BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Sexual Magick & Other Essays (1988) Katon Shual   The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism (2008) Arthur Versluis   A Brief History of Nakedness (2010) Philip Carr-Gomm   If you are looking for some 'how to' manual involving dark side practices, Shual's Sexual Magick is not the book for you. Rather it is a sensitive and humane investigation of the role of the sexual in modern magical practice and it is thoroughly liberal in tone. Katon Shual is the pseudonym of the Oxford-based magician, Mogg Morgan, who has done much in such circles to bring the somewhat harsh and masculinised world of Crowley and Grant into line with modern liberal and tolerant culture. The high point for me was an extended 'rant', allegedly from the God Set, against not Christianity (the usual target of neo-pagan resentment) but late paganism as it developed under the Roman elite. For a simple account of how neo-pagans see sexuality in quasi-political and cultural terms, pag...

Emanuel Swedenborg [Graphic Novel] (1982) Christopher Hasler/John Kaczmarczyk The Hell-Fire Friars:Sex Politics and Religion (2002) Gerald Suster   The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003) Ian McCalman  The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008) Evelyn Lord   A vailable at a ridiculously low price from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, a graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg by Hasler and Kaczmarczyk provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the geniuses of early Modern Europe. He is as important in his way as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, someone struggling to make sense of the world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around him would have taken for granted. Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the ...

The World of Sex (1940)  Henry Miller   Men's Adventure Magazines in Post-War America: The Rich Oberg Collection (2004) Taschen Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film (2005) Jimmy McDonough   Miscellany of Sex (2007) Francesca Twinn   Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque (2010) Paul Willetts     Henry Miller wrote the original draft of his long essay The World of Sex in 1940 when he was about to turn 50, somewhat of a turning point for any redblooded male, but the text was substantially revised for a secondary publication in 1957 when he was nearing 70. This is a relevant set of facts. This is not a male view of sex so much as that of a highly sexualised male past his powers and frustrated at a world that had always failed to accept him publicly for what he was. He would not have been alone in that frustration - America 're-moralised' itself in the wake of the G...