What Is Sex Magic?
A brief overview of the history and practice of sex magic. Plus fun facts re: flying ointment, temple prostitutes, and penis-stealing. And raunchy, witchy writing prompts!
Welcome back to The Cauldron!
The Cauldron features artful nudes from SF-based photographer and mysterious gentleman Jose de los Reyes. See more of his work on Instagram.
Defining sex magic
Sex magic is transcendent. It’s a manifestation of will and power, a communion with the divine within yourself. In more concrete terms, sex magic means “[…] using the power of your sexual energy as a vehicle for your will and imagination, focusing on a personal goal and then transforming your goal into reality by accessing higher states of consciousness.”
The history of sex magic
Last month’s post, The Gods Who Die, describes the Sacred Marriage as a ritual sex rite ensuring a prosperous harvest. The ceremony is a re-enactment, where humans stand in for the gods, and also one of the original examples of sex magic at work: through sex, the couple takes on the gods’ life-giving powers.
How does Isis bring Osiris back to life? Sex magic.
December’s post offers Inanna and her consort Dumuzi as an example. Inanna is an ancient Sumerian goddess, a predecessor of Aphrodite. The most important performance of Inanna worship was a New Year’s celebration culminating in a sacred marriage rite that wed the king—a stand-in for Dumuzi—to Inanna herself, represented by the high priestess. Their union ensured the land’s abundance, and the worshipers’ survival.
Fast forward to the Roman Empire, where magic of all kinds was ubiquitous: according to The Conversation, erotic spells were especially popular. Along the Mediterranean, magic was typically associated with the chthonic deities like Hermes and Persephone, who “went between the worlds of the living and the dead to carry out these spells.”
In the Mediterranean, curse tablets with magical inscriptions were buried in cemeteries, dropped down wells, and left at other liminal locations. “[…] Buried in those dark places, the tablets could work their magic on the living […].”
Big witch energy
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is taken in by a lone witch on an island. This witch is Circe. Her portrayal “[…] may be considered the first extant portrait of a witch in Greek literature,” according to Daniel Ogden, author of Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Circe’s powers include necromancy, invisibility, and—you guessed it—sex magic.
The temple prostitute: fact or fiction?
The best-known sex magic figure of antiquity is the temple prostitute. Kristen Sollee, author of the fantastic text Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, describes the “sacred whore” as uniting “[…] the spiritual and the sexual historically. They were women who were priestesses in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, [and] India, and served as the embodiment of the goddess of love and sex and fertility over whose temple they presided. Basically men could come and have sex with them and in that union they could reach a higher state of religious connection.”
Sollee acknowledges that the existence of the temple prostitute is highly debatable. Many scholars claim sacred prostitution did not exist. Others frame the practice of temple sex as more slavery than sex work. However, as Sollee points out, even if the empowered temple prostitute is pure myth, the concept has inspired many contemporary sex workers and witches: “[…] so if it wasn’t real back then, it certainly is now.” She writes in Bust:
Just as women who defied sex in the ancient world were later persecuted as witches, modern female sex workers are shamed for using their bodies to survive and thrive in a culture that has never granted them complete bodily autonomy. Nevertheless, the legacy of sacred whoredom is palpably alive today amongst many witch-identified sex workers who are harnessing sex magic in their professional practices. Weaving a spell of seduction, like any spell, requires an intimacy with both the physical and metaphysical realms.
Sex magic in the Middle Ages
In medieval Europe, witches weren’t assumed to be women. Most of the books on advanced magic were in Latin, which the majority of women (and men, actually) couldn’t read. Then Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum came along. This was THE text on witches, a salacious and outrageous compendium of all the terrible things witches could do, and what could be done to them (hello medieval torture porn). The Malleus Maleficarum provided a textual association between witchcraft, women, and sex, which mirrored the attitude already held by many clergymen. As the academic article “Women, Men, and Love Magic in Late Medieval English Pastoral Manuals” explains:
Toward the end of their notorious discussion of why women were more likely to be witches than men, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum described how magic could be used to affect love and sex by “diverting the minds of men to irregular love” and “impeding the procreative force.” Not surprisingly, given the subject matter of the chapter, the people they described as most likely to do this were women, especially women who were engaged in illicit sexual relationships: “those who are more inflamed with the purpose of satisfying their base lustings, like adulteresses, female fornicators and the concubines of powerful men.”
Another witchy power, alleged by the Malleus Maleficarum: penis-stealing.
A quick trip on the ‘ol broomstick: witches and hallucinogen-laced flying ointment
During the Middle Ages, some women interrogated (read: tortured) for witchcraft confessed to applying ointments made with vision-inducing poisons like henbane, mandrake, deadly nightshade, and ergot to their broomsticks. They then straddled the brooms, thereby absorbing the flying ointment through the skin, and lifted off. If only the victims of witch hunts could’ve flown away…
A newly-made witch rubs a magical ointment all over her body in The Master and Margarita, a wonderfully absurd novel written under Stalinist rule. The ointment is a gift from the Devil. It smells noxious but makes the witch glow, and fly.
If you’re intrigued by flying ointment, you can easily obtain some on Etsy. (You can also find human teeth. Don’t ask how I know that…)
Aleister Crowley: “The Beast”
Aleister Crowley was a real character, to put it mildly. Born in England in 1875, Crowley was known as a poet, magician, journalist, alchemist, philosopher, spy, and, in the UK, “the wickedest man in the world.” He liked to refer to himself as the Beast 666, though the nickname had little to do with the devil. Crowley also did lots of drugs and had lots of sex.
