Class recordings archived HERE
Sex Magic is the practice of a ritualized sexuality to access cosmic power. Western sex magic operates on some key religious assumptions: first, the idea that God, human beings, and the cosmos share a deep connection, and second that it is possible to use the body to act on the cosmos. Thus the study of sex magic, while interesting in itself, opens big questions about the nature of religion and its understandings of affect, embodiment and power. This course will explore the growth of Jewish myths and rituals of sacred sexuality in selections from key Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic texts, including the Shiur Qomah, The Sefer Yetsirah, The Sefer Bahir, The Zohar, and Moshe Cordovero’s Tefillah LeMoshe. In studying these texts we also observe firsthand the processes of mythical and ritual innovation, and in this perhaps we may come to a better understanding of kabbalah specifically but more generally of religion, what it is, and how it changes.
Marla Segol is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the “Sefer Yetsirah” and coeditor of Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts.