Sex, Drugs & Magick
A Journey Beyond Limits Robert Anton Wilson
Hilaritas Press 2021 Pb, 444pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781734473520
Oh, for the halcyon days of the 1970s, when sex, drugs, and magick – or the occult in general – were strange, threatening and, dare I say it, revolutionary. How unlike today when they are virtually on tap, available in a variety of shapes and sizes at more outlets than we know what to do with. There are countless Netflix or Amazon series about witches, magicians, sorcerers or some other once-marginalised occult community. Sex is a buyer’s market, with practically anything you want available anytime you want it. Cannabis and psychedelics have been legalised in a number of places, and the technology of getting high has developed into a kind of pinpoint accuracy, or your money back. It’s difficult not to cast a nostalgic look back at a time when having a puff and heading to the one decent occult bookshop you knew to look at their selection of sex magic manuals afforded a frisson like no other. At least I remember it that way.
This glance down Memory Lane was prompted by a rereading of Robert Anton Wilson’s outrageously dated but still enlighteningly enjoyable Sex, Drugs & Magick, in a new edition bookended by tributes and appreciations by some current practitioners of the not-so-dark arts.
These include Grant Morrison, Rodney Orpheus, Phil Farber and others who carry on the esoteric/ erotic/psychedelic tradition that RAW – as he was fondly known – established in classics like The Illuminatus Trilogy, Cosmic Trigger, Schrödinger’s Cat and other works of what we might called “illuminated agnosticism.”
With Sex, Drugs & Magick, you get what it says on the tin. Given that it was originally written for the Playboy Press – RAW had been on their staff for years – and published in 1973, the emphasis is on old-fashioned, straightforward heterosexual rolls in the hay, and how they can be sensually enhanced and even
– Goddess forbid! – transformed into a mystical experience through the use of cannabis and LSD. This last was tipped by Timothy Leary as the ultimate aphrodisiac, but Wilson admits that fumbling with intercourse while the cosmos is ripping through your cerebral cortex is not always a good idea. Such cautions aside, this is the kind of book in which you are positively encouraged to “try this at home”. RAW is not an uncultured sensualist, and among the fictionalised “case studies” of folk who took the “psychedelic revolution” too seriously – acid casualties abound – one finds sober (!) advice on how best to employ mind-altering accessories when getting in the sack. Nonbinary folk and ardent feminists may want to put it on the pyre, but if you remember when there really was an Establishment (wasn’t there?) this book will make you get the Rizla out. Gary Lachman
★★★★
penchant for MR James, has put together a handsome anthology of 15 stories by members of the Chit-Chat Club, and finishes with an extract of a satire on the Club that appeared fictionalised in a long-lost Decadent novel from 1894, The Green Bay Tree. These stories were not read at the Club gatherings, although the helpful introduction notes that the minutes record a number of spiritual, psychical and supernatural discussions, suggesting a proto-fortean bent.
The collection mixes better known stories by MR James and EF Benson with more obscure tales by RH and AC Benson, Maurice Baring and the excellent “The Phonograph Bewitched” by HW Tatham. In a rather neat and satisfying way, this Swan River Press edition conjures up the wisps of a long-vanished ethos of privileged Cambridge men being earnest about often frivolous things. The introduction exploits the resources of the Club minute books very well and sets an atmospheric scene with great panache. A worthy addition to the Jamesiana shelves. Roger Luckhurst
★★★★