Tag Archives: sex magic

The Complete Magick Curriculum of the Secret Order G∴B∴G∴

The Complete Magick Curriculum of the Secret Order G∴B∴G∴: Being the Entire Study, Curriculum, Magick Rituals, and Initiatory Practices of the G∴B∴G∴ (The Great Brotherhood of God) by Louis T Culling; edited, revised, and expanded by Carl Llewellyn Weschke; from Llewellyn Publications, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

“Founded upon the revolutionary premise that High Magick can be distilled to a few powerful and efficient steps, Louis T. Culling’s original edition of this classic magick book broke all the rules.

Llewellyn is proud to present an updated and expanded edition of this pioneering work.

The G∴B∴G∴, or “Great Brotherhood of God,” was a magickal order founded by acclaimed magician Frater Genesthai. Louis T. Culling, one of the initial members of the G∴B∴G∴ in California, was instructed by Genesthai to reveal the Order’s magickal curriculum when the time was right.

Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, publisher of Culling’s original edition of this book, offers illuminating commentary, definitions, and discussion points to render these profound magickal philosophies and practices even more accessible and relevant for contemporary magickal practice. This new edition is also an interesting philosophical commentary, answering a number of questions about historical occult orders and figures like Aleister Crowley. The techniques taught in this curriculum include:

Dream Recall and Interpretation · Functioning in the Borderland · Finding One’s True Magickal Identity · The Retirement Ritual · The Invocation of Thoth · Ritual Divination · Imprinting the I Ching on the Body · The Three Degrees of Sex Magick · Thelema and the Magickal Will · Invocation of Human Quality · The Rite of Transubstantiation · Conversations with a God · Magickal Offspring—the Familiar · The Great Lunar Trances” — back cover

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Events at Treadwell’s for February and March, 2014

Here is a selection from the upcoming events at Treadwell’s Books in London for February and March, 2014, which may be of interest.

Antinous: Last God of the Ancient World
24 February 2014
John J Johnston

When, in 130 AD, the beautiful youth Antinous, favourite of the Roman emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile, under suspicious circumstances Hadrian proclaimed him a god and his cult survived until the eventual fall of the Empire. Drawing upon archaeological and textual sources, tonight’s lecture explores Antinous’ religious and artistic legacy from the time of his death and apotheosis until the modern age, and examines the importance of his name and image to gay men since the 18th Century. John J Johnston is Vice-Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society. This event celebrates LGBT History Month.

Price: £7
Time: 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start

Crowley and Politics
19 March 2014
Book Launch Party with Marco Pasi

Tonight join us for the launch party of a seminal study of Crowley’s relationship with the politics of his times, published by Acumen. Crowley sought an alternative way to express his religious feelings, which led him to elaborate his own vision of political and social radical change: he announced a new era, echoing the ideal of a new man proposed by the totalitarian regimes and the radical politics of his era. Author Marco Pasi has worked with many unpublished documents and his study offers fresh insights. Joining us at the launch is Marco Pasi, Assistant Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Signed copies will be available on the night. Please note this event is a book launch party and not a formal lecture.

Price: Free but reply essential to be added to guest list
Time: 7pm to 9:30pm, speeches 7:46pm

The Oldest Sex Magic Text?
20 March 2014
Lecture — An Early Mesopotamian Tablet

A very early tablet, written in cuneiform, refers enigmatically to a sex magic act. Our speaker tonight reveals this brief but important discovery and uses it to shed light on ancient Mesopotamian ideas of ‘sacred marriage’, goddess power, sovereignty, hallucinogenic drugs and — yes — sex magic. Our speaker is an academic scholar in the field with a deep interest in magic. Tonight is for everyone with a fondness for Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Inanna, Enkidu, Tammuz, Pazuzu and the wonderful world of the Tigris-Euprhates valley. This is a repeat lecture: those who came in January and wish to re-attend may do so without charge: please email or ring.

