Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (30 page)

With such a well-publicised member of the contemporary witchcraft movement as Mr. Sanders openly revealing such an odd piece of sexual behaviour it is not altogether surprising that some of those who write hard-core pornography, either for business or for pleasure, have used magic and witchcraft as a convenient framework around which to build their erotic fantasies.

Of many such occult/pornographic novels that have appeared in recent years most are utterly worthless; they succeed only in displaying a complete ignorance of the real nature of magic on the one hand and a distressing poverty of style and erotic imagination on the other. Supernatural elements are usually missing from the plots of these books—their authors seem to assume (a) that the only reason people ever gather together behind locked doors is to hold phallic orgies, and (b) that a belief in witchcraft or magic necessarily implies that the believer is a sexual pervert.

One of the few pieces of hard-core pornography that both accepts the supernatural and is written by someone with a little real knowledge of his subject is
Inpenetrable
(sic), a novel dealing with, of all things, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the sodality which was
the fons et origo
of the contemporary magical revival. The real Golden Dawn flourished in the years 1887–1939 and its rites were conducted in rooms in unfashionable quarters of London; the author of
Inpenetrable
³
has shifted the Golden Dawn date to 1969 and situated its headquarters in Eaton Square!

The Golden Dawn of History was of unblemished moral reputation; its members may sometimes have been spiteful or silly, but they were not sexual perverts. The Golden Dawn of Mr. Harris (or Mr. Levi) invokes demons, worships Satan and indulges in buggery, rape and psychic murder; and yet certain references show that Mr. Harris is not
altogether ignorant of the nature of the real Golden Dawn. Thus Maureen Graille, the heroine of the book, holds ‘
The Kabbalah Unveiled
on her lap’; the author of
The Kabbalah Unveiled
was S. L. MacGregor Mathers, founder of the Golden Dawn. Similarly Lord and Lady Aston, two of the occult perverts whose curious activities are recounted in detail and at length, are described as students of the writings of Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner. Even the author’s most ludicrous attempts at imagining a pornographic application of occult techniques contain descriptive material which must be derived from some knowledge of the contemporary witch-cult. For example Kyleen Beck, a powerful witch, whose activities play an important part in the plot of
Inpenetrable
, has developed a new aspect of crystal-gazing—she uses it as a means of spying on the love-making of her guests! She is described as staring at her crystal ball with her lips drawn back “over her yellowing teeth in a snarl of frustrated lust”. Excited by this copulation by crystal (“as good as any closed circuit television,” says Mr. Harris) her “frantic fingers clawed at the hot dry-haired twat between her thin angular legs. She played with herself as she watched the crystal, and when Nona started to sway towards Eric, sinking his rod into her quim, Kyleen couldn’t stand it any longer. Going over to a corner of the room she returned with her witch’s broomstick, the top of the handle of which was shaped like a phallus. Sitting down again she opened her legs wide, and with a snuffle of greedy pleasure stuffed the phallic broomstick up her hole.”

The interesting thing about this fictional episode, is that just such broomsticks are used in a sexual rite by at least one Gardner-derived coven. As far as I know no description of such instruments has ever been printed and it would therefore seem possible that Mr. Harris has been in contact with one or other of the covens of the witch-cult.

The general interest in sexual magic and witchcraft is increasing; so is commercial production of pornography. It seems almost certain that we are doomed to further floods of magical pornography. It is to be hoped that it will be better written than that which has so far been produced!

¹
See Chapter One, pp. 7–8.

²
The fact that Mr. Sanders does not usually do such things goes to show how very virtuous he normally is. I, although not possessed by a spirit, not only insult my friends but smoke their cigarettes, filch their drink and even sell malicious stories about them to the editor
of Private Eye
. F.K.

³
I have traced three printings of
Inpenetrable
. While none of them contains details of place or date of publication, it is clear that (a) they are of English or American origin, (b) they were printed in 1970 or 1971, (c) that there must be a fourth, and original printing of the book—for the three I have seen were all produced by photo-lithography. The authorship of the book is uncertain; one edition gives him as “Joel Harris”, another as “Aristotle Levi”—but I do not suppose that either name is genuine.

It is unlikely that the more radically sexually orientated of the covens of the contemporary witch-cult will ever attract any considerable membership, but the sexual magic of Aleister Crowley is showing signs of increasing popularity. The Beatles included Crowley’s photograph as “one of the people we like” on the sleeve of one of their LP records, the philosophy of
Stranger in a Strange Land
—a novel that has attained a cult-following almost as great as that achieved by Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
trilogy—shows a marked resemblance to that of Crowley’s religion of Thelema, and the leader of one of England’s best-known pop groups has bought Boleskine House, Crowley’s old home, and has embarked upon a serious study of “Magick”.

Crowley dead has far more disciples than Crowley living ever had, and interest in the sexual techniques employed by him is increasing by means of a geometrical, rather than an arithmetical, progression. I have few doubts that in its Crowleyan manifestations sexual magic is going to survive in the occidental world for as far ahead as it is possible to foresee.

It is also possible that in the years to come a westernised version of Tantricism will begin to attract a following; oriental occultism in one or another form—Theosophical, Zen or Sufi—has been popular in Europe and America for almost a century and I think it very likely that we shall soon begin to see an outbreak of Californian Tantricism. It is a prospect which such scholars as Agehananda Bharati—who look upon the study of oriental mysticism as almost inseparable from that of philology—regard with aversion. I, on the other hand, rather look forward to its occurrence; for, while I have no doubt that such a
movement would be inevitably accompanied by the same irritating pretentiousness that characterises contemporary Zen Buddhism, I am sure that it will enable at least a few people to use sexuality as a means of transcending normal modes of consciousness.

