Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 7 Ghost Ship: The Voyage of the Mary Celeste (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 the morning of November 7, 1872, after two days waiting out foul weather off Staten Island, a newly refitted brigantine called the Mary Celeste slipped out of New York Harbor and into the Atlantic, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of alcohol in her hold. Aboard were Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven hand-picked crewmen. None of them was ever seen again. Four weeks later the ship was found drifting, empty, in the open ocean. What happened next is a story about how a mystery becomes a legend, and about the young doctor who would one day create Sherlock Holmes… Briggs was no reckless adventurer; a devout Massachusetts sea captain from a seafaring family, he read his Bible faithfully and had chosen his off...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 6 Gustavus Adolphus: The Lion of Midnight (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 the morning of November 6, 1632, a fog so thick that Swedes still call heavy mist “Lützen fog” settled over a flat plain in Saxony, where two armies waited to destroy each other. Somewhere inside it, the King of Sweden rode forward at the head of his cavalry, lost sight of his own men, and was cut down by enemy horsemen. When the fog lifted, his horse Streiff came back to the Swedish lines alone, wounded, with an empty saddle. Gustavus Adolphus was dead at thirty-seven. To millions of Protestants across Europe, he hadn’t simply been a king. He had been the fulfillment of a prophecy, and his death on that foggy field is one of the strangest chapters in the history of the Rosicrucian dream… Protestant Sweden still used the old Julian calendar in 1632, while the...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 5 The Gunpowder Plot and the Wizard in the Tower (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.) Shortly before midnight on November 4, 1605, a soldier calling himself John Johnson was arrested in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing watch over thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. Under interrogation, he would soon give up his real name, Guy Fawkes , but by the time the sun rose on November 5th, London was already lighting celebratory bonfires, the beginnings of a holiday England still hasn’t stopped observing. Every year since, bonfires have burned across Britain in memory of the Gunpowder Plot ’s failure, and effigies of Fawkes have gone up in smoke with them. But the strangest figure swept up in the Plot wasn’t one of the conspirators at all. He was an earl, a scholar, and, by popular reputation, a wizard, and he would die twenty-seven years lat...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 4 The Curse of the (Real Life) Mummy (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 November 4, 1922, in the Valley of the Kings, a boy who carried water for Howard Carter ’s expedition uncovered the edge of a stone step. Carter had been told by his patron, Lord Carnarvon , that this would be his last season, and he had very little left to lose. What lay at the bottom of those steps became the most famous archaeological discovery in history. Within five months the patron was dead, and within days of that, newspapers around the world were explaining why. The explanation they offered was a curse. It had almost nothing to do with ancient Egypt, and quite a lot to do with a newspaper contract… On November 26, Carter made a small opening in a sealed doorway and held a candle to it, and when Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything, he gave the answe...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 3 St. Malachy and the Prophecy of the Popes (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 the night of November 2, 1148, at the Abbey of Clairvaux in France, a sick Irish archbishop died in the arms of Bernard, the most famous abbot in Europe . Bernard loved him and wrote a long, affectionate biography of the man, full of reforms, journeys, and miracles. It contains no list of future popes. Four hundred and forty-seven years later, in 1595, a list of 112 cryptic Latin phrases appeared in print under the dead archbishop's name, said to describe every pope from his own day until the end of the world. The archbishop was St. Malachy , his feast day is today, and the list has had a much stranger afterlife than he did… Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, known in Latin as “Malachy,” was born in Armagh in 1094 and became its archbishop in 1132. He was a reformer...