Sex Magic: The Strange History, the Practices and the People Behind It
Most people who've heard of sex magic think it starts and ends with Aleister Crowley. It doesn't. The idea that orgasm can be used as a tool for magic was being sold by mail order in 1870s America by a mixed-race spiritualist who'd recruited Black troops for the Union army. A woman took her own life in 1902 rather than face prison over her writing on sex and spirituality. A rocket scientist tried to summon a goddess with it in 1946, and the man helping him ended up running off with his girlfriend and a chunk of his money.
This is the longer story: where sex magic really came from, what people actually did in its name and the strange mix of scholars, con artists, poets and engineers who shaped it.
Quick answers
• What is sex magic? An umbrella term for rituals that use sexual arousal, orgasm or sexual energy to power a magical goal, such as charging a talisman, invoking a god or reaching an altered state of mind.
• Who started it? Nobody knows for sure, but in the modern West the first clear teacher is Paschal Beverly Randolph in the 1860s and 1870s. Crowley arrived on the scene decades later and built on ideas that were already circulating.
• Is it the same as Tantra? No. Some Tantric traditions include ritual sex, but Western sex magic borrowed the vocabulary from thin second-hand sources, according to the scholars who've studied it.
• What is the OTO? The Ordo Templi Orientis is a magical order founded in Germany in the early 1900s. Its upper degrees taught sexual magic and Crowley took it over. It still exists today.
• Is anyone still doing it? Yes. It survives in the OTO, in the Great Rite of Wicca (usually performed symbolically) and in chaos magic, which treats orgasm as one way of reaching a focused state.
What sex magic actually is (and what it isn't)
At its simplest, sex magic is the belief that sexual arousal can be put to work. The practitioner fixes a wish, a symbol or a deity in mind, builds up arousal and aims everything at that target at the peak. The moment is treated as a burst of pure focus, and the theory is that the will can slip past the everyday thinking mind while it lasts. Later occultists started calling that state gnosis.
Historian Hugh Urban, who has written more on this subject than anyone, describes modern sex magic in his study of its Victorian roots as something that both reflected and undercut Victorian attitudes to sex. It offered liberation and secrecy at the same time, and that tension runs through the whole story.
The practices come in three broad flavours. There's solo work, partnered ritual between two people and symbolic versions where the sex act is acted out with objects such as a knife and a cup. What ties them together is the idea that sexual energy is a real, usable force and not just something to be kept in check. What it isn't is Satanism, a sacrifice cult or a sex party with a spell attached, whatever the tabloids of the 1920s told their readers.
The older roots, and why the family tree is messy
Any history of sex magic has to nod to Tantra, because Western occultists kept nodding to it themselves. In some Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions, ritual sex is known as maithuna. According to Encyclopedia.com's entry on the practice it works on two levels: symbolic in the right-hand path and actual in the left-hand path, especially among the Kaula and Kapalika cults and the Sahajiyas. In those settings “the woman is seen as the goddess present in flesh”, and the ritual mirrors the union of Shiva and Shakti.
The problem is what happened when that idea reached Europe. Victorian and Edwardian occultists picked up Tantra through translations, travellers' tales and Orientalist guesswork. Urban's paper on Tantra and the OTO points out that Theodor Reuss, the man who built the OTO, had only a nebulous grasp of it from secondary European sources and defined it crudely as sexual religion. Even Kenneth Grant, Crowley's own devoted follower, admitted that Crowley's references to real Tantric technique showed a general ignorance. So sex magic borrowed Tantric words, but its European roots run somewhere else entirely.
If the crossover between Indian religion and Western witchcraft interests you, we've looked at that from a different angle in Common Ground: The Quiet Similarities Between Witchcraft and Hinduism.
Paschal Beverly Randolph: the man everyone forgets
Paschal Beverly Randolph was born in 1825 in the Five Points district of Manhattan to a Black mother and a white father who abandoned the family. His mother died of cholera when he was six. According to the Public Domain Review's profile he worked on ships sailing between New England, Cuba and Britain, then began lecturing on spiritualism and working as a trance medium. In 1858 he publicly broke with the spiritualists, citing their racism and the hypocrisy of their radicalism. A life-changing experience with Egyptian hashish had already pushed him further from the seance circuit.
His life outside the occult was every bit as intense. During the Civil War he recruited Black soldiers for the Union. In Reconstruction he taught in Freedmen's Bureau schools in Louisiana, wrote for the Weekly Anglo-African and slept with pistols in his bed because of white supremacist threats. In 1864 he attended the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse alongside Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. He described himself as of mixed race and believed that heritage gave him unusual mental range.
His sexual teachings grew out of that restless career. Randolph's core claim was that “soul-power and sex-power are co-efficients and co-dependents”. He taught that a mutual, focused orgasm between a committed couple opened a brief pathway to the cosmos, and he combined the idea with diet, hashish, magnets, mirrors and mental concentration. Urban notes that he insisted both partners had to climax for a prayer made at that moment to work, and quotes him saying “the paroxysm of both is necessary”.
None of this went out through respectable bookshops. Randolph sold manuscripts by mail with titles like The Golden Letter, The True Oriental Secret, The Ansairetic Mystery and The Mysteries of Eulis. He also claimed to have founded a string of Rosicrucian bodies, including a Supreme Grand Lodge in San Francisco in 1861 and a Brotherhood of Eulis in Nashville in 1874. Most of them probably lasted only months, and how much they really existed is unclear. His two wives, Mary Jane and Kate, were both gifted practitioners who worked on his publications, and Kate later held a medical degree.
There's a striking modern edge to some of what he wrote. Randolph called gender a provisional thing and argued that physical sex was a misleading guide to a person's soul. He also insisted that sex magic adepts would eventually revolutionise the world, and he acknowledged learning from a Voodoo queen in New Orleans.
His end was grim. After police raids on his Rosicrucian Rooms, he shot himself in Toledo, Ohio, on 29 July 1875, in his late forties. His son Osiris Budha had been born that March, according to the OTO's own biography of him. Yet his ideas carried on. They fed into the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and then the OTO, and Reuss later claimed the OTO was the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, a group tied to Randolph's teachings. Crowley-centred retellings of sex magic usually skip him. The Public Domain Review ties that omission to the racism he faced from the very occultists who happily borrowed Oriental and Egyptian material.
Ida Craddock: the woman who married an angel
Ida Craddock's story runs alongside the OTO's, joined to it by only one thin thread, and it shows what happened to people who talked about sacred sex in public. Born in 1857, she tried to enrol at the University of Pennsylvania in 1882 and was turned away because she was a woman. She went on to write a stenography textbook that experts called the best beginner's guide ever printed, then worked in Chicago as an instructor in divine science. She also claimed to be married to an angel. According to the Daily Beast's profile she described the experience in Heavenly Bridegrooms. In 1894 her own mother tried to have her committed to an asylum.
Her practical advice was ahead of its time. The First Amendment Encyclopedia says she promoted coitus reservatus (male orgasm without ejaculation, except when trying for a child) as a spiritual enhancement of marriage, and recommended 15 to 30 minutes of loveplay. Her manuals included Advice to a Bridegroom and The Wedding Night.
She was never shy about controversy. In 1893 she wrote an essay defending the belly dancer Fahreda Mahzar, better known as Little Egypt, whose routine at the Chicago World's Fair had drawn moral outrage, according to a profile on the Maude blog. Her reasoning was that “What concerns us all is eminently fit for discussion by all.” Her views weren't a free-for-all, either. The same profile says she opposed masturbation, contraception and abortion while backing informed choice. The Wedding Night itself was a 24-page pamphlet with frank anatomical descriptions and honest information about sexual positions and orgasm, and it stressed the importance of sexual pleasure, as the Monstrous Regiment of Women blog describes it. Comstock bought a copy in a sting operation, and jurors were told it was too obscene to read.
Her enemy was Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and had lobbied for the 1873 Comstock Law. By one account of his career, he boasted before his death that his work had led to 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. Craddock was arrested in Chicago in 1899, and although Clarence Darrow represented her, he pushed her towards a plea deal. She got a suspended sentence and her books were burned. In 1902 a New York jury convicted her over three passages in The Wedding Night without leaving their seats. She took her own life in mid-October 1902 with illuminating gas (sources differ by a day on the exact date). Her last letter said prison at her age “would be equivalent to my death-warrant”. Emma Goldman called her “one of the bravest champions of women's emancipation”.
