Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 31 Blessed Samhain From Modern Occultist! (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.) Tonight marks Samhain, the Gaelic festival that gave Halloween most of its genuine bones, and it seems fitting to close out a month built on separating documented history from invented backstory with the single most widely repeated piece of misinformation in all of modern occultism: the claim that Samhain was an ancient Celtic god of death... He wasn’t; in fact, he never was—and the actual story of how that myth got invented is, appropriately enough, a genuine ghost story about a fabrication that refused to die. The claim traces to a specific source and a specific year: Charles Vallancey , an eighteenth-century British military officer turned amateur antiquarian, published a book in 1786 titled A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland , in which he casually de...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY   October 30 W.B. Yeats and the Séance Before Samhain (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 30, 1912, William Butler Yeats sat in a darkened room with a medium named Alfred Vout Peters, took careful notes on what came through, and filed the results away with the same seriousness he brought to drafting a poem. The notes survive today, eleven typescript and handwritten pages in a folder at the National Library of Ireland, catalogued as part of a collection of Yeats’s occult papers that fills twenty-three boxes. The man who wrote “The Second Coming” spent decades of his life taking séances exactly this seriously, and it’s worth understanding just how deep that commitment actually ran. Yeats’s occult life wasn't a youthful detour he outgrew once the poetry career took off. It ran the length of his adult life, parallel to it, feeding it… Ye...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 29 The Death of George Gurdjieff (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 29, 1949, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff died at roughly eighty-three years old, having spent his final two weeks in decline after collapsing at a class just fifteen days earlier. He left behind no tidy system, no single finished text explaining what he actually taught, and a body of followers who have spent the three-quarters of a century since arguing, sometimes bitterly, about what exactly that teaching was. Few figures in modern esotericism managed to be this influential while remaining this genuinely hard to pin down. Even his own birth date resists certainty, a fitting detail for a man whose entire philosophy centered on how little people actually understand about themselves… Sources place his birt...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 28 The Magic Ambassador: Robert-Houdin’s Algeria (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 28, 1856, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin , the French magician whose name Harry Houdini would later borrow for his own, stood before an Algiers theater packed with sixty Arab chiefs, caids, and agas and began a performance the French Foreign Office had specifically engineered. His own memoir calls the day his “first performance before the Arabs.” What that memoir leaves considerably less clear is how much of the story around it can actually be trusted, starting with the man telling it. The documented facts are straightforward enough on their own, and genuinely remarkable. By 1856, Robert-Houdin had already retired from the stage, having spent the previous decade building a reputation as the father of modern conjuring, blending mechanical ingenuity with p...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY October 27 Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford, and the Road to the Golden Dawn (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 27, 1824, in Ipswich, England, a clergyman's son was born who would spend his adult life rebelling against the very faith his father preached. Edward Maitland refused ordination, chased gold to California, served as a colonial land commissioner in Australia, and eventually returned to England to co-found a society now credited by serious historians as a direct forerunner of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn . His collaborator in that project is, if anything, the more extraordinary figure of the two, and she believed, with complete sincerity, that she had killed two men with her mind… That collaborator was Anna Kingsford , and the partnership between her and Maitland produced some of the strangest, best-documented claims in ...