Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY  September 5 The Roman Festival of Ludi Romani   (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 September, ancient Rome shut down for its biggest annual event: the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, a sprawling public festival of chariot racing, theater, and religious procession held in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus , king of the gods. It's often described as running a tidy nine days, roughly September 5th through the 13th. That description isn't wrong so much as it's a snapshot of one specific moment in a festival that spent centuries quietly growing, and whose actual founding the Romans themselves couldn't fully agree on. Even ancient historians, writing with access to sources long lost to us, gave two entirely different accounts of how these games began… The Ludi Romani did not begin in as a fully formed festival. According to Livy , the g...

Special Report A Note on “The Dark Side of Mindfulness” C.M. Kushins /  Editor of Modern Occultist Yesterday, a piece in The Atlantic made its way around my circles, tracing the research career of Dr. Willoughby Britton, a Brown University psychiatrist who set out, back in 2004, to prove that meditation improves sleep, and found instead, to her own genuine dismay, that it sometimes made things worse. The editors, as editors tend to do, named it something decidedly attention-grabbing: “The Dark Side of Mindfulness.” As a practitioner of diverse esoteric practices whose personal journey began with a study (and positive, self-affirming experience) in Buddhism, my first reaction, I'll admit, was something close to what several of you have written in to say yourselves: a flash of defensiveness on behalf of a practice that has given so many of us so much.   Having sat with it longer, I don't think defensiveness is the right response, and I don't think this magazine is in the b...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 4 Frank L. Baum Joins the Theosophical Society (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.) Three years apart, on the exact same calendar date, two of the Theosophical Society's most consequential moments took place. On September 4th, 1889, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott arrived in London and, at Helena Blavatsky's own residence, met Annie Besant for the first time, the beginning of a partnership that would eventually place Besant at the helm of the entire international movement. Exactly three years later, on September 4th, 1892, in Chicago, a struggling writer named Lyman Frank Baum and his wife Maud filled out their own membership applications to the Theosophical Society's Ramayana branch. Eight years after that, Baum would publish The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , and generations of readers since have argued fiercely, and inconclusively, abou...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 3 Gerald Gardner is Initiated into the New Forest Coven (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.) In September of 1939, according to his own later account, a British customs officer and amateur folklorist named Gerald Gardner was led into a private home near the New Forest and initiated into a coven of witches who claimed to be practicing a religion that had survived, in secret, since before the Christianization of Europe. Gardner would spend the next fifteen years building an entire modern religious tradition, Wicca, on the foundation of that single initiation. Whether the coven that initiated him actually existed as he described it, and whether the ancient religion it claimed to preserve was ever real in the first place, are two entirely separate questions, and scholars have spent the better part of a century answering both of them very differ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 2 Popular Science Announces “The Modern Occult”   (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.) In September of 1900, subscribers to Popular Science Monthly opened their issue to find, sandwiched between an article on the flight of birds and one on electric automobiles, a lengthy essay with a title this very blog might have borrowed: “The Modern Occult.” Its author, Professor Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin, the first person in the United States to earn a doctorate in psychology, spent nineteen dense pages methodically taking apart Theosophy, Spiritualism, Christian Science, astrology, palmistry, alchemy, and the whole “motley crew” of drugless healers then flourishing across America. It is, in its way, a direct ancestor of everything this column tries to do, a rigorous, occasionally cutting, historically grounded attempt to separa...