| Description |
In his work Magia Sexualis – Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2018), the American religionist Hugh Bayard Urban dwells on the little interest of academic circles (especially social anthropology/religion studies) in the so-called "alternative sexuality", or to its wide and increasingly popular representation (esotericism is turning into commercial exotericism) in (post)modern society. The evidence is currently produced on a daily basis by brochures, books, instructions, lectures, courses, blogs, vlogs, video documentaries dedicated to esoteric sexuality, but also esoteric sexual aids. Various interpretations of the tantric tradition seem dominant, but it is only a part of the (post)modern bricolage consisting of discontinuous elements. Here we can find e.g. Christian Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Satanism, Buddhism, European and Oriental astrology, (neo)paganism, New Age, Beat lyrics and ecofeminism. Thus, the presented contribution responds to this call to "fill the academic gap" and in the first part it briefly deals with the ideological starting points, historical ideas and fantasies about the "sexuality of the others" and us "normal". The aim of the first part is to critically explicate key concepts, including the central concept - sexuality/alternative, and to relate them to mysticism and magic. Further – to emphasize the power and (counter)power narrative, which also creates what the philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco calls the paranoid (over)interpretation of signs. In this context, it is a paranoid interpretation (rumors, superstitions, targeted stigmatization) of sexuality as a sign, or in a more complex sign process. The second part of the contribution will try to find their continuity between discontinuous ideas as semiotic constructs, taking into account current data obtained from virtual (publicly known persons, influencers such as porn actress Daisy Lee, who underwent a ritual ceremony with Ayahuasca) and classical field of research among people inclined to alternative religiosity. So, in summary, it will be a comparison of Hugh B. Urban's text Magia Sexualis with my own current research and an extension of "alternative sexuality" with its ethnosemiotic interpretation.
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