Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician

John Patrick Deveney is a historian of Western esotericism, and this State University of New York Press book is his academic biography of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth century Black American spiritualist, Rosicrucian and originator of Western sex magic teaching. Its strength is archival, Deveney worked from primary manuscript sources to establish the originality of Randolph's own sex-magic doctrine and to separate his genuine writings from the later redaction and elaboration published under Maria de Naglowska's name, a distinction that had been blurred in earlier popular accounts. Its limit is the same one any biography of a marginal, poorly documented nineteenth century figure carries, gaps in the record mean some claims about Randolph's life rest on inference from fragmentary evidence, which Deveney is careful to flag rather than paper over.