Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (15 page)

“The oil of St. Cosmo is in high repute for its invigorating quality, when the loins, and parts adjacent, are anointed with it. No less than 1400 flasks of that oil were either expended at the altar in
unctions, or charitably distributed, during this fete in the year 1780; and as it is usual for every one, who either makes use of the oil at the altar, or carries off a flask of it, to leave an alms for St. Cosmo, the ceremony of the oil becomes likewise a very lucrative one to the canons of the church.”

Inspired by Hamilton’s letter Payne Knight spent two years scouring classical literature and history for references to the worship of Priapus and other phallic deities. He began his
Essay
with a typically eighteenth-century declaration on his belief in the immutability of human nature
³
and then went on to tell his readers a great deal more about the worship of Priapus and the sexual aspects of ancient religion than most of them could possibly have wished to know. The
Essay
aroused a storm of criticism; Payne Knight’s attempt to deal seriously with a subject which had previously, as one nineteenth-century editor pointed out, been “entirely tabooed or … treated in a way to hide rather than to discover the truth” awakened all the prejudices of the learned world, particularly those of the Anglican clergymen who were such an important part of that same world.

Payne Knight bowed his head to the storm; he recalled and burnt all the copies of his book he was able to lay his hands upon, bought up the few second-hand copies that came on to the market and generally did his best to ensure that the
Essay
was totally forgotten. In this he was unsuccessful; quite a lot of copies escaped the holocaust and were circulated from hand to hand amongst those interested in the subjects of fertility and phallic religion.

Seventy-nine years after its first publication the
Essay
was reprinted by Hotten. This second edition was bound up with an anonymously written
Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe;
this second work was almost certainly written by an antiquarian and historian named Thomas Wright—although a certain Richard Turner and Hotten himself may have had a hand in its composition.

Thomas Wright, born in 1810, spent most of his life in great poverty.
He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge—where he held a sizarship and supplemented his income by hack-work, writing a
History of Essex
subsequently issued in forty-eight monthly parts—and afterwards made a living by churning out historical and philological works. There are no less than one hundred and twenty-nine separate books by Wright enumerated in the catalogue of the library of the British Museum; in view of his almost unbelievable literary fecundity it is not surprising that errors abounded in his works. After his death in 1877 one obituary remarked that “nearly all his philological works are defaced by errors of transcription and extraordinary misinterpretations of Latin, early English and early French … but as a pioneer in the study of Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval literature and of British archaeology he deserves grateful remembrance”. Like his other works his study of sex-worship in mediaeval Europe was marred by many errors and misunderstandings. Nevertheless he was the first person to establish some sort of link between the mediaeval witch-cult and the survival of classical fertility religions and he anticipated many of the conclusions of Margaret Murray, although she herself seems to have been quite unaware of Wright’s contribution to the subject.

The 1865 edition of the essays of Payne Knight and Thomas Wright fell into the hands of Hargrave Jennings—a man who seems to have been the original of the character of Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’ novel
The Moonstone
—who saw in them, as he thought, the key to the mysteries of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

As a thinker Hargrave Jennings’ ideas were second or third hand; as a writer he was tenth rate. Nevertheless, his conceptions of sexual symbolism exerted some influence on the occultists of his own and succeeding generations.

Jennings, born in 1817, published the first edition of his
The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries
when he was fifty-three years old. In ponderous, involved and often obscure language the book attempted to prove that, particularly, the mysteries of the Rose Cross were mysteries of sex and, more generally, that sexual symbolism was a universal language the interpretation of which led to an understanding of the real significance of ancient and oriental art and mythology. Like some proto-Freudian Jennings saw the penis and the vagina in almost everything; thus cromlechs, dolmens, round towers in Ireland and, indeed, everything remotely convex in shape were all seen as symbolic male organs, and, similarly, anything which could be twisted by the
imagination into the form of a hole or a cavity was seen as a symbolic vagina. Jennings’ sexual obsessions—and the darkly convoluted prose in which he expressed them—are well illustrated by the following extract from his
Rosicrucians
in which he tried to prove (a) that England’s premier order of chivalry, the order of the Garter, was originally concerned with sexual mysteries, (b) that the Garter was not a garter but, of all things, a sanitary towel, and (c) that the symbolic roses of the Order signified menstruation.
⁴
He wrote:

