Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 21 The Occult Makes the Cover (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 21, 1969—the day after the Spring Equinox—the most widely read news magazine in the United States put an astrologer on its cover. Not a politician. Not an astronaut—though the Apollo program was in full swing and the moon landing was only four months away. Not a civil rights leader or a protest organizer or a general. An astrologer: Carroll Righter , the Hollywood astrologer whose client list included Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and—as TIME would report in the same issue—the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The cover story was titled "Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult," and it ran to six pages. It was not a dismissal. It was a reckoning. TIME magazine in 1969 was not a fringe publication, a counterculture zine, or an alternative press organ. ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 20 “ The Equinox of the Gods ” On the Spring Equinox of 1904, in a Cairo apartment, a young woman in a trance spoke five words that changed the Western esoteric tradition forever.   (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.) The Spring Equinox arrives today. For a moment, and only a moment, the world is balanced. The arc of the sun crosses the celestial equator, and day and night stand in perfect equality—the same number of hours of light as dark, the same number of darkness as light—before the long climb toward midsummer begins. Ancient peoples built their most sacred monuments to track this moment. Stonehenge aligns to it. The pyramids of Giza orient to it. The great passage tombs of Ireland are positioned with respect to it. Virtually every culture that has ever inhabited the Northern Hemisphere has recognized the Spring Equinox as one of the...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 19, 1859 Gounod's Faust : The Devil's Bargain Begins   (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 19, 1859, the curtain rose at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris on what would become the most frequently performed opera in the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, Gounod's Faust had been staged more times than any other opera ever written. It opened the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1883. It accumulated over two thousand performances at the Paris Opéra alone. It became, for a generation, the very definition of what grand opera could be . Yet it almost did not happen at all. The production had been plagued from the beginning by a sequence of mishaps so comprehensive and so precisely aimed at the opera's most vulnerable points that, if one were inclined toward a certain kind of read...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY MARCH 18 Sheelah's Day: The Fertility Goddess Hiding in Plain Sight (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.) Yesterday we raised a glass to Patrick. Today, by ancient Irish tradition, we raise one to Sheelah . March 18 th — Lá 'le Síle , “Sheelah's Day”—was once observed across Ireland as the natural and necessary completion of the St. Patrick's Day celebrations. Where March 17th belonged to the male saint, March 18th belonged to his female counterpart: Sheelah, variously described in folklore as Patrick's wife, his mother, or simply his sacred feminine other half, the figure without whom the great missionary's story was somehow incomplete. On Patrick's Day, the shamrock was wetted with whiskey. On Sheelah's Day, it was drowned in the final glass—consumed entirely, the luck of Ireland swallowed whole, the green dissolved in...