Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 14 Verdi’s Macbeth: The Most Dangerous Play in the World (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 night of March 14, 1847, the curtain rose at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence on an opera unlike anything the Italian stage had seen before. There was no tenor hero. There was no love story. There was no heroine to be rescued, no noble sacrifice, no redemptive finale in the accepted Italian operatic tradition. What there was instead was a Scottish general receiving a prophecy from three witches on a battlefield, murdering his king in the dark, and being destroyed—slowly, inexorably, magnificently—by the consequences of having listened. The composer was Giuseppe Verdi, thirty-three years old, already one of the most celebrated figures in Italian music. The opera was his tenth. And it was, he would later write to the man who had raised him, the wor...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 13 Fooled by the Heavens (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 night of March 13, 1781, a German-born musician turned amateur astronomer sat at the eyepiece of a telescope he had built himself in the garden of his rented house in Bath, England, and saw something that didn't belong. He was conducting a systematic survey of the stars— cataloguing faint objects, methodically sweeping the sky—when he noticed an object that appeared slightly larger and more disk-like than a star should. It moved. It had, in his own words, "a visible diameter" that a point of light could not possess. William Herschel wrote in his journal: "In the quartile near Zeta Tauri ... either a Nebulous star or perhaps a Comet." He thought he had found a comet. He had found a planet. And in doing so, he doubled the known size of the solar system i...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 12 The Gutenberg Bible: The Word Made Mobile   (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 12, 1455, a man named Enea Silvio Piccolomini sat down and wrote a letter to his superior, Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, that would become the first eyewitness account of one of the most consequential objects in human history. Piccolomini had visited the Frankfurt trade fair the previous October and encountered something that left him—a sophisticated diplomat, papal legate, future Pope Pius II, and one of the most educated men in Europe—barely able to contain his excitement. He had seen pages from a printed Bible. Not copied by hand. Not illuminated by a monk in a scriptorium over the course of a year. Printed. Mechanically. In quantity. "All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true," he wrote. "The scr...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 11 The Sacred City: The Masonic Foundations of Washington, D.C.   (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.) In March 1791, two remarkable men arrived at the banks of the Potomac River to begin laying out what would become the capital of a new nation. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the French-born architect and military engineer, had been appointed by President George Washington to design the city's grand plan. Benjamin Banneker , a free Black man from Maryland — mathematician, astronomer, almanac publisher, and one of the most extraordinary minds of his generation — had been engaged by surveyor Andrew Ellicott to provide the astronomical calculations that would anchor the entire survey to the stars. The city they began to shape that month would become one of the most symbolically rich urban environments ever constructed. And the esoteric dimensions...