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Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian and Sex Magician
This first scholarly work on Randolph includes the full text of his two most important manuscripts on sexual magic.
This is a superb piece of work. It is the only book that I know of about Randolph, who is generally considered a notable curiosity of nineteenth-century esotericism, but whom the author establishes as an absolutely central and pivotal historical character. This historiography is masterful--meticulously detailed and coherently presented. This is an important book, filling a gap that wasn't previously known to have been so substantial. It's well written, a tour de force at amassing the data. It is a must read." -- Dan Merkur, author of An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions
This is the fascinating story of Paschal Beverly Randolph, an African American who carved his own eccentric path in the mid-nineteenth century from the slums of New York's Five Points to the courts of Europe, where he performed as a spiritualist trance medium. Although self-educated, he became one of the first Black American novelists and took a leading part in raising Black soldiers for the Union army and in educating Freedmen in Louisiana during the Civil War. His enduring claim to fame, however, is the crucial role he played in the transformation of spiritualism, a medium's passive reception of messages from the spirits of the dead, into occultism, the active search for personal spiritual realization and inner vision.
From his experiences in his solitary travels in England, France, Egypt and the Turkish Empire in the 1850s and 1860s, he brought back to America a system of occult beliefs and practices (the magic mirror, hashish use and sexual magic) that worked a revolution. The systems of magic he taught left their traces on many subsequent occultists, including Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, and are still practiced today by several occult organizations in Europe and American that carry on his work. This is the fist scholarly work on Randolph and includes the full text of his two most important manuscript works on sexual magic.
"It is fascinating, because the subject's life was filled with dramatic adventure and hardship, and touched upon so many issues of the day. Deveney's work is important in itself as a ground-breaking study of an intriguing character. I can think of no figure in nineteenth-century Western esotericism who has been more unjustly ignored than Randolph. Deveney rescues him from obscurity in this biography, which will be regarded as authoritative for many years to come." -- K. Paul Johnson, author of Initiates of Theosophical Masters and The Masters Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge .
This is a superb piece of work. It is the only book that I know of about Randolph, who is generally considered a notable curiosity of nineteenth-century esotericism, but whom the author establishes as an absolutely central and pivotal historical character. This historiography is masterful--meticulously detailed and coherently presented. This is an important book, filling a gap that wasn't previously known to have been so substantial. It's well written, a tour de force at amassing the data. It is a must read." -- Dan Merkur, author of An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions
This is the fascinating story of Paschal Beverly Randolph, an African American who carved his own eccentric path in the mid-nineteenth century from the slums of New York's Five Points to the courts of Europe, where he performed as a spiritualist trance medium. Although self-educated, he became one of the first Black American novelists and took a leading part in raising Black soldiers for the Union army and in educating Freedmen in Louisiana during the Civil War. His enduring claim to fame, however, is the crucial role he played in the transformation of spiritualism, a medium's passive reception of messages from the spirits of the dead, into occultism, the active search for personal spiritual realization and inner vision.
From his experiences in his solitary travels in England, France, Egypt and the Turkish Empire in the 1850s and 1860s, he brought back to America a system of occult beliefs and practices (the magic mirror, hashish use and sexual magic) that worked a revolution. The systems of magic he taught left their traces on many subsequent occultists, including Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, and are still practiced today by several occult organizations in Europe and American that carry on his work. This is the fist scholarly work on Randolph and includes the full text of his two most important manuscript works on sexual magic.
"It is fascinating, because the subject's life was filled with dramatic adventure and hardship, and touched upon so many issues of the day. Deveney's work is important in itself as a ground-breaking study of an intriguing character. I can think of no figure in nineteenth-century Western esotericism who has been more unjustly ignored than Randolph. Deveney rescues him from obscurity in this biography, which will be regarded as authoritative for many years to come." -- K. Paul Johnson, author of Initiates of Theosophical Masters and The Masters Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge .
607 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 11, 2017
This biography on P.B. Randolph dispels many of the fables about his life while providing an enormous amount of factual info about it. My only complaint are the timeline issues. There's a fair amount of going back and forth in time but it's not surprising considering the prolific and active life this fascinating mystic had. Highly recommend this for anyone really interested in Randolph and to those who are curious about the occult revival of the late 1800's.
January 7, 2017
Make no mistake, the subject is a five star affair but I found the text somewhat short of doing justice to the remarkable life of Dr. Randolph -- an African-American spiritualist and occultist, abolitionist and crusader for freedmen's rights, at least when that role served his greater purposes, biographer of the Davenport Brothers, and, it must said, probably only a semi-successful conman. Far ahead of his time, Randolph preached the necessity for sexual equality, the bountiful blessings of mutual orgasm, and attitudes toward sex (though only occasionally "free love") that must have signaled him out even from the progressive circles in which he moved. Eventually, his advice on lovemaking evolved into "sex magic" that prefigures the OTO and other later occultists, the belief that profound simultaneous ecstasy could work miracles. Maybe so if such magic is accompanied by liberal doses of Dr. Randolph's magic elixir, which mostly consisted of extracts of hashish. He named his son Osiris Budh.
The sensual doctor must have cut quite a figure in his day. A better book needs to be written about him and he would make an excellent subject for a premium TV series.
The problems in this book for me are the dry narrative style. For example, we are told that Randolph was witty but we see no evidence of that until the appendices, where some truly hilarious passages are reproduced, masterpieces of winking entendre that must have filled the lecture halls with nervous laughter. There is a description of Randolph's charisma but it never breathes. The greater flaw for me (and reflective purely of my own reasons for interest in this material) is far too great a focus on the minutia of Randolph's teachings, including two interminable chapters on what Madame Blavatsky might or might not have borrowed from his work. In general, I find the lives of occultists, and the places their work touches other currents of history, infinitely more interesting than their doctrines and teachings. A biography of Randolph that focused less on the shifting minutia of his beliefs and more on what his life and work meant in the context of the non-occult world would be far more to my liking.
Still, this is, as far as I know, the only book on its subject and Dr. Randolph is a genuinely amazing historical figure, one deserving of being much better known.
The sensual doctor must have cut quite a figure in his day. A better book needs to be written about him and he would make an excellent subject for a premium TV series.
The problems in this book for me are the dry narrative style. For example, we are told that Randolph was witty but we see no evidence of that until the appendices, where some truly hilarious passages are reproduced, masterpieces of winking entendre that must have filled the lecture halls with nervous laughter. There is a description of Randolph's charisma but it never breathes. The greater flaw for me (and reflective purely of my own reasons for interest in this material) is far too great a focus on the minutia of Randolph's teachings, including two interminable chapters on what Madame Blavatsky might or might not have borrowed from his work. In general, I find the lives of occultists, and the places their work touches other currents of history, infinitely more interesting than their doctrines and teachings. A biography of Randolph that focused less on the shifting minutia of his beliefs and more on what his life and work meant in the context of the non-occult world would be far more to my liking.
Still, this is, as far as I know, the only book on its subject and Dr. Randolph is a genuinely amazing historical figure, one deserving of being much better known.
December 7, 2016
First read portions in Fall 2011; read the whole thing again for grad school.
I should temper that five-star rating in retrospect, but I'm gonna keep it because the book blew my mind as an undergrad and deserves a wider audience. Deveney reveals the bizarre life and misadventures of Paschal Beverly Randolph, a biracial man who became a prominent, controversial Spiritualist and magician in the mid-1800s. Plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, Randolph still traveled widely and proposed a new, active form of occultism, by which people could use drug potions, magical tools, and rituals to communicate with the heavens. Secret occult masters reached from beyond the grave to talk to Randolph, or so he claimed. In contrast, regular Spiritualism was a passive affair, in which mediums "channeled" messages from ghosts.
Deveney's argument is overloaded with the names and actions of Randolph's peers, reflecting this book's origins as an academic thesis. The text should have been cut down, with some of this comparative material relegated to the footnotes or an appendix. Nonetheless, Deveney reveals how many Europeans challenged the Christian interpretation of viewing the world. His comparison of Randolph's writings to those of Helena Blavatsky, a rival occultist and founder of Theosophy, reveals the pronounced ways that Blavatsky borrowed from the lesser-known Randolph. Deveney positions Randolph (active, individual, practical occultism) in opposition to Blavatsky (collective, abstract Theosophy), but he backs off from this contrast. Randolph and Blavatsky both described a more active form of communicating with the next life — although only Randolph's method placed such an emphasis on magical practices and rituals.
One of the craziest books you'll ever read.
I should temper that five-star rating in retrospect, but I'm gonna keep it because the book blew my mind as an undergrad and deserves a wider audience. Deveney reveals the bizarre life and misadventures of Paschal Beverly Randolph, a biracial man who became a prominent, controversial Spiritualist and magician in the mid-1800s. Plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, Randolph still traveled widely and proposed a new, active form of occultism, by which people could use drug potions, magical tools, and rituals to communicate with the heavens. Secret occult masters reached from beyond the grave to talk to Randolph, or so he claimed. In contrast, regular Spiritualism was a passive affair, in which mediums "channeled" messages from ghosts.
Deveney's argument is overloaded with the names and actions of Randolph's peers, reflecting this book's origins as an academic thesis. The text should have been cut down, with some of this comparative material relegated to the footnotes or an appendix. Nonetheless, Deveney reveals how many Europeans challenged the Christian interpretation of viewing the world. His comparison of Randolph's writings to those of Helena Blavatsky, a rival occultist and founder of Theosophy, reveals the pronounced ways that Blavatsky borrowed from the lesser-known Randolph. Deveney positions Randolph (active, individual, practical occultism) in opposition to Blavatsky (collective, abstract Theosophy), but he backs off from this contrast. Randolph and Blavatsky both described a more active form of communicating with the next life — although only Randolph's method placed such an emphasis on magical practices and rituals.
One of the craziest books you'll ever read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews