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A talk given at Pantheacon 12 in San Jose, CA, this account of the occultism of our great-grandparents raised a bit of a stir at the time; some of the themes have appeared since then in my Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and other works.

One of the pieces of received wisdom about the past we all get in the course of growing up in modern America is the idea that the Victorian period was very, very, very sexually repressed. To describe attitudes as “Victorian” is to dismiss them as prudish, repressive, and spiritually constipated. Now of course each generation before the 1960s believed that it was the first one ever to discover sex, and I think the current notion in popular culture is that sex was discovered once and for all in the back seat of a Chevy convertible in a parking lot near Golden Gate Park in 1965. I hope, though, that I won’t be puncturing anyone’s faith in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny if I point out that popular culture pretty often gets things wrong, and rarely so much as in talking about Victorians and sex.

The Victorian era wasn’t particularly oversexed, as eras go. But it certainly wasn’t particularly undersexed, either. What it was, possibly more than any other culture in recorded history, was caught in a bind between public ideology and private reality. It’s popular to dismiss this as a matter of simple hypocrisy, but it was much more complex than that. The Victorians believed intensely in word magic. When Victorians wanted something to be true, they said that it was true, and they expected reality to play along. If it didn’t, they got uncomfortable, and said it again, twice as loud. Reality being what it is, they ended up shouting some things at the top of their lungs.

One thing that tends to be overlooked in talking about the Victorian era is that the sexual culture we’re discussing was entirely a creation of the English-speaking world – of Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and a few other areas strongly influenced by British culture. It’s easy to forget that any degree of sexual repression in England, say, was balanced by the fact that France was not very far away, and France had a completely different attitude toward sex. Or, rather, the French had a different attitude toward word magic, and never managed to achieve the total disregard for reality that reigned on the other side of the channel. The French also profited financially quite a bit from the fact that a remarkable number of British men, and quite a few British women as well, spent their holidays in France, where they could let the word magic lapse for a bit, and refer to the fact that they had genitals and the means, motive and opportunity to use them.

I’ve suggested that the Victorians practiced word magic, and that’s actually not just a figure of speech. Look closely at the fundamental concepts of modern magic and you’ll find some astonishing echoes of Victorian thinking. The concept of the magical will, as developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and popularized by Aleister Crowley, is probably the best example. The Victorians were obsessed by the power of the human will. Go digging in any collection of self-help books from the 19th century – you think we have a lot of self-help books nowadays, take a look at the 19th century literature on the subject and prepare to be amazed. A huge proportion of them focused on developing, strengthening, concentrating the will.

How many of you have read Crowley’s Liber E vel Exercitorum or Liber III vel Jugorum? Those are the books where he discusses methods of will training like dropping the word “I” out of your vocabulary for a day. That exercise, and most of the other things in those essays, were borrowed straight from the Victorian willpower literature. I have a dusty old book by Frank Channing Haddock, copyright 1907, titled Power of Will that contains close to 2000 exercises for giving your willpower a workout; most of them read like classic magical training exercises, and indeed they are – but they’re also the sort of thing ordinary Victorians learned in school to build character.

How the thought of Aleister Crowley teaching Victorian character-building exercises may make your head spin – it does mine – but that’s exactly what was going on. What makes this irony particularly fine is that one of the major reasons Victorians taught these exercises to young men was that they thought this would help the young men resist the urge to masturbate, while Crowley seems to have taught them in the hope that they would help young men resist the urge not to masturbate.

Of course masturbation was one of the places where the word magic I mentioned above was used most enthusiastically. Serious medical books by physicians and professors insisted that masturbation, or rather self-abuse as it was usually called, was a serious health threat; that only a very small percentage of degenerate young men fell into the awful habit; and that these few were punished with blindness, insanity, and having hair grow on their palms. In all probability every single one of the writers who published these books masturbated regularly, most men do, and I doubt too many of them had to shave their palms or get seeing eye dogs as a result.

I’ve spoken entirely of young men, you’ll notice. Nobody talked about female masturbation back then. Very few people talked about female sexuality at all. The most widely respected medical textbook on human sexuality published in England during Queen Victoria’s reign, Dr. William Acton’s massive 1857 tome The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, mentions women twice and vaginas not at all. For Acton, as for most male Victorians, “reproductive organs” meant penises and testicles. Vaginas were utterly taboo. That taboo was so rarely breached that when the scandalous avant-garde painter Gustave Courbet painted a woman’s crotch in 1866 – just the crotch, filling the picture frame – and titled the painting The Origin of the World, the rich private collector who commissioned it kept it in his dressing room with a veil hanging in front of it.

The same Victorian medical establishment that warned of the awful dangers of masturbation also flatly denied the existence of the female orgasm. At most, doctors were willing to admit that a small minority of debauched and depraved women had orgasms, but nice women didn’t. Nice women had something called a hysterical crisis, which was not an orgasm. It wasn’t even sexual, officially speaking, though women who didn’t have an outlet for the sexual desires they supposedly didn’t have in the first place needed to have a hysterical crisis every so often to stay healthy. That was the sales pitch for a very popular medical appliance in the latter years of the Victorian period, the electric vibrator. Many middle-class Victorian women had one, and used it to give themselves hysterical crises as needed. These aren’t the little devices you get nowadays, of course; the motor unit was about the size of a small vacuum cleaner, and had a spring-wrapped cable connecting it to the business end. Mind you, for their time, they were marvels of miniaturization, much smaller and handier than the steam-powered vibrators of the mid-19th century, and much more convenient than making an appointment with a doctor to get a hysterical crisis by hand massage – which also happened quite a bit.

