Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 19 The Betty and Barney Hill Abduction (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 September 19th into the early morning of September 20th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through rural New Hampshire when they noticed a bright light in the sky that seemed to track alongside their car. They arrived home roughly two hours later than expected, with no clear memory of how that time had passed. It would become, in the decades since, the most famous and most thoroughly documented alien abduction case in American history, the template every subsequent “Grey alien” encounter has been measured against. What most retellings compress into a single dramatic night, though, actually unfolded across several years, and the specific abduction narrative most people know today didn't exist yet on the night it supposedly happened. Th...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 18 Crowley, Pessoa, and the Mouth of Hell (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 23rd, 1930, Aleister Crowley checked out of his Lisbon hotel for the final time and vanished. Two days later, a journalist friend of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa found a cigarette case and a note wedged into the rocks at Boca do Inferno , the dramatic sea cave near Cascais whose name translates to “Devil’s Mouth,” or “Mouth of Hell.” The note, in mangled Portuguese laced with Thelemic symbolism, read roughly: “I cannot live without you. The other mouth of Hell that will catch me will not be as hot as yours.” Newspapers across Portugal and beyond ran the story as a suicide. Crowley was, at that exact moment, very much alive… Crowley reappeared roughly three weeks later, and he did so in Berlin, not Lisbon. That correction matters because the rea...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 17 Rocket Woman: The Forgotten Magic of Barbara Canright (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.) Barbara Canright died in Seattle on September 17th, 1997, at the age of seventy-seven, having spent the better part of six decades as a genuinely forgotten figure in the history of American rocketry. In 1939, she became the first female mathematician employed at what would eventually become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calculating the thrust-to-weight ratios and propellant potential that helped turn a small Caltech experiment nicknamed the “Suicide Squad” into a serious national rocket program. She's remembered today, when she's remembered at all, largely through Nathalia Holt's magnificent and important 2016 book Rise of the Rocket Girls . What that book, and most retellings since, tend to underplay is the other institution Canri...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 16 A Notary's Gift of Trionfi   (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 Friday, September 16th, 1440, a notary and public official from Anghiara named Giusto Giusti sat down and made an entry in his personal diary: he had given a “pair of naibi a trionfi,” a pack of triumph cards, to the condottiero Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta , custom-made expressly in Florence with Malatesta's own coat of arms, beautifully done, at a cost of four and a half ducats. That single line is, as far as documented history can currently confirm, the earliest known reference to Trionfi cards anywhere in the world, the direct historical ancestor of what would eventually become the tarot. What makes this particular piece of tarot history worth a second look isn't just its age. It's how astonishingly recently we actually found out about it…   Before...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 15 Portrait of a Gentleman: Reginald Scot's Last Will   (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 15th, 1599, an English gentleman named Reginald Scot sat down and wrote out his own will in his own hand, a task he'd complete roughly three weeks before his death that October at his home in Smeeth, Kent. The document ends with a line historians still quote for its rawness: an admission that his marriage had brought his wife far more trouble than comfort, and that without her he would have died “not worth one groat.” It's a strikingly candid final note from a man whose actual legacy rests on a considerably bolder act of candor, published fifteen years earlier, that had already made him one of the most controversial writers in England. That earlier book has also collected a famous story about its own destruction that turns ou...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 14 Occult Philosopher: The Birth of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa   (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 14th, 1486, in the free imperial city of Cologne, one of the Renaissance's most genuinely influential occult philosophers was born: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, whose Three Books of Occult Philosophy would go on to shape Western esotericism for the next five centuries. Before getting into his life, though, one detail worth correcting outright: Cologne has never, at any point in its history, been a French city. In 1486 it was a free imperial city within the Electorate of Cologne, part of the Holy Roman Empire, thoroughly German territory both linguistically and politically. Agrippa's later travels genuinely did take him through France, where he taught, served various patrons, and, fittingly enough, eventually...