2
SADO-MAGIC IN HISTORY
Throughout history magicians, shamans, and fakirs of all sorts have made use of physical stimulation (or even the deprivation of stimulation) as a key to unlocking inner states of consciousness or to activating faculties that allow their will to influence events in their environments. This stimulation is often interpreted as pleasure, but just as often pain is used.
Everyone is familiar by now with the American Indian initiatory ritual ordeals such as those made popular in the film A Man Called Horse. Warriors of the Mandan Sioux tribe were put through an ordeal of pain, which involved their being lifted off the ground suspended by piercings in their pectoral muscles. They would hang there until they received their vision. The Oglala Sioux have the “Sun Dance,” which involves similar, if less common rituals.
The priests of the Norse God Odin undergo torturous ordeals in imitation of their God, who is said to have hung for nine nights on the cosmic tree to gain insight into the runes, the secrets of the universe.
In fact, the use of floggings of various kinds as a rite of passage—from boyhood into manhood, or into a secret initiatory religion, such as Mithraism—is widely known among traditional peoples from Africa to the Pacific and to the northern climes of Europe.
The Lacedaemonians, or Spartans, held a Feast of Flagellations before the altar of the Goddess Artemis/Diana. There young boys were severely beaten before the gathered people. The young men were to bear these floggings cheerfully so as to not disgrace their families by showing any fear or pain. In later times these floggings provided a spectacle for the entertainment of the masses. In this and similar rites flogging seems to have taken the place of certain kinds of sacrifice.
It should also be noted that flogging has been a prescribed treatment for various sorts of sicknesses and disorders—both physical and mental—since ancient times. Ancient Greek and Roman medical manuals suggest it as a treatment for things ranging from “lunacy” to a variety of physical maladies. As late as the nineteenth century various medical theorists were defending the medical value of this treatment.
As far as pleasure is concerned, it, too, has been used for transcendental and magical purposes. You only have to think of the whole Indian system of tantrism or the use of sexual energies in various forms of oriental alchemy to realize how much sexual pleasure has played a fascinating role in the development of spiritual or magical powers.
But what if these two methods of accessing personal power were combined? Imagine what forces and what states of mind could be generated by bringing together the techniques of pain and pleasure! That is precisely what Sado-Magic does. Although this may be a novel approach to magic, especially in the pragmatic form that is being presented here, it is by no means a new idea, especially when we look at the history of Western culture.
The most current ideas about the practice of Sado-Magic have been drawn from many sources. From the ancient traditions of various peoples and sects, as well as from modern pioneers in these methods, each has something to teach us.
ANCIENT WAYS IN THE WEST
The ancient Europeans always seem to have been especially fond of this kind of stimulation. This is a trait they share with the Japanese in the Far East. In the most ancient of times their orgiastic Rites of Spring very often involved flagellation in conjunction with sexual activity.
Many of the old sacred “pleasure/pain games” have been preserved in toned-down folk customs—such as the English “Binding Day,” or “Hocktide.” This “Hocktide” took place over the Monday and Tuesday in the week following the second Tuesday after Easter. On one of these days young girls were tied up and hidden in the woods, later to be hunted by the boys. They were supposed to be provided with a coin with which they could buy their liberation—but if no coin was to be found the boy could “have his way.” On the other day of Hocktide, the roles were reversed.
Flagellation with birch branches was always a part of the Rites of Spring in northern climes. The power of the feminine birch was thought to be able to drive out weaknesses and entities that might sap the strength or vitality of the youth. In Christian times the belief was altered so that the power of the birch was thought to be able to “drive out devils.” This is why it was used in judicial punishments in early modern times. Judicial birchings were still being conducted as late as the 1970s on the culturally conservative Isle of Man in Britain. (There have been some on that island who would like to see these reinstituted.) Again the folklore of flagellation is probably best preserved in England—and it is no wonder sexual flagellation has been referred to for centuries (even by the amorous French) as le vice anglais—the English vice.
But such uses of flagellation in conjunction with sexual rites were by no means limited to the northern latitudes in Europe. Even the most archaic practices of the Roman Lupercalia also had sacred, if Sado-Masochistic, overtones. This festival was celebrated on or about the fourteenth of February (“the month of purification”). This was to become St. Valentine’s Day in the Christian calendar. Its original function was to “purify” nature. To the ancients this had a different meaning from what it was to get in Christian times. To the pagans this “purification” was a banishing of weakness and illness and a strengthening of the forces of nature—including human flesh—to make them vital and powerful. A central custom of the old Roman Lupercalia involved the young men of the town dressing in wolf skins and arming themselves with whips made of thongs of wolf hide. They would then roam the streets hunting for young girls who, when caught, had to bare their flesh to be whipped.
Many of these customs had already died out or lost their immediate erotic content in ancient times. The Roman poet Ovid reported on the whipping activities of the Lupercalia, explaining that they are not the way they used to be, since now the ladies merely present the palms of their hands to be lightly spanked by the wolf-hide whips. But his tone seems to indicate that there was still something he regarded as “uncivilized” about these customs.
In the Roman city of Pompeii, buried and thus perfectly preserved by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, there was discovered a “Villa of the Mysteries.” On the walls of this building, scenes of various stages of initiation are depicted. One of these shows a young woman lying over the lap of an older one. The younger one is being thrashed across her back with a rod wielded by a wingéd feminine divinity. Several of the Mystery cults required ritual flagellation as an act of purification before the mystes could engage in certain activities. These included the Mysteries of Mithras (which have their ultimate origins in Iran).
