Modern Occultist News

SPECIAL FEATURE The Odyssey and the Occult: Hidden Esotericism in Homer’s Epic   (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.) Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened this weekend to the biggest live-action debut of his career, and by Sunday night it will likely be the number one film in the world. Somewhere between Matt Damon lashed to a mast and the box office charts, though, almost nobody buying a ticket this weekend will know that they’re watching a story ancient philosophers, magicians, and mystics have spent nearly two thousand years reading as something closer to a spellbook than a war story. Long before Homer’s epic was assigned reading, it was scripture for people who believed Odysseus’s ten-year voyage home wasn’t really about a man trying to get back to Ithaca at all. It was about a soul trying to get back to God… The Cave of Two Doors Sometime around the third centu...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 18 The Publication of Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (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.) Picture a sick, restless twenty-year-old shut up in his parents’ house in Frankfurt, freshly sent home from law school with a hemorrhaging lung and no degree to show for it. A family friend—a mystic, deeply read in alchemy—hands him a massive, expensive volume covered in strange geometric engravings of a universe built out of salt, sulfur, and fire-water, and tells him it maps the hidden architecture of creation. He can’t make head or tail of it. Decades later, that same baffling book resurfaces, almost unrecognizable, inside one of the most famous scenes in German literature, when a similarly restless scholar named Heinrich Faust opens a book of magic, is transfixed by an illustration of the magical universe, and resolves on the spot to become a s...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 17 Margaret of Antioch, the Dragon-Slayer   (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.) In the West, she stands serene on a hillside, robes untouched, one foot resting lightly on the back of a docile, defeated dragon—Raphael painted her that way, and so did Titian, twice. In the East, she is on the floor of a prison cell, fist knotted in a demon’s hair, hauling his head back while she swings a copper hammer into his face with everything she has. Both are the same nineteen-year-old girl. Both are the same story. And today, July 17th, belongs specifically to the second version: this is Saint Marina’s day on the Byzantine calendar, not the West’s—a small correction in her favor, since yesterday’s column had to make a similar one at Alexius’s expense. Margaret of Antioch, as the West calls her, or “Marina the Great Martyr,” as the East does, is one of C...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 16 Alexius, the Roman "Man of God" (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.) For seventeen years, a beggar lived under a staircase in one of the wealthiest houses in Rome, fed on kitchen scraps, mocked by the household’s own servants, while the family that owned the house grieved daily for a son they believed lost to the world. Only when he died, a letter clutched in his hand and a mysterious voice crying out through the city’s churches, did his father, mother, and the wife he had abandoned on their wedding night learn that the pauper under their own stairs had been Alexius all along. It is one of the most beloved and strangest legends to survive from the early Church, and it comes with a twist its medieval audience never seem to have known: the Roman senator’s son at the center of the story was almost certainly never Roman, and quite possibly...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 15 Lords of the Underworld: Set and Ti-Tsang   (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.) In one telling, a god tears himself violently from his mother’s womb rather than wait for a natural birth, arriving into the world already the god of storms, deserts, and disorder. In another, a young woman descends voluntarily into hell itself, searching the courts of the dead for a mother she fears is lost there, and emerges having sworn never to rest until every last suffering soul is freed. Today, by the reckoning of more than a few modern pagan calendars, both stories are being celebrated at once: the birth of the Egyptian god Set, and the underworld-saving vow of the Chinese bodhisattva Ti-Tsang. Both figures are genuinely ancient, genuinely major, and genuinely fascinating. Neither one, as far as this column has been able to determine, has anything to d...