Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (31 page)

Suddenly Vintras, who was extremely pious, heard the bell of the local church ringing for Mass. He hurried back to his office in order to fetch a prayer book. On the table where he had been writing he found a letter containing “a refutation of heresy and a profession of Catholic orthodoxy” and upon the letter lay placed the coin which he had given the old beggar. Vintras was thunderstruck and decided, for no apparent reason, that his mysterious visitor had been the Archangel Michael.

Probably the whole incident had been carefully arranged and stage-managed by an acquaintance of Vintras, a rascally lawyer named
Geoffroi, who was the agent of Charles Naundorf, a confidence trickster who called himself Duke of Normandy and claimed to be Louis XVII, rightful King of France.
¹
Naundorf, who was not even French and had spent the years 1824–8 in prison for forgery, had a sizeable following on the lunatic fringe of French royalism. He was supposedly a Protestant and the supporters of ultra-montane royalism were urged to pray for his conversion; whether or not Geoffroi had actually arranged Vintras’ “vision” of the “Archangel Michael”, there is no doubt that those who manipulated the Naundorf movement saw that they could use Vintras’ fervent but superstitious piety for their own purposes.

The first “vision” was supplemented by others; both the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph appeared, informed Vintras that he was the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah, that his task was to proclaim the coming “Age of the Holy Ghost” and commanded him to found the Church of Carmel—originally known as the Work of Mercy. Vintras travelled around the country preaching the coming kingship of Naundorf, the pre-existence of souls and universal redemption. He was a powerful preacher and he soon acquired a following that included not only unlettered men like himself but members of the bourgeoisie and even priests, among them the Abbé Charvoz, a theologian of some eminence who became the movement’s theologian.

Vintras set up his first oratory at Tilly; here, clad in vestments of their own devising, the priests of the Work of Mercy celebrated the
Provictimal Sacrifice of Mary
and witnessed many miraculous events—saw empty chalices suddenly brim over with blood, beheld mystic bloodstains appear on the consecrated host
²
and even saw the Holy Ghost (in the form of a plump woodpigeon) perch on Vintras’ shoulder. Vintras himself experienced visions of an increasingly lurid nature. The following, which dates from 1840 or 1841, is typical:

“On Monday night the 17th or 18th of May a frightful vision struck at my soul and body … I had gone up to the holy chapel and was about to open the door when I saw written on it in letters of fire, ‘Dare not to enter, thou whom I have spewed out of my mouth’… I fell down overcome … I saw on every side an abyss full of hideous monsters who called me brother …

“I called on the Divine Mary, Mother of God, to help me … Suddenly great whirlpools of flame arose from the abyss into which I was about to fall. I heard yells of furious exultation and could pray no longer, when a voice … filled my ears … ‘Behold Mary, whom you called your shield against us, behold her gracious smile, hear her gracious voice.’

“… I saw her above the abyss. Her eyes of heavenly blue were filled with fire, her red lips were violet, her mild and divine voice had become terrible and like a thunderbolt she hurled these words at me: ‘writhe, proud one, in the burning regions inhabited by devils’.

“O, if only I revealed to the enemies of the Work of Mercy those things that pass in me would they not cry victory? They would say that this is evidence of monomania. I wish to God that it were so, for then I would have less to lament …”

As the religious hysteria increased the ecclesiastical authorities became alarmed and in November 1841 the Bishop of Bayeux condemned the pamphlets of Charvoz as teaching doctrines incompatible with the Catholic faith. It is probable that the Church authorities also arranged the arrest and trial on charges of fraud of Vintras and Geoffroi in the following year. Although the trial was undoubtedly rigged it resulted in Vintras receiving a seven, and Geoffroi a two years’ sentence of imprisonment.

In 1848 the sect was formally condemned by Rome; Vintras replied with a counter-condemnation of the Pope and a dignified defence of his own position: “If my mind counted for anything in the condemned works,” he wrote, “I should bow my head and fear would possess my soul. The Work is not my Work, however, and I have had no concurrence in it, either by research or desire. Within me is calmness; I have not laid awake on my bed nor have night-watches wearied my eyes; God gives me pure sleep.”

Vintras’ difficulties were increased by the activities of an ex-disciple named Gozzoli (he seems to have been a mere pawn of Geoffroi who
had also fallen out with the prophet), who in 1851 published a pamphlet accusing Vintras of homosexuality and of conducting secret Masses at which both priest and people were naked. Geoffroi’s son, a priest, alleged that his father’s former associates had taught him a secret “magical prayer” to be recited at the foot of the altar and to be accompanied by masturbation.

For some years the Church of Carmel enjoyed a modest prosperity; branches of it were established in Spain, in Belgium, in England and in Italy.

Vintras died on December 7th, 1875. Shortly before this event he had made the acquaintance of an altogether more intellectual—and more sinister—personality than himself, an unfrocked priest named Boullan who had been imprisoned in Rome for heresy and in France for fraud.

