Modern Occultist News

  The Modern Occultist Interview  #4 (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.) Claudiney Prieto is a prominent Brazilian Wiccan Priest, author, and educator, known for popularizing Wicca in Brazil and founding the Dianic Nemorensis tradition. He has authored several books, including the bestseller Wicca: A Religião da Deusa, and founded the first Museum of Magic and Witchcraft in Brazil. His latest, The Kybalion for Witches , is a Llewellyn Worldwide exclusive, and a first for Modern Occultist. We are honored to present his exclusive, unedited MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW here for the first time. For an exclusive sneak-peek at The Kybalion for Witches , be sure to check out the new, Spring Equinox issue of MODERN OCCULTIST ! MODERN OCCULTIST The Kybalion for Witches begins with a remarkable act of intellectual honesty: you acknowledge upfront that The Kybalion itself is not the an...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 7 The Death of Alfred Watkins, Discoverer of Ley Lines On April 7, 1935, the man who taught the world to see the hidden geometry of the landscape died in Hereford.   (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 a summer afternoon in June 1921, a sixty-six-year-old English businessman named Alfred Watkins was standing on a hillside near Blackwardine in Herefordshire, studying his Ordnance Survey map, when the landscape opened up to him in a way it never quite had before. He saw, suddenly and with the force of what he would later describe as a flash of insight, a network of straight lines crossing the countryside—invisible threads connecting hilltops, ancient earthworks, standing stones, old churches, and medieval market towns in alignments so precise they could not be coincidental. The lines were there, running through the land beneath the surface...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 6 Petrarch’s Laura: A Light in the Dark Ages   (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 morning of April 6, 1327, in the Church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon, a twenty-three-year-old Italian scholar named Francesco Petrarca looked up and saw a woman, but dared not speak to her. He may never have spoken to her. She was already married—to Count Hugues de Sade, an ancestor of the notorious Marquis—and his own career in the Church made marriage impossible in any case. What he saw across that church was fair-haired, modest in bearing, dignified in presence. Her name, as far as we know, was Laura. In stead, he spent the next twenty-one years writing about her. Her tragic death in 1346 during the plague didn't even stop him from writing about her.  The 366 poems of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta—the Canzoniere , "the Songbook" —are amo...