Modern Occultist News

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 4 The Discovery of Easter Island   (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 4, 1722, Jacob Roggeveen was not looking for Easter Island. He was sixty-two years old, a Dutch explorer sailing three ships and 223 men across the Pacific in search of Terra Australis—the great hypothetical southern continent that European cartographers had been placing on maps for centuries, convinced that such a landmass must exist to balance the continents of the north. His father had spent a lifetime obsessing over the theory. Roggeveen had inherited the obsession, and at an age when most men of his era were long settled, he had equipped an expedition to settle the question once and for all. On April 4, his lead vessel, the Afrikaansche Galey, lay to and made the signal of land in sight. When Roggeveen came up alongside, he recorded in his journal that...

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...