Magic & Magicians I am a magician. I practice magick and I perform magic. I've been a "magician member" of  The Magic Castle, a world-famous club for magician entertainers. I have performed magic for all age groups and have entertained thousands of people. Magic, like magick, has several subcategories. Two such subcategories whose differentiation can be confusing even to magicians, are mentalism and mental magic. Mental magic is simply any trick giving the impression that some sort of psychic ability is being used or a paranormal phenomenon is being demonstrated. Many magicians, within their acts of cards and coins or boxes filled with assistants or large cats will include

Are you familiar with Tantra? If you live in a Western culture, you probably know that Tantra is "that sex stuff." It's about "spiritualized sex," the Kama Sutra, weird sex positions, and sex that lasts for hours. Didn't Sting say so? (Okay, now he admits it was a joke.) Even in India, the birthplace of Tantra, most people think of Tantra as either "that sex stuff" or "black magick" or both. Here in the West, the Tantra most people are familiar with is really more accurately called "Neo-Tantra." It has a focus on extended periods of ecstatic sex and, supposedly, leads followers to a more spiritual state. Practitioners will talk about moving energy, breathwork, and visualization—all

The Great and Powerful Oom As most of you know, I am very interested in the subjects of Tantra, sacred sexuality, and sex magick. I discuss these subjects in parts of my Modern Magick and, of course, in my Modern Sex Magick. Although Tantra is quite old, it's introduction in the U.S. is relatively recent. In fact, the introduction of the high level of Indian thought and theology is relatively new to the West. With the typical sense of Christian superiority at the time, most people thought that Hinduism was just the stupid beliefs of savages until 1893 and the Parliament of World Religions held in Chicago. There, Swami Vivekananda electified the audience as he described the

People have a natural interest in sex. Without sex, we wouldn't be here. And yet, we seem to have a love-hate relationship with sexuality. To many Westerners sex is a gift from God but we should only experience this gift under certain limited situations. To others, sex is at best a necessary evil and shouldn't even be discussed. But people will talk. If it's not polite to talk about what your friends do in private, it's okay to talk about people in a far-away country. That way, you can work out your psychological need to discuss sexuality while taking an pseudo-anthropological approach to this discussion. This is exactly what happened in Victorian Britain, where "proper" people who would