Seership; A guide to soul sight. By Paschal Beverly Randolph
This is the master book on the art of Seership. Written by one of the greatest of all seers, he tells the secrets that made him know all over the world.
Today, July 29th, let’s commemorate the passing of an oft unsung hero of the 19th century, a true spiritual vanguard on all fronts, Paschal Beverly Randolph. It was on this day at the age of 50 (and only a few days after his son Osiris was born) that Randolph opted to end his life in 1875 with a bullet to his brain. The path he cut was through rough terrain and it took a terrible toll. Lucky for us that follow the weeds have not completely reclaimed the road upon which he toiled.
Randolph was born a true American in the sense that his ancestry was as complicated as the racial makeup of the country which he loved and fought to enlighten. His father came from the distinguished, genteel Randolph family of Virginia while his mother was of European, Native American and Malagasy heritage. In Randolph’s heritage we find all of the dynamics at play in America in the 19th century: the hypocritical Jeffersonian, the poor European laborer, the Native American, the Diasporic African. But this fusion of paradoxical cultures lent their strengths to Paschal in a way no other conventional family could have.
Consequently, Randolph embraced the Jacksonian idea of the self-made man since he really had no other option than to be a rugged individualist. But he did so without sacrificing his intellectual strengths or his heterodox spiritual drives (both impulses are as American as apple pie but have always been seen as taboo anyway). As a teen he traveled the world in order to support himself and to expand his horizons and cultivate his yearning to understand the secrets of the Universe. He met and mingled in many of the occult circles of Paris and London, traveled throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and went as far east as Persia all before the age of 30.
He was a pioneer in exploring non-ordinary states of awareness and promoted these states as a means to alleviate the ills of the world. As a Spiritualist and trance medium he often used this platform to educate the populace about social as well as spiritual issues. He also started the oldest recorded Rosicrucian society in the United States. Additionally he worked with magic mirrors, trance states induced with and without the aid of hashish and other entheogenic substances, sex magic and a host of other techniques.
He was a champion of sexual freedom and the cultivation of sexual energy for spiritual ends. Many of his books like “Eulis! The History of Love” or “The Ansairetic Mystery – A New Revelation Concerning Sex!” were stunningly progressive works which fuse together the twin American obsessions for sex and the religious impulse in ways that few had seen stateside.
As a defender of human rights he was a staunch abolitionist. After the Emancipation he taught freed slaves how to read and write in New Orleans (a city where he also eventually became a school principal). He was a friend of Lincoln and was the only African American in the president’s funeral procession. He also had ideas as radical as those of Garvey on how to protect African-Americans from the aggression of whites.
He was and forever will be one of my great American heroes.
Cheers to PBR.
Short Verse to PBR
Caliban’s revenge against Prospero
You railed against the fools,
A tried and true
Green Hermeticist,
In lands not so hospitable
To learned men of color.
The Stone, yours,
Displayed brilliantly
Moony-wombs and Solar CMEs
Conjoined in erotic frisson,
Magnetized for the ages,
Is now ours
Per Aeternum.
-NRSYH
“The ejective moment, therefore, is the most divine and tremendously important one in the human career as an independent entity; for not only may we launch Genius, Power, Beauty, Deformity, Crime, Idiocy, Shame or Glory on the world’s great sea of Life, in the person of the children we may then produce, but we may plunge our own souls neck-deep in Hell’s horrid slime, or else mount the Azure as coequal associate Gods; for then the mystic Soul swings wide its Golden gates, opens its portals to the whole vast Universe and through them come trooping either Angels of Light or the Grizzly Presence from the dark corners of the Spaces.”
Paschal Beverly Randolph (October 8, 1825 – July 29, 1875) was an American medical doctor, occultist and writer. Randolph is notable as perhaps the first person to introduce the principles of sex magic to North America, and, according to A.E. Waite, establishing the earliest known Rosicrucian order in the United States .
Sources disagree as to Randolph’s birthplace (New York or Virginia). He was a free man of mixed-race ancestry, descendant of William Randolph. His father was a nephew of John Randolph of Roanoke and his mother was Flora Beverly, whom he later described as a woman of mixed English, French, German, Native American and Malagasy ancestry. This background led to his being a spokesman for the abolition ofslavery. His mother died when he was young, leaving him homeless and penniless; he ran away to sea in order to support himself. A peripatetic man, he lived in many places, including New York state, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Toledo, Ohio. He married twice; his first wife was African-American; his second wife was Irish-American.
