Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 23 Tycho Brah and the Alchemy of the Stars   (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.) He had a brass nose, a pet elk, and a dwarf jester named Jepp whom he believed to be psychic. These are the details history tends to lead with when it comes to Tycho Brahe—and they’re all true. But occult rumors don’t begin to account for what he actually built, or what he actually believed, or why on May 23, 1576, King Frederick II of Denmark made one of the most consequential acts of royal patronage in the history of science: granting the entire island of Hveen to Tycho Brahe by royal decree, along with an annual stipend, and told him to build whatever he deemed necessary to understand the heavens. What Brahe built was Uraniborg—"the Castle of the Heavens”—the first custom-designed research institution in modern European history. What he pursued there, in ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 22 Ragnar Lodbrok and the Norse Warrior’s Path   (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.) According to the sagas, when King Ælla of Northumbria threw Ragnar Lodbrok into a pit of vipers—the Viking king’s punishment for his characteristically overconfident invasion of England with just two ships—Ragnar didn’t scream or beg or pray for mercy. He sang. The poem attributed to his last moments, the Krákumál —“The Lay of Kraka,” composed sometime in the twelfth century and placed in his dying mouth as the venom spread—is one of the most extraordinary death songs in world literature. Twenty-nine stanzas of battle-joy, of remembered raids and honored enemies and the warmth of steel in the hand. Its final lines, repeated as a refrain, have echoed across nine centuries: “We struck with our swords. The hours of my life are ended. I die laughing.” In some modern Nors...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 21 Sacrifice of the Ram: The Festival of Veiovis (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 priest paused before the ram, blade in hand, and asked, “Agone?”—"Shall I strike?” He waited for the command before he drew the knife. He would not act without permission from the god. This was the ritual heart of the Agonalia —one of Rome’s oldest and most obscure religious festivals, observed four times a year at the Regia, the ancient ceremonial house of the sacred kings on the Via Sacra. On January 9, the ram died for Janus, god of beginnings and thresholds. On March 17, for Mars, patron of war and the spring campaign season. On December 11, for Sol Indiges , the indigenous sun god. And on May 21—today, in the ancient Roman religious calendar—the sacrifice was offered to a deity whose nature puzzled the Romans themselves: Veiovis, the anti-Jupiter —the “...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 20 Vasco da Gama and India's Influence on Western Magic   (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.) He was looking for spices, and yet he found something considerably more consequential. On May 20, 1498, after eleven months at sea—rounding the Cape of Good Hope, up the East African coast Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Calicut, on the Malabar Coast of southwestern India. He was the first European in history to reach India by sea. He’d broken the Arab monopoly on the spice trade, opened a direct maritime route between Europe and the East, and set in motion a colonial enterprise whose consequences are still unfolding more than five centuries later. But there was a consequence no one anticipated, and it would take four hundred years to fully manifest: the slow, complex, transformative collision between European occultism and H...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 19 A.E. Waite: Death of the Scholar   (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.) Somewhere in the world right now, someone is laying out a Tarot spread. The cards they’re using almost certainly descend, in image and arrangement, from a deck first published in December 1909. The Fool stepping off the cliff. The High Priestess between her pillars. The Tower struck by lightning. The Ten of Pentacles with its multigenerational family and its archway of vines. Every one of those images was drawn by a single hand, in six months, for a flat fee, with no royalties, and no name on the box. Arthur Edward Waite died on May 19, 1942, at the age of eighty-four. He died with his name on the deck—the Rider-Waite Tarot, as the world has always called it. The woman who actually drew the cards, every last one of the seventy-eight, died nine years later in a Cornish boarding ...