Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 6 Carl Jung and the Occult of Modern Psychology   (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 good doctor kept a secret in a Swiss vault for nearly fifty years. Carl Gustav Jung—born July 26, 1875, who died on this date in 1961 at the age of eighty-five—was the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century … and whose work the psychiatric community never quite knew what to do with. The founder of analytical psychology, the theorist of archetypes and the collective unconscious, the inventor of synchronicity and the concept of the shadow—Jung was, depending on who you ask, either the greatest depth psychologist since Freud or a credulous mystic who confused subjective vision with objective fact. His colleagues accused him of occultism,   specifically because he was exploring exactly the same territory as the occultists—and doing so...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 5 The Night of the Watchers: Atlantis & the Book of Enoch   (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 calculation, it happened 8:00pm local time. That level of specificity—not merely the year and date, but the precise hour on June 5, 8498 BC when a civilization older than any in the historical record vanished beneath the Atlantic Ocean—is either the most precise piece of archaeology ever attempted, or a monument to the human capacity for severe academic nonsense. Probably both, in roughly equal measure. The man responsible for the calculation was Otto Heinrich Muck , born in Vienna in 1892—an w aeronautical engineer, WWI flying officer, inventor of the U-boat snorkel, member of the Peenemünde V1 and V2 rocket research team, and holder of approximately 2,000 patents at the time of his death in 1956. By all accounts, he wa...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 4 Scotland's Witchcraft Act and the North Berwick Trials   (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 law never defined what it was prohibiting… On June 4, 1563, the Parliament of Scotland passed the Act Anentis Witchcraftis—Against Witchcraft—making the use of “any manner of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy” a capital offense for all parties: the practitioner, their client, and anyone who consulted them. The penalty was death. The text of the Act didn’t trouble itself to define what witchcraft actually was, or how it was to be distinguished from healing, from prayer, from folk medicine, from the use of charms that the Catholic Church had tolerated for a thousand years—it simply prohibited it, in the broadest possible terms, and left the definition to the courts, the Kirk, the local community, and the anxieties of the moment. The consequences were ca...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 3 The Rose and the Cross in America   (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.) To write honestly about R. Swinburne Clymer—who spent nearly seven decades as the Supreme Grand Master of what he maintained was the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the Americas, and died on this date at the age of eighty-seven in 1966—is to write about a figure whose historical importance and whose personal controversies are genuinely inseparable. And yet, we cover him here because the tradition he represented deserves to be understood. The more interesting story, in many ways, is not Clymer himself, but the man whose legacy he spent his life championing, often inaccurately but always passionately: Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African American occultist, Rosicrucian, and sex magic theorist who may have done more to shape the American esoteric ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 2 The Devils of Loudun & the Trial of Urbain Grandier   (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 was unmistakable. Amid a series of mysterious sigils, the pact was written in backwards Latin, signed in blood, and countersigned by Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Elimi, and Astaroth—each in their own infernal hand. On June 2, 1630, the trial of Urbain Grandier—priest, reputed womanizer, and (apparently) the most dangerous man in the small French town of Loudun—began on charges of adultery and moral degeneracy. Unbelievably, he survived it, and was acquitted by the Archbishop of Bordeaux himself. That out of the way, Grandier returned to his parish in characteristically high spirits—but the elation wasn’t destined last; within four short years, the charges—now upgraded significantly—were brought against him again. Seventeen Ursuline nuns had be...