The New Flesh Palladium by Robert North

THE NEW 
FLESH PALLADIUM 

MAGIA EROTICA 

ROBERT NORTH 

Edition Américaine

Copyright @ 1996 by Robert North 

Fourth edition 2006 

In recent years, the public has been surfeited with books on "sex magic" which are little more than self-help marriage manuals with some yoga thrown in. For readers who wish to go beyond these vanilla treatments, Robert North offers an initiated study of dark, erotic rites that challenge the very limits of consciousness itseIf. 

The New Flesh Palladium: Magia Erotica recounts the bizarre experiments of the historic masters of this forbidden art. It also gives 
explicit instructions regarding blood sacrifice, bondage, the whip, right use of sexual fluids, drug-induced ecstasies and  other aspects of magickal tradition that have hitherto heen taught only from mouth to ear. 

This is, indeed Strong Medicine that dwarfs the slave soul mentality of mundanes and seeks the utter paroxysm of the Spirit. Enter freely and of your own Will. 

Inquities about this work should be directed to the author at the 
addresses below. All communications will be treated confidentially. 

bobnorth@newfleshpalladium.net
www.newfleshpalladium.net
http://newfleshpalladium.blogspot.com
http://mysteryofsevenpalms. blogspot.com 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

1  Origins of the New Flesh 
2 Swedenborg and Sade: Early Ideas 
3  Mesmer and the Magnetists 
4. The Prophets of the New Dispensation 
5  Randolph and Blavatsky  
6  Nietzsche, Sacher-Masoch and Wilde 
7 OTO: The Curators of Sex Magic 
I 8 Wilhelm Reich: Sexpol, Bions and Orgonomy 
9 The Gods of Sex Magic: Lovecraftian Cults 
10.The Practice of Sexual Magic 

Appendix
Appendix I -- Sources
Appendix II --Invocations of the Paris Working 
Appendix III--True tables of Correspondences

              CHAPTER 1 
ORIGINS OF THE NEW FLESH 

As we scan the cosmic past of humankind on Earth, we see two ways 
of power. High above, in the misty mountains of the East, the 
mysterious lamas practiced their inhibitory meditations, mortifying their flesh with piercing, encumberments and other ascetic disciplines. They learned to achieve altered states of consciousness through sensory deprivation and body modification. Theirs was the way of non-action. Their doctrines were dhyana (concentration) and attainment of the void. They gained power and mastery over life by refusing to compete with it, accepting the brutality of nature by complying with it, thereby transcending it. They were the first human ancestors of all mystics and their formula was submission. 

Down below, in the steaming jungles of primal man, the excitatory 
magicks of obeah and spirit possession were danced into the night. The sex force was given free and full expression in orgiastic rites of sex and . blood. The celebrants would whip themselves into an ecstatic frenzy through scarification and wanton licentiousness so that they might be "mounted" by their gods and receive oracular inspiration. They gained, power and mastery over life by demanding it through extreme actions, designed to catapult their Will forward. They were the first human ancestors of all magicians and their formula was domination. 

Both of these formulae were very human responses to the feeling of 
alienation, the sense that humankind is a stranger on Earth, not evolved 
from it; placed here by some unknowable transcendent power that is  distant yet familiar. Our God becomes an absent father/mother with 
whom we share an affinity that we can never feel with the other beings of nature that surround us. It is only natural that we should seek to gain 
power over our situation and to do this we must turn to the body. 

We may inhibit it, as did the magi of the mountains, or excite it like 
the possessed dancers of the jungles. But it is to the body that we must  turn when we discover that'we are alone and it is ultimately through the 
bodp that we must seek empowerment. The fakhir pierces and mortifies 
his body that he may slip out of it to attain higher worlds, yet the body is still his gate to liberation. The sexual libertine's desire allows him to slip out of everyday consciousness, to stop thinking and start feeling, to 
experience the world and other people directly. So the body is also his 
gate to liberation from the world of alienation. 

It is this knowledge of the equal efficacy of both these paths that 
creates the essence of The New Flesh Palladium. The wisdom that God is Man, Man is God is the primary postulate of our teachings. The power is within and the key to our own self empowerment is the dual formulae of dominance and submission, both paths combined. That blend of restraining and exciting the senses results in the supersensual life, the will to power. "Now victim for a moment, my lovely angel, soon you'll persecute me in your turn," writes the Marquis de Sade. In other words, escape from the alienation of the old, gray world comes from interaction and intimacy, which are experienced in their fullest in the rites of dominance and submission. 

The magick of The New Flesh Palladium
may be defined as the employment of supersensual techniques to empower the self and. escape alienation or, on a more technica1 note, the accumulation and manipulation of sexual energy in its most extreme forms. The term The New Flesh Palladium has many levels of interpretation. There are seven sacraments which The New Flesh refers to: 

1. The Creole expression 'Wete Po. Mete Po," to remove 
the skin to put on a new skn. This is the key phrase and 
concept in the secret Bizango societies of Haiti which 
trace their spiritual lineage back to the ancient obeah cults 
of primal Africa. 

2. A Tibetan yogic meditation, probably from the ancient 
Bon religion, that 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 the doctrines of the O.T.O., 
invariably create new life, either on the material or astral 
plane. 

4. The addition of encumberments, masks, restraints and 
other bondage devices to the flesh. 

5. The new skin that grows as a 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 that 
reconnects Man with the God of Thomas Lake Harris. 

7. Surgical procedures for sexual regeneration to restore 
dormant sexual organs thereby returning Man to his 
original, Pre-Adamite, physical sexuality. 

The term Palladium refers to the goddess Pallas Athena, whose statue 
protected the ancient site of Illium (Troy). It signifies a safe place. It 
represents a protected haven in the erotic wilderness, a pure land where 
we may find empowerment and intimacy. The goal of The New Flesh 
Palladium is Gratified Desire. We are reminded of William Blake's The Question Answer'd:
 
"What is it  men in women do require? 
The lineaments of Gratified Desire. "What is it women do in 
men require? 
The lineaments of Gratified Desire." 

But we pursue that goal through extremes. De Sade writes, "What is 
pleasure? Simply this: That which occurs when voluptuous atoms clash 
and fire the electrical particles circulating in the hollow of our nerve 
fibers. To complete the pleasure the clash must be as violent as possible."In The New Flesh Palladium it is the quality which was termed by Wilhelm Reich, Orgastic Potency, that is the key to Gratified Desire. We define this as the capacity for complete, convulsive discharge of sexual energy with a momentary loss of consciousness. Whatever image is present in the mind during this moment of the rain ecstatic will be reified in the Palladist's sphere . Reich's orgasm formula is this: 

"Tension 
leads to Bioelectrical Charge 
leads to Bioelectrical Discharge, 
leads to Relaxation". 

Therefore, the greater the amount of tension, the greater the amount 
of discharge, This is the raison d'etre for employing extreme amounts 
of restraint and excitation. It is Strong Medicine for a strong disease: 
Emotional Plague. The rule of The New Flesh Palladium 
concerning its gods and rites is best expressed by Austin Osman  Spare:  "know all ritual ceremony and conditions as arbitrary (you have yourself to please). By sigils and the acquirement of vacuity, any past incarnation, experience, etc., can be summoned to consciousness. Sleep is better than prayer." As Jim Morrison pronounced, 'You cannot petition the Lord with prayer,'" This is another assertion that we are alone and that the power is within. Nevertheless, many Palladists have found the Cthulhu Mythos a highly appropriate system ot expression because ot the archetypal forces involved. Since it is documented in the powerful, yet antiquely mysterious style of H.P. Lovecraft, based on his dreams, the cult of the Great Old Ones is both accessible and suitably arbitrary. Lovecraft was a "firm disbeliever in anything occult" and his Life and works are thoroughly documented. This provides an additional protection against any demagogues arising who might claim some special initiation, and therefore authority, from HPL, as has been the case with so many mystery schools. Crowley's various avatars are, perhaps, the mast notable example. Further on this point, in A.C.'s personal copy of his publication, The Equinox; he underlined the followmg passage: 

"To this secret order every wise and spiritually enlightened 
person belongs by right of his or her nature. Into this sacred 
society no one can be admitted by another, unless he has the 
power to enter by himself by virtue of his own interior 
illumination." 

This principle is strictly applied to The New Flesh Palladium, 
without exception. The images of the Great Old Ones naturally seem 
to lend themseives to the darker side of sexuality. 

The New Flesh Palladium may be understood as the convocation of the wisdom of the New Dispensation of Man, the breaking of any and all covenants with ghosts and gods, the Abomination of Desolation. 
 
Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow 
golden md bear the reflection of joy over all the world. 

Chapter 2

SWEDENBORG AND SADE: 
EARLY IDEAS 

Humankind in the twentieth century of the Common Era has a rich 
and mysterious history to look back upon. Objectively verified written 
records take us back 5000 years. Archeology suggests human civilization in existence some 40,000 years ago, and psychic impressions by various mystics trace human evolution to times so remote that it challenges the very imagination. Perhaps the most interesting occult history of the world was given by Rudolf Steiner in his An Outline of Occult Science and Cosmic Memory which consists of his readings of the Akashic Records of the 
Cosmos. Steiner was heavily influenced, as were most thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by the evolutionist theories of Charles Darwin. While Steiner's writings are admittedly highly subjective, is vision of multitudes of human souls evolving at different rates 
through many worlds all linked by reincarnation makes fascinating 
reading and provides some sensible logistics for seemingly disparate 
occuIt theories. Speaking of the very ancient past, Steiner writes, "As the external eye looks into misty gray distances, so the inner eye of the seer looks upon five more forms of consciousness, as far off as distant spirits, of which a description, however, is quite impossible. In all, one can speak of twelve stages of consciousness." Steiner elaborates seven of these stages in his books, of which Man is currently living in the fourth, or Earth, stage. 

With Steiner's cosmology, the divisions of epochs, root races and 
other aspects of evolution become highly complex. Throughout the 
whole series, he sees Man develop memory, personality, logical thinking 
and spirituality, whle evolving alongside life-forms of greater and lesser 
advancement. During the Atlantean period, a historical period that 
Steiner saw immediately preceding our own recorded era, he states: 
"Hitherto the gods had led men through their messengers; now 
men were to know about these divine entities. They were to leam 
to consider themselves as the implementing organs of divine Providence" 

The principal leader, Manu, was assisted by other divine messengers who executed his intentions for particular branches of life and worked on the development of a new race. from a certain quarter men had come into possession of knowledge of arts, which were not immediately connected with what the above-mentioned Manu had to consider as his true task. This knowledge and these arts were at first devoid of religious character. They came to Man in such a way that he coult think of nothing other than his personal needs. 

At this point in the text, Steiner breaks off with a footnote stating that it is not permitted to make public communications about this knowledge and these arts. This is one of the few references that Steiner makes to sex magick in his published writings. He was an early initiate of the O.T.O., the primary source of sex magickal teachings in the early twentieth century, although he remained very secretive about this aspect of his occult life. It is highly significant that Steiner equates Man becoming more self-conscious with the knowledge of sexual magick for it is exactly this experience that The New Flesh Palladium is both a symbol and exponent. 

For the first 1750 years of the Common Era, religious thought revolved around the idea of an external Deity controlling the world of men. Copernican theory finally upset the astrological concept of an imperfect sub-lunar world beneath the perfection of the spheres, and even the Julian calender gave way to an idea of heavenly bodies behaving in a less than perfect manner. 

Before these events, Man saw human imperfection juxtaposed against God's perfection. Therefore, human sexuality was seen as an imperfect copy of Divine perfection. While sexuality was always closely connected with religious feeling, it could not be understood as a complete magickal formula in and of itself until God was de-mythologized and the "covenant" (i.e. that God was in his heaven and would look after Man as long as Man obeyed Him) was broken. Some ancient Gnostic and tantric teachings seem to imply this, but it was not until the equality of the heaven's with man's world was established that the true function of sex magick could be understood. 

This occurred as the Age of Reason ushered in the concept that God is Man, Man is God became an explicit idea. In 1745 Emanuel Swedenborg experienced a life-transforming vision which made him, perhaps, the first great prophet of the Age of Man, or the New Flesh. 

While there were many hints of this doctrine in previous ages, the is one particular case of spiritual vision that has such great impact upon the doctrines of sexual magick that it can hardly be ignored. This is the record of the spiritual workings of John Dee and Edward Kelly some 150 years before Swedenborg.

John Dee was probably Renaissance England's greatest scholar. He possessed one of the largest Libraries of the period and he was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. He immersed himself in the study of science and magick, but was also deeply involved with geography, antiquarianism, theology and the fine arts. That he was a very devout and pious Christian cannot be doubted. 

His curiosity in the spirit world led him to employ a seer, Edward Kelly, whom he bade gaze into a glass of black obsidian brought back from recent voyages to the New World. Dee would address humble religious prayers to God that He might send visions of holy angels to Kelly through the glass. Although some of the material was lost the content of the visions provides us with one of the most remarkable magickal systems of all times, including its own language, hierarchy of beings, governance over parts of the Earth, sigils and much magickal knowledge which it seems Dee never investigated further. 

Some of these communications read:

"Behold you are become free. Do that which most pleaseth you. For Behold,  your own reason riseth up against my wisdom ... I am the Duaghter of Fortitude and ravished every hour from my youth ... I am a harlot for such as ravish me and a virgin for such as know me not ... I will open my garments and stand naked before you, that your love may be more enflamed toward me ... Behold these four: who is he that shall say: They have sinned? or unto whom shall they make account? Not unto you, O you sons of men, nor unto your children; for unto the Lord belongeth the judgment of His servants"

This is pretty straightforward sex magickal talk for a devout Elizabethan. There is no indication that either Dee or Kelly ever pursued these teachings except for one instance when they may have engaged in a night of wife-swapping at the behest of the Angels. It does seem notable that such ideas should have appeared in a respectable and pious setting. The spiritual diaries of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly represent the most important foreshadowing of the doctrines of sex magick of which The New Flesh Palladium is an exponent. In fact, this "Enochian Magick" as the Dee-Kelly material has come to be known, has been utilized by most sex magickal groups of the second half of the twentieth century.

Much like John Dee, Emanuel Swedenborg was anything but a sexual libertine. Born in 1688, Swedenborg pursued the life of a scientist in Uppsala, Sweden. It was not until his late fifties that he underwent a religious visionary experience that convinced him that he lived in both the spiritual and material world. He spent the rest of his life writing books that recorded his experiences and conversations with the inhabitants of the spiritual world. He emphasized intense study of the bible and was a devout Christian. He practiced a technique of "inner breathing," listened to an inner voice and experienced many trance states. His position as the first prophet of the New Flesh and sexual magick is based on the content of his visions. While he, like John Dee, Wilhelm Reich, H.P. Lovecraft and other major influences on sexual magick was a sexual conservative, his writings embody the first clear sense that Man can find God in his humanity. 

