Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 10 “Future Events Such As These”: Ed Wood and Criswell (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 October 10, 1924, in Poughkeepsie, New York, the world received Edward Davis Wood Jr., a man history would eventually crown, somewhat unkindly, the worst film director who ever lived. Wood deserves his own column someday, angora sweaters and all. But today belongs to his strangest collaborator, a man who appears at the beginning and end of Wood's “masterpiece,” Plan 9 from Outer Space , solemnly warning the audience that future events such as these will affect them in the future. That man called himself a psychic. His name was Criswell, and his one genuinely eerie prediction deserves to outlive every joke ever made about his movie…   Jeron Criswell King, born in Princeton, Indiana, in 1907, built a career as what might fairly be called America...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 9 Nicholas Roerich and the Search for Shambhala   (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.) He designed the sets for the single most riotous premiere in the history of ballet, painted more than seven thousand canvases, searched the high passes of Central Asia for a hidden Buddhist kingdom, co-authored a sixteen-volume mystical philosophy with his wife, negotiated secretly with Soviet officials to build a trans-Asian theocracy, and, almost as an afterthought, helped derail a sitting United States Vice President's bid for the presidency. Nicholas Roerich, born in Saint Petersburg on October 9, 1874, Old Style September 27, may be the most consequential occultist most Americans have never heard of… Start with the ballet, since it's the detail most people already half-know without realizing it's connected to everything that followed. Roerich ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 8 The Birth of Paschal Beverly Randolph (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.) He was born in the slums of Five Points, New York, on October 8, 1825, to a mother who claimed descent from a queen of Madagascar and a father who vanished soon after. By the time he died fifty years later, Paschal Beverly Randolph had sailed the world as a common seaman, practiced medicine without formal training, lectured on abolition beside future generals, taught freedmen to read at gunpoint in occupied New Orleans, and built, by most serious historians' accounts, the first genuine Rosicrucian order on American soil. He is also, with real historical justification, credited as the man who brought sex magic into Western occultism. Almost everything about that sentence deserves a closer look, starting with the date itself… Almost everything about that sentence...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 7 Year Zero: The Hebrew Calendar Begins   (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.) Somewhere around sunset on what we'd now call October 6th sliding into October 7th, 3761 BCE, nothing happened. No star moved, no continent formed, no first breath was drawn. And yet that exact moment, reckoned backward across millennia by rabbis who never claimed to be astronomers, remains the fixed zero point of the calendar still used today to date every Jewish holiday, every bar mitzvah, every ketubah signed anywhere in the world. Modern calendrical calculation, confirmed independently by sources ranging from the US Naval Observatory to the technical documentation behind contemporary Hebrew calendar software, places the epoch at sunset on Sunday, which, because the Hebrew day begins at sunset rather than midnight, rolls that moment into what Western reckonin...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 6 The Moulin Rouge and Occult Paris   (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 October 6, 1889, a windmill made of painted wood and electric lights opened its doors at the foot of Montmartre, and within weeks the Moulin Rouge had become the most famous nightclub on earth. The cancan, the absinthe, the gaslit scandal of it all, that's the Paris most people picture. A few streets away and a few years later, two of the era's most celebrated writers nearly killed each other in a duel over an accusation of murder by magic. The weapon in question wasn't a pistol. It was a letter to the editor… In January 1893, the Parisian newspaper Gil Blas published a letter from the best-selling author Stanislas de Guaita , denying, at length and with evident relish, the rumors circulating about him: that he had killed enemies from a distance through ...