Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 11 "Lord Merlin: The Extraordinary Hidden Life of Dr. Frederick Santee"   (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 gravestone in Old River Church Cemetery in Wapwallopen, Pennsylvania carries an epitaph that most visitors will not recognize as unusual: “I shall return when Spring's first shadow trails.” It is a line from a poem by the man buried beneath it. It is also, for those who understand the Wiccan tradition, something more: a statement of belief in the cycle of death and return, in the turning of the wheel, in the promise that what the earth receives it will eventually give back. Frederick LaMotte Santee, FAAR—who was known to his coven as Lord Merlin, and who died on April 11, 1980—was one of the most remarkable and least-known figures in the history of Modern Occultism. He was, in a single lifetime, a child prodigy who e...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 10 The Honest Deceivers: When Penn Met Teller   (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 1974, a man named Weir Chrisemer introduced two people to each other: one was Penn Fraser Jillette—nineteen years old, six feet six inches tall, freshly graduated from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, already a skilled juggler and fire-eater, burning with a furious skeptical intelligence that had not yet found its proper vehicle; the other was Raymond Joseph Teller—twenty-six years old, quiet by instinct and by professional design, a graduate of Amherst College with a degree in Classics, currently teaching Latin and English at a New Jersey high school, performing magic at fraternity parties in the evenings and discovering, to his satisfaction, that silence made his audiences pay closer attention. Chrisemer had been performing with ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 9 The World, the Flesh and the Devil: How the First Color Feature Film Arrived—and Vanished   (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 evening of April 9, 1914, an audience gathered at the Holborn Empire on High Holborn in London for the premiere of a fifty-minute British silent drama called The World, the Flesh and the Devil. The title came from the Litany of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer : “From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, spare us, good Lord.” The film's cast list included, in a role presumably requiring some theatrical bravado, an actor credited simply as H. Agar Lyons—playing the Devil himself. What made this evening genuinely historic had less to do with its plot—a melodrama of mistaken identity involving switched babies, frustrated social climbers, and the inevitable complications of confused inheritanc...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 8, 2026 The Voice in the Corner: Aleister Crowley and Aiwass 122 years ago today, a voice spoke from the corner of a Cairo drawing room … and the Æon of Horus began   (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.) At noon on April 8, 1904, Aleister Crowley sat down at his desk in the drawing room of a ground-floor apartment near the Boulak Museum in Cairo, Egypt, and began to write. For exactly one hour, he wrote, taking down what he described as a voice coming from over his left shoulder, from the furthest corner of the room. The voice was, he described,   was passionately poured, musical and expressive, rich in timbre, carrying tones that were solemn, voluptuous, tender, and fierce as the message demanded. It identified itself as Aiwass , the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat —Horus the Child. He returned to the same room, at the same hour, on Apri...