Excerpts from Paschal
Beverly Randolph’s Eulis!, and an Introduction to His Work
by Teresa Burns
Of all the magicians
and esotericists associated with the nineteenth century occult revival, few
were more simultaneously flamboyant, mysterious, villified, and popular than
Paschal Beverly Randolph. His father may have been Edmund Randolph, the
slave-owning governor of Virginia who was George Washington’s first Attorney
General; or he may have been William Beverly Randolph of the same wealthy
Virginia family; or an unknown “William Randon,” and/or a descendent of
Pocahontas. His mother Flora Clark, depending on when the story is told, may
have been a Black princess from Madagascar, a native-American, an abandoned
African-American mistress of a wealthy white man, or all of the above.
Orphaned at an early
age, he grew up on the streets of New York City in the 1840s before re-emerging
as part of the early American spiritualist movement. Soon an “M.D.” appeared
after his name and the spiritualist became a physician whose specialty was sex.
By the late 1860s he was “The Rosicrucian” who wrote about magic mirrors and
founded the oldest Rosicrucian order in the United States, the Fraternitas
Rosae Crucis; by 1873, after surviving a series of personal disasters, he
published The New Mola, where he declares he will reveal the secret of the
Ansairah priesthood of Syria.
The very next year,
1874, Randolph published his most famous work, Eulis!, which included a long
treatise on “Affectional Alchemy.” The excerpts here are all published from
that work. Randolph seemed to be trying to revive a “Brotherhood of Eulis,”
styled after an initiatory process he likened to the Eleusinian Mysteries. His
final two works, The Ansairetic Mystery and The Mysteries of Eulis, were
distributed privately, presumably to Brotherhood members, but were published for
the general public in 1997.

In his tour de force
intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century occult revival in
English-speaking countries, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin
says:
Randolph’s books, taken
as a whole, contain the nineteenth century’s fullest compendium of practical
magic: not the ceremonial kind found in Barrett’s Magus, nor the Ficinian and
Kabbalistic kind compiled by Eliphas Levi, but magic presented without antique
jargon as a way for modern men and women to increase their happiness and to
control their lives. The essentials of his practical teaching are contained in
Seership, which is on the use of magic mirrors to develop clairvoyance and
other psychic powers, and in The Ansairetic Mysteries and Eulis, which is the
longest of his sexual treatises. Both books would become fundamental documents
of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
John Patrick Deveney,
in his preface to Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth Century Black American
Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician, says:
In occult circles,
where his name and works continue to be known, Randolph has become more of a
myth than a man, the subject of much misinformation and vast conspiratorial
theories. From the early 1860s on he was ‘The Rosicrucian,’ associated in the
popular mind with crystal gazing, drugs (especially hashish), secret Oriental
brotherhoods, and sex. He was infatuated with women from his earliest years,
and also spent most of his mature life trying to improve the lot of women
trapped in Victorian marriages by teaching his notions of true sexuality. Beyond
this, however, and fundamentally he was a practical occultist and a sexual
magician, with a coherent and imaginative view of the universal role of
sexuality. His work stands out strongly from the antiquarian compilations of
the armchair occult theoreticians of the era and from the secondhand platitudes
of the spiritualist movement from which he emerged. He was the forerunner of
modern occultism and it was to him more than to anyone else that the
transformation of the occult world from the 1870s through the 1890s is due.
Why, then, did he wind
up nearly forgotten? Certainly his race was one reason—even while the Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor used and revised some of his writings, Madame Blavatsky
and others referred to him as the “Nigger.” Gustave Meyrink, who thought enough
of Randolph to translate one of his novels into German, used the same term.
Randolph himself said that much of what he knew was dismissed until he labeled
it “Rosicrucian”: “Early in life I discovered that the fact of my ancestry on one
side, being what they were, was an effetual estopa1 on my preferment and
advancement, usefulness and influence. I became famous, but never popular. I
studied Rosicrucianism, found it suggestive, and loved its mysticisms. So I
called myself ‘The Rosicrucian’, and gave my thought to the world as
Rosicrucian thought; and lo! the world greeted with loud applause what it
supposed had its origin and birth elsewhere than in the soul of P. B.
Randolph.”
Through the 1860s,
Randolph was heavily involved in the Abolitionist movement; he dedicated a book
to Abraham Lincoln and was, according to some, Lincoln’s friend. After
Lincoln’s assassination he was one of those accompanying the body west on the
train, but was asked to get off because of his race. For all of Randolph’s
struggles against injustice, one might suppose he would appear in history books
only a few lines below Frederick Douglas, and arguably Randolph was the second
most well-known African American man in the United States. Like Douglas, he was
an Abolitionist; like Douglas, he sought to improve the economic status of
southern Blacks through education; like Douglas, he spoke up for women’s
rights.
The Abolitionist
movement and spiritualism went hand-in-hand, so the problem for those closest
to him wasn’t Randolph’s occult beliefs. It was that he seemed to make enemies
very easily, even among the communities he was trying to help. Also, while both
men were writers, today Douglas’s prose, in works like Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, sounds very modern compared to that of Randolph, and most
readers’ views of race and gender today are more similar to that of Douglas.
While Randolph was a fiery anti-slavery speaker, he prose is full of whole
passages discussing the innate differences between people based on their race,
nationality, hair color, or eye color; his attitudes in these cases often seem
more similar to those of the whites who made racial slurs against him than
those of his political allies like Douglas. He is at pains to say he is a descendent
of the “Queen of Madagascar” and “not a drop of continental African, or true
Negro blood runs through me,” though he quickly adds that it wouldn’t matter if
there were.
Similarly, while
Randolph’s defense of women runs throughout his work, and while his celebration
of love and sexuality as a cure for all ills seems a revolutionary thought for
white Victorians, he has very fixed ideas about gender roles. Though he came of
age in the New York spiritualism communities where views on the spirit world
were intermingled with ideas ranging from free love, socialism, feminism,
vegetarianism, natural cures, and tax reform, he would recant spiritualism and
free love by the late 1850s, after journeying through the English and French
occult circles. (Frederick Douglas, meanwhile, would be nominated by another
spiritualist feminist, Victoria Woodhull, to be her vice-presidential candidate
when she became the first woman to run for U.S. President in 1872.)
In England, as Randolph
performed as a spiritualist and public trance speaker, he says he “became
acquainted with a few reputed Rosicrucians” who included Hargrave Jennings,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Kenneth McKenzie and others. He became interested in
crystal scrying, and became the correspondent of many others who would revive a
“Rosicrucianism” based on arcane European and English texts in ways Randolph’s
never would be. He met and for many years corresponded with Frederick Hockley,
who had his own John Dee and Edward Kelley style of scrying set-up; he
befriended Emma Harding Britten, who later formed the “Orphic Circle.” Then
Randolph went to France, where depending upon the account, he met everyone from
Eliphas Levi to Napoleon III.
Looking for a moment of
the different accounts of his encounter with Levi will show the problem with
trying to piece together a history of Paschal Beverly Randolph from the
accounts of other esotericists. R.S. Clymer, in his colorful but
hard-to-swallow history entitled The Rosicrucian raternity in America (1928),
devotes many pages to Randolph’s time in France, and informs us that during
this time, “Napolean ruled over the life F of the nation, while Levi ruled its
mind. In his own right Randolph himself was a ruler. His knowledge was
frequently considered incredible for a mortal. He was aware that the
three—Napoleon, Levi, and himself—were to meet in order to fulfill the Karma of
previous incarnations.” And indeed, says Clymer, this happens. Soon Clymer relays
an amazing story reputedly from Levi, where Levi recounts a series of accurate
predictions about his life given by Randolph, and Randolph’s vision of Levi as
Appollonius of Tyana.
Unfortunately, this
almost certainly never happened. Levi’s reported evocation of Appollonius of
Tyana occurred in England in 1854, while Randolph was still in the United
States.
But before we dismiss
all of the rest of the Randolph stories with this one, consider the problem
Randolph presents: he mixes with almost all of the men and women associated
with starting different esoteric secret societies in the United States. He
writes the only detailed book on magic mirrors in his time period; ties scrying
with sex-magic, then shifts to another topic before anyone catches up. Most of
the late nineteenth century esoteric orders, save those he founded, don’t claim
him, and its nearly impossible to separate out what is due to racism and what
is due to Randolph’s erratic behavior or how much the first caused the second.
Most of what we have in writing is sheer gossip, most of it full of errors. For
instance, no one knows for sure why Randolph and Madame Blavatsky developed a
sudden, pointed hatred for each other. Some say they had a telepathic
connection Blavatsky detested; many recount their “magickal duel” that
supposedly caused Randolph’s death by suicide. Writers from Meyrink to Ayton –
but notably, all white writers -- recount the ways this duel took place:
usually it involves a magickal pistol and Blavatsky turning Randolph’s “Black
Magic” back upon himself so he commits suicide. Yet in many other places
Randolph writes against “Black Magic.”
In his biography of
Randolph, John Deveney recounts different versions of this “occult duel” that
supposedly led to Randolph’s shooting himself, and says that “even in the
kindest light” many of the details must be wrong, such as reports of Blavatsky
actually “firing” the pistol from India (she was not in India until several
years after Randolph died.) Meanwhile,
when later HBL writing warns against using sexual magic for power and suggests
it will drive one to delusion, one manuscript adds that Randolph’s suicide was
an example of “the calamitous consequences of imperfect initiation.”
Yet beneath the swirl
of personality, it is easy to see clear connections between Randolph and those
orders who are not comfortable with him. Writers from Rene Guenon to Deveney to
Godwin have suggested that one of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s primary
antecedents was Randolph’s “Brotherhood of Eulis.” When Randolph begins writing
on love, “affectional alchemy,” and sexual magic in the 1870s and claims to
have found the true secret of Eulis in an initiatory society in the near East,
he ads: “Many will suspect from our true name — BROTHERHOOD OF EULIS —that we
really mean “Eleusis,” and they are not far wrong. The Eleusinian Philosophers
(with whom Jesus is reputed to have studied) were philosophers of Sex; and the
Eleusinian Mysteries were mysteries thereof.” The word Eulis seems to most
likely come from Greek êôs—meaning, depending on context, dawn, daybreak, life,
the East, or even Êôs, the Goddess of Dawn, whose name is hidden in Christian
“Easter.”