In the eastern realm there are further hints at the use of flagellation for magical or spiritual ends. From the Vedas, the oldest sacred scriptures of India, we read of the “honey-whip” (Sanskrit madhukasha) in the Atharva Veda (IX:1) and in the Rig Veda (I:157). In both instances the “honey-whip” is mentioned in connection with the equine Ashvins—twin gods of health and youth. The formula of the “honey-whip” forms a powerful symbol of the nature of the use of flagellation in spiritual pursuits. The sweetness of honey, with its association with deep wisdom, is connected with an instrument of pain. This is also reflected in the liturgy of the Zoroastrians of Iran. There we read in the Yashts that thirty strokes of a whip, called the Sraoshô-Karana, were applied before conducting a sacrificial feast. Sraosha is the yazata, or God, of Obedience and the Guardian of Prayer in Zoroastrianism. This whip is thought to have an ablutionary effect and to liberate the sufferer from all sin.
Besides these sacred contexts, there also seem to be quite a few depictions in Greek art of what seem to be purely recreational spankings and floggings. But even these may have originally had some holy purpose, although they may not be apparent to most people today. But we understand.
As late as the early twentieth century in Russia the ecstatic cult known as the Khlysti (“whippers”)—of which Rasputin is reputed to have been an initiate—performed rites, which involved prolonged flagellation, ending in an orgy. Although this was done in an ostensibly Christian framework, it was hardly orthodox, and most certainly was a survival of the most ancient rites performed by the ancestors of the participants.
Sexuality in all its forms, and most especially in this form, was suppressed (or sublimated) by the teachings of the medieval church, or pathologized by nineteenth-century “professors.” During the twentieth century in European culture, however, the sacred power of sexuality was being rediscovered. The apparently “new” interest in Sado-Masochistic sexuality was really just a renewal of something very ancient in our culture.
In modern times the renewal of the sexual aspects of what came to be called B/D or S/M began as a recreational activity in the form of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “whipping clubs,” or “flagellation clubs.” The existence of these can be traced from contemporary literature, such as Fashionable Lectures and The Merry Order of St. Bridget (1857). These “clubs” were gatherings where members of both sexes could meet to carry out sexually oriented and highly ritualized experiments in flagellation. At the same time specialized brothels were being instituted in London, Paris, and Berlin. These brothels, or “message parlours,” provided their customers with experiences in every form of bondage, discipline, and flagellation imaginable. One of the most famous and successful of the madams in this field was Theresa Berkley, who even invented her own bondage device (the Berkley Horse). She died in 1836, wealthy from her earnings from her specialized services.
THE JAPANESE TRADITION
KINBAKU-BI
It has been noticed that besides Europe the only other cultural sphere that seems to have embraced Sado-Masochism as a distinct sexual aesthetic is Japan. There are several unique aspects to the Japanese tradition, which we will highlight here. However, it is also important to be aware of the degree to which early twentieth-century European images of Sado-Masochism penetrated Japanese culture at that time.
The predominance of visual aesthetics in Japanese culture is obvious. From Zen gardens to ikibana, “flower arrangement,” the trend is clear. One of the earliest documented manifestations of a Sado-Masochistic dimension in an artistic context is the art of Ito Seiyu (1882–1961). He was a painter, woodblock artist, photographer, and writer. His work, often based on folktales or ancient manuals, acted as a bridge between old and new Japan. His aesthetic aim is said to have been the depiction of “Beauty in Suffering.” He captured the real drama of the edge between pleasure and pain in the fleshly experience of what he was depicting. Seiyu pioneered what became a significant tradition in Japanese (and eventually Euro-American) art, with artists such as Minomura Kou (Toshiyuki Suma).
The depiction of Sado-Masochism has also extended to both literature and film in contemporary Japan. The maiden-in-distress theme is a common one in folktales and in Kabuki theater. Artists such as the famous Oniroku Dan (1931–2011) splashed the vision across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The world of anime and more precisely hentai—which explicitly shows scenes of torture and unusual sexuality—are replete with images of Sado-Masochism. This is especially true of the Japanese manga, or illustrated novels. Since, at present, Japanese censors ban the depiction of pubic hair or penetration in film or video productions, scenes often have to appear as either live action or animation.
In the early twentieth century as Japan and Europe (especially Germany) grew closer culturally and militarily, there developed a school of art and literature called ero guro (nansensu), “erotic grotesque (nonsense)” in the 1920s and 1930s. This stemmed from decadent European circles, such as Weimar Berlin. It was suppressed during World War II, but it returned to influence postwar Japanese culture with themes of bondage, torture, and erotic crucifixion.
The most dominant contemporary figure in the Japanese world of Sado-Masochism was Oniroku Dan. He was a writer of over two hundred S&M novels and wrote screenplays for dozens of films between 1974 and 1988. He had a definite and intrinsically Japanese philosophy of Sado-Masochism, which centered on a male fantasy, based on love and viewing a beauty suffering from a sense of shame.
The most conspicuous aspect of Japanese Sado-Masochism is a particular style of rope bondage most popularly called shibari in Europe and kinbaku in Japan. Shibari is a term derived from the Japanese art of wrapping beautiful packages with twine, whereas kinbaku, “tight binding,” harkens back to the martial and judicial roots of Japanese rope bondage. In ancient times prisoners were both detained and tortured using similar bondage techniques, which could either result in comfortable immobility or excruciating pain.
To a great extent kinbaku is an aesthetic exercise or ceremony on the part of the kinbakushi, or expert in kinbaku—he ties his object beautifully and observes her beauty as she endures suffering and shame and receives pleasure and humiliation. There is a spiritual dimension to this aesthetic practice. Just as with ikebana, “flower arrangement” or kado, “way of flowers,” where the samurai would learn in a meditative way to appreciate beauty and to identify with it and to relax the body, mind, and soul, so, too, does the aesthetically and spiritually aware kinbakushi approach his art. The active partner in the process contemplates the beauty of the sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, and even the tastes involved, coupled with the necessary identification with the object in order to close the circle. This is kinbaku-bi, the “beauty of tight binding.” From the standpoint of the one being bound, the technique of kinbaku can facilitate trancelike states leading to inner liberation. Kinbaku can be a mode of sensory deprivation or a way to cause continuous pain.
Techniques of Japanese rope bondage have been making their ways into the Western practice of Sado-Masochistic sexuality for many decades. Although there may appear to be many similarities between Japanese and Western traditions of Sado-Masochism, on an inner cultural and psychological level the differences are often profound and fascinating. For some of the information in this section, we are indebted to the guidance of Master “K.”
There have been several personalities in modern European and American history who have greatly influenced our perceptions of this kind of sexuality. The two most famous are the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Each of whom deserves some attention here.
THE MARQUIS DE SADE
Dontien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) was philosophically a radical materialist, and so he is quite atypical of “magicians” as we usually expect to find them. But magic can often be found in the most unexpected places.
As a materialist de Sade was following his countryman Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1752), who was in turn following the philosophy of the ancient Epicureans who held that all that existed was made up of material atoms—including what most call the soul or spirit.
De Sade is hardly the writer of “pornography” he is popularly held to be. His works are, by far, more full of questions of cosmology, theology, and psychology than they are of sex.
Georges Bataille, who also cites the work of Maurice Blanchot, refers to de Sade’s philosophy as one that extols the absolute sovereignty of the individual who exists in solitude, apart from other individuals whom he does not recognize as his equals. Other humans exist for his pleasure alone—to be his victims. In this de Sade denies the basic precepts of the Reason of his day, and gives vent to a pure “bestial” nature devoid of Reason. In this limitless world of isolate subjective imaginings, which the Sadist attempts to impose upon the world of men around him, the Sadist derives his pleasure. Bataille also eloquently points out that, in fact, de Sade’s refined use of language, which indicates the Marquis’ awareness of his imagined cruelties, actually precludes his actual criminality: violence is silent and dumb, eloquent thoughts and words are incompatible with actual violence. This is perhaps at the root of why and how Sadeans are the least violent of people, in fact.
Julius Evola, in his Metaphysics of Sex (pp. 105–12), identifies aspects of de Sade’s philosophy with Eastern forms of the left-hand path, or vamachara. According to Evola the vamachara emphasizes the destruction of order, norms, and laws—and de Sade is doing the same in his philosophy. The left-hand path aspects of de Sade’s ideas are further explored in Lords of the Left-Hand Path (pp. 165–70).
The human faculty of imagination is the key to de Sade’s psychology. De Sade writes in Justine, Philosophy of the Bedroom and Other Writings, “Imagination is pleasure’s spur . . . directs everything, is the motive for everything; is it not thence that our pleasure comes?”1 Here his ideas concerning the erotic enter his philosophy most directly. De Sade says that the pursuit of pleasure is the object of human life, and that physical satisfaction is more noble than the merely mental. Happiness depends on the greatest possible extension of pleasure. This is done by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and fantasies. Only through willful imagination can the possibilities for pleasure be extended. Social or religious conditioning prevents most people from fulfilling themselves in this way.
De Sade says there are essentially three kinds of people when it comes to eroticism: 1) those of weak or repressed imagination, courage and desires—and who live without remarkable incident; 2) “natural perverts”—who act out of obsession, which is usually congenital in origin, and 3) libertines—who consciously develop their fantasies and who set about to realize them. This third category, the Libertines, by actively using their imaginations, transform themselves through acts of will, as de Sade would have it, “in accordance with Nature.” This is the key to the magical use of de Sade’s ideas.
Whether in the sexual or more abstract philosophical sphere, social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer provides the truest definition of Sadeanism: “The pleasure felt from the observed modification on the external world produced by the will of the observer.”
The legacy of de Sade has really been more a matter of aesthetic reputation than a true understanding of his philosophy. Only certain limited aspects of that philosophy are generally accepted by postmodern Sadeans, although de Sade is acknowledged as the modern founder of the theoretical basis of the conscious experience of this type of sexuality.
LEOPOLD RITTER VON SACHER-MASOCH
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835–1895) was born into a family of the Austro-Hungarian petty nobility. His father was chief of police in Lemberg, Austria. Leopold highly identified with the agrarian, semipagan sects of the Slavs of Galatia and idealized the almost savage “Sarmatian” woman. In the early part of Masoch’s career as an author he was well respected for his literary achievements. These were only later in his lifetime to be stigmatized by pathologizing professors of the belles lettres.
When Masoch was just ten years old he had an experience that was to leave a lasting imprint on his soul. One Sunday afternoon, when the young Leopold was visiting the house of his “aunt-in-law,” the Countess Zenobia, he was asked to help her take off her sable cloak and put on her squirrel-lined green velvet jacket, all of which gave him a surge of erotic feeling. Later, while Leopold was hiding in her boudoir, this aunt received a young suitor as the youngster watched in terror of being discovered. He witnessed the countess being confronted by her husband, whom she then beat with a whip. Moments later he was discovered, whereupon Leopold reports that she “seized me by the hair and threw me to the carpet; she then placed her knee upon my shoulder and began to whip me vigorously. . . . And yet I must admit that while I writhed under my aunt’s cruel blows, I experienced acute pleasure.”2
Masoch’s continual replaying of aspects of this scene in his erotic life and literary imagination is a manifestation of what might be called “imprinting.” Such imprinting goes beyond mere pleasurable recollections and may play a role in conserving actual life force by restimulating psychophysiological channels in the organism.
