Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 14 The Philosopher and the Oracle: Gottfried Leibniz and the I-Ching (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 April 1, 1703, a letter arrived in Hanover after a journey of nearly a year and a half. It had been written in Beijing by a French Jesuit missionary, and folded inside it was a woodcut of the sixty-four hexagrams of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes . The man who opened it was thunderstruck. In those mysterious stacks of broken and unbroken lines, he saw his own life’s most cherished discovery staring back at him. His name was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , and he died on November 14, 1716. He is remembered as the co-inventor of calculus and the father of binary arithmetic, the code that runs every computer on earth. He was also a young alchemical secretary, a dreamer of a magical universal language, and a man convinced that an oracle h...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 13 Robert Louis Stevenson and the Dreaming Self (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.) One night in the autumn of 1885, in a house in Bournemouth on England’s south coast, Fanny Stevenson woke to the sound of her husband crying out in his sleep. Alarmed, she shook him awake. Instead of thanking her, he was indignant. He had been dreaming, he protested, “a fine bogey tale,” and she had interrupted it at the most thrilling moment. That interrupted nightmare became Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and its dreamer, born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, was Robert Louis Stevenson . He would spend the rest of his life wondering who, exactly, had written it: himself, or the little people who worked in the dark… Stevenson came by his nightmares honestly. A sickly only child, often confined to bed with lung ailments, he was raised largely by hi...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 12 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Nun Who Dreamed the Cosmos (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.) Sometime in the late 1660s, in the viceregal palace of Mexico City, a teenage girl stood before a panel of some forty learned men: theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, and poets, summoned by the Viceroy himself to test whether her famous erudition was real. According to her first biographer, she fended off their questions the way a royal galleon fends off a swarm of little canoes. The Viceroy never forgot it. Neither did New Spain. Her name was Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, and the world would come to know her as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , the “Tenth Muse.” Born on November 12th, in a village in the shadow of two great volcanoes, she would become one of the greatest poets of the Spanish language, a fearless defender of women’...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 11 Happy Birthday Paracelsus! (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 June 24, 1527, as students in Basel lit their traditional bonfire for the Feast of St. John , the city’s new professor of medicine stepped forward and tossed one of the most revered medical textbooks in Europe into the flames. The faculty was scandalized. The students were thrilled. And the professor, a stocky, combative Swiss physician who lectured in German instead of Latin and wore an alchemist’s leather apron instead of academic robes, was delighted with the uproar. He called himself Paracelsus , and he was born, according to one of several traditional dates, on November 11, 1493. He would reshape medicine, alchemy, and the occult imagination of the West, and give us the gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders that still haunt ceremonial magic today… Truth be told, n...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY November 10 Descartes’ Three Visions (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.) It was St. Martin’s Eve, November 10, 1619, and a young French gentleman-soldier had shut himself away in a stove-heated room somewhere in southern Germany, waiting out the winter in the army of the Duke of Bavaria. He was twenty-three, restless, and burning with an idea. Before he slept that night, he believed he had glimpsed the foundations of a wonderful new science. Then came the dreams. By morning, René Descartes was convinced that heaven itself had shown him his life’s path. The father of modern rationalism, it turns out, was launched by a prophecy in the night, and within a few years half of Paris would suspect him of belonging to the most mysterious brotherhood in Europe…   Descartes had spent the previous year in the Dutch Republic, where, according to the jour...