Price: £7. Ring 0207 419 8507 or book online
Time: 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start

Alchemy’s Mutus Liber
24 March 2014
Paul Cowlan

The Mutus Liber (The ‘silent’ or ‘symbolic’ Book), first appeared in the town of La Rochelle in 1677. The author ‘Altus’, is now thought to be Isaac Baulot, a local apothecary and physician. There is no text, and the work consists of fifteen plates apparently illustrating an alchemical process, a process which inspired the successful plant alchemy of Armand and Jacqueline Barbault in the 1960s. Some believe it to be entirely psycho-spiritual in its intent, while others interpret it qabbalistically. In this illustrated talk Paul explores each plate, offering comments and suggestions on the symbolism .We promise an enriching exploration of one of alchemy’s most famous enigmas. Paul Cowlan is a spiritual alchemist of over twenty years’ experience and a popular speaker.

Price: £7
Time: 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start

Magic in 17th Century England
26 March 2014 (Wednesday)
Alexander Cummins

Seventeenth-century England — with its Civil Wars, Revolution, and Restoration — was a tumultuous place. It was also a period where early modern people consulted astrologers, magicians, and cunning-folk for a variety of occult services and magical objects. The stars’ influence was traced in all aspects of life: from planting crops, to political propaganda, to medical care and guidance counselling. In investigating early modern English astrology, this lecture will explore fascinating historical perspectives on the nature of time, meaning and human life. Alexander Cummins is an historian of magic and emotion. He is currently finishing his doctorate at the University of Bristol.

Price: £7
Time: 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start

The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, the 1971 paperback from Bantam Books, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

This is the first paperback edition of the single volume redaction of the multivolume The Spirit of Solitude, “re-Antichristianed” The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, which still has not been published beyond the first two volumes, and, in spite of the ad copy, this is, indeed, still an abridgement of the sourcework. Publication of the complete Confessions might, maybe, finally begin with volume 1 available sometime in 2013.

“Complete and Unabridged—The Profane and Uninhibited Memoirs of the Most Notorious Magician, Satanist and Drug Cultist of the 20th Century.”

“Aleister Crowley called himself ‘Beast 666’ and was a self-proclaimed saint of the Gnostic Church. He became a ‘god’ in his own temple at the age of forty-five. By that time, he was infamous in several countries as a writer, poet, painter, chess expert, master magician, mountaineer, drug addict and satyr.

Born in England in 1875, the sone of a wealthy brewer, Crowley totally rejected the Victorian hypocrisy of his day and dedicated himself to a life of debauchery, evil, Satanic spells and writing, especially on such topics as sex, magic and occultism.

A notorious pleasure-seeker, Crowley truly was the hippie of his age, ‘doing his thing.’ He was banned from Italy and was forced to leave other countries, always under mysterious circumstances. Crowley was a constant user of heroin, cocaine, opium, hashish and peyote, and early in his life earned a reputation for indulging in wild sex and drug orgies which he combined with his so-called religious rites.

his reputation followed him everywhere as he traveled from country to country, practicing witchcraft and black magic with his strange group of mistresses and eccentrics.

Colourful, feared, despised and admired, Crowley brought excitement and evil with him wherever he went. He was the author of several books, treatises and poems, many of which are widely read and appreciated today.”

“Aleister Crowley was poet, painter, writer, master chess player, lecher, drug addict and magician. his contemporary press called him ‘the wickedest man in the world.’ The most bizarre and notorious figure of his age, Crowley’s own story is now available in paperback from the first time.

But The Confessions of Aleister Crowley is more than just the autobiography of a man. It is also the portrait of an age. Everything is set down just as Crowley experienced it.

In addition to being a famed magician, Crowley also had a well-deserved reputation as a writer. his flair for literature and his gusto for life elevate this books several levels above the ordinary ‘confession’ type of literature prevalent in his day.

His writing is crisp, witty and amusing and always fascinating. Crowley believed that he could do anything he set his mind to. And he’ll make a believer out of you.”

The Hermetic Library Reading Room is an imaginary and speculative future reification of the library in the physical world, a place to experience a cabinet of curiosities offering a confabulation of curation, context and community that engages, archives and encourages a living Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to contribute to the Hermetic Library Reading Room, consider supporting the library or contact the librarian.