I am highly indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze for my understanding of the work of Masoch. For while the often ponderous works of the Marquis de Sade have all been translated into English, it seems that the usually more literarily meritorious works of Masoch have been largely ignored by publishers, literary critics, and translators.
Masoch’s literary vision was to create a cycle of works he called The Heritage of Cain. Only two of the projected six works were ever completed—The Divorced Woman and his most famous book, Venus in Furs—both published in 1870. These and other of his novels and short stories reveal some of the scope of his vision, however. Although not as explicit and philosophical as de Sade, Masoch, too, was interested in matters of politics and religion. Masoch, like de Sade, was a nobleman with an interest in the rights of the common man, or peasantry. Almost all of Masoch’s stories have as a theme the exercise of tyrannical power (of an eastern European noblewoman) over members of the local peasantry. This exercise of power is ambiguously viewed by Masoch with a combination of lust and horror.
Although the Marquis de Sade has lent his name more prominently to the theory and practice of this form of sexuality, it is perhaps Sacher-Masoch who was really the father of what we call the D/S or S/M movement in human sexuality in this century. The actual works of Sade are filled with things that most “Sadeans” of today find abhorrent. This is chiefly because in Sade’s works pain and bondage are almost always inflicted non-consensually. The Sadist (as opposed to the Sadean) derives pleasure from breaking contracts—the Masochist is virtually obsessed with making them.
In reality the ideologies expounded by Sade and Masoch are not two ends of the same spectrum or continuum. They were analysed as belonging to such a spectrum by the German psychopathologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (in his Psychopathia Sexualis). However, this does not make the analysis correct.
In fact what seems to have happened is that the “safe, sane, consensual” tradition of Sado-Masochistic sexuality is an expression of what Masoch was talking about, while the all-too-common “dangerous and coercive” tradition is closer to the truth of Sade’s philosophy. Strictly speaking we have Sadism (with an active and passive role of behavior). For the sake of simplicity (and for aesthetic reasons as well) we choose to call the active Masochist a Sadean and only the passive Masochist by that name.
Deleuze astutely analyzes the transformative and even initiatory qualities of Masoch’s work.
The masochistic contract generates a type of law that leads straight to ritual. The masochist is obsessed; ritualistic activity is essential to him, since it epitomizes the world of fantasy. Three main types of rite occur in Masoch’s novels: hunting rites, agricultural rites, and rites of regeneration and rebirth. They echo the three fundamental elements: cold, that requires the conquest of the fur, the trophy of the hunt; the buried sentimentality and sheltered fecundity, which agriculture demands, together with the strictest organization of work; and finally that very element of strictness, that cruel rigor which regeneration and rebirth demand. The coexistence and interaction of these three rites sum up the mystical complex of masochism. We find it again and again, variously embodied throughout the work of Masoch: the ideal woman hunts the bear or the wolf; she organizes or presides over an agricultural community; she makes man undergo a process of rebirth.3
It is unfortunate that Sacher-Masoch’s contemporary literary reputation was ruined by having his name attached to a “sexual pathology.” Perhaps we can do something to repair his reputation, not by disassociating him from this form of sexuality, but by providing greater understanding for the sexual format itself, and the symbolic use of explicit sexuality in literature.
Some of the best known names in the “magical revival” of the early part of the twentieth century have been involved with the practice of Sado-Magic personally, although often their public writings did not make this explicit.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
In the modern history of sexual magic no one has been more influential than Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). His influence stems from the fact that he wrote so much, and so well, and that he founded or reformed at least two important magical organizations.
Crowley’s father was a wealthy brewer and member of a fundamentalist Christian sect known as “the Plymouth Brethren.” His father died in 1886, and Crowley’s future exploits were largely financed through his inheritance. As a young man his avocations were poetry and mountain climbing. In December 1896, while in Stockholm, he began to realize the possibilities of magical philosophy. Two years later he entered the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” By 1900 he was initiated to the Adeptus Minor grade in that order, but not long after this he was alienated from the organization and began an independent career in magical studies.
In 1904 Crowley conducted a magical working in Cairo, Egypt, in which he received the words of a text entitled Liber Al vel Legis: The Book of the Law from a discarnate entity calling itself “Aiwaz.” In 1907 he founded his own order, the Argentum Astrum (Silver Star).
Apparently the A
A did not fulfill every possible magical function since Crowley subsequently undertook an alliance with a pseudo-Masonic German lodge—the Ordo Templi Orientis—in 1912. This order taught forms of sexual magic akin to Indian tantrism. Crowley was absorbed in this kind of magic for the rest of his life.
Crowley died in relative obscurity in Hastings, England, on December 1, 1947, in the fullness of seventy-two years of age. But his philosophy has remained influential throughout the Western magical world during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Although Crowley is perhaps best known for his sexual magic, he published very little that dealt with the subject in any specific way. What he did publish was often in veiled terms or a “twilight language.” Later interpreters and disciples have made explicit what Crowley only hinted at in his own lifetime. But Crowley is very explicit (even if often couched in cryptic magical shorthand) in his personal magical diaries. These were not published until after his death. In these diaries we not only see the manner of his working of sexual magic in general, but the extent to which Sadean sexuality played a part in it.
From an early age Crowley displayed an interest in Sado-Masochistic sexuality—especially with himself as the submissive. This matured into a magical interest by 1920. Diary entries during the summer of that year, written while Crowley and his followers were at the “Abby of Thelema” near Cefalu in Sicily, reveal the depth and nature of his Masochistic workings. As we will discuss in chapter 4, it should not come as a surprise that this dominant magical personality would gravitate toward the submissive role in Sado-Magic. This is because the magician Crowley seems to have been primarily interested in self-transformation, in the transformation of his own subjective universe, and the submissive role is the most direct route to this goal.
