Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Horror in the East,” a look at truly frightening Buddhist beliefs and rituals, with Justin McDaniel, professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of the Penn Ghost Project, and former Buddhist monk.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-horror-east ]

Profs and Pints is bringing to Guilford Hall one of its most fascinating speakers, Professor Justin McDaniel, a former Buddhist monk whose teachings about macabre Eastern beliefs and practices are sure to expand your horizons when it comes to horror.

Westerners often regard Buddhism as a religion of peace, meditation, and compassion. While this is often true, it ignores the horrific and phantasmagoric side of many Buddhist rituals and beliefs. Those include practices such as meditating on corpses, strolling through giant “Hell Gardens” filled with terrifying images, and telling stories about haunting and highly sexualized ghosts. It’s no wonder that Buddhist countries produce some of the most violent horror films in the world.

Professor McDaniel will give an entertaining and highly visual talk looking at the ways in which Buddhists in Japan, Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Singapore, and other places embrace the macabre. You’ll leave with a much richer understanding of Buddhism and the cultures and worldviews that gave rise to horror movies that can scare the wits out of you.

Dr. McDaniel has lived a life that gives him distinct expertise on this subject matter. He has published award-winning books on meditation, ghosts, and Buddhist literature, studies Buddhist art, and translates Buddhist manuscripts. He lived for many years in Southeast Asia, where he conducted research as a Fulbright Fellow, taught and translated, and became a Buddhist monk. He also has regularly given cemetery tours and founded the Penn Ghost Project, an interdisciplinary effort to study beliefs in spirits from the beyond.

His talk will give you a much richer perspective on horror as a worldwide phenomenon. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Punishment depicted in the hell garden at Aluvihara Rock Cave Temple in Sri Lanka (Photo by istolethetv/ Creative Commons).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Dead Men Tell Tales,” an examination of what happens to our bodies after we die and what stories our corpses tell, with Rhys Williams, forensic anthropologist and assistant professor in forensic science at Loyola University Maryland.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/perch-dead-men .]

Ever wondered what happens after an unidentified body has been found in the woods and police have been summoned? Have you been curious about what can be discovered through the inspection and autopsy of decayed human remains?

You can get answers to even your grisliest questions when Profs and Pints brings forensic anthropologist Rhys Williams to The Perch in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. A specialist in burial location and digital imaging, Dr. Williams has worked with international forensic and archaeological teams to find and analyze both crime evidence and artifacts bound for museums. The Grim Reaper himself would be impressed by his knowledge of death scenes and what happens to our bodies when we die. (This talk will feature topics and images some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.)

Dr. Williams will start by giving you a crash course on human decomposition, discussing the factors that determine how a body decomposes and at what speed.

You’ll learn how temperature and insect life play a big role—the warmer the environment, the more insects and the faster the rate of decay. How a body progresses through the stages of bloating, decay, and skeletonization also involves many other environmental and personal factors, though. They include the clothing on the body, rainfall, the presence of scavengers, soil pH, and microbiology. Whether a body is buried, and at what depth, determines how these factors come into play.
You’ll also learn how once a body has decomposed the exposed bones tell their own story, holding vast amounts of information revealing who the deceased once was. Examining the form, function, morphology and development of bone sheds light on sex, age, stature, and a wealth of medical and cultural history.

Dr. Williams will discuss how the analytical methods he describes can be applied to a body found in the woods, an archaeological burial, a mass grave, or in the process of identifying disaster victims.

As a class exercise, we’ll examine a forensic case together, looking at methods used in constructing the biological profile of an unidentified body. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk itself starts at 6:30.)

Image: A mummified corpse in the crypt of the parish church of St. Thomas am Blasenstein in Austria. (Photo by Otto Normalverbraucher / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Ancient Terrors of the Night,” an introduction to what terrified the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, with Barbette Stanley Spaeth, professor emerita of classical studies at William and Mary and scholar of magic and the supernatural in the ancient world.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-ancient-terrors. ]

Literature, papyrus scrolls used for magic, and archaeological finds show that ancient Greeks and Romans believed in demons, ghosts, vampiric beings, reanimated dead, shape‑shifters, and night‑hags.

Gear up for Halloween by getting to know what might have spooked Nero or Sophocles with the help of Barbette Stanley Spaeth, who has spent 25 years researching, teaching, and publishing on the supernatural of antiquity.

Dr. Spaeth, who previously has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks, will make clear that ancient Greek and Roman tales of the “terror that comes in the night” were not relegated to folklore but woven into religion, law, medicine, and the sincere practice of magic. These stories explained the unexplained, enforced social norms, and supplied tools for protection or attack such as amulets, curse tablets, exorcisms, and other various spells.

You’ll learn how belief in daimones (demons) went from regarding them as ambiguous, semi‑divine beings to assigning them a malign character and making them the targets of exorcism. People thought the dead returned as incorporeal spirits or ghosts as a result of improper burials or in response to unresolved business with the living remained, and that they also could be exorcised with the proper rituals. Necromancy typically summoned such shades to ask them for information, yet texts also describe how animated corpses were harnessed to harm others, becoming ancient analogues of vampiric or zombie threats.

We’ll discuss how witches and magicians were believed to shape-shift into a variety of creatures—including wolves, owls, and weasels—to carry out their dark deeds.

The most frightful of all, however, may have been the night hags, who were blamed for sleep assaults, drained vitality, sexual violence, and the kidnapping and torture of children to derive ingredients for magic.

You’ll emerge from the talk with an understanding of how our modern terrors of the night are drawn from a long, complex classical heritage as refracted through centuries of reinterpretation as well as various local traditions. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: An 1898 painting by Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl depicts souls on the banks of the Acheron, a river, associated with Hades, where necromancy was practiced.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “An Encounter with Early Vampires,” a scholarly look at what folklore, grave sites, and various records tell us about centuries-old Slavic beliefs concerning the undead, with Stanley Joseph Stepanic, who teaches a course on Dracula and vampire folklore as an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Virginia.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees.]

Modern popular culture tends to treat vampires as irresistibly sexy. But the folklore that gave rise to Dracula, Nosferatu, Twilight, and an assortment of skimpy Halloween costumes actually depicted vampires as gruesome rather than attractive, the stuff of nightmares rather than fantasies.

Join a fascinating excavation of early vampire belief with Stanley Stepanic, who has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks and whose course on Dracula is exceptionally popular among University of Virginia students.

He’ll take you on a scholarly journey to Eastern Europe and back in time several centuries, beginning with the first written evidence of vampires in a Russian text from 1047 A.D. You’ll learn about references to vampire burials in Slavic legal codes from the fourteenth century and about the vampire hysteria that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the mid-eighteenth century.

You’ll learn how the vampires of those times were depicted as rotting, reanimated corpses that returned from the grave to attack their victims and inflict diseases such as rabies and tuberculosis upon them. Many of the earliest were undead men whose first targets were their families. Women reported being sexually assaulted by the vampiric forms of their husbands, and those who subsequently gave birth would regard their offspring as human-vampire hybrids destined to become vampire hunters.

We’ll peer into the graves of people whose bodies were chopped into pieces to prevent their rise from the dead. Professor Stepanic will explain how writers of the eighteenth century resurrected the vampire in the much more appealing form we envision today, but echoes of the original version continue to thrive in popular culture in the form of zombies.

You’ll come away seeing vampires in a new light that renders them far more terrifying. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.