ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 6
The Modern Occultist Podcast Launches!
(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.)
Today,
at 12:00pm EST, Modern Occultist steps off the page for the first time! The Modern Occultist Podcast, hosted by our own
co-publisher Diana Serhal, premieres its first episode on our YouTube channel,
and the guest list assembled for Season One reads like a table of contents
pulled straight from the magazine's own issues, brought fully to life.
The Modern Occultist Podcast
will air every first and third Thursday of the month at 12:00pm EST, running
through this December. Each episode streams on our YouTube channel, where the
full archive will remain available afterward. Diana brings the same editorial instincts to the mic that she's brought
to the magazine's pages since day one: genuine curiosity, esoteric knowledge,
and love of our guests’ different perspectives on all things occult. If you've
enjoyed the interviews in our print issues, you already know roughly what to
expect, except now you'll get to hear the pauses, the laughter, and the
tangents that never make it onto the page.
We
couldn't have asked for a better name to open the season: Lon Milo DuQuette needs no introduction to regular readers of this
magazine; he's one of contemporary occultism's most beloved voices, a prolific
author whose books on Thelema, Tarot, and ceremonial magic have introduced
entire generations of newcomers to the Western esoteric tradition without ever
once talking down to them. His gift has always been making genuinely deep
material feel like a conversation with an old friend rather than a lecture, and
that's exactly the energy Season One is launching with.
The guest roster stretching out across the rest of the season draws heavily from names this magazine's readers will already recognize, alongside a few wonderful new voices joining the fold for the first time:
Dr. Michael
Weisenburg, Director of the Irvin
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South
Carolina and a contributor to the very
first issue of Modern Occultist,
bringing a rare-books scholar's eye to esoteric material most of us only ever
encounter secondhand.
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Mario Haynes,
a professional actor, playwright, and yoga instructor with an MFA in Acting
from Harvard, whose stage work has ranged from Dracula to the American
Repertory Theater.
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Dr. Matthew
Melvin-Koushki, Associate Professor
of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina and one of the leading
scholars working on the occult sciences of the Persianate world, from
Timurid-Safavid lettrism to Islamicate geomancy and astrology.
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Neyah, whose contribution to our “Manifestation” issue was one of that issue's standout pieces, returning now for a longer conversation on that topic, and more.
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Renata Papp, neurologist and transformative coach, and another
voice from our “Manifestation”
issue, bringing her own perspective
on the practice to the podcast format.
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And Claudiney Prieto, the influential Brazilian Wiccan Priest whose book Wicca: A Religião da Deusa has sold over 300,000 copies and The Kybalion for Witches, as well as founder of Brazil's first Museum of Magic and Witchcraft and of the Dianic Nemorensis Tradition, joining us as part of the web-exclusive coverage already planned for his work as founder and organizer of this year’s first annual Global Pagan Summit.
The
Modern Occultist Podcast airs on our
YouTube channel, youtube.com/@ModernOccultistMagazine, starting today at12:00pm
EST. Subscribe now so you don't miss the first episode!
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the man opening our very first episode, we're recommending the book that's introduced more newcomers to Lon Milo DuQuette's voice than perhaps any other.
My Life with
the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician
By
Lon Milo DuQuette | Weiser Books
Long
before he became one of the most trusted elder statesmen of American Thelema,
Lon Milo DuQuette was a working musician chasing session gigs and bar bands
through 1970s Los Angeles, which is precisely where My Life with the Spirits
picks up. First published in 1999 and still one of Weiser's most consistently
recommended titles, this memoir traces DuQuette's genuinely unlikely path from
struggling guitarist to initiated ceremonial magician, by way of a chance
encounter with a copy of Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice
that, in DuQuette's own retelling, he initially mistook for a book about stage
tricks.
What
makes the memoir essential reading, and what makes DuQuette himself such a
beloved figure in this community, is the total absence of pretension in how he
tells it. He's disarmingly honest about his own early confusion, his false
starts, and the sheer number of times his invocations produced results
considerably stranger than he'd bargained for, all delivered in the same warm,
self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud voice that regular readers of this magazine
will recognize from his interviews. The book moves through his real initiations
into the O.T.O. and his growing friendship with Israel Regardie with the pacing
of a genuinely well-told story rather than a dry spiritual autobiography, which
is exactly why it's remained in print for over two decades.
Readers looking for a systematic instructional text on ceremonial magic should look elsewhere in DuQuette's considerable catalog; this is memoir first, technical manual a distant second. But as an introduction to why DuQuette has spent three decades as one of occultism's most approachable public faces, and as a genuinely funny, honest account of what it actually feels like to stumble into real magical practice by accident, My Life with the Spirits remains the best possible place to start, whether you're tuning into today’s premiere or simply looking for your next great occult read.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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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