Boullan, born in 1824, had been a religiously inclined youth and had entered the priesthood. Subsequently he had become the confessor of a nun named Adele Chevalier whom he had made his mistress and who had become the mother of at least two children by him. In 1859 the two founded
The Society for the Reparation of Souls
, an organisation which specialised in the “casting out of demons” by unusual methods of exorcism. Some of the techniques used were extremely repellent—Boullan and his mistress “cured” one group of allegedly possessed nuns by feeding them a mixture of human excrement and the consecrated host! It is also likely that the two dabbled in a type of Black Magic very similar to that practised by Guibourg and La Voisin two hundred years before; there is some evidence to show that on January 8th, 1860 they conducted a Black Mass at which they ritually sacrificed their own bastard child, born a few weeks previously.

After his meeting with Vintras Boullan declared himself a convert to the former’s doctrines and, together with his tiny personal following, joined the Church of Carmel; he rose rapidly in the favour of the prophet—Vintras was never a very good judge of character—and after Vintras’s death proclaimed himself as the new Supreme Pontiff and as the reincarnation of St. John the Baptist. Most of the members of the Church refused to accept Boullan’s claims to supremacy, but a few did so, and they settled with their chief in Lyons, a city that had retained some reputation for religious eccentricity since the time of the Cathars and other mediaeval Manichees.

Whatever may have been the truth about the alleged sexual deviations
of Vintras himself there is not the slightest doubt that Boullan practised a form of sexual magic. He held the common—and theologically incorrect—nineteenth-century opinion that the sin that had led to the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden had been sexual in nature and that “as the Fall had been caused by a culpable act of love it is through acts of love accomplished in a religious spirit that the Redemption of Humanity can be achieved”. If humanity indulged in sexual activities with angels and other heavenly beings, said Boullan, it was enabled to more rapidly climb the ladder of spiritual evolution that led to the Divine Union. Similarly, copulation with animals speeded up their spiritual evolution—and was therefore meritorious!

12. The Prophet Vintras—his disciples believed that they copulated with the mighty dead. See Appendix, “Copulating with Cleopatra”.

13. Peladan—a leading figure in the
Kabalistic Rose Croix
.

Documents survive showing that Boullan and his followers engaged —or thought they engaged—in copulation with angels, cherubim, seraphim and the spirits of such historical figures as Cleopatra and Alexander the Great. The techniques used were masturbation, with the operator strongly imagining that he or she was in coitus with the desired angel or spirit, and actual sexual intercourse in which each participant identified the other with the appropriate disembodied being. There is no hard evidence to show that bestiality—sexual intercourse with animals—was practised, but it is extremely probable that it was indulged in by at least some members of the Church of Carmel. Boullan himself participated in rites that were essentially scatological in nature; he seems to have been fascinated by the human excretory organs and their functions.

Boullan’s death, as curious as his life, came at the climax of a “Battle of the Magicians”—the theurgists of the Church of Carmel on one side of the conflict, those of an occult fraternity called the
Kabalistic Order of the Rose-Croix
on the other.

The
Kabalistic Order of the Rose-Croix
had come into existence in 1887 and was largely the creation of a French Marquis named Stanislas de Guaita. The Marquis had sought only literary fame until 1885 when, as a result of reading the books of Eliphas Levi, he had been converted to occultism and acquired a burning desire to be a master-magician; from then until his premature death in 1897 from an overdose of drugs his life was devoted to a fight against the real or supposed machinations of Black Magicians and to the revival of the ancient mysteries. In his scarlet-draped study, clad in a Cardinal’s robe, he took cocaine, hashish and morphine “to project the astral body” and attempted the transmutation of base metals into gold. Reports of Boullan’s sexual teachings
reached de Guaita and he spent a fortnight in Lyons posing as a potential convert to the Church of Carmel. During this brief stay he acquired a considerable insight into the inner nature of Boullan’s teaching and this insight was considerably increased a month or so after his return to Paris when he was joined by Oswald Wirth, a member of Carmel who had revolted against its chief’s teachings and had decided to transfer his allegiance to the White Magic of the
Kabalistic Rose-Croix
. The two decided that Boullan was, as they wrote in their joint essay
The Temple of Satan
, a “pontiff of infamy, a base idol of the mystical Sodom, a magician of the worst type, a wretched criminal, an evil sorcerer”— and accordingly declared war on him, sending him a letter affirming that he was “a condemned man”. Exactly what de Guaita and Wirth meant by this phrase is uncertain; they themselves claimed later that they were only referring to their forthcoming literary exposure of Boullan, eventually published as the first part of de Guaita’s
Serpent of Genesis;
Boullan, on the other hand, believed that it was a threat to end his life by magical spells and, certainly, this does seem to have been the more probable explanation of the words used.

This battle of the magicians, real or imaginary, lasted for almost five years and ended only with Boullan’s death. Two years after its commencement the novelist J. K. Huysmans became involved in it as a result of his attempts to gather information about the supposed survival of Satanism in the nineteenth century.

Huysmans had written a letter of enquiry to Boullan and had received a friendly reply; subsequently he was sent from Lyons some of Vintras’ miraculous “bleeding hosts” together with a considerable amount of carefully selected documentation cleverly designed to give him an altogether favourable impression of Boullan and the Church of Carmel.