June 21

MODERN OCCULTIST Releases Issue Three for the Summer Solstice—and Introduces a New Feature: “OCCULT READS”!

(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 Sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky at precisely 4:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time this morning—the exact, calculable instant when the Earth’s 23.4-degree tilt carries the Northern Hemisphere to its maximum exposure to solar light. It is the longest day of the year. It is the shortest night. And for those of us who keep the old observances alongside the new ones, it is Litha: Midsummer, the height of the Wheel of the Year, the moment the Oak King stands at the absolute peak of his power before the long, graceful turn toward autumn begins...

We could not have asked for a more fitting day to bring you the third issue of Modern Occultist!

Without exaggeration, our Summer Solstice issue is the most ambitious collection we have assembled to date—a sustained, serious engagement with the Chaos Magic current and the figures who built and continue to build it. We are profoundly grateful to every contributor who lent their voice, time, and expertise to this issue, and prouder than we can easily say of what the team has produced….

This issue features a full-length interview with Lon Milo DuQuette, conducted on Bicycle Day, ranging across his decades inside the Ordo Templi Orientis, his friendship with the Crowley legacy, and some amazing Hollywood stories that have genuinely never been told in print before.
John Michael Greer offers a wide-ranging interview touching on modern Paganism, the historical Merlin, the Keys of Freemasonry, and a great deal of hard-won wisdom in between.
Aside from an incredible interview on her new bestseller, The Holy Year of Thelema, Maevius Lynn shares exclusive instructions on how to create your own Thelemic altar for the Summer Solstice.
Thumper Forge presents his new book, The Chaos Apple, and gives humorous advice on modern Chaos Magic and comments on its influence on today’s pop culture.
Gavin Fox contributes an original feature on “Memetics for Magickians,” mapping his Trisphere model of Synthetic, Systemic, and Kinetic nodes for readers encountering it for the first time.
Eric Wagner and Tom Jackson—biographers of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, respectively—give their own personal take on each writers’ legacies and contributions to the cross-section of Chaos Magic and postmodern literature.
Plus a profile on Austin Osman Spare, as well as an in-depth memorial to the late, great Peter J. Carroll…

Alongside the features, this issue debuts our expanded Occult Reads catalog—a master list spanning one hundred affiliate titles across seventeen categories—and introduces our growing relationships with Aeon Spirit, Anathema Publishing, Crossed Crow Books, HarperOne, Hilaritas Press, Inner Traditions, Llewellyn Worldwide, New Falcon Publications, Original Falcon Press, Rare Biblio, Red Wheel/Weiser, Scarlet Imprint, Sirius Limited Esoterica, and Starfire Publishing.

None of this would exist without the trust those publishers have placed in us, and we intend to honor it fully.

Announcing: A Daily Occult Read, Starting Monday

Here is the part we are most excited to tell you: beginning Monday, June 22, Modern Occultist will publish an original book or deck review every single day, in addition to our regular “On This Day in Occult History” feature. We have spent the weeks leading up to this issue reading deeply and writing extensively across an extraordinary range of publishers and traditions, and rather than let that work simply populate a static affiliate page, we want to bring it to you the way we believe it deserves to be read: one considered, honest review at a time, every day, indefinitely.

Expect everything from foundational Chaos Magic texts to premium limited-edition Anathema productions, from tarot and oracle decks to scholarly recoveries of forgotten esoteric voices, from devotional studies to genre-crossing fiction. Every review will carry the same standard: an honest cinematic hook, real constructive critique where it is warranted, and a closing statement that tells you plainly whether the book deserves a place on your shelf.

We are launching this new daily feature with Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky’s Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt—a fitting choice, given how large DuQuette looms over this very issue, and given how much pure pleasure that book delivered when we first sat down with it. Look for it Monday morning.

And Don’t Forget the Summer Solstice!

Before the calendar. Before the church. Before the grimoire or the grade system or the published manifesto—there was the longest day…

Every civilization that ever watched the sky understood that something extraordinary happens in late June: the sun reaches its highest point, lingers at the peak of its arc, and then begins—almost imperceptibly—to retreat. For our ancestors, this was not a neutral astronomical fact. It was a drama. The god of light stood at the summit of his power and immediately began to fall. The world held its breath between the fire of noon and the coming of the dark.

The Summer Solstice—Midsummer, Litha, Alban Hefin, the Feast of the Sun—is perhaps the single ritual occasion most consistent across the breadth of the Western magical traditions. And in the year of our magazine’s Chaos Magic issue, it seems right to trace the thread from the ancient bonfires all the way to the hyper-charged sigil burning in someone’s backyard at peak solar noon.

The pre-Christian roots of Midsummer celebration run deep and wide. Across Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic Europe, the solstice was marked with bonfires—not merely as festivity but as active magic. Fire was the sun’s earthly counterpart, a way of sympathetically reinforcing solar power at the very moment it began to wane. Cattle were driven between the flames for purification and protection. Herbs gathered on this night—St. John’s Wort, elderflower, vervain—were understood to carry a potency unavailable at any other time of year. The veil between worlds was believed to thin, as it does at Samhain, though here the spirits abroad were more likely to be mischievous than malevolent.

The sun at its zenith was a liminal moment: maximum light producing maximum shadow. Every tradition that engaged seriously with solar symbolism understood this paradox. The solstice marks the turning point. The king of light is also, in the same instant, the king about to be sacrificed.

Litha: The Wiccan Sabbat

In contemporary Wicca, the Summer Solstice is celebrated as Litha—one of the eight Sabbats on the Wheel of the Year, and one of the four solar festivals alongside Yule, Ostara, and Mabon. Litha marks the pinnacle of the Oak King’s reign: in Wiccan mythology, the year is governed by two divine twins—the Oak King of the waxing year and the Holly King of the waning year—who battle at each solstice for supremacy. At Midsummer, the Holly King defeats the Oak King, and the light begins its long retreat toward winter.

Litha practice is rich and sensory: outdoor rituals at dawn or dusk, bonfires and candle circles, altar decorations of sunflowers and marigolds, offerings of honey and herbs, and the weaving of solar wheels from straw. The God is honored at the fullness of his power; the Goddess, heavy with summer’s abundance, is revered as the Great Mother. It’s a celebration of vitality, growth, and the full expression of magical will—but it’s also, quietly, a meditation on the turn that follows every peak.

Thelema and the Solar Current

For Thelemites, the Sun is not a seasonal symbol—it’s the central current of magical practice, engaged with every single day. Aleister Crowley’s Liber Resh vel Helios prescribes four adorations to be performed at dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight, addressed to the solar deity in four Egyptian forms: Ra at sunrise, Ahathoor (Hathor) at noon, Tum (Atum) at sunset, and Khephra at midnight. Crowley described the purpose plainly: “firstly, to remind the aspirant at regular intervals of the Great Work; secondly, to bring him into conscious personal relation with the centre of our system; and thirdly, for advanced students, to make actual magical contact with the spiritual energy of the sun and thus to draw actual force from him.”

The Summer Solstice, in Thelemic practice, is one of the “feasts of the times”—occasions for communal celebration and a deepened performance of Liber Resh. There’s no prescribed solstice ritual beyond this; the flexibility is intentional. What the Thelemic framework provides is something more fundamental: a cosmological understanding of the sun as the symbol of the True Self, the Khabs, the innermost star. “Every man and every woman is a star.” declares The Book of the Law—and the summer solstice, when the star of our solar system burns longest and brightest, is the natural occasion to affirm that identification. The Gnostic Mass creed names “one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth”—a line that anticipates, curiously, the tradition that follows.

Chaos Magic and the Longest Day

Chaos Magic has no liturgy, no fixed calendar, and no obligatory deities. What it has is an understanding of gnosis—that altered states of consciousness are the mechanism through which magical intent bypasses the rational mind and enters the substrate of reality—and a ruthless pragmatism about which tools actually work.

The Summer Solstice, for the chaos magician, is pure energetic infrastructure. The longest day of the year is a naturally turbocharged anchor point: maximum solar energy, maximum light, maximum vitality. Austin Osman Spare’s theory of sigil magic—the encoding of desire into symbol, the charging of that symbol through gnosis, the forgetting of its meaning so the subconscious can act on it unimpeded—finds its ideal conditions at solar peak. Burn the sigil in the longest shadows of noon. Stare at the sunrise until the afterimage blooms behind your closed eyes, then project your intent into the chaos of that retinal fire. Use the heat itself, the physical exertion of a body pushed to its limits in midsummer sun, to achieve the necessary altered state.

Chaos magic also engages the solstice’s darker logic: the moment the sun peaks is the moment entropy begins. This makes the solstice the perfect occasion for banishing work—writing down what you’re finished with and burning it at the exact instant of peak daylight, using the descending light to carry the old patterns away. The chaos altar for this work needn’t include an athame or a consecrated chalice. Broken technology, discarded objects, a thumb drive with a playlist you no longer need—whatever holds personal charge, whatever the subconscious recognizes as meaningful, is precisely the right tool. The paradigm-shift ritual works best, chaos practitioners argue, when it’s strange enough to outwit the rational mind’s objections entirely.

What unites the Wiccan celebrating Litha, the Thelemite performing Liber Resh at four stations across the longest day, and the chaos magician burning a sigil in the solstice bonfire is something older than any of their traditions: the recognition that this particular moment in the solar year carries genuine energetic weight. The ancient peoples who built Stonehenge to align with the midsummer sunrise were not being metaphorical. The Neolithic communities who drove their cattle between the flames were not being superstitious. They were doing what every serious magical practitioner does—working with the world as it actually is, in its cycles and its turning points and its moments of maximum power.

Blessed Summer Solstice to all of our wonderful readers!

(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.)

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