Forgotten Templars

Forgotten Templars: The Untold Origins of Ordo Templi Orientis [also] by Richard Kaczynski arrived at the Reading Room.

“An unlikely cocktail of actors and musicians, doctors and merchants, anarchists and sexual reformers populated the occult underground of the late nineteenth century. One by-product of this strange brew was the magical order known as Ordo Templi Orientis, or the Order of Oriental Templars, with its controversial mix of esoteric Freemasonry, yoga and sex magic. While its name is familiar thanks to its second Grand Master, Edwardian enfant terrible Aleister Crowley, its origins have subsisted as shadowy mytho-history. Until now. This revelatory study brings into sharp focus the perfect storm of personalities, movements, and circumstances that gave rise to one of the largest and most influential secret societies of our time. It is a story that has waited a century to be told.”

“Limited edition of 777 copies · viii + 322 pages · over 250 b&w illustrations · quarto (9×12) format on 70 pound paper · cloth hardcover with gold-foil stamping and dust wrapper · $79.95.” [via]

Jack Parsons, Scientology and the Jet Propulsion Lab

You may have heard about the recent publication of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, a new and extensively researched exposé on Scientology, which, of course, mentions Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons.

“Before Scientology, there was Aleister Crowley, the English “magician” revered by generations of would-be wizards. When Hubbard and a friend tried to breed an Antichrist according to Crowley’s teachings, even Crowley rolled his eyes: “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Of course, Hubbard – “Source,” just “Source,” no “the,” of Scientology – didn’t really want Crowley’s approval. According to the Church of Scientology, he was undercover for “naval intelligence” on a mission that “broke up black magic in America.” Phew!” [via]

Well, all this has people talking about Jack Parsons and the Jet Propulsion Lab again, such as in “The strangely true connection between Scientology, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Occult Sorcery“.

“One of the weirdest historical confluences you can imagine took place in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s. There, a darkly handsome young man and chemistry autodidact named Jack Parsons had just made a bundle of money by inventing solid rocket fuel and selling it to the military. He was part of a group of explosion-obsessed researchers at CalTech who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where recently the Martian Rovers were made. He was also a goddess-obsessed acolyte and generous financial supporter of the infamous Pagan leader, Aleister Crowley.

Parsons used his defense contract money to convert an old mansion into a group house whose residents included other Pagans, artists, scientists, and writers. One of his boarders was a charismatic science fiction author named L. Ron Hubbard, who became Parsons’ greatest frenemy, participating in rituals of sex magic with the rocket scientist, sleeping with his girlfriend, and finally absconding with all his money. Here is the true story of how Scientology and JPL were both conceived by men under the sorcerer Crowley’s mystical influence.” [via]

You may also be interested checking out “A Rocketship to Babalon: the Short Strange Life of Jack Parsons” in Matt Staggs from back in 2010.

“However, his scientific work was only one part of Parson’s life. He was also an avid student of the occult.

He applied his zeal for scientific research to his inquiries into the unknown, and eventually came to the attention of the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. The British occultist appointed Parsons to the head of California’s Agapé Lodge – a branch of Crowley’s OTO (Ordo Templi Orientalis). The OTO practiced what Crowley called Thelemic magick: a mix of sexual rituals, bastardized Kabbalism and rites taken from Freemasonry and medieval grimoires. Crowley espoused what he considered to be a scientific approach to the practice of magick, espousing “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion,” a statement that Parsons could stand behind. His own esoteric works were often mixed with his scientific experiments, and it has been reported that Parsons attempted to invoke spirits while working with rocket fuel.

As a leader of the Agapé Lodge, Parsons was passionate and generous, using his salary to fund the upkeep of the order while conducting occult experiments that he hoped would usher in a new age of magickal freedom. After his own wife left him, Parsons took up with his sister-in-law Sara Northrup, an OTO member herself. The two were magickal partners as well as romantic ones, and were soon joined in their occult studies by a third: future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Soon after they met, Hubbard and Parsons began a magickal ritual called The Babalon Working: a spell to invoke the power of a goddess. This divine being – identified by Crowley as both the Biblical whore of Babylon and the goddess Ishtar – would bring about the end of what they considered an age of repressive Christian morality. Crowley warned against this for a number of reasons, perhaps the most practical of which was that the self-styled “Wickedest Man in the World” considered Hubbard a con man an swindler. Parsons disregarded the warning.” [via]

The Sacred Rite of Magical Love

The Sacred Rite of Magical Love: A Ceremony of Word and Flesh by Maria de Naglowska, translated by Donald Traxler, has arrived at the Reading Room courtesy of Inner Traditions.

This work was released in February, earlier this year, and follows other recent books by the same author and translator from Inner Traditions including last year’s The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, and Sacrament and Advanced Sex Magic: The Hanging Mystery Initiation, and also a new issue of Magia Sexualis: Sexual Practices for Magical Power, widely attributed to Pascal Beverly Randolph but which survives only from Naglowska’s French translation and which was possibly supplemented by her, re-translated to English by Traxler, which last was just released subsequently in August.

“The first English translation of Maria de Naglowska’s sexually magical novella, Le rite sacré de l’amour magique

• Contains autobiographical material from Maria de Naglowska’s life

• Continues, in symbolic story form, the sexual initiatory teachings expounded in Naglowska’s The Light of Sex and Advanced Sex Magic

• Includes a summary of Naglowska’s religious doctrine in her own words

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.” [via]

The Sacred Rite of Magical Love: A Ceremony of Word and Flesh

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.”

New enlarged edition of The Secret Source

You may be interested in a new enlarged edition of The Secret Source: The Law of Attraction and its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages by Maja D’Aoust and Adam Parfrey published by Process Media.

“The new clothbound edition of The Secret Source includes a new chapter highlighting The Law of Attraction as promoted by secret societies through the ages, including Albert Pike for Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and new images from the fraternal brotherhoods.” [via]

“The Secret Source was originally published in 2007 with a paperback edition, and now it’s been released in an attractive hardcover edition with further material on Sex Magic of the 19th Century.” [via]

The White People and other Weird Stories

“The White People and other Weird Stories, By Arthur Machen” by Tim Cumming is a review of a new collection of Golden Dawn initiate Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics).

“Machen was a bestseller in his day, a member of the Golden Dawn, and intimately acquainted with the spiritualism, occultism, mediumship and excesses of the Decadent era. The Great God Pan (strangely omitted from this collection) and The Three Imposters were published in the 1890s, shocking society, and attracting invitations to lunch from Oscar Wilde.

Machen had already lived in London more than a decade, as he plied a trade as a freelance writer, translating Casanova and writing an essay on tobacco, before an inheritance allowed him to write what he fancied. Aubrey Beardsley and, later, Austin Osman Spare illustrated his works. But Wilde’s 1895 imprisonment turned the moral tide against Machen’s tales of supernatural horror. It wasn’t until the 1920s that his books began selling in large quantities. Alas, Machen had sold the rights decades before. TS Eliot was among those who secured him a Civil List pension against the poverty of his later years.

His great stories, and the key works in this collection, date from the Decadent 1890s. The haunted, hallucinogenic mix of spell workings, witchcraft and disguised sex magic in ‘The White People’ was hailed by HP Lovecraft as the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’), and it bears the imprint of one who believed in the ‘wild improbability’ of what he wrote.” [via]

Passing mention of Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons in an interview about a Lovecraft documentary.

Passing mention of Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons in an interview about a Lovecraft documentary “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown” [Amzn].

“LNN: What were the most rewarding, challenging, and insightful moments in making your documentary?

Woodward: When you’re interviewing talented and knowledgeable artists like Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub and Caitlin R. Kiernan, it’s impossible not to gain new insights into life let alone Lovecraft. Guillermo Del Toro recommended a book called Sex & Rockets which is all about the life of JPL co-founder Jack Parsons (a man who was a disciple of Aleister Crowley, practiced sex magic with L. Ron Hubbard, and died under mysterious circumstances while summoning “something” into his home).”

“LOVECRAFT: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN is a chronicle of the life, work and mind that created these weird tales as told by many of today’s luminaries of dark fantasy including John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon , Caitlin Kiernan, and Peter Straub.”

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Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks