A natural history of sex magic from Dr. Eubie - Talker of the Town
Brighton School Board candidate Melaney Bernhardt is un…An open invitation to a conversation in Nathaniel Squar…(Un) Writing an old wrong in Brighton’s Meadowbro…
Posted by email protected | May 5, 2016 | Cultural Life, History | 0 |
The Great Rite of Wicca involves symbolic sexual intercourse
In the older western sources, sex magic was mostly something you accused your enemy of doing. These included orgies, ceremonial sex performances (with an audience), ritually imbibing sexual fluids and menstrual blood, and anointing objects with these same fluids. Sometimes with some infant sacrifice mixed in. Probably most groups accused of these things did not do them.
Then there’s that sex magic is based on human imitation of divine creative power. If people thought creative power was based in a sexualized relation between human and divine, any ritual performed to activate that power was sex magic. So in some of the earlier sources, it would simply be visualization of the divine body, or performing letter combinations with the understanding that god created the universe by combining sexualized letters. With the development of kabbalah, in the 12th and thirteenth centuries, things changed.
Kabbalists saw creation as the emanation of the divine substance into ten sefirot, which were gendered, and had sex with each other. When they did that, creation was completed. It was also the way that divine energy or blessings flowed into and sustained the world.
So kabbalists thought that they could draw down blessings by having sex, kind of the opposite of the ‘as above, so below’ principle. They thought if they had sanctified sex, God would do so too. Then the blessings would rain down. This was a private affair but it’s pretty well absorbed into Hasidism.
At other times, in 16th and 17th century Safed, some people used sex magic(prostrating themselves on the gravestones of saints in various attitudes) to draw down the souls of those saints. There were some developments of this too with the Sabbatian and Frankist movements (both Jewish, but antinomian and branded heretical) who allegedly performed public sex acts to bring about the redemption, and who are both reputed to have consumed some fluids.
Two replica Incan erotic sculptures I bought in Peru. (left) Ceramic vessel, erotic art Moche culture 100 AC – 800 AC. (right) a gay orgy. see A 1997 trip to deep Peru retracing the Shining Path
This changed in the 19th Century Europe, with the Europeans getting all orientalist. Western esotericism was born out of that impulse: to combine western forms of mystical and magical practice with Indian and Muslim ritual. Satanism as we know it now came out of these Western Esotericist or Theospohist doctrines.
One of the most important nineteenth century theorists of was Paschal Beverly Randolph, who was not a satanist but claimed to have been initiated into Gnostic, Tantric, and Sufi rituals. For him, the experience of sexual orgasm is the critical moment in human consciousness and the key to magical power: “true Sex-power is God-power,” as he put it. The moment when new life is infused from the spiritual realm into the material is crucial moment — the soul is suddenly opened up to the spiritual energies of the cosmos. “At the instant of intense mutual orgasm the souls of the partners are opened to the powers of the cosmos and anything truly willed is accomplished.” That’s from his Eulis. This ritual was performed in private, and in the context of marriage, I believe.
Two of the early groups were the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Order of the Golden Dawn. Aleceister Crowley filtered Randoph’s ideas through the teachings of groups but also slapped on some of those late antique heretical accusations of fluid drinking, and ritual anointing of talismans with fluids. And because Crowley lived in Victorian times, he understood well the power of taboo. So he threw in some auto-eroticism and anal elements.
From my parent’s porch. Postcard my mother brought back from TARQUINIA – Necropoli: Tomba dei, Tor Tombeau des Tori, Tori Grave, Tori Grab. Maybe sex magic works into your 80s
And I’ll quote Hugh Urban on that:
In Crowley’s revised system, however, the O.T.O.’s nine degrees were expanded to eleven. The eighth, ninth and eleventh of these focused on more explicitly transgressive sexual rites of auto-erotic and homosexual intercourse. As Peter Koenig summarizes the upper degrees:
Crowley’s VIIIth degree unveiled… that masturbating on a sigil of a demon or meditating upon the image of a phallus would bring power or communication with a divine being. . . . The IXth degree was labeled heterosexual intercourse where the sexual secrets were sucked out of the vagina and when not consumed…put on a sigil to attract this or that demon to fulfill the pertinent wish. . . . In the XIth degree, the mostly homosexual degree, one identifies oneself with an ejaculating penis. The blood (or excrements) from anal intercourse attract the spirits/demons while the sperm keeps them alive.
The Hindu use a type of sex magic called Tantra.
In many ways, this secret of sexual magic was really the key to his entire vision of a new Aeon based on the full affirmation of the Will and the complete liberation from the repressive, oppressive religions of the past.
Indeed, Crowley takes the “repressive hypothesis” and the urge to sexual freedom to its furthest extreme: for he not only proclaims the liberation of sexuality from the prudish bonds of his Victorian childhood, but he also makes the most deviant and anti-social of sexual acts — namely, masturbation, oral consumption of sexual fluids and homosexual intercourse– the ultimate keys to magical power. In other words, he set out to usher in his own new Aeon by smashing and tearing down the entire social-moral structure of the world in which he was raised.
And so it comes full circle. Tantra combined with kabbalah and late antique accusations of heresy meant to bust up Victorian repression with the power of satan.
Dr. Eubie.
RELATED
How Conservative Am I Really? Exploring experiences that heighten and empower female sexuality at the Rochester Erotic Arts Festival by Shadi Kafi
Talker loses his innocence, Rockily, at the Cinema Theatre
A 1997 trip to deep Peru retracing the Shining Path.
Like this: LikeLoading…LikeLoading…Welcome to Talker of the Town! My name is David Kramer. I have a Ph.D in English and teach at Keuka College. I am a former and still active Fellow at the Nazareth College Center for Public History and a Storyteller in Residence at the SmallMatters Institute. Over the years, I have taught at Monroe Community College, the Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College. I have published numerous Guest Essays, Letters, Book Reviews and Opinion pieces in The New York Times, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Buffalo News, the Rochester Patriot, the Providence Journal, the Providence Business News, the Brown Alumni Magazine, the New London Day, the Boston Herald, the Messenger Post Newspapers, the Wedge, the Empty Closet, the CITY, Lake Affect Magazine and Brighton Connections. My poetry appears in The Criterion: An International Journal in English and Rundenalia and my academic writing in War, Literature and the Arts and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Starting in February 2013, I wrote for three Democratic and Chronicle blogs, “Make City Schools Better,” “Unite Rochester,” and the “Editorial Board.” When my tenure at the D & C ended, I wanted to continue conversations first begun there. And start new ones. So we created this new space, Talker of the Town, where all are invited to join. I don’t like to say these posts are “mine.” Very few of them are the sole product of my sometimes overheated imagination. Instead, I call them partnerships and collaborations. Or as they say in education, “peer group work.” Talker of the Town might better be Talkers of the Town. The blog won’t thrive without your leads, text, pictures, ideas, facebook shares, tweets, comments and criticisms.
October 20, 2015
January 29, 2019
September 29, 2015
April 23, 2020
Like what you see on our site? We’d appreciate your support. Please donate today.
