39
P. B. RANDOLPH
Like the previous article, this appeared in La Flèche No. 7, November 15, 1931. It contains a surprising amount of information about Paschal Beverly Randolph, considering how little is known for certain. Naglowska signed the article with her own name.
Paschal Beverly Randolph*23 was born in New York City on October 8, 1825. The tradition says that he was, on his mother’s side, descended from a queen of Madagascar. But this thesis is contested in America, from whence come to us reports that are contrary to those that we’ve received from the rare groups, scattered through central Europe and Finland, where the magicians of the Temple of Eulis, which Randolph founded in San Francisco on the fifth of November, 1861, took refuge.
Is the question of the source of his Negro blood important for the understanding of the very particular initiation of the man to whom we today render the homage that he deserves?
We do not heitate to answer, “yes,” for, whatever diehard individualists may say about it, the blood that passes from generation to generation is a determining factor in the formation of people’s will and intellect.
Now Randolph’s work, which places the center of human capacities (physical and mental) in the sex, and which did not hesitate to show, already in the nineteenth century, that on the mental plane the woman represents the positive pole and the man the negative pole . . . clearly indicates an origin that is foreign to the white race, essentially Christic, that is to say negator of the spiritual worth of the woman and of the sacredness of the flesh.
And it is not strange, for us who are announcing the reprise of the ascendant march toward the Origin, to discover the precursor of our mystico-realist revelation precisely in a man in whom the infallible direct knowledge of the ancient African races and the cold, skeptical logic of the Anglo-Saxons so happily harmonized.
For us, Randolph’s work itself, still more than the features of his face, however characteristic, proves that the thesis supported by his disciples in Europe is correct: the author of Magia Sexualis was a mulatto.
This, obviously, does not weaken in any way the right of the United States of America to be proud of the birth on their soil of this prodigious man.
P. B. Randolph traveled a great deal. At the age of fifteen he was already feeling the pull of the sea and went to work as a ship’s boy on a merchant ship. He sailed thus for five years, when all of a sudden he was taken with a desire to become a doctor. He returned to his country, worked without letting up, and obtained, at twenty-five years, the desired diplomas. He was a good practitioner right up to the time of his death.
But Europe, Paris above all, attracted him incessantly. General Ethen Allen Hitchcock, who lived in Paris and to whom Randolph had been introduced by his friends, the doctors Fontaine and Bergevin, introduced him into the occultist circles of the time, and it is thus that the future American mage struck up friendships with Eliphas Levi, Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Mackey. Later, he was introduced to Kenneth, to R. H. Mackenzie, to Count Brazynsky, to Napoleon III, to Alexis and Adolph Didier, to Count Tsovinski, to General Pelliser, to the Duke of Malakoff, and others.
Randolph was excited about the occult mysteries taught by these men: still, he did not subordinate himself to their school: his blood permitted him more and better. He returned to America, and there created the lodge of the Temple of Eulis, which had several branches in different cities of the United States.
He attracted the fellow-feeling and veneration of President Lincoln, who sent him to Russia, around 1866, apparently to get Alexander II’s support for the young republic.
Concerning Randolph’s trip to Saint Petersburg, nothing definite has been told by his American friends, but having had the very special opportunity to grow up in an environment, otherwise very sheltered, where the truths discovered by Randolph were known and put into practice, we permit ourselves to say—since all the persons whom this could harm have been dead since the war—that the luminous mage did not fail to create a branch of his San Francisco lodge on the nostalgic bank of the white Neva.
Peace to your soul, oh Princesse Hélène, who gave me the first keys to real initiation! May the new generations profit from it today!
The lodges and circles created by Randolph in America opened and closed several times. One does not know the exact reasons, but from some intimate documents left by the great man, it clearly appears that he carefully chose his adepts and sent packing any undesirable elements that worked their way into his secret groups. Certainly, Randolph did not strive for large numbers, and preferred one person of real value to a hundred mediocrities. The same was true in Europe.
People have talked a lot about the animosity between H. P. Blavatsky and Randolph. Current followers of Randolph, grouped in New York, argue against this occult battle, on the subject of which, nevertheless, some very well-documented details come to us from elsewhere.
Logically, H. P. Blavatsky could not find herself in agreement with the practitioner of sexual magic, for her thought and her work belong in spite of everything to the Christic phase, that is to say to the occult dream that wishes for victory of the spirit over the flesh.
In certain passages of The Secret Doctrine, one definitely feels that the creator of modern (Christico-Hinduizing) Theosophy had had some inspirations that almost raised the veil of Isis, but each time it fell before the eyes of H. P. Blavatsky when she tried to translate in current words what she had perceived beyond the lower planes. And the Theosophists of today (see The Veil of Isis, by Chacornac) bear witness to the same prudish myopia, against which they could not do anything anyway, for the new grace has not touched them.
Readers who will take the trouble to compare Magia Sexualis with the innumerable volumes of the Theosophical libraries will be able to see the difference for themselves.
P. B. Randolph died in 1874,*24 at the age of 49 years. His son, who lived longer, died in 1928.†5
Randolph’s widow, very old, is still living, in New York.‡3