The one link to the occult world is Crowley. According to a Suffragette City 100 profile, he endorsed Heavenly Bridegrooms, though I've only found that claim in one place, so treat it as unconfirmed. Otherwise she belongs beside the story and not inside it. But she explains a lot. Under the Comstock laws, anyone mailing frank sexual material risked prison, and Randolph's mail-order secrecy suddenly looks less like showmanship and more like self-defence.
The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the fight with Blavatsky
Randolph's teachings reached Europe through a mysterious order. According to Theosophy World's entry, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor began public activity in London in late 1884 under the Polish occultist Max Theon as Grand Master. Peter Davidson and the Reverend William Alexander Ayton served as Provincial Grand Masters and Thomas H. Burgoyne as Secretary. Davidson and Burgoyne posted rituals and lectures to members and produced the monthly Occult Magazine, first in Scotland and later in Georgia. The teachings were largely lifted from Randolph.
Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, turned hostile when she learned of the group in 1885. That friction is one reason the Theosophical Society set up its own Esoteric Section in 1888. The Brotherhood faded away in the early 1890s, but Burgoyne published its material in The Light of Egypt in 1893, complete with anti-Theosophical commentary.
Kellner, Reuss and the birth of the OTO
Carl Kellner (1851 to 1905) was a wealthy Austrian paper chemist who claimed he'd been taught by a Sufi named Soliman ben Aifa and two Hindu tantrikas. Urban's paper gives their names as Bhima Sena Pratapa and Sri Mahatma Agamya Paramahamsa. I haven't found independent evidence in any of the sources that those teachers existed. Kellner began working with Theodor Reuss (1855 to 1923) around 1895, and, according to the OTO's own history, Reuss collected Masonic charters from the English Freemason John Yarker between 1902 and 1905. Kellner died on 7 June 1905 and Reuss finished the order's constitution in 1906.
Reuss was, in Urban's words, a curious and controversial figure whom many suspected of fraud. He also had a big idea. He declared sexual magic to be “the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets” and imagined a utopian neo-Gnostic future in which priest-doctors would carry out the sexual re-education of the masses.
The order's literature spoke in alchemical code. The penis was the athanor (the alchemist's furnace), semen was the blood of the red lion and the vagina was the retort. The OTO organised itself in a Masonic manner with ten degrees, the first six covering general occult teaching and the seventh to ninth introducing sexual magic, according to Encyclopedia.com. The ninth degree was said to hold the highest symbol of sexual magic.
Aleister Crowley takes over
Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12 October 1875 in Leamington Spa, to parents in the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. His mother reportedly called him the Beast 666, and he later adopted it as a title for himself, according to Britannica and Encyclopedia.com. He studied at Cambridge, joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898 and, on a trip to Egypt with his wife Rose Kelly in April 1904, claimed to have received The Book of the Law from a spirit called Aiwass. Its best-known line is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, as Encyclopedia.com's profile of Crowley notes. In 1907 he founded his own order, the A.'.A.'., and began publishing the journal The Equinox.
His sexual magic was already developing. In 1909 he took the poet Victor Neuburg into the Algerian desert for a run of rituals, and Neuburg's entry in Encyclopedia.com says Crowley developed his sex magick ideas during that period. A same-sex ritual working in Paris is usually dated to 1913. Neuburg broke away around 1914, reportedly after a nervous breakdown that followed an alleged curse from Crowley. He later ran the Vine Press in Steyning, Sussex, from 1916 and died on 30 May 1940.
Crowley's own path into the OTO is a good story. By his account, Reuss noticed that Crowley's book The Book of Lies had accidentally given away the order's supreme secret. Crowley was admitted to three degrees in 1910. On 21 April 1912 Reuss chartered him as head of the order for Britain and Ireland, running an English-language rite called the Mysteria Mystica Maxima. He rewrote much of the ritual material. Around 1920 Reuss's health declined, Crowley proclaimed himself Outer Head of the Order in November 1921 (claiming Reuss had chosen him), and Reuss died on 28 October 1923.
What did the ninth degree involve? Urban's work describes ritual intercourse in which the combined sexual fluids were treated as a consecrated Elixir. The Elixir was used to charge sigils and talismans or, in the language of the rites, to bring a god into the practitioner's consciousness. Crowley wrote that its power was so great that nothing the human imagination could conceive would be beyond it, which is why he said it couldn't be used carelessly.
Not every OTO rite was private. The best known is the Gnostic Mass, which Crowley wrote in Moscow in 1913 under the influence of the Liturgy of St Basil, according to the Ecclesia Gnostica Universalis. It was first published in March 1918 in the magazine The International. As an OTO lodge's guide explains, it's the central ritual of the order, both public and private. Five people run it: a Priest, a Priestess, a Deacon and two Children. It follows the shape of a Catholic Mass with Thelemic ideas in place of Christian ones, and the Priestess role draws on the Scarlet Woman of The Book of the Law. The climax is a eucharist of wine and cake, and the sexual side is symbolic. The congregation's declaration, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!”, is about as far as the words go in that direction. Gardner later borrowed lines from it for the Great Rite.
The Abbey of Thelema, and how it ended
In April 1920 Crowley moved to Cefalù in Sicily and set up a commune at the Villa Santa Barbara, according to Weird Italy. He called it the Abbey of Thelema. There were no formal statutes. Residents practised occult ritual, yoga and “free love” and experimented with drugs. Atlas Obscura describes a common room with a scarlet ceremonial circle, and Crowley's own bedroom, which he called “the room of nightmares”, was covered in hand-painted erotic frescoes of monsters and hermaphroditic goblins.
The end came fast. A young Oxford student named Raoul Loveday arrived with his wife Betty May and died at the Abbey. Sources give the cause as dysentery or typhoid from contaminated water. Betty May went home and talked to the press, and the Sunday Express ran lurid stories. In 1923 the Fascist authorities expelled Crowley, with the Prefect of Palermo branding him undesirable and suspecting him of espionage. Villagers whitewashed the murals. The building is still abandoned today. It was declared an artistic site of interest in 1990, and in 2010 it was listed for sale at €1.5 million with no buyers reported.
Crowley's later years were shabbier. He moved through Tunisia and France before settling in England, and he developed a serious heroin addiction and money problems. He spent his final years in a boarding house room on book royalties and died in Hastings on 1 December 1947, aged 72.
Austin Osman Spare and the sigil
Austin Osman Spare (1886 to 1956) was an artistic prodigy from Snow Hill in London who exhibited at the Royal Academy as a teenager. He joined Crowley's A.'.A.'. briefly in 1909 and quickly walked away from what he saw as the over-complicated ceremonial habits of the Golden Dawn tradition. His alternative, laid out in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy in 1913, was that magic lives in the subconscious, and it only switches on when the conscious mind is bypassed.
Spare's sigil method is still widely used by modern practitioners. According to this breakdown of his technique, you write your desire as a sentence, strike out repeated letters and fold the remaining letters into a single abstract symbol. You charge it with a moment of intense focus followed by sudden blankness, then destroy it and forget it. His own route to that blankness was the “death posture”, which one modern guide to the book describes as standing on tiptoe with locked muscles, hyperventilating for two or three minutes and then collapsing.
The orgasm link comes later. The sigil article I've cited lists orgasm as one of several ways of charging a sigil in modern chaos magic, but it doesn't credit Spare directly with that idea, and I haven't found a solid source that does. Spare's philosophy set the stage, and later practitioners filled in the sexual detail. Spare himself lived a modest, reclusive life in the working-class tenements of Southwark, and Kenneth Grant supported him in his final years.
Maria de Naglowska and the Paris lifeline
Maria de Naglowska (1883 to 1936) was born in St Petersburg and became a fixture of Paris occult circles as “La Sophiale de Montparnasse”. She founded the Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow and, between 1930 and 1935, published twenty issues of an occult newspaper called La Flèche. According to her publisher's biography, she also translated Randolph's Magia Sexualis, and her version is the form in which that classic text has survived. Her lectures drew Julius Evola, Man Ray and André Breton.
