Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 25 The Feast of St. James & Priscillian the Martyr   (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.) Every July 25, Spain grinds to a halt for its patron saint. Fireworks go off over Santiago de Compostela, the King attends Mass, and thousands of pilgrims who've spent weeks walking the Camino de Santiago finally arrive at the cathedral doors to see the tomb they've come for: the resting place of St. James the Great , apostle of Jesus, beheaded in Jerusalem and, according to legend, miraculously transported to Spain to be buried. It's one of Christianity's three great pilgrimage destinations, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. It's also, according to a persistent and genuinely credentialed line of scholarship, entirely possible that the man in that tomb isn't James at all—but a fourth-century mystic named Priscillian, executed as a sorce...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 24 Marjorie Cameron: The Woman Who Was Babalon   (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 January 1946, a rocket scientist named Jack Parsons finished a magical ritual designed to summon an “elemental” woman into his life, and days later, a red-haired painter named Marjorie Cameron walked into his house in Pasadena. Parsons was convinced he'd found what he'd invoked. Cameron, who knew nothing about the ritual and hadn't yet decided whether she believed in any of it, spent the rest of her life complicating that story on her own terms—first as the unwilling vessel of someone else's prophecy, and eventually, on her own terms entirely, as one of the more genuinely original artists to come out of postwar Los Angeles. She died this day in 1995, and the four decades in between are a case study in what happens when a woman refuses to stay ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 23 Happy Robert Anton Wilson Day!   (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.) An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson • Eric Wagner • New Falcon Publications • Revised Edition, 2020 • ISBN: 1-56184-165-X Every Day is a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus!, Writing, and Anarchism • Edited by Tom Jackson • Hilaritas Press • 2025 • ISBN: 978-1952746437   On July 23, 1973, a former Playboy editor turned novelist sat in California running himself through a battery of yogic breathing exercises and ceremonial magic techniques he'd adapted from Aleister Crowley, trying to see what would happen if he took his own skepticism and set it down for a while. Somewhere in the archive of human letters there is a category of writer who cannot be summarized. You can describe their books, chart their influences, document their controversies, quote the...

ON THJIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 22 The Feast of Mary Magdalene (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 most of Western history, if you’d asked someone on the street who Mary Magdalene was, you’d have gotten the same answer: a reformed prostitute, the sinful woman Jesus forgave, a symbol of repentance and second chances. Almost none of that comes from the Bible. It comes from a single homily delivered by a pope in Rome in the year 591; one man’s opinion, stated once , that somehow calcified into thirteen centuries of Western Christian identity. Today, July 22, the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of Mary Magdalene, and the story of how she got her actual name back is a genuinely remarkable piece of religious history, running in parallel with a much stranger, much older story about what a handful of ancient Gnostic Christians believed she really was… The Pope Who Invented...