Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy’s New Age

Abstract

"Implicit in many studies in this field is the assumption that it is the scientific knowledge of sex that is the paradigmatic form of modern sex- ual knowledge...While this has been, and remains, a crucial enterprise, I would like to explore an alternative trajectory in which--as psychics, mystics, or theosophists--men and women like T.S. influenced, assimilated, and reworked new sexological and psychoanalytic claims regarding gender and sexuality into and through an elaborate constellation of spiritual beliefs, beliefs that they claimed were also scien- tific, even though their occult science might not be universally (or even very widely) recognized as such. While this has been, and remains, a crucial enterprise, I would like to explore an alternative trajectory in which-as psychics, mystics, or theosophists-men and women like T.S. influ- enced, assimilated, and reworked new sexological and psychoanalytic claims regarding gender and sexuality into and through an elaborate constellation of spiritual beliefs, beliefs that they claimed were also scientific, even though their occult science might not be universally (or even very widely) recognized as such. And it acquired its academic respectability in part through its triumph over precisely these alternative ways of thinking about the subject. In fact, these issues-the relationship of religious belief and spiritual experience to sexual behavior and gender identity-intrude into the more scientific story that Ellis chose to tell in the many editions of Sexual Inversion." (411-412)