Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 18 Joan of Arc’s Long Road to Sainthood On April 18, 1909, the Church that had burned Joan of Arc for hearing voices finally called her Blessed. It took nearly 500 years...   (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.) She was thirteen years old when the voices began. In the village of Domrémy in the Lorraine countryside, in the summer of 1425, a peasant girl named Jehanne heard something in her father's garden. She described it later, under interrogation, with disarming precision: a voice, coming from her right, accompanied by a great light. It told her to be good and attend church. It came back. It came back many times. Eventually she identified the voices as those of Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch—three of the most venerated figures in medieval French Catholicism. They told her that sh...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 17 Carl Sagan’s “Dragons” (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 17, 1978, The Dragons of Eden won the Pulitzer Prize. What Sagan saw in the fossil record of your own skull should still haunt… In some lost Eden where dragons ruled, the foundations of our intelligence were laid. That line—from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch review of Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden —captures something the book itself spends 263 pages carefully, magnificently earning. On April 17, 1978, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded its General Nonfiction prize to a work of popular science that had already spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was Sagan's first and only Pulitzer. It remains, nearly fifty years on, one of the strangest and most resonant works of science writing ever produced—a book that was simultaneously rigorous, sp...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 16 The Accidental Mystic & the Discovery of LSD   (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.) It was a Friday afternoon in wartime Basel, and Albert Hofmann was trying to make a drug for circulation problems. He never finished. Somewhere in the final stages of re-synthesizing his twenty-fifth lysergic acid derivative—a compound he'd set aside five years earlier after it showed no particular promise in animal tests—he absorbed a trace amount through his fingertips. He didn't notice it at first. Then he did. He described it later in a report to his Sandoz superior Arthur Stoll: a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. He went home, lay down, closed his eyes against the unusually glaring afternoon light, and sank into what he called 'a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated i...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 15 Tellus Mater & Bast: the  Mother Earth & the Cat Goddess April 15 is sacred to not one but two of the ancient world's most enduring goddesses—Rome's Tellus Mater, the earth beneath your feet, and Egypt's Bast, the cat who guards your door.  One demands reverence. The other one wants to party. (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.) April is doing a lot of heavy lifting this year on the pagan and esoteric calendar. We've had Crowley receiving the Book of the Law from Aiwass (April 8), the Feast Day of Archangel Gabriel (April 9), Sybil Leek appearing on American television for the first time (April 13), the 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg (April 14)—and today, April 15, the calendar gives us not one but two ancient goddess festivals running simultaneously: the Roman Feast of Tellus Mater and the Egyptian Festival of B...

  The Modern Occultist Interview  #5 (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.) James D. McCallister is a Columbia, South Carolina-based novelist, independent business owner, and civic figure who has spent three decades building a life out of disciplined intention. His Dixiana trilogy—a 600,000-word "prodigal-son" epic rooted in questions of consciousness, manifestation, and transformation—is the centerpiece of a writing career he willed into existence one submission at a time. He sat down with Modern Occultist to talk about near-death experiences, sobriety, Neville Goddard, and why reality is stickier than you think... MODERN OCCULTIST Can you introduce yourself for our readers?   JAMES D. MCCALLISTER I'm an independent business owner. I'm an artist. I've been involved in civic matters here in Columbia, South Carolina, and I've won awards in all three of...