Her own doctrine was strange and, in places, deeply uncomfortable. She taught a Third Term of the Trinity in which the Holy Spirit was feminine and sexual mysteries reconciled opposites. A blog summary of her teachings reports that men were initiated while women were chosen as priestesses, and that only blonde women qualified. It also lists rites such as the Hanging Mystery and the Rite of the Compasses. The same source notes that her writings contain racist and sexist elements. That blog is a secondary source, so treat the finer ritual details with caution. Naglowska reportedly told followers her teachings couldn't spread for two or three generations, and she refused to reprint her books before she died.
Jack Parsons: the rocket scientist who tried to summon a goddess
Jack Parsons was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons in Los Angeles on 2 October 1914. In 1936 he, Edward Forman and Frank Malina approached Theodore von Kármán with a proposal to build rockets. The group became known at Caltech as the “suicide squad” because of the danger of the work, and had to move out to the Arroyo Seco. Parsons invented a solid fuel for jet-assisted take-off, helped found Aerojet and pioneered an asphalt-based propellant, according to the Caltech student paper. There's a crater on the far side of the Moon named after him.
He also led a second life. He discovered Crowley's writings in 1939, and he and his wife Helen were initiated into the Agape Lodge of the OTO on 15 February 1941, as Pasadena Now records. He eventually headed the lodge. His home at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue, a mansion built in 1899 for a Caltech benefactor, became known as “Grim Gables”, or the Parsonage. It was converted into a temple hosting OTO gatherings and filled with an eclectic bunch of lodgers. After the war one of them was L. Ron Hubbard, who began an affair with Betty, Parsons's girlfriend and Helen's half-sister. Hubbard went on to found Scientology, a story we cover in Inside the Church of Scientology.
The Babalon Working is the wildest chapter. Historian Henrik Bogdan's peer-reviewed article in the journal Numen reconstructs it from Parsons's own records. In early January 1946 Parsons and Hubbard began an eleven-day cycle of invocations using the Third Key from the Enochian system, the Air Tablet. They played Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead as background. Parsons was High Priest and Hubbard was Scribe and Seer. Their stated goal was to incarnate Babalon, the Thelemic goddess of sexuality and freedom, as a counterweight to the destructive energies of the postwar world.
On 18 January Parsons declared the operation accomplished in the Mojave Desert. The same day, a red-haired woman named Marjorie Cameron turned up at the Parsonage. Parsons was convinced she was the answer. From 19 January to 27 February he ran a second round of sexual magic invocations with Cameron as his partner. On 28 February he wrote down seventy-seven verses he called Liber 49 (the Book of Babalon), presented as a missing fourth chapter of Crowley's Book of the Law. The final three-night phase ran until 4 March, with Hubbard dictating messages purportedly from Babalon. Bogdan's account of the records lists a windstorm, a lamp thrown across a room, a yellow-brown light about seven feet tall, knocking sounds and one observer whose arm was paralysed.
Crowley wasn't impressed. According to Bogdan, when he got the details he wrote to his successor Karl Germer suspecting Hubbard of playing a confidence trick and dismissing Parsons as a fool. He may have had a point. Parsons, Hubbard and Betty formed a company called Allied Enterprises to buy and sell yachts, with Parsons reportedly putting in around $21,000 to Hubbard's roughly $1,200. Hubbard married Betty that August. When Parsons realised what was happening he chased them to Miami, reportedly performing an invocation to the spirit Bartzabel to stop their yacht leaving, and got back only a few thousand dollars.
His scientific career had already been wrecked. The FBI and the Pasadena police had investigated his OTO involvement, and the government pressed him to sell his shares in JPL and Aerojet for only about $11,000. On 17 June 1952 Parsons died when an explosion destroyed his home laboratory. Fulminate of mercury was involved, police blamed the chemicals and some people have wondered ever since whether it was an accident, suicide or murder.
Marjorie Cameron: the woman at the centre
It would be easy to leave Cameron as a footnote in Parsons's story, and that would be a mistake. According to the Cameron Parsons Foundation, she was born in 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa, described as a cantankerous and rebellious child whose mystical, artistic side didn't suit her conservative family. She joined the Navy during the Second World War, drawing maps and working in photographic units. When she heard her brother had been hurt in action she went AWOL to see him and was court-martialled, then confined to base until an honourable discharge in 1945.
