Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 7 "219 Ideas the Church Wanted Dead" Today marks the issuing of the 219 "Philosophical Propositions" (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 March 7, 1277, Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, published a list of 219 philosophical propositions and declared them heresy. The document was meant to end a conversation. It became one of the most consequential intellectual provocations in Western history. The target was Latin Averroism — a current of thought that applied the rigorous logic of Aristotle, filtered through the great Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd, to questions the Church considered settled. At its most dangerous edge, this tradition entertained what became known as the Double Truth: the idea that something might be philosophically true and theologically false at the same time. For an institution whose authority rested on...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 6 Eight Teenagers Are Building a Country — And They've Made Me Their Merlin In a chaotic political landscape, eight teenagers are doing the impossible: taking the reins on their own future and forming their own country ... and Modern Occultist is here to help.  By C.M. Kushins, Publisher — Modern Occultist Digital 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.) I have a confession to make. When we were first asked if Modern Occultist might consider becoming a spiritual sponsor for a micronation — a self-declared teenage-run country called Gapla , situated on 54 acres of forested, unclaimed land between Serbia and Croatia — my first instinct was to smile and feel a tad jealous that I hadn’t thought of that at seventeen-years-old. But my assumption that Gapla was a school project, perhaps, or game between friends was quickly proven wro...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 5 "The Safarnama—The Persian Book of Travels" (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.) There is a particular kind of dream that does not fade with the morning light. You know the one. It arrives not with the dissolving quality of ordinary sleep-theater but with a weight, a clarity, a sense of having been addressed rather than merely entertained. The Sufis called such dreams ru'ya — true visions, distinguished from ordinary dreams as a physician distinguishes a pulse from background noise. The Isma'ili philosophers of the eleventh century understood them as a form of direct transmission from the active intellect — the divine mind touching the prepared human one. On the night of March 5, 1046, a Persian court official named Naser Khosrow had exactly such a dream. And when he woke, he resigned his government position, left behind the c...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 4 "The Night the Sky Went Silent" The Enlightenment of John Flamsteed (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 fourth of March, 1675, King Charles II of England signed the warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal — and in doing so, drew a line in the sky that the Western world has been arguing about ever since. On one side of that line: astrology . The ancient art of reading the heavens as a language, a living symbolic system in which the positions of planets and stars carried meaning for human lives, kingdoms, and the turning of ages. On the other side: astronomy. The new science of measuring, cataloguing, and calculating — the sky as mechanism rather than message, as clockwork rather than conversation. The establishment of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich was, on the surface, a thoroughly practical affair....