All this may suggest that the Victorian sex magic we’re going to discuss was hidden away under a layer of euphemisms thicker than Tammy Faye Bakker’s makeup. The most amazing thing about Victorian sex magic, though, is that it did nothing of the kind. Crowley was far from the first person to notice that in an age that believes in word magic, speaking the unspeakable can be one of the most powerful magics of all. That’s why one of the most influential intellectual movements in the 19th century went by the distinctly non-euphemistic name of phallic religion.

That’s the theory that human religion started out as worship of the life force, expressed by its most prominent symbols. Scandalous though it must have sounded to Victorian ears, it was a very popular theory all through the period. It got started back in the late 1700s when a handful of scholars such as Richard Payne Knight compared ancient Greek and Roman erotic art with the sexual symbolism of Hindu spirituality, which Englishmen were beginning to encounter by way of the British colonial empire in India. Knight and his colleagues were among the first people in the western world to really grasp the fact that Christianity is nearly alone among the world’s religions in being terrified of sexual pleasure. I think it was H.L. Mencken who described puritanism as the awful, unshakable fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time. That attitude runs deep in the Protestant churches that dominated Victorian England and America, and Knight was one of the first people to wonder out loud why the Christianity of his time suffered from it and nearly all other religions don’t.

But Knight and his colleagues went a good deal further than that. They started noticing that a huge amount of pagan religion, and nonwestern religion, and in fact every other kind of religion in the world except mainstream Protestant Christianity, has a lot to do with fertility. They noticed that when the Greeks called Zeus “father of gods and men,” they weren’t talking about his role in the family politics of the gods; they meant “father” in its most robust biological sense – start counting the myths in which Zeus fathers someone on somebody and you’ll be busy for a long, long time. They noticed that the classic Hindu symbol of the god Shiva is simply an erect penis. And they ended up arguing that every religion in the world except mainstream Protestant Christianity was nothing more or less than the worship of sex.

It may seem a little odd from our modern perspective to use a one-sided label such as “phallic religion” for these theories, but it’s a thoroughly Victorian oddity. Remember that you couldn’t even mention the existence of vaginas in public. Thus learned Britons of the time, or at least learned male Britons, spoke of phallic religion rather than genital religion, and they certainly didn’t mention vaginal religion. The remarkable thing is that they found room in their theories of primitive religion for vagina-goddesses as well as penis-gods. This probably explains why books on the sexual dimension of religion were considered pornographic straight through the nineteenth century, not just by moral reformers, but by sellers and buyers of pornography as well. Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, the 1786 book that launched the phallic religion theory, saw print again in 1865 at the hands of J. C. Hotten, one of the premier publishers of Victorian smut. Plenty of other scholarly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on sexual themes in mythology and religion graced the shelves of Victorian London’s pornographic bookstores. It was the only way most of them could stay in print at all.

As a talking point among scholars, the theory of phallic religion was scandalous enough, but it didn’t stay safely confined in the groves of academe – not by a long shot. And this is where it’s time to introduce one of the Victorian sex magicians who are central to our little exploration this morning. Those of you who’ve attended my earlier talks here at Pantheacon know this guy, because he’s been a research topic of mine for a few years now. His name was Owen Morgan; under the title of Archdruid Morien, he presided over the Druid gorsedd of Pontypridd from 1888 until his death in the 1920s. He believed and publicly taught that Christianity is a pagan sex cult. And he thought this was a good thing.

Morgan was one of the many influential eccentrics of the Druid Revival, the oldest documented continuously active pagan revival in the world today. The Druid Revival has a reputation nowadays as one of the dowdy branches of Paganism – you know, the kind of people who keep their robes on during ritual. Several modern pagan writers have classed them as Mesopagans and argued, if I may oversimplify a little, that they’re not really pagans at all, just slightly eccentric Christians in funny outfits. Now it’s true that many of the 18th and 19th century Druid Revivalists had a less hostile attitude toward Christianity than many Pagans do nowadays, and were perfectly willing to swipe appealing ideas from any source, including Christianity. But as we’ll see, their version of Christianity was not always exactly the sort of thing that you’ll find being preached over at the First Church of Christ this morning. Practiced, quite possibly, but not preached.

The Druid Revival also has a reputation for loopy scholarship, and to be honest, some of that is well earned. Take a look sometime at a forgotten classic of the late eighteenth century, The Way to Things by Words, which was written by John Cleland and published in 1766. Cleland was also the author of Fanny Hill, the most famous work of pornography in the English language, which is one reason I can’t resist bringing him into this discussion, but he was also a big fan of the ancient Druids. He was convinced that the Freemasons were actually surviving Druids. He argued that the Masons got their name, not from being descended from medieval stonemason’s guilds, but because they were actually Druids who celebrated Beltane, May Day, as their main festival and so were known as May’s sons. Masons. Get it? You can see that the sort of thinking that gave us The 21 Lessons of Merlin has a long history behind it.

