Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 8 The Opening of the Lion's Gate   (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.) Somewhere around midnight tonight, millions of people across social media will post the same image: a lion, a star, a stylized number 8 turned on its side into infinity, captioned with some version of “the veil is thin, manifest big.” The Lion's Gate Portal, they'll tell you, is an energetic doorway thousands of years old, tracked by the ancient Egyptians themselves, opening precisely on 8/8 when Sirius aligns with the Sun in Leo. It's one of the most widely repeated pieces of occult lore on the internet. It's also, in the specific form most people are sharing it, considerably younger than believed… The Gate Opens The term “Lion's Gate” traces to the American astrologer Ray Mardyks, who coined it to describe the lunar eclipse of August 8th, 198...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 7 Kepler’s Witchy Woman (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 the night of August 7th, 1620, an elderly herbalist woman in the Swabian town of Leonberg was dragged from her bed, thrown into a linen chest for lack of anywhere better to put her, and hauled off to prison. The charge was witchcraft; the specific evidence was a potion she'd supposedly given a neighbor named Ursula Reingold that made the woman sick. None of this would have survived as more than a grim local footnote if the accused hadn't happened to be the mother of one of the most important astronomers who ever lived: Katharina Kepler, mother of Johannes Kepler. What followed was a fourteen-month legal ordeal, a son who dropped everything to become his mother's lawyer, and, layered on top of the real history, one of the more persistent myths in the history of science, a ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 6 The Modern Occultist Podcast Launches! (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.) Today, at 12:00pm EST, Modern Occultist steps off the page for the first time! The Modern Occultist Podcast , hosted by our own co-publisher Diana Serhal, premieres its first episode on our YouTube channel, and the guest list assembled for Season One reads like a table of contents pulled straight from the magazine's own issues, brought fully to life. The Modern Occultist Podcast will air every first and third Thursday of the month at 12:00pm EST, running through this December. Each episode streams on our YouTube channel, where the full archive will remain available afterward. Diana brings the same editorial instincts to the mic that she's brought to the magazine's pages since day one: genuine curiosity, esoteric knowledge, and love of our guests’ differen...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #12 Lon Milo DuQuette The Tarot Architect: How to Become the Master Builder of Your Spiritual Temple &   Young Aleister Crowley and the Magician’s Revolt: A Novel (with Jim Bratkowsky)   Red Wheel / Weiser, 2025 & 2026   Lon Milo DuQuette is a living legend. An author, musician, and one of the world's foremost authorities on Aleister Crowley, Thelema, Kabbalah, and the Western magical tradition, he serves as Deputy Grand Master of Ordo Templi Orientis U.S.A. But he’s also a hell of a guitarist and storyteller, and has a great sense of humor. Modern Occultist was able to catch up with him regarding a few, seemingly, unrelated topics: his Hollywood excursions in the 1960s, Scientology, and his own path towards enlightenment. And be sure to watch for tomorrow's premiere of the MODERN OCCULTIST PODCAST , where Lon was generous enough to be our first guest, featuring an in-depth interview about his life and career! ...