Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) was born in Five Points, Manhattan, to an African American mother and a white father, who abandoned the family shortly thereafter. His mother died of cholera when he was six, and Randolph went to sea to avoid destitution. The itinerant period which followed exposed the curious young Randolph to a myriad of cultures and religious practices, all of which would inform his later philosophies. Randolph came of age at the peak of the American Spiritualism movement, and soon found his way to the stage as a lecturer and “to perform as a trance medium. In 1858, however, he publicly broke with the spiritualists, citing their racism, the hypocrisy of their radicalism, and their narrow view of the immaterial world” (Langer Cohen).
Indeed, Randolph’s spiritualism was closely entwined with his abolitionism, and at the outbreak of the American Civil War, he joined the drive to recruit Black soldiers to the Union Army. He spoke alongside Frederick Douglass at the October 4-7 1864 National Convention of Coloured Men, and in the same year “while living in New York, was requested by President Lincoln to educate the recently freed slaves in Louisiana. During his stay, Randolph taught many, black and white, to read and write. For this act, Randolph states ‘I was obliged to sleep with pistols in my bed, because the assassins were abroad and red-handed Murder skulked and hovered round my door.’ Randolph also delivered many lectures on black rights and Spiritualism at Economy Hall in New Orleans” (ANB).
Of Randolph’s more than fifty books, the present text is notable for its publication during the first years of the Civil War. This was a period in which Randolph was travelling widely: from California, to London, East Asia, and France. It was described by his biographer as his “most coherent theoretical work”, and his “masterpiece” (Deveney, 102, 103).
Randolph’s teachings addressed the more profoundly arcane aspects of nineteenth century spiritualism, including: gender fluidity (he referred to those outside of the male/female binary as “betweenities”), how using sex, drugs and diet could unlock paranormal faculties, and his visions of the afterlife, which are utopian to the point of near science fiction.
Randolph founded a series of secret societies around his Rosicrucian ideas, all of which were supported by his own writings. These were mostly self-published, with the assistance of his first and second wives and due to the, at times, sensational content seem largely to have been distributed through mail-order services advertised in spiritualist periodicals like the Religio-Philosophical Journal, or in Randolph’s other works. As such they have not survived in great numbers. The present work is published by Mary Jane Randolph, to whom he was married from 1850 until an unknown time in the 1860s. There is no record of a divorce, but Kate Corson is listed as his publisher from at least 1874.
Deveney, J.P. Paschal Beverly Randolph (Albany, State University of NY Press, 1997); Langer Cohen, L. “The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschel Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics” in The Public Domain Review (Accessed 4 Dec 2025).
