Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 11 Happy Birthday, Lon Milo DuQuette:  The Mark Twain of the Occult (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 Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel, circa 1970…. A young acid-cowboy duo called Charley D. and Milo has been booked, against their better judgment, to back Sammy Davis Jr. for one night, in front of a room that includes John Wayne, Nancy Sinatra, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and a stoned young George Carlin who wanders up afterward to tell them they were “groovy.” Everything is going fine until Sammy starts introducing the next number—“Spinning Wheel”—a song the two guitarists have never learned. Lon Milo DuQuette and his partner quietly slip their guitars off, creep offstage, and leave Sammy Davis Jr. alone with only the drummer to get him through it. They never worked with the William Morris Agency again. Neither, as it turned out, did the agen...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 10 Franz Bardon: A Hermetic Master Silenced By Communism (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 1958, Franz Bardon died in a Brno prison hospital, roughly four months into a communist detention that had already stripped him of his freedom, his medical care, and eventually his life’s collected manuscripts, magical tools, and talismans, none of which were ever returned to his family. He remains one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers on Hermetic magic—and also one of its most heavily mythologized. But, separating the system-builder from the legend turns out to be the more interesting story… A System-Builder Bardon was born on December 1, 1909, in Katherein, near Opava in what was then Austrian Silesia, the eldest of thirteen children to a father, Viktor, known locally as a devout Christian mystic. Franz trained as an ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 9 Panathenaea, Rhea, and Dionysus: Athens’s Greatest Festival   (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.) Imagine in your mind’s eye Athens at the height of summer: the Panathenaic Way packed shoulder to shoulder from the Dipylon Gate to the Acropolis. A runner comes pounding up from the sacred grove of the Academy, torch held high, having outpaced every rival in a two-mile relay that began at the altar of Eros. Behind him, a procession that has been building for hours: priests, magistrates, cavalry, resident foreigners bearing trays of honeyed cakes, and at its heart a ship-cart carrying an enormous woven robe, worked for nine months by the city’s noblest unmarried daughters, bound at last for the ancient wooden statue of the goddess who made this city hers. That is the Panathenaea, and by most modern pagan calendars—this column’s source materi...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 8 The Celtic Tree Month of Holly   (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.) Starting today, in the reckoning kept by countless modern Druids, witches, and tree-calendar enthusiasts, the Wheel turns... Oak, which has ruled the light half of the year since late June, steps aside, and Holly takes the throne for the twenty-eight days running from July 8 to August 4. Its leaves do not soften or drop with the season; its wood does not know the mellowing of autumn. It stays exactly as it is—dark, glossy, armed at every edge with a spine sharp enough to draw blood—straight through to the depths of winter, when it becomes, quite literally, the only green thing left standing in an English hedgerow. This is a story about a tree whose reputation as a fierce, lightning-charmed guardian is entirely earned. It is also a story about a calendar that claims a pedi...