Author: Paschal Beverly Randolph
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465611452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Sex is a thing of soul; most people think it but a mere matter of earthly form and physical structure. True, there are some unsexed souls; some no sex at all, and others still claiming one gender, and manifesting its exact opposite. But its laws, offices, utilities, and its deeper and diviner meanings are sealed books to all but about two in a million; yet they ought to have the attentive study of every rational human being, every aspirant to immortality beyond the grave. In some sense this matter has been, and is, the subject of thought, but only in its outer phases, or its grosser aspects; seldom in its higher ones, and never, until now, in any of its loftier and mystical bearings. Books by ship-loads on one or two, and always either its physiological or sentimental sides of the subject, have been put forth by ambitious M.D's, or notoriety-seeking empirics; books which mainly satisfied a prurient taste or morbid curiosity, gave but little light, and generally left their readers practically as ignorant as before. Other books, in other millions, vile, atrocious, cancerous, abounding with death in every line, fraught with ruin on every page, have been, still are being, scattered everywhere across the nations, till the flower of the world's youth has been blighted, and the morality of earth sapped dry. Oh, that literature, foul, disgusting beyond belief! terrible as the cobra's fang, keener than the dagger's edge, monstrous as a drunkard's dream, more devastating than the spotted plague! until between the two millstones—quackery, pseudo-professional literature on the one hand, and the execrable, libidinous abominations on the other—one-half of the manhood and womanhood of our nation has been ground into the very dust. No punishment can be too severe for the disseminators of the latter; no contempt too great for the authors of the former. Not one of the very many respectable people, including fifty French, a score of English, about as many Americans, and a few German authors, who have stained reams of good white paper, and spilled gallons of ink in writing anent the sublime subject of sex, have taken the trouble to go one inch below the surface; but have been content to copy each other, and repeat the same old worn-out story,—else concealed a few good ideas in barrels of words. They have taken man and woman, shown us their anatomy; explained something of physical gender; said something about function and periods, and there left us, because they knew nothing further themselves. For example, there are ten thousand treatises extant concerning what the doctors call the sin of one Onan, meaning, thereby, a certain nameless solitary vice. But the man alluded to in the Bible never was guilty of that sin at all. Albeit his crime was equally bad, equally disastrous and hateful. In these days it is politely called "conjugal fraud," and in plain terms consists of the nuptive union to the orgasmal climax, which was allowed to occur only in a manner never intended by the Infinite God. "He wasted his seed upon the ground, that he might not beget children to inherit his brother's name." (See Bible.) Millions do the accursed thing to-day that they may be childless, as indeed they deserve to be; for he who does that heinous wrong commits a quadruple crime, against his wife, himself, nature and God; to say nothing about the right of all souls to be incarnated by the act of man.
Author: Paschal Beverly Randolph
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American authors
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Author: Lynne L. Hume Ph.D.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440804192
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
A rare combination of personal and academic, this book showcases the myriad avenues for transcending the boundaries of reality through direct sensory experience. The Varieties of Magical Experience: Indigenous, Medieval, and Modern Magic provides a comprehensive volume that examines magic in all its aspects. Through detailed case studies, verbatim accounts of personal experiences, and first-hand experience from the authors' own active participation in many alternative religious rituals and ceremonies, this unique book reveals how magic can be a universal phenomenon that crosses cultural, historical, and spatial boundaries. The work is organized in five sections that embrace several broad themes: indigenous magical and shamanic practices; medieval witchcraft; sorcery and hermetic magic; and contemporary Western magical practices, including the role of sexuality, trance, and meditation. The introductory section explores the idea of magic, other realities, and the employment of all the senses, while the final section discusses contemporary issues of ecology and cybermagic. The authors give voice to the powerful emotions and feelings that result from a magical encounter, providing engaging and accessible information to general readers, while those well versed in the opaque world of magic and occultism, consciousness studies, and imaginal and disembodied realms will appreciate the book's content at a deeper level.
