Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 3 The Invisible Hand of Jack the Ripper On April 3, 1888, a woman named Emma Smith was attacked in Whitechapel—and a file was opened that would never truly be closed   (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 early hours of April 3, 1888, a forty-five-year-old widow named Emma Elizabeth Smith was making her way home along Whitechapel Road when she noticed she was being followed. She quickened her pace. Turned right into Osborn Street. The men followed. At the junction with Brick Lane and Wentworth Street, they caught her—three of them, possibly four, at least one a teenager. They beat her, robbed her of everything she had, and subjected her to a savage sexual assault. Badly injured, bleeding, she staggered back to her lodging house at 18 George Street in the small hours of the morning. Fellow residents Mary Russell and Annie Lee, alarmed by...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 2 Nutopia to New York: John Lennon’s Micronation On April 2, 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono announced a conceptual nation and asked the United Nations for recognition. Fifty-three years later, a real teenage-built micronation is walking into the room   (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 April 2, 1973, John Lennon held a press conference in New York City to announce the birth of a new country. It had no land, no borders, no population count, no laws beyond what he called cosmic ones. Its flag was a white handkerchief—which Lennon waved, and then blew his nose on, to the delight of assembled reporters. Its national anthem, eventually released on his 1973 album Mind Games , consisted of four seconds of silence. Its Great Seal featured a hand-drawn sea creature balancing a yin-yang globe on its nose. Its embassy was a gold plaque on the k...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 1 The Wonders of the Invisible World Cotton Mather Writes Witchcraft into History   (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 April 1, 1693, Cotton Mather—Boston's most prominent Puritan minister, Harvard-educated theologian, and the most prolific writer in colonial America—suffered a profound personal loss that he attributed, with characteristic conviction, to the invisible war he believed was being waged against the godly by the forces of darkness. The loss deepened his certainty in the reality of diabolical assault on New England's Puritan experiment. It also accelerated the completion of the book he was already writing: Wonders of the Invisible World. Published later that same year, Wonders of the Invisible World became—and remains—the most detailed written defense of the Salem witch trials ever produced. It is a document that tells us more a...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 31 Modern Occultist Issue 2 Debuts! The Spring Equinox 2026 Manifestation Issue is out NOW!   (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.) We have, in these pages, spent the past week tracing a single unbroken thread across seven days: the persistence of sacred knowledge against every force arrayed against it: Gabriel's feast, suppressed and enduring; Dante's hidden cosmology; the Murder Act's accidental gothic legacy; the pagan Wends given a century's reprieve; Blake's Jerusalem , stripped of its radical pronoun and still burning; the Golden Dawn's spectacular collapse, and the tradition that escaped from the rubble; Aleister Crowley staring calmly from the Sgt. Pepper cover, twenty years after his death, in the most famous photograph in rock history... The signs are always given. The knowledge is always available. Today, o...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 30 “All You Need Is Love (Under Will)…” On March 30, 1967, Michael Cooper photographed the most famous album cover in history—and Aleister Crowley, expelled from the Golden Dawn sixty-seven years earlier, stared out from the back row (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 told the story of how the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn imploded on March 29, 1900 — expelled its own founder, produced a masked intruder in a Highland kilt, and inadvertently seeded the entire modern Western magical tradition. Today, exactly sixty-seven years later, the most famous figure to emerge from that explosion arrived at a photographer's studio in Chelsea and took his place in history. On March 30, 1967, the Beatles walked into Michael Cooper's studio at 4 Chelsea Manor Studios on Flood Street and posed for what would become the cover of Sgt. Peppe...