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Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic―the use of sex as a source of magical power―emerged. This book, the first history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition, places these practices in the context of the larger discourse surrounding sexuality in American and European society over the last 150 years to discover how sexual magic was transformed from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. Focusing on a series of key figures including American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Gerald Gardner, and Anton LaVey, Hugh Urban traces the emergence of sexual magic out of older western esoteric traditions including Gnosticism and Kabbalah, which were progressively fused with recently-discovered eastern traditions such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. His study gives remarkable new insight into sexuality in the modern era, specifically on issues such as the politics of birth control, the classification of sexual “deviance,” debates over homosexuality and feminism, and the role of sexuality in our own new world of post-modern spirituality, consumer capitalism, and the Internet.
349 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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435 people want to read
About the author
Hugh B. Urban
25 books22 followersHugh B. Urban, Ph.D. (History of Religions, University of Chicago), is a professor of religious studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 23, 2008
A thoughtful account of the influence of 'sex magic' within (and on the cultural shift from) Victorian values through modernity to the current post-modern melange of consumerism and radical individualism. Urban looks at the issues through key figures and 'schools' and his book shows how Ronald Hutton has opened a space for other academics who can offer serious insights into our contemporary condition by exploring previously taboo subjects despite the fears of their academic peers.
Randolph, Reuss, Crowley, Evola, Gardner, LaVey and Spare are all studied through a glass that has its mildly Marxist moments (and is no worse for that). However, if you are looking for a sex book as opposed to an analysis and source for the social treatment of sex, forget it - this is a wonderfully anti-aphrodisiac text. You will never see Western Tantra in the same light again. A strong recommendation and a significant contribution to cultural studies.
Randolph, Reuss, Crowley, Evola, Gardner, LaVey and Spare are all studied through a glass that has its mildly Marxist moments (and is no worse for that). However, if you are looking for a sex book as opposed to an analysis and source for the social treatment of sex, forget it - this is a wonderfully anti-aphrodisiac text. You will never see Western Tantra in the same light again. A strong recommendation and a significant contribution to cultural studies.
December 28, 2021
Actually ZERO stars! I REALLY didn’t like this book.
Normally, despite me saying that I review everything I read, if a living author writes a book I really don’t like I discreetly pass it by and don't stick my knife into it as I know that there are some books I just don’t ‘get’. For example, I love J.G. Ballard but ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ really is, for me at least, just that.
However, with non-fiction its a different matter as facts are facts. I know! Don’t get all ‘history is written by the victors’ with me- give me a chance to explain myself in this review.
It is hard to know where to start with this abysmal book. The blurb for it gives you the trajectory the volume takes so we will skip all that.
After the introduction, the first chapter one summarizes sexual magic up to about the 1700’s touching on the Cathars, Knights Templar, the Witch Trials and Alchemy. Screeds have been written on these subjects and to cover such territory in a mere thirty pages is just laughable. Urban's point is that ‘history is written by the victors’, ie the Judeo-Christian religions of the West didn’t like anything that was subversive and would play up (or invent) the worst things possible undermine their power (ie dirty dirty sexual shenanigans) in order to suppress it. Whilst this is of course true, by concentrating on that Urban plays down, through lack of space, the supreme importance of the the Jewish Kabbalah and Alchemy upon all Western esotericism and you might have thought that he would have mentioned John Dee and Edward Kelly’s Enochian experiments (which seemed to involve a bit of wife swapping ie actual sex magic) and which figure heavily in both the O.T.O. and Crowley’s work. Although Swedenborg and Blake (together) receive three pages there is no mention of Mesmer. I did not notice a single mention of Plato or use of the tern ’neoplatonism’ in the entire book. This is a shocking absence. Moving on…
Of all the main figures in the other chapters I knew least about American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875). He is an interesting figure, promoting freedom for all and was a major player in the foundation of the National Equal Rights League for ‘the recognition of the rights of the coloured people of the nation as American citizens” Randolph promoted sexual freedom and thought that a fulfilling sex life with its orgasms and ‘love energy’ would enhance all aspects of mental and physical well-being including business deals, longer life, frustrating the plans of others etc. However, with a monotony that we see in all the cults, this is controlled in some way, in Randolph's case all the benefits of sex would only be obtained by being in a loving (heterosexual) marriage with ones (sole) partner and none of that masturbation. It is almost as an aside that Urban mentions Randolph’s suicide, possibly over his wife having an affair, I had to look that up myself, which is surely an interesting fact in the context of this book worth expanding on. He also mentions The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, “tremendously influential on much of later western esotericism, arguably as influential as its rival movement, the Theosophical Society”. Really? Tell me more! Urban doesn’t- I think he just doesn’t know and is just blustering.
