Arthur Versluis is the editor-in-chief of Esoterica and the founding president of the Association for the Study of Esotericism. He lives in Michigan where he is a professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Michigan State University. In this scholarly paperback, he traces the twisting and turning path of Western sexual mysticism.

He opens with a look at the infiltration of Gnostic traditions into medieval Christianity. He sees the emergence of the troubadours as a critical moment for a mysticism of erotic love in the West. He discusses the esoteric tradition of Jacob Bohme in the seventeenth century, the nineteenth century utopian communities of John Humphrey Noyes and Thomas Lake Harris, the free love movement of the twentieth century, and the modern writings of Denis de Rougemont and Alan Watts. The author finds within these experiments with sexual mysticism an attraction to nature and magic, the strong role of women as spiritual guides, and the goal of transcendent union with the Divine.