Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 2 Peter J. Carroll (1953–2026) (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 is with deep sadness that we report Peter James Carroll—occultist, author, co-founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros, and the architect of chaos magic as a living magical tradition—passed away unexpectedly in the early hours of Wednesday, April 22, 2026. He was seventy-two years old. The announcement on his website, Specularium.org, carried the only headline that fit: "The Wizard Has Gone." Robert Anton Wilson—no casual dispenser of praise—called him "the most original, and probably the most important, writer on Magick since Aleister Crowley." That assessment has aged well. Carroll didn't merely contribute to the Western magical tradition; he cracked it open, stripped it of its accumulated dogma, and rebuilt it on foundations that would have been unrecog...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 1 The Illuminati (Yup, It’s Real) On May 1, 1776, five men gathered in a forest outside Ingolstadt, Bavaria, and founded the most famous secret society in human history. The conspiracy theorists got almost everything wrong—which is a shame, because the real story is considerably stranger…   (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 torchlight flickered between the trees. There were five of them: Adam Weishaupt, twenty-eight years old, professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, and four of his students. The date was the first of May—Beltane, the old fire festival, though it's unlikely Weishaupt chose it for that reason. He chose it because it was a date, and he needed a date, and he had been waiting long enough. He called the new organization the Bund der Perfektibilisten —the Covenant of Perfectibility. He would later change the ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 30 The Invisible Made Visible: The Discovery of the Electron On the evening of April 30, 1897, physicist J.J. Thomson stood before the Royal Institution in London and announced that matter had a hidden interior — that inside the atom, which everyone had assumed was the smallest possible thing, there was something smaller still…   (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 audience at the Royal Institution's Friday Evening Discourse on April 30, 1897, expected a competent lecture on cathode rays. Instead, they got a revolution. Joseph John Thomson—thirty-year-old head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, meticulous experimentalist, and a man whom colleagues described as genuinely difficult to ruffle—had spent the previous months driving electrical current through vacuum tubes and measuring what came out the other end. Cathode rays: streams...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY April 29 James Watt & The Birth of Steampunk On April 29, 1769, Patent 913 was enrolled in the name of James Watt, Scottish engineer, for a new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines. He not only kickstarted the Industrial Revolution—but inspired the dreams of Steampunk (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 insight arrived, as the best ones do, during a walk. It was a Sunday afternoon in May 1765, and James Watt—instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Freemason of Lodge 77, and a man who had been thinking about the inefficiency of steam engines for more than a year—was strolling across Glasgow Green when the solution appeared to him. The Newcomen engine, then the only practical steam engine in existence, wasted most of its energy by repeatedly heating and cooling the same cylinder. What if the condensation ...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #7   (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.) Virginia Monti—better known within the manifestation community as Neyah —has been a prolific modern occultist her entire life; known as the founder and vocalist of the hard rock band, Psychedelic Witchcraft , she’s also an artist and popular manifestation coach through her YouTube and Patreon channels, “Neyah” and “Neyah Visions”—although, as she explained to Modern Occultist magazine, her journey has led her more and more towards teaching the methods and philosophies she credits for much of her success… MO For anyone unfamiliar with your manifestation work, tell us a little about yourself. NEYAH Well, my work focuses on bridging the gap between the mystical and the practical. I help people reclaim their inherent power to shape their lives through intentional living, mindset shifts, and spiritu...