Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (28 page)

At Nyack Pierre Bernard was treated with even more veneration than that customarily extended to Tantric
Gurus
—indeed, his followers seem to have regarded him as being almost divine—and their admiration for their chief was not diminished by even his most eccentric proceedings; by, for example, the time when he followed his wife’s “Dance of Death” (in which, clad in a veil, she arose from a coffin and performed a sort of belly dance) with a dance performed by himself with a baby elephant as his partner—this particular baby elephant, he solemnly told his disciples, was a particularly sacred Tantric baby elephant.

Ceremonies involving coffins seem to have been popular with the
Sacred Order of Tantriks;
on May 15th, 1927 one of the Hearst papers described an extraordinary ritual devised by Bernard to celebrate the tenth wedding anniversary of two of his disciples:

“For this ceremony, which was mystically a marriage as well as an anniversary, the bride and groom were dressed as for their first wedding. The girls and women of the cortege wore the robes and veils of nuns, covering brilliant and fantastic costumes beneath. The men wore the robes and cowls of monks, covering up equally gay and fantastic costumes in which they were to appear later.

“All carried tall candles, like a procession in a cathedral.

“Immediately behind the bride and groom were carried two coffins. These coffins were the symbols of the dead and the burying of the past.

“Afterwards the coffins were covered with gay draperies and used as tables for an elaborate banquet, while the monks and nuns put off their sombre religious habits and appeared as gay revellers.”

In spite of such nonsensical publicity stunts there seems little doubt that Pierre Bernard and his wife really believed in the truth of that
which they taught and that their Tantricism was authentic, although, of course, heavily westernised. While Bernard confined his public teachings to an extremely innocuous right-handed Tantricism it seems almost certain that an inner group at Nyack engaged in radical, left-handed practices—Bernard neither sued the newspapers which reported that he indulged in “love orgies” nor the author of
My Life in a Love Cult
, a “sensational exposure” serialised in the Hearst press.
¹⁸
Certainly the contemporary
New York Sacred Tantrics
, who still display some regard for Bernard, indulge in left-handed practice, although (as a member informed me) “only with our wives and girl friends”.

¹
Fourier was particularly optimistic. He contended that with the advance of socialism it would be possible to chemically transform the oceans of the world into lemonade, a beverage of which he seems to have been fond to the point of addiction.

²
With great success; the Shaker communities were economically successful but died out because no children were born to members.

³
It is interesting to note that, like the Tantric practitioners of Bengal, Randolph used psychedelic drugs in his rites. He seems to have been the first western occult ist to take any interest in the allegedly consciousness-expanding properties of ether, hashish etc.

⁴
Jones was so well-known for his extravagant admiration of Crowley and Crowley’s writings that when an acquaintance saw him standing disconsolately by an immobilised Ford he sarcastically suggested to Jones that he should read the vehicle some of the master’s erotic verse. “I’ve tried that already”, replied Jones, “and she just drips oil.”

⁵
The “son” was the aforementioned C. S. Jones, whom Crowley considered to be his magical son by his concubine Jane Foster.

⁶
The “Ape” was the magical name of one of Crowley’s mistresses.

⁷
Qadosh means holy. For some reason Louis Culling persistently miscalled it Qodosh” in his somewhat misleadingly entitled book
The Complete Magick Curriculum of the Secret Order G.B.G
.

⁸
Further details of the Agape Lodge and of its connections with L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the pseudo-scientific cults of diametics and Scientology, may be found in my
Ritual Magic in England
(Spearman 1970).

⁹
I am not, of course, implying that any of the leaders of the Satanic Church practise sex-magic; I have no knowledge of the exact membership of the secret circle to which I refer.

¹⁰
The
Astrum Argentinum
was a magical order founded by Crowley some years before he came into contact with the O.T.O. It taught not sexual magic but a modified version of the occult system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

¹¹
I have reproduced this reported statement in a bowdlerised form. If she did express this interesting theory it may be an indication that Jayne had read some of the works of the French nineteenth-century magician Eliphas Levi, for he held very much the same point of view.

¹²
Such stories would have been, of course, completely untrue. It must be emphasised that in spite of his curious beliefs La Vey seems to be sincere and a man of integrity.

¹³
I should have thought these allegations to have been incompatible with one another. Perhaps, however, La Vey was trying to wean the animal from drug- addiction and its roars were symptomatic of its withdrawal from its “hooked” state.

¹⁴
In western magic this grade is considered to be the highest possible of attainment; to claim to possess it is more or less the equivalent, quite literally, of claiming to be God Almighty.

¹⁵
The charges were taken up by the New York police but later dropped; the girls’ accusations were not backed up by any hard evidence and, in any case, seem to have been motivated by jealousy of another of Bernard’s girl friends.

¹⁶
Probably derived from the earlier works of “Arthur Avalon” (Sir John Woodroffe Bt.).

¹⁷
This tenuous link between Scotland and Tantricism would, no doubt, have intrigued the Scottish magician J. W. Brodie-Innes. Brodie-Innes, a leading figure in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, took a great interest in the sexual lives of his fellow initiates; moreover it was he who presented the British Museum library with its copies of that Victorian storehouse of salacity
The Pearl Magazine
—although, typically, he claimed that the gift came, not from him, but from an anonymous and deceased client.

¹⁸
Interestingly enough this exposure was written by a sister of Aleister Crowley’s mistress, Leah Hirsig.

More than one of Crowley’s later American followers has seen the work of Wilhelm Reich as a link between the conceptions of orthodox science on the one hand and those of their own sexual-magical philosophies on the other. As Dr. F. I. Regardie, himself a trained Reichian analyst and vegetotherapist,
¹
has pointed out, the very idea of the existence of such a link would probably have given Reich heartfailure—nevertheless, there is no doubt that Reich arrived quite independently of the occult tradition at a theoretical position very similar to that which is held by at least some exponents of that same tradition.

While Wilhelm Reich, born in Austro-Hungary on March 24th, 1897, was of Jewish extraction his background was not in the least typical of the central European Jewish life of his period; his mother-language was German, not Yiddish; his father was a farmer, not a trader or a member of the professional middle classes; and his parents had no religious beliefs—although they encouraged their son to read the Bible as a matter of scientific interest.

Between 1907 and 1915 Reich attended a German-language High School, specialising in the sciences and graduating with “excellent” in all subjects; subsequently he was enlisted into the army where he fought on the Italian front and was commissioned as a lieutenant.
After his demobilisation in 1918 he entered the Vienna University Medical School; as a discharged veteran he was allowed to cram the normal six years of study into four, but the additional pressure of work involved in this crash course did not prevent him from supporting himself by tutoring other students in pre-medical subjects.

In January 1919 a fellow student suggested to Reich and others that sexology was a subject unjustly neglected by the medical faculty of the university. An unofficial meeting took place, attended by about eight students, and it was decided to set up a sexological seminar. Reich regularly attended this, but he never took part in the discussions;
²
for the approach to sexuality displayed by the other students seemed unnatural and aroused a sense of aversion within him. He felt a similar dislike for the attitude of a Freudian analyst who gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis to the members of the seminar. Nevertheless, he became convinced that sexuality was “the centre around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual”, read Forel, Bloch,
³
Stekel and Freud, and, in the summer of 1920, became a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, then under the personal direction of Freud. He was elected to full membership of the Society in October of the same year.

After obtaining his doctorate in July 1922 Reich spent two postgraduate years at the University Neurological-Psychiatric Clinic directed by Professor Wagner-Jauregg; Wagner-Jauregg was a brilliant neurologist—it was he who had developed the malarial treatment for General Paralysis of the Insane, the syphilitic infection of the central nervous system—but his attitude towards psychoanalysis was one of complete contempt and, according to Reich, he missed no opportunity of poking fun at Freudian sexual symbolism. Neurotics were treated with bromides and suggestion-therapy and a success rate of approaching ninety per cent was claimed—according to Reich these “cures” were non-existent, either there was spontaneous remission or the patient was described as “cured” when some individual symptom had disappeared—the other ten per cent went off to the Steinhof, a vast
hospital-prison in which something like 20,000 grossly disturbed patients were incarcerated. In spite of the Clinic’s neurological bias the two years that Reich spent there exerted an important influence on his intellectual development; in particular, two patients seen by him caused him to evolve the first faint intimations of the ideas that were later to be developed by him as the concepts of
physiological anchoring
(the idea that a psychic experience may lead to the lasting physical alteration of an organ in the human body) and of
energy discharge as a response to muscular armouring
.

The first of these two concepts, that of physiological anchoring, was foreshadowed by Reich’s examination of a young girl who had been admitted to the Clinic suffering from paralysis and muscular atrophy of the arms. No neurological aetiology could be traced, and Reich learned from her that the paralysis had set in after her boy friend’s unsuccessful attempt to clasp her in his arms—as he had reached out for her she had raised her arms as though paralysed, and from then on the paralysis had remained and, eventually, the muscles had begun to atrophy.

The second patient whose symptoms Reich found particularly impressive was a stuporous catatonic.
⁴
One day Reich witnessed this patient’s behaviour pattern suddenly change from the usual stuporous immobility into one of frenzied activity; there was a furious outburst of rage and bad temper which—and this Reich took to be of great significance—gave the patient a pleasurable release of tension. Reich felt that this physical/psychic explosion could not be adequately explained by the Freudian theory of catatonia and that, as Reich himself said, “the psychic
content
of the catatonic fantasy
could not be the cause
of the somatic process”. Ultimately he came to believe that in catatonia muscular armouring has reached a stage where energy-discharge (either physical or psychic) is almost impossible and that as a result of this the dammed-up energy eventually breaks through from the centre of the autonomic nervous system and liberates previously frozen muscular force.

In 1922 Reich began the professional practice of psychoanalysis; in
fact, such was the informal structure of the psychoanalytic movement in its early years that Reich, who had never undergone a full training analysis, had been having patients referred to him by Freud since 1919!

For some time Reich remained a fairly orthodox Freudian, but as the years went by he found that he was developing views at variance with those of Freud; it was not so much that he left Freud as that Freud left him; he could not stomach Freud’s semi-abandonment of his original conception of anxiety as a product of somatic sexual excitation barred from discharge nor could he accept the existence of the “death wish” of later Freudianism.