Once upon a time, in the district of Gareotha, some fourteen miles from Aberdeen in Scotland, a young man was haunted by the ghost of a woman, ‘more beautiful than any woman that he had ever seen.’ She came to his rooms by night, passing through locked doors and shuttered windows, and ‘coaxed and forced him’ as Guazzo says, to have sexual intercourse with her. All night long she would use the young man to satisfy her passion, then depart at the break of dawn, ‘with scarcely any sound,’ only to return the following night.1
In the city of Bonn, in Germany, lived a Catholic priest named Arnold, who had a daughter of exceptional beauty. He was exceedingly jealous of the girl's virginity, and preserved her by locking her in an upstairs room whenever he left his house. One evening he returned from service to his parishioners to find the girl in tears. When asked what was the matter, she told him that a spirit had attended her, foiling both bars and locks, and that he had made love to her, despite all her efforts at resistance.2
Still another story concerns a girl of noble lineage who lived in the vicinity of Moray Firth in Scotland. She refused several noblemen who asked to marry her, and, upon being asked why by her parents, said that she had ‘a marvellously beautiful youth’ who ‘had frequent intercourse with her by night, and sometimes by day.’ She said that ‘she did not know whence he came or whither he went’ but he had, as Guazzo put it, ‘stormed the fortress of [her] virginity’ successfully. Three days after this remarkable revelation one of the maids heard the pair making love and informed her parents that the youth, whoever he was, was with her. They locked and bolted the house so that he could not escape, threw open the door to the girl's room, and found her with a Being of unearthly appearance.3
Sprenger says that in his time women were sometimes surprised in the fields and woods, lying on the ground, naked from the waist down, moaning and writhing as if having sexual intercourse, yet without any visible lover being present. After a time, ‘a black vapour of the size of a man’ would be seen to depart from the girl ‘and to ascend from that place’4
These stories are typical of what one might call erotic hauntings. They are ghost stories, but they differ from other ghost stories in that the ghost seems to want more than just to hang about uninvited. In Japan these ghosts are known as ‘Yoku-shiki-gaki’ or ‘spirits of lewdness’ Gaki is the Japanese equivalent of the Indian word Preta, the earthbound spirit of a mortal who did not, for some reason ascend to the World of Boundless Light, and who, while awaiting reincarnation, not only clings to the earth-sphere, but seeks out erotic encounters. Says Lafcadio Hearn:
They can change their sex at will and can make their bodies as large or small as they please. It is impossible to exclude them from any dwelling, except by the use of holy charms or spells, since they are able to pass through an orifice even smaller than the eye of a needle. To seduce young men, they assume beautiful feminine shapes—often appearing at wine-parties as waitresses or dancing girls. To seduce women they take the form of handsome lads. This state of Yoku-shiki-gaki is a consequence of lust in some previous human existence, but the supernatural powers belonging to their condition are results of meritorious Karma which the evil Karma could not wholly counterbalance.5
In ancient times it was believed that these erotic ghosts were capable, not only of making love, but of siring children.
Geoffrey of Monmouth tells just such a story about Merlin, which has been repeated by all the chroniclers since. Merlin's mother was the daughter of King Demetius, and a nun—thus a royal virgin. When King Vortigern asked her the name of her son's father, she said ‘that she had never enjoyed the society of any mortal or human but only spirit assuming the shape of a beautiful young man. The spirit ‘had many times appeared unto her, seeking to court her with no common affection but when any of her fellow-virgins came in, he would suddenly disappear and vanish. [After] many and urgent importunities I yielded, saith she, to his pleasure—and I was delivered of this son (now in your presence) whom I caused to be called Merlin.’6
Christopher Heywood, who is one of Merlin's biographers, admits that ‘this may be easily believed to be a mere fiction . . . to conceal the person of her sweetheart . . . And yet,’ he says, ‘we read that the other fantastical congression is not impossible.’
‘For Speusippus, the son of Plato's sister, and Elearchus the Sophist, and Amaxilides, in the second book of his philosophy, affirm in the honour of Plato, that his mother, Perictione, having congression with the imaginary shadow of Apollo, conceived and brought into the world him who proved to be the prince of philosophers’7
Apollo was imagined by the ancients to be a real womanizer. In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch says that before Alexander was born, Philip of Macedon peeked at his mother Olympias through a chink in the door to her bedroom and saw her lying with a serpent. He sent Chaeron of Megalopolis to the Oracle of Delphi to learn the significance of the vision and was told that the serpent was the god Apollo, and that the god had been having sexual intercourse with Olympias at the moment when Philip caught them. The oracle said that Philip was doomed to lose the eye with which he committed that impiety, and that Olympias would give birth to a son who would be only half mortal.8
Apollo was positively chaste in comparison to Zeus who the ancients thought was out to ravish every girl in sight whether goddess or mortal Bacchus was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Semele, the princess of Thebes. Perseus was the son of Zeus and the virgin Danae, princess of Argos. Amphion was the son of Zeus and Antiope, princess of Boeotia. Mercury was the son of Zeus and Maia, the daughter of Atlas, and a similar origin was claimed for Aeolus, Arcas, Aroclus, and even Apollo himself.9
In her Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, published by the Aquarian Press, Dion Fortune offers an interesting theory which could explain how such legends got started.
She says that according to ‘esoteric philosophy’ man has seven ‘bodies,’ and not just one, and that ‘sex, or polarity,’ exists on ‘each of the seven planes according to their several conditions’ All seven of these ‘bodies’ are sexual, then, and not just the physical body, and ‘unless a man mates each of his bodies which has arrived at a functional state, his state of union will be incomplete, and he will still be in a state of sex-hunger, seeking his mate.10
During the act of mating, she says, ‘the subtle forces of the two natures rush together, and, as in the case of two currents of water in collision, a whirlpool or vortex is set up’11 In Psychic Self Defence she describes this ‘psychic vortex’ as ‘resembling a waterspout, a funnel-shaped swirling that towers up into other dimensions.’
As body after body engages, the vortex goes up the plane. . . . A soul upon the astral plane may be drawn into the vortex if it is ripe for incarnation, and thus enter the sphere of its parents. If the vortex extends higher than the astral plane, souls of a different type may enter this sphere, but such extension is rare, and therefore it is said that man is born of desire, for few are born of anything else.12
If this theory is correct, then the mere fact that someone sheds his physical body at death or during astral projection does not, ipso facto, make him a non-sexual being, which is the only objection one could raise to stories of erotic hauntings. That doesn't mean that stories of virgin birth should be accepted as historical fact but it does suggest that sex continues, not only into old age, but beyond the grave. And it suggests some interesting possibilities for the traveler on the astral plane.
In his Adventures of a Modern Occultist, British spiritualist Oliver Bland related several stories of sex in the other world based on the testimony of ‘spirits,’ breathed a deep late-Victorian sigh, and gave his readers some bad news. He had reached the ‘inevitable conclusion,’ he said, that ‘however much we may desire to get rid of it, sex is as troublesome in the next world as in this.’13
He says that a great deal of material tended to ‘come through’ during seances that supported this conclusion, but that it was kept from the public, since Spiritualistic writers wished to portray the spirit-world as a place where sex did not exist. Even Bland felt that ‘the accounts could not be published for general or even private reading’ but he says frankly that they ‘show what may be called a peculiarly active sex-life in the after-world.’14
As an example, here are a few words from a Muslim ‘spirit’ who called himself Sidi Aissa Ben Sdub, and who was evoked by French experimenters in Algiers. Bland describes it as a ‘cryptic statement’ with which the spirit ‘prefaces his words': ‘Know, then, O mortals, that here are neither camels nor horses—nor virtuous women—for us, virtue, as ye know it, exists not. And, as I have related, there being neither camels nor horses nor virtuous women, what think ye then occupies the time of us who were strong men?’15
Swedenborg is more explicit. He says that ‘we are not to infer that celestial couples are unacquainted with voluptuousness,’ because ‘the propensity to unite exists in the spiritual bodies as it does in the material bodies. The angels of both sexes are always in the most perfect state of beauty, youth, and vigour. They enjoy therefore the utmost voluptuousness of conjugal love, and that to a much greater degree than is possible for mortals.’16
In A Magician Among the Spirits, Houdini tells of a man who lost his wife and became a spiritualist so that he could embrace and fondle her fully materialized form during seances. The presence of other sitters prevented the pair from going any further than just that, but the mediums who invoke such spirits have been known to call them up in private for more intimate encounters.
‘If there are “Spirits” capable of drinking tea and wine, of eating apples and cakes, of kissing and touching the visitors of seance rooms, all of which facts have been proven, why should not those same spirits perform matrimonial duties as well?,’ asks Madame Blavatsky.17 She certainly knew enough examples from her own experience. One was ‘an idiotic, old, and slovenly Canadian medium’ who believed he had a spirit wife—in life a famous novelist—and that they had bred a ‘herd’ of spiritual children.18 Another was ‘a well-known New York lady medium’ who believed that she had an astral husband—a ‘nightly consort,’ as she put it—and she mentions still others in France.19
It was her belief that ‘holy spirits will not visit promiscuous seance rooms, nor will they intermarry with living men and women.’20 The spirits that were doing all this carousing were therefore spirits of a different—unholy—kind, although let it be said that Madame Blavatsky was not a Christian and would have had nothing to do with theological notions of ‘devils.’ Nonetheless, she believed that these mediums were in danger of ‘death and madness’ and that several of them ‘escaped . . . only by becoming Theosophists. It is only by following our advice that they got finally rid of their spiritual consorts of both sexes.’21
Just how to do this, she doesn't say, but Jules Bois does. According to ‘a theologian of great erudition’ that he consulted, one must ‘fumigate the haunted chamber with a melange of pepper, birthwort roots, cardamoine, ginger, caryophyllaceous herbs, cinnamon, nutmeg, calamite resin, benzoin, a forest of aloes, and trisanthe.’ This is supposed to work against ‘aquatic demons.’ For others, we are counselled to use water-lily, liverwort, cypress, mandrake, and henbane.22 In his Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot says that a common ‘cure’ for an erotic haunting was to take a stone ‘which hath naturally a hole in it,’ pass a string through the stone, and hang it over the afflicted person's bed.23
A more ingenious method was adopted by self-sacrificing Saint Christine. Whenever some lady of her acquaintance was afflicted with an erotic ghost, she would simply sleep in the unfortunate woman's bed, and suffer through the experiences herself.24
Daniel Defoe mentions a man who was
so haunted with naked ladies, fine beautiful ladies in bed with him, and ladies of his acquaintance, too, offering their favours to him, and all in his sleep, that he seldom slept without some such entertainment. The particulars are too gross for my story, but he gave me several long accounts of his night's amours, and being a man of virtuous life and good morals, it was the greatest surprise to him imaginable. He owned with grief to me, that the very first attack was with a very beautiful lady of his acquaintance, who he had been really something freer than ordinary with in their common conversation. This lady [came] to him in a posture for wickedness, and wrought up his inclination so high in his sleep, that he, as he thought, went about actually to debauch her, she not at all resisting, but that he waked at the very moment, to his particular satisfaction.
He was greatly concerned at this part, namely, that he really gave the consent of his will to the fact, and wanted to know if he was guilty of adultery, as if he had lain with her. Indeed, he decided the question against himself so forcibly that I, who was of the same opinion, had nothing to say against it.
Not could all my divinity or his own keep the [succubi] from attacking him again. On the other hand, as I have said, he worried to the degree, that he injured his health, naked women [coming] to him, sometimes one, sometimes another, sometimes in one posture of lewdness, sometimes in another, sometimes into his very arms, sometimes with such additions as I am not merry enough to put into your heads. The man, indeed, could not help it. But as I hinted to him, he might bring his mind to such stated habit of virtue, as to prevent its assenting to any wicked motion, even in sleep, and that would be the way to put an end to the attempt. And this advice he relished very much, and practiced, I believe, with success.25
Numerous writers mention this phenomenon of a succuba impersonating some living woman in order to get her way. Brignoli has such a case in his Alexicacon.
The incident took place at Bergamo in the year 1650, and the victim—ifwe can call him that—was a young man, twenty-two years old. He was in bed one night, when the chamber door opened and a girl named Teresa ‘stealthily entered’ She explained that she had been driven from her home, and had come to him for refuge. He was in love with this girl, and when she suggested that they make love, he readily assented. Summers says that he ‘passed a night of unbounded indulgence in her arms,’ but that before morning, she revealed her true identity. She was, of course, a succuba. Nonetheless, ‘the same debauchery was repeated night after night, until struck with terror and remorse, he sought the priest to confess and be delivered from this abomination’26 In the year 1337 a woman named Joan, who lived at Kingsley in the diocese of Winchester, is said to have had a lover, named William. She met him in the forest of Wolmer for romantic purposes, but on seeing him later at a different place, he denied that he had ever been there. She realized that she had made love to an incubus, who had assumed William's form for the purpose, and died soon afterward, or so says the monkish chronicler.27 In a more amusing case which was left to us by Reginald Scot, an incubus ‘came to a lady's bedside and made hot love to her.’ She seems to have consented at first, but after he was through, suddenly she took offence, and ‘cried out so loud that a company came and found the ghost hiding under her bed. It looked exactly like Silvanus, the local bishop! Just why a ghost would hide, rather than melt into thin air, as ghosts are wont to do, we cannot imagine, but the incident provoked sniggers all round, and did considerable harm to the bishop's reputation.
Sometimes there is clear evidence of mental pathology in these stories. In his Autobiographies, Yeats wrote of his guru, MacGregor Mathers, that he ‘is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice. One had called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven her away with one furious sentence, “Very bad taste on both sides.”’28 If his story is true, though, Mathers must have been in a bad mood when the woman called, because he claimed to know something about this phenomenon and dispensed information on the subject to his Golden Dawn members.
When Dion Fortune published her Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, Mathers's wife Moina almost expelled her from the organization on the grounds that occult sexual information was part of the GD's secret teaching, which she was sworn not to disclose. ‘It was pointed out to her that I had not then got the grade in which that teaching was given,’ she later wrote, ‘and I was pardoned’29 However, it is obvious that she must have received this teaching in an irregular manner from some fellow initiate, and thereon hangs a tale.
In My Rosicrucian Adventure, Israel Regardie flatly denies that any sexual teaching whatever was given out by the Golden Dawn. ‘I have seen most of the important documents issued to the Zelator Adeptus Minor, including a few of those used by the Theoricus Adeptus Minor’ he says ‘and there is nothing in them which could even remotely be interpreted as sex-magic’30 But most of the important documents is not all of the important documents. Mr. Regardie is contradicted in this not only by Dion Fortune, but by two other witnesses as well—Catherine Mary Stoddart, and Ithell Colquhoun—and it is probably more than coincidence that all three of these are girls.
