Cadernos de Campo (Mar 2021)

O sexo e o corpo como veículos das práticas mágicas no esoterismo do século XX Reflexões sobre magia sexual em Thelema

  • Beatriz Parisi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.47284/2359-2419.2020.29.191214
Journal volume & issue
no. 29
pp. 191 – 214

Abstract

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This article aims to demonstrate the importance of sex magic in the construction of a specific form of corporeality within the esoteric practices of the 20th century, using Thelema, a magical-religious system developed by Aleister Crowley, as a case study. The body, through the re-signification of sexual practices and their space in social life, gains centrality as a locus of lived experience and as a potential for active transformation of itself and the world. This new way of building the body, positifying it as the space of subjectivity and plasticity, is totally inserted in the socio-political demands of the fin-de-siècle. This way of building the body will be investigated using a mythical-ritual apparatus that reinforces, through the repetition of the rite, this new corpus of values linked to already existing categories, with an emphasis on sex, showing another face of foundational discursive duality of modernity: the body as a double of the subject (LE BRETON, 2002 [1990])

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