Paschal Beverly Randolph

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.

Randolph's most consequential and most controversial teaching concerned sex magic, the idea that the energies of sexual union, rightly directed by the will and imagination at the moment of climax, could be used to work magical effect and attain spiritual illumination. He appears to be the figure who introduced a systematic doctrine of this kind into the modern Western tradition, presenting it in works such as Eulis! and in privately circulated manuscripts. The teaching was scandalous in Victorian America and contributed to legal trouble and to his marginalization.

He founded a series of initiatory bodies devoted to his interpretation of Rosicrucianism, including the Brotherhood of Eulis and organizations that fed into the later Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, presenting himself as the head of a Rosicrucian order and grounding his authority in his travels in the East rather than in European lodge lineages.

His influence far outran his fame. His sexual-magical teachings passed, in altered form, into the German occultist Theodor Reuss and the Ordo Templi Orientis, and so into the work of Aleister Crowley, becoming a central thread of twentieth-century magic. That much of this influence was unacknowledged, and that its Black American originator was long written out of the story, has made the recovery of Randolph a significant chapter in the modern history of Western esotericism, the context in which this atlas records him.