Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 22 Saint Columba and the River Beast   (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.) Sometime around the year 565, according to a story written down more than a century after it supposedly happened, an Irish abbot named Columba stood on a riverbank in the land of the Picts and watched local mourners bury a man freshly killed by something that had dragged him underwater. When one of his own monks volunteered to swim across to fetch a boat, the creature surfaced with its jaws open, and Columba, making the sign of the cross, commanded it to go no further. It fled. That single scene, four sentences in a seventh-century Latin hagiography, has since become the most-cited “first sighting” in the history of the Loch Ness Monster , repeated in books, documentaries, and calendar features every August 22nd for decades. It's a fascinating story, and worth telli...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 21 Bois Caïman and the Haitian Revolution (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.) Back in January, we honored January 2nd as Haitian Ancestor Day, telling the story most people know: a Vodou ceremony in the woods of Saint-Domingue, presided over by the houngan Dutty Boukman and the mambo Cécile Fatiman, sparking the revolution that would make Haiti the only nation in history born from a successful uprising of enslaved people. That story deserves a second visit, because the deeper you go into the actual historical record, the more genuinely complicated and genuinely fascinating it gets. Today, August 21st, is when many historians now believe the specific religious ceremony behind that legend actually took place, distinct from an earlier planning meeting popular memory has since folded into the same night. Untangling what happened across those Augus...

Featured Book Review Integration of Shadow Work into Practice A Review of Raven Digitalis’s Shadow Magick Spellbook: Spells, Charms, and Rituals for Positive Change By guest reviewer Melissa Love   “Shadow work” has become one of those buzzwords sneaking around every corner. It seems to peek out from under the yoga mat, work its way into dream journal prompt lists, from behind the monstera pots in professional therapy offices, and in hundreds of articles and short-form videos all over the internet, mostly contradicting themselves in the process. It’s no wonder so many of us are confused, lost, and feel a bit Sisyphic when it comes to this subject; one that we know is vital to personal mental health and, in our case, the vibrational health of the collective consciousness as a whole. It’s frustrating. And once we do figure out how to start, all of a sudden, all the half-truths and sources of contradictory information fade away once the void actually starts staring bac...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 20 Happy Birthday, H. P. Lovecraft!   (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 20th, 1890, a boy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, who would spend his entire adult life insisting, in essay after essay and letter after letter, that none of it was real: no gods, no spirits, no cosmic forces, no life after death, nothing beyond the cold indifferent mechanics of matter in motion. H. P. Lovecraft called himself, in his own words, “an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism.” And yet the fictional universe that same committed skeptic built, almost entirely as a private literary experiment, would go on to be treated as genuine occult revelation by real practicing magicians within decades of his death, its central invented text eventually manifesting as an actual, physic...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 19 Vinalia Rustica and the Worship of Venus (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 19th, ancient Roman gardeners and grape-growers set down their tools and took the day off, kitchen gardens and vineyards alike formally dedicated to the goddess Venus. Farmers spoke a prayer asking Jupiter to hold off the storms and hail that could still ruin an unripe crop. Wine flowed freely in the streets around Rome's oldest temples to Venus. On the surface, it looks like exactly what it's often called: a grape harvest festival for the goddess of love. Dig into the actual Roman sources, and the picture gets considerably stranger, and considerably more interesting, on nearly every point. Even the temple most closely tied to this date has an origin story with nothing romantic about it at all… Venus and the Her Temple The oldest dat...