The Master Key of Love and the Psychology of Human Behavior, Including the Psychology of Human Relations

A scarce Rosicrucian title, in which the author discusses the psychological, physiological, and sexual components of a happy marriage and compatible sexual union. First published in 1925, the author offered a correspondence course by the same name. In his foreword, the author claims to want no credit for the secrets held therein, but only that he "desires to see humanity a super race of beings." The book was later included as a chapter in the anthology Rosicrucianism in America (1990) edited by Gordon Melton. A scathing review in the Oct. 1925 issue of The Occult Digest provides some indication of how the book was regarding in occult circles:: This gem shines with all of the luster of calosoma scrutator, which nightly intrigues passersby with its shimmering coat of green, molded of pigment acquired in the walls of the sewer in which it lives. It is useless for such purveyors of "sex information" to attempt a defense. Their abysmal ignorance of biology, biological chemistry, scientific psychology, and in some cases even simple physiology glares with the brilliance of the noonday sun from nearly every page of their products. They are unauthoritativè, inaccurate, misleading and menacing. Not sufficiently dirty to come under the peculiary amusing censoria of this country, they pass for profound, even (which is our particular concern) occult revelations of the mysterious technique of sex. Harry Owen Saxon (1868-1940), aka, the "love professor," was born in England and immigrated to the U.S. in 1903. He operated the Triangle Psychological Publishing Co. in Chicago in the 1920s and early 1930s and was also the author/publisher of Vibrations: Every Brain Its Own Radio Station (1924). In 1929, he became embroiled in a highly publicized divorce case, in which is wife, Maude Depue Winchell of Zanesville, Ohio, who was also the Triangle's secretary and a previous subscriber to his correspondence course, filed for divorce after three months of marriage claiming physical abuse and the theft of her alimony from her previous husband. One account published in an Australian newspaper claimed that Saxon hit Winchell 13 times in one day and on another occasion knocked her through three doorways (Barrier Miner, 2 Nov 1929, p. 1). Saxon's books and courses were predictably less in demand following the case and according to census records he lived in a variety of lodging houses until his death in 1940. Glued yellow wrappers printed in red & black (7 ¾" x 5 ¼"), 127, [1] p. No copies of any edition in the trade (Sept., 2023) and only one copy of any edition in WorldCat (this one, at UCSB). Scarce.…