Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 28 The 110th anniversary of Parry's Jerusalem (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 28, 1916, a choir of three hundred voices gathered at the Queen's Hall in London's Langham Place—the self-described musical center of the Empire—and sang a short poem for the first time. The poem was by William Blake, dead for nearly ninety years. The music was by Hubert Parry, who had written it eighteen days earlier and handed the manuscript to his former student Henry Walford Davies with the rather casual comment: “Here's a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.” What Davies did with it, what England did with it, and what continues to be done with it one hundred and ten years later—that is one of the stranger stories in the history of sacred music. Because the poem that became Jerusalem was not written as a patriotic hymn. It w...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 27 The Saint and the Pagans Or, "How a Holy Roman Emperor allied with pagan Slavs and accidentally preserved one of the last great religious traditions of the medieval 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.) In the year 1003, the most powerful Christian ruler in Europe made a decision that scandalized his contemporaries, baffled his bishops, and quietly changed the course of religious history on the continent. Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany and Italy, a man of such conspicuous personal piety that the Catholic Church would eventually canonize him as a saint, signed a peace deal with the pagan Wends —the Slavic tribes of the Elbe River region who worshipped many gods, maintained magnificent wooden temples, and had been resisting Christian missionaries for generations. Not only did he make peace with them—he made an ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 26 The Murder Act of 1752 and the Birth of Frankenstein (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 26, 1752, the Parliament of Great Britain quietly passed a piece of legislation that would alter the relationship between death, science, and the human imagination for the next three centuries. Its formal title was unwieldy, as parliamentary titles tend to be. Its purpose, stripped to essentials, was this: the corpses of convicted murderers, after hanging, would no longer be buried. They would be handed to the Company of Surgeons for public dissection. The lawmakers who drafted the Murder Act were thinking about deterrence, not literature. They could not have anticipated that the chain of events they set in motion—legal corpses, desperate surgeons, grave robbers, galvanic experiments on twitching executed bodies—would eventually lead a nineteen-...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 25 Dante and the Journey That Never Ends   (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.) "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita." — Inferno, Canto I   “Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” Seven centuries after those words were first committed to parchment, they retain a power that no translation can fully tame. This is because Dante Alighieri was not merely describing a literary conceit. He was mapping something true—something every human being who has ever lived through a period of confusion, crisis, or spiritual disorientation has felt in their bones: the moment when the path forward disappears and the darkness closes in. Today, March 25, is Dantedì —Italy's National Dante Day, established in 2020 and...