Modern Occultist News

  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...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 8 Robespierre & the Cult of the Supreme Being   (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 June 8, 1794 and the guillotine was shrouded in flowers. In many ways, the outcome was inevitable: the 20th of Prairial in Year II of the French Republic (not coincidentally, the Christian feast of Pentecost) and Paris had staged the most elaborate act of state ceremonial magic in the history of the modern world—not exactly accepted as “mainstream” during the era of Napoleon. A procession of National Convention deputies, dressed in matching sky-blue coats and carrying sheaves of wheat, flowers, and fruit, wound through the streets from the Tuileries gardens to the Champ de Mars. At their head, walked Maximilien Robespierre—lawyer, revolutionary, chief architect of the Terror, and, as of six weeks earlier, the founder and high priest of a new state ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 7 Gervase of Canterbury’s Mysterious Lightning   (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 described it simply, in way any of us would in describing something beyond comprehension… On June 7, 1195, Gervase —a Benedictine monk at Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury, one of the most meticulous chroniclers of his age—recorded in his journals: “A marvelous sign descended near London,” consisting of a dense and dark cloud from which a white substance emerged, grew into a spherical shape, and then fell as a “fiery globe” toward the river before vanishing completely from view. And that was it—no interpretation; (surprisingly) no theological commentary; and (equally surprisingly) no attempt to explain causation of the event to God or the devil. What he had seen was just too strange. Eight hundred and thirty years later, physicists at Dur...