Swedenborg writes: "God is Very Man ... Man is both a heaven and an earth in microcosm ... Every created thing is an image of God in a mirror ... Marriage is from the Marriage of Good and Truth, whence also Heaven in its whole complex is called a Marriage ... I have pursued this anatomy with the single purpose of searching out the soul. For she is represented in the body, as a mirror ... Love is the life of Man and the Lord, because he is life itself, is Love itself ... Heaven's warmth constitutes the life of an angel's intending, since heaven's warmth is the Divine love." 

In contradistinction to Emanuel Swedenborg's life and influence stands the infamous shadow of the Marquis de Sade. Born half a century later, Sade's writings constitute the nightside of Swedenborg's concern with the world of the spirit. "Smitten stiff by desire, 'tis with yourself you must be solely concerned. And, as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort victim, destined to that passion's fury." 

If Swedenborg was concerned with documenting the land of the spirit, it was ever the marquis' intent to focus upon the nature of the physical. He was blunt, "Nature created human beings to no other end than that they amuse themselves on earth and make it their playground,its inhabitants their toys." Instead of focusing on the nature of man's spirit, Sade preferred writing novels describing the perverse nature of man's physical life. Justine mentions a devious counterfeiter, who maintains a dungeon of female captives whom he tortures and rapes, as their lives are hopelessly lived out chained to a wheel, working to their death. Juliette describes French aristocrats employing women as candle holders and serving tables for hot food, that is, when they are not eating their flesh and drinking their blood. 120 Days of Sodom is perhaps his most outré novel. It begins with the narrative of a band of powerful autocrats sequestered in a castle with no other object than to violate and pervert the bodies of women and children imprisoned there for their pleasure. The novel degenerates into a mere catalogue of atrocitiies and perversions. It is perhaps significant that this "most upsetting" of all novels was written by Sade, during imprisonment in the Bastille, on a fifteen yard roll of toilet paper -- and yet it survived!

It seems that in every way that Swedenborg was noble, Sade was vile. For Sade, the cruelty of the physical world holds the same fascination as does the beauty of the spiritual world for Swedenborg. "Beauty, virtue, innocence... these qualities also afford us the opportunity of violating another prohibition; I mean, offer us the kind of pleasure we get from sacrilege."

But sacrilege is of the mind, and more properly, of the spirit. And it is here that Sade and Swedenborg join hands, for they both seek reality beyond either body or spirit for its own sake. They posit a supersensual world, they want more. Thus they are the antithetical prophets of the New Flesh. Perhaps Sade speaks of this most eloquently, "Desire of the flesh can be gratified in the flesh. Desire as an idea knows no limits." Swedenborg echoes this belief in supersensual transcendence when he writes, "realities that exist in the spiritual world that can be seen by man when his internal sight is opened ... cannot be opened by the Lord, but only by man himself." To which Sade rejoins: "What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything about you gives you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you ... every man wants to be a tyrant when he fucks."

Chapter 3

MESMER AND THE MAGNETISTS

The theories and pracitices of sexual magick are based upon the existence of a universal energy - magnetic fluid, astral light, akasha, odic force - which permeates the entire universe and which acts as an invisible medium, through which the human will may impel changes on elements within that universe. The reasons for utilizing sexuality to manipulate this universal energy are threefold. 

First, that the access to the flow of this energy in human beings is greatly increased by sexual excitement. 

Secondly, that the fluids which are secreted by the body during sexual stimulation have a natural affinity with this energy and act as an excellent conductor, therefore becoming a condenser of the astral fluid in the physical plane. If these fluids are withdrawn into the body and absorbed into the bloodstream, they become a health giving, purifying force for the individual. If they are ejaculated outside the body they become a vehicle for the will of the individual. 

Thirdly, if the flow of sexual energy is carried to the point of orgasm, the will is projected into the universe in a sling-shot effect, the degree of sexual tension being equal to the force of the projection of that will.

The first researcher in modern times to isolate and experiment with this energy was Franz Anton Mesmer. In all ages and in all countries, there have been persons who have claimed such power for themselves. But before Mesmer, this force was attributed to the action of supernatural powers. Healing forces were ascribed to the action of a benevolent Deity and disease was often seen as the work of demons. It was mesmer who first put forth that this power was inherent in Man and could be controlled by the human will. 

Born in 1734, Franz Anton Mesmer began his studies at a Jesuit theological school, receiving a doctorate in philosophy. He went on to obtain a doctorate in medicine from the University of Vienna. His medical dissertation was entitled On the Influence of the Planets expounded the relationship of planetary ties to certain tides in the human body, relying on Kepler and Newton's theories of planetary movement. 

Mesmer had been aware of the "faith healing" exorcisms of the Jesuit priest Johann Joseph Gassner and wondered if the forces that he witnessed might not be connected with the phenomenon of magnetism. He had been treating a Fraulein Oesterline for hysterical symptoms as related to his theory of tides. Now, he proposed to induce an artificial tide within the Fraulein's body by having her swallow a perparation containing iron and attaching magnets to different parts of her body. She reported feeling streams of mysterious fluid running through her body and was cured of the symptoms for several hours. Mesmer dubbed the force "animal magnetism" and thence dedicated his life to the study of its mysterious propoerties. Like an omen of the controversy that would dog Mesmer's career, a certain Father Maximillian Hell immediately claimed responsibility for the cure. He had loaned the magnets to Mesmer and maintained that he had suggested the treatment. Mesmer countered by saying that he had read of the use of magnets by physicians in France, Germany, and Britain. However, he was already beginning to doubt the importance of the magnets themselves. Mesmer soon abandoned this method, moving on to more exotic techniques. 