Crowley’s Sado-Magical technique is clear from his diary entries of June 18 and July 22 and 26. These entries also testify to the intensity of these workings. Here we can only outline some of the aspects of these workings, which are more complex than we have space to enter into here. As discussed in chapter 4 of this book, the Masochistic, or submissive, Sado-Shaman projects ideal qualities onto his partner, who embodies those qualities. Then through his or her domination and enslaving of the submissive the Masochistic Sado-Shaman is imprinted with the willed ideal qualities. Subjective transformation is achieved.
In Crowley’s diary entry of June 18, 1920, we read:
I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave, Her victim, eager to be abased, passionately a thirst for suffering, swooning at Her cruelty, craving Her contempt; ’tis joy to be splashed with the mire of Her Triumph, to bleed under the whip’s lash, to choke as Her heel treads my throat . . .
Here the magician clearly attains a higher state of consciousness by submitting his Mastery to the envisioned higher Being of Her.
In the entry of July 22 the extended magical working has progressed to the point where he writes:
[1:45 a.m. ] . . . I swore to take Her as my High Priestess to Him [Crowley’s personal god, Aiwaz] and act accordingly. She is to direct all action, and taking the initiative throughout.
[4:00 a.m.] We have been continuing Cocaine in a Lesbian Orgie in which I was Alys, her tribade, after a frightful ordeal of cruelty and defilement put on me as her fist passion for Her slave, which tore from me the last rag of manhood, violated my last veil of modesty . . .
It was for her to Nurse Her Babe, train it with Her sharp whips and sharper words, bring it to puberty, to virile might, and . . . murder him in his Father’s House . . . Fling him Her Satan into the Bottomless Pit [the vulva] . . .whence first he issued to those stupid wanderings that naught could end but their own homecoming.
The workings of this night conclude with Crowley being forced to lick the feet of his Scarlet Woman.
In the course of these magical experiences the magician envisions himself being magically transformed into a woman, symbolically slain, and resurrected by Her, and eventually gains union with Her as a whole Being.
This series of Workings ultimately concludes with the extensive entry of July 26 in which we learn that he has had to endure being burned with lighted cigarettes and forced into an act of coprophagy as a kind of Holy Eucharist.
Undoubtedly Aleister Crowley was a pansexual satyrist who left no aspect of sexuality unexplored for its magical potentials—and certainly did not neglect the “English vice.”
ERNST SCHERTEL
The Philosopher King of Weimar Germany, as he was called by Mel Gordon, was born in Munich in 1884 and died in relative obscurity in Hof in 1958. The peak of his artistic, scholarly, and philosophical career came in the years leading up to the Nazi assumption of power in Germany at the beginning of 1933.
Early in life Schertel was tormented by crushing inhibitions. His inner life of imagination was wild and sensual, but he could not express this part of himself for fear of eternal damnation. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy at Jena in 1911. In the summer of 1912 he began writing a semiautobiographical “gnostic” novel entitled Die Sünde des Ewigen: Dies ist mein Leib (“The Sin of Eternity: This is my Body”). The effects of this writing process, finished in 1913, were magically liberating. He says of himself after completing the work: “I threw myself into life like an unchained predatory beast, without inhibition, in a frenzy of enjoyment and real action.”
After spending a few years as a teacher in a progressive college preparatory school, where he organized the students in dance performances he called “Mystery Plays,” Schertel began a career as an author, lecturer, teacher of dance, and publicist. He became ever more successful in these endeavors, publishing works on nudism, occultism, the history of culture as it relates to the expression of primal urges and instincts, and his favorite topic, the art and literature of Sado-Masochistic sexuality.
His masterpiece is generally acknowledged to be Der Flagellantismus als literarisches Motiv (“Flagellation as a Literary Motif”) [in 4 volumes, 1929–1932]. More recently he has also generated some attention because of his book on occultism entitled Magie (“Magic”), which he sent to the voracious reader and charismatic, yet upstart, political organizer, Adolf Hitler, in 1923. Schertel had no real sympathy for the Nazis in general and was, in fact, later persecuted and imprisoned by them. His books were banned, and he was stripped of his Ph.D. in 1937 by Nazi authorities.
After the war Schertel recovered enough to begin to try to reissue some of his old material—but postwar Germany was not the same freewheeling world of intra-war Berlin. Just before his death he was able to republish his masterpiece under the new title Der Flagellantismus in Literature und Bildnerei (1957).
Dr. Ernst Schertel must be considered the grandfather of Carnal Alchemy. His worldview was dominated by the triad of eroticism, magic, and Sado-Masochism. As much as Schertel wrote, nowhere did he entirely betray the secrets of his own personal work and activities.
The essence of Schertel’s magical theory is that powerful and unique personalities could be developed through techniques designed to dissolve the ordinarily perceived distinctions between the “body” and the “spirit,” between the “real” and the “ideal.” These integrative processes hinged on techniques of corporeal experience—eroticism, nudity, indulgence in exhibitionism, and voyeurism, unconventional “dance” movements, pleasure, and pain.
WILLIAM SEABROOK
We are indebted to the pioneering work in original scholarship done by Robert North, the late Visible Head of the New Flesh Palladium, for making us aware of Seabrook’s experiments with Sado-Shamanism. Some of this experimental work is contained in the third part of Seabrook’s classic study Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940).
