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“TRY”: The Occult Legacy of P.B. Randolph
By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, modern occultism drew upon ideals, imagery, and drama of antiquity — remade in light of humanity’s hopes, wishes, and strivings in the Industrial Era.
Seen from one perspective, mechanistic forces appeared to rule the world. Darwin’s theories on the orderly biologic development of life were published in 1859.
But to a cohort of rebels, seekers, romantics, occultists, and esotericists, there existed a substory. To them, the individual was an unruly being possessed of self-determining qualities. One of the great figures on the modern scene to explore this view was American ceremonial magician Pascal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875).
Randolph, a free man of partial Black descent, was born in 1825 in the notorious and dangerous Five Points neighborhood on Canal Street in lower Manhattan.
His father abandoned the family leaving Randolph and his mother to enter a poorhouse when he was six or seven. His mother soon died, probably of typhus, and he was left orphaned, raised variously by foster parents and a half-sister. Seeking to escape street life and pissant labor, the adolescent Randolph became an…
