Sex, Drugs & Magick - A Journey Beyond Limits

By Robert Anton Wilson

Sex has many facets - biological sociological, esthetic, psychological, compulsive, ecstatic, tragic, playful, loving, perplexing and (I am told), even on occasion boring - but in this text is considered chiefly in its "transcendental" aspect. By this, I mean simply that in orgasm everybody experiences, to some degree, an explosion/implosion of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press, LLC.
• Release date: Apr 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781734473537

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Sex, Drugs & Magick

A Journey Beyond Limits

Robert Anton Wilson



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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.

eBook International Standard Book Number: 978-1-7344735-3-7

First Edition 1973 Playboy Press

First Falcon Edition 1987

Second Printing 1988

Third Printing 1990

Fourth Printing 1993

Fifth Printing 1997

Second Revised Edition (Sixth Printing) 2000

Seventh Printing 2004

Eighth Printing 2008

Ninth Printing 2011

Third Print Edition & eBook 2020, Hilaritas Press

Cover Design by amoeba

Cover Photography by @yolandaliou

Cover model: Jass Yang

eBook design by Pelorian Digital

Robert Anton Wilson photo by Roger Ressmeyer

Images from the Middle Ages: The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe - Thomas Wright et al, 1865 (courtesy of Archive.org)

Khajuraho Temple photo By BSSKrishnaS - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Roman Tintinnabulum from Wellcome Collection Gallery Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Wikimedia Commons

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com



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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

– Brian Eno

Woodstock was not about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was about spirituality, about love, about sharing, about helping each other, living in peace and harmony.

– Richie Havens

A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.

– Sebastian Marincolo

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as the art. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing, in the contemporary world, that you are likely to see to a Shaman.

– Alan Moore, from the 2005 documentary

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

– Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

– Hunter S. Thompson

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To my wife, Arlen

Blessed Be

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.

– John C. Lilly, M.D., The Center of the Cyclone

Contents

FOREWORDS & AFTERWORDS – 2021 EDITION

Training the Rainbow Searchlight – by Grant Morrison

Not All Doors Lead Outward – by Damien Echols

The Groundwork for a Renaissance – by Phil Farber

Spiral Architect – by Cat Vincent

PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

PREFACE TO THE 1987 EDITION

INTRODUCTION

PRELUDE – Ice Maiden: The Story of Jane

CHAPTER 1 – Overview: The Brews of Aphrodite

INTERLUDE – Slouching Toward Bethlehem: The Story of Leonard

CHAPTER 2 – Horned Gods & Horny Potions

INTERLUDE – Divorce Psychedelic Style: The Story of Tom & Jerri

CHAPTER 3 – The Smoke of the Assassins

INTERLUDE – Drug of Choice: The Story of Bill

CHAPTER 4 – The Mexican Weed

INTERLUDE – Behind Suburban Doors: The Story of George & Martha

CHAPTER 5 –  Powders White & Deadly

INTERLUDE – Reject: The Story of Holy Out

CHAPTER 6 – Tibetan Space-Time-Warp Star-Nova Trips

INTERLUDE – Up Against the Wall: The Story of Tyrone

CHAPTER 7 – 2000: An Inner Space Odyssey

RISK GLOSSARY – An Alphabetized Reference, With Guidelines & Warnings

Our Holy Trinity – by Rodney Orpheus

Global Agnosticism – by Andrew O’Neill

The Alchemical Mystery of Prima Materia – by Alexis Mincolla

Seven Guidelines For the Intrepid Adventurer Pursuing the Expansion of Consciousness Through the Practices of Sex, Drugs, and Magick – by Arden Leigh

BIBLIOGRAPHY



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Forewords & Afterwords

2021 Edition

Coincidance, a Joycean word defined by Robert Anton Wilson as, the dance of synchronicity throughout nature, may well describe part of the process by which Hilaritas Press came to have eight new essays, four forewords and four afterwords, to add as enchanting bookends to this edition of Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits.

A lot has changed for sex, drugs and magick since this book was written in 1972-73 and revised by the author in 1987 and again in 2000. Offering an updated perspective on these topics for both new and long-time RAW fans seemed sensible, so we created a magickal ritual for calling forth interest in the world of writers familiar with sex, drugs and magick. We used the sacred ritualistic tools of email and Zoom to cast our spell. That really seemed to work.

A few years ago we asked noted writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison if he might write a new foreword for any one of our upcoming new editions of RAW books. We sent him our list of books to choose from, and he replied, "The obvious one is Sex, Drugs and Magick, but I might also consider Ishtar Rising as I've been working on Wonder Woman for the last couple of years and the concept of the 'goddess' – and the rise of female power in the Aeon of Ma'at as Kenneth Grant might describe it – has been on my mind a lot and may yield some interesting insights."

Grant’s interesting insights on the goddess led to a wonderful essay that we included in the new edition of Ishtar Rising: Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She’s Returning, but we never stopped thinking that Sex, Drugs and Magick did seem like a natural choice, so we contacted Grant again as we began to work on this new edition of the book. At first he thought he didn’t have time to write something, but he wanted to help out by suggesting we ask Arden Leigh, Alexis Mincolla and Rodney Orpheus to contribute. All three were practicing magick along with other arts, and all three had been greatly influenced by RAW’s writing. That seemed pretty great, but when it rains it pours, and soon after, Grant ended up sending us a brilliant bit of writing after all.

Word also came back from the RAW Trust Advisors – RAW experts and old friends of RAW. John Higgs said he would love to read whatever chaos magician and comedian Andrew O’Neill would come up with. A number of the Advisors suggested both Phil Farber, author of High Magick: A Guide to Cannabis in Ritual and Mysticism, and cunning-man and journalist Cat Vincent.

Meanwhile, RAW’s daughter Christina had asked practitioner and teacher Damien Echols if he had an interest in writing something about his connection to RAW and ritual magic. Damien thanks the books of Robert Anton Wilson for helping him find a universe of infinite wonder during the 18 years he spent, falsely convicted, sitting on death row.

Soon we had eight essays, eight entirely different viewpoints – all influenced by the ideas of Robert Anton Wilson. Four forewords and four afterwords. Four and four are fitting numbers in the RAW multiverse. In this case, an octet of magicians, well versed in the craft – casting an engaging set and setting for Sex, Drugs and Magick.

– Hilaritas Press publishers, Rasa and Christina

Training the Rainbow Searchlight

by Grant Morrison

Training the rainbow searchlight of his signature wit and searing intelligence on what many of us might regard as the three main ingredients for a good night out, Wilson sets himself the task of examining and countering the misinformation and myths around the Sex, Drugs & Magick of the title, while making clear the ways in which each can be used separately but most importantly together as powerful practical pathways to transcendence and self-transformation.

With guests including DeSade and Wilhelm Reich, Albert Hoffman, Crowley, Leary and Blake showing up to the speculative party at his place, the result is classic RAW, surveying the heights of the ecstatic experience with the mind of an engineer, the soul of a poet, and a droll, agnostic sense of humour.*

~•~

* The two paragraphs above were offered by Grant Morrison for this new Hilaritas Press edition of Sex, Drugs & Magick. Grant gave us permission to add the following paragraphs that were taken from a Mondo 2000 interview conducted by Prop Anon and Laura Kang.

~•~

Magick provides a powerful context and support system for even the darkest or most fucked-up times and experiences. Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter, every boy and girl should familiarize themselves with the disciplines of magic even if only for shits and giggles. It’s also engaging and absorbing and creative to make spells and do rituals and to form rewarding relationships with things that shouldn’t exist.

Magic encourages you to take charge of your own life, so it confers a sense of agency and self-control that can seem lacking at times like these when sort of epic, elemental forces seem to have us all at their mercy. Given the options, who wouldn’t prefer to be rampaging around in higher planes, interacting with eternal archetypes and pop culture gods? Who wouldn’t want to bring back ideas that could change the world?

