The Sex Magicians

The Sex Magicians

Robert Anton Wilson

Introduction by Michelle Olley

Afterword by Gregory Arnott

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AT THE ORGASM RESEARCH FOUNDATION Dr. Roger Prong, who was known by some foundation employees as a bloody Peeping Tom and a horny old voyeur, was in fact very scientific – or so he always insisted as he watched the girls having orgasms.

At the laboratory, Josie Welch, already nude but with a single sheet demurely spread over her full and obviously glorious body, looked unhappy as Roger entered.

They tell me there won’t be any men today, she said as soon as she saw the doctor.

That’s right, my dear, he said with professional unction. That part of your testing is finished. Today we move on to the part that you’ll find even more gratifying.

The sheet slipped a bit, revealing several inches of round, tense breast. You want me to try dames? she asked with some confusion of emotions; curiosity and guilt flicked in her lovely blue eyes. I never tried that scene before. I’m not queer, you know. But if it’s for science, well, maybe . . . She obviously was hoping to be convinced.

What a fantastic piece of hot lustful woman she was, Roger thought irrelevantly.

The Sex Magicians

Copyright © 1973 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

Print ISBN: 978-1-952746-35-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-952746-75-8

First Edition 1973 Sheffield House

Second Edition 2024 Hilaritas Press

Cover Design by amoeba

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com



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Contents

Introduction by Michelle Olley

1 – What is the sound of one hand clapping?

2 – Are you drinking the water or the wave?

3 – Who will guard the guardians?

4 – Why is a duck?

5 – What is Property?

6 – Where did the universe come from?

7 – Time: is it real or illusory?

8 – Is there Life after Death?

9 – How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

10 – Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

11 – Where do these questions come from?

12 – Is God male? female? or neuter?

13 -– Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men?

14 – What is outside the Universe?

15 – Does a dog have Buddha?

16 – Who is the third who walks always beside you?

17 – What is outside Space?

18 – Who am I?

Afterword by Gregory Arnott

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Introduction

by Michelle Olley

Vibrations come from the Space World

Is of the Cosmic Starry Dimension

Enlightenment is my Tomorrow

It has no planes of Sorrow

Hereby, our Invitation

We do invite you to be of our Space World

Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Enlightenment, 1958

VIBES: those astral vibrations that emanate from the Space World – and the heart of this story – are something of an overused trope for us moderns. We press them into service for music-and-party ambience checks, hot takes in politics, sensory nuance hacks in relationships, literary criticism or the latest fat-sugar-salted, hyper-palatable candy bar. Then there’s the larger, cultural Vibe Shift, when imperceptibly, time nudges what was once the apotheosis of the zeitgeist into suddenly looking a little . . . old hat. Flares, free love, fondue sets, bondage trousers, lumberjack shirts, riot grrrls, girl power, Instagram filters, sailor flash tattoos, Blackberrys, perma-tanned impresarios spitting bile on TV talent shows, perma-tanned reality TV show presidents spitting bile on Twitter.

Many, many vibe shifts have occurred since this salacious little paperback’s first edition in 1973.

The Sex Magicians manifested in the Golden Age of Porn – a liminal space between the invention of photography and film, and the home video recorder – all mediums embraced almost immediately by the smut peddlers of their day. Many of the first erotic daguerreotypes were created in the brothels of 19th century Paris and London, changing hands for a pretty penny. For most people in the mid 20th century, reveling in explicit sexual imagery involved going behind the green door at your local red light district’s XXX cinema, perusing the top shelf spicy books and magazines sold in gas stations and railway newsstands, or maybe ogling the gorgeous gals, guys and gods in classical art, if you were fancy. Betamax, VHS, PAL and NTSC soon superseded (super seeded?) all that.

In 1973, if you wanted to experience kaleidoscopic, hardcore pornographic tableaux of the sort Wilson provides in the following pages you had to vibe shift past the pulp fiction paperbacks that sex shops filled their front shelves with (also used as ballast, bought by the ton, on US ships exporting goods overseas), to the good stuff, usually stocked towards the back, or under the counter. In 1960s and 70s swinging London Soho, sex shop genres were HETERO, HOMO and FLADGE. (I know this because I organized a lecture about it by Dr Helen Wickstead at The Museum of Sex Objects in 2022). There wasn’t a shelf for HIPPY SEX MAGIC (though there was plenty of flower power-fuelled shenanigans in all three categories). This may explain why it seems to be the only surviving book released under the Sheffield House imprint. The Sex Magicians was originally published by GX Inc - a mostlybunall gay porn pulp paperback outfit based in the valleys of suburban LA. The book came out at the same time as Wilson’s second non-fiction work Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, published (and buried without ceremony, to paraphrase Wilson’s appraisal of things) by Playboy Press (now back in print via this esteemed publisher as Sex, Drugs & Magick).

This debut novel also comes to us from the heady days when Wilson was making his way down the freelance freefall rabbit hole, transitioning from Playboy editor salaryman into a full time, capital W, Writer. As he explained to Wilson biographer PropAnon/Gabriel Kennedy in 2003: I spent 20 years of my life working for corporations to support a large family. A large family by American standards: a wife, four kids, nine dogs, I forget how many cats, you know, and 25 chickens and a pony at one point. And I had had enough of working in a hierarchy. Wilson quit the rat/bunny race in 1972. RAW fans will know that after writing the Great Discordian American Novel with Robert Shea, it wasn’t until 1975 that Illuminatus! saw the light of day. You do the math. The Sex Magicians may have been, as some have posited, an act of sex magic to bring the Discordian opus into the world, or it may have been a prosaic act of conjuring food for the table/bowls/yard. Both things can be true at once. There is a long and honorable tradition of authors writing erotic work to support their more ambitious literary efforts; William Burroughs and Anais Nin are traditionally cited here.

The hardcore nature of the anonymous cover art puts The Sex Magicians squarely in the back-of-the-sex shop/girlie mag small ads camp, as does the relentless procession of pornographic scenarios which the plot tip-toes discreetly between, careful not to disturb the Matter at Hand with too much deflationary exposition. For all that, Wilson manages to smuggle in many characters and ideas that will go on to stimulate and delight his readers for decades to come. And it’s funny. Minor spoiler alert: the Hagbardish-Hefneresque character Sput brings a novel anti-establishment twist to libertine ennui by achieving the necessary erotic frisson to achieve climax only by fantasizing about authority figures, including the Attorney General and Dr Spock. The Game of Porn Baron with Unlimited Access to Blow Jobs from Aspiring Models clearly takes its toll.

Sput reminds me of the night I had dinner with Penthouse kingpin Bob Guccione back in 1997, at the height of the nostalgia-fest that was the Cool Britannia era. (Long story short, I had been recruited to help re-invent Penthouse UK for the 90s in the style of the ascendent mens’ magazines of the age, like Loaded and FHM. We failed. Spectacularly.) At the time, Guccione was convinced that the mafia still had a hit out on him and rarely left his high security mansion in upstate New York. His condition for visiting London as guest of honor for our relaunch party was 24 hour security and a bullet-proof limo. The man looked Deeply Over It – like an oversized Tony Curtis carved out of teak, drinking his Coca Cola and telling war stories to our eager minor public schoolboy publishers about his run-ins with Her Majesty’s Postal Service. Not quite the dirt they were hoping for, I’m sure.

It’s a challenge to view a piece of work which was designed to goose the libidos of domesticated primates in 1973, who most likely considered themselves relatively sexually and culturally enlightened, without falling into the Internet Scolding Mode du jour. There is plenty to cringe and ick about here in the outdated language/slurs and broad assumptions about female pleasure. We may however be missing out on some of its revolutionary sedition if we don’t take into consideration how much actual sexual praxis Wilson includes in The Sex Magicians. As he discusses in the contemporaneous Sex, Drugs and Magick, there are certain practices passed through time, cloaked in occult linguistic folderol that have millennia of proven cause and effect, helping men and women pass through the crucible of desire into the union of passion, melding minds and transcendental mutual climax. The ins and outs of how women can dependably orgasm was certainly missing from all the surreptitious literature that came my way as a curious youngster. (I’m thinking here of the water-logged 1970s porn mags found in the bushes at my dad’s local rugby club, and the 1980s Forum Letters paperback in the bottom of my mum’s bedroom chest of drawers. Neither furnished me with the instructions on HOW women achieve orgasm, beyond ‘he stuck it in her and she came instantly’ type-of-scenario).

There’s a hypocritical tendency in mainstream media to dismiss and shame works of art that openly set out to arouse the reader. Sexual imagery and allusion is the water we scroll in. Sex and magic have this in common: they are both routinely dismissed, viewed as unserious work when deployed openly, but their techniques are regularly pressed into the service of capital in the more covert seductive arts of advertising and propaganda. You wouldn’t know it from reading the London Review of Books, but raunchy ‘romantasy’ fiction (especially with magic, dragons, fae folk etc.) is having a moment right now, thanks to a combination of fanfic, avid women readers and #Booktok. For a peerless analysis of this trend, plus the denigration of women’s erotic fiction and pornography in general I humbly recommend you take the time to watch Contrapoints philosopher Natalie Wynn’s YouTube deep dive on Twilight. It’s all the feminist theory on pornography you’ll ever need, which I decided to spare you in this essay (Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday, Andrea Dworkin, Jackie Collins – all the greats). And Contrapoints does it with poise, élan, and pictures.

Perhaps over time we moderns have learned to tune out this desire/shame sexual double standard from our reality tunnels without scarring our psyches? Or maybe not. Maybe it Lies Beneath, percolating into a darker undercurrent, along the lines of Wilhelm Reich’s contention that repressed sexual desire can be sublimated into a masochistic relationship to power? Something that best selling author and magician Alan Moore said when I interviewed him in 2009 for Skin Two Magazine has stuck with me: the idea that we are meta-programmed by mainstream culture to feel shame and powerlessness after becoming aroused by mainstream porn. He compared pornography to the Skinner box (a 1930s pleasure/pain device used on rodents, invented by psychologist B.F. Skinner) that delivers an electric shock of shame and regret to us horny little rats as soon as we are done with the object facilitating our desire. Such a rationalized fusion of desire and shame can’t be good for us in the long term. This may well be the case for the ubiquitous forms of modern pornography, delivered like most things on our smartphones these days, in snack-sized chunks of empty calories. And how does that vibe with the cognitive dissonance we all live with in a world beset with moral contradictions? Should we not also feel shame because the pornography we watch is delivered to us by a phone made by an indentured worker in slave labor conditions in the far east, containing a climate-destroying lithium chip, dug out in a perilous environment by a miner (usually a woman or child) on subsistence wages in Africa? The Skinner box in our pockets delivers a FNORD because Everything Else These Days that provides our dopamine hits also comes with a shock of shame for those with eyes to see. Ethical Consumption