The Sacred Rite of Magical Love: A Ceremony of Word and Flesh by Maria de Naglowska, from Inner Traditions, is a translation by Donald Traxler of Le rite sacré de l’amour magique. Naglowska not only provided the translation in French of B. P. Randolph’s Magia Sexualis: Sexual Practices for Magical Power, which was the only surviving source of that text, but authored a series of books which have recently been translated and published through Inner Traditions, such as The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, and Sacrament and Advanced Sex Magic: The Hanging Mystery Initiation.

Joan Pope, whom you may be familiar with as Hermetic Library anthology artist Whip Angels, offered a review of Naglowska’s, also recently available, The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, and Sacrament, over on David B Metcalfe’s blog, at “The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, & Sacrament by Maria de Naglowska, a review by Joan Pope”. You may also remember a previous post about the Whip Angels track The Light of Sex.

In the same vein, perhaps, as the series of fictional novels by Dion Fortune, such as the Sea Priestess and others, and of works in the library’s Cadaver Synod: Esoteric Fiction and Fictional Esoterica section, this is a novella by Naglowska which is inspired by the esoteric work of the author in the real world and should be of interest.

“Available for the first time in English, The Sacred Rite of Magical Love is a mystical, sexually magical novella written by Maria de Naglowska—the Russian mystic and esoteric high priestess of 1930s Paris. Her religious system, called the Third Term of the Trinity, taught the importance of sex for the upliftment of humanity.



A natural continuation of Naglowska’s The Light of Sex and Advanced Sex Magic, this volume also contains autobiographical material from Maria de Naglowska’s life. Full of symbolic language and hidden meanings, the story follows a young woman named Xenophonta as she experiences the apparition of a dark force, whom she calls the Master of the Past and to whom she dedicates her heart and her service. En route to a midnight rendezvous with him, Xenophonta encounters a young Cossack, Micha, who sexually accosts her. Telling Micha that she already belongs to another, she escapes to keep her rendezvous. Micha, now jealous, follows her and ends up taking part in a strange, mystical ceremony that transforms him, through the magic of word and flesh.



With a preface discussing the Sacred Triangle and the magical symbol of the AUM Clock, both central symbols in Naglowska’s religious system as well as in the story, the book also includes a summary of the doctrine of the Third Term of the Trinity in de Naglowska’s own words–important to any student of the Western Mystery tradition.”