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| art by Harry Smith, Magus |
I asked Tom and Adie to pen a couple responses to the afterword for The Sex Magicians. They graciously did so. I've combined their remarks to wrap up our series.
from Tom Jackson (Archivist and Reporter)
Anyone who reads
The Sex Magicians by Robert Anton Wilson can tell it is both a porn novel and a work that aspires to be more than just porn. The sex magic aspects of the novel are pretty clear, and Gregory Arnott's afterward, "Tracking Down the Mama Vibe: Sexual Fantasy and the Nature of Magical Fiction," is largely aimed at readers such as myself who don't know much about sex magick. (Put it this way: Almost all of what I do know is derived from reading other work by Wilson).
Gregory ranges widely in his afterword, but I want to point out that he succeeds in two things that a reader might ask for. He provides a "for further reading" guide to the interested reader who might want to learn more about sex magick, directing us to books by authors such as Louis T. Culling, Francis King and Kenneth Grant.
And if the reader wants to try another novel in which sex plays an important role, Gregory recommends
Somnium by Steve Moore. I totally agree with Gregory that
Somnium is a classic fantasy novel which many readers would enjoy.
Gregory admits that Wilson "isn't exactly known for the subtlety of his sex scenes in the first place," and I have to admit, I thought the sex in
The Sex Magicians was the least interesting part of the book.
The question of how well a "serious" writer of fiction has succeeded when tackling a book that has elements of porn can be an interesting one. One of my favorite contemporary novelists, Janice Weber, also wrote a novel permeated with sex,
Swing Set. To my mind, the sex in Weber's novel is much more interesting than the sex in Wilson's. That might be partially because ultimately the two wrote novels for different audiences. Wilson's book is written explicitly for a porn publisher marketing books to people looking to buy porn; Weber's book is likely aimed, at least mostly, at the sort of people who read literary fiction such as Weber's other novels.
from Adie (Magical Dilettante)
Sex is not a lot of fun these days. At least, for many people it isn’t, fraught as it is with constant questions of ethics, boundaries, and our own seemingly bottomless anxieties. Worldwide, people are increasingly uninterested and unengaged in sex, or unable to find sexual partners, with record numbers of Gen Z-ers reporting being single and celibate. While there’s no right answer to the question “how many people should be having sex”, it’s hard to believe that these trends point to a particularly healthy cultural relationship with sex. People are scared, disillusioned, and frustrated. Men and women are increasingly distrustful and dismissive of each other.
I don’t believe that this state of affairs, no pun intended, is in any way sustainable. While I’m certainly not saying that everyone needs to be fucking all the time, or that everyone should be engaging in heterosexual P in V, the fact is that men and women need each other, to be able to engage in mutually respectful sexual, romantic, intellectual and emotional relationships.
In The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore hints at the damage the male/female divide has done to magic with his (nearly) equally dismissive treatment of the ooey-gooey, unrigorous, largely female world of neo-Paganism and the cynical, grasping, dudebro-infested milieu of Chaos Magic(k). The
solve is well underway, with no real indications of how and if it will ever end. So how do we
coagula?
In his typically erudite afterword to
The Sex Magicians, Gregory Arnott, my husband and frankly the best magical partner and guide one could ask for, makes an excellent case for sex magic, and Wilson’s approach in particular, as a necessary step in reuniting the masculine and the feminine. While his essay doesn’t specifically address the concerns I’ve outlined above, he laments the “psychedelic swirled world of instant pornography and spiritual depredation” and implores us to “heed the call of [Wilson’s] revolution”. While of course
The Sex Magicians does not hold up in some ways, in other ways it just might be the book we need at the moment, as a gateway into the Yesodian world of fantasy, play, and liberation. Gregory is completely right that we need to find a responsible balance between the imagination and the real; we see far too many examples of slippage between these realms, ranging from people getting engaged to Chat GPT boyfriends to extreme porn-obsessed guys hurting and even killing their partners to fulfill their fantasies of choking or testicular inflation. I guess the key is also in what kind of fantasies we want to entertain. Are they about communion or isolation? Are we using our fellow humans as toys and objects, or as partners in mutual exploration and alchemical balance? Are we recognizing the joyous, silly-yet-extremely serious, transformative potential in sex?
Robert Anton Wilson is guiding us towards the right kinds of fantasies, and it’s up to us to bring them into the 21st century. And we should follow Gregory’s, and Wilson’s, advice and use one of the tried-and true magical frameworks, like the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, to guide us. Our current definition of sexual freedom, quite frankly, isn’t working. We’re unmoored and imbalanced. We need to balance freedom with connection and mutual responsibility, emotion with intellect, the inner masculine with the inner feminine. The unrestrained imagination of Yesod must be grounded by the earthly awareness of Malkuth. This is a tall order, and it’s probably easier for people to cling to their grievances against the opposite sex and look for meaning in escapism, in porn or video games or social media circle-jerking. But the path is out there, for anyone brave enough to find it.
