Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) was an American physician, writer and occultist, and, as a free-born Black man who became a founding figure of Western esotericism, a person without close parallel in his century. Born in poverty in New York City and largely self-educated, he went to sea as a young man, read widely, and set up as a doctor specializing in what would now be called sexual and reproductive medicine.
He first came to notice within the Spiritualist movement of the 1850s as a celebrated trance medium, but he broke with Spiritualism's passive contact with the dead in favour of an active, disciplined pursuit of higher states, a shift that makes him, in the judgment of the historian John Patrick Deveney, a pivotal figure in the transformation of Spiritualism into modern occultism.
During and after the Civil War Randolph was also a public man: an abolitionist who worked to recruit Black soldiers for the Union and to educate the newly freed in the South, and one of the earliest African American novelists. He travelled to Europe and the Near East, where he claimed to have received esoteric teachings, and he wrote prolifically and sold his books and remedies by mail. He died at Toledo in 1875, by his own hand.