Early life
As a teen and young man, Randolph traveled widely, due to his work aboard sailing vessels. He journeyed to England, through Europe, and as far east as Persia, where his interest in mysticism and the occult led him to study with local practitioners of folk magic and varied religions. On these travels he also met and befriended occultists in England and Paris, France.
Career
After leaving the sea, Randolph embarked upon a public career as a lecturer and writer. By his mid-twenties, he regularly appeared on stage as atrance medium and advertised his services as a spiritual practitioner in magazines associated with the Spiritualist Movement. Like many Spiritualists of his era, he lectured in favor of Abolition; after Emancipation, he taught literacy to freed slaves in New Orleans.
In addition to his work as a trance medium, Randolph trained as a doctor of medicine and wrote and published both fictional and instructive books based on his theories of health, sexuality, Spiritualism and occultism. He authored more than fifty works on magic and medicine, established an independent publishing company, and was an avid promoter of birth control during a time when it was largely against the law to mention this topic.
Having long used the pseudonym “The Rosicrucian” for his Spiritualist and occult writings, Randolph eventually founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States, which dates back to the era of the American Civil War. This group, still in existence, today avoids mention of Randolph’s interest in sex magic, but his magico-sexual theories and techniques formed the basis of much of the teachings of another occult fraternity, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, although it is not clear that Randolph himself was ever personally associated with the Brotherhood.Two twentieth century occultists and practitioners of sex magic, Theodor Reuss of Germany and Aleister Crowley of Great Britain, were heavily influenced by Randolph in both organizing theOrdo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and in their sex magic rituals.
In 1851, Randolph made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln. Their friendship was close enough that, when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Randolph accompanied Lincoln’s funeral procession in a train to Springfield, Illinois. However, Randolph was asked to leave the train when some passengers objected to the presence of an African American in their midst.
Death
Randolph died in Toledo, Ohio at the age of 49, under disputed circumstances. According to Professor Carl Edwin Lindgren, D.Ed., many questioned the coroner’s finding that Randolph died from a self-inflicted wound to the head, for many of his writings express his aversion to suicide. The evidence was conflicting. R. Swinburne Clymer, a later Supreme Master of theFraternitas, stated that years after Randolph’s demise, in a death-bed confession, a former friend of Randolph had conceded that in a state of jealousy and temporary insanity, he had killed Randolph. Randolph was succeeded as Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas, and in other titles, by his chosen successor Freeman B. Dowd.
The triple extraordinary life of The Rosicrucian:
💡Paschal Beverly Randolph💡
All but forgotten by mainstream history, his life was extraordinary he also felt at the time people labeled as black “Africans if they were to stay in America they would go extinct (found out why?)
“In the science of the mysteries that we teach, just as in nature, the female attracts the male, so we can attract to ourselves the desired form by creating the negative in order to attract the contrary, the positive! This is the principle basis of all magic, no law is superior to it; and it permits us to accomplish operations in two fashions: intellectually, it is spoken calmly, without emotion, and sensually, it is spoken in love.“
There exists a talisman of universal application. In the Elemental Kingdom it is represented represented by pyramis, fire; in geometric terms by the pyramid or triangle and in biological terms by the phallus. As the sun radiates life and light throughout the solar system, so the phallus radiates life and light upon earth, and, similarly, subserves a power greater than itself. For as the sun is a reflection of Sirius, so is the phallus the vehicle of the Will of the Magus. In the non-initiate the phallic power operates independently of and often at variance with, its possessor; it functions capriciously, regardless of the individual. The phallic power possesses the individual, not vice versa. In the case of the initiate, however, the position is reversed. The O.T.O. possesses the secret knowledge of rectification and the means of release from the thraldom of unregenerate instinct. It instructs the operator in the proper use of the Elemental Fire, the right building of the Pyramid, the successful wielding of the Magick Wand. The control of the Elemental Fire involves the inhibition of the usual physical results of sexual congress. The libido is not “earthed”, but directed by the Will to incarnate in a form specially prepared for its reception. Liber Agape, the enchiridion of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis of the O.T.O., shows how sexual magick is based on the assumption that no cause can be baulked of an effect. If the natural effect is annulled, the discharge of energy is not lost, it forms a subtle or astral image of the idea dominant in the mind at the climax of coitus. Ordinarily this idea is one of lust, and because of this a tendency or habit is set up in the mind, which consequently becomes increasingly difficult to control. This tendency must therefore be destroyed. The mental exaltation generated by a magically controlled orgasm forms a lucent lenselike window past which stream the vivid astral imagery of the subconscious mind. Specific images are evoked and “fixed”; they become instantly and vitally alive. As their luminous presence is obsessive, magical safeguards are essential to offset actual obsession. These images are dynamic links with the deeper centres of consciousness and act as keys to the experience or revelations which form the object of the Operation. To incarnate such experiences is the object of sexual magick. It is necessary, therefore, to formulate the will with great care and with strict economy of means. There must be nothing in the mind at the moment of orgasm except the image of the “child” which it is intended to bring to birth. Objurgations against masturbation, onanism, coitus interruptus, karezza and other apparently sterile methods of using sexual energy, follow logically upon awareness (however consciously unacknowledged this awareness may be) of the sacramental nature of the generative act. Erroneous conclusions drawn from incomplete apprehension of the factors involved led in the past to the “fire and brimstone” admonitions directed against “abuses”, which at one time were thought to lead to degeneration of the nervous system, blindness, paralysis and insanity. In actual fact, none of the energy is lost, though it fails to find a field of operation in the matrix which nature has provided for it. It breeds, instead of physical offspring, phantoms composed of tenuous matter. Through the deliberate and persistent practice of such “abuses”, qliphotic entities are engendered; they prey upon the mind and feed upon the nervous fluid. As Crowley notes: “The ancient Jewish Rabbins knew this, and taught that before Eve was given to Adam the demon Lilith was conceived by the spilth of his dreams, so that the hybrid races of satyrs, elves, and the like began to populate those secret places of the earth which are not sensible by the organs of the normal man”.1 Many long and tedious dissertations on the possibility of a “witch” giving birth to offspring after union with the devil in the form of an incubus should be understood in the sense that children are born of such unions, though not physical children. Any discharge of energy, of any kind, has an effect on all planes. If results on one plane are baulked-as would happen in the case of the incubus-then they appear on another. According to ancient authorities on Witchcraft, incubi and succubi were personifications of the devil himself. The devil is synonymous with the creative spirit in man. Crowley goes so far as to declare that “the satyr is the True Nature of every man and every woman”. The incubus or succubus is the exteriorization, or extrusion, of the satyr in each individual. It represents the subliminal Will; in effect, the Dwarf Self or Holy Guardian Angel. It is this principle in man that is immortal, and it is inextricably bound up with the sexuality, which, in turn, is the key to its nature and the means of its incarnation. (…) Dr. Kellner, who reformed the O.T.O. In modern times was initiated in the use of the sexual current by an Arab named Soliman Ben Aifa, and two indianTantrics Bhima Sen Pratap and Shri Mahatma Agamia Paramahansa. It is not certain, but it is very likely that they were initiates of the Vama Marg, or left-hand path. The cleary tantric element in some of the instructions of the ‘OTO Involving the use of sex becomes so clear. The term Vama Marg, despite the details of Sir John Wodroffe, is still under a cloud of errete interpretations generated by emotional reactions to ideas alien to Western thought. I do not expect to succeed where such authorities have failed, but I reaffirm once again that the expression “left-hand path” is a technical term indicating the magical use of sexual energy, sometimes with the help of female helpers (Shakti), as in the case of tantric, and female companions (Manjaris) as in the case of Sahajiya. The tantric especially those of the sect Kaula, follow practices similar to those of certain African cults or neo-African such as voodoo and the Obeah. But the assistance of women is not always necessary and not always used. In the system of spiritual culture that includes the sexual use of women and establishing a high ideal of reverence for the feminine principle as the Shakti, or power-aspect of the universe, not the product of psychopaths, unless we postulate the existence of an unbroken line of culprits that extends for countless centuries. Neither the original African concept of sex is in no way inferior to the highly developed and complex formulas used by alchemists or Rosicrucians in their Great Work of transformation of the vulgar metal of the worldly passion into the pure gold of spiritual light. Is the bigotry of the Orthodox religionist and the blind stagger in the dark of psychologists materialists which sees these systems as a morbid expression of the primordial creative impulse. Crowley’s life was a struggle against a mindset that led to suppress in the name of a servile creed – whether it was religious, liberal arts or sciences – the secret and sacred source of life in favor of a reflection deformed psychological impotence typical of those who prescribe the suppression and restriction of a way of life. The only pity that AL recognizes is the restriction, cause of all the “sins”. When Crowley took over the leadership of ‘O.T.O. , It did so with the intent to promote individual liberty under the law of Thelema. He incorporated the fundamental principles of this law in Liber Oz, that published in 1942. In the space of a few hundred words, he declared what he described as the political program of the ‘OTO In the outside world. The old Aeon, like any other event was inevitable and it aroused exactly that current that his ministers were trying to suppress, if not destroy. The sexual energy inhibited from 2000 years, as a result, it now consumes a tremendous orgasm, the impetus which in physical terms will projects the human consciousness with ultraphysical signs.ì. The projection is the formula of Ra-Hoor-Kuith; Horus is its active phase. There will explosion, disintegration and reintegration of elements again downloaded in vehicles whose substance will have a subtle nature and relatively immaterial, approssimatosi to the scientific concept of entities seen in AL. During dictation of AL, Crowley asked for a “sign” and Nuit exclaimed: “The sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body” (…). Since an Aeon follows another, it will appears changes in the sexual nature of the organisms that will develop the thelemic concept. The pro-parent (Female) dominated the Aeon of Isis, parthenogenesis was the formula of that era. In ‘Aeon of Osiris, the progenitor (Male) prevailed. The Aeon of Horus, is the Aeon of the “ Son Crowned and Conqueror ”- it will see the merging of the two sexes in one. The bisexual Baphomet of the Templars symbolizes this concept. In the language of Thelemic magick, Heru-Ra-Ha – solar consciousness – phallic – it manifests itself as active current as represented by Horus Ra-Hoor-Kuith (IX) and as the passive current represented by Set, or Shaitan, or Hoor Paar-Kraat (XI). These are dual ways of the Baphomet operation.
adapted from: The Magical Revival (1972), Kennet Grant Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God (1973), Kennet Grant
“Sex and magic are intertwined experiences—sex is one kind of magic (and can be made more magical
without being concerned with sex-magic at any point), and magic can be,
while erotic and arousing, not necessarily sexual in the way that is
often understood. There is a commonly-held belief that those who
practice sex-magic are indulging themselves in wild orgiastic rites at
every opportunity. This is rarely the case. After all, if you need to
go through lots of occult rigmarole just to get laid, then you’re a bit
sad, aren’t you? Then again, the occult subculture is full of SAD
people, desperate to finally get laid and attempting to turn to
sex-magic as a last resort.”
Phil Hine– Sex Magic, Tantra & Tarot: The Way of the Secret Lover
The best magick is disruptive. Magick practice that rockets you out of your comfort zone and puts you into a liminal unknown where anything is permitted. To this, sexual techniques are ideal. Break taboos. Arouse reserves of emotional energy locked away in fear and shame. Physical strain, strange breathing patterns, and unusual sensation and physical reaction are all readily available to those that will.
Any successful magick must first break out of the mundane, your comfort zone. Stepping without fear into the unknown. Letting go of reality as you know it and opening up to possibilities normally impossible. This may be done calmly by breaking habits, sitting in unusual posture, holding your hands a certain way, saying words in a language you don’t know or speaking in glossolalia. Each unusual action performed with intent is a step away from the normal and into a space where the veil becomes thinner.
Sex is a potent domain for such action. Find what you are ashamed to explore and go there. Go to a sex shop and get toys. The best toys excite, they make you uncomfortable, “What if I were found with this?!” When you play, allow yourself to feel. Don’t keep yourself in an emotionally sterile place. Get dirty! Dress up for yourself. Learn some self bondage. Get sticky with lube. Imagine being seen in this way. Even better, find a forum and share images of yourself in this way.
This may all be done solo. This approach to sex magick does not require a partner and it is much better to work solo than work with a partner that does not help you feel safe to explore; safe when going to a place that feels unsafe.
The rich energy comes naturally. To make magick, simply add the encoding of intent.
In the practice I call “sigil swallowing”, suck cock with eyes fixed upon a sigil. Use a dildo suction cupped to a will and sigil taped to the wall. If working with a partner, draw the sigil upon their body. Oral sex of any type is excellent for attaining gnosis. Let your breathing be strained and your desire aroused.
Anal penetration conjures an emotional sensation that is indescribable to those that haven’t felt it. There is a pleasure and a submission to it. Mark your intent upon the penetrating toy or upon the body of a partner. Bring that into yourself and relax into the feeling.
We could go on, but the point is: explore. Sexual gnosis is potent and simply accessible. Develop your own practices and share!
Occult Aspects 