Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Sex Magick (Llewellyn, 1998) is generally well-informed and well-written. As in his popular earlier book, Modern Magick, he relies heavily on the ceremonial framework of Aleister Crowley and crew, with which he here combines a good dose of Tantric teachings.
He gets high marks for his serious and largely successful efforts throughout to avoid gender-based prejudices, and he repeatedly rejects dogmatic or restrictive approaches to sex and magick. Kraig states his aims as follows:
In this book, I have tried to create a new paradigm… a set of tools that will give new ways to understand the basics of what sex magick really is.… I will consider this book successful not by the number of people who buy or quote from this book, but from the number of people who, as a result of reading this book, begin to incorporate sex magick into their rituals. [pages 313-4]
Regardless of whether Modern Sex Magick succeeds on these terms, it's a good addition to your library. It is well organized in three sections, the first being introductory, the second more advanced, and the third devoted to such (shiver) outré practices as group sex and S/M.
The book is packed with solid information about sex, bodies, rituals and magick, most of which is readily available elsewhere. Its original contributions come principally in tying together disparate traditions and in presenting an interesting perspective on the recent history of sex magick (Austin Spare, for example).
Unfortunately, Kraig makes a most egregious omission. He fails to incorporate safer-sex practices in the rituals he presents. In a book full of occasions for fluid exchange, not to stress safer-sex (indeed, not to make it a part of the rituals by default), seems very irresponsible.
Not only does Kraig fail to stress safer sex, he never even mentions the subject. The man is in denial. In the introduction, he writes: "I am very proud that Modern Magick was the first major occult book to openly discuss AIDS. [page xvi]"
Then he goes on to suggest that "on a practical, real-world level," the disease isn't much of a threat to heterosexuals. Noting that you don't have to engage in sex magick involving fluid exchange, he admonishes his readers to take personal responsibility for the consequences if they do.
That's it. No mention of women being more at risk than men, no mention of other nasty STDs, no discussion of how to eroticize latex, nothing, even in one chapter devoted largely to health. This despite the fact he includes some other very basic information.
Think of it this way: There are plenty of intelligent people out there who are as stupid as Donald Kraig in this respect, and they're having unprotected sex all the time, and they're just the kinds of folks likely to show up at your rituals.
So please: In sex magick as elsewhere, practice safer sex! It may refocus the mechanics a bit — you won't find the kind of daisy chain illustrated on page 255 quite as easy to pull off if everyone's using condoms and dams or plastic wrap — but the same energetic effect can be achieved in plenty of other ways, and you will actually be taking personal responsibility for your actions.
I'm afraid that, in general, Kraig's chapter on group workings was one of the more disappointing ones to me. Creating effective and fulfilling spiritual rituals of an orgiastic nature is much harder than you might expect, and I was hoping he had more useful ideas and suggestions to contribute.
The chapter on S/M, by contrast, is surprisingly good. Although it doesn't break any new ground, it's a thorough and sensible introduction to the subject condensed into 40 pages.
There are a lot of interesting bits and pieces of information scattered through this book, and as I said, if you're interested in sex magick, you should definitely read it.
However, myself, I don't find a ceremonial approach to sex magick very appealing. It's not a right or wrong thing, it's a matter of personal taste.
First off, false rigor fails to excite me. Talk of Theorems and Corollaries doesn't make the discourse seem more credible. TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms) like DLC (Duofocal Love Couple) don't add precision, and drawings masquerading as Venn diagrams don't really clarify. Mathematical formulations like, "if a human can raise `P' amount of power," seem silly. I like math, but this just doesn't seem the place for it.
On the other side of the coin, manuals of all sorts (and this is one) seem to focus primarily on what you do with your body rather than what you feel, or what your spirit experiences. Most of the rituals described in the book seem oddly incomplete to me — fine as far as they go, but some main ingredients aren't even listed in the recipes.
For instance, Kraig glosses over emotions, especially negative ones like fear, guilt, jealousy and embarrassment, that so often come up around sex, and particularly public sex. Not only do we all encounter these feelings, but I believe working through them is what generates a lot of the positive energy common to sex magick.
From a practical point of view, there really aren't that many physical ways to have sex — it boils down to stimulating the genitalia and secondary erogenous zones of those involved in accord with wildly varying tastes. An effort to categorize the resulting physical postures and scenarios seems to me a misguided attempt to find external analogs for the incredible complexity and diversity of our internal sexual experience. Even Tantric techniques, which are interesting on a number of levels, generally don't tie directly into the fears, hopes, archetypes and ecstasies that make sex interesting for so many of us.
To me, focusing on external action is missing the point. In sex, you can do exactly the same physical thing over and over and have a different experience of it every single time. The important stuff all goes on in the mind and spirit.
I wish Kraig had explored more of the spiritual-erotic imagery and associated myth-journeys that have developed around the world, rather than focus so much on the physical details. Most people interested in sex magick are already fairly familiar both with their own bodies and with what works for them as ritual. What's interesting is the imagery that can be used to make a personal mix of the two.
My favorite chapter in Modern Sex Magick was one in which Kraig incorporated accounts written at his invitation by three women. These were less theoretical and formulaic than the rest of the book, and focused more on these magicians' personal experiences and practices. For myself, I found more food for thought in this single chapter than the whole rest of the book.
To be fair, Kraig is clearly an inveterate experimenter himself, with a strong feeling for archetypal forms and not a great many prejudices. I far preferred reading the rare passages where he describes his own experiences to reading the pseudo-technical theo-rizing and vague recipes.
So, while this could well be a book for your library, you may want to look elsewhere for profound sexual-spiritual guidance.
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