Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 3 Poe at Ryan's Tavern (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.) It was Election Day in Baltimore, and a tavern was doing double duty as a polling place. Somewhere in the noise, a printer named Joseph Walker found a man who could barely make sense, dressed in clothes that didn't seem to be his own. The man managed to name an acquaintance, a Dr. Snodgrass, and Walker dashed off a note. The stranger was Edgar Allan Poe. It was October 3, 1849, and he had four days left. The story that's been told from that day onward has a gutter in it, and a drunk, and a moral. Almost none of it holds up as well as the mystery underneath… Poe left Richmond on September 27, bound for New York, and nothing reliable is known of his movements until October 3. Walker's note to Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training, descri...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 2 Tarot and the Moonchild: The Birthdays of A.E. Waite & Jack Parsons   (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.) They were born forty-three years and an ocean apart. On October 2, 1857, in Brooklyn, Arthur Edward Waite came into the world, and he would spend a long life in London arguing that the point of the Western mystery tradition was mysticism, not magic. On October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles, a boy named Marvel Whiteside Parsons was born, and he would spend a very short one proving that a man could design rocket propellant by day and conjure a goddess by night. Beyond a birthday, Waite and Jack Parsons share a book, and it isn't one either of them wrote: Aleister Crowley's 1917 novel Moonchild . Waite is in it, as a villain. Parsons spent 1946 trying to live inside it. And the popular versions of both men have picked up a few erro...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 1 Night of the Living Chainsaw Massacre: The Anniversary of Two Horror Classics (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.) October 1st carries an unusual coincidence for horror fans: two of the genre's most influential films, released six years apart, both had their very first public screenings on this exact date. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead opened at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opened in Austin, Texas, Hooper's own hometown, on October 1, 1974. It's a fun bit of trivia on its own, but both films carry a genuinely occult wrinkle worth unpacking, one folkloric, one closer to outright myth… Start with the word most people assume Romero's film is actually about. Night of the Living Dead is routinely credited with inventing the modern zombie, t...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 30 The Meditrinalia: A Feast to the Goddess of Healing   (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.) Modern Pagan calendars list September 30th as the Meditrinalia , an ancient Roman festival honoring Meditrina, goddess of medicine, healing, and arcane pharmacopeia. It's a lovely image for an occult column to run with, a goddess of magical medicine getting her due on the cusp of autumn. There are two problems with it, and they compound each other in an unusually interesting way: the date is wrong, and the goddess herself likely never existed until Romans needed one to explain a festival whose real meaning had already been forgotten. Every ancient source that actually survives agrees on the date, and it isn't this one… Every ancient source that actually survives agrees on the date, and it isn't this one. The Meditrinalia fell on October...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 29 Michaelmas: The Feast of the Holy Dragonslayer   (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.) Michaelmas has a long and fascinating history. Unlike several of the September dates this blog has spent the month untangling, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels on September 29th is a genuine, continuously observed Christian holy day, older than the printing press, still marked on university calendars and legal terms across Britain and Ireland today. The folklore that's grown up around it over the centuries, however, is a slightly different matter, and worth separating from the liturgical fact underneath it… The date itself has a documented, and rather unglamorous, origin story. In the fifth century, a basilica near Rome was dedicated in Michael's honor, with celebrations beginning on the evening of the 29th ahead of the formal dedicatio...