After moving to Pasadena she met Parsons through a friend, and he believed she was his “Scarlet Woman”. They married in 1946. After his death she made herself into a serious artist. She appeared on the cover of Wallace Berman's Semina 1 in 1955, starred in the film The Wormwood Star that year and acted opposite Anaïs Nin in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in 1956. She also starred with Dennis Hopper in Night Tide in 1961 and published a collection of poems and drawings, Black Pilgrimage, in 1964. She had a daughter, Crystal, in 1955, scattered Parsons's ashes in the Mojave Desert and died of cancer in 1995. The Whitney Museum later included her work in its exhibition on Beat culture.
Gerald Gardner and the Great Rite
Sex magic also slipped into Wicca. Gerald Gardner was born in 1884 and worked in Ceylon, Borneo and Malaya for around 32 years, according to Encyclopedia.com. He claimed that in 1939 he was initiated into a coven by a woman he called “Old Dorothy”, whom historians identified as Dorothy Clutterbuck. They argue her coven was of recent origin, not ancient. After Britain repealed its Witchcraft Act in 1951 he could go public, and he published Witchcraft Today in 1954. He met Doreen Valiente in 1953 and she became his high priestess.
The Great Rite is the ceremony of the third and final degree of Wiccan initiation. Urban's paper on the Goddess and the Great Rite explains that it takes two forms: symbolic, in which an athame (ritual knife) is lowered into a cup of wine, and literal, with actual intercourse. The symbolic version is by far the more common. Gardner met Crowley in 1947 and received an OTO authority document, and he directly quoted Crowley's Gnostic Mass in the rite. The structure of a coven, with men and women alternating around a circle under a priestess, also echoes the Tantric chakra as John Woodroffe described it. Valiente was more open about this than Gardner. She called Tantra “the path of attainment for the men and women of the Kali Yuga”.
The same postwar occult boom produced plenty of colourful characters, including Anton LaVey. If that scene appeals, Jayne Mansfield and Anton LaVey: Hollywood's Glitz Meets the Occult is a good next stop.
After Crowley: Kenneth Grant and the OTO split
Kenneth Grant was born on 23 May 1924 and met Crowley in December 1945, when he was 21. He worked as an informal assistant to Crowley until Crowley's death, and Crowley reportedly called him a “gift from the gods”, according to New Dawn magazine. Grant founded a branch called the New Isis Lodge, which ran from 1955 to 1962. Karl Germer, the nominal head of the OTO after Crowley, expelled him for exceeding his authority. Grant ignored the expulsion, and that split produced his Typhonian Order alongside the American OTO. He went on to write nine volumes across three trilogies between 1972 and 2003, mixing Set worship, Egyptian mysteries, Tantra, sex magick and Lovecraft.
The OTO itself struggled. Germer led it from Crowley's death in 1947 until his own death on 25 October 1962, without naming a successor. Grady McMurtry then reorganised the order using emergency charters from Crowley and took the title of Caliph by June 1969. It was incorporated in California in 1979 and gained tax exemption in 1982. After McMurtry died in 1985, ninth-degree members elected a successor who uses the name Hymenaeus Beta. By 1992 the OTO reported around 2,100 members in 135 lodges across twenty countries, so it's a small but real organisation.
Chaos magic: sex magic goes DIY
The most influential modern heir to Spare is chaos magic. Peter Carroll published Liber Null in 1978 and co-founded the Illuminates of Thanateros the same year with Ray Sherwin. The name combines Thanatos (death) with Eros (love). According to this profile of Carroll, he divided gnosis into two types: inhibitory, such as meditation, and excitatory, such as intense physical or emotional stimulation. Orgasm, which the sigil guide above lists next to pain and dancing as a charging method, sits naturally in the second group. Carroll's approach treats “belief itself is a magical tool”, which strips away the old orders, degrees and secrecy. You no longer need an initiation, just a technique.