Owen Morgan came out of this tradition. He also came out of the Welsh branch of the Revival, which means that much of what he taught and did can be traced back to the work of that force of nature Edward Williams, better known by his nom de barde Iolo Morganwg. Poet, opium addict, first-rate scholar of medieval Welsh literature, and one of the brightest stars in the glittering firmament of British literary forgery, Iolo burst on the scene in the late 18th century and had an immense impact on the culture of the time. He knew a lot of influential people; William Blake used to do ritual with him, and George Washington helped fund the publication of his first Druid book. In between stints in debtor’s prison, Iolo went around Wales starting bardic gorsedds everywhere anyone wanted one. Pontypridd, a little town in Glamorgan, wanted one, so Iolo gave them a charter, taught them the rituals, and launched them on their journey to the far shores of British religious history.

The archdruid of the Pontypridd gorsedd was a man named Evan Davies, better known by his bardic name Myfyr Morganwg. Davies started out as a Protestant minister for a small Welsh Methodist sect, small enough that he had to have a day job as a watchmaker. But Fate had marked him out for a more interesting career. Sometime in the 1860s, after thirty years preaching the Christian gospel, Davies abandoned his church and announced that he was reviving the ancient Druid mysteries of his forefathers, with himself as Archdruid. From that time until his death in 1888, he celebrated the solstices and equinoxes beside the Pontypridd rocking stone with a very Pagan version of Iolo’s gorsedd ceremonies.

On Davies’ death, his mantle passed to Owen Morgan, a writer for the popular press. Morgan quickly turned his literary talents to the Druidic cause, producing a tome entitled The Light in Britannia. The scale of this magnum opus of Pontypridd Druidism may be judged by its subtitles: The Mysteries of Ancient British Druidism Unveiled; The Original Source of Phallic Worship Revealed; The Secrets of the Court of King Arthur Revealed; The Creed of the Stone Age Restored; The Holy Greal Discovered in Wales. Historian of Druidry James Bonwick called it “among the most candidly expressed books ever printed,” and indeed it is. Owen Morgan, you see, had broken the taboo we talked about a little while ago. He talked about vaginas. He did quite a bit of talking about vaginas, in fact, and vaginal religion as well.

Mind you, Morgan began his book with a note warning the unwary reader to expect explicit talk about phallic worship. On the first page, though, he launched straight into a discussion of the masculine and feminine principles of Nature. A few pages later Morgan was talking about the vulva of the goddess Venus and outlining the sexual mysteries central, in his opinion, to every religion worth the name. Before long the Sun was revealed as the son of the masculine divine principle Celi; the Earth likewise as Venus, the daughter of the feminine divine principle Ced; and the fertilization of the Earth by the Sun takes place in exactly the way you might expect. Speaking of the feminine principle, Morgan wrote: “Her feet were represented, open like a triangle, toward the sun rising at the summer solstice and winter solstice respectively; the apex of the fork would be on the equinoctial line, facing the virile sun in spring rising due east.”

In the time of Queen Victoria, this sort of image was startling enough, but Morgan was only just warming up to his theme. When he explained that “Aaron entering into the Holy of Holies and the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, signified the same thing as Noah entering into his Ark,” the attentive reader must have guessed pretty quickly that Morgan’s phallic theology had thrust its way into the Bible itself. Morgan devotes pages to the task of exposing the Ark of the Covenant as the symbolic vulva of the earth goddess. One chapter expounds the solar and sexual mysteries of the Tabernacle erected by the Israelites in the wilderness. Another interprets the ritual of the Day of Atonement as a symbolic orgy of astronomy and sex, in which the High Priest enters the Holy Place and is reborn from it, or, in Morgan’s own inimitable prose, experiences a new birth “through the hairy eastern outlet of the Virgin of Israel.”

And he capped that off by making Jesus a phallic symbol – the god who rose again. In other words, he did Richard Payne Knight and the phallic religion theorists one better; they thought every religion but Protestant Christianity was sex worship; Morgan saw no reason to exclude Protestant Christianity from the holy truth behind all religions. He was a tolerant man, after all. Now, to be precise, Jesus was more than just a penis in Morgan’s theory. He was also a solar symbol, and he was also the historical person Jesus of Nazareth who came to Britain in his youth, learned the true religion of astronomy and sex from the ancient Druids, and proceeded to teach it back home in Judea. So he wasn’t just the sun and a penis, he was a Druid missionary. At least Morgan didn’t make Jesus a Freemason; that had to wait for some of our modern pseudo-historians.

Now I’ve called Morgan a sex magician, and that may need a little explanation, because if he practiced sex magic of the obvious sort no trace of that remains in his books or archives. The sex in his Druidry was all symbolic – as I said, Druids are the ones who keep their robes on in ritual. He invoked the earth goddess and the sun god and rejoiced in their lovemaking, but the form that took was watching the rays of the rising sun caress the earth on the solstices an d equinoxes. But he played a very important role in bringing explicit sexual symbolism into the occult community all through the English-speaking world.

He’s obscure today, but his ideas had a very wide influence, and some of the odder bits of early twentieth-century occultism become a good deal less odd when illuminated by The Light in Britannia. When one of Aleister Crowley’s instructional texts tells the reader to visualize a “solar-phallic hippopotamus,” those familiar with Morgan’s work will recognize this apparition as a familiar symbol, rather than an unfortunate side effect of too much rat poison on the blotter paper. On a broader scale, Morgan’s work is apparently the first systematic account in the modern West of a duotheistic fertility religion, with one god who comprises all other gods, and one goddess who includes all other goddesses. Half a century after Morgan’s time, that became the fundamental theology of Wicca. While the Craft certainly had many different sources, I’m convinced that Morgan was one of them.

