Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 11 Celebration of the Puck Fair   (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.) Each year on August 10th, in the small County Kerry town of Killorglin, a wild male goat is captured in the surrounding mountains, hauled down into the town square, and crowned. A local schoolgirl, chosen for the honor and titled the Queen of Puck, sets a garlanded crown on his head. He's hoisted onto a high platform above the crowd, where he'll survey his temporary kingdom for three straight days of markets, music, and pubs staying open until three in the morning, before being released back into the hills he came from, no worse for the experience and considerably more famous. Ireland's Puck Fair is genuinely one of the country's oldest surviving festivals, documented in legal records back to the 1600s. What it is not, despite how often the claim gets repeated,...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 10 Sirius, the Unseen Companion   (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 10th, 1844, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel sat down at the Königsberg Observatory and wrote a letter announcing something he had never seen, would never see, and had no way of directly proving: that the brightest star in Earth's night sky was not traveling alone. After more than a decade of watching Sirius trace an infinitesimal, wavering path across the sky rather than the perfectly straight line simple physics predicted, Bessel concluded the only explanation was gravity, an unseen companion massive enough to tug the great star gently off its course. He would die two years later. It would take eighteen more years, and a telescope he never lived to look through, before anyone actually saw the thing he'd found with nothing but mathematics and p...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #13 Maevius Lynn   The Holy Year of Thelema: A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition   Llewellyn Worldwide, 2026 MODERN OCCULTIST Your book opens with a fascinating observation: that Aleister Crowley, the most prolific ritual writer in the Western esoteric tradition, left virtually no specific rituals for the holy days he himself established. You describe this silence as “conspicuous”—even citing Crowley's own famous quip about things being “conspicuous by their absence.” What do you make of that silence? Was it oversight, invitation, or something more deliberate on his part…? MAEVIUS LYNN I think it is interesting that despite the central, sacred text of Thelema, The Book of the Law , calling for the celebration of the holy days, Aleister Crowley did not write rituals for them. I suppose we will never truly know why, but I suspect that it’s just simply a fact that he didn’t have enough time. Reading through some of h...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 9 The Death of Hieronymus Bosch   (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 Wednesday, August 9th, 1516, the bells of Saint John's Cathedral in 's-Hertogenbosch rang for a requiem mass. An organist played, a choir sang, gravediggers stood ready, and the Brotherhood of Our Lady's account books recorded a payment for the soul of “Jeronimus van Aken painter.” The man being mourned had spent decades filling altarpieces with some of the most disturbing, hallucinatory imagery Christian Europe had ever seen: pig-nuns pressing quills into dying men's hands, birdheaded demons devouring sinners on privies, gardens of naked bodies stretched across landscapes that look, five centuries later, uncannily like a bad trip. Given all that, it's not surprising that history has spent the centuries since trying to figure out exactly what kind of man...