Modern Occultist News

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 27 Shirley Jackson's " The Lottery" (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.)       June 27th does not appear anywhere on the historical calendar of real-life occult terror, and yet it may be the single most ominous date in American literature—scarier, by the reckoning of more than one critic, than October 31st itself. The reason has nothing to do with anything that genuinely happened on this date and everything to do with a 1948 short story that begins, with deceptive gentleness: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” opens like a postcard. It ends as one of the most quietly devastating depictions of ritual violence ever published in a major American magazine. When The New Yor...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 26 The True Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (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 day in 1284, the feast day of Saints John and Paul, a piper dressed in clothing of many colors walked through the German town of Hamelin, and one hundred and thirty children followed him out through the East Gate, toward a hill called “the Koppen” …   and were never seen again. There is no Brothers Grimm sentimentality in the earliest surviving account of this event. There are no rats—just a date, a number, a colorfully dressed stranger, and a town that spent the next several centuries treating the disappearance as the central trauma of its civic history. This is, perhaps, the strangest entry this column has yet covered—not because the supernatural elements are especially elaborate, but because the core event sits so close to...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 25 Marie Anne Lenormand: ‘Remember Me When  You Are Empress’ (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 day in 1843, Marie Anne Adélaïde Lenormand died in her Paris apartment at the age of seventy-one, having spent more than four decades as the most powerful fortune-teller in Europe. Over the course of her career as a medium, she’d been consulted by revolutionaries who would lose their heads, an empress who would lose her throne, and an emperor who would lose an entire continent. Yet, she left behind a fortune of 500,000 francs and a single surviving relative to claim it: a nephew, a devout Catholic with a military career, who took the money without hesitation and then burned every piece of her occult collection he could find. Lenormand’s cards, her notes, her correspondence with the dead century she had haunted so completely—...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY June 24 Curse of the Plague Dance (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 day in 1374, in the German city of Aachen, people began dancing in the streets and could not stop. They had not chosen to dance. They did not want to be dancing. Witnesses described them grimacing in pain, foaming at the mouth, shaking and twitching as they moved, utterly unable to control their own limbs. The affliction spread along the Rhine within days—to Liège, to Utrecht, to Tongres, to towns whose names have otherwise vanished from the historical record. Some danced for hours; some danced for days. Some, according to the chronicles, danced until their hearts simply gave out beneath them. Because the outbreak began on the feast day of St. John the Baptist, it was named St. John’s Dance. It would not be the last such episode (nor even the firs...