“But to return to the import of the title of the Order of the Garter. This is a point very engrossing to heralds, antiquaries, and all persons who are interested in the history, traditions, and archaeology of our country. The origin of the Order would be trivial, ridiculous, and unbelievable, if it be only thought due to the picking up of a lady’s garter. It is impossible that the great name and fame of this ‘Garter’ could have arisen alone from this circumstance. The Garter, on the contrary, is traceable from the times of King Arthur, to whose fame throughout Europe there was no limit in his own period. This we shall soon show conclusively from the accounts of the Garter by Elias Ashmole, who was ‘Garter King of Arms’, and who was one of its most painstaking and enlightened historians; besides himself being a faithful and conscientious expositor and adherent of the hermetic science. The ‘Round Table’ of King Arthur—the ‘mirror of chivalry’—supplies the model of all the miniature tables, or tablets, which bear the contrasted roses—red and white, as they were originally (and implying the female
discus
and its accidents)—with the noble ‘vaunt’, or motto, round them—‘Evil to him’, or the same to him, ‘who thinks ill’ of these natural (and yet these magical) feminine circumstances, the character of which our readers will by this time not fail to recognise. The glory of woman and the punishment of woman after the Fall, as indicated in Genesis, go hand in hand. It was in honour of Woman, and to raise into dignity the expression of the condemned ‘means’ (until sanctified and reconciled by the intervention of the ‘S.S.’, or of the Holy Spirit, or of the Third Person of the Trinity), which her mark and betrayal, but which produced the world in producing Man, and which saved it in the person of the Redeemer, ‘born of Woman’. It is to glorify typically and mystically this ‘fleshly vehicle’, that the Order of the ‘Garter’—or ‘Garder’—
that keeps it was instituted. The Knights of the Garter stand sentinel, in fact, over ‘Woman’s Shame’, at the same time that they proclaim her ‘Glory’, in the pardoned sense. These strange ideas are strictly those of the old Rosicrucians, or Brethren of the ‘Red Cross’, and we only reproduce them. The early writers saw no indecency in speaking openly of these things, which are usually hidden away.

“If the blackness or darkness of ‘Matter’, or of the ‘Mother of Nature’, is figured in another respect in the belongings of this famous feminine Order, instituted for the glory of woman. Curious armorists, skilled in the knowledge of the deep symbolism with which the old heralds suffused their illustrations or emblazonments, will remember that
black
is a feature in the Order of the Garter; and that, among figures and glyphs and hints the most profound, the ‘Black Book’, containing the original constitutions of the Order,—from which ‘Black Book’ comes the important ‘Black Rod’,—was
lost
before the time of Henry the Fifth.

“Elias Ashmole mentions the Order in the following terms: ‘We may ascend a step higher; and if we may give credit to Harding, it is recorded that King Arthur paid St. George, whose red cross is the badge of the Garter, the most particular honours; for he advanced his effigy in one of his banners, which was about two hundred years after his martyrdom, and very early for a country so remote from Cappadocia to have him in reverence and esteem.’

“… The material whereof the Garter was composed at first is an
arcanum
, nor is it described by any writer before Polydore Virgil, and he only speaks of it in general terms. The Garter was originally without a motto. As to the appointments of the Order, we may gain the most authentic idea of them from the effigies of some of the first knights. Sir William Fitz-warin was buried on the north side of the chancel of the church of Wantage, in Berkshire, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of King Edward the Third. Sir Richard Pembridge, who was a Knight of the Garter, of the time of Edward the Third, lies on the south side of the cathedral of Hereford. The monument of Sir Simon Burley, beheaded
A.D.
1388, was raised in the north wall, near the choir of St. Paul’s, London. It is remarkable that Du Chesne, a noted French historian, is the source from which we derive the acknowledgment that it was by the special invocation of St. George that King Edward the Third gained the Battle of Cressy; which ‘lying deeply in his remembrance, he founded’, continues Du
Chesne, ‘a chapel within the Castle of Windsor, and dedicated it in gratitude to the Saint, who is the Patron of England’. The first example of a Garter that occurs is on the before-mentioned monument of Sir Francis Burley; where, on the front, towards the head, are his own arms, impaling his first wife’s set within a garter. This wants the impress, or motto. Another shield of arms having the same impalement placed below the feet, is surrounded with a collar of ‘S.S.’, of the same form with that about his neck. It was appointed by King Henry the Eighth, and embodied in the Statutes of the Order, that the collar should be composed of pieces of gold, in fashion of Garters; the ground enamelled blue, and the letters of the motto gold. In the midst of each garter
two roses
were to be placed, the innermost enamelled red, and the outermost white; contrarily, in the next garter, the innermost Rose enamelled white, and the outermost red, and so alternately; but of later times, these roses are wholly red. The number of these Garters is so many as to be the ordained number of the sovereign and knights-companions. At the institution they were twenty-six, being fastened together with as many knots of gold. And this mode hitherto has continued invariable; nor ought the collar to be adorned or enriched with precious stones (as the ‘George’ may be), such being prohibited by the laws of the Order. At what time the collar of ‘S.S.’, came into England is not fully determined; but it would seem that it came at least three hundred years since. The collar of ‘S.S.’ means the Magian, or First Order, or brotherhood. In the Christian arrangements, it stands for the ‘Holy Spirit’, or ‘Third Person of the Trinity’. In the Gnostic talismans, it is displayed as the bar, curved with the triple ‘S’. Refer to the ‘Cnuphis Abraxoids’ occurring in our book, for we connect the collar of ‘S.S.’ with the theology of the Gnostics.

“That the Order of the Garter is feminine, and that its origin is an apotheosis of the ‘Rose’, and of a certain singular physiological fact connected with woman’s life, is proven in many ways—such as the double garters, red and white; the twenty-six knights, representing the double thirteen lunations in the year, or their twenty-six mythic ‘dark and light’ changes of ‘night and day’. ‘But how is all this magic and sacred in the estimate of the Rosicrucians?’ an inquirer will naturally ask. The answer to all this is very ample and satisfactory; but particulars must be left to the sagacity of the querient himself, because propriety does not admit of explanation. Suffice it to say, that it is
one of the most curious subjects which has occupied the attention of antiquaries. That archaeological puzzle, the ‘Round Table of King Arthur’, is a perfect display of this whole subject of the origin of the ‘Garter’; it springs directly from it, being the same object as that enclosed by the mythic garter, ‘garder’, or ‘girther’.

“King Edward the Third chose the Octave of the ‘Purification of the Blessed Virgin’ for the inauguration of his Order. Andrew du Chesne declares that this new Order was announced on ‘New Year’s Day,
A.D.
1344’. There were jousts holden in honour of it on the ‘Monday after the Feast of St. Hilary following—January 19th’. There are variations in the histories as to the real period of the institution of the Garter; most historians specifying the year 1349. Ashmole states that a great supper was ordered to inaugurate the solemnity of the institution, and that a Festival was to be annually held at
Whitsuntide
(which means the ‘S.S.’); that King Edward erected a particular building in the Castle, and therein placed a table (‘Round Table’) of 200 feet diameter, giving to the
building itself
the name of the ‘Round Table’. He appropriated £100 per week—an enormous sum in those days—for the maintenance of this table. In imitation of this, the French King, Philip de Valois, instituted a ‘Round Table’ at his court. Some say that he had an intention of instituting an order of knighthood upon the same ‘feminine subject’, but that he was anticipated by King Edward; which shows that it was something more than an accident and a mere garter which inspired the idea of this Rose forming the mystery. The knights were denominated ‘Equites Aureae Periscelidis’. King Edward the Third had such veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary, that he ordained that the habit of his Knights of the Garter should be worn on the days of her Five Solemnities. Elias Ashmole states that the original of the Statutes of Institution had wholly perished long before his time. There was a transcript existing in the reign of Henry the Fifth, in an old book called
Registrum Ordinis Chartaceum
. Though the Order was instituted so long ago as in the year 1344, it was not till the reign of Charles the Second that the Knights were empowered to wear the star they use at present embroidered on their coats. The rays are the ‘glory’ round the ‘Red Cross’.