Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 17 Kannamesai: Shinto and the Gods (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.) Each October 17, at the Inner Shrine of Japan's Ise Jingu , priests complete a rite considered the single most important ceremony performed anywhere in Shinto practice all year. Newly harvested rice, grown and gathered within the same season, is offered to Amaterasu Omikami , the sun goddess from whom Japan's imperial line claims unbroken descent, in a ritual called Kannamesai , the tasting of the gods. It's a genuinely ancient rite, and the date it falls on today is, somewhat surprisingly, a comparatively recent one... The ceremony itself unfolds over three days rather than one, with October 17 marking its culmination rather than its start. Kannamesai opens on the evening of October 15 with a rite called Okitama shinsai , invoking a guardian spirit of the shrine...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 16 An Occult Reading of Narnia (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.) In celebration of Greta Gerwig's upcoming epic take on Narnia's The Magician's Nephew , today we give an occult glance at the first book in C.S. Lewis's classic series and the book that started it all, which was published seventy-six years ago on this day... On October 16, 1950, Geoffrey Bles published a 172-page children's novel in London about four siblings who step through a wardrobe into a snowbound land ruled by a witch. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe went on to sell tens of millions of copies, and its author, a devout Christian apologist who had spent years writing in open defense of orthodox belief, is remembered today as one of the twentieth century's most unambiguous literary voices for the faith. The book he wrote that year, and the circl...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 15 The Swedish Witch Trials (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 15, 1674, a district court convened in the hamlet of Hammar, in the parish of Torsåker , to begin hearing testimony against the local population on charges of witchcraft. Modern calendars often list this date as the day of Sweden's largest witch trial , and both the date and the scale check out. One detail commonly attached to it does not: Torsåker sits nowhere near Dalarna; it's roughly three hundred miles north, in the province of Ångermanland, a mistake that quietly erases the real geography of one of early modern Europe's most severe witch panics…   The confusion with Dalarna is an easy one to make, since Dalarna genuinely does belong to this story, just an earlier chapter of it… Sweden's great witch panic, later remembered as Det stora oväsende...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 14 Durga Puja: Between the Invocation and the Battle (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 millions of households in Bengal and Bangladesh, modern Pagan calendars circulating online this week list October 14th as the day of Durga Puja, the great festival honoring the ten-armed Mother Goddess and her victory over the buffalo demon Mahishasura . The festival itself is entirely real, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the largest religious celebrations on Earth. The date, as it turns out, isn’t quite right this year, and the actual lunar calendar behind it tells a richer story than a single fixed day ever could. Durga Puja runs on the Bengali calendar, and 2026 places its real center of gravity nearly a week later than October 14th… The festival's opening invocation, Mahalaya , falls this year on October 10th, a predawn ceremony...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 13 The Templar Arrests   (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.) Before dawn on October 13, 1307, royal agents across France moved on every Templar preceptory in the kingdom at once, acting on sealed orders King Philip IV had distributed weeks earlier with instructions not to be opened until the appointed day. Hundreds of knights were seized in a single coordinated sweep, charged with heresy, and handed to inquisitors instructed to extract confessions by whatever means were necessary. It remains one of the most efficient acts of state-sponsored persecution in medieval history…   The claim that this arrest is the origin of Friday the 13 th ’s reputation for bad luck has become so widely repeated that it now functions as common knowledge, and it is, according to every folklorist who has actually traced the superstition's documented hist...