. . . Wilson provided his readers with very direct and practical tools we could use to examine our own heads and change the often self-defeating negative narratives we feed ourselves. The exercises in Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology were as utilitarian as the Chaos Magic rituals and DIY shamanism I was practicing at the time and proved to me that real magic is very down-to-earth and pragmatic. They really worked. He also introduced me to the multi-reality-tunnel approach, where you make an effort to see beyond your own narrow view of the world by incorporating as many different viewpoints into your own as you can. Experience is prismatic, inconsistent — you know, the sun is a scientist’s gravitational fusion process and a poet’s host of radiant angels. Both descriptions of the sun are real descriptions made by real observers with different points of view, that when added together give us a more accurate, nuanced understanding of the nature of the sun. To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing.



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Innovative comic book writer and playwright Grant Morrison is well-known for work in nonlinear narratives, counterculture explorations, and the various uses of Chaos Magick.

Not All Doors Lead Outward

by Damien Echols

Robert Anton Wilson helped me realize that not all doors lead outward. The best ones, the ones that lead to the most exciting and uncharted places, are within. And no one in this world can withhold the key that unlocks those doors from us.

My name is Damien Echols, and I spent 18 years incarcerated on death row for murders I did not commit. During those years, Robert Anton Wilson’s writings introduced me to the fact that the world was much bigger than I had ever dreamed.

As I sat on death row, reading his work created a doorway that allowed me to walk out of my cell and into a universe of infinite wonder. He taught me how to begin creating my own world, and how to leave behind the mundane and mediocre drudgery that seemed to swallow most people whole.

As a child I would look at the world around me, and nothing seemed to make sense. I watched as those who lived in the world of poverty where I grew up toiled endlessly for no discernible reason beyond surviving for one more day, one more month, and I would think . . . there has to be more than this. This can’t be all there is to life here.

However, the realm where people had a point and purpose, and were filled with fire and a hunger to know more, seemed forever beyond my reach. Looking for the entrance physically was impossible, due to my long confinement and torture – in the physical world it seemed there was absolutely nothing I could do to help myself . . . but I learned that in ancient Sumer, art was considered to be a sacred form of expression. For the Sumerians, art was a vehicle that housed divinity, in order to carry it into future generations. They believed that whatever was preserved in visual or written form continued to radiate out through time and space, and would continue to live in the hearts and minds of future generations, where it would continue to bring about changes in consciousness. This deeply resonated with me as I searched intensely for ways to make sense of my experience, and compelled me to dive into the study of high magick as the art it truly is.

I began to see that art was a method for transcending the grave, and influencing the flow of history beyond the confines of our mortal years. Writing is an art, and writing was mankind’s very first vehicle for not only passing on information, but also achieving immortality. Before writing, we were only remembered for as long as word of mouth allowed us to be. But through the written word, our names can be uttered by living lips well beyond our allotted years.

In this way, the written word allows us to continue contributing to the growth and progress of human evolution in a manner that transcends boundaries like space and time.

From my perspective, that’s what Robert Anton Wilson’s words continue to do every day, and hopefully will continue to do into the future. The reason the decision was made to reprint this edition of his work is because new people continue to stumble across old copies of it daily, and experience a kind of epiphany that causes them to change the entire course of their lives.

They write to R.A.W.’s family with tales of how profoundly impacted they were when they brushed against his work, often expressing the feeling that it is as if they found a piece of a puzzle that they didn’t even realize was missing up until that point.

The hope is that by making this work available to an even wider audience of both old and young people, the ripples of wisdom and humor between its covers will continue to spread and contribute to humanity’s awakening and evolution. If his work is completely new to you, I hope this is the first of many trips you will take down the rabbit hole of reality with R.A.W. as your tour guide!

L.V.X.



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Damien Echols, author of Angels and Archangels: A Magician's Guide. As a visual artist, his artwork entails glyphs, sigils, and symbols designed to bypass the conscious mind and speak directly to the subconscious, combining magick techniques with his own alphabet and writing system to break down concepts and scenarios into abstract designs.

The Groundwork for a Renaissance

by Phil Farber

Robert Anton Wilson wrote the original version of Sex, Drugs, and Magick during the darkest, most Nixonian days of the War on Some Drugs. As in many of his books and lectures, Bob’s passion here as he argues against ignorance and willful malevolence is unmistakable, even after editing and updating the text a couple times over the decades. That passion, and the information that he shares in a clear, easily-understood, and often mind-blowing way, made this book, back then and even now, an important antidote to the lies and propaganda of the prohibitionist forces.

Fortunately for us, the citadel of prohibition is cracking and beginning its inevitable dissolution. Bob lived to see the first hairline fractures in the walls built of government B.S. In the mid-1990s, my girlfriend and I were eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant. On one wall was a TV set to a 24/7 news channel, which we were seriously trying to ignore. But then a story came on about the legalization of medical cannabis in California and we looked up to see a video of Bob Wilson, first in line, receiving his legal edibles. We started shouting and cheering, to the surprise and annoyance of the other lunch customers.

Since then, legalization of both medical and recreational weed has progressed from coast to coast and around the world. As well, research into the classic psychedelics has begun again, with modern brain-scanning equipment and stringent lab protocols. And what we’re learning is that Bob (and Tim Leary, Albert Hoffman, John Lilly, Terence McKenna, et al.) was right. Some psychedelics, including psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and LSD are clearing regulatory hurdles to take their place in the mental and physical health pharmacopoeia. It was books like Sex, Drugs, and Magick, and people like Robert Anton Wilson, who laid the groundwork for this renaissance of research and kept the idea of the usefulness of psychedelics alive.

Organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) have taken on prohibitionists and unwieldy government bureaucracy to bring MDMA, ketamine, and psilocybin through clinical trials and to patients suffering from PTSD, depression, and other mental health issues. Over in the U.K. researchers including David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris have performed fMRI brain scan studies of the more commonly-used psychedelics with provocative findings. The Beckley Foundation has funded genomic studies, clinical trials, and neuropharmacological research. We now know that these amazing substances improve connectivity in the brain, encourage healthy neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, are strongly neuro-protective, and, in general, are healthy and very useful substances.

That’s all important stuff; it is now allowing for greater access to these substances, more research, and therapeutic support for people with a variety of health issues. And yet there are at least two other doors that books like this one continue to hold open: the use of these substances in sex and magick. As legalization and greater societal acceptance draws closer, a bit more light is beginning to shine through the cracks in those doors. At this point, there aren’t many researchers exploring those aspects; the people peering through the doorways and occasionally exploring what lies beyond are people like you, dear readers, who incorporate cannabis and psychedelics into your spiritual practices, your own sex lives, and your personal growth as human beings.

Bob frames his discussion in a way that highlights the War on Some Drugs as a form of religious persecution, dating back to the suppression of pagans by the expansion of Christianity, and as more general xenophobia, the fear of people who think differently than we do. Most of this is pretty obvious and some tidbits of history that have come to light in recent years confirm it. Here in the USA, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was enacted when Tricky Dick Nixon wanted to have some control over the people who were protesting his policies. The protesters were largely younger, more liberal, open-minded people – hippies! – who were much more likely to smoke weed or experiment with psychedelics. When Nixon wanted to subdue one of his biggest ideological enemies, the most dangerous man in the world, Tim Leary, he had him busted for having a roach in his car. Tim, at the time, was just about to launch a campaign to run for governor of California. In the 1930s, when big-time bigot Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the newly-minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics, wanted to harass black and Mexican jazz musicians, he pushed through the prohibition of cannabis, even though his earlier correspondence suggests that he knew it was a harmless substance.

