Sexual Alchemy

Most of us associate alchemy with the idea of transforming lead into gold, or mixing bizarre chemicals to create mad-scientist concoctions. While this is part of alchemy, there are many other elements that relate closely to other esoteric traditions. For instance, it was thought that astrology controlled many of the elements that alchemists worked with.

The most important search in the field of alchemy, however, was the search for a long life. Potion after potion was created to bestow this blessing on humans, and in Western alchemical traditions, each failed. But there were other traditions in the far East.

Taoism benefited from the influence of many southeast Asian religious traditions, including tantrism. Ultimately, many different tantric schools came out, including one called tantric alchemy, or sexual alchemy. It places a good deal of importance on the search for immortality, and uses sex, breath, and muscle control to provide the blessing of extended and ultimately eternal life for its practitioners.

Like many other forms of tantrism, the primary tool for power was the kundalini, the snakelike power that coils at the base of the chakras. Through several types of control including the retention of sperm in the sexual act, the practitioner of sexual alchemy could show his mastery of spirituality and extend the length of his life by retaining that vital energy.

Alchemy in general is not the esoteric, substance-dependent paradigm most think it is. Rather, it is a unique subsection of magick concerned primarily with the transformation of humans and substances: lead into gold, mortality into immortality, human into the divine. All alchemical processes start with low, earthbound processes and substances, and use spirituality, will, and natural law to transmute them into higher-level things.

The Magician, Key 1 in the Major Arcana of tarot cards, is the representative of alchemy in the deck; his motto, expressed by Golden Dawn researchers, is “As above, so below.” This means that all things of the earth (below) are inextricably interwoven with the things of the heaven (above). Alchemists (and in a related paradigm, shamans) seek the balance that lies between the two in order to shift it, effecting transformation, healing the sick, and transcending the physical and material plane.

Sexual alchemy does this by channeling the power of the kundalini through the body to power it in magickal endeavors. The chakra centers correspond with seven stages of alchemical transformation, during which the earthly is moved toward the divine; while the last stage is nearly impossible to achieve, even movement slightly along the chakra core will extend life and may be able to accomplish other life changes as well.

Other forms of sexual alchemy hold that the retention of sperm is not the critical element of magickal transformation, but that the point of the orgasm, when both partners are most perfectly sharing one another, opens one to the heavens: as above, so below. Because women can hardly retain sperm, this is a much more common sexual alchemy belief among females than the tantric version.