But his rather rarefied form of sex magic was far from the only one in circulation in the Victorian period. It’s at this point that we turn to Thomas Lake Harris, the second of the Victorian sex magicians I mean to discuss this morning. Harris was an American. He was a little older than Owen Morgan, and quite a bit weirder. He was born in New England in 1823 and had a perfectly conventional childhood, then went to seminary to become a minister. Ah, but there’s where he started veering from the straight and narrow, because the church he wanted to become a minister in was the Church of the New Jerusalem, better known as the Swedenborgian Church.

Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose writings provided Harris with most of his textbooks in his seminary days, was one of the weirder Christian mystics of the 18th century, which is saying something. He was Swedish, one of those gentlemen scholars who contributed so much to science in its early days, and he worked for the government as an inspector of mines. And then just after he turned 50 he started seeing angels; and talking to angels; and having angels explain the true nature of the universe to him, in vast length and immense detail. Being the dedicated scientist that he was, he wrote it all down. To be precise, he wrote over 200 books on the subject, including his magnum opus, Arcana Coelestia, in 12 volumes.

All this output got him a fair amount of attention, and he had one endearing trait that made him very popular among intellectuals at the time. He knew the Bible inside and out, and came to the quite sensible conclusion that such a pack of absurdities couldn’t possibly be literally true. And so he proceeded to argue that the Bible was a vast collection of metaphors and similes, all of which were simply symbolic ways of expressing the philosophy of Emmanuel Swedenborg. When the Book of Leviticus said “thou shalt not eat bats,” that didn’t mean you should lay off the Malaysian fruit bat stew; no, bats symbolized something, and eating symbolized something else, and it all ended up in vast detail somewhere in Volume Ten of Arcana Coelestia. All of this gave people in the late 18th and early 19th century an enormous degree of spiritual flexibility. They could claim that they were perfectly good Christians, studied the Bible daily and so on, and still dig into Malaysian fruit bat stew if they had a mind to, because that passage in Leviticus actually meant something else.

Now some of this may be reminding you of Owen Morgan and Jesus the Penis, but I hasten to reassure you that Swedenborg lacked Morgan’s inimitable one-track mind. To Swedenborg, Jesus meant lots of things, and as far as I know – I’ve only read a small portion of Swedenborg’s writings – he never suggested that the best way to find Jesus was to reach into your pants. On the other hand, he did have an attitude toward sex that Richard Payne Knight et al. would have approved of. The stark terror of sex that infected most Christian denominations in his time never seems to have touched him. He read that passage in the gospels where Jesus says that there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage in heaven, and said, well, that makes sense – no marriage, therefore angels are into free love. Got it. And he wrote quite a bit on the love live of angels, and how we all become angels and practice free love as we spiral up through the complexities of the Swedenborgian heaven.

So this is the stuff that poured through the young Thomas Lake Harris’ fevered imagination as he studied to become a Swedenborgian minister. Mind you, he still got married, and tried to settle into a conventional career running a church, but it just didn’t work. Around 1850 he met Andrew Jackson Davis, who deserves a lecture all to himself someday. Davis was called the Poughkeepsie Seer; he was a clairvoyant healer who claimed to have gotten his medical training from the ancient Roman doctor Galen and his spiritual knowledge straight from the ghost of none other than Emmanuel Swedenborg. Davis practiced mesmerism and got onto the Spiritualist bandwagon in its earliest years, and he taught Harris how to put himself into trance. That was all it took. Within a short time Harris had friends in heaven. To be precise, he had a very special friend in heaven. Her name was Queen Lily of the Conjugial Angels. Not conjugal, mind you, conjugial, though I haven’t read enough Swedenborg to be perfectly clear on the difference. Harris and Queen Lily had a very close relationship – close enough that he fathered three baby angels on her. He wrote her reams of syrupy but extremely explicit love poetry; she returned the favor by teaching him all about heaven and how to get there.

The secret of getting there, according to these lectures in bed, was celibacy. Well, to be more precise, physical celibacy. Or to be even more precise, celibacy with partners who were as physical as you were. Once you gave up on sex with other incarnate human beings, you could establish a “counterpartal union” with your angelic soul mate and hop into the ethereal sack on the first date if you wanted to. That was the key to eternal life. Mind you, Queen Lily’s lectures covered a good deal more territory than that. She taught Harris to practice a breathing exercise called open breathing, and another exercise called demagnetizing. When you do those regularly, according to Her Conjugial Majesty, the Holy Spirit comes into your body and gets rid of all the negative animal magnetism you’ve picked up over the years. Once that happens, thousands of happy little faeries show up and take up residence inside your body, scoop up any illnesses you happen to have, and haul them out with the trash. So you become perfectly healthy, not to mention open and demagnetized, and then you’re ready to swear off sex with mere human beings and head for the celestial singles bar to look for your angelic soul mate.

