The Astral Power of Female Hair: Gender Danger and Magic in the Lectorium Rosicrucianum

Abstract

This article examines the modern Gnostic group Lectorium Rosicrucianum’s views on magic as being intertwined with ambivalent approaches to gender and emancipation. I focus on a hermaphroditic myth scripted to be performed in a magic ritual with the aim to restore man and woman as a complete person. This gendered magic ritual, designed by the group’s main theorist Jan van Rijckenborgh, is analysed as an esoteric response to contemporary egalitarian impulses and as a renegotiation of the perceived universality of polarised sexes in Christian culture. By applying Judith Butler’s theory to cultural negotiations of materiality and emancipation, and particularly to how origin myths of gender are employed in such negotiations, a critical discussion is offered. I discuss the related problems of using circular argumentation, of performing the occult notion of a dangerous “feminine essence†in magic ritual, and of the tendency to covertly postpone emancipation in favour of magically creating higher equality in God. I finally argue that van Rijckenborgh’s gendered views on magic depend on gnosis as an “embodied speech†and are informed by a literal conceptualization of spiritual embodiment that implicates a monist approach to reality that disregards ordinary distinctions between psychological, biological, and divine realities.