Urban is an expert in Tantra (or at least lectures on it) and I was hoping his chapter on it might be revealing. Once again we are let down with only a very basic overview given. Urban's main point is that generally speaking, a lot of the sex magicians (Crowley included) who use ‘tantra’ really knew very little and had just taken the ‘racy bits’ or worse, just taken the name in order to try and inject a bit of the ‘mystic east’ into proceedings. These are fair points, cultural appropriation in religion has been done since Atlantis. Strangely (in my opinion) there is no mention of the Theosophical Society influence in this respect, as it was very popular in both the west and successfully re-exported back to India. No matter…
We have a bit of a woolly chapter on the O.T.O. in general and then we get to Crowley. I do not set myself up as a Crowley expert but have read about him and magic in general for forty-odd years and so hope you might believe me when I say that this chapter is an utter abomination.
One of the main…er…thrusts…(sorry!) of Urbans’s book is that sexual magicians and Crowley especially were kicking against the pricks (sorry!) of society and used “deviant sexual acts such as masturbation and homosexuality” (Urban uses this phrase a lot) partly as a way of shaking people from their staid and safe ways and as a method of achieving gnosis. The re-action against sexual magic and Crowley is also a measure of public acceptance of such things. Crowley is hugely important in the history of 2oth century magic and thus a gold mine for Urban’s thesis but the mistakes and omissions are just staggering.
How about these for starters; it is “Do what to WILT [shall be the whole of the Law] NOT ‘Do what thou will’, Crowley died in Hastings, not London and he also spelt his magic with a ‘k’ on the end to distinguish it from stage shows and as a nod to the phallus. This is basic stuff.
You would think that Urban might include some inclusion of Crowleys homosexual magic(k) is his discussion and thus mention the series of homosexual rituals Crowley and the poet Victor Neuburg undertook in Algiers which utilized John Dee’s Enochian magical system and was written up as ‘The Vision and the Voice’. It is one of the most important series of rituals Crowley ever undertook and also one of the most exciting to read about with Neuburg literally wrestling in the desert with the 'mighty devil' Choronzon ('the demon of dispersion' and a major obstacle on the spiritual path) when the ritual goes awry. There is not a single mention of this, despite it appearing in every biography and of course, Crowley own autobiography. Given this omission, we can scarcely by surprised when we find no mention of Crowley's homo-erotic poetry (especially The Bagh-i-Muattar by ‘Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz’) or even the infamous ‘Leah Sublime’. Also worryingly absent (given Urban's expertise in Tantra) is any mention of Alan Bennett, Crowley's teacher in the Golden Dawn who later went to Ceylon to become a Buddhist monk.
Urban also refers a few times to the use of bestiality in sex magic. Thankfully (as I love animals but not in that way) he gives no instances at all (thus not backing up this claim in any way) and even misses the opportunity to do so by failing to mention the incident of Leah and the (uncooperative) goat at Crowley's miserable 'Abbey' at Cefalu.
After this, I really was on the verge of losing the will to live, but ploughed on. La Vey as an occultist is given serious (really!) consideration, there is actually a fairly decent piece on Gerald Gardner (although the bar wasn’t being set very high) but little mention of Alex Sanders who was a better publicist when it came to nude witches in the Sunday press and probably did more to push the 'sexy witch' angle than the more serious-minded Gardner.
