Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism

Hugh B. Urban is a scholar of religion at Ohio State University specializing in the history of Western esotericism, and this University of California Press book is his standard scholarly history of sex magic in modern Western esoteric traditions, tracing its development from Paschal Beverly Randolph through Aleister Crowley and later figures. Its strength is that it frames this whole current as a distinctively modern phenomenon shaped by nineteenth and twentieth century concerns, rather than treating it as an unbroken transmission from ancient practice, an argument grounded in Urban's own close reading of the primary esoteric texts across this period. Its limit is that it surveys a broad current across more than a century, so a claim needing biographical depth on one specific figure, Randolph for instance, is better served by a focused biography alongside this synthesis.