Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY February 28 “The Death and Afterlife of W.B. Yeats” (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.) On the afternoon of January 28th, 1939, in a modest upstairs room at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, William Butler Yeats died. He was seventy-three. His wife George and his companion Edith Shackleton Heald were at his bedside. Outside, a particularly cold Mediterranean winter had been aggravating the cardiac and renal conditions that had been closing in on him for months. He had known it was coming. In the weeks before, working with the fierce concentration of a man determined to finish what he had started, he composed some of his finest late poems in that small room above the sea. Among them was “Under Ben Bulben” —which contained not only his own epitaph but precise instructions for his burial, written with the cool authorit...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY The Man Who Never Died On the Two-Hundred-and-Forty-First Anniversary of the Death—or Disappearance—of the Count of St. Germain A special from  MODERN OCCULTIST magazine (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 is a man who never dies, and who knows everything.”  — Voltaire, letter to Frederick the Great, 1758 On the morning of February 27, 1784, in a converted factory at Eckernförde in the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, a man died. The parish register of St. Nicolai Church recorded the burial quietly, as parish registers do—name, date, the plain facts of an ending. No relatives came to claim his possessions. When the city eventually auctioned off his estate, the inventory made for disappointing reading: 82 Reichsthalers in cash, assorted clothing, some linen shirts, a few razors, a pair of sunglasses. No diamonds. No gold. No philosopher's...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY February 26 “ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  & the Birth of Horror” (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.) On February 26, 1920, at the Marmorhaus theatre in Berlin, the lights went down, a crooked world appeared on the screen, and cinema was never quite the same again. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had arrived—and with it, the first true horror film, the first cult film, and one of the most sustained acts of occult imagination in the history of the moving image. ——— The producer, Erich Pommer, was so nervous on his way to the premiere that he reportedly turned to his companions and announced: "It will be a horrible failure for all of us." He was wrong. Women in the audience screamed when the somnambulist Cesare first opened his eyes. Some fainted during the abduction scene. The film ran for four weeks—an extraordinary run for the era—then ret...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY February 25 "Walpurga: The Saint Among the Witches" (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.) On February 25th, 777 AD, a Benedictine abbess named Walpurga died quietly in the German town of Heidenheim. She had spent her life converting pagans, healing the sick, and battling witchcraft. Twelve centuries later, her name is most commonly invoked on the night the witches ride. There is a particular kind of historical irony that the occult tradition specializes in: the saint co-opted by the very forces she opposed, the Christian feast day that could not quite contain the older fire burning underneath it, the holy woman whose canonization date became—by a process that is either deeply comic or deeply significant, depending on your disposition — one of the great witch festivals of the Western world. Saint Walpurga is the supreme example. The Woman Hersel...