Author: Nevill Drury
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199793050
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
The Western magical traditions are currently undergoing an international resurgence. In Stealing Fire from Heaven, Nevill Drury offers an overview of the modern occult revival and seeks to explain this growing interest in ancient magical belief systems. Gnosticism and the Hermetica, the medieval Kabbalah, Tarot and Alchemy, and more recently, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, collectively laid the basis for the modern magical revival, which first began to gather momentum in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Western magic has since become increasingly eclectic, drawing on such diverse sources as classical Greco-Roman mythology, Celtic cosmology, Kundalini yoga and Tantra, shamanism, chaos theory, and the various spiritual traditions associated in many different cultures with the Universal Goddess. Drury traces the rise of various forms of magical belief and practice, from the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the emergence of Wicca and Goddess worship as expressions of contemporary feminine spirituality. He also explores Chaos Magick and the occult practices of the so-called Left-Hand Path, as well as twenty-first-century magical forays into cyberspace. He believes that the rise of modern Western magic stems essentially from the quest for personal spiritual transformation and direct experience of the sacred--a quest which the trance occultist and visionary artist Austin Osman Spare once referred to as "stealing fire from heaven." Considered in this light, Drury argues, modern Western magic can be regarded as a form of alternative spirituality in which the practitioners seek direct engagement with the mythic realm.
Author: John Patrick Deveney
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791431191
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 642
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Book Description
His most enduring claim to fame is the crucial role he played in the transformation of spiritualism, a medium's passive reception of messages from the spirits of the dead, into occultism, the active search for personal spiritual realization and inner vision.
Author: Carol Faulkner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of prostitution, Nichols used adultery to define loveless marriages as a betrayal of the self, a consequence far more serious than the violation of a legal contract. Nichols was not alone. In Unfaithful, Carol Faulkner places this view of adultery at the center of nineteenth-century efforts to redefine marriage as a voluntary relationship in which love alone determined fidelity. After the Revolution, Americans understood adultery as a sin against God and a crime against the people. A betrayal of marriage vows, adultery was a cause for divorce in most states as well as a basis for civil suits. Faulkner depicts an array of nineteenth-century social reformers who challenged the restrictive legal institution of marriage, redefining adultery as a matter of individual choice and love. She traces the beginning of this redefinition of adultery to the evangelical ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, when perfectionists like John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, concluded that marriage obstructed the individual's relationship to God. In the 1840s and 1850s, spiritualist, feminist, and free love critics of marriage fueled a growing debate over adultery and marriage by emphasizing true love and consent. After the Civil War, activists turned the act of adultery into a form of civil disobedience, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's publicly charging the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with marital infidelity. Unfaithful explores how nineteenth-century reformers mobilized both the metaphor and the act of adultery to redefine marriage between 1830 and 1880 and the ways in which their criticisms of the legal institution contributed to a larger transformation of marital and gender relations that continues to this day.
Author: Manon Hedenborg White
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190065028
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
The Eloquent Blood focuses on the changing construction of femininity and feminine sexuality in interpretations of the goddess Babalon. A central deity in Thelema, the religion founded by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), Babalon is based on Crowley's favorable reinterpretation of the biblical Whore of Babylon, and is associated with liberated female sexuality and the spiritual ideal of passionate union with existence. Combining research on historical and contemporary Western esotericism with feminist and queer theory, the book sheds light on the ways in which esoteric movements and systems of thought have developed over time in relation to political movements.
Author: Hugh B. Urban
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520932889
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic—the use of sex as a source of magical power—emerged. This book, the first history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition, places these practices in the context of the larger discourse surrounding sexuality in American and European society over the last 150 years to discover how sexual magic was transformed from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. Focusing on a series of key figures including American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Gerald Gardner, and Anton LaVey, Hugh Urban traces the emergence of sexual magic out of older western esoteric traditions including Gnosticism and Kabbalah, which were progressively fused with recently-discovered eastern traditions such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. His study gives remarkable new insight into sexuality in the modern era, specifically on issues such as the politics of birth control, the classification of sexual "deviance," debates over homosexuality and feminism, and the role of sexuality in our own new world of post-modern spirituality, consumer capitalism, and the Internet.
Author: Paschal B. Randolph
Publisher: Health Research Books
ISBN: 9780787313210
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 150
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Book Description
1874 It's wondrous magic, chemistry, rules, laws, modes, moods and rationale. Being the third revelation of soul and sex. Also, reply to "why is man immortal?" the solution of the Darwin problem. an entirely new theory.
Author: Paschal Beverly Randolph
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Clairvoyance
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