Seabrook was a writer, a journalist, and an adventurer who explored the inner and outer landscapes of Asia, Africa, and Haiti. In the early 1930s he spent time in Paris, where he became part of the circle surrounding Maria de Naglowska. Naglowska’s circle is also said to have included Jean Paulhan, for whom Dominique Aury (Pauline Réage) wrote Story of O. One of the rites of the system practiced by Maria de Naglowska involved the short but actual hanging of a male initiate before engaging in an act of sexual magic with an officiating priestess.
Seabrook also lived for some years in New York City and in the Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck, where he carried out experiments in what was just then being called E.S.P. and its links to the techniques usually associated with bondage and discipline. Two of these experiments, carried out with the aid of a woman he calls “Justine,” involved prolonged suspension and sensory deprivation by means of what might be called a bondage or discipline hood. These experiments were conducted in the years just prior to the Second World War.
In the method Seabrook called “Dervish Dangling” Justine would be suspended by a rope with straps around her wrists. She would stand on tiptoe supported by telephone books. If the rope became lax, she could restore or increase the tension by moving one or more of the books out from under her feet. She would dangle in darkness for several hours at a time—and on occasion she would actually be able to go “through a ‘slit’” or “through a ‘door’” into another “world in time-space, beyond our three-dimensional horizon . . .” On one occasion Justine was able to foresee accurately an experience she would share with Willie some months later in the southern French city of Avignon. This involved an unlikely set of events surrounding a lady lion tamer and an old lion pissing on the audience.
The other technique was the use of a leather mask, sometimes called the caput mortuum, which effectively cuts off all sensory input from the eyes, nose, and ears, as well as eliminating otherwise dominant tactile input from the skin on the face. Seabrook reports that at first Justine “feared and hated” wearing the mask, but eventually she grew to like it. Justine would also be bound in various postures to reduce other sensory data, especially to reduce input from the hands. Her most dramatic success with this method was when she foresaw that her cousin would receive an unlikely delivery of a “barrel of fish.” This indeed did happen some months later.
These and other similar activities were entered into by Seabrook and those who worked with him in the spirit of experimental games—half scientific, half erotic play. This may be the key to their rate of success.
GERALD GARDNER
Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964) was a man of little formal education who spent most of his adult life in the Far East. He retired from the commercial branch of the British Civil Service in 1936 when he returned to England and slowly began to create the religious system now known as “Wicca.” No one can read anything about Gardner’s original system of initiation and magic and not be impressed with the amount of whipping and bondage involved. Some have even been prompted to speculate that he invented the system to satisfy his own sexual needs! Historical and personal facts speak to the reality that he had (by his own nature and predispositions) tapped into a legitimate and powerful way of working magic: one with deep roots in his English ancestry.
This world of traditional magical flagellation and bondage in the context of European witchcraft has most recently been explored on a practical level by Inga Steddinger in her volume titled Wiccan Sex-Magic.
Initiations into “Gardnerian Witchcraft” involve binding the initiate to an altar and scourging him or her with a whip. Thereafter he or she gives the presiding Priestess or Priest (always of the opposite sex from the initiate) a “fivefold kiss”—upon the feet, knees, genitals, breast, and mouth. This is really a classic manifestation of the ritualism of Sado-Magic.
A revealing example of how Gardner practiced Sado-Magic is illustrated in a text, which he left behind in his own “Book of Shadows.” It is printed here verbatim as edited by Aidan Kelly in his groundbreaking piece of research titled Crafting the Art of Magic (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1991).
(Feet, knees, and wrists should be tightly bound
to retard blood.) Scourge 40 or more, to make
skin tingle, then say, invoking Goddess,
Hail, Aradia, from the Amalthean horn
Pour forth thy store of Love. Lowly I bend
Before thee! I invoke thee at the end
When other Gods are fallen and put to scorn.
Thy foot to my lips! My sighs inborn
Rise, touch, curl about thy heart. Then spend,
Pitiful Love, loveliest Pity, descend
And bring me luck who am lonely and forlorn.4*2
Ask the Goddess to help you obtain your desires, then Scourge again to bind the spell. This will be powerful in ill luck and for sickness. It must be said in a Circle, and you must be properly prepared and well purified, both before and after saying, to bind the spell.
Before starting you must make a very clear picture in your mind of what you wish. Make yourself see the wish obtained. Be sure in your own mind exactly what it is and how it is to be fulfilled. This spell is the one that was taught to me long ago, and I have found it works, but I don’t think there is any special virtue in the words. Any others can be substituted provided they ask the goddess’s (or god’s) help and say clearly what you wish and you form the clear mental image; and if it doesn’t work at first, keep on trying until it works. Your helper, who wields the scourge, must know what you wish and also from the mental image. And at first, at any rate, it will be better for you to work the spell, then for the girl to take your place and work it also; you scourge her. Don’t try anything difficult at first, and do it at least once a week until it works. You have to get into sympathy with each other, before anything happens, and regular Working helps this.
A knowledgeable reading of this “spell” reveals a sorcerer who was very familiar with the magical workings of S-M. In reality he makes us privy to the essence of his type of Sado-Magic. Notice that it begins with bondage, then goes on to flagellation, during which time the flagellant focuses his or her imagination on the desired result—but in a sacralized, prayerful, and submissive mood. Gardner makes it clear that the power is in the actions, not in the words of the “spell.” Finally he is keenly aware that the dominant and the submissive must be in “sympathy with each other before anything happens.”
The whole movement of modern “Wicca,” which now encompasses the spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, had its genesis in the magical Workings of Mr. Gardner. The essence of his magical technique was obviously Sadean. Sadly this Sadean element is often the first aspect to be eliminated from his system by more “politically correct” modern Wiccans who are often likely to view it as some sort of an “embarrassment.” By doing this they trade true and authentic magical power for political expediency. As Gardner says of the flagellant rite above: “This is the one that was taught to me long ago, and I have found that it works . . .”5 However he came by his knowledge of Sado-Magic, he seems to have applied it well. This aspect is especially pursued—if secretly—by the branch of witchcraft known as Vana-Troth.