Strangely (sigh!) hardly anything on Kenneth Grant and his unorthodox use of Tantra in relation to Crowley and his magick. This is another gold mine for Urban unexplored which is an enormous pity as Grant is difficult to follow at the best of times. there is also a very poor summation of Austin Osman Spare who is seemingly tacked on as a semi-afterthought with the Chaos magicians with no mention of his well-known use for his special vases.
Urban states that one of his aims is to place the growth of sexual magic within the context of the times in which they emerge, for example, practitioners like Starhawk and their links with ‘radical feminism’ (his term). This idea is interesting (if somewhat obvious) but again Urban misses so many opportunities to explore it. For example, might the resurgence of interest in witchcraft in the mid 20th century be linked to a reaction against the horrors of two World Wars? I think so, but Urban writes as if the Wars (including the 'cold war'), or votes for women and subsequent emancipation (kicking against the pricks of patriarchy) or the pill (or HIV) never occurred. I would argue that all of these factors had an influence on how magicians saw the world and wanted to reshape it. He does mention J-K Huysmans' literary influence on the ‘Black Mass’ via his satanic novel ‘La Bas’ (one could argue almost every subsequent portrayal of a Black Mass owes something to this book) but nothing on Joséphin Péladan who had plenty to say about sexuality in magic.
There were so many instances of ‘wrongness’ that I found it hard to believe the book was written in the age of the internet and yet it was published in 2007 so he has little excuse for these oversights/mistakes. Urban is at pains to point out at various times that this is the first ‘academic’ to study this territory. I don’t quite know how he defines this so cannot, strictly speaking, argue otherwise, although it is in the dull prose that one certainly tends to associate with modern academia. However, there are plenty of earlier 'serious' books that cover this territory infinitely better than Urban by the likes of Francis King and Christopher McIntosh. The former is credited in Urban's bibliography.
The bibliography/index is also somewhat poor. For example, absent from either is Nikolas and Zeena Schreck’s ‘Demons Of The Flesh’, a book he quotes from a number of times in the text (and references in the chapter notes). On the subject of the Schrecks, he fails to mention that Zeena is Anton La Vey's daughter or that they were involved in Michael Aquino's break away from the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set.
Indexing and bibliography mistakes are perhaps where an editor might have been useful, as hopefully, they would have spotted such anomalies and perhaps noticed the misspelling in the quotation of the Gardnerian Great Rite. Even basic spellcheck would hopefully have queried the spelling of the religion of 'Vodoo'.
Overall, this is a terrible, lazy, poorly written, poorly researched book. Urban should be utterly ashamed of himself for inflicting this upon the world and if I were his University I would be giving him a big dunces hat and make him stand in a corner writing out 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' 93,000 times. Avoid the book like a dose of the clap.
Normally, despite me saying that I review everything I read, if a living author writes a book I really don’t like I discreetly pass it by and don't stick my knife into it as I know that there are some books I just don’t ‘get’. For example, I love J.G. Ballard but ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ really is, for me at least, just that.
However, with non-fiction its a different matter as facts are facts. I know! Don’t get all ‘history is written by the victors’ with me- give me a chance to explain myself in this review.
It is hard to know where to start with this abysmal book. The blurb for it gives you the trajectory the volume takes so we will skip all that.
