In 2024, VOCS member Patricia Merivale established the Merivale Visitors in Residence program at UBC's Green College. The inaugural lecture for the program is due to be given on July 24th by Professor Christine Ferguson. Please note, this is not a VOCS-organized event, however, you can register directly with the organizers via the RSVP link below.

• Date: Thursday July 24th 2025 
• Time: 4.15PM for a 5.00PM start (See details in RSVP link) 
• Venue: Coach House, 6201 Cecil Green Park Rd,  V6T 1Z1
• RSVP: https://greencollege.ubc.ca/node/3177

Embracing the Impossible: Arthur Conan Doyle, Aleister Crowley, and the Occultural Turn in Detective Fiction

In his famous maxim from The Sign of Four (1890), Sherlock Holmes declares "the impossible" to be precisely what the detective must exclude in order to arrive at a true solution. My talk focuses on an alternative tradition of new religious literary detection emergent during the long *fin de siècle—*and arguably within the Holmes canon itself—that would gleefully defy this prohibition, embracing the "impossible" in the form of supernatural forces and arcane systems of spiritual law within plots that aimed not simply to thrill and entertain, but also to proselytize a disenchanted public.

Focusing on the fascinating, little-known "Simon Iff" stories produced by scandalous ceremonial magician and Thelemite Aleister Crowley at the end of the First World War, I demonstrate the unique affordances of detective fiction for articulating, synthesizing, and testing unorthodox forms of spiritual belief—and conceptions of legality, both criminal and metaphysical—within the secular age.