Sex Magicians
Michael William West
Destiny Books 2021
Pb, 246pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781644111635
The subtitle, far too long for the header, is a fair summary of the book: “The lives and spiritual practices of Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Anton LaVey and others.” There are 12 in all, in birth order, so rocket scientist Parsons and artist Cameron, a wondrous but highly dysfunctional couple, sandwich William Burroughs, which would undoubtedly have amused him.
In a practical sense, the author says, sex magic is “an occult branch of psychology, in that it allows the magician to access and meddle with the subconscious mind”, though really that could be said of all areas of magic. Put simply, it’s harnessing the power of human sexuality, especially the moment of orgasm, for magical purposes. Sex and spirituality have been linked in the East for centuries, but in the West it was the African American Paschal Beverly Randolph who developed the magical practice in the mid-19th century. (Helena Blavatsky referred to him dismissively and bitterly as “the N....r”.)
It’s good to see Randolph getting rightful recognition
as, in West’s words, “the most important figure of the genesis of Western sex magic”; without him Theodore Reuss and Carl Kellner wouldn’t have founded the Ordo Templi Orientis – or would have done so only in a highly emasculated form – which would have had a knock-on effect on Aleister Crowley’s occult career.
Inevitably, but unnecessarily, Crowley’s chapter is much longer than anyone else’s; it’s twice as long as Randolph’s, which is simply wrong.
Also, the author barely gives any idea of the complex lineage leading from Randolph to the OTO – just a couple of sentences about the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor – and doesn’t even have entries for Reuss or Kellner! And though he mentions that Randolph “reinvented himself as ‘The Rosicrucian’”, he gives no indication that his teachings were influential on the founders of both the Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis and the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross (AMORC) – though both organisations have done their best to distance themselves from any taint of sex magic.
Despite these significant failings, Sex Magicians is a worthwhile collection of readable and informative mini-biographies of the often troubled lives of some of the most significant esotericists of the last century and a half, ending with Genesis P-Orridge, whose on-stage excesses with assorted bodily fluids in the 1970s seem a universe away from Randolph’s ideas.
★★★