Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 25 Gregory the Great & the Divine Plague Procession On April 25, 590, a man who had tried to flee the papacy led the surviving population of a plague-ravaged Rome through the streets in procession and prayer. Eighty of them died along the way. Then the angel appeared.   (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.) Rome in the spring of 590 was a city that had been dying for a long time. The Plague of Justinian—the first great pandemic of bubonic plague to sweep Europe and the Mediterranean, beginning in 541—had returned in waves for fifty years. The Tiber had flooded catastrophically the previous November, inundating grain stores, washing away buildings, driving serpents through the streets. The flood receded and the plague rushed in behind it, moving through the weakened, famished city with terrible speed. In January 590, Pope Pelagius II died ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 24 The Trojan Horse, Or … The Oldest Trick in the Book On April 24, 1184 BC, the Greeks entered Troy inside a wooden horse and burned the city to the ground   (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.) There was a priest of Apollo named Laocoön who tried to stop them. When the Trojans were debating what to do with the enormous wooden horse the Greeks had left behind on the beach—apparently as an offering to Athena, apparently as proof that they had sailed away and the ten-year war was over—Laocoön ran down from the citadel and threw his spear into the horse's flank. “I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts,” he said, or words to that effect. He was right. The gods punished him for it. Two enormous serpents came out of the sea and crushed him and his two sons to death while the Trojans watched in horrified silence. The gods did not want Troy to surviv...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 23 William Rowan Hamilton & the Mathematics of Pure Time On April 23, 1827, a twenty-one-year-old Irish mathematician presented his Theory of Systems of Rays to the Royal Irish Academy—still an undergraduate. Sixteen years later, he would carve the most important equation of his life into a stone bridge with a penknife because he had nothing else to write on   (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.) Every morning, for weeks, his children would come down to breakfast and ask the same question. "Well, Papa, can you multiply triplets?" And every morning, William Rowan Hamilton would shake his head. "No. I can only add and subtract them." He had been trying to solve the problem for fifteen years. He wanted to extend the mathematics of complex numbers—which describe points on a plane with elegant, multiplicable precision—in...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 22 In the Gods We Trust… On April 22, 1864, Congress authorized the first American coin to bear the words “In God We Trust.” It was a two-cent piece, minted during the bloodiest war in American history. But pull any dollar bill from your pocket, and the theology runs considerably deeper than the motto…   (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 coin was a practical object, born of crisis. By 1864, two years into the Civil War, Americans had hoarded virtually all gold and silver coinage out of circulation. Commerce was grinding toward paralysis. Congress authorized a new two-cent piece in bronze as an emergency measure—cheap enough to spend, durable enough to circulate. The design was plain: a federal shield on the obverse, a simple wreath on the reverse, and above the shield, on a flowing ribbon, four words that had never appeared on American ...