Dealings with the Dead: The Human Soul, its migrations and its transmigrations. Penned by the Rosicrucian.

Utica, N.Y. Published by M.J. Randolph. 1861-62.

"It is of my death that first I wish to speak, and of what took place thereafter"

First edition. 181x110mm. pp. [2], 268 [4pp adverts]. Brown cloth, blindstamped decoration to upper and lower covers and lettered in gilt to spine. Corners bumped and rubbed and some wear to edges and head and foot of spine. Joints a little tender but holding. Some soiling and marking to the edges but overall a very good copy of a book that is extremely rare in commerce, none appearing in the auction records. The rear endpaper has the ownership inscription of William Herbestrom of Blandford. On the final advertisement page is inscribed M.J.Randolph New York. Mary Jane Randolph was Paschal's wife and the publisher of his books. She sold them by mail order along with a variety of herbal remedies and Native American medicines. 
Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) was born in New York to a mixed race mother (a barmaid) and a white father (a plantation owner) to whom she was not married. Randolph's father abandoned them and then his mother died of smallpox. The young Randolph lived by begging on the streets before running away to sea, working his way backwards and forwards across the Atlantic before being injured and being forced to return to dry land. There were two main strands to his life. The first was his work as an abolitionist, recruiting black soldiers for the Union Army and then educating freed slaves in Louisiana at the Freedmen's Bureau schools.
It was through his friendship with Ethan Allen Hitchcock (who would become a leading Civil War General) that Randolph was introduced, in 1850, to Rosicrucianism which opened up the path to what would become his life's work. He spent the next decade studying spiritualism, magic, clairvoyance and other aspects of esoterica. He tied these in to radical ideas on the role of race, sexuality and gender (earthly gender being "provisional" and God being both male and female) to formulate a somewhat sui generis form of the occult. In 1858, Randolph became the Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternita Rosae Crucis but he was always his own man, and his incorporation of "sex magic" into his occult ideas was particularly controversial and with something of the 1960s sexual revolution about it. A man apart from and ahead of his time.
He died in tragic and uncertain circumstances of a gunshot wound, possibly by his own hand. But death was always in his thoughts. As he writes in Dealings with the Dead: "It is of my death that first I wish to speak, and of what took place thereafter - of where and how I found myself as soon as the icy hand of Death had touched my heart".

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