Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 13   The Poet and the Witch: The Births of W.B. Yeats & Gerald Gardner (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 this date, nineteen years apart, two of the most important figures in the history of modern Western occultism were born: William Butler Yeats in 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin; and Gerald Brosseau Gardner in 1884, in Blundellsands, Lancashire. One would become the greatest poet in the English language since John Keats, a Nobel laureate, and a dedicated practitioner of ceremonial magic who spent over twenty-five years in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the other, a retired colonial civil servant who, in his sixties, created the tradition that would become modern Wicca. Although they never knew each other personally, Yeats and Gardner stand linked not only by the shared stars under which they were born, but in their dual pas...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 12   “What's Wrong With Its Eyes?”—Rosemary's Baby and a Question of Consent   (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.) Mia Farrow’s voice—thin, childlike, slightly off-key—singing wordless syllables over Krzysztof Komeda’s spare, minimalist score as the opening credits roll over slow shots of Central Park West… It’s one of the most iconic, unsettling film opening of its era, and possibly of its genre: nothing supernatural in sight, and yet the unease is immediate and total. Rosemary knows something before the audience does. On this day in 1968, Paramount Pictures released Rosemary’s Baby , Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel that had skyrocketed to bestseller status only the year before. Like the book upon which it was based, the film opened to overwhelming critical and commercial success, grossing $33 million aga...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 11   Ruth Montgomery: Journalist of the New Age (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 covered six presidents and attended FDR’s funeral—the only woman among twelve invited reporters. Earlier, in 1959, she had ridden with Nixon’s press corps through Soviet Russia, filing dispatches to the Hearst syndicate, an accomplishment that only added to her later post as the president of the Women’s National Press Club. By any measure, Ruth Montgomery was one of the most accomplished political journalists of her generation. A cursory glance through Montgomery’s credentials and it’s a wonder she isn’t as well-known as contemporary, Barbara Walters. But something happened to Montgomery that took her out of mainstream journalism and put her in a, somewhat, class all her own: one day, she sat at her typewriter, cleared her mind, and let the spirits do t...

 ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 10 The Martian Chronicles: The Life & Death of Hélène Smith (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 claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antionette—but that wasn’t the strangest of her claims. According to renowned psychic medium and contemporary innovator of “automatic writing,” Hélène Smith, who passed away in Geneva on this date in 1929, she was also fluent in speaking “Martian”—as she had been a regular visitor to the fourth planet from the sun for many years. Born Catherine-Élise Müller on December 9, 1861, in Martigny, Switzerland, Smith spent four decades as the most celebrated medium in the French-speaking world, becoming the subject of a landmark study that shaped both modern psychology and the Surrealist movement. Based upon that study, Ferdinand de Saussure—the father of modern linguistics—personally analyzed and named Sm...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 9 Johann Galle & the Occult Neptune (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 discovered it “with the point of his pen.” Or so claimed French astronomer François Arago , describing his colleague Urbain Le Verrier ’s achievement in predicting the existence and position of an unknown planet entirely through mathematical calculations—before any human eye could confirm it was there. It was during the summer of 1846 that Le Verrier noticed that the orbit of Uranus had been behaving strangely. Something else was out there, he suspected, pulling Uranus off its predicted course. He surmised another planet must exist, and so wrote a letter to a German astronomer he had never met, and asked him to look. That astronomer was Johann Gottfried Galle, born in Radis, Prussia on this date in 1812. Galle received Le Verrier’s letter on the morning o...