Sex, Gender, and Magic

Last week, I attended Paganicon 2025. As a gathering for Pagan practitioners and those seeking to explore their spiritual practice, Paganicon drew magical practitioners from across the globe.

Perhaps magic and spiritual exploration seem out of character for a scientist, a technologist, an educator. Like much of my story, the path I take is eclectic. Although steeped in the Scientific Method, I am certainly Pagan and a practitioner of magical arts.

I straddle many lines drawn by humans. I am pansexual. I am transgender. I am a magical scientist who knows human knowledge is dwarfed by human ignorance.

And - as I transitioned gender to present as a woman - I sensed a change in the way I connected to the Universe. My magic changed as my societal status changed.

At first, the changes confused me. But as I spoke with other magical practitioners about the role of sex and gender in spirituality (to date - here, here, here, and here), my sense of how identity plays into magic made clear one universal concept.

At its best, magic is fueled by acting in accordance with our true selves. Magic is the explosion caused by a fully realized identity celebrating itself and its agency within the Universe.

The foundation of polarity

Aleister Crowley formulated one of the best known definitions of magic(k) as "causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." Given sufficient Will, Crowley believed it "theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature."

These statements imply magical practitioners force the Universe to do as we bid it, and the corpus of Western Magical Tradition appears to confirm a transactional nature of magic. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, possibly the greatest influence on Western magic since 1888, developed ritual workings to invoke, banish, command, and channel the forces of Nature.

Western Magical Tradition describes two poles of action - the masculine and the feminine. Masculine actions initiate and direct. Feminine actions receive and complete.

Unfortunately, "masculine" and "feminine" are charged with social context that ill suits their use in magical conversation today. But both actions are easily related to the sex act, in which a male initiates reproduction, and a female gestates and gives birth to complete reproduction.

Crowley was a proponent and practitioner of Sex Magic - and precisely for this reason. Sex Magic works, and it does because magic begins with polarity.

Male and female are obvious implementations of polarity, and most people are quite enthusiastic about engaging in sex. As bodies are stripped to engage in the sex act, conformity with Will is stripped down to simple polarity, endowing it with power.

The spaces between

Western Magical Tradition describes polarity, but how does polarity apply to somebody like I am?

I don't fit sexual or gender stereotypes. I fall outside these boundaries as one not easily categorized, not easily defined, not easily limited by human concepts. I exist between the poles.

But magic is not of the poles. Magic is the combination of and resolution between the poles.

As part of a panel on sex and gender at Paganicon, Mhara Starling commented that magic happens in the liminal spaces. That is, magic lives between the poles, the indefinable space, the space she and I occupy…as well as each human as we live the human experience.

None of us is strictly masculine or feminine. Even the burliest of men working in the burliest of industries has knowledge of the value he sees in what might be called a feminine characteristic.

In those cases, we must ask who defines human characteristics as feminine or masculine? Why are the classifications rigid and immutable?

We must also consider how embracing our liminality may empower each of us to explore our Universe and each other in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Gender as the space between

Sex Magic works…but not due to the scientific definition of sex. As I discussed many times, sex is purely about reproduction. Sex is an abstract definition by biologists to describe a species and the way individual organisms of the species might reproduce.

Sex, strictly speaking, applies to an individual organism only in reference to a single act of reproduction. Sex does not apply across a lifetime in which an organism faces many changes physically as well as socially.

To shore up those twiddly bits between the spaces of acts of reproduction, biologists coined a new word. Gender is the individual implementation of sex characteristics, cognition, and behavior expressed within a greater social environment.

Gender - by its nature - is liminal. We know who we are, yet the social environment enforces gender roles as social norms. There is no escape from liminality for an individual within a social environment.

But it is by fully embracing who we are and expressing it unapologetically that social environments evolve. And with social evolution, the most powerful magic occurs as we express our full selves in the Universe.

Power in liminality

Magic is not born of polarity, but of liminality. Magic is the combination, the synthesis, the offspring.

In terms of Hermetic Cabala, magic is not the action of the Pillar of Severity or the Pillar of Mercy. Magic is the birth that takes place through the Middle Pillar. Magic is the Godhead of Keter made Christ Center in Tifaret, ideated through Yesod to be beautifully fulfilled in Malkut.

As humans, we view our Universe as binary. Black or White. Good or Evil. Male or Female. What is must exist as one or the other.

But the Universe operates on a spectrum. Not Black or White, but colors of the rainbow (and the Rainbow). Not Good or Evil, but the social context of ethics. Not Male or Female, but the beauty of every human expression.

Magic is most powerful when we do it from our place of truth, from our deepest identity, from our liminal state of perfection.

In this way, perhaps Crowley was right in his definition. As we act in conformity with Will, we use our knowledge of Self. As we complete our intention, we perform what is best for ourselves and for our social environment.

Authenticity, intention, and will

But does the Western Magical Tradition seek the best for the social environment? Or does it teach personal gain in the guise of the greater good? Has the magical world fostered a binary even to its detriment?

Christianity systematically neutered the feminine from its spiritual path, leading humanity into the Dark Ages. But the Renaissance fared no better - substituting worship of reason for worship of deity while preserving the false binary and one-sided view of the Universe.

As magical practitioners, our path forward must be to seek the counterexample, to delve deeper than the obvious, and to focus on that part of existence that isn't easily explained. But we must do so not out of a sense of compassion for those left behind as society further segregates humanity, but for the wisdom embodied by those who live fully in the space between.

We are empowered by embracing liminality. We are empowered by expressing our full, authentic selves. We are empowered to perform our best magic through alignment of Self with Source, alignment of our intention with the Will of the greater current of the Universe.

And this current is found in the spaces between.