Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 4 Scotland's Witchcraft Act and the North Berwick Trials   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) The law never defined what it was prohibiting… On June 4, 1563, the Parliament of Scotland passed the Act Anentis Witchcraftis—Against Witchcraft—making the use of “any manner of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy” a capital offense for all parties: the practitioner, their client, and anyone who consulted them. The penalty was death. The text of the Act didn’t trouble itself to define what witchcraft actually was, or how it was to be distinguished from healing, from prayer, from folk medicine, from the use of charms that the Catholic Church had tolerated for a thousand years—it simply prohibited it, in the broadest possible terms, and left the definition to the courts, the Kirk, the local community, and the anxieties of the moment. The consequences were ca...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 3 The Rose and the Cross in America   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) To write honestly about R. Swinburne Clymer—who spent nearly seven decades as the Supreme Grand Master of what he maintained was the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the Americas, and died on this date at the age of eighty-seven in 1966—is to write about a figure whose historical importance and whose personal controversies are genuinely inseparable. And yet, we cover him here because the tradition he represented deserves to be understood. The more interesting story, in many ways, is not Clymer himself, but the man whose legacy he spent his life championing, often inaccurately but always passionately: Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African American occultist, Rosicrucian, and sex magic theorist who may have done more to shape the American esoteric ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 2 The Devils of Loudun & the Trial of Urbain Grandier   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) It was unmistakable. Amid a series of mysterious sigils, the pact was written in backwards Latin, signed in blood, and countersigned by Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Elimi, and Astaroth—each in their own infernal hand. On June 2, 1630, the trial of Urbain Grandier—priest, reputed womanizer, and (apparently) the most dangerous man in the small French town of Loudun—began on charges of adultery and moral degeneracy. Unbelievably, he survived it, and was acquitted by the Archbishop of Bordeaux himself. That out of the way, Grandier returned to his parish in characteristically high spirits—but the elation wasn’t destined last; within four short years, the charges—now upgraded significantly—were brought against him again. Seventeen Ursuline nuns had be...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY   June 1 Vesalius, Copernicus, and the Union of Microcosm and Macrocosm   (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) In 1543, the world got a new body and place within the known universe. It was the year that produced two publications that, taken together, represent the most concentrated intellectual earthquake in the history of Western thought: that June, Andreas Vesalius published De Humani Corporis Fabrica —“On the Fabric of the Human Body” —and dismantled fourteen centuries of medical doctrine with a scalpel; earlier that same year, Nicolaus Copernicus had published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ,   moving the Earth out of the center of the cosmos. And in only a matter of months, Paracelsus—the Swiss physician-alchemist-magician who had spent three decades insisting that the human body and the cosmos were a single unified system—di...