Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 26 The Occult Origins of Bram Stoker'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.) The popular mythology surrounding Bram Stoker’s Dracula —published on May 26, 1897, by Archibald Constable and Company in London, bound in yellow cloth with red lettering at six shillings—almost happened by accident. Much like the origin of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , it began with a nightmare—following a late supper of dressed crab that didn’t quite sit well with the author’s digestion. Of course, this story—first told by Stoker’s son Noel—is debated, and largely anecdotal. The truth? Dracula was the product of the most systematic and deliberate occult research program undertaken by any Victorian novelist. When Aleister Crowley first read the finished novel, he declared it “splendidly well-documented” and noted that Stoker had gotten his occult “facts...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 25 Marie Doro: The Actress Who Walked Out of Time   (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.) She changed hotels four times a week to avoid being found. This wasn’t paranoia in the clinical sense—or at least, the people who knew Marie Doro didn’t describe it that way. It was something more deliberate, more chosen: a systematic dismantling of the social connections that had made her, for two decades, one of the most celebrated actresses on the Broadway stage and in the early silent film era. She’d acted opposite Charlie Chaplin before he was famous, and she’d been the muse—and maybe more—of William Gillette, the man who invented the modern image of Sherlock Holmes (the pipe and deerstalker cap were his ideas). She’d been managed by Charles Frohman, the most powerful theatrical producer in America, until the morning of May 7, 1915, when he went dow...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY May 24 The Birth of the Goddess Diana (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 lake is perfectly still at midnight. On the wooded shores of Lake Nemi—tucked into the Alban Hills south of Rome, so dark and reflective that the ancients called it Speculum Dianae , the “Mirror of Diana”—worshippers once walked in torchlit procession through the trees, their flames doubled in the water below them. Women who had prayed for safe childbirth and received it came to the grove to leave garlands in thanks. Hunters dedicated their first kills at her altar. The sacred grove itself—the lucus Nemorensis —was tended by a priest with a peculiar and violent tenure: a runaway slave who had killed his predecessor to claim the title, and who held it only until another runaway slave killed him in turn. James George Frazer opened The Golden Bough with this image—the pri...