A Randolph Book That Randolph Did Not Write

Magia Sexualis is a systematic treatise on sexual magic first published in French in 1931 under the name of Paschal Beverly Randolph, but Randolph had been dead since 1875, and the book was in fact assembled, edited and substantially composed by the Russian-French occultist Maria de Naglowska, who translated and freely expanded fragments attributed to Randolph more than half a century after his death. The result presents a full account of magical practice centred on sexual energy, and it became influential in French and later international occult circles, but its relationship to Randolph's own teaching is loose: how much genuinely derives from him and how much is Naglowska's own doctrine (she led her own "Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow" and had distinctive ideas) is impossible to disentangle cleanly. It is therefore a doubly mediated text, a French book of 1931, shaped by its editor's own system, circulating under the name of a dead American whose actual writings, such as Eulis!, are quite differently phrased. Hugh Urban treats it as a case study in how the Randolph legacy was transmitted and transformed.