Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 20 Happy Birthday Selena Fox!   (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 20, 1949, in Arlington, Virginia, a woman was born who would go on to found one of America’s oldest standing Pagan churches, win a genuine federal court battle over a fallen soldier’s grave marker, and spend five decades defending Wiccan religious practice in rooms where almost nobody wanted her there. Selena Fox’s astounding résumé reads less like a typical occultist’s biography and more like a civil rights lawyer’s, which is, as it turns out, close to the point. Today, she is a living legend of civil rights, environmental activism, Wicca, and modern Paganism… Fox’s path into Wicca ran directly through activism rather than away from it. She helped organize the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, while still a psychology student, and began leading public Paga...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 19 The Bell Witch (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 19, 1820, a cavalry officer named John R. Bell crossed the Red River at Port Royal, Tennessee, on the return leg of a grueling eight-month expedition to the Rocky Mountains, and stopped that evening at the Murphey residence in Robertson County for dinner. In his journal, he recorded what he heard that night: tales of an invisible, talking voice, heard by thousands, haunting a farm not far from where he sat. Bell wasn't a relative of the family whose name the legend would eventually carry. He just happened to share it. Historians who've examined the documentary record agree on an uncomfortable fact about the Bell Witch: there is no surviving contemporary source for the haunting from the years it supposedly occurred. The story’s entire modern foundation rests on a manuscr...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #18 King Arthur Pendragon The Trials of Arthur: The Biker Who Would Be King Hilaritas Press, 2026 Co-written with CJ Stone   MODERN OCCULTIST In 1986 you walked into a solicitor's office and made it official: not a stage name, not a nom de guerre, but a legal Change of Name Deed, John Timothy Rothwell becoming Arthur Uther Pendragon on paper, on your passport, on your driving license. Forty years on, with twenty-six court appearances (and a Crown Court witness statement from Professor Ronald Hutton behind you) does the name still feel like something you stepped into, or has the man and the myth simply become indistinguishable at this point? And for a new reader meeting you for the first time in this edition, what would you want them to understand about the difference between believing you are the once-and-future king and choosing, deliberately, to become him?   KING ARTHUR PENDRAGON The two are indistinguishable because onc...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 18 Edgar Cayce and the Dayton Reading (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 the autumn of 1923, a man who had built his entire reputation on diagnosing illness while asleep found himself, in a Dayton, Ohio hotel room, saying something he didn't understand and couldn't quite believe he'd said. Edgar Cayce had spent over a decade delivering trance-state medical readings, helping strangers he'd never met with ailments doctors couldn't solve. On October 18, 1923, under the questioning of a wealthy Ohio printer named Arthur Lammers, the sleeping Cayce stopped talking about bodies and started talking about souls… The man who pushed him there wasn't a stranger off the street. Arthur Lammers was a serious, committed student of Theosophy, esoteric astrology, and psychic phenomena, and when he turned up at Cayce’s photography s...