Modern Occultist News

The Modern Occultist Interview  #14 Tom Jackson Every Day is a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus! Writing and Anarchism (ed.) Hilaritas Press, 2025   MODERN OCCULTIST John Higgs observed that one of the great paradoxes of Illuminatus! is that its cult following transferred itself almost entirely to Robert AntonWilson, leaving Roberts Shea’s enormous contributions and later solo work at genuine risk of being forgotten. You spent a decade assembling this collection to correct that imbalance. What do you think produced that asymmetry in the first place—and what does Shea’s work offer that Wilson’s, for all its brilliance, doesn’t? And also, is that something that you can directly address as the editor and chief webmaster for the RAWIllumination.net official blog? TOM JACKSON I suspect that part of it is that after  Illuminatus!  was published in 1975, Robert Anton Wilson went on to fairly quickly publish  a series of other brilliant books that con...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 12 Lychnapsia Festival: The Lighting of the Lamps   (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 August 12th, sometime in the fourth century CE and likely for a considerable stretch of centuries before that, the streets of Rome would have flickered with the light of thousands of small oil lamps, lit all at once in a public celebration called the Lychnapsia, literally “the lighting of lamps.” We know the festival existed because it's recorded in the Chronography of 354, an illustrated Roman calendar compiled by the scribe Filocalus for a wealthy Christian patron. What that calendar does not tell us, and what scholars have spent nearly a century arguing about since, is exactly whose festival it was. The overwhelming scholarly consensus, reached carefully rather than assumed, is that the Lychnapsia honored Isis. But “overwhelming cons...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 11 Celebration of the Puck Fair   (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 year on August 10th, in the small County Kerry town of Killorglin, a wild male goat is captured in the surrounding mountains, hauled down into the town square, and crowned. A local schoolgirl, chosen for the honor and titled the Queen of Puck, sets a garlanded crown on his head. He's hoisted onto a high platform above the crowd, where he'll survey his temporary kingdom for three straight days of markets, music, and pubs staying open until three in the morning, before being released back into the hills he came from, no worse for the experience and considerably more famous. Ireland's Puck Fair is genuinely one of the country's oldest surviving festivals, documented in legal records back to the 1600s. What it is not, despite how often the claim gets repeated,...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 10 Sirius, the Unseen Companion   (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 August 10th, 1844, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel sat down at the Königsberg Observatory and wrote a letter announcing something he had never seen, would never see, and had no way of directly proving: that the brightest star in Earth's night sky was not traveling alone. After more than a decade of watching Sirius trace an infinitesimal, wavering path across the sky rather than the perfectly straight line simple physics predicted, Bessel concluded the only explanation was gravity, an unseen companion massive enough to tug the great star gently off its course. He would die two years later. It would take eighteen more years, and a telescope he never lived to look through, before anyone actually saw the thing he'd found with nothing but mathematics and p...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #13 Maevius Lynn   The Holy Year of Thelema: A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition   Llewellyn Worldwide, 2026 MODERN OCCULTIST Your book opens with a fascinating observation: that Aleister Crowley, the most prolific ritual writer in the Western esoteric tradition, left virtually no specific rituals for the holy days he himself established. You describe this silence as “conspicuous”—even citing Crowley's own famous quip about things being “conspicuous by their absence.” What do you make of that silence? Was it oversight, invitation, or something more deliberate on his part…? MAEVIUS LYNN I think it is interesting that despite the central, sacred text of Thelema, The Book of the Law , calling for the celebration of the holy days, Aleister Crowley did not write rituals for them. I suppose we will never truly know why, but I suspect that it’s just simply a fact that he didn’t have enough time. Reading through some of h...