In the 1960’s, musicians and occult fans fell in love with Crowley and his rockstar-ish ways. His face appears on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover. Some speculate Crowley is actually Sgt. Pepper himself.
Crowley was a practitioner of magic, which he spelled “magick.” According to Vice, he was also “the most notorious sex magic practitioner in recent history.” To Crowley, sex was "the supreme magical power."
In Crowley’s age, many notable occultists mixed popular Spiritualism with Romantic ideas about the contemporary meaning of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Eastern religious theory and symbolism. Crowley became a member of the most influential group of this period, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which practiced ceremonial magic.
Bram Stoker was also a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
After Crowley left the order, he traveled through India and China, sampling Hindu Tantrism, yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism along the way. Eventually, he became the head of the UK chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an order which employed sex rituals in initiation ceremonies.
In 1904, Crowley founded a new religion called Thelema (still active today), which draws from the I-Ching, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Hindu Tantra, Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, Greek, and Egyptian mythology. He based Thelema on the tenet “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which derives from French author François Rabelais’ work Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Another Ordo Templi Orientis member also went on to start his own religion. That person was L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology.
In 1947, Crowley died alone and broke. But he left behind a number of texts he’d authored on magic, sex magic, yoga, and ritual theory. He also wrote plays and published two novels. His work influenced Gerald Gardner, the “Father of Witchcraft.” The two met just before Crowley’s death.
The Father of Witches: Gerald Gardner
Born in England in 1884, Gerald Gardner lived in Sri Lanka and Malaysia in his youth, where he developed an interest in folklore and ritual magic. When he went back to England in the 1930’s, he joined a coven with ancient roots, or so he said.
In 1954, Gardner published Witchcraft Today, in which he claimed the coven he’d joined was practicing pagan rites that had somehow survived Christian dominion and assimilation. He’d found the spiritual missing link, in other words. Except the coven might not have existed and even if it did, it wasn’t a perfectly preserved remnant of the past. Nevertheless, Gardner’s claim lent credence to the myth that those persecuted during the witch trials were actually practitioners of a magical pagan religion.
Wiccan beliefs and symbology are a mix of several pre-Christian religions from Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Gardner also took inspiration from the Freemasons and other occultists, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Aleister Crowley was once a prominent member.
Gardner and his cohorts crafted a Wiccan sacred sex ritual called the “Great Rite,” intended to symbolize the union between male and female—the divine polarity of god and goddess. (The male/female duality is a tenet of traditional Wicca, which can be problematic in an agender and non-binary-inclusive world.) Originally, to perform the Great Rite, the priest and priestess would have sex before their coven. Today, many perform this ceremony symbolically with a chalice and blade.
Gardner’s epitaph reads "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess."
It’s hard to underestimate the influence of Wicca on contemporary paganism. Still considered the largest modern pagan or neopagan religion, there are several schools of Wicca, including Gardnerian, Celtic, and Alexandrian. There are goddess-worshipping covens like Dianic Wicca, and Wicca-derived practices such as Feri. Many specific rituals and celebrations that come from Wicca are widely practiced by witches who do not otherwise identify as Wiccan.
The erotic
Gardner died in 1964, only ten years after the publication of Witchcraft Today. Meanwhile the occult was all the rage in the 1960’s. Elements from a swath of cultures, including Tantric traditions, were amalgamated with borrowed Native American religious practices to form what we now think of as New Ageism. As New Ageism endures and evolves, a discussion of cultural appropriation flows right alongside it: Crowley and Gardner have been analyzed and critiqued through a post-colonial intersectional feminist lens.
In the late 60’s, female sex magic practitioners started “coming out of the broom closet” to reclaim their power and define their own identities. In 1978, Audre Lorde issued the final word on the erotic with her speech “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power,” delivered at a conference on women’s history at Mount Holyoke College:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Sex magic today
Modern witches exist across cultures, genders, race, class, and religion. There are Buddhist witches, Christian witches, hedge witches, hoodwitches, kitchen witches—hello! And hell yeah, all kinds of witches are doing sex magic.
A modern Thelemite writes:
It is ambivalence towards sex magic that has reinforced our ambivalence towards sex and sexuality; it is this that has left us stumbling to keep up, rather than at the vanguard of social progress. And there are historical reasons for ambivalence, and this was necessary at times – but now is the time to move forward. We must come, once more, to see sex as sacred. This is the whole focus of occultism, of mysticism – it always has been. This is our Great Mystery of manifestation and energy, as it appears in Malkuth, veiled in nature. It is not just woman this metaphor is applied to, but sex – sex difference, sex energy – itself.
In researching for this post, I skimmed a lot of “manifest through your yoni!” articles about sex magic: “It’s like creating a vision board,” reports Women’sHealth, “but hotter.” One essay turned out to be an ad for high-end lingerie. (I did enjoy this piece in Vice—yay crystal dildos!—and this article from sheknows is practical yet serious.) Sure, sex magic can be just for funsies. It’s your magic, you do you. It’s also spellwork, and therefore potentially powerful and transformative. As Audre Lorde said, “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world [...].”
Writing Prompts
From Pick Your Potions’ Study Coven's “Smutty Study” Syllabus
The advertising copy for broom-style vibrators.
A 17th century magician’s guide to hosting a successful orgy.