True Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Stories Part VI

Rosicrucian: Paschal Beverly Randolph

Paschal Beverly Randolph (October 8, 1825 – July 29, 1875) was an American medical doctor, occultist, spiritualist, trance medium, and writer. He is notable as perhaps the first person to introduce the principles of erotic alchemy to North America, and, according to A. E. Waite established the earliest known Rosicrucian order in the United States.

Early life

Born in New York City, Randolph grew up in New York City and was baptized at the Church of the Transfiguration, Episcopal (Manhattan). He was a free black man, a descendant of William Randolph. His father was a nephew of John Randolph of Roanoke and his mother was Flora Beverly, whom he later described as having mixed English, French, German, Native American, and African ancestry. His mother died when he was young, leaving him homeless and penniless; he ran away to sea to support himself. From his adolescence through to the age of twenty, he worked as a sailor.

As a teen and young man, Randolph traveled widely, due to his work aboard sailing vessels. He journeyed to England, through Europe, and as far east as Persia, where his interest in mysticism and the occult led him to study with local practitioners of folk magic and various religions. On these travels, he also met and befriended occultists in England and Paris, France.

Career

Returning to New York City in September 1855, after "a long tour in Europe and Africa," he gave a public lecture to African Americans on the subject of immigrating to India. Randolph believed that "the Negro is destined to extinction" in the United States.

After leaving the sea, Randolph embarked upon a public career as a lecturer and writer. By his mid-twenties, he regularly appeared on stage as a trance medium and advertised his services as a spiritual practitioner in magazines associated with Spiritualism. Like many Spiritualists of his era, he lectured in favor of the abolition of slavery; after emancipation, he taught literacy to freed slaves in New Orleans.

In addition to his work as a trance medium, Randolph trained as a doctor of medicine and wrote and published both fictional and instructive books based on his theories of health, sexuality, Spiritualism, and occultism. He wrote more than fifty works on magic and medicine, established an independent publishing company, and was an avid promoter of birth control during a time when it was largely against the law to mention this topic.

Having long used the pseudonym "The Rosicrucian" for his Spiritualist and occult writings, Randolph eventually founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis in 1858, and their first lodge in San Francisco in 1861, the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States. This group, still in existence, today avoids mention of Randolph's interest in sex magic, but his magico-sexual theories and techniques formed the basis of much of the teachings of another occult fraternity, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, although it is not clear that Randolph himself was ever personally associated with the Brotherhood.

Belief and teaching

Randolph described himself as a Rosicrucian. He had worked "largely alone", producing "his own synthesis" of "esoteric teachings".

Sex and gender

How Randolph incorporated sex into his occult system was considered uncharacteristically bold for the period in which he lived. He believed that sex magic could lead to increased health, love, the empowerment of women, and children of superior intelligence. In his more underground publications, he wrote that church and marriage were oppressive forces that could be overthrown with the power of love in a worldwide revolution.

Randolph held an unusually expansive view of gender identity, considering earthly gender to be "provisional," and referring to God as both male and female. In a book on love, he wrote: