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This chapter looks at the first known example of a truly sophisticated and well-documented system of sexual magic, the work of Paschal Beverly Randolph, providing a brief background on Randolph and considering his works in the context of nineteenth-century debates surrounding sex, women, and marriage. It suggests that Randolph was a reflection of the sexual attitudes of his time, and relates how his teachings were transmitted throughout England and Europe through a variety of esoteric orders, giving birth to a wide range of sexual magic in movements such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and their offshoots.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about the rise of sexual magic in America and Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. The book traces the transmission of magia sexualis from the United States to Europe as it was passed on through such authors as Paschal Beverly Randolph, Theodor Reuss, and Aleister Crowley. It examines the impact of Indian traditions like Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, which by the early twentieth century had come to be increasingly fused with Western sexual magic, and analyzes the profound transformation of sexual magic from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. The book argues that the literature on sexual magic has, from its origins, been plagued by a deep tension and ambivalence: The tension between liberation and exploitation.

This chapter explores the use of drugs in the occult milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is fin de siècle occultism. While it examines the significance of drug use in the life and work of key figures such as W. B. Yeats, Helena Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley, it also looks at little-known but important occultists such as Paschal Beverly Randolph and Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, as well as organizations such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Order of the Golden Dawn. There is also some analysis of temperance discourses within Theosophy and particularly Spiritualism. Finally, there is an overview of drug use in post-Crowleyan Thelemic thought later in the twentieth century.

This chapter argues that conceptions of magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and the occult have influenced constructions of sex and sexuality to a much greater extent than has been realized in the existing scholarship. It contends that magia sexualis and its notion of will in particular play an essential role in the construction of sexual subjectivity. The chapter begins by thinking about the possibilities of attraction without desire or sexuality by considering the quasi-magical/quasi-chemical idea of elective affinities in Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein’s The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854/5). In the second section, it traces the afterlife of this sexual subjectivity and its relation to will in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in order to chart a genealogy of aim-based sexuality. The chapter concludes by examining Paschal Beverly Randolph's pioneering sexual magic, arguing that he is one of the earliest theorists and instantiators of sexual subjectivity. In particular, the chapter argues that he constructs his vision of sexual subjectivity in relation to the specter of American slavery.

This chapter examines how funk as affect directs how some black people inhabit their bodies and imagine sexuality. It studies how Paschal Beverly Randolph's occult manuscripts on sexual magic, and conjoined twins Christine and Millie McKoy's autobiography as freaks, provide a foundation of how black funk freakery differs from the Victorian-era freak. The chapter utilizes funk's ideologies about labor, leisure, and imagination to counteract colonial meanings of freak, since black funk freakery remains a significant black intervention on white America's definition of sex, work, and sex work. Funky black freaks understand sexuality and sexual difference as originating from outside the body. On this plane, gender or sexual difference does not equate with or become sexual deviance as it does in sexology.

Through reference to books and Spiritualist periodicals, chapter 4 situates Blavatsky’s early theory of metempsychosis in relation to anti-reincarnationist currents in Anglo-American Spiritualism. It also explores Blavatsky’s debt to and tension with the French Spiritism of Allan Kardec (1804–1869), arguing that her rebirth theories must be understood in light of her simultaneous reception and rejection of certain specific elements present in Anglo-American Spiritualism as well as French Spiritism. It considers the similarities and differences between Blavatsky’s ideas on rebirth and those of Kardec, the American medium Cora Scott Tappan (1840–1923), the British medium Emma Hardinge Britten (1823–1899), the American magician Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875), and the occult society the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.