Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 15 The Grimoires of Albertus Magnus (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 the winter of 1249, so the story goes, a Dominican friar in Cologne invited William of Holland, King of the Romans, to dine with him. The king and his courtiers arrived to find the tables laid outdoors in the convent garden, deep in snow, and grumbled at their host’s folly. Then, as they sat down, the snow melted away, the sun blazed, the trees burst into leaf and blossom, and birds began to sing. The moment the meal ended, winter returned. Astonished, the king granted the friar the land he wanted. It never happened. But the friar was real, and he died in Cologne on November 15, 1280. He was a bishop, a teacher of saints, one of the greatest scientists of the Middle Ages, and eventually a saint himself, and yet for seven centuries his name has been printed on the cove...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 14 The Philosopher and the Oracle: Gottfried Leibniz and the I-Ching (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.) On April 1, 1703, a letter arrived in Hanover after a journey of nearly a year and a half. It had been written in Beijing by a French Jesuit missionary, and folded inside it was a woodcut of the sixty-four hexagrams of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes . The man who opened it was thunderstruck. In those mysterious stacks of broken and unbroken lines, he saw his own life’s most cherished discovery staring back at him. His name was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , and he died on November 14, 1716. He is remembered as the co-inventor of calculus and the father of binary arithmetic, the code that runs every computer on earth. He was also a young alchemical secretary, a dreamer of a magical universal language, and a man convinced that an oracle h...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 13 Robert Louis Stevenson and the Dreaming Self (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.) One night in the autumn of 1885, in a house in Bournemouth on England’s south coast, Fanny Stevenson woke to the sound of her husband crying out in his sleep. Alarmed, she shook him awake. Instead of thanking her, he was indignant. He had been dreaming, he protested, “a fine bogey tale,” and she had interrupted it at the most thrilling moment. That interrupted nightmare became Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and its dreamer, born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, was Robert Louis Stevenson . He would spend the rest of his life wondering who, exactly, had written it: himself, or the little people who worked in the dark… Stevenson came by his nightmares honestly. A sickly only child, often confined to bed with lung ailments, he was raised largely by hi...