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Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie and Sexual Regeneration

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The Occult Nineteenth Century

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Abstract

By the 1890s, the unspoken “open secret” in contemporary occultism was that sexual energy was the vital force that made possible psychic “unfoldment,” spiritual progress, and immortality. This was “regeneration,” the reverse of “generation,” the sexual act that creates man. Regeneration restored the Edenic state. Kenneth Sylvan Launfal Guthrie (1871–1940) was the most detailed expositor of regeneration. A disciple of Hiram Erastus Butler, he combined Butler’s practical teachings with his own extensive knowledge of primitive Christianity. The breathing and meditation exercises taught in his Brotherhood of the Eternal Life guided the student in becoming aware of the monthly “Vitality Germ” (zoé)—the Elixir of Life—generated by the body and taught how to effect its “resorption” to regenerate man.

Now, it is the concentration of this Spiro [“vital force”] in the air we breathe that, in its union with the MAGNETIC CURRENT that FLOWS THROUGH ALL, becomes the SPIREMA in the Greek Bible. In plain English, the concentrated life force, the FIRE OF LIFE IN SEX, the FRUIT OF THE TREE OF LIFE. And as true as its use in generation procreates and brings to earth human beings in new human bodies, just so true is it that when men and WOMEN learn to USE the SAME FIRE and fruit of life in regeneration that they now use in GENERATION and PLEASURE, they will have found the SECRET OF LIFE and WILL SURELY cease to die

—Levi Dowling, c.1909, quoted in Buescher (2007: 37–38)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Almost all of the books and journals referred to here can be found in the collections of The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals and the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus, at www.iapsop.com. Accessed 23 March 2019.

  2. 2.

    There was another side of Butler’s practice, totally unknown outside a small circle within his group, that consisted in members running the “quicksilver mill”—manually assisting the sexual partner by “resort to caresses [sic] and light manipulations” until “she will feel as if she were seated on a stick of dynamite, and he will feel as if he had got hold of something that would require help to let go of” (McDonald 1888: 75–79). Guthrie displayed no sign of being aware of this. McDonald (“Styx,” 1829–1917) was a disciple of Butler’s, a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and was, along with Sylvester Clark Gould (1840–1909), one of the founders of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, the claimed progenitor of Theodor Reuß’ Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in Germany.

  3. 3.

    Gnosticos 1932: 565–567: “One cannot do without the help of the other partner if he wants to be free from the ‘wheel of rebirths’.”

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  1. Independent Scholar, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

    John Patrick Deveney

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  1. Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Lukas Pokorny

  2. Department of Religious Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Franz Winter

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Deveney, J.P. (2021). Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie and Sexual Regeneration. In: Pokorny, L., Winter, F. (eds) The Occult Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55318-0_9

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