ANTON SZANDOR LAVEY
Anton LaVey (1930–1997) was a self-made myth of a man. In 1966 he founded the Church of Satan, which was in its earliest days best known for its nude female altars and apparently orgiastic goings-on in LaVey’s “Black House” at 6114 California Street in San Francisco. Some of the images of LaVey’s early Church of Satan rituals include LaVey spanking one of his “topless witches” and one gentleman in bishop’s vestments being flagellated. LaVey was a close friend of the famous Dutch dominatrix Monique van Cleef—who was said to be a Priestess in his Church. But LaVey’s interest in the magical philosophy of S-M went well beyond these provocative facts and images.
A serious study of LaVey’s views reveals a materialistic philosophy very much akin to that held by the Marquis de Sade himself. LaVey’s worldview revolved around social dynamics, especially as these relate to the relationship between the sexes. The magic he saw in all this involves the exchange of power and the increase of mutual power between individuals. LaVey always saw a question of dominance and submission in the relationship between the sexes or between any two individual humans. One will dominate the other, one will be the master, the other the slave. He was also quick to point out that there is power to be gained in being the slave as well—it all depends on the nature of the master and what the slave gets in exchange for her (or his) slavery.
LaVey believed that masochistic tendencies can begin in the phenomenon of “eustress”—or “good-stress” (as opposed to distress = “bad-stress”). People love to suffer fear and pain—think of all the recreational activities based on experiencing these things—from horror movies to roller coaster rides, and from aerobics classes to dieting—people will even pay good money to suffer fear and pain. They need it, they have to have it, they won’t be happy without it. “No pain, no gain!”
He even went so far as to say that inherent masochism is the major factor in marketing products. The name of the game is increasing consumer anxiety and dissatisfaction (= pain). The consumer is led to believe that he or she can only “spell relief ” by buying the products or participating in the popular consumer trends—all of which LaVey cynically pointed out are inherently “painful” (physically, emotionally, or financially).
The magic here comes through a certain psychological mechanism. Some elements of mankind (and according to LaVey especially womankind!) need a certain amount of misery, pain, and slavery. This inherent need will be played out in life one way or another. Because most people are unconscious of this need in themselves it simply gets played out in unhappy circumstances of life. This becomes what LaVey called “self-destructive masochism.”6 Actual misfortune and misery are the only result. But if one is a “self-affirming masochist,” who is conscious of this element in the personality, and who lives it out in a creative and self-aware manner, then the actual misery can be “exorcised” in a pleasurable and fun way.
Typically unaware or unconscious Masochists are people for whom “everything seems to go wrong.” They have lousy jobs, can’t get dates, their cars are always breaking down. Misery follows them wherever they go, and they are unhappy. Such persons are probably Masochists who are unaware of their needs. Various aspects of the objective universe, however, provide for them in most unpleasant and miserable ways. If these same Masochists discover the true nature of these needs, and play them out in real but controlled (and often ritualized ) ways, the real-life miseries will be banished and replaced by fun and pleasurable indulgences in slavery and torture! The Masochist will have a Master (or Mistress). The self-aware Masochist can simply choose one of his or her taste.
LaVey’s ideas about Sadism were also interesting. He thought of the Sadist as a facilitator of the self-aware Masochist’s experience. In the relationship between the Sadist and the Masochist there is a true exchange of power in which both give something and both gain something they inherently need. There is also the recognition that the roots of the true Sadistic impulse lie not in hatred or anger, but in jealousy or envy. The Masochist is viewed as a projection of the Sadist’s own inner or, as he called it, “demonic” self. The Sadist then proceeds to train, control, and even punish a symbol of his or her “demonic self ” through the Masochist.
The Sadist is also the Artist. The insightful definition of Sadeanism offered by Gorer (“the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer”7 is equally true of the Artist or Magician. In the work of all of these types something is imagined in the subjective universe and from there it is caused to come into being in the objective universe.
These ideas recall the Greek myth of the misogynistic Pygmalion who created the sculpture of Galatea—his perfect woman. But in an ironic twist he then fell in love with her—even though her stony form was unreceptive to his love. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, took pity on Pygmalion and caused the sculpture to take on a fleshly form that could be his wife. (This is the origin of the story of Henry Higgins and Eliza Dolittle by way of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.)
Here we are also reminded of what Michelangelo said of the marble from which he sculpted his great works such as David or the Pietà. He held that the shapes were already hiding in the marble, and that his work was to liberate them. He could only transform marble from a cold and hard substance into something warm, supple, and endowed with spirit if the marble wanted to be so transformed. The true Sadist works with the same attitude as Michelangelo. The Masochistic need must, in fact, dwell in the heart of the Slave before the Sadist can bring it out.
Two contemporary magical orders either dedicated to or heavily influenced by Sado-Magic are the New Flesh Palladium and the now retired Order of the Triskelion.
THE NEW FLESH PALLADIUM AND ROBERT NORTH
Robert North was the Grand Imperial Hierophant of the New Flesh Palladium and Visible Head of that Order. The New Flesh Palladium traces its roots to the nineteenth-century organizations known as the “Re-Theurgists Optimates” and the “Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.” The NFP surfaced in the late twentieth century in such places as St. Charles, Missouri; Key West, Florida; Providence, Rhode Island; and Lyon, France. It was first headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, home of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Brotherhood of Eulis a hundred years earlier and later in Miami, Florida. Robert North was best known to the public for his translation and biography of P. B. Randolph titled Sexual Magic. His other writings included The New Flesh Palladium: Magica Erotica (1996) and “Maria Naglowska: The Satanic Woman” (1993) later incorporated in The Magical Grimoire of Maria Naglowska (2009).
