September 22

Modern Occultist Issue Four Arrives!

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The sun crosses the equator today, the balance point between light and dark we spent last night preparing for, and there's no better date on the entire calendar to release an issue built around exactly that same tension. Issue Four of Modern Occultist is officially live, and its theme, Angels & Demons, sits precisely where this magazine has always lived most comfortably: the space where genuine scholarship, lived practice, and honest myth-checking meet.

This is, without exaggeration, the most stacked roster we've ever assembled in one issue, and we wanted to give readers a real sense of everything waiting inside before you dive in.

Thirteen full interviews anchor this issue, and the range is genuinely remarkable. Julia Sophia, astrologer and tarot reader, joins us fresh off co-authoring Uranus, Neptune, & Pluto for Weiser Books. Sanhre Daffowt brings his physics-forward take on chaos magic from Chaos Witchcraft, while Jenna Matlin, tarot reader and psychic medium, discusses the katabasis at the heart of The Tarot Book of the Dead. Scholar Peter Mark Adams joins us to talk Sola-Busca Tarocchi and Renaissance Neoplatonism, and Arthur Pendragon, the former biker turned Pagan Druid leader, sits down with us on the fortieth anniversary of his own transformation.

Frater Barabbas, an elder in the Alexandrian tradition and author of Liber Artis Archaeomancy and Liber Nephilim, brings the issue's most direct angelic and demonic grimoire work, while Dr. Eric Colleary, curator of theater and performing arts at the Harry Ransom Center and steward of its Aleister Crowley archive, discusses the genuine crossroads between stage illusion and claimed occult power. Nick, the host of The Occult Rejects podcast and founder of the Occult Research Institute, joins us as well, alongside Primis Nati, whose debut The Satanic Self we were proud to champion as a genuine new voice.

Rounding out the roster: Angel Millar discusses the supernatural feminine archetype at the heart of Supernatural Woman and the Male Initiate; Todd Elliott, Druid and Reiki master, talks agrarian magic and dual-faith practice from The Cunning Farmer; and numerologist Joy Woodward closes the section discussing Your Destiny Is in Your Numbers.

And finally, we feature in Occult Reads' "Back of the Book" section, an exclusive interview with Dr. David Shoemaker, clinical psychologist and au thor in private practice, specializing in Jungian and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, and the Chancellor and Prolocutor of the Temple of the Silver Star, a ceremonial and initiatory order based on the principles of Thelema, Qabalistic psychology, and similar traditions. He is also a long-standing member of Ordo Templi Orientis and A.’.A.’. and host of the Living Thelema podcast.

This issue also features something we're especially proud of: David Pantano, the historian behind The Hermetic Book of the Dead, has generously contributed an original essay, “Hermes Redivivus,” to the magazine, and Italian journalist and esoteric researcher Gaetano Lo Monaco reviews Pantano's earlier work, The Magic of Giuliano Kremmerz. C.J. Stone, co-author of The Trials of Arthur, brings us a feature piece on Arthur's own decades-long fight for Britain's Pagan landscape.

Our Occult Reads section is doing heavy lifting this issue, with full reviews of every book represented in our interviews above, plus additional titles: The Toltec Legacy (Weiser), From Now to Now (Hilaritas Press), The Magical Writings of W.B. Yeats (Aeon Spirit), and The Tarot of Marsilio, Volume 1: Down Here (Scarlet Imprint).

Beyond the interviews and reviews, a dedicated history piece traces the genuine, tangled lineage of “books of the dead” across ancient spiritual systems, from Egypt to Tibet, and how that entire tradition eventually gave rise to H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon. A companion profile, “W.B. Yeats, the Poet Laureate of the Golden Dawn,” examines the poet's own years inside the legendary magical order. And for readers who've followed our recent dive into chaos magic and quantum theory, “The Quantum Mechanics of Angels and Demons” takes that inquiry even further, asking whether angels and demons might function as genuine entities, genuine psychological archetypes, or something existing meaningfully in between.

Every current running through this issue, ceremonial grimoire work, tarot history, numerology, agrarian Druidry, stage magic archives, chaos theory, keeps circling back to the same central question: what actually stands between us and the forces, entities, and archetypes we've spent millennia trying to name, summon, banish, or understand. Angels and demons have never really been opposites so much as two names for the same essential mystery, approached from opposite directions. This issue spends its full length exploring that mystery honestly, without flattening it into easy answers in either direction.

Modern Occultist Issue Four: Angels & Demons is available now. Thank you, as always, for reading, and for making this magazine's ongoing exploration of historical occultism possible.

(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.)

Modern Occultist