Dotty as all this sounds to modern ears, Harris attracted quite a following. Part of that was because the idea of physical celibacy as the ticket to sexual fulfillment on another plane wasn’t original to Harris, not by a long shot. The most popular book on the subject straight through the 19th century was a remarkable novel titled Le Comte de Gabalis by the Abbé Montfaucon de Villars, originally published in 1670. The Abbé was not an occultist, and his book is actually one of the funniest satires on the occult community ever written. His protagonist knows nothing about occultism, and wants to learn, so he adopts the plan of claiming to know all about it already – an example that’s been copied by a lot of modern beginners in the pagan scene, of course. He ends up having a conversation with a mysterious nobleman, the Comte de Gabalis, who explains to him the real secret behind Rosicrucian occultism – that it’s all about making love with elementals. Lots of elementals. You see, the elementals aren’t jealous of each other; they’re perfectly happy to cuddle up to the aspiring mage en masse; but they can’t stand human rivals. So if you’re going to make it with elementals, you have to swear off less ethereal partners. That’s what the Comte explains to our protagonist; it’s hard not to glimpse Queen Lily’s curvaceous figure peeking out through the veils of the Abbé’s raucous prose.

It’s a very, very funny book. The only thing funnier is the way it was received by 19th and 20th century occultists in Britain and America. They took it seriously. I’ve got a copy that was published in the first years of the 20th century by an occult organization calling itself simply “The Brothers.” They presented the Abbé’s bit of fun as a revelation of the inner teachings of Rosicrucian mysticism, which they read symbolically, of course – much the same way that Swedenborg interpreted the Bible. Now for all I know, The Brothers were also out there demagnetizing themselves and cuddling up to their angelic counterparts. They might well have been, because Thomas Lake Harris was astonishingly influential in the occult scene of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those of you who know your Golden Dawn history will remember a Frater Resurgam, mundane name Edward Berridge, a very influential member of the original Golden Dawn. He was also a student of Harris’ writings and did a lot of demagnetizing, and he wasn’t the only Harris fan in the Golden Dawn scene.

Harris himself established what we’d now call a commune in upstate New York, and then moved to Santa Rosa, California when word got out that at least some of his “counterpartal marriages” were a good deal less etherial than he claimed. In 1894 he proclaimed that he had become immortal via spiritual union with Queen Lily; they were now one cosmic being, and this having happened, the world was about to end. This somehow failed to happen, and he quietly packed his bags and went to New York City, where he died – much to his own surprise, no doubt – in 1906.

So with Owen Morgan, we have intellectual sex magic; with Thomas Lake Harris, sex magic passes from the realm of the abstract into what Henri Corbin calls the imaginal realm, the world of images and inner experiences. But there’s a third Victorian sex magician on the list for this morning, who brought things right on down to the physical plane. He was one of the most influential occultists of modern times; a lot of people here today probably don’t know his name, but all of you know his ideas. His name was Paschal Beverly Randolph and he was an American original.

Randolph was the first influential African-American Hermeticist, an absolutely brilliant writer and occult theoretician with a gift for original thought that left most of his contemporaries in the dust. If he’d had one additional gift – the ability to get along with anyone, anywhere, for at least five minutes – nobody would remember the Theosophical Society or the Golden Dawn; it’d be all Randolph, all the time. Given that he was a professional sex therapist and a vocal proponent of the female orgasm, I don’t think that would have been a bad thing.

He was the illegitimate son of Flora Clark, an African-American woman, and William Beverly Randolph, a white man who Randolph later claimed belonged to the wealthy Randolph family of tidewater Virginia. He was born and raised in New York’s most notorious slum district; he lost his mother by age seven and had to fend for his own thereafter. He worked as a bootblack, begged from door to door, was a cabin boy on a merchant ship and a barber in upstate New York. But that was before Spiritualism.

It’s hard for people nowadays to really grasp the impact that Spiritualism had on the second half of the 19th century, especially but not only here in America. For a couple of decades at the height of the movement it looked as though America might just turn its back on Christianity completely. The story’s an instructive one. Three young girls, the Fox sisters, started getting messages from beyond the grave via loud taps that seemed to emanate from the floor of their house. A standard bit of folklore, rooted in common poltergeist phenomena, except that this time it turned into the catalyst for an extraordinary religious movement. America in the late 1840s was full of Swedenborgians and Mesmerists; Andrew Jackson Davis was a leading figure but only one of thousands. Quite a few of them figured out very quickly that they could one-up the Fox sisters by going into trance and having conversations with the dead. Before long millions of Americans believed that you didn’t have to take life after death on faith; you could go to a seance and have a conversation with dear departed Aunt Mildred, find out how she was doing in the Summerland, and so on.

At first glance, none of this had a thing to do with sex, but the spirits had an interesting habit. They didn’t stick to the Biblical status quo. They had their own ideas about religion and morality, ideas that had a remarkable amount of similarity to those of the Swedenborgians and Mesmerists who were channeling them, and they also drew on the work of another very strange figure of the time – the French philosopher Charles Fourier.

Fourier was one of those bizarre visionaries who played such an important role in European thought during the 19th century. He believed that he personally was the most important person who ever lived, and his teachings formed the boundary between the age of barbarism – the European civilization of his time – and the future age of true civilization. Civilization, you see, is based on the cosmic principle of passional attraction. In a civilized society, people do everything out of passional attraction, and once people grasped the secret of passional attraction by reading Fourier’s philosophy, the entire world would be transformed. I don’t mean just that human society would be transformed; once people started listening to Fourier, a vast rain of cosmic citric acid would fall from the heavens and turn the seas to lemonade, four additional moons would come out of hiding and snuggle up in a close earth orbit, and so on. And in that future paradise, besides sipping free lemonade and watching the moons rise, and rise, and rise, and rise, the most important human activity would be vast amounts of orgiastic sex.