After the introduction, the first chapter one summarizes sexual magic up to about the 1700’s touching on the Cathars, Knights Templar, the Witch Trials and Alchemy. Screeds have been written on these subjects and to cover such territory in a mere thirty pages is just laughable. Urban's point is that ‘history is written by the victors’, ie the Judeo-Christian religions of the West didn’t like anything that was subversive and would play up (or invent) the worst things possible undermine their power (ie dirty dirty sexual shenanigans) in order to suppress it. Whilst this is of course true, by concentrating on that Urban plays down, through lack of space, the supreme importance of the the Jewish Kabbalah and Alchemy upon all Western esotericism and you might have thought that he would have mentioned John Dee and Edward Kelly’s Enochian experiments (which seemed to involve a bit of wife swapping ie actual sex magic) and which figure heavily in both the O.T.O. and Crowley’s work. Although Swedenborg and Blake (together) receive three pages there is no mention of Mesmer. I did not notice a single mention of Plato or use of the tern ’neoplatonism’ in the entire book. This is a shocking absence. Moving on…
Of all the main figures in the other chapters I knew least about American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875). He is an interesting figure, promoting freedom for all and was a major player in the foundation of the National Equal Rights League for ‘the recognition of the rights of the coloured people of the nation as American citizens” Randolph promoted sexual freedom and thought that a fulfilling sex life with its orgasms and ‘love energy’ would enhance all aspects of mental and physical well-being including business deals, longer life, frustrating the plans of others etc. However, with a monotony that we see in all the cults, this is controlled in some way, in Randolph's case all the benefits of sex would only be obtained by being in a loving (heterosexual) marriage with ones (sole) partner and none of that masturbation. It is almost as an aside that Urban mentions Randolph’s suicide, possibly over his wife having an affair, I had to look that up myself, which is surely an interesting fact in the context of this book worth expanding on. He also mentions The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, “tremendously influential on much of later western esotericism, arguably as influential as its rival movement, the Theosophical Society”. Really? Tell me more! Urban doesn’t- I think he just doesn’t know and is just blustering.
Urban is an expert in Tantra (or at least lectures on it) and I was hoping his chapter on it might be revealing. Once again we are let down with only a very basic overview given. Urban's main point is that generally speaking, a lot of the sex magicians (Crowley included) who use ‘tantra’ really knew very little and had just taken the ‘racy bits’ or worse, just taken the name in order to try and inject a bit of the ‘mystic east’ into proceedings. These are fair points, cultural appropriation in religion has been done since Atlantis. Strangely (in my opinion) there is no mention of the Theosophical Society influence in this respect, as it was very popular in both the west and successfully re-exported back to India. No matter…
We have a bit of a woolly chapter on the O.T.O. in general and then we get to Crowley. I do not set myself up as a Crowley expert but have read about him and magic in general for forty-odd years and so hope you might believe me when I say that this chapter is an utter abomination.
One of the main…er…thrusts…(sorry!) of Urbans’s book is that sexual magicians and Crowley especially were kicking against the pricks (sorry!) of society and used “deviant sexual acts such as masturbation and homosexuality” (Urban uses this phrase a lot) partly as a way of shaking people from their staid and safe ways and as a method of achieving gnosis. The re-action against sexual magic and Crowley is also a measure of public acceptance of such things. Crowley is hugely important in the history of 2oth century magic and thus a gold mine for Urban’s thesis but the mistakes and omissions are just staggering.
How about these for starters; it is “Do what to WILT [shall be the whole of the Law] NOT ‘Do what thou will’, Crowley died in Hastings, not London and he also spelt his magic with a ‘k’ on the end to distinguish it from stage shows and as a nod to the phallus. This is basic stuff.
You would think that Urban might include some inclusion of Crowleys homosexual magic(k) is his discussion and thus mention the series of homosexual rituals Crowley and the poet Victor Neuburg undertook in Algiers which utilized John Dee’s Enochian magical system and was written up as ‘The Vision and the Voice’. It is one of the most important series of rituals Crowley ever undertook and also one of the most exciting to read about with Neuburg literally wrestling in the desert with the 'mighty devil' Choronzon ('the demon of dispersion' and a major obstacle on the spiritual path) when the ritual goes awry. There is not a single mention of this, despite it appearing in every biography and of course, Crowley own autobiography. Given this omission, we can scarcely by surprised when we find no mention of Crowley's homo-erotic poetry (especially The Bagh-i-Muattar by ‘Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz’) or even the infamous ‘Leah Sublime’. Also worryingly absent (given Urban's expertise in Tantra) is any mention of Alan Bennett, Crowley's teacher in the Golden Dawn who later went to Ceylon to become a Buddhist monk.
Urban also refers a few times to the use of bestiality in sex magic. Thankfully (as I love animals but not in that way) he gives no instances at all (thus not backing up this claim in any way) and even misses the opportunity to do so by failing to mention the incident of Leah and the (uncooperative) goat at Crowley's miserable 'Abbey' at Cefalu.
