Founders of a Scottish conservation charity tried to keep their occult interests quiet while chasing public cash to restore Aleister Crowley's old haunt. The Boleskine House Foundation (BHF), bagged £250,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and has nearly completed rebuilding Boleskine House near Loch Ness (and it is looking good even if it has got a larger occult theme than the original).  Once home to Aleister Crowley for 14 years the site has long been a magnet for occultists including Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page. But leaked chats suggest the charity’s original inner circle had a different agenda. Former members say they were asked to conceal any ties to Thelema, Crowley’s spiritual philosophy, when the project launched in 2019. In messages seen by The Sunday Times , Keith Readdy, an American academic who bought the fire-damaged property with his wife Kyra, advised volunteers to present themselves as history buffs. “We can say we’re honouring the Fraser family,” he...

According to the Russian press, the one person who really knows how the Ukraine War ends is a Russian psychic with more eyeliner than credibility. Adelina Panina, speaking to Kremlin mouthpiece MK, announced with great certainty that Russia is “confidently moving towards inevitable victory” and that the triumph will be signed “on paper” before year’s end. Which is a bold call, given she also once prophesied the war would wrap up neatly in May, and we all saw how that went. Her latest premonition is, of course, about as authentic as her eyelashes, and one has to wonder whether the spirits whispering in her ear are vodka fumes or the collective mumblings of Moscow’s propaganda department. Panina appears to have learnt from her previous mistakes and gave her oracles a few months to play out.   Still, she assures her audience that a peace deal will soon be recorded for posterity. Families who’ve buried loved ones and endured years of bombing will no doubt be thrilled to hear ...

A bunch of chancers flogging curses on Etsy are now claiming they magically assassinated Charlie Kirk after right-wing conspiracy nuts hijacked a Jezebel piss-take. Before Kirk was shot, Jezebel ran a satirical piece mocking Etsy witches who charge silly money for spells. The article joked about hexing Kirk, but made it clear they only wanted to curse his socks and sabotage his podcast mic. “I just want him to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit. I want his thumb to grow so big that he can't tweet,” the story said. After the killing, Christian nationalists and the usual frothing right-wing rags latched onto the piece and took it dead seriously. They started bleating that witches had blood on their hands and started gathering firewood for a bonfire. While the entire Wiccan movement should probably be keeping quiet right now for their own safety, the same Etsy witches Jezebel was mocking are crawling out to take credit, hoping to drum up business despite not being involve...

A Fort Wayne witch shop boss was left battered and concussed after a fluorescent-clad yob stormed his mystical emporium and screamed that all witches must die. Fae’s Cabinet owner, Travis Tribolet-Ward, said the man wandered into his shop on 6 September looking like trouble in a hi-vis yellow sweatshirt and red trousers. “I was in our shop when a gentleman entered,” Tribolet-Ward told The Wild Hunt . “He asked if I was a Satanist. I said no, I was a practising Witch.” The creep loitered until the customers had cleared off, then barged behind the counter. That’s when it kicked off. “He stomped on my back for about five minutes,” Tribolet-Ward said. “He threw me on the floor twice, actually broke one of our birdcages, and then he was kneeing me in the face at that point.” All the while he was shouting “Kill all the witches” and “All witches must die,” as if he had just stepped out of a dodgy Hammer Horror flick.  Tribolet-Ward tried to fight back with a bottle of bleach, but the...

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has sent a gang of esoteric right-wing vloggers completely round the twist, with three of them now demanding an armed uprising against the left. Leading the charge was Arcanvm’s  Ike Baker, who kicked things off with a pompous “Alea iacta est” [the die is cast]. When asked if he was really calling for civil war, he snapped back: “it had already started.” Baker ranted that the time for politeness was gone. “There is no talking sense to people that have none, because they have sadly conflated it with education while simultaneously giving themselves over to the groupthink of political identity, which leads ultimately to rationalised insanity.” Without evidence, he branded Kirk’s killing a “public execution” by the left. Then he laid into liberals, saying they “scream about gun violence but elect political structures which facilitate the release and prolonged social havoc wrought by ‘career criminals, ’ two words which shouldn't even be allowed t...

Just two days before far-right talking head Charlie Kirk [ pictured ] was gunned down at Utah Valley University, Jezebel ran a tongue-in-cheek story claiming to have paid Etsy witches to hex him. The piece, titled “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk,” was published on 8 September. It described hiring self-styled witches to perform symbolic curses, wishing him trivial misfortunes such as a dodgy podcast microphone, a zit at the worst possible time, a sock that wouldn’t stay up, and the hope that “everyone hate him.” The writer stressed there was no call for harm, saying: “I’m not calling on dark forces to cause him harm,” framing the stunt as satire on Kirk’s persona and the way witchcraft has been turned into an online commodity. But Kirk’s assassination on 10 September saw the story take on an ugly resonance. Jezebel hastily slapped on an editor’s note: “This story was published on September 8. Jezebel condemns the shooting of Charlie Kirk in the strongest possible te...

Co-founder of Alexandrian Witchcraft and Witch Queen Maxine Sanders has thrown petrol on an already blazing row in the occult world after publicly defending Christian Day, a notorious witch with a rap sheet of scandals longer than most people’s Book of Shadows . Day, who runs the online  Spectral Evidence shin-dig, has already hit headlines for all the wrong reasons. Most recently , he suggested Palestinians should be “eating their children” and has been dragged through court accused of elder abuse; he has also been slammed for stalking, racism and general nastiness.   Yet instead of keeping her distance, Sanders shocked many by leaping to his defence in a Facebook post, even mocking one of his accusers and brushing the whole saga off as little more than community drama. She wrote a lengthy post calling the criticism “spectacle dressed up as accountability.” She singled out one of Day’s alleged victims, using the mocking nickname “Spikey,” and accused him of hypocris...