Sex magic is the use of sexual arousal, activity and orgasm as a means of raising and directing power toward a magical or spiritual aim, a current within modern Western esotericism. Its practitioners hold that the intense energy generated by sexual excitement and release can be consciously channeled, focused, at the moment of climax, upon a clearly formed intention, a visualised sigil or a desired outcome, so that the sexual act becomes a vehicle for the magician's will rather than an end in itself. The idea that sexuality carries a potent spiritual force, and that this force can be harnessed rather than merely indulged or suppressed, is the common thread across the tradition's various forms.
Modern Western sex magic took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph is generally credited as its pioneer in the West; the idea was developed within the Ordo Templi Orientis, which made a form of sex magic the secret of its higher degrees, and elaborated extensively by Aleister Crowley within his system of Thelema. These Western developments drew inspiration, often loosely and selectively, from their authors' understanding of Eastern tantra, and the relationship is frequently misrepresented: the historical tantric traditions are overwhelmingly matters of ritual, mantra and yoga in which sexual practice, where it appears at all, is a rare, initiated and often symbolic element, and modern sex magic is a distinct Western construction rather than a direct continuation of them. Within contemporary occultism sex magic remains a recognised if controversial practice, treated by its practitioners as one of the more powerful and demanding of magical techniques.