Myths and how to read the sources
A few things are worth keeping straight. Crowley didn't invent sex magic, and he wasn't even its first Western teacher. The origins of the OTO's teachings are murky. Kellner's Eastern masters have never been verified, Reuss's Tantric knowledge was vague and some scholars see Randolph's influence as the more direct route. The Great Rite is usually symbolic. Not every detail about the Abbey or the Babalon Working comes from a neutral source, since Crowley's followers, his critics and the tabloids all had their own reasons for shaping the story. And where sources disagree, as they do on Randolph's book dates, Loveday's cause of death and the exact day Craddock died, it's fairer to say so than to pick the neatest version.
It's also worth remembering this is history. Some of these rituals, such as the Hanging Mystery, involve real physical risk, and this article isn't a how-to guide.
Why the idea won't go away
Urban's idea that sex magic offered liberation and secrecy in the same breath goes a long way towards explaining it. Sex was tightly policed in the nineteenth century, and the Comstock laws made frank talk risky. A mixed-race spiritualist, an American sex educator, a German paper chemist, a British poet and a Pasadena rocket engineer each found a way to say that sexual energy could be sacred and useful. They didn't agree on much else. Randolph wanted revolution, Reuss wanted priest-doctors, Crowley wanted a new religion and Spare wanted a way to bypass the thinking mind. Some were sincere, some were hustlers and a few were both. That mix is a big part of why the story is still so hard to stop reading.
You Might Also Like
• Inside the Church of Scientology: Power, Secrecy and the Human Cost of Control picks up where Jack Parsons's story leaves L. Ron Hubbard.
• Jayne Mansfield and Anton LaVey: Hollywood's Glitz Meets the Occult looks at another meeting between show business and the occult in the 1960s.
• Common Ground: The Quiet Similarities Between Witchcraft and Hinduism explores the crossover that Western occultists kept borrowing from.
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20. The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, John Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic (Henrik Bogdan, Numen 63:1). Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/20431452/The_Babalon_Working_1946_L_Ron_Hubbard_John_Whiteside_Parsons_and_the_Practice_of_Enochian_Magic_Published_in_Numen_International_Review_for_the_History_of_Religions_63_1_pp_12_32
21. On the Origins of the Gnostic Mass. Ecclesia Gnostica Universalis. https://ecclesiagnosticauniversalis.org/history/
22. The Gnostic Mass. Dove and Serpent Oasis, OTO. https://doveandserpent.oto-usa.org/the-gnostic-mass
23. Exploring the Occult World of Jack Parsons. Pasadena Now. https://pasadenanow.com/main/exploring-the-occult-world-of-jack-parsons
24. Parsons, Jack (1914-1952). Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/parsons-jack-1914-1952
25. Jack Parsons: The Paradoxical Figure Who Revolutionized Rocketry. The California Tech. https://tech.caltech.edu/2025/03/04/jack-parsons-revolutionized-rocketry/
26. Marjorie Cameron. Cameron Parsons Foundation. https://cameron-parsons.org/cameron
27. Maria de Naglowska. Inner Traditions. https://www.innertraditions.com/author/maria-de-naglowska
28. The Satanic Sophia and Confrerie de la Fleche d'Or (secondary blog source, cited for Naglowska's teachings). crashdolley. https://crashdolley.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/the-satanic-sophia-confrierie-de-la-fleche-dor-fraternity-of-the-golden-arrow/
29. The Book of Pleasure: Austin Osman Spare's Guide to Sigils, Gnosis and Self-Love (secondary source). Spirits Conjure. https://spiritsconjure.com/knowledge/book-pleasure.html
30. Austin Osman Spare's Sigil Method Explained. Grimoire. https://grimoire.love/encyclopedia/spare-sigil-method/
31. Gardner, Gerald Brousseau. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gardner-gerald-brousseau
32. Maithuna. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/other-religious-beliefs-and-general-terms/miscellaneous-religion/maithuna
33. Typhon Rising: The Magical Legacy of Kenneth Grant. New Dawn Magazine. https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/secret-wisdom/typhon-rising-the-magical-legacy-of-kenneth-grant
34. Peter Carroll: The Father of Chaos Magic and Liber Null (secondary source). Nicole's Ritual Universe. https://mysticryst.com/blogs/the-mystic-journal/peter-carroll-the-father-of-chaos-magic-liber-null
