A late work of Paschal Beverly Randolph, published in 1874, in which he set out, in guarded and often oblique language, the sexual and magical doctrine of the circle he called the Brotherhood of Eulis. The book teaches that the affections and the sexual force are the hidden springs of human power, and that the will held clearly at the moment of union can shape health, fortune, and spiritual attainment. Written for initiates rather than the general reader, it veils as much as it reveals, and its full teaching was meant to be completed by personal instruction.
Facts
Scholarship
Critical EditionNo modern critical edition exists. The deliberately guarded language of the original 1874 printing has made annotated scholarly editions rare, and readers rely chiefly on facsimile reprints of the original text itself. 1 First PublishedFirst published in 1874, one of the last works Randolph issued before his death the following year, and the fullest public statement he made of doctrine otherwise reserved for initiates of his own order. 1 TransmissionIts teaching passed onward chiefly through Randolph's own students and the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis he founded rather than through wide open publication, and later European occultists including Theodor Reuss drew on his sexual magical doctrine, not always with full attribution. 2 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / CompilerPaschal Beverly Randolph 1 Text
Literary Form Attributions
TraditionWestern esoteric / Rosicrucian 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionNo modern critical edition exists; the deliberately guarded language of the original 1874 printing has kept annotated scholarly editions rare, and readers rely chiefly on facsimile reprints of the original. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteWritten in guarded, often oblique language partly to protect the sexual doctrine it describes from outside readers, a deliberate obscurity the historian John Patrick Deveney's biography treats as central to interpreting Randolph's late work rather than as mere stylistic excess. 1 Learn More
Randolph's Sexual Magic, in Guarded Language
Eulis! is a late work of Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), the African American physician, Spiritualist and occultist, published in 1874, in which he set out, in deliberately guarded and often oblique language, the sexual and magical doctrine of the circle he called the Brotherhood of Eulis. Its central teaching is that the affections and the sexual force are the great creative power in the human being, and that the moment of union, rightly used with focused will and prayer, is the supreme opportunity for magical and spiritual realisation.
Randolph is a pivotal and long-underrated figure: he is arguably the first to introduce systematic sex magic into modern Western occultism, decades before it became central to the O.T.O. and to Crowley, and his ideas passed, sometimes without acknowledgement, and sometimes distorted, into the later tradition. As a free man of color writing frankly about sexuality in nineteenth-century America, he worked under real social danger, which partly accounts for the veiled manner of the book. The historian Hugh Urban and the biographer John Patrick Deveney have recovered his importance.
What the Guarded Language Is Guarding
Eulis! is Randolph's statement of his central doctrine, and the reason it is difficult to read is that he could not say plainly what it is about. His position was that the moment of sexual union is a condition in which the will, correctly directed, can act on the world and on the participants, and that this is the key to the whole of practical occultism. Writing that in 1874, in America, in a book he expected to be seized, required circumlocution, and the book is accordingly full of it.
The material is arranged as a set of teachings on the will, on the conditions required, and on the ethics of the thing, with the operative content distributed among passages that read as moral exhortation until the reader has understood what is being described. Randolph insisted throughout on the mutual consent and the mutual benefit of both participants, which distinguishes his position sharply from some of what followed.
His influence is larger than his readership. Randolph was a free Black man writing in the American nineteenth century, and the sexual magic that reached twentieth century European occultism, including the Ordo Templi Orientis, runs back to him whether or not those who used it acknowledged the source.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Attributed To
Eulis! (1874) is the work of Paschal Beverly Randolph.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician
John Patrick Deveney, State University of New York Press, 1997On Eulis! and the Brotherhood of Eulis
2. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
Hugh B. Urban, University of California Press, 2006On Randolph's published works
Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2012on Randolph's place in Western esotericism
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.