.