ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
March 31
Modern Occultist Issue 2 Debuts!
The Spring Equinox
2026 Manifestation Issue is out NOW!
(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.)
We have,
in these pages, spent the past week tracing a single unbroken thread across
seven days: the persistence of sacred knowledge against every force arrayed
against it: Gabriel's feast, suppressed and enduring; Dante's hidden cosmology; the Murder Act's accidental gothic legacy; the pagan Wends given a century's
reprieve; Blake's Jerusalem, stripped of its radical pronoun and still burning; the Golden Dawn's spectacular collapse, and the tradition that escaped from the
rubble; Aleister Crowley staring calmly from the Sgt. Pepper cover, twenty
years after his death, in the most famous photograph in rock history...
The signs
are always given. The knowledge is always available.
Today, on March 31, 2026—the Spring Equinox, that ancient threshold between darkness and returning light—Modern Occultist adds its own small entry to the occult history we have been tracing all week.
Issue 2 is here!
The Manifestation Issue
The theme of
this issue is manifestation—not just in the vision board, morning-routine,
social media sense that the word has acquired in recent years, but in its
deepest and most demanding meaning: the ancient technology, present in every
human civilization from the Vedic tradition onward, of bringing inner intention
into material reality through disciplined practice, aligned consciousness, and
the patient cultivation of the inner states from which outer realities
naturally arise.
Before the
Law of Attraction became a bestselling brand, it was called heka in Egypt,
sankalpa in India, wu wei in China, and a hundred other things in a hundred
other tongues. The terminology was different. The insight was the same. In this
issue, we trace that insight from its oldest roots to its most contemporary
expressions—and along the way, we introduce six extraordinary contributors
who are living and teaching these principles right now.
What's Inside
Managing Editor Diana Serhal opens with Before the Vision Board, a sweeping historical survey of manifestation practices across world civilizations—Vedic India, ancient Egypt, classical Greece and the Hermetic tradition, Taoism, Buddhism, Yoruba cosmology, the Abrahamic mystical currents—tracing the common threads that run through all of them and asking what the ancient practitioners understood that the modern version sometimes obscures.
Claudiney Prieto—Brazilian Wiccan Priest, founder of the Dianic Nemorensis
tradition, and the visionary who established Brazil's first Museum of Magic and
Witchcraft—graces our cover and our pages with an exclusive excerpt from The Kybalion for Witches, his forthcoming Llewellyn Worldwide title. Prieto's
synthesis of the Hermetic Seven Principles with contemporary Wiccan practice
is, as our full review makes clear, one of the most serious and important
contributions to Western esoteric literature in recent years. We are proud to
offer readers their first look.
Neyah—Virginia
Monti, founder and vocalist of the hard rock band Psychedelic Witchcraft, and
one of the manifestation community's most thoughtful and grounded voices—speaks
with Modern Occultist about the relationship between magic and manifestation,
the discipline required for genuine practice, and the story of how she
manifested a music career from a broken voice and an empty bank account in
Florence.
Manifestation
coach Brittaniee Donals introduces us to Embodied Identity Manifestation—her
framework for understanding that we do not attract what we want, but what we
are—in a wide-ranging conversation about timelines, self-concept, and why the
most powerful technique is simply noticing the thoughts you're already
thinking.
Renata Papp,
certified in neurology and based in Budapest, shares her extraordinary
firsthand account of attending a Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat in Basel, Switzerland—including
a ninety-minute meditation during which she lost all sense of time and space,
and a room of eight thousand people found themselves crying simultaneously in
pure joy.
Trevor Emdon,
teacher of what he calls effortless manifesting, speaks from his home in the UK
about the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of most manifestation
teaching—and offers a quieter, stranger, and ultimately more radical
alternative: the grass grows by itself. You cannot make it grow faster. And it
doesn't need your help.
James D. McCallister—Columbia, South Carolina novelist, business owner, and civic figure—speaks
about the 600,000-word Dixiana trilogy he willed into existence over three
decades, his relationship with Neville Goddard, and why manifesting sticky-icky
reality requires considerably more discipline than most teachers admit.
The issue
also features Tesla's 369 Method, a guide to Nikola Tesla's numerological
legacy and its application to modern manifestation practice; Science Meets the
Sacred, an exploration of where quantum physics, neuroscience, and the ancient
teachings converge; Three Fathers, a portrait of Abdullah, Neville Goddard, and
Dr. Joseph Murphy—the mystics who shaped the modern method; and The Modern
Occultist Guide to Manifesting, a practical survey of the most significant
techniques in active use today.
Our book reviews
section—the Codex—covers five new and upcoming Llewellyn Worldwide titles,
including Claudiney Prieto's The Kybalion for Witches, Jessica Howard's Energy Healing for Modern Life, Jiulio Consiglio's Your Highest Vibration, Laura
Tempest Zakroff's Tarot by Tempest, and Tracy Quinlan's Charting Love with Astrology. We also offer a retrospective review of David Jay Brown's
Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse—a book that has acquired, two
decades on, a rather startling new layer of context (see inside...). And the Scary Games series
by J. Theophrastus Bartholomew returns, in characteristically terrifying form,
with two new volumes from editors Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett.
This magazine
exists in exactly that tradition: Modern Occultist is a digital scholarly
publication for the modern reader of esoteric history and practice—a place
where the ancient is treated seriously, where the knowledge is given the depth
and rigor it deserves, and where the threshold between established history and
unmapped intellectual territory is explored with genuine curiosity and care.
Issue 2 is
available now at modernoccultist.com. If last week's blogs have resonated with
you—if any of the seven stories we told spoke to something you already knew but
hadn't yet heard named—then this magazine was built for you.
The candles are lit. The circle is open.
Welcome back!
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)
Modern Occultist
2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