Now it must be emphasized here that none of these ladies ever suggested that the GD's sexual theories were ever taught at a practical, as opposed to a merely theoretical level. But it is impossible to believe that such teaching did not exist with all the testimony to the contrary, and one suspects that only women were initiated into it. Ithell Colquhoun says that Westcott and Mathers ‘recommended an Elemental marriage’ to a Mrs. Carden, ‘despite the fact that she was married already in a less rarefied fashion to A. J. Carden and had produced a daughter.’31 And Miss Stoddart says that an initiate known as ‘E.O.L’ brought certain breathing exercises to England from lodges in Germany which were supposed to ‘arouse and raise the unused sex-forces’ for occult purposes.32 The Germans were quite interested in this problem of how to ‘arouse and raise’ the ‘unused sex-forces’ of their female initiates, and, unlike that of the Golden Dawn, it appears that their work was eminently practical.
A German iron tycoon named Karl Kellner is said to have visited India during the 1890's and to have made the acquaintance of an authentic Tantric Yogi, who initiated him into many of the secrets of that particular form of esoterism. Now Tantric Yoga is different from other forms of yoga in that sexual intercourse is used as a means for attaining Enlightenment, and upon his return to Germany, Kellner seems to have pursued Enlightenment with all due vigour. He formed a group in 1895 called the Or do Templi Orientis, which admitted both men and women, and which taught Tantric sexual magic to its advanced students. Some of the most unlikely people joined Kellner's Order, including Rudolf Steiner, who became Austrian Chief of the OTO, Franz Hartmann, the eminent Theosophist, and Theodore Reuss, who succeeded Kellner as Outer Head of the Order. Publicly, the leaders of both the OTO and the GD recommended ‘chastity’ as a precondition for occult development, while in private they pursued a somewhat different course, and they were not the only ones.
In a recent book, Marion Meade notes with astonishment that ‘at the age of fifty-four, in spite of two husbands, an indeterminate number of lovers, and a child’ Madame Blavatsky ‘solemnly insisted she was a virgin.’33 She seems to have been very concerned with the question of sex and insisted that members of her Esoteric Section give it up altogether. ‘Black Magic,’ in her opinion, was connected in some manner with practising occultism while neglecting to practise chastity.
In The Key to Theosophy she alludes to certain ‘physiological questions’ which justify this position and which she refused to discuss. More important, though, was her feeling that no man can serve two masters, and that occultism was, in her words, ‘a jealous mistress.’ She considered ‘practical Occultism’ to be ‘far too serious and dangerous a study for a man to take up, unless he is in the most deadly earnest,’ and as Lysistrata well knew, earnest doesn't get much deadlier than when one gives up sex. She is herself proof that sex and occult development are not incompatible, however, and that moreover, hypocrisy and occult development are not incompatible, either.
Yeats speaks of a disciple of hers who tried to practise chastity and who seems to have suffered from the sexual equivalent of the binge-purge syndrome. He was a ‘young man’ said Yeats, and he
filled [Madame Blavatsky] with exasperation, for she thought that his settled gloom came from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed to long periods of ascetism . . . with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil. After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the members of the local Theosophical Society with poetical rhapsodies about harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy.34
Another of her disciples, Mohini Chatterjee, was married, and yet nonetheless was able to make psychic contact with Mahatma Koot Hoomi. Upon his arrival in Paris he seems to have dazzled the ladies, who imagined that he practised true Theosophical chastity, and at least one of them—an Englishwoman named Miss Leonard—set out to try to change all that.
According to her fellow Theosophists, she swore to seduce him. She pursued him into his bedroom, and when that did not produce the desired result she stripped to the waist in a public park. Eventually, she got her man and of course all this got back to H. P. Blavatsky, who, according to Meade, ‘responded with a mixture of jealousy and repugnance.’ Yet ‘noticeable’ in her letters, says Meade, ‘is Helena's own thrill at imagining a “nut-meg Hindu” in the arms of a fair-skinned “too-erotic spinster.” Her sexuality, rigidly repressed for a decade, could not help but reveal itself’35
It revealed itself again when Mabel Collins, author of Light on the Path and editor of Lucifer, became ‘plainly entangled with two young men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages’ Yeats described her as ‘a handsome, clever woman of the world, who seemed certainly very much out of place, penitent though she thought herself.’ Her indiscretion caused ‘much scandal and gossip’ Yeats says, and she was dressed down soundly by Madame Blavatsky, who told her, ‘I cannot permit you more than one.’36 Meade considers this story ‘probably apocryphal since H.P.B. was as adamantly anti-sex as she was anti-Mabel’ but chastity was restored all round.37 In a letter written later on, Koot Hoomi wrote that Blavatsky had ‘deprived [Mabel] of a toy’ and that she could be expected to retaliate, which she did, shortly afterwards.38 Nobody who has read her Caves and Jungles of Hindustan can help noticing the relish with which Blavatsky recalled watching naked boys wandering around India. With those facts in mind, it is hard to take her pronouncements about chastity very seriously.
