Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 9 Blood Pact: Christoph Haizmann and the Devil’s Contract (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 May 9, 1678, Bavarian painter Christoph Haizmann knelt at the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Mariazell, Austria, and retrieved—physically, from the hands of the Devil himself—a document he had signed twelve years earlier in ordinary ink, promising to be Satan’s son. Three centuries later, Sigmund Freud would read the case file and conclude that none of it had anything to do with the Devil at all. Both men were probably right. A Diabolical Negotiation Christoph Haizmann was born in Traunstein, Bavaria, around 1647 or 1651 (the records are inconsistent) and worked as a painter of modest reputation in the Austrian provinces. In 1666, his father died. Haizmann, by his own account, was the sole surviving member of his family, and the loss pitched him int...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 8 The Occult in Technicolor: Hammer’s Dracula (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 May 8, 1958, Hammer Film Productions released Dracula —shot in rich Eastmancolor on a budget of £81,000 in twenty-five days at Bray Studios in Berkshire. It starred a thirty-five-year-old Christopher Lee in his breakthrough role and Peter Cushing as his nemesis, Professor Van Helsing. Critics were appalled and audiences were transfixed … For the first time, the blood ran red… The Hammer Horror era is generally discussed in terms of its commercial audacity—a small British studio remaking the Universal monsters in color and blood at a moment when Hollywood had largely abandoned the genre—and its aesthetic pleasures, which are considerable. What gets less attention is the degree to which those films, and Dracula in particular, were doing something genuinely interesti...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 7 Ann Radcliffe and the Literature of the Uncanny (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 May 7, 1794, G. G. and J. Robinson of London published a four-volume Gothic novel by a thirty-year-old woman who had never visited the Italian Alps, never seen a medieval castle by moonlight, and never traveled to the Pyrenees or Apennines she described with such hallucinatory precision … and changed Gothic literature forever. The Mysteries of Udolpho made its author the most popular novelist in England virtually overnight. The publisher paid her five hundred pounds for it—an extraordinary sum in 1794, equivalent to several years of comfortable living—and still considered themselves to have gotten the better of the bargain. The book sold through edition after edition, spawned imitators by the dozen, and became the cultural touchstone of its decade: Jane Aust...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 6 The Sack of Rome and the Death of the Renaissance On the morning of May 6, 1527, an army of Spanish and German mercenaries breached the walls of Rome and spent the next eight months raining hell on the greatest cultural city since Athens.   (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 man who might have stopped it died in the first minutes of the assault. Charles III, Duke of Bourbon—renegade French aristocrat, Constable of France turned imperial general, and the one figure with the authority to impose even minimal restraint on the force he commanded—had dressed himself that morning in a distinctive white cloak so his troops could identify him in the chaos of the assault. He might as well have taped “Shoot Me” on his back. The Duke was killed at the base of the Janiculum Hill almost immediately after the attack began, still breathing as he w...