In Victorian America this sort of thinking was very popular. Andrew Jackson Davis drew quite a few of his ideas from Fourier, and so did a lot of other intellectuals of the time, which is how Fourier got into spiritualism. He got into some other traditions of the same era, too. In there with the cosmic citric acid and the passional attraction, Fourier proposed that in the society of the future, industry and land would be owned by the state, not by individuals or companies, and so he appears in the history books as the inventor of socialism. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Karl Marx’ dictatorship of the proletariat is any more likely than Fourier’s lemonade oceans. For our present purposes, the point is that Fourier had a major influence on Spiritualism, and Spiritualism brought many of his ideas to prominence in America and elsewhere.

So this was the movement that swept Randolph out of his barbershop and into the big time. Randolph became a convert to Spiritualism as soon as he heard of it, and within a few years he had become one of the very first African-American Spiritualist mediums. Like most mediums of the time he studied the whole range of popular occult philosophy. By the early 1850s he billed himself as a “clairvoyant physician” specializing in sexual problems, and 1854 saw the publication of his first book, a novel titled Waa-gu-Mah. Great title, but nobody knows what it was about – it didn’t do very well, and no one’s been able to find a copy.

In 1855 he toured England, France, and Germany, holding séances and meeting with European occultists, and his reception was favorable enough that 1857 saw a second European tour. In 1858, though, he publicly renounced Spiritualism and spent the next few years on the anti-Spiritualist lecture circuit, claiming that mediums were the passive victims of evil spirits. He was always doing flip-flops like that. Predictably, he ended up picking a fight with the conservative Christian church that paid for his anti-Spiritualist lecture tours, and left the country again. Later on he claimed that he spent 1861 and 1862 traveling in the Near East, made contact with a heretical Islamic sect in Syria he called the “Ansaireh” – they’re known now as the al-Nusairi – and got from them the principles of his later occult teachings. Whether this actually happened is anyone’s guess, as Randolph’s statements about his own biography changed frequently and contradicted one another as often as not.

By the mid-1860s he was back in America, recruiting African-American volunteers for the Union army in the Civil War, and after the war ended he made a brief and unsuccessful foray into politics. By the end of the decade he was back to writing and occultism, and began to teach the system he called Eulis or the Ansairetic Arcanum, the method of occult philosophy and sexual magic that turned into his real legacy to the occult community. Eulian magic starts with the basic practices of volantia, decretism and posism. Got that? Volantia is calm focused concentration, decretism is absolute focus on a single act of will, and posism is the mental receptivity that follows the act of will. Once you learn these, you can get started on the magic mirror, the primary magical instrument of Randolph’s system, which gives you clairvoyance. Well, actually, it gives you either zorvoyance or aethavoyance, depending on your level of awareness and training; zorvoyance is astral vision, aethavoyance gets you above the astral. All this is a prelude to to the art of blending, Randolph’s term for the sort of conscious trance where the initiate’s consciousness fuses with that of a higher spiritual being.

But the core of the whole system was the mysteries of sex. Randolph was way ahead of his time in his views about sex. Remember that most physicians denied the existence of the female orgasm; Randolph not only believed in it but insisted that orgasmic release was essential to mental and physical health in women as well as men. When two lovers focused minds and wills on a common intention at the moment of mutual orgasm, Randolph believed, the result was an energy release with unlimited magical powers.

This was brilliant and, at the time, very original stuff. Randolph was in fact the inventor of the most widely used system of sex magic in modern Western occultism. By labeling him the inventor of this method, I’m treading on somewhat speculative ground; in fact, nobody knows whether he made it up or got it from someone else. His own story changed as often, and as drastically, as a punk rocker’s hair color. Sometimes he claimed he’d gotten it from ancient Rosicrucian traditions; sometimes he claimed it had been passed onto him by the Ansaireh; sometimes he claimed he’d invented it all himself.

Randolph died in 1875, curiously enough about seven months before Aleister Crowley was born. Crowley claimed that he’d been Eliphas Levi in his previous incarnation; unfortunately for this theory, Levi didn’t die until after Crowley was born, and Levi was also a very gentle, mellow, scholarly sort who had a devoted circle of longtime friends and no enemies to speak of. Randolph, on the other hand, was an emotionally unstable genius obsessed with sex and power, utterly convinced of his own brilliance and just as utterly baffled by the recurring discovery that the rest of the world didn’t think as highly of him as he did. You tell me which of those men was more likely to reincarnate as Aleister Crowley.

But I digress. Randolph founded half a dozen magical orders in his lifetime, and blew them apart with his own grandstanding and temper tantrums. After his death, several of the fragments regrouped and started initiating people on their own. In the 1920s, Reuben Swinburne Clymer gathered up most of the remaining bits in North America and reorganized them as the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, which was a major player in the Rosicrucian wars of 20th century America and is still active today over in Pennsylvania.

But the major successor to Randolph’s mantle was the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which flourished and foundered in the 1880s. The H.B. of L. combined Randolph’s teaching with a lot of material from the same underworld of English magical lodges that spawned the Golden Dawn. The H.B. of L. had members in America, Britain, and Europe. For a while it was the most influential occult order in the western world, but it had a skeleton in its closet: its secretary had criminal record for mail fraud. That came out in 1886, and the Theosophists pounced on it – they were in the middle of a war with the H.B. of L. in those days. The H.B. of L. prompty imploded, and its two leaders moved operations to America.

