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Sexual Magick: and Other Essays
A hard-to-find volume with a number of essays on sexual magick, chaos magick, and other subjects of esoteric interest.
128 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1865
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October 31, 2010
If you are looking for some 'how to' manual involving dark side practices, this is not the book for you. Rather it is a sensitive and humane investigation of the role of the sexual in modern magical practice and it is thoroughly liberal in tone. Katon Shual is the pseudonym of the Oxford-based magician, Mogg Morgan, who has done much in such circles to bring the somewhat harsh and masculinised world of Crowley and Grant into line with modern liberal and tolerant culture.
The high point for me was an extended 'rant', allegedly from the God Set, against not Christianity (the usual target of neo-pagan resentment) but late paganism as it developed under the Roman elite. For a simple account of how neo-pagans see sexuality in quasi-political and cultural terms, pages 86 to 92 are all you need to read:
"Roman law is the culprit and not Christian ethics. And you have been living under Pax Romana right up until your so-called Industrial Revolution. And Roman Law,may I remind you, is hardly less repressive than the flesh-hating creed of Christianity."
'Set' certainly has a point here and he backs it up with sound evidence in the next few paragraphs.
But the book loses momentum somewhat before this. It is short and most of what needs to be said is well said in the first two articles. The last two have interesting material on ambiguities in our sexuality and on the incorporation of the environment as analogy for the body (a core Tantrik concept) but it is all a little bitty and oddly unresolved, easy enough to read but without a clear theme that would pull all this material together. This inability to sustain an argument that moves easily as a narrative seems to be embedded in magic(k)al culture and it represents my most common frustration with its literature - throwing four articles or talks together does nothing to help this, especially as the articles/talks themselves are not always fully coherent in terms of their narrative thrust.
This first two articles represent a mere eighty pages or so. Nevertheless, there is, in these, fruitful and opinionated material on the history of attitudes to sexuality within the magical revival and on the 'kundalini' or serpent power concept but it has to be said that, again, Shual presents but does not always integrate his material well. There are indulgent intrusions of material that clearly mean a lot to him but look a bit like a cut-and-paste, interpolations to entertain his listeners, where he wants to make a point yet cannot seem to be able to contextualise that point clearly to readers. Some more rigorous editing would have been a courtesy to a reading audience.
Much of the book also seems to be a hidden polemic (appropriate in the mid-1990s but less relevant now) for acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and lesbianism as all capable of following through on the insights of his own preferred amalagam of the thelemite and tantrik traditions. I am sure he is right on the basis that anything is intellectually possible and permitted but, looked back on from a fifteen year distance, the book seems to be more geared towards entering the LGBT debate, somewhat guardedly since it was a minefield then as now, than a brave account of what sexual magic actually is, what it means and how it can be used.
There is, despite the dramatic cover and promise in the subject matter, an odd diffidence about the text - as if the author is quite determined to humanise and liberalise his material but is nervous of putting a foot wrong in a difficult and touchy community. Similarly, the references to the Setian or Typhonian tradition of Grant and to the Nath tradition of the Tantriks (the two primary influences on Shual) contain lumps of speculation. We have got rather used to this from reading Grant but the method has a tendency to send the reader off into obscurity rather than gnosis. The numerology thing that thelemites do still strikes me as absurd and the readings of the meanings of ancient religions remain suspect. This tradition is as reconstructionist as any other neo-pagan religion if less likely to admit this than most because of the seriousness given to Crowley's revelation from 'Aiwass'.
My main quarrel with the book is that, like all magical traditionalisms, it tries too hard to reconcile past insights with modern discoveries. It often puzzles me why we can't just cut to the chase and give modern science and instinctive libertarian insights more leeway without cluttering our new world with analogical complexities and obscurities, references back to truly alien cultures, attempts to draw complex parallels between chakras and the endocrine system and acceptance of the rebellious but sometimes half-baked visions of spiritual leaders who still had one cultural foot in the attitudes of the late-imperial world. Yes, these were all exciting, valuable and true in their time but are we not in danger of getting 'stuck' and turning liberation into psychotherapeutic cultism for the few at the expense of the liberation of the many?
I can see that past rebels in our own culture and the insights of the tantrics have been instrumental in getting many people to shift their mental models from acceptance of Roman oppressions to new and free ways of thinking. However, there is a real danger that we fail to move on from these 'magical' sources and develop a more appropriate post-industrial and post-modern mentality that accepts the insights of existential philosophy and science as way stations to mass liberation without need for cults and ritual beyond their individual psychotherapeutic value. A paradox of a book - a bit weak in the round but with value as a trigger for thought on one's own account if you have never thought deeply about sexuality as a spiritual matter rather than just as procreation, rutting or a tool in power plays between the genders.
The high point for me was an extended 'rant', allegedly from the God Set, against not Christianity (the usual target of neo-pagan resentment) but late paganism as it developed under the Roman elite. For a simple account of how neo-pagans see sexuality in quasi-political and cultural terms, pages 86 to 92 are all you need to read:
"Roman law is the culprit and not Christian ethics. And you have been living under Pax Romana right up until your so-called Industrial Revolution. And Roman Law,may I remind you, is hardly less repressive than the flesh-hating creed of Christianity."
'Set' certainly has a point here and he backs it up with sound evidence in the next few paragraphs.
But the book loses momentum somewhat before this. It is short and most of what needs to be said is well said in the first two articles. The last two have interesting material on ambiguities in our sexuality and on the incorporation of the environment as analogy for the body (a core Tantrik concept) but it is all a little bitty and oddly unresolved, easy enough to read but without a clear theme that would pull all this material together. This inability to sustain an argument that moves easily as a narrative seems to be embedded in magic(k)al culture and it represents my most common frustration with its literature - throwing four articles or talks together does nothing to help this, especially as the articles/talks themselves are not always fully coherent in terms of their narrative thrust.
This first two articles represent a mere eighty pages or so. Nevertheless, there is, in these, fruitful and opinionated material on the history of attitudes to sexuality within the magical revival and on the 'kundalini' or serpent power concept but it has to be said that, again, Shual presents but does not always integrate his material well. There are indulgent intrusions of material that clearly mean a lot to him but look a bit like a cut-and-paste, interpolations to entertain his listeners, where he wants to make a point yet cannot seem to be able to contextualise that point clearly to readers. Some more rigorous editing would have been a courtesy to a reading audience.
Much of the book also seems to be a hidden polemic (appropriate in the mid-1990s but less relevant now) for acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and lesbianism as all capable of following through on the insights of his own preferred amalagam of the thelemite and tantrik traditions. I am sure he is right on the basis that anything is intellectually possible and permitted but, looked back on from a fifteen year distance, the book seems to be more geared towards entering the LGBT debate, somewhat guardedly since it was a minefield then as now, than a brave account of what sexual magic actually is, what it means and how it can be used.
There is, despite the dramatic cover and promise in the subject matter, an odd diffidence about the text - as if the author is quite determined to humanise and liberalise his material but is nervous of putting a foot wrong in a difficult and touchy community. Similarly, the references to the Setian or Typhonian tradition of Grant and to the Nath tradition of the Tantriks (the two primary influences on Shual) contain lumps of speculation. We have got rather used to this from reading Grant but the method has a tendency to send the reader off into obscurity rather than gnosis. The numerology thing that thelemites do still strikes me as absurd and the readings of the meanings of ancient religions remain suspect. This tradition is as reconstructionist as any other neo-pagan religion if less likely to admit this than most because of the seriousness given to Crowley's revelation from 'Aiwass'.
My main quarrel with the book is that, like all magical traditionalisms, it tries too hard to reconcile past insights with modern discoveries. It often puzzles me why we can't just cut to the chase and give modern science and instinctive libertarian insights more leeway without cluttering our new world with analogical complexities and obscurities, references back to truly alien cultures, attempts to draw complex parallels between chakras and the endocrine system and acceptance of the rebellious but sometimes half-baked visions of spiritual leaders who still had one cultural foot in the attitudes of the late-imperial world. Yes, these were all exciting, valuable and true in their time but are we not in danger of getting 'stuck' and turning liberation into psychotherapeutic cultism for the few at the expense of the liberation of the many?
I can see that past rebels in our own culture and the insights of the tantrics have been instrumental in getting many people to shift their mental models from acceptance of Roman oppressions to new and free ways of thinking. However, there is a real danger that we fail to move on from these 'magical' sources and develop a more appropriate post-industrial and post-modern mentality that accepts the insights of existential philosophy and science as way stations to mass liberation without need for cults and ritual beyond their individual psychotherapeutic value. A paradox of a book - a bit weak in the round but with value as a trigger for thought on one's own account if you have never thought deeply about sexuality as a spiritual matter rather than just as procreation, rutting or a tool in power plays between the genders.
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