Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 30 The Reckoning of Christopher Marlowe   (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.) His body was buried the next morning in an unmarked grave, and the pardon came down twenty-eight days later. On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe —the most celebrated playwright in England, son of a Canterbury shoemaker who had climbed through Cambridge on a scholarship, and the renowned the author of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and the play that forever became synonymous with the dark side of occultism, Doctor Faustus—died of a stab wound above the right eye in a room in Deptford, South London. He was only twenty-nine years old. To the bewilderment of all Marlowe’s friends and admirers, his killer, Ingram Frizer, was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth within the month and immediately returned to the service of his employer. The official explanation—“a qu...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 29 The Tower: The Fall of Constantinople   (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 Final emperor of the Byzantine Era, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting in the final assault, but amid the chaos and mass of bodies, his own was never specifically found. On today’s date in 1453, following a fifty-three-day siege, the walls of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II. At the time, the very concept of such a defeat was unimaginable; the dynamic central city had the greatest defensive fortification within the entire medieval world, and thought to be impenetrable. Built by Theodosius II in the fifth century, it had remained unbreachable for over a thousand years. And then finally, the capital of Christendom’s eastern half—and repository of the classical world’s accumulated knowledge—fell in a single catastrophic day. W...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 28 Vanishing Light: Solar Eclipses & Occult Power    (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 soldiers were in mid-battle when the sky went dark. It was May 28, 585 BC, on the banks of the River Halys in what is now central Turkey, when the armies of King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of Media continued their bloody, fifteen-year war—a grinding, inconclusive conflict over control of Anatolia that had seen the deaths of hundreds on both sides. And this morning, the war raged on. However, at around noon, men from both sides of the conflict began to notice a strange anomaly in the skies above: the sun had mysteriously begun to vanish. Soon, the moon’s shadow crept across the face of the sun and the sky was black. To the bewilderment of all, the stars became visible; the temperature dropped; birds went silent. It could only be a s...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 27 Vincent Price, Man of   Mystery   (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 never dreamed he’d become a leading man—or, for that matter, the leading man who’d haunt everyone else’s dreams… Vincent Leonard Price Jr.—born this day 1911, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest child of a candy company president and the great-grandson of the man who invented baking powder—went to Yale, studied art history, crossed the Atlantic to pursue a master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute in London, and then did what no sensible art historian does: he announced he wanted to become an actor. By the time he died on October 25, 1993, Price had appeared in more than a hundred films, narrated Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” voiced a villain in a Disney animated feature, written cookbooks (and one biography of his beloved dog), lectured on fine art at univ...