Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 29 Midnight Comes to Faust: The Death of Christoph Haizmann   (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 29th, 1677, a struggling Bavarian painter named Christoph Haizmann collapsed inside a church in the Austrian town of Pottenbrunn, his body wracked with spasms he couldn't control. The parish priest who examined him described “a wretched man, destitute of all help.” What made his breakdown so specific, and so well documented, was the reason behind it: nine years earlier, grieving his father's death and unable to work, Haizmann had signed not one but two pacts with the Devil , and the deadline on the second was closing in. The case would go on to become one of the most thoroughly studied “demonic possession” stories in Western history, not despite being examined by modern science, but because of it. Two and a half centuries after H...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 28 The Eclipse That Conquered an Army   (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 27th, 413 BCE, a date frequently rounded up to the 28th in modern retellings, the Athenian fleet at Syracuse sat fully loaded and ready to slip away under cover of darkness. Two years of siege had collapsed into disease, defeat, and exhaustion. The generals had finally agreed, however reluctantly, that retreat was the only option left. Then the full moon slid into the Earth's shadow and began to vanish. By the time it reappeared, the Athenian high command had already made the decision that would cost tens of thousands of lives and permanently cripple their empire. Few historical anecdotes about celestial omens are this well documented, this consequential, or this thoroughly debated by the ancient sources themselves… By the Sun and the Moon,...

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...