A more serious matter is the contention of sex-starved medieval priests that astral sex is dangerous. Here we would seem to be getting into questions of fact and not opinion, and the stories reported by the priests tended to be, as one modern commentator put it ‘fraught with horror.’39 It is too much to expect of frail human nature that a celibate would be sympathetic to the sexual activities of others, and during the Middle Ages, at least, celibate priests equated sex with sin and chastity with goodness. Astral sex to them must therefore be sex with a devil, and it is notable that an erotic ghost was never referred to as an incubus or a succuba, but as an ‘incubus devil’ or a ‘succuba devil.’ I mention this just to put their opinion on record, although I must say that I disagree with it. More objective reporters seem to have more positive things to say.
The following story appeared in volume six of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research, and is typical of more modern accounts.
On 3 October, 1863, I sailed from Liverpool for New York. On the evening of the second day out a severe storm began, which lasted for nine days. Upon the night following the eighth day of the storm, I dreamed that I saw my wife, whom I had left in the United States, come to the door of my state-room, clad in her night-dress. At the door, she seemed to discover that I was not the only occupant of the room, hesitated a little, then advanced to my side, stooped down and kissed me, and after gently caressing me for a few moments, quietly withdrew. Upon waking I was surprised to see my fellow-passenger, whose berth was above mine, but not directly over it, leaning upon his elbow and looking fixedly at me. ‘You're a pretty fellow,’ said he at length, ‘to have a lady come and visit you in this way.’ I pressed him for an explanation, which he at first declined to give. At length he related what he had seen while wide awake, lying in his berth. It corresponded exactly with my dream. The day after landing, almost [my wife's] first question when we were alone together was, ‘Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?’ On the same night when the storm had just begun to abate, she had lain awake for a long time thinking of me, and about four o'clock in the morning it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came a length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stem until she came to my state-room. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the lower one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in. But soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down, and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.’40
The fact that she ‘hesitated’ upon seeing that her husband was not alone suggests that she might have had something more than just a kiss in mind. In The Llewellyn Practical Guide to Astral Projection, Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips point out that something more would indeed have been possible, and moreover, that the woman in this situation has a decided advantaged.41
The second possibility, in which both partners are ‘exteriorized’ at the time of the incident, is more rare than the incubus or succuba phenomenon, because each partner ‘finds’ the other on the astral plane, rather than deliberately projecting to the other's presence. Robert Monroe, who includes a chapter on astral sex in his Journeys Out of the Body, describes the experience as what two oppositely charged electrodes would ‘feel’ if they had consciousness. He says
They would ‘need’ to come together. There is no barrier that can restrain it. The need increases progressively with nearness. At a given point of nearness, the need is compelling. Very close, it is all-encompassing. Beyond a given point of nearness, the attraction-need exerts tremendous pull, and the two unlikes rush together and envelope one another. In an immediate moment, there is a mind (soul?) shaking interflow of electrons, one to the other, unbalanced charges become equalized, peaceful contented balance is restored, and each is revitalized. All this happens in an instant, yet an eternity passes by. Afterward, there is calm and serene separation.42
Compared to the astral experience, he says, physical sex is a mere shadow.