I finished The Sex Magicians. I won't write a long review, but here are a few comments.
Some of you probably are wondering if the book is merely a pornography book written for money, or a real "RAW book." Well, it's both. It was clearly written for a porn publisher -- it's a short book, filled with long sex scenes -- but it's also a kind of Illuminatus! variation. Markoff Chaney is a major character, for example, and Simon Moon turns up at "Simeon Luna."
As Gregory Arnott mentions in the Hilaritas podcast, much of The Sex Magicians was reused in The Trick Top Hat, the original second volume of the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. Much of that reused writing apparently was cut when RAW made cuts in all three books for the more commonly available one volume omnibus volume.
This reuse of material may explain why RAW never got The Sex Magicians republished during his lifetime; perhaps he felt that reusing quite a bit of it was an alternative to bringing it out again. In any event, it's a situation similar to The Starseed Signals, which never came out during RAW''s life but which has sections recycled into Cosmic Trigger 1.
There are some Markoff Chaney jokes that I don't remember from Illuminatus! and quite a bit of Crowleyan sex magick. So you may want to read it if you want to be an Illuminatus! completist or if you have a particular interest in sex magick.
I'll have a couple of other blog posts soon on the book.
1 comment:
I made it to page 46 and finally put it aside and started reading something else. I’ve never done that with a RAW book before but I personally found the sex scenes to be boring and tedious. Maybe I’ll pick it up later and try to finish it. I lived through the era when it was written so I can appreciate the historical context, but I don’t think it does much to enhance RAW’s legacy.
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