Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 18 Urbain Grandier and The Devils Restored! (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.) This October, nearly four centuries after the events it depicts, audiences will finally get to see Ken Russell's The Devils exactly as he intended it. Warner Bros.' new specialty label Clockwork has completed a full 4K restoration of the director's uncensored cut, premiered at Cannes this year, screening at TIFF, and heading to North American theaters October 16th before a UK release two weeks later, fully uncut for the first time since its notorious 1971 debut. The film has spent over fifty years as one of cinema's most legendary casualties of censorship, banned outright in several countries and butchered by studio cuts everywhere else. Its subject deserves that same restoration of attention: on August 18th, 1634, a French parish priest named Urbain ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 17 Happy Birthday, Llewellyn George!   (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 17th, 1876, a boy was born in Swansea, Wales, whose own first name would eventually become one of the most recognized words in American occult publishing, printed on the spine of thousands upon thousands of books he'd never personally write. His father died young; his mother remarried and moved the family to the United States, where the boy grew up in Chicago before eventually making his way west to Portland, Oregon, around the turn of the century. There, under the name Llewellyn George, he built something that has now outlived him by well over seventy years and counting: the legendary publishing house that shares his own first name… Astrologer to Publishing Legend George studied astrology formally under L. H. Weston before striking out on his own, and t...

The Modern Occultist Interview  #15 Gavin Fox The Accelerated Necromancer / The Death Codex: The Accelerated Necromancer’s Special Edition Erebus Society, 2024   MODERN OCCULTIST The Trisphere model—Synthetic, Systemic, and Kinetic—is one of the more genuinely original frameworks to emerge from the Chaos Magick community in recent years, and what immediately strikes the reader is the insistence that these three nodes function as a continuous circuit rather than a linear progression. A desire fired in the Kinetic can reinject itself into the Synthetic, fundamentally changed by its cultural journey. You write that “many concepts, both magickal and mundane, go around multiple times during their lives.” Can you give us a concrete example from your own practice where you witnessed that circuit complete an unexpected second or third rotation—and what it looked like when it did? GAVIN FOX Well I am glad to hear that the Trisphere model resonated with you so deeply, and ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 16 Rodin Opens The Gates of Hell (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 16th, 1880, French President Jules Ferry signed a state commission ordering the sculptor Auguste Rodin to produce a monumental bronze doorway for a planned Musée des Arts Décoratifs , decorated with “bas-reliefs representing The Divine Comedy .” Rodin, an avid reader of Dante and still a relatively obscure artist at the time, seized on the assignment with the ambition of a man determined to make his name. What he ultimately produced, a churning, twenty-year, then thirty-seven-year obsession containing more than 180 writhing figures torn from the pages of the Inferno, would become one of the most influential sculptures in Western art. It would also never once function as an actual gate to anything. The museum it was built for was never constructed. The doors were ne...