Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (17 page)

If Von Hammer’s interpretations were correct there seems to be no doubt that the Templars were guilty of at least some of the crimes of which they were accused, that their connections with the Middle East had brought them into contact with a surviving Gnostic cult and that the inquisitors were justified in their charges of heresy. Von Hammer was a philologist, however, and all philologists, metaphorically speaking, live on the edge of a high cliff; it may be that Von Hammer fell over it—an interesting experience recently undergone, so it seems,
by Dr. John Allegro of sacred mushroom fame—and that the Templars were as innocent of heresy as most historians of the last century believed them to have been, harmless victims of the Christian monarchs who first confiscated the Templars’ estates and then burnt the deprived owners at the stake. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is undeniable that the accusations against the Order of the Temple led to its suppression, after which it was almost forgotten for over four hundred years.

It was the explosive eighteenth-century growth of European speculative freemasonry that led to a revival of interest in the Knights Templar. Freemasonry had been introduced into Europe from Great Britain, firstly by Jacobite exiles, many of them Catholic—it was not until 1738 that the Pope condemned masonry—and then by pro-Hanoverian English merchants who founded new Lodges which were, unlike the Jacobite Lodges, recognised by the Grand Lodge of England. Within a few years the Europeans, particularly the French, were founding their own Lodges, taking their rituals, their mystic words (such as Mahabone) and their secret signs and steps from the English Lodges whom they were imitating.

Now, to both the non-mason and to some masons the most curious thing about masonry is that its secrets are no secrets; I do not mean by this that the so-called secrets are available to all who care to spend enough money on books at any masonic bookseller, although this is, of course, true, but that the secret rituals, passwords and steps of the craft are almost meaningless. That if there
is
a real secret at the heart of masonry (and many whose opinions I respect affirm that there is) it lies not in these things but in something much deeper which is hidden from him who has not reached the core of the masonic initiation—after all an unutterable secret is, by definition, unutterable! The English masons of the eighteenth century appear to have remained comparatively unworried by this problem, for while the Jacobites used their Lodges as covers for political conspiracy, the pro-Hanoverians of Grand Lodge were content to use the masonic rites as an excuse for drunkenness and debauch.

The more intellectual members of the French Lodges, however, gave considerable thought to the matter. Surely, they felt, masonry must have
some
inner meaning and purpose besides the re-enactment of mediaeval legends about King Solomon and a murdered builder named Hiram. To some the history of the Knights Templar seemed to provide the answer; the Templars had been great builders, their
strangely-shaped round Churches famous throughout Christendom, and the symbolism of the masonic craft-degrees centred around the building of the Temple of Solomon—it was difficult for the eighteenth-century mind to believe that this was mere coincidence. The Order of the Temple, it was affirmed, had not been completely destroyed by the inquisitors, it had “gone underground” and survived as the masonic fraternity!

Within a few years several occult-masonic organisations had appeared, each claiming a Templar origin for itself. In Scotland there was the Royal Order, alleged to have enjoyed an uninterrupted existence since the fourteenth century when it was founded, so the story went, by two French Templars who had fled for refuge to Scotland. In Germany and France was the Stride Observance, under the control of mysterious “Unknown Superiors” and demanding the unconditional submission and obedience of all other masonic groups. In England there were many “Templar encampments”—independent, quasi-masonic bodies, usually working in close association with Chapters of Rose-Croix masons. A little later a new Order of the Temple appeared in France; it used the
Levitikon
, an unorthodox version of the Gospel of St. John, as its holy book and relied upon an eighteenth-century forgery, the Charter of Larmenius, to prove its Templar origins.

The last of this long line of occult Templar organisations, the
Ordo Templi Orientis
, usually referred to as the O.T.O., was founded at the beginning of the present century by Karl Kellner, a wealthy German iron master who was also an occultist and a high-grade freemason. Its original members seem to have all come from the ranks of the German Lodge of the
Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Mizraim
.

The ninety degrees of the masonic Rite of Memphis and the ninety-seven degrees of the Rite of Mizraim were both of early nineteenth-century origin. The membership of both organisations was small and the Rites had fallen into the hands of an Englishman, John Yarker of Manchester, who unified them under the name of
Memphis and Mizraim
. There is no doubt that Yarker was prepared to confer high-sounding masonic degrees on anyone who was prepared to pay his fees and that by 1900
Memphis and Mizraim
had become a fee-snatching racket of the very worst type.

In 1902 Yarker, who was in considerable financial difficulties, sold a charter authorising the establishment of a German Grand Lodge of
Memphis and Mizraim
to three occultists named, Klein, Hartmann and
Reuss. This Grand Lodge was duly established in Berlin and began to publish a magazine called the
Oriflamme
. I have been unable to trace early copies of this periodical but I believe that the contents of these issues were purely masonic and that no mention was made of the O.T.O. By 1904, however, both the O.T.O. and Kellner began to be mentioned by name in the
Oriflamme
and references were made to a “great secret” that was in the keeping of the Order. The nature of this great secret was made clear in a jubilee edition of the
Oriflamme
published in 1912:

“Our Order possesses the
KEY
which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets, namely, the teaching of sexual magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the secrets of Freemasonry and all systems of religion.”

Kellner claimed that the sexual magic taught by himself and his Templar Order had been derived from three oriental adepts, one Arab and two Hindu, but a more immediate source may have been a group of the European followers of an American sex-orientated occultist named Paschal Beverley Randolph. Randolph, a mulatto, suffered from an acute persecution complex and took great care to conceal the unusual nature of his sexual teachings under a cloak of symbolism. Even some of his closest associates seem to have had no knowledge of them, and it is significant that R. Swinburne Clymer, who eventually inherited the chieftainship of the numerous occult organisations founded by Randolph—most of them existing only on paper—regarded any form of sexual magic as sheer Satanism. Nevertheless, Randolph did pass on his sexual teachings to a trusted group of his French disciples. I think it probable that it was from one or more members of this French group that Kellner derived the sexual techniques used in the O.T.O.—although of course, there is no doubt that he did meet Tantrics in the course of his oriental wanderings. An occult group ultimately deriving from Randolph had survived in France until the present day, and it is interesting to note that its sex-magic techniques are more or less identical with those of the O.T.O.

