Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 26 Leo Martello: Even Witches Have Civil Rights   (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.) Manhattan, Thursday, October 29, 1970. Two days before Halloween, in a municipal office, four people sit down to settle a question nobody had ever formally put to the City of New York. On one side, the Parks Department attorney and a deputy commissioner. On the other, Barbara Shack of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a forty-year-old graphologist from Greenwich Village who wants a permit to hold a gathering of witches in Central Park. And he got it: on Halloween night more than a thousand people assembled in the park to dance and sing and declare themselves openly, in a country where doing so was still a good way to lose your job. A Global Village crew filmed it, and the documentary aired repeatedly on Channel 13. It was the first public Witch-In...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 25 Mary A. Cornelius: The Occultist of No Lodge (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.) Chicago, around the turn of the century. A widow in her early seventies—a Baptist minister's wife, a former state president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a woman who had spent decades campaigning to close saloons and protect animals and get books into the hands of children—publishes a novel. The title page reads The White Flame . Beneath it, in the plainest possible language, sits the subtitle: “an occult story.” Nobody at the time seems to have found this strange. Mary Ann Mann was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on September 25, 1829 (although even that much deserves an asterisk: her memorial record gives 1827; her Illinois death record gives 1829. The census returns across her lifetime disagree with each other and occasionally with both.) ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 24 The Death of Paracelsus   (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.) Salzburg, September 1541. In a rented room at the inn called Zum Weißen Roß, on the Kaigasse, a forty-seven-year-old physician dictates his last will. He leaves money to relatives back in Einsiedeln, money to his friends in the city, and everything remaining to the poor of Salzburg. Three days later he's dead. Within a generation half of Europe is arguing about how it happened, and the arguing hasn't stopped since. Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim—Paracelsus—died on September 24, 1541. And almost nothing about that death has been left alone since. His admirers said murder; Rival physicians, the story went, had hired assassins; one version has him pushed from a height, a fall that would conveniently account for the fracture later found in his skull. His enemies pref...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 23 Nebulae: The Word That Promised a Star (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.) New York, the last week of September 1915. Aleister Crowley is three weeks shy of forty and about as far from the life he'd imagined for himself as a man can get. He's stranded in a neutral country, writing pro-German propaganda he'll spend the rest of his life insisting was satire, and broke enough that the rent is a recurring emergency. The Equinox has gone quiet. His order is scattered across an ocean at war. And on the night the sun crosses into Libra, he sits down with a married poet from the Adirondacks and asks the dark for a single word. The dark gives him one. Nebulae. Crowley started the practice in 1907, and it's one of the more quietly elegant things he ever built. At each equinox he'd obtain a Word and circulate it to every memb...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 22 Modern Occultist Issue Four Arrives! (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.) The sun crosses the equator today, the balance point between light and dark we spent last night preparing for, and there's no better date on the entire calendar to release an issue built around exactly that same tension. Issue Four of Modern Occultist is officially live, and its theme, Angels & Demons, sits precisely where this magazine has always lived most comfortably: the space where genuine scholarship, lived practice, and honest myth-checking meet. This is, without exaggeration, the most stacked roster we've ever assembled in one issue, and we wanted to give readers a real sense of everything waiting inside before you dive in. Thirteen full interviews anchor this issue, and the range is genuinely remarkable. Julia Sophia , astrologer and tarot reader...