Those of us who identify as pagans, witches, magicians, or otherwise explore non-Judeo-Christian spiritual paths, face some of this bigotry more directly, although it seems that, parallel to the collapse of the drug war, pagan and magical traditions are increasing in popularity and general acceptance. These are not entirely separate phenomena. Some of this has been driven by access to computers and the internet (technology that owes a lot to the acidheads who first imagined it); some by more positive portrayals of witches and magicians in popular culture; and some by an increased awareness of ecology and forces of nature (pagan traditions are often nature-centered, and the ecology movement may owe a debt to LSD). But, again, it was books like this one that helped to keep sex and drugs as part of magical practices, even when, during the 1970s through ‘90s, influenced by prohibitionist bullshit, prominent magicians and magical organizations eschewed the use of the ancient and traditional drugs, pretending or inexplicably believing that millennia of high magick never happened. And through all of his books, Bob did more to raise awareness of magick as a form of brain-change than anyone since Aleister Crowley himself.

The facade of prohibition and fundamentalist bigotry seems to be, hopefully, crumbling and, along with the scant handful of other authors who made the effort, we owe our thanks to Robert Anton Wilson. The question today is, who will now carry on this work of disseminating truth and opening minds? Along with the important publishing work of Hilaritas Press and the literary efforts of some writers, that effort, that obligation, falls to all of us. If this book, or any of Bob Wilson’s writings, inspires you to explore consciousness, to learn how to meta-program your own neurology, or to learn about magical traditions, you have the opportunity to follow Wilson’s example and become a role model for another generation of explorers and to help shape the cognitive future of the human race.

– Phil Farber

February 23, 2021



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Phil Farber is the author of High Magick: A Guide to Cannabis in Ritual and Mysticism.

Spiral Architect

by Cat Vincent

And so we return and begin again.

– Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, first line.

I. Strange Loops

It’s The Year Of Their Lord, 1971. In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Robert Anton Wilson is shopping for some jewellery as a treat for his wife Arlen from a sparse royalties cheque. Arlen insists that he get something for himself. He asks a jeweller friend to make him a large silver ring, engraved with an inward-turning spiral design. No specific reason, though the spiral had many associations for him . . . it just felt right.

Two years later, the first edition of the book you hold in your hands was published by Playboy Press.

Fifty years after Bob bought that spiral ring, I find myself called to write a new introduction to this book. In his own introduction to the 2000 edition, Wilson notes,

. . . the man who wrote it does not exist anymore.

Neither does the world he wrote of in 1973, or commented upon in 2000.

Many aspects of those times, as seen by both that working class New Yorker and this working class Londoner, do seem to cohere . . . perhaps in only slightly mutated forms.

Nowhere is this more apparent to me than in the areas of sex, drugs and magic.

I first read Wilson some time around 1977, when I came upon a second-hand copy of Illuminatus! in paperback. Because fate seems to be fickle, the bookshop only had books 2 and 3 . . . but I got them anyway.

It just felt right.

Growing up weird in an impoverished part of a Kentish dock town, and having some incidents of High Strangeness from the age of seven onwards, I had a hunger for oddness, but especially for some way to bring context to a world whose local ideas of ‘god’ and ‘normal’ had nothing to offer. I had devoured Crowley alongside Colin Wilson, Jacques Vallee and other explorers of the Strange from my kindly local library in my attempt to make sense of at least some of my experiences, so seeing Old Aleister’s name on the back cover of the book was certainly a draw . . . but I was not prepared for the transformative effect it would have on me.

Soon after, I read the first Cosmic Trigger, and it was the exact revelation that I needed. Wilson’s ideas and speculations – and, especially, his hard-headed experimental records – gave me two vital ideas:

– that sorely-needed context for the Weirdness of the world and my mind: his multi-model approach and emphasis on internally directed neural change balanced with careful skepticism of your own ideas about Truth – these are tools which have served me for nearly half a century, and . . .

– permission to explore the possibilities of working with popular culture as my primary set of maps: Bob’s use of Star Trek metaphors, and drawing parallels between such fictional entities and the spirit world, opened new vistas for me as a fledgeling magician.

Every new Wilson book I could find, as I moved from my insular childhood to being a young adult working in London and joining in with the social world of both science fiction fandom and practical occultism, gave me more points of reference. More maps to meld with my own, charting my journey and leaving markers to follow later.

Another set of maps came from the Harlan Ellison short story collection Deathbird Stories (1975). In the introduction, Ellison talks about the tales being modern mythologies for the New Gods being born in our modern age . . .

The grimoires and NECRONOMICONs of the gods of the freeway, of the ghetto blacks, of the coaxial cable; the paingod and the rock god and the god of neon; the god of legal tender, the god of business-as-usual and the gods that live in city streets and slot machines. The God of Smog and the God of Freudian Guilt. The Machine God. They are a strange, unpredictable lot, these new, vital, muscular gods. How we will come to worship them, what boons they may bestow, their moods and their limitations – these are the subjects of these stories.

I took hold of this idea of New Gods, born from our times (and especially our fictions) and ran with it in ways the staunchly atheist and straight-edged Ellison would not have approved of. And I was not alone in this: around that time, a group of experimental mages in London and Leeds were drawing on similar currents to develop a postmodern, Wilson-influenced magical approach which became known as chaos magic.

I got my first copy of this book in 1987, when I was (of course) twenty three years old.

And, unlike my earlier experiences with Wilson, my knowledge of both sex and drugs was no longer merely literary.

I lost my first copy, probably lent it to a stoner friend. It’s that sort of book.

The second time it showed up for me in the early Nineties, reading it with the second introduction was a significant development in my personal experiments with sex, drugs and magic in various combinations.

II. The Widening Gyre

"I've just been spending time in the subway,

riding in circles, thinking in circles.

There's no way out."

– Detective Eddie Walenski, Dark City (1998)

I am not the youth I was in 1987, or the child I was in 1971, or the man of 1998, when Alex Proyas’ film Dark City blew me away, putting aside even its immediate neighbour The Matrix a year later: its imagery of spirals as the prime metaphor for its tightly controlled and manipulated world clearly haunts me still.

(The Matrix was based in part on Morrison’s The Invisibles, a comic book series rife with the spirit of Wilson, and drawing on Morrison’s own sex/drug/magic self-experiments . . . notably their explorations of gender in the autobiographical Lord Fanny. Morrison now identifies as non-binary.)

However, aspects of all those previous instances of Cat Vincent, all the different people I have been, cohere still . . . continually looping around in a spiral: never quite touching, but occupying the same angles of the circle of my life’s experiences. So, to reread Sex, Drugs & Magick in 2021, with so much water and blood under the bridge, was an I-opener.

I had, for one thing, forgotten just how much of the 1987 Introduction had heavily influenced my magical praxis, especially around sex-magic. The explicit alchemical symbolism Wilson spoke of there sent me to find the Louis T. Culling book mentioned as a useful manual: my first ever tattoo was of a white rose upon a red Templar cross, explicitly referencing ‘it is only on the cross that the rose may bloom’.

But, read with my 2021 eyes and contexts, a lot of the actual book bears, even demands, reexamination . . . for example, the very narrow heteronormative, gender essentialist sex magic formula given here looks very different to a bisexual kinky man of this century. It’s unquestionably a major piece of symbolism in the canon, and one I use constantly, but it doesn’t speak much to genderqueer people, or those not into penetrative sex. (Though of course roses and thorns have a long established legacy in the BDSM community.)

One of the changes in discussions of sexuality and gender these days is that the terminology has become far more complex, allowing for a wider range of perspectives and lived experiences (such as a-romantic or asexual people – something the text treats as ‘frigidity’ to be ‘cured’) much easier to discuss inclusively. Some find this difficult, but to a neophile like me, the more words we have, the more symbols and maps, the more we can talk about the true complexity of desire. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination: the Vulcan philosophy of delight in difference, a concept Bob loved.

Even allowing for the shifts of meaning on this turn of the spiral, there’s so much of value here, much of it timely in these upheaving times. For all the outdated slang, Bob’s compassion for the subjects of his stories is very present – as is his erudition and practicality, his even-handedness on balancing theory, history and on-the-ground utility.

One small part was an especial delight: for years, I had heard a phrase from Californian Silicon Valley acidheads and other hedonic engineers . . . "no matter