While in Vienna, Dr. Memer effected a good many cures. It was ultimately one of these cures which forced him to leave. This involved a blind girl of eighteen, Mlle. Paradis. While Mesmer claimed to have restored her vision, there was much controversy over the incident and the story spread all over Europe. When her father tried to regain custody of the girl, the doctor resisted and retained custody for a month longer. Scandal resulted and Mesmer was forced to move his practice to Paris. 

In Paris, Mesmer set up a salon which would become a favorite haunt of Parisian society. In it, he devised an invention which would allow him to treat large number of patients at the same time. This was called the "baquet". 

The baquet was a large oaken tub, four or five feet in diameter and a foot or more in depth, closed by a wooden cover. Inside the tub were placed bottles full of water disposed in rows radiating from the center, the necks in some of the rows pointing towards the centre, in others away from it. All these bottles had been previously magnetized by Mesmer. Sometimes there were several rows of bottles, one above the other; the machine was then at high pressure. The bottles rested on layers of powdered glass and iron filings. The tub itself was filling with water. The whole machine, it will be seen, was a kind of galvanic cell. The cover of the tub was pierced with holes, through which passed slender iron rods of varying lengths which were jointed and moveable, so that they could be readily applied to any part of the patient's body. Round this battery the patients were seated in a circle, each with his iron rod. Further, a cord, attached at one end to the tub, was passed round the body of each of the sitters, so as to bind them all into a chain. Outside the first a second circle would frequently be formed, who would connect themselves together by holding hands. Mesmer, in a lilac robe, and his assistant operators - vigrous and handsome young men - walked about the room pointing their fingers or an iron rod held in their hands at the diseased parts. The progress of the cures was generally furthered by the application of the operator's hand to various parts of the body, and especially by the pressure of the fingers on teh abdomen. And this pressure was often maintained for a considerable time-- sometimes for several hours. 

The proceedings were enlivened throughout by music played from a piano or other instrument. The effect produced by this procedure varied naturally according to the temperament of the patient and the nature of his ailment. A frequent characteristic phase, especially with women was the occurrence of the "crisis". The tableau presented by the patients is one of extreme diversity. Some are calm, composed, and feel nothing; others cough, spit, have slight pains, feel a glow locally or all over the body, accompanied by perspiration; others are shaken and tormented by convulsions. These convulsions are remarkable in their frequency, their duration, and their intensity... The convolutions are preceded and followed by a state of languor and reverie, by exhaustion and drowsiness. Any sudden noise causes the patients to start, and even a change in the music played on the piano has an effect. A special room  -- the Salles des Crises -- carefully padded, was set aside for the reception of the more violent patients"

Such are contemporary accounts of Mesmer's work in pre-Revolutionary Paris. Many successes were claimed--not surprising when one considers that in one year (1784) Mesmer was said to have treated about eight thousand patients. His clients were drawn, for the most part, from the upper ranks of society although Mesmer reserved certain times which he donated for treatment of the poor. 

All this success did not sit well with the medical establishment. Eventually, a report was issued condemning the pracitce of animal magnetism. It is not surprising that the doctores of his day should have resented losing so much business to Mesmer's ecstatic successes. As a result, he gathered a few of his most faithful friends about him and established a secret society: the Society of Harmony. For a high fee, people could subscribe to membership, provided they were willing to sign a contract to preserve the secrets of animal magnetism. Many distinguished and aristocratic men joined the society, including some of the architects of the American and French Revolutions. In spite of official condemnation, the society carried on and Mesmer's ideas influenced many pioneers of psychology and other sciences of the mind and spirit. 

If we explore Mesmer's writings we find that while his early researches exhibit a strong skepticism towards any "supernatural" phenomenon, his later writings reveal the discovery of some rather exceptional forces. His Precis Historique and Dissertation on Discoveries refer to an "internal sense organ" which may produce a "sixth sense," especially in states of somnambulism. 

In fact, it was not Mesmer, but a student of his, the Marquis de Puysegur, who discovered somnambulism that state which modern psychology recognizes as hypnosis. While making magnetic passes over one of his patients, de Puysegur noticed that the man had fallen into a deep sleep. During this trance, the subject spoke of some business that worried him. Thinking to calm him, the Marquis suggested that he think of something pleasant. The man began to act as though he were taking part in a shooting match and then began to dance as if attending a celebration. When the subject awoke, he felt refreshed, but could not remember any of these activities. 

Soon, Mesmer and his disciple began to view somnambulism as a very important part of animal magnetism. They isolated what became known as "the higher phenomena." These included such paranormal manifestations as thought transference, or telepathy, of the immediate response of the subject to the unexpressed will of the magnetist; medical clairvoyance, or the ability to see things at remote distances;seeing while the eyes are closed or even blindfolded; hypnotism performed at a distance or through walls; and "rapport" or the "community of sensation," in which the subject shares the sensations experienced by the hypnotist. Soon, demonstrations of these powers of animal magnetism became all the rage in early nineteenth century America. These "scientific curiosities" were the precursors of the performances of spiritual mediums and state magicians in years to come. 

Mesmer did not make public any specifically sexual experiments with animal magnetism (to do so would most certainly have mean scandal and severe censorship). but the sexual nature of the "crisis" that took place in his salon and the "higher phenomenon" are early examples of sexual magick. 

One  of the most interesting of the magnetists to follow in Mesmer's path was Charles Poyen. Poyen had been initiated into the magickal rites of voodoo in the islands of Martinique and Guadelupe, where, members of his family owned extensive plantations. The French planters, many of whom had fled from France during the Revolution, had been experimenting with animal magnetism in conjunction with the African Ju-Ju magick of their slaves. Some of the rites of the medieval grimoires from France were also grafted on to these practices, creating a truly eclectic form of occultism. 

In 1836, encouraged by the mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts, who was himself a devotee of Mesmer's doctrines, Poyen begaan giving lectures on the subject in Boston and offering private instruction to anyone interested in mastering the art. After receiving little interest in Boston, Charles Poyen moved to the nearby city of Providence, Rhode Island, where he agreed to magnetize the patient of a local doctor in an attempt to relieve her of a stomach ailment. The treatment was successful and provoked such interest that the patient, a Miss Cynthia Gleason, toured the country with Poyen as his "sleeping beauty" giving exhibitions of the higher phenomena of animal magnetism. 

This was the beginning of a wave of interest in magnetism that swept America in the 1830s and 1840s. For Americans, Mesmerism became entertainment, a diversion to be exhibited on stages and dabbled with in parlours. The topic of phrenology (the study of the surface of the head) was popular at that time and many Mesmerists billed themselves as "phreno-magnetists." There was magick in the air. Perhaps it was a reaction to the dreary realities of the industrial revolution or the unimaginative confidence of Darwinian rationalism. On the other side of the Atlantic researchers like Baron von Reichenbach took the phenomena quite seriously and published scientific reports on the subject. 

By 1848, the American enthusiasm for animal magnetism began to wane and was replaced with a new fad--spiritualism. In that year, the Fox sisters established contact with spirits of the dead in Hydesville, New York, and the parlour Mermerists turned to communicating with dead aunts and the shades of Julius Caeser. The writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, contemporary of Franz Anton Mesmer, began to replace the theories of the magnetists and the public became fascinated with life after death instead of magnetic fluid. 

Underlying all these topics, yet spoken of only in hushed tones for fear of scandal was the dark energy of sexual magick. It was as though the cause behind all causes was sleeping, waiting to be awakened by some fearless prophet. 

Chapter 4

THE PROPHETS OF THE NEW DISPENSATION

Andrew Jackson Davis published The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind in 1847. The formidable 800 page work was said to be written "by and through" him and quickly became a widely accepted revelation explaining the formation of the world, an explanation of Old Testament, New Testament and modern prophets, and an Indication as to how Man should live in society. At the time of writing, Davis was an uneducated nineteen year old boy from upstate New York. Although some of the contents are obviously derived from contemporary sources (Swedenborg, the social theorist Fourier, and a British work on geology by Robert Chambers), the spiritual concentration of ideas was to set an example for many revelatory volumes by subsequent seers. 

Davis began life as the son of an itinerant cobbler who drank and brutalized his mother. The family drifted through upstate New York. In his teens, Andrew became apprenticed to a traveling doctor who came under the influence of Mesmer's teachings and began to experiment by magnetizing Davis. The young man responded by exhibiting such Mesmeric qualities as "rapport" and medical clairvoyance, diagnosing various rural patients. During this period, Davis experienced a vision in which he conversed with the ancient Arab physician Galen and became aware of his duty to reveal The Principles of Nature. The book was dictated in a series of lectures while Davis was deeply Mesmerized and, therefore, regarded as a kind of divine revelation. It was an iconoclastic revelation, since it denied the divinity of Christ and the sanctity of the Bible, suggesting a spirit world that is focused on Man. Regarding sex magick, Davis wrote, "Love is developed from the blood... that ultimate essence of the blood to which reference has been made Is the sacred menstrum of love, the seminal secretion, the seed of life which flows through the system." In fact, Davis may well have been motivated by this doctrine in his much publicized liaison with Rhode Island heiress, Mrs. Catherine Dodge. 

An intimate friend and colleague of Davis, Thomas Lake Harris, went on to expound a much more detailed sexual interpretation of the New Dispensation. Harris became well known for founding spiritual communities in Mount Cove, Virginia; Salem-on-Erie, New York; and, even, in California [Santa Rosa]. He formed the Brotherhood of the New Life or Respirationists and practiced a certain breathing technique mentioned by Swedenborg as the source of his revelations. This was known as "open" or "divine respiration" and was based on the theory that God created Man in his own image and likeness, and breathed into him the breath of life. The breathing into Man of the breath of life was the sensible point of contact between the divine and human, between God and Man. Man in his holy state was, so to speak, directly connected with God, by means of what might be likened to a spiritual respiratory umbilical chord, which ran from God to man's inmost or celestial nature, and constantly suffused him with airs from heaven, whereby his spiritual respiration or life was supported. Thus Man's entire nature, physical as well as spiritual, kept in a state of godlike purity and innocence, without however, any infringement on his freedom. 

According to this theory, after the Fall of Man this spiritual respiratory connection between God and Man was severed and the spiritual intercourse between the Creator and the creature was brought to an end and, hence, spiritual death. Added to this was the doctrine of Pre-Adamite Man: that God created Man in his own image, male and female, with the entire genitalia of both sexes in one body with the dual elements necessary to generate offspring, without need for actual intercourse between separate sexes. These "Pre-Adamite" twin-sexed beings were known as "Elohim" or the "Sons of God."The Fall of Man was attributed to the sensuality and pride of the Elohim in (needlessly) penetrating each others' bodies sexually, thereby creating sin. In punishment for this act, God separated the sexes.

Harris believed that "when the Divine breaths have so pervaded the nervous structures that the higher attributes of sensation begin to waken from their immemorial torpor, and to react against disease, a sixth sense is as evident as hearing is to the ear, or sight to vision. It is distributed through the entire frame. So exquisitely does it pervade the hands that the slightest touch declares who are chaste and who are unchaste. And this sixth sense is the sense of chastity." It is in this state of divine chastity that one may experience "true nuptial love, which is born of love to God. The nuptial pair, form the inmost oneness of the divine being, are embosomed each in each, as loveliness in loveliness, innocence in innocence, blessedness in blessedness. In possessing each other they possess the Lord, who prepares the two to become one heart, one mind, one soul, one love, one wisdom, one felicity" Thus, reuniting with one's soul-mate, one may return to the state of the Elohim. In his writings, Harris suggests that this soul mate may take the form of a spiritual being or a physical person. 

Another important prophet of the new sexuality and utopian communism during this era was John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Putney, Oneida and Wallingford communities. Noyes taught the practice of male continence (intercourse without male ejaculation), later to be popularized as "Karezza" by sexologist Alice B. Stockham. While a student at the Yale Theological Seminary, Mr. Noyes came to believe that the Second Coming of Christ had taken place within his soul and that he had been made perfect, without sin. His followers became known as "Perfectionists" and they interpreted the rule of the gospel, "love thy neighbor as thyself," as an injunction to seek the Pre-Adamite state freely among themselves. It is significant to note Noye's concept of the Second Coming as a personal experience of divine revelation and expiation of sin. The general avoidance, if not forbiddance, of propagation (a belief generally held by the ancient Gnostics) was common among these cults of new sexuality. It followed that if Man was living in a state of expulsion from God, it would be pointless, possibly even blasphemous, to beget more human beings into this wretched state. Thus, finding a purpose for sexuality that was directly contrary to propagating humanity put these pioneers of sexual magick in opposition to conventional religious belief as well as popular opinion.

During this same period, another prophet of sexual magick arose in France in the person of one Eugene Vintras. in 1839, Vintras, who had been working at a cardboard box factory in Tilly-sur-Seule, received a vision of the Archangel Michael, who delivered a letter containing a "refutation of heresy and a profession of Catholic orthodox." Vintras went on to found the Church of Carmel, also known as the Work of Mercy, preaching the coming kingship of Charles Naundorf, self proclaimed heir to the  throne of France, the preexistence of souls and universal redemption. Clad in priestly vestments which included an inverted cross, Vintras celebrated the "Provictimal Sacrifice of Mary" and foretold of a coming "Age of the Holy Ghost." He experienced visions of chalices flowing with blood and saw bloodstains appear on the consecrated host. The French magician Eliphas Levi would later comment that he had examined these miraculous hosts and found that they were marked with the averse pentagram. Vintras wrote:

"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 whoe 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."

After condemnation by Church authorities, Vintras was arrested on charges of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. In 1851 an ex-disciple named Gozzoli published a pamphlet accusing Vintras of homosexuality and of conducting secret Masses at which both priest and people were naked. A priest involved in the affair alleged that he had been taught a secret "magical prayer" to be recited at the food of the altar and to be accompanied by masturbation.

The Church of Carmel continued for many years and, after Vintras' death in 1875, the Abbe Boullan was proclaimed the new Supreme Pontiff of the Church. Boullan had been ordained a Catholic priest and subsequently seduced a nun, Adele Chevalier, with whom he formed an organization known as "The Society for the Reparation of Souls." The two specialized in "casting out demons," exorcizing one group of nuns by feeding them a mixture of human excrement and the consecrated host. Once Boullan assumed leadership of the Church of Carmel, he proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist. He put forth that if humanity experienced sexuality with angels and other heavenly beings, it was enabled to more rapidly climb the ladder to spiritual evolution that lead to Divine Union. He maintained "as the Fall had been caused by a culpable act of love it is through acts of love accompanied in a religious spirit that the Redemption of Humanity can be achieved."

Evidently, Boullan and his followers utilized techniques of visualization and masturbation to engage in copulation with angels, cherubim, seraphim and the spirits of such historical figures as Cleopatra and Alexander the Great. There is also evidence to suggest that members of the Church of Carmel participated in scatological rites and bestiality. 

Boullan eventually became friends with J.K. Huysmans, who wrote about his experiences in that brilliant novel of Satanism and decadence, La Bas. It is believed that Boullan's death was the result of a magickal attack by another French occultist, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita. Guaita was the leader of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, a group of Roman Catholic occultists that presented public performances in Paris known as "Salons de la Rose-Croix." The group included such well-known personalities of the 1890s as Sar Peladan, Gustave Moreau, Felicien Rops, Oswald Wirth, and the musical composer Erik Satie. Also accused of Boullan's death was Gerard Encausse, who wrote books on the occult under the pseudonym "Papus." Jules Bois, friend of J.K. Huysmans and fellow magician, maintained that Guaita and Papus had declared war on Boullan, sending him a letter affirming that he was a condemned man." On January 3, 1893, after a series of terrifying visions, Boullan died in the arms of his mistress and clairvoyant, Julie Thibault. 

Interestingly enough, Papus went on to gain control of the Martinist Order and became ordained as a Bishop in the Gnostic Catholic Church. Both of these groups formed close ties with the Ordo Templi Orientis, the first organization to announce publicly that it taught sexual magick!

When American utopians and French occultists practiced their sexual doctrines in comparative openness, the origins of sexual magick among the English are shrouded in secrecy. As we have seen, the Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee may have been the first researcher to encounter these doctrines on any continent. In the records of his experiments with Edward Kelly and the magick mirror, Dee's prayers and conjurations suggest that he approached the subject with the traditional neo-Platonist concept that he was but an instrument of God's will and that the astral fluid (a term coined many years earlier by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus) proceeded from a benevolent, somewhat anthropomorphic Deity. However, the angelic communications that he received spoke of a "war in heaven" and imply a definite possibility that this "Father-God" is almost dead, at any rate, and that the time of Man's supremacy is at hand. The closest thing to sexual magick that is spoken of is a suggestion by the angels, that Dee and Kelly should engage in "wife swapping" or, as Dee relates, "that we two had our wives in such sort as we might use them in common." In the original manuscript there is a heavily erased and barely legible section which seems to confirm that this took place. Whatever further sexual operations may have taken place is not recorded, although the general tone of the angelic communications is certainly conducive to such practices and many twentieth century magicians have used Dee's Enochian Calls in conjunction with sexual ritual. 

Two Englishmen, who certainly had contact with American utopians and were aware of the Pre-Adamite Doctrine via the sexo-archeologist Hargrave Jennings, were Major Francis George Irwin and his son Herbert. Like Dee and Kelly before them, they were engaged in skrying through the magick mirror. On October 31, 1873 (All-Hallows Eve or Samhain), Major Irwin contacted "Count Cagliostro" through his son, Herbert, skrying in the magick mirror. On ten successive nights, the Irwins received the history and rituals of the Order of the Swastika, or Fratres Lucis. "Cagliostro" told Irwin that The Order had originated in fourteenth century Florence, from whence it spread to Rome, Paris, and Vienna. Among former members were, he claimed, Vaughn, Fludd, the Comte de St. Germain, Mesmer, Martinez de Pasqualez, Swedenborg, and Cagliostro himself. The objects of the Order were the study and practice of natural magic, Mesmerism, the science of life and death, immortality, Cabala, alchemy, necromancy, astrology and magic in all its branches." Later, Irwin claimed that he had me with the Fratres Lucis in Paris and that fifteen years earlier there had been only twenty-seven members in the whole world. 

The Fratres Lucis became identified with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. The only known members were the Irwins the seer Frederick Hockley; a friend of Hockley's, Benjamin Cox; the Masonic historian Kenneth MacKenzie; and the American iconoclast P.B. Randolph. H.P. Blavatsky also claimed membership in this group as did the mysterious author of a book published in 1889 called The Light of Egypt, Thomas Burgoyne. The symbol of the order was a swastika drawn in the manner of the Armanic Rune, Gibor. In a letter to Gerald Yorke in 1950, Capt. E.J. Langford Garstin wrote, "Hockley, MacKenzie and Irwin all disliked and mistrusted S.A. (Sapere Aude/W. Wynn Westcott, the most likely author of the Golden Dawn manuscripts), which is why he was refused admission to the Fratres Lucis." 

Since we know that Wescott's Golden Dawn teaching, later enlarged by MacGregor Mathers, were very specifically non-sexual, it is just possible that Wescott was refused admittance to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor due to the very nature of it's teachings. Indeed, Mathers, Westcott and Blavatsky followed the right hand path of Hermetic abstinence. We know that an early member of the Golden Dawn, Dr. Edward Berridge, was very nearly expelled from the order because of his advocacy of the sexual doctrines of Thomas Lake Harris. Of course, only a thorough examination of the teachings of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor will reveal the depth of its sexual magick teachings, but we can surmise that it served as a rallying