Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 1 Happy Lughnasadh from Modern Occultist! (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.) Yesterday this column walked through centuries of English folk custom attached to Lammas Eve: Old Boggy at the door, tenant farmers presenting their landlords with the first cut of wheat, Shakespeare using the date as calendar shorthand his audience needed no footnote to understand. Today, on Lughnasadh itself, we're telling a much younger story. The eightfold Wheel of the Year, the structure nearly every modern Wiccan and Pagan calendar is built on, the one that gives Lughnasadh its official place alongside Samhain , Imbolc , and Beltane as a “Greater Sabbat,” did not exist in anything like its current form before the 1950s. Two men built it, largely by negotiating a compromise between their own competing traditions, and some of its most familiar names weren...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 31 Don’t Answer the Door!: Lammas Eve (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.) Tonight, across the English countryside for centuries, farm families would have been finishing a very specific piece of business before dark: cutting the first ears of the new wheat, grinding them, and shaping the flour into a decorative loaf meant for tomorrow's altar. That's the ordinary version of Lammas Eve. There was also a considerably stranger piece of folk belief attached to the same night, one that had nothing to do with bread at all. According to English folk tradition, the Devil himself resented the coming harvest, and to make his displeasure known, he was said to dispatch a messenger called Old Boggy to knock on doors after sunset, ready to drag off any man foolish enough to answer. The instruction handed down through generations was simple and specific: ...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 30 Emily Brontë’s Ghost Story   (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.) Emily Brontë, born this day in 1818, was not an occultist; She left no grimoire, joined no order, and by every surviving account, was too private and too devoted to her family's parsonage to have gone looking for one. And yet the single novel she managed to finish before dying of tuberculosis at thirty has spent nearly two centuries doing something occult writers keep noticing and keep returning to: it treats a ghost, a haunted house, and a man's demand to be haunted forever as the emotional center of the story. This isn't a piece about Brontë as a secret magician but, rather, how the tradition she never joined has claimed her anyway… A Ghost Story for the Ages Strip away the romantic reputation Wuthering Heights has accumulated and what's left is, structu...

  The Modern Occultist Interview  #10 THUMPER FORGE The Chaos Apple Llewellyn Worldwide, 2026 MODERN OCCULTIST The Chaos Apple opens with a scene that, to me, perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the whole book: you're lying naked on a massage table in LED goggles while your friend Chester performs biofield tuning, and when you ask what you're doing, he says simply, “Chaos Magic.” It's a wonderfully disarming entry point! But what strikes us at Modern Occultist is how seriously you take Chaos Witchcraft beneath all the irreverence. For readers who might falsely mistake assume from the playfulness (ie., the “Pringles can curse”!), what would you say is the genuine intellectual and spiritual thesis of the book?   THUMPER FORGE I really want readers to understand that there is no right or wrong when it comes to magical practice and belief: There’s only what works for the individual. I tend to think about it in terms of theatre—like, a comedy can only be success...