After this, I really was on the verge of losing the will to live, but ploughed on. La Vey as an occultist is given serious (really!) consideration, there is actually a fairly decent piece on Gerald Gardner (although the bar wasn’t being set very high) but little mention of Alex Sanders who was a better publicist when it came to nude witches in the Sunday press and probably did more to push the 'sexy witch' angle than the more serious-minded Gardner.
Strangely (sigh!) hardly anything on Kenneth Grant and his unorthodox use of Tantra in relation to Crowley and his magick. This is another gold mine for Urban unexplored which is an enormous pity as Grant is difficult to follow at the best of times. there is also a very poor summation of Austin Osman Spare who is seemingly tacked on as a semi-afterthought with the Chaos magicians with no mention of his well-known use for his special vases.
Urban states that one of his aims is to place the growth of sexual magic within the context of the times in which they emerge, for example, practitioners like Starhawk and their links with ‘radical feminism’ (his term). This idea is interesting (if somewhat obvious) but again Urban misses so many opportunities to explore it. For example, might the resurgence of interest in witchcraft in the mid 20th century be linked to a reaction against the horrors of two World Wars? I think so, but Urban writes as if the Wars (including the 'cold war'), or votes for women and subsequent emancipation (kicking against the pricks of patriarchy) or the pill (or HIV) never occurred. I would argue that all of these factors had an influence on how magicians saw the world and wanted to reshape it. He does mention J-K Huysmans' literary influence on the ‘Black Mass’ via his satanic novel ‘La Bas’ (one could argue almost every subsequent portrayal of a Black Mass owes something to this book) but nothing on Joséphin Péladan who had plenty to say about sexuality in magic.
There were so many instances of ‘wrongness’ that I found it hard to believe the book was written in the age of the internet and yet it was published in 2007 so he has little excuse for these oversights/mistakes. Urban is at pains to point out at various times that this is the first ‘academic’ to study this territory. I don’t quite know how he defines this so cannot, strictly speaking, argue otherwise, although it is in the dull prose that one certainly tends to associate with modern academia. However, there are plenty of earlier 'serious' books that cover this territory infinitely better than Urban by the likes of Francis King and Christopher McIntosh. The former is credited in Urban's bibliography.
The bibliography/index is also somewhat poor. For example, absent from either is Nikolas and Zeena Schreck’s ‘Demons Of The Flesh’, a book he quotes from a number of times in the text (and references in the chapter notes). On the subject of the Schrecks, he fails to mention that Zeena is Anton La Vey's daughter or that they were involved in Michael Aquino's break away from the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set.
Indexing and bibliography mistakes are perhaps where an editor might have been useful, as hopefully, they would have spotted such anomalies and perhaps noticed the misspelling in the quotation of the Gardnerian Great Rite. Even basic spellcheck would hopefully have queried the spelling of the religion of 'Vodoo'.
Overall, this is a terrible, lazy, poorly written, poorly researched book. Urban should be utterly ashamed of himself for inflicting this upon the world and if I were his University I would be giving him a big dunces hat and make him stand in a corner writing out 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' 93,000 times. Avoid the book like a dose of the clap.
February 3, 2016
Magia Sexualis is a rare find: an academic text on a topic that's still woefully neglected by anthropology, religious studies et.al. It not only offers an in-depth look at the history of "sex magick", but also manages to engage the readers in a critical dialogue with their own preconceived notions and blindly accepted norms.
March 22, 2009
Urban's literary and enjoyable survey of Sex Magick movements, with an emphasis on the Victorian era, is a great read. I especially enjoy his post-feminist critique of Wicca. I'm looking forward to reading more Urban in the future.
August 9, 2015
Hugh Urban is a delight to read. Part of the delight comes in his choice of fascinating topics. This study of sex magic, written for an informed audience, is captivating and raises some very important questions. I wrote further thoughts about this engaging book on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
April 29, 2014
At times, poorly organized, but a good intro to fringe religion.
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December 11, 2023For research, may return.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews