Title: Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism Author: Hugh B. Urban Publisher: University of California Press Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 336 Genres:: Non-Fiction, History Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

“The practice of sexual magic… is intimately tied to a profound desire for liberation, transgression, and radical freedom on all levels—sexual, social, religious, and political alike.”

An intensive body of work, Magia Sexualis looks at how members of different religious groups have attacked other religions throughout history. They seemed to revel in declaring opposing practitioners almost without exception hideously guilty of extreme sexual excess, perversion, and often the ritual human sacrifices to one of countless forms of the devil. Faith lashing out against faith, the pattern of fear, hatred, and attack is nearly as old as time itself. The Romans persecuted the Christians, who in turn persecuted the Gnostics. Zoom ahead a few thousand years in time across a few oceans to Salem, Massachusetts and women accused of being witches were hanged, drowned and burned, believed to be guilty of among other things obscene forms of sexual congress with demons and other dark forms of gratification mean to bring harm to the often bloodthirsty “innocent.”

As the author Urban shows, there’s no quicker way to be branded a sexual demon, heretic, or threat to the existing government than to rebel against mainstream culture. Within sex, the active movements of the man and relatively passive role of the woman can be said to parallel the active and passive properties of God, most of all at the point of ejaculation and the liquid raw material to create another life is released into the chamber that incubates it.

Victorian-era English author and sexual magic practitioner Aleister Crowley’s life and beliefs are covered along with those of Paschal Beverly Randolph, a 19 th-century scholar who stated the salvation and/or manipulation of the world lay in worshipping God through vigorously passionate sexual love within marriage. In his words, “at the instant of intense mutual orgasm the souls of the partners are opened to the powers of the cosmos and anything then truly willed is accomplished.” Urban also muses on the writings of Julius Evola, an Italian WWII-era intellectual, who believed the aggression present in tantra urgently needed to be put to military use in conqering the world and that the teachings of pre-Christian Europe provided the best strategy. Urban also explores the life and teachings of 20 th century figure Anton Lavey, aka the Black Pope, a modern-day Satanist who argued that the ultimate religion is not of Satan but the self.

Urban’s look at the origins and purposes of sexual magic is truly stunning and incredible bordering on incredulous.