Some British H.B. of L. members ended up in the Druid scene, and as a result there’s quite a bit of H.B. of L. practice in some British Druid orders. In America, the H.B. of L. helped lay the foundations for the Tantrik Order in America, which was launched in 1906 by Pierre Bernard aka Oom the Omnipotent. Yes, that’s what he was called. Oom claimed that he’d been trained and initiated in a Tantric ashram in India, but as far as I know there’s no evidence that he made it any farther west than California. It may not be a coincidence that at the beginning of the last century California was one of the main hotbeds of the H.B. of L.’s successor orders. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Oom also had connections to William Walker Atkinson, a very important figure in the occult scene of the time, who we’ll be discussing in a bit.

Whatever his sources, though, Oom was the first person in America to publicly teach something he claimed was Tantra, and inevitably his version of it – unlike most of the classic Hindu tantras – centered on sex. Members of the lower degrees practiced physical culture exercises; members of the higher degrees did a rather different set of exercises involving two or more participants. Oom got a reputation as the Love Swami, came through several police investigations without serious incident, and ended up with a clientele that included some extremely rich and influential New Yorkers, including at least one member of the Rockefeller family. In the 1920s his Tantrik Order in America had branches in half a dozen cities, and Oom himself was a public figure of some importance; he was about as respectable as you can get when your business card says “Tantric sex guru.” Things downshifted a bit during the Depression and the Second World War, but the Tantrik Order in America was a going concern until Oom’s death in 1955, and I understand it’s recently been revived by the modern tantrika Nik Douglas.

Around the time Oom was getting his career under way, though, several members of the H.B. of L. launched orders of their own. One was Sylvester Gould, who led a schism off the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia – the Masonic parent body of the Golden Dawn – called the Societas Rosicruciana in America, or SRIA, which is still active today – their headquarters is in upstate New York. Another was a H.B. of L. initiate in Austria named Karl Kellner. Kellner had the idea of establishing a new quasi-Masonic rite to carry on the H.B. of L. teachings, particularly Randolph’s sexual gnosis. Kellner and his friend Theodor Reuss put together this new rite; they called it the Ordo Templi Orientis.

While the OTO was still in its early days, in 1912, Reuss gave a charter to Rudolf Steiner, who at that time was still secretary of the Theosophical Society in Germany and hadn’t yet launched his own system of Anthroposophy into the occult market. A little later, after Steiner’s break with the Theosophists and the founding of the Anthroposophical Society, Steiner taught some of his system to a Danish occultist named Carl Grashof, who then came to America, took the nom de Rose Cross of Max Heindel, and founded the Rosicrucian Fellowship in Oceanside, California. Make a note of that: American Rosicrucian order #1.

A little later on, Reuss was contacted by Harvey Spencer Lewis, a former New York City advertising executive turned occultist, who wanted to be a Rosicrucian. In 1917 Lewis got an OTO charter from Reuss and began trying to set up an organization of his own. After several false starts the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, AMORC, was founded in Florida in 1925. They moved to San Jose a few years later, and of course they’re still a going concern here: American Rosicrucian order #2. #3 is the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis of R. Swinburne Clymer, which I mentioned a while ago, and #4 is the SRIA. These orders were the big four of the golden age of American Rosicrucianism, the main protagonists of the Wars of the Roses in the 1920s American occult community, and all four can trace their roots back to Paschal Beverly Randolph in one way or another. See what I mean about his influence?

One of the things that probably needs to be stressed here is that these people weren’t isolated voices crying in the wilderness. One of the great misconceptions in the Pagan scene nowadays is the idea that there’s anything new about the modern Pagan scene. There isn’t. San Jose probably had as many people practicing pagan religion and magic in the 1900s as it does today. The pagans and occultists of those days did a lot of networking through occult bookstores, as we do now, but they also had a network of magical lodges, occult orders, and public organizations like the Theosophical Society – a much more developed network than most parts of the occult scene have today. The four American Rosicrucian orders I’ve just mentioned existed at a time when one out of every two adult Americans, counting both genders and all ethnic backgrounds, belonged to at least one secret society – there were 3,500 secret societies active in America in the first decades of the 20th century.

It’s a time when African-American hairdressers, who made up most of the hairdressing industry of the time, and made house calls, sold hoodoo preparations as well as beauty products: your husband’s not paying enough attention to you? Here’s a lip gloss, and a new hairstyle, and here’s a mojo bag and some floor wash to keep his cheatin’ heart safe at home. That was the business model for hairdressers in those days, and it’s the reason why drugstores and beauty supply firms used to be the sources for hoodoo supplies.

It’s also a time when people who were pumping iron were as often as not practicing magic at the same time. The term for exercise systems in those days was physical culture, and if you read the physical culture literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries expecting something like you get from today’s exercise gurus, you’re headed for a big surprise. Some of the most prominent people in physical culture at the time were also occultists. One of the best examples is Joseph Greenstein, stage name The Mighty Atom, one of the last of the old-time strongmen. He weighed about 96 pounds soaking wet and could tie a #2 iron horseshoe into an overhand knot with his bare hands. He was also a Jewish Cabalist who did his feats through a mastery of Cabalistic philosophy and esoteric practice. Another great example is Genevieve Stebbins, one of the first exercise teachers for women in America. She learned the Delsarte system of movement exercises in France, and taught that. She was also a high ranking initiate of the H. B. of L. and helped one of its successor orders, the Brotherhood of Light, get started.

