emancipation

Essays
The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics

The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics

Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (b. 1825), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation. more