The first grade of the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor Order was Grade of Eulis, and the HBL circulated
Randolph’s manuscripts, even while warning that Randolph himself was only “half-initiated.”
The Brotherhood of Luxor as Blavatsky
describes it, “with all its Near Eastern echoes, appears to bear a closer
resemblance to Randolph’s Rosicrucians than it does to her own later Indian or
Tibetan mahatmas.” The Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor’s close resemblance to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light
has been noted by many; because of this, and because of OTO co-founder Karl
Kellner’s association with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, Francis King
suggests that the most “immediate source” of Kellner’s rituals seems to have
been a group of European followers of the American occultist P.B. Randolph.”
Having Randolph’s
“Mysteries of Eulis,” rather than a collection of antiquarian texts, as one of
the bases of revived Rosicrucianism, calls many of Rosicrucianism’s very
definitions into question. If Paschal Beverly Randolph was indeed the
"Supreme Grand Master" of the Rosicrucian Order, as he and later
Clymer said he was, doesn’t that make Rosicrucianism “descend” from the
Eleusian, or Anserietic, or some other Mysteries, rather than from a mystical
Christian Rosenkreutz or three European manifestos. . . or does his
Rosicrucianism “descend” from anything in the physical world at all? The
argument is most bizarely illustrated by the early twentieth century battles
between the two main American Rosicrucian groups, headed by H. Spencer Lewis
and Reuben Swinburne Clymer. Clymer, as we’ve seen, considers Randolph the
Supreme Grand Master, and attacks Lewis’s Rosicrucians for, among other things,
their connection to the O.T.O. Meanwhile the Societas Rosicrucian in Anglia,
many of whose early members were one-time Randolph correspondents, stays
conspicuously silent, though its one-time head, Golden Dawn co-founder W.W.
Westcott, moved in the same circles as Mackenzie, Hockley, Yarker, and of
course, Randolph. The only surviving copy of Randolph’s Mysteries of Eulis
comes from Jonathan Yarker.
Where does “The Rosicrucian”
say about the origin of his Order? Here is Randolph’s answer, from the
“Affectional Alchemy” section of Eulis!:
I am induced to say
thus much in order to disabuse the public mind relative to Rosicrucianism,
which is but one of our outer doors—and which was not originated by Christian
Rosencrux; but merely revived, and replanted in Europe by him subsequent to his
return from oriental lands, whither, like myself and hundreds of others, he
went for initiation.
The Rosicrucian system
is, and never was other else than a door to the ineffable Grand Temple of
Eulis.[14]
Index
Bibliography
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The Rosicrucian Fraternity in America; Authentic and Spurious Organizations ..
Library edn, Pa., Rosicrucian Foundation, Quakertown.
Cranston, SL 1993, HPB
: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the
Modern Theosophical Movement, Putnam, NY.
Deveney, JP 1997,
Astral Projection or Liberation of the Double and the Work of the Early
Theosophical Society, Theosophical History, Fullerton, CA.
Deveney, JP 1997,
Paschal Beverly Randolph : A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist,
Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Godwin, J, Chanel,
C& Deveney, JP 1995, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor : Initiatic and
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Gutierrez, C 2005, The
Occult in Nineteenth-Century America, Davies Group, Aurora, CO.
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King, F 1970, Ritual
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New Mola! The secret of mediumship; a hand book of white magic, magnetism and
clairvoyance. The new doctrine of mixed identities! Rules for obtaining the
phenomena, and the celebrated rules of Asgill, a physician's legacy, and the Ansairetic
mystery, P.B. Randolph, Publisher, Toledo, OH.
Randolph, PB 1869, Love
and its hidden history. A book for man, woman, wives, husbands, and for the
loving and the unloved .. 4th ed. entirely rewritten edn, W. White and Co,
Boston, MA.
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Clymer, RS 1930, Seership, guide to soul sight; a practical guide for those who
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The Confederation of Initiates, Quakertown, PA.
Randolph, PB &
Clymer, RS 1930, Eulis! Affectional alchemy; the history of love: its wondrous
magic, chemistry, rules, laws, moods, modes and rationale. Being the third
revelation of soul and sex and a reply to "Why is man immortal?", The
Confederation of Initiates, Quakertown, PA.
Randolph, PB& Meyrink,
G 1922, Dhoula Bel; ein Rosenkreuzer-Roman, Rikola, Wien.
Scarborough, S. 2001,
"The Influence of Egypt on the Modern Western Mystery Tradition: The
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor", Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition,
vol. 1, no. Autumnal Equinox 2001. Available:
http://www.jwmt.org/v1n1/influence.html.
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