Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 27 Happy Birthday, Man Ray!   (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 27th, 1890, a tailor's son named Emmanuel Radnitzky was born in Philadelphia, a name he would spend the rest of his life quietly erasing. By the time he'd become one of the twentieth century's most influential photographers, he answered only to Man Ray, a self-made identity he guarded so closely that his own 1963 autobiography barely mentions a date. Decades later, that same reinvented artist would turn up, camera in hand or simply as one face in the crowd, at the occult seminars of a Russian mystic calling herself the “Satanic Woman” of Montparnasse, sitting alongside a future architect of Traditionalist philosophy and the founder of Surrealism itself. Whether Man Ray believed a word of what he heard in that room is a genuinely open question, and it's wo...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 26 The Death of Cagliostro (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 26th, 1795, word reached the outside world that the man who had once dazzled Catherine the Great, befriended a French cardinal, and convinced half the royal courts of Europe he possessed the Elixir of Life had died, alone, in a cell carved into the rock of the Forte di San Leo. He had spent his final six years there, sentenced to life imprisonment by the Roman Inquisition after his own wife denounced him as a heretic, magician, and Freemason. Even the most sober modern encyclopedias, writing more than two centuries later, still have to include the same honest caveat: the manner of his death is unknown. Nobody ever disclosed where he was buried, either. That a man this thoroughly documented, this endlessly written about, this obsessively fictionalized by everyone fr...

  ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 25 The Order of the Occult Hand   (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.) Not every entry in this blog's history involves a real ceremony, a real ritual, or a real belief system. Some involve a group of newspaper reporters getting drunk in a Charlotte, North Carolina bar in 1965 and deciding, entirely as a joke, to found a secret society. Sixty years later, journalists were still quietly initiating themselves into it, one purple sentence at a time, and most of their readers never noticed a thing. The Order of the Occult Hand may be the only “occult” tradition in this magazine's coverage that its own founders will happily admit, on the record, means absolutely nothing at all… But then again, it’s kept a legacy in mainstream print for years… The Origins of the “Hand” The phrase itself predates the joke by well over a century; a sear...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 24 The Eruption of Vesuvius   (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.) For nearly two thousand years, calendars, history books, and dramatic paintings alike have agreed on a single date: August 24th, 79 CE, the day Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pumice, freezing an entire Roman world mid-motion for archaeologists to eventually uncover. It's one of the most vivid disasters in the ancient record, and in esoteric circles it's sometimes read as something larger still, a genuine elemental and chthonic upheaval, earth and fire erupting through the surface of ordinary Roman life without warning. There's just one problem archaeologists themselves can't fully agree on: an enormous and still-unresolved body of physical evidence suggests the eruption may not have happened in August at all. Few ancient disasters com...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 23 Rabbi Joseph Caro and Kabbalah Roots (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 23rd, 1542, in the hillside town of Safed, a rabbi laid down his pen on a manuscript he had been building for twenty uninterrupted years. Joseph Caro had begun the Beit Yosef in 1522 in Adrianople, and across two decades of exile, relocation, and relentless study, he had methodically worked through thirty-two major legal authorities stretching back to the Talmud itself, reconciling centuries of scattered, contradictory Jewish legal rulings into a single coherent commentary. The Beit Yosef would go on to become the foundation for the Shulchan Aruch, the definitive code of Jewish law still consulted by observant communities worldwide today. Caro is remembered, correctly, as one of the great legal minds in Jewish history. He was also, for roughly forty years...