Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 29 The Death of Paschal Beverly Randolph (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 July 29, 1875, in Toledo, Ohio, a forty-nine-year-old man died of a gunshot wound in front of a neighbor’s house. The coroner called it suicide. His wife had recently had an affair; he was drinking heavily and nearly broke. It was a quiet, sad end for a man who, twenty years earlier, had lectured to packed halls across two continents, corresponded with European royalty, and built, from nothing, the first Rosicrucian order in American history. His name was Paschal Beverly Randolph, and for the better part of a century after his death, the tradition he helped invent came very close to forgetting he had existed at all. The Lecture Circuit Randolph was born in New York City in 1825, the son of a Black mother, Flora, and a white father who left before he could remember ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 28 Lilias Adie: The Witch of Scotland (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 July 28, 1704, in the small coastal parish of Torryburn, Fife, an elderly woman named Lilias Adie was taken into custody accused of witchcraft. She was likely in her sixties. She would never leave custody alive, and in dying before her trial could conclude, she inadvertently did something no other accused witch in Scottish history managed to do: she left behind a grave. Everyone else convicted in Scotland’s two centuries of witch persecution was strangled and then burned, their ashes scattered with no ceremony and no marker. Lilias Adie’s body still exists, or did until the nineteenth century decided otherwise, and the story of what happened to her before and after her death is one of the strangest and most quietly devastating in the whole of Scottish history. The Kir...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 27 The Birth of Kūkai   (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.) Somewhere on a forested mountain in Wakayama Prefecture, at six o’clock this morning, a monk in ceremonial robes carried a wooden box of food along a stone path lined by thousand-year-old cedars. He’ll do it again at ten-thirty. He does this every single day, and has done it, without a single morning missed, for roughly twelve hundred years, because the man he’s feeding is Kūkai, founder of Japanese Shingon Buddhism , born on this date in 774, and as far as his own religious tradition is concerned, Kūkai is not dead. He is meditating. He has been meditating since the year 835, and he will keep meditating until the future Buddha arrives, and in the meantime, he still needs breakfast. An Esoteric Apprenticeship Kūkai’s path to founding an entire school of Buddhism started, by his ow...

  The Modern Occultist Interview  #9 JOHN MICHAEL GREER Merlin's Wheel: Self-Initiation in the Druid Tradition   &   The Secret of the Temple: Earth Energies, Sacred Geometry, and the Lost Keys of Freemasonry Aeon Books, 2025 & 2026   An exclusive from our third issue! One of the most respected writers and teachers in the occult field today, John Michael Greer has written more than fifty books on esoteric traditions, nature spirituality, and the future of industrial society. An initiate in Druidic, Hermetic, and Masonic lineages, he served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He lives in Silver Springs, Maryland with his wife, Sara. He can be found online at www.EcoSophia.net MODERN OCCULTIST I’ve long admired how one of your earlier books, The Occult Philosophy Workbook , can be used as a perfect primer for nearly any magical or esoteric systems that a reader would continue to study post-co...