Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 11   Ruth Montgomery: Journalist of the New Age (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.) She covered six presidents and attended FDR’s funeral—the only woman among twelve invited reporters. Earlier, in 1959, she had ridden with Nixon’s press corps through Soviet Russia, filing dispatches to the Hearst syndicate, an accomplishment that only added to her later post as the president of the Women’s National Press Club. By any measure, Ruth Montgomery was one of the most accomplished political journalists of her generation. A cursory glance through Montgomery’s credentials and it’s a wonder she isn’t as well-known as contemporary, Barbara Walters. But something happened to Montgomery that took her out of mainstream journalism and put her in a, somewhat, class all her own: one day, she sat at her typewriter, cleared her mind, and let the spirits do t...

 ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 10 The Martian Chronicles: The Life & Death of Hélène Smith (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.) She claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antionette—but that wasn’t the strangest of her claims. According to renowned psychic medium and contemporary innovator of “automatic writing,” Hélène Smith, who passed away in Geneva on this date in 1929, she was also fluent in speaking “Martian”—as she had been a regular visitor to the fourth planet from the sun for many years. Born Catherine-Élise Müller on December 9, 1861, in Martigny, Switzerland, Smith spent four decades as the most celebrated medium in the French-speaking world, becoming the subject of a landmark study that shaped both modern psychology and the Surrealist movement. Based upon that study, Ferdinand de Saussure—the father of modern linguistics—personally analyzed and named Sm...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 9 Johann Galle & the Occult Neptune (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.) He discovered it “with the point of his pen.” Or so claimed French astronomer François Arago , describing his colleague Urbain Le Verrier ’s achievement in predicting the existence and position of an unknown planet entirely through mathematical calculations—before any human eye could confirm it was there. It was during the summer of 1846 that Le Verrier noticed that the orbit of Uranus had been behaving strangely. Something else was out there, he suspected, pulling Uranus off its predicted course. He surmised another planet must exist, and so wrote a letter to a German astronomer he had never met, and asked him to look. That astronomer was Johann Gottfried Galle, born in Radis, Prussia on this date in 1812. Galle received Le Verrier’s letter on the morning o...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 8 Robespierre & the Cult of the Supreme Being   (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 June 8, 1794 and the guillotine was shrouded in flowers. In many ways, the outcome was inevitable: the 20th of Prairial in Year II of the French Republic (not coincidentally, the Christian feast of Pentecost) and Paris had staged the most elaborate act of state ceremonial magic in the history of the modern world—not exactly accepted as “mainstream” during the era of Napoleon. A procession of National Convention deputies, dressed in matching sky-blue coats and carrying sheaves of wheat, flowers, and fruit, wound through the streets from the Tuileries gardens to the Champ de Mars. At their head, walked Maximilien Robespierre—lawyer, revolutionary, chief architect of the Terror, and, as of six weeks earlier, the founder and high priest of a new state ...