Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 28 Thesmophoria: The Last Fasting of Demeter   (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.) Across modern Pagan calendars, September 28th is frequently listed as the day ancient Athens opened the Thesmophoria , a secret, women-only mystery rite honoring Demeter and Persephone and tied to the agricultural cycle. It's a genuinely striking image, and unlike some of the invented holidays this column has debunked before, the festival itself is completely real, one of the best-documented women's rites in the ancient Greek world. The specific date attached to it, however, doesn't hold up. Tracing the claim backward leads to a familiar place… Tracing the claim backward leads to a familiar place: the same “Days of September” listicle, still circulating under various names across Pagan calendar sites since at least 2009, that this column alrea...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 27 The Man In The Stone Room: Koot Hoomi's Samādhi (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.)   A square stone building somewhere beyond Ladakh, in the direction of the Karakorams… No windows, no doors—the only way in is an underground passage running from a chamber in the monastery. Inside, a man's body lies cold and stiff on the floor while his spiritual superior comes and goes, tending it. The Himalayas stand to the right. There's a lake nearby. The body will lie there for three months, and the man inside it is not, in any sense his correspondents would recognize, dead… That's the scene as Helena Blavatsky described it in a letter written on October 2, 1881, to Mrs. Hollis Billings . The man in the stone room was Koot Hoomi , and according to Theosophical chronology he had entered samādhi around September 27—a continuous trance ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 26 Leo Martello: Even Witches Have Civil Rights   (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.) Manhattan, Thursday, October 29, 1970. Two days before Halloween, in a municipal office, four people sit down to settle a question nobody had ever formally put to the City of New York. On one side, the Parks Department attorney and a deputy commissioner. On the other, Barbara Shack of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a forty-year-old graphologist from Greenwich Village who wants a permit to hold a gathering of witches in Central Park. And he got it: on Halloween night more than a thousand people assembled in the park to dance and sing and declare themselves openly, in a country where doing so was still a good way to lose your job. A Global Village crew filmed it, and the documentary aired repeatedly on Channel 13. It was the first public Witch-In...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 25 Mary A. Cornelius: The Occultist of No Lodge (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.) Chicago, around the turn of the century. A widow in her early seventies—a Baptist minister's wife, a former state president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a woman who had spent decades campaigning to close saloons and protect animals and get books into the hands of children—publishes a novel. The title page reads The White Flame . Beneath it, in the plainest possible language, sits the subtitle: “an occult story.” Nobody at the time seems to have found this strange. Mary Ann Mann was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on September 25, 1829 (although even that much deserves an asterisk: her memorial record gives 1827; her Illinois death record gives 1829. The census returns across her lifetime disagree with each other and occasionally with both.) ...