There were dozens of people like this, and the old physical culture literature is full of magical exercises. Let’s turn back to Crowley again for a moment. One of the other things he had students do in Liber E, Liber III, and his books on Yoga was hold a single position in perfect stillness for long periods. That wasn’t original to him, and it wasn’t something he got from Hindu yoga. It was out of the willpower literature, which got it from physical culture. Standing motionless in specific poses was an ordinary part of physical training in those days, and people did it for the same reasons Crowley did: it teaches you to recognize and release unnecessary muscular tension in your body. So the Victorian period, as I suggested earlier, was a time when some of the most fundamental ideas of modern magic were standard practice in all walks of life.

And this is the context in which I want to introduce my last Victorian sex magician, another American, and one of the most interesting of the lot. His name was William Walker Atkinson, but almost nobody knows him by that name any more, because he was fond of pen names and used a bunch of them. Atkinson was a businessman who worked himself into a nervous breakdown around the beginning of the 20th century, and recovered by way of New Thought – that’s the term that was used for the sort of self-help psychology you still get by the truckload in today’s bookstores. After his recovery, he left his old life behind, moved to Chicago, and started a new career as a writer and marketer of books on New Thought, eastern philosophy, and the occult.

Those of you who’ve spent time in old-fashioned occult bookstores probably remember a line of hardback books with glossy covers, red or blue, no dust jackets, published by an outfit in Chicago calling itself the Yogi Publication Society; that was Atkinson. You might remember some highly eccentric books on yoga – they’re actually about physical culture, but they call it yoga – by a guy calling himself Yogi Ramacharaka; that was Atkinson. And if the store in question carried old books on sex magnetism and similar topics, you might just remember some books written by a guy who used the splendid name Theron Q. Dumont, all about mental magnetism and sexual energies and how to get laid by magic; that was also Atkinson.

And probably most of you have seen, if not read, a little blue hardback called the Kybalion, which claims to give the fundamental concepts of Hermetic Philosophy, and was written by three initiates who didn’t give their names. One of those was Atkinson. The other two were Michael Whitty, the head of the American branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Paul Foster Case, a Golden Dawnie who later broke away and founded his own order, the Builders of the Adytum. Atkinson was probably the lead writer – the writing is very much in his style. And one of the seven principles of the Kybalion, the seven most basic concepts of the Hermetic tradition as these three occultists understand it, is the Principle of Gender – the principle that everything has male and female dimensions, everyone has male and female aspects, and every kind of creation comes into being by the sexual interaction of these masculine and feminine principles, however those happen to be expressed in physical form.

So in the Kybalion, one of the classic works of American occultism, and a book that deserves a lot more attention than it gets these days, everything has sex. The relationship between the sun and the earth is sexual, as Owen Morgan suggested; the relationship between living human beings and other-than-human beings has a sexual dimension, as Thomas Lake Harris insisted; and in the sexual union of active and receptive energies, a creative secret of immense power lies hidden, as Paschal Beverly Randolph taught.

The Kybalion’s a little late to be strictly Victorian. It was published in 1912, just two years before everything that was left of the Victorian world crashed into ruin in the mud, blood, and trenches of the First World War. That was the end of a world, in a sense I’m not sure many people realize today – not only the end of the Victorian world, but the end of the road for the whole Christian, aristocratic, hierarchical society that dominated Europe for a thousand years before then. The Sâr Peladan, who was a French occultist, novelist, and art critic and will be getting a lecture of his own one of these days, talked in the decades before the war of la decadence Latine, the Latin decadence – and by “Latin” he meant every aspect of European civilization that could trace a meaningful connection back to old Rome. He saw it coming, and his novels – there were 22 of them, and those of you who know your French Tarot symbolism already know more about them than most modern literary critics – his novels basically set out to do an autopsy on a dying civilization. But Peladan wasn’t a sex magician, so I’ll stop there.

When we look back at magical traditions from before 1914, we’re looking at the remnants of a world that no longer exists. It’s easy to make fun of some of the sillier dimensions of that age, as I hope I’ve demonstrated; and of course it’s also easy to be outraged by habits of thought and action from those days that offend against our modern ideas of decency and propriety. But beyond the laughter and the screams of outrage, there’s also the fact that this is the magic of our ancestors. I mean that quite literally. If your great-grandparents lived in America or Europe, odds are that at least one of them, and most likely more than one, belonged to one of the Victorian era’s magical secret societies, or practiced the occult disciplines that were part of the old physical culture systems, or got given training exercises for willpower in school, or picked up a mojo bag or some floor wash from the hairdresser to deal with a personal problem. One of them might have studied with Randolph or Oom the Omnipotent, or taken courses from Atkinson, or been shocked out of their socks by Morgan’s The Light in Britannia.

A lot of people in the Pagan community these days don’t like thinking about ancestors in this way. It’s very popular to use the term solely for those ancestors who lived far enough in the past that they can be wrapped up in the rose-colored glow of romantic fantasy; and if we don’t know a thing about what magic they actually did, so we can project our own ideas back onto them, so much the better. Our own great-grandparents aren’t usually so biddable, so unless they’ve been turned into raw material for grandmother stories and untraceable fam-trads, we often don’t like to talk about them. Yet these people, these Victorian great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, were practicing magic. Some of them were practicing sex magic. Their magic, sexual and otherwise, is still accessible today – and some of those traditions offer resources for our own magic, here and now, that we might do well to draw on.