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.“
Occult Aspects 