Spoilers perhaps: What are your thoughts about Cochran?

Seems to me that Cochran is an occult practitioner and that there is no evidence to suggest that he is anything else. He managed to accumulate enough wealth to get any obscure texts he needed as well as outrageous things like procuring a stone from Stonehenge, but it all seems human level (In a James Bond villain sorta way).

I've run a good many tabletop RPGs based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and so I have put a bit of thought into the practicalities of ritual magic in a real world context. One of the areas that I cannot make sense of is the use of astrological data for the timing of events. It is an unfortunate fact that dates such as Beltane and Samhain connect with no actual position of the heavenly bodies that are supposed to have some effect on occult matters. I hand waved the problem to some extent using the dates as approximate periods of traditional significance while having my occultists draw detailed information from the ephemeris.