The O.T.O. was organised in nine operative grades—there was a tenth degree, but this was purely administrative in its functions, “X°” being a title given to the head of each national section of the Order. The grades up to and including the sixth were ritually conferred, the
first three of them bearing a marked resemblance to the three degrees of Craft Masonry and the last three being largely concerned with the Order’s unorthodox interpretation of masonic symbolism. The seventh, eighth and ninth grades dealt with sexual magic; there were no rituals for these degrees, initiates were simply handed written material giving the appropriate instructions. In the eighth degree was taught a peculiar type of autosexual activity—I can only describe it as magical masturbation—which, so far as I know, has no oriental equivalent, but the heterosexual magic taught in the ninth degree was quite similar to that of the left-handed Tantricism of Bengal.

A large number of manuscripts written by O.T.O. initiates have survived. These deal in detail with the sexual techniques of the Order’s ninth degree and there is no difficulty in understanding them once one realises the nature of the code in which they were written. This code was drawn from the traditional technical terminology of alchemy. The penis was referred to as
the athanor
, the semen as
the Serpent
or occasionally,
the blood of the red lion
, while the vagina was called
the cucurbite
or
the retort
. The secretions that lubricate the vagina were called
the menstruum of the Gluten
, sometimes abbreviated to
the menstruum
, and the mixture of semen with vaginal lubricant was termed
the First Matter
or, when supposedly transmuted by the magical powers of the participants in the rite, the
Amrita
, or
Elixir
.

The initiates of the IX° claimed that success in almost any magical operation, from the invocation of a god to “procuring a great treasure” could be achieved by the application of the appropriate sexual technique. Thus to invoke the powers of a god into themselves they mentally concentrated on the god throughout their sexual intercourse, building up the form of the deity in their imaginations and attempting to imbue it with life. At the moment of orgasm they identified themselves with the imagined form, mentally seeing their own bodies and that of the god blending into one. If they wanted to “charge” a talisman—a magical charm designed to achieve some desired end, such as love or fame—they anointed it with the
Amrita
resulting from their sexual act,
³
during which act they had concentrated on the talisman and
its purpose. A similar method was used to imbue with magical power a letter written for some particular purpose; the power was supposedly augmented if the
Amrita
was used to trace an appropriate symbol on the envelope, e.g. if the letter was an application for money the sigil of the god Jupiter was drawn on the envelope.

After the death of Karl Kellner in 1905 Theodor Reuss assumed the Headship of the O.T.O. and, under his leadership, the Order enjoyed a modest but rapid growth, extending its activities to Denmark, France, Luxemburg and England.

Reuss had lived an interesting life. He was the offspring of a German father and an English mother and in his mother’s country had experienced a certain amount of professional success as a singer in music-halls and at all-male smoking concerts. He seems to have combined this artistic career with spying for the Prussian secret police on German socialist exiles in London—his attention was particularly concentrated on the children of Karl Marx. In the ’eighties he had joined the Socialist League, a revolutionary organisation founded as an orthodox Marxist counterblast to H. M. Hyndman’s semi-reformist Social Democratic Federation,
⁴
and had become a member of its executive committee, presumably in order to spy upon the activities of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx-Aveling, who was also upon the executive. No doubt Reuss hoped to ingratiate himself with the Marx family and thus worm his way into the confidence of the German Social Democrats but he was disappointed, for both Eleanor Marx and her rascally lover, Edward Aveling, took a strong dislike to him. Eleanor found Reuss vulgar; she even went to the length of writing a letter to Karl Kautsky, the German socialist leader, complaining of the coarseness of the songs that Reuss had sung at a concert given in aid of the funds of the Socialist League. A few months later the League’s paper, the
Commonweal
, published an article exposing Reuss as a police spy and shortly afterwards he was expelled from the organisation.

There is little trace of Reuss between his expulsion from the Socialist League and his attainment of the Headship of the O.T.O. in 1905, but it seems probable theat he earned his living by a combination of singing, spying, and running a dubious export-import business.
⁵
He seems to have had a complete comtempt for the conventions of his time, and under his chieftainship the O.T.O. quite openly proclaimed that it practised sexual magic—under Kellner it had been much more discreet in its public pronouncements.

¹
An interesting light was thrown on the general morals of the Order by a Knight named Theobald de Taverniac who completely denied that he and his fellows were guilty of sodomy. The charge was ridiculous, he said, “because they could have very beautiful and courtly women whenever they liked, and they did have them frequently when they were rich and powerful enough”.

²
Thus Guillaume de Arblay said that when he was received into the Order there was placed on the altar a head with two faces, a terrible look and a silver beard. He told his inquisitors that he believed the object to be a holy relic, the head of one of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs of Cologne. It is possible that Guillaume put down the “terrible look” to either virginity or martyrdom, but I cannot surmise why he thought the lady should have had two faces and a silver beard!

³
The late Aleister Crowley owned a talisman called Segelah (it was intended “for finding a great treasure” and was taken from the mediaeval Abramelin system of magic) that had been consecrated in this way. I have seen it, and it is a most unpleasant looking object, smeared with dried semen and menstrual blood. Crowley never succeeded in “finding a great treasure” except, as his followers would say, in a metaphorical sense. The present owner of the talisman, however, has used it as a means of discovering rare books, seemingly with great success.