Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 15 Maria de Naglowska: The Devil’s Priestess   (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 August 15th, 1883, a daughter was born into one of St. Petersburg's aristocratic families, the child of a provincial governor of Kazan, raised for a life of privilege inside the exclusive walls of the Institute Smolna. Nothing about that beginning suggests where the life of Maria de Naglowska was actually headed: imprisonment, exile across three countries, a scandalous newspaper, a controversial occult society conducted from the cafés of Montparnasse, and, by the end of her life, a reputation as one of interwar Paris's most notorious practitioners of sexual magic, known to her own followers as the Sophiale, and to herself, deliberately and provocatively, as “a Satanic woman.” Getting from Kazan to Montparnasse took Naglowska through more upheaval tha...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 14 National Navajo Code Talkers 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.) A quick note before today's post: this blog usually digs for the esoteric thread running underneath a date on the calendar. Today, we're setting that habit aside entirely. Some history deserves to be told plainly, on its own terms, without a mystical frame draped over it, and the story of the Navajo Code Talkers is exactly that kind of history… On August 14th, 1982, President Ronald Reagan formally proclaimed “National Navajo Code Talkers Day,” honoring the Navajo Marines, and the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chippewa, Creek, and Sioux servicemen who came before them, whose native languages became one of the most effective tools in American military history. The idea had precedent: during the First World War, Choctaw and Cherokee soldiers had already demonstrated that Nat...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 13 Hekate's Night: A Celebration of the Sacred Goddess (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 modern Pagan and witchcraft world, thousands of practitioners will walk to a crossroads, set down an offering, an image of a key, a torch, a coin, a bit of garlic or fish, and light a candle for Hekate. Hekate's Night, sometimes called the Hekatesia , has become one of the most widely observed dates on the contemporary Pagan calendar, repeated in book after book as an ancient Greek festival honoring the goddess of witchcraft and the crossroads. There's just one problem worth sitting with before tonight's candles are lit: an ancient festival called the Hekatesia genuinely did exist, and by every trace of evidence we actually have, it wasn't held on August 13th, and it wasn't held in Greece. Untangling where today...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #14 Tom Jackson Every Day is a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus! Writing and Anarchism (ed.) Hilaritas Press, 2025   MODERN OCCULTIST John Higgs observed that one of the great paradoxes of Illuminatus! is that its cult following transferred itself almost entirely to Robert AntonWilson, leaving Roberts Shea’s enormous contributions and later solo work at genuine risk of being forgotten. You spent a decade assembling this collection to correct that imbalance. What do you think produced that asymmetry in the first place—and what does Shea’s work offer that Wilson’s, for all its brilliance, doesn’t? And also, is that something that you can directly address as the editor and chief webmaster for the RAWIllumination.net official blog? TOM JACKSON I suspect that part of it is that after  Illuminatus!  was published in 1975, Robert Anton Wilson went on to fairly quickly publish  a series of other brilliant books that con...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 12 Lychnapsia Festival: The Lighting of the Lamps   (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 12th, sometime in the fourth century CE and likely for a considerable stretch of centuries before that, the streets of Rome would have flickered with the light of thousands of small oil lamps, lit all at once in a public celebration called the Lychnapsia, literally “the lighting of lamps.” We know the festival existed because it's recorded in the Chronography of 354, an illustrated Roman calendar compiled by the scribe Filocalus for a wealthy Christian patron. What that calendar does not tell us, and what scholars have spent nearly a century arguing about since, is exactly whose festival it was. The overwhelming scholarly consensus, reached carefully rather than assumed, is that the Lychnapsia honored Isis. But “overwhelming cons...