GODS OF SEX ARE THROWING A PARTY
There is a moment in the history of erotic photography when the photograph stops being merely a record of the body and starts behaving like something more mysterious.
We have spent the earlier parts of this series watching photography discover the nude, turn the nude into fantasy, and eventually turn fantasy into an industry.
1/2 The rising curve model Lovisa Lager leans deeper into dominance in this erotic photo series by Rémi Lamandé featured in Dazed Magazine / Nobuyoshi Araki at the Museum of Sex via Dazed Magazine
3/4 Hand-Painted Daguerreotypes From The 1850s Capture The Color Of Nudity / Strange Love, 2011 Archival Pigment Print by Ellen von Unwerth, Staley-Wise Gallery NY, Artsy
The nineteenth-century camera gave us the erotic body as an image; the postcard, magazine and pin-up taught us how to consume that image; pornography developed increasingly sophisticated ways of turning looking into stimulation.
But the further we travel into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the harder it becomes to separate the erotic image from the larger machinery of fantasy, ritual and altered consciousness. Because perhaps the history of pornography is not only a history of what people have wanted to see. It is also a history of what people have wanted to feel.
Sex has always been rather inconvenient in that respect. It refuses to remain comfortably inside the category of biological function. It is pleasure, certainly, but it is also imagination, obsession, attachment, fantasy, reproduction, performance, identity, vulnerability and power.
5/6 WHATEVER PARTY backstage - Josef Jasso Photography / Fashion backstage of @sbshades show with @hellojonte and Rico by Josef Jasso
It can make an ordinary room feel charged with possibility and make a perfectly rational person behave as though their brain has temporarily been outsourced to their hormones. Religions have recognised this power for thousands of years, which is one reason sexuality has so often been surrounded by rules, taboos and elaborate systems of permission and prohibition.
And then there are the people who decided that perhaps the problem was not sex itself, but the way civilisation had been trying to control it. Welcome to the magic of sex magick…
Not the stage-magician variety with a cape, rabbits and suspiciously enthusiastic assistants, but the much older and stranger proposition that sexual energy might be used deliberately to alter consciousness, intensify intention or approach the divine. In this territory, the erotic body is not simply an object to be admired or consumed. It becomes an instrument.
7/8 Photo Pictorial Amanda Lepore, transgender model, performer, and former Club Kid via Facebook Page / #josefjassophotography #kyliesoniquelove Insta-POP @xosonique
That distinction matters for our story because it takes us back to the question that has been quietly haunting this entire series: what exactly is an erotic image for? To excite? To document? To sell? To provoke? To liberate? To scandalise? To remember?
Or perhaps, sometimes, to take us somewhere else.
THE OLD IDEA THAT SEX COULD TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE
The idea that sexuality could have a spiritual dimension certainly did not begin with modern pornography, and it did not begin with Aleister Crowley either.
Traditions associated with Taoism and Tantra developed their own understandings of sexuality as a source of energy, discipline and transformation, although it is worth being careful about flattening very different religious and philosophical traditions into one convenient Western idea of “sex magick.”
9/10 #josefjassophotography #kyliesoniquelove @xosonique / Josef Jasso Photography via Facebook Page
The attraction of the subject to modern occultists was precisely that sexuality seemed to offer a form of energy that was already built into the human organism. You did not have to invent it. You merely had to learn how to direct it.
This was a particularly seductive idea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European occultism was busy rummaging through religions, philosophies and magical traditions in search of alternatives to conventional Christianity.
The period produced an extraordinary appetite for secret knowledge, spiritualism, esotericism, Eastern religions, ceremonial magic and forbidden forms of sexuality.
The respectable Victorian world was obsessed with regulating the body while simultaneously producing an astonishing quantity of literature about what happened when regulation failed.
11/12 #Josef Jasso Photography#josefjassophotography #kyliesoniquelove Insta-POP @xosonique /Amy Taylor, the vocalist of the punk rock band Amyl and the Sniffers, captured by photographer Jamie Nelson for the Champagne Problems feature in Vogue Portugal @VoguePortugal 2025 issue @CaltexCowgirll from @AmylAndTheSniffers, Casting and full production by Espresso Productions
Sexuality, in other words, was already an occult subject before anyone put the words sex magick on a book cover. Aleister Crowley simply made the combination impossible to ignore.
Crowley’s importance to the story is less that he invented sex magick than that he turned it into part of a much larger philosophy of individual will, ritual and transformation. One of the practices associated with his work was eroto-comatose lucidity, a deliberately induced state between wakefulness and sleep produced through prolonged sexual stimulation and exhaustion.
13/14 BTS @davidgiampiccolo Broken Heart collection #JosefJassoPhotography — Sex God's Palace / via Josef Jasso Fashion Photography
In the account preserved in the material for this chapter, the practice was connected with what Crowley called the “Sleep of Siloam,” although the history of the terminology reaches further back than Crowley himself.
Paschal Beverly Randolph had already described a related state in the nineteenth century, calling it the “Sleep of Sialam.” Helena Blavatsky later used the expression “Sleep of Siloam,” although her interpretation involved a different route into trance.
The genealogy is therefore not neat, linear or particularly obedient to modern categories. Crowley was not standing at the beginning of a tradition so much as entering an existing conversation and giving it his own decidedly Crowleyan vocabulary. The important point is what all these versions have in common: the altered state.
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