Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 12 The Death of Simon Forman   (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.) According to the story repeated in nearly every account of his life, the Elizabethan astrologer, alchemist, and herbalist Simon Forman told his wife on a warm Sunday afternoon in September 1611 that he would die the following Thursday night. Monday passed. Tuesday passed. By Wednesday his wife was needling him about it. On Thursday, September 12th, he ate his dinner, rowed out onto the Thames toward some building work he had underway at Puddle Dock, collapsed in the boat with the words “An impost, an impost,” and died exactly as he'd predicted. It's one of the most famous self-fulfilled prophecies in occult history. It's also a story we only know because of a single source, written down decades after the fact by someone who was nine years old when it supposedly ha...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 11 Michelangelo’s Apostle Trapped in the Marble (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 April 24th, 1503, fresh off the triumph of his newly unveiled David , a twenty-eight-year-old Michelangelo signed a contract with the Consuls of the Florentine Wool Guild for one of the most ambitious sculptural projects of the Renaissance: twelve over-life-sized marble Apostles, one for each niche of the Florence Cathedral's presbytery , at a proposed pace of one finished statue per year. Only one of the twelve was ever begun. Saint Matthew survives today two-thirds carved, permanently caught mid-emergence from its marble block, a work that ended up revealing something far more interesting about Michelangelo's own philosophy of art than a finished Apostle series ever could have. Even the date most often cited for this story needs a small corre...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 10 The Birth of Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen” (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 September 10th, 1801, in a small cottage in New Orleans's French Quarter, a free woman of color named Marguerite Henry gave birth to a daughter who would become the most famous religious figure in American folk history: Marie Catherine Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Laveau spent decades as a working midwife, herbalist, hairdresser, and spiritual leader, known city-wide for genuine acts of community care, tending the sick during yellow fever epidemics and visiting condemned prisoners before their executions. She's also, more than almost any other figure in American religious history, someone whose actual biography has been thoroughly tangled up with someone else's. That someone else was her own daughter , and untangling the two Marie...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 9 The “Black Queen” and Her Colloquy of Poissy   (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 1561, in a monastery outside Paris, French Catholic bishops and Protestant Huguenot theologians sat down together in an attempt to do something that would have seemed unthinkable a generation earlier: debate their way to a shared understanding of the Eucharist and avert a looming civil war. The Colloquy of Poissy was the last real attempt at reconciling France's religious divide before the Wars of Religion tore the country apart for the next three and a half decades. It was organized by Catherine de' Medici , queen mother and regent for her young son Charles IX , and it failed. Catherine herself has gone down in popular history as a sinister, occult-steeped schemer, and the timeline of that reputation deserves far more scrutiny than it us...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 8 Joan of Arc and the Wound at the Porte Saint-Honoré   (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 morning of Thursday, September 8th, 1429, Joan of Arc led the French assault on the Porte Saint-Honoré , one of Paris's fortified gates, in an attempt to retake the city from its English and Burgundian defenders. She was struck down by a crossbow bolt through the thigh while probing the water-filled moat, and had to be forcibly carried from the field, still urging her soldiers onward even as she bled. It was a real, thoroughly documented military defeat, one of the first serious setbacks in a campaign that had, until that point, moved from triumph to triumph. It also marks a useful pivot point for examining the claim underneath her entire career: the voices and visions that put a teenage farm girl at the head of a royal army in the first pl...