Artificial phalli seem to have been first used in prehistoric times, probably for ritualistic purposes, and by the later classical period they were to be found in comparatively common use—considering that most of them must have been made of non-durable materials, a surprising number of them have survived.

With the fall of the Roman Empire and the triumph of Christianity the dildo, so to speak, went underground—for, from the very beginning orthodox Christianity strongly deprecated all sexual activity except, of course, copulation between husband and wife, and even that was only tolerated in what ribald Polynesians were later to call “the missionary position!” It is true that certain Gnostic sects may have had a more tolerant attitude, and some of them, if their enemies are to be believed, were positively licentious. St. Epiphanius, the Bishop of Constantia, alleged that the Nicolaites affirmed that salvation was only attainable by means of frequent sexual intercourse; he also stated that another Gnostic sect sacramentally administered semen to its members. All this should be regarded with extreme scepticism; pagan writers related very similar stories about the early Christians.

In spite of Christianity the dildo, presumably home-made and normally used only in strict privacy, survived, and Burchardus, a mediaeval Bishop of Worms, described it and its use in some detail:

“Fecisti quod quaedam mulieres facere solent, ut saceres quoddam molimen aut machinamentum in modum virilis membri, ad mensuram tuae voluntaries, et illud loco verendorum tuorum, aut alterius, cum aliquibus ligaturis colligares, et fornicat ionem faceres
cum aliis mulierculis, vel aliae eodem instrumento sive alio tecum. Si fecisti, quinque annos per legitimas ferias poeniteas.—Fecisti quod quaedam mulieres facere solent ut iam supradicto molimine, vel aliqo machinamento, tu ipea in te solam faceres fornicationem? Si fecisti, unum annum per legitimas ferias poeniteas.”

“You have done what certain women are accustomed to do, that is, made a certain contraption or contrivance in the form of the male member, its dimensions according to your preference, and fastened it with several straps to your private parts or those of your partner, so that you may fornicate with other women, or others with the same instrument (or with another instrument) to you. If you have done this, five years’ penance on public holidays. Do you do what certain women are wont to do, that is, with the aforementioned contraption or some such contrivance, fornicate alone within yourself? If you do this, one year’s penance on public holidays.

As the nineteenth-century writer Thomas Wright observed, “the Holy Bishop appears to have been very intimately acquainted with the whole proceeding”.

Today the dildo seems to be re-emerging from its obscurity into semi-respectability; a battery driven electric model, discreetly advertised as “fitting the natural curves of the human body” can be bought by mail-order (the pun is unintentional), while extremely realistic models—although of what I, for one, would consider unduly heroic proportions—are mass produced by a firm in North London and are even occasionally supplied to paraplegics by Britain’s National Health Service. It is rumoured that the same firm also makes extra-large implements to order. An employee tells me that on one occasion an Arab Sheikh ordered the manufacture of such an enormous instrument of this type that he and his fellow-employees could only assume that it was intended to pleasure a favourite camel.

The ninth-century Islamic Aniza school of mysticism was founded by Abu-el-Ataahia, a member of the powerful Arabian Aniza (Goat) tribe. Members of the school attained a state of religious ecstasy by rhythmic clapping or drumming and/or dancing. The symbol of the school was, according to one Sufi-historian, a lighted candle set between a pair of horns, presumably to indicate “light from the head of the Goat”, i.e. the Aniza.

Robert Graves has suggested that this sect reached Western Europe and became the witch-cult. He has explained names allegedly used in the European witch-cult as corruptions of Persian and Arabic words. Thus “Robin” a name often associated with witchcraft and folk-beliefs (as in Robin Hood and Robin Goodfellow), is allegedly derived from the Persian
Rah-bin
(“he who sees the road”); the word athame (the athame is the ritual dagger used in the present-day Gardnerian witch-cult) is held to be a corruption of the Arabic
ad-dbamne;
“coven” is from the
kaftan
, the winding-sheet which Aniza cultists wore while dancing, and “Sabbath” is supposedly a corruption of
az-zabat
, “the Powerful Occasion”.

All this is delightful—but nonsensical. All the features of the witch-cult which Graves holds to be derived from Islamic sources were either in existence before there was any possibility of Sufi influence in Western Europe or did not become associated with witchcraft until after the artificial creation of the Gardnerian cult. Thus the name “Robin” was associated with the folk-hero “the man in green” as early as Anglo-Saxon times and the athame, or ritual knife, was first introduced into witchcraft by Gerald Gardner; he took the name and the
design of the implement from MacGregor Mathers’ nineteenth-century translation of the
Key of Solomon
—there is no trace whatsoever of the use of the athame in witchcraft, as distinct from ceremonial magic, until the present century.

This was only one of the religious activities of the White Mass Priests of the Church of Carmel, followers of an unfrocked priest named Boullan, remote spiritual heirs of Guibourg and the priest/sorcerers of seventeenth-century Paris.

The founder of the Church of Carmel was a certain Eugene Vintras. He was born in 1807, the illegitimate son of a servant girl. After a charity education he drifted from one unsatisfactory job to another before finding a temporary stability as the foreman of a small cardboard-box factory at Tilly-sur-Seule. One evening in August 1839 he was sitting in his tiny office when there came a sudden knock at his door followed by the entry of an old man dressed in rags. The old man addressed Vintras by his baptismal names and said “I am unutterably tired and wherever I go people treat me with disdain and say that I am a thief.” Vintras gave the old man a coin and ushered him out, locking the door behind him; as he did not hear the old man go down the stairs (which led to the exit from the factory) Vintras called a workman and together they searched the building. To their amazement the old man had utterly and mysteriously disappeared!