To a scholar who has spent many years studying ancient religions, new religions hold a strange appeal. After all, we are trained to look at obscure texts from forgotten cultures and to decipher the mute clues they have left behind. New religions have the benefit of being (generally) documented in ways that ancient religions aren’t, and often exist in societies more literate than those of the remote past. Finding out about them may be easier, but understanding them may be just as difficult. In my research on magic, I was led to Hugh B. Urban’s Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism. I’ve always found Urban’s work engaging, and since this book is one of the few academic studies to investigate magic seriously, I was eager to see what he had to say. As usual, I wasn’t disappointed.
Sex magic is frequently at the heart of magical beliefs. Urban shows that this has been the case from ancient times. Those of us who’ve studied ancient Syrian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Aramaean religions aren’t surprised by this. Those cultures inhabited a world pummeled by magic, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that sex might have had something to do with it. The majority of Urban’s book, however, concerns figures starting in the nineteenth century who introduced new religious forms of sexual magic into the occult circles of their times. Focusing on a specific practitioner in each chapter, he brings us up to the present with some familiar, or often less familiar, names. Magic, by its very conception, is a religious idea. Even if some of the more notorious modern magicians such as Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey took religion in a darker direction, it was still religion. The founding of Wicca by Gerald Gardner naturally receives some attention.
As Urban notes from the beginning, sex magic is not a topic for titillation. It involves some transgressive, but also original thought about something that is so basically human that we all know about it even if we won’t discuss it. And the dark practitioners have seemingly exhausted the vaults of extremism regarding sexuality that even a straight-laced, nay even Presbyterian, culture may find itself with no further options. Where does one go when the foulest of profanities has been executed? Certainly not back to the beginning, for we’ve come too far for that. The postmodern world deconstructs itself leaving us to wonder if there can be any magic left at all. It is no wonder, I should venture, that Harry Potter was gathering steam even as Urban wrote his book. Magic will, by its nature, always find a way.
Politics Magazine