The wisdom that “God is Man, Man is God” is the primary postulate of the NFP. The magick of the New Flesh is defined as the employment of supersensual techniques to empower self and escape alienation, or on a more technical note, to accumulation and manipulation of sexual energy in its most extreme forms. Within the order teachings there are seven sacraments that the New Flesh refers to:
(1) The Creole expression “Wete Po, Mete Po,” to remove the skin to put on new skin. This is a key phrase and concept in the secret Bizango societies of Haiti, who trace their spiritual lineage back to the ancient Obeah cults of primal Africa.
(2) A Tibetan yogic meditation, probably from the ancient Bön religion, visualizes the flesh melting away from the bones of the yogi, leaving only the skeleton. New Flesh is then seen to flower from the bones to create a perfect body of light.
(3) The sexual fluids of the male and female and the mingling thereof, which, according to occult doctrine, inevitably creates new life, either on the material or the astral plane.
(4) The addition of encumberments, masks, restraints, and other bondage devices to the flesh.
(5) The new skin that grows as the result of the scarification rites that are considered an essential preliminary to spirit possession in many shamanistic cults.
(6) The doctrine of New Life and inner respiration taught by Thomas Lake Harris.
(7) Surgical procedures for sexual regeneration to restore dormant sexual organs thereby returning man to his original, pre-Adamite, physical bisexuality.
The central ritual of the NFP is Oscar Wilde’s Salomé performed in a sexually explicit manner. Elements of sensory deprivation, Sado-Masochism, and ritual magick are key components. Membership in the Palladium is never divulged to the public, and admittance is by invitation only.
The parent organization of the New Flesh was considered to be the Brotherhood of La Fleche d’Or, the Golden Arrow. This was founded by Maria de Naglowska, who flourished in 1930s Paris, where she became notorious for celebrating her “Mass of Gold” and proclaiming “Satanic Initiation according to the Third Term of the Trinity.” Robert North did pioneering research on her from the early 1990s. Her teachings focused on a sacred sexuality whereby “the priestesses of love are destined to prepare the future of humanity.” Although she only recently has become known to the English-speaking world, her disciples included French writers Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski, as well as Jean Paulhan, the writer who inspired Story of O. She also included among her Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow the adventurer William B. Seabrook, whose experiments with S-M and E.S.P. were the scandal of Paris.
The New Flesh teachings are heavily influenced by Symbolist and Surrealist doctrines. The Palladist is expected to go through such ordeals as “entering the body of Babylon,” engaging in the “six modes of congress,” performing the “sex mutation” and enduring the ordeal of the “mystery of the Hanging.” This is Strong Medicine, which includes explicit instructions regarding blood sacrifice, bondage, the whip, right use of sexual fluids, drug-induced ecstasies, and other aspects of the magickal tradition, which can only be communicated from mouth to ear.
THE ORDER OF THE TRISKELION
Sado-Shamanism and Carnal Alchemy are basically our own coinages. One of the authors of this book, Stephen Flowers, also writes and is known under the name Edred Thorsson. He was the Grand Master of the Order of the Triskelion, which is currently closed. The basic information letter of the Order appears as an appendix to this book for historical purposes. Elements of Sado-Shamanism are to be found in various parts of his published work, although it is not present everywhere. Some esoteric teachings of the Rune-Gild may include the secrets of polarian mysteries of the Norse God Odin closely related to the operating principles of Sado-Shamanism.
Stephen received his early training in the world of Sadeanism when he was introduced to it as a young man while studying in Germany in the early 1970s. His mentors were members of the Burggesellschaft, or “Chateau Society.” In the 1980s he founded and developed the Order of the Triskelion in this country based on his experiences.
Besides the work of the Triskelion, Stephen has developed and experimented with a variety of magical and initiatory techniques within the Gothic and Witchcraft traditions.
Underlying all of his work in these fields is his idea of transformation through the synthesis of polar extremes, such as pain and pleasure, bondage and liberation, humiliation and pride, along with that experienced between the selves of the (empowered) dominant and (powerless) submissive, which, when combined with a Sense of Mystery, of voyaging into the Unknown, result in the formula that leads to personal transformation. The transmutation of one polar extreme to another is the essence of what is called “Carnal Alchemy.”
Another of Stephen’s contributions to the field of operative Sadeanism was what he called the “Triskelion Process.” This was a part of the curriculum of the Order of the Triskelion and cannot be entered into here in too much detail. It is experienced in the form of layer upon layer of Mystery, guided by an initiated Master or Mistress. In many ways the Triskelion Process is a magical formula for the conscious articulation and/or generation of fantasies of a Sadean nature, the conscious desire to fulfill these fantasies, and finally the experience of the fantasy in the flesh. Once this pattern of the “fleshing of fantasy” has been actualized often enough in the context of the chamber, its power inevitably manifests in other aspects of the initiate’s life. The Triskelion Process has been called a mechanism for “making dreams come true.”
In 1990 Stephen met his eternal lover, Crystal Dawn, who subsequently became the Grand Mistress of the Order of the Triskelion and was the leader of the Onyx Circle under the sponsorship of the Order.
Only in the latter part of the twentieth century did the full magical and spiritual implications of the practice of the techniques discussed in this book again become manifest in European culture. It is part of our ancient heritage, and it is part of the continuing heritage of many other peoples, but it has been, and will continue to be, for pioneers of the present to rediscover the mysteries of the past and to create other horizons yet Unknown.