Introductions by email protected | Oct 1, 2015 | About
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 1981. Caption: Dave Kramer of Brighton concentrates on his next…
Read More
Rachel’s Rebel Roots by email protected | Jun 25, 2016 | History, Politics
RAB with FDR in Washington Square Park 6/16/16 I went to Washington Square Park to hear why Rachel…
Read More
Che of The Town: Interviews (1-107) by email protected | Mar 28, 2017 | Cultural Life
You first met Che in Rochester works for actor Che Holloway, an impromptu interview and amble…
Read More
The Presidential Visits Series in its entirety: James Monroe to Joseph Biden by email protected | Mar 8, 2018 | History
Of the 44 men who have served as President of the United States, 32 have stopped in Rochester…
Read More
Site says Brighton is best place to live in New York by email protected | Apr 5, 2018 | Talker of the Town
Twelve Corners Memorial Park, Brighton, NY 4/5/18 Photo: David Kramer Recently, the Rochester…
Read More
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1995 “Billy Pilgrim” pilgrimage to the Mt. Hope grave of Edward R. Crone Jr, Brighton High School ’41 by email protected | Mar 8, 2019 | History
Provided by Rosemary Lloyd. Signed copy of the 25th anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five by…
Read More
“Mr. Crane’s Vivid Story:” New and Improved by email protected | Mar 27, 2019 | Cultural Life
The Wells-Brown Room, Rush Rhees library, the University of Rochester. Just SOME of Crane’s books…
Read More
Why I voted for Adam Bello and a trip down Talker political memory lane, 2015 – 2021 by email protected | Oct 29, 2019 | Politics
Adam Bello at the 2019 Labor Day Parade. Photo: David Kramer SEE ALL PHOTOS 2015 – 2021…
Read More
Dr. Joseph Roby could not save Lenore Engel, 11, victim of the 1918 pandemic buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery by email protected | Mar 24, 2020 | History
Growing up on 39 Wilkins Street near Joseph Avenue in a German, possibly Jewish, family, Lenore…
Read More
When Washington Square Park felt like Tiananmen Square by email protected | Sep 11, 2020 | Social Issues
The bus stop on Court Street Photo: David Kramer, 9/4/20 Last Friday, September the 4th, I heard…
Read More
In search of the missing 19 granite timepieces at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: 1973 – September 11th, 2001 by email protected | Dec 6, 2020 | History
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Highland Park. The area that contained the missing last 19 granite…
Read More
For our 7th, Bill Pruitt offers “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TALKER ’22” by email protected | Sep 26, 2022 | Talker of the Town
Talker of the Town is on the screen. Photo: David Kramer, see Happy Birthday Mom, we miss you so…
Read Moreby email protected | Oct 1, 2015 | About
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 1981. Caption: Dave Kramer of Brighton concentrates on his next…
Read More by email protected | Jun 25, 2016 | History, Politics
RAB with FDR in Washington Square Park 6/16/16 I went to Washington Square Park to hear why Rachel…
Read More by email protected | Mar 28, 2017 | Cultural Life
You first met Che in Rochester works for actor Che Holloway, an impromptu interview and amble…
Read More by email protected | Mar 8, 2018 | History
Of the 44 men who have served as President of the United States, 32 have stopped in Rochester…
Read More by email protected | Apr 5, 2018 | Talker of the Town
Twelve Corners Memorial Park, Brighton, NY 4/5/18 Photo: David Kramer Recently, the Rochester…
Read More by email protected | Mar 8, 2019 | History
Provided by Rosemary Lloyd. Signed copy of the 25th anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five by…
Read More by email protected | Mar 27, 2019 | Cultural Life
The Wells-Brown Room, Rush Rhees library, the University of Rochester. Just SOME of Crane’s books…
Read More by email protected | Oct 29, 2019 | Politics
Adam Bello at the 2019 Labor Day Parade. Photo: David Kramer SEE ALL PHOTOS 2015 – 2021…
Read More by email protected | Mar 24, 2020 | History
Growing up on 39 Wilkins Street near Joseph Avenue in a German, possibly Jewish, family, Lenore…
Read More by email protected | Sep 11, 2020 | Social Issues
The bus stop on Court Street Photo: David Kramer, 9/4/20 Last Friday, September the 4th, I heard…
Read More by email protected | Dec 6, 2020 | History
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Highland Park. The area that contained the missing last 19 granite…
Read More by email protected | Sep 26, 2022 | Talker of the Town
Talker of the Town is on the screen. Photo: David Kramer, see Happy Birthday Mom, we miss you so…
Read More
