Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 31 Modern Occultist Issue 2 Debuts! The Spring Equinox 2026 Manifestation Issue is out NOW!   (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.) We have, in these pages, spent the past week tracing a single unbroken thread across seven days: the persistence of sacred knowledge against every force arrayed against it: Gabriel's feast, suppressed and enduring; Dante's hidden cosmology; the Murder Act's accidental gothic legacy; the pagan Wends given a century's reprieve; Blake's Jerusalem , stripped of its radical pronoun and still burning; the Golden Dawn's spectacular collapse, and the tradition that escaped from the rubble; Aleister Crowley staring calmly from the Sgt. Pepper cover, twenty years after his death, in the most famous photograph in rock history... The signs are always given. The knowledge is always available. Today, o...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 30 “All You Need Is Love (Under Will)…” On March 30, 1967, Michael Cooper photographed the most famous album cover in history—and Aleister Crowley, expelled from the Golden Dawn sixty-seven years earlier, stared out from the back row (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.) Yesterday we told the story of how the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn imploded on March 29, 1900 — expelled its own founder, produced a masked intruder in a Highland kilt, and inadvertently seeded the entire modern Western magical tradition. Today, exactly sixty-seven years later, the most famous figure to emerge from that explosion arrived at a photographer's studio in Chelsea and took his place in history. On March 30, 1967, the Beatles walked into Michael Cooper's studio at 4 Chelsea Manor Studios on Flood Street and posed for what would become the cover of Sgt. Peppe...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 29 Exiled by 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 March 29, 1900, the London adepts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn voted to expel their founder and Chief, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The man who had built the most comprehensive system of Western esoteric practice ever assembled—who had synthesized Hermetic Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, alchemy, geomancy, and Enochian magic into a single coherent initiatory structure—was cast out of his own creation. The events surrounding his expulsion read less like the collapse of a serious occult institution and more like a West End farce: forged letters from imaginary German countesses, accusations of astral attack, a young man in a black mask and full Highland military regalia attempting to seize a London temple by force, W.B. Yeats helping a police constable eject him...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 28 The 110th anniversary of Parry's Jerusalem (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 March 28, 1916, a choir of three hundred voices gathered at the Queen's Hall in London's Langham Place—the self-described musical center of the Empire—and sang a short poem for the first time. The poem was by William Blake, dead for nearly ninety years. The music was by Hubert Parry, who had written it eighteen days earlier and handed the manuscript to his former student Henry Walford Davies with the rather casual comment: “Here's a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.” What Davies did with it, what England did with it, and what continues to be done with it one hundred and ten years later—that is one of the stranger stories in the history of sacred music. Because the poem that became Jerusalem was not written as a patriotic hymn. It w...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY March 27 The Saint and the Pagans Or, "How a Holy Roman Emperor allied with pagan Slavs and accidentally preserved one of the last great religious traditions of the medieval world..." (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 year 1003, the most powerful Christian ruler in Europe made a decision that scandalized his contemporaries, baffled his bishops, and quietly changed the course of religious history on the continent. Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany and Italy, a man of such conspicuous personal piety that the Catholic Church would eventually canonize him as a saint, signed a peace deal with the pagan Wends —the Slavic tribes of the Elbe River region who worshipped many gods, maintained magnificent wooden temples, and had been resisting Christian missionaries for generations. Not only did he make peace with them—he made an ...