Modern Occultist News

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...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 28 Thesmophoria: The Last Fasting of Demeter   (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.) Across modern Pagan calendars, September 28th is frequently listed as the day ancient Athens opened the Thesmophoria , a secret, women-only mystery rite honoring Demeter and Persephone and tied to the agricultural cycle. It's a genuinely striking image, and unlike some of the invented holidays this column has debunked before, the festival itself is completely real, one of the best-documented women's rites in the ancient Greek world. The specific date attached to it, however, doesn't hold up. Tracing the claim backward leads to a familiar place… Tracing the claim backward leads to a familiar place: the same “Days of September” listicle, still circulating under various names across Pagan calendar sites since at least 2009, that this column alrea...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY September 27 The Man In The Stone Room: Koot Hoomi's Samādhi (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.)   A square stone building somewhere beyond Ladakh, in the direction of the Karakorams… No windows, no doors—the only way in is an underground passage running from a chamber in the monastery. Inside, a man's body lies cold and stiff on the floor while his spiritual superior comes and goes, tending it. The Himalayas stand to the right. There's a lake nearby. The body will lie there for three months, and the man inside it is not, in any sense his correspondents would recognize, dead… That's the scene as Helena Blavatsky described it in a letter written on October 2, 1881, to Mrs. Hollis Billings . The man in the stone room was Koot Hoomi , and according to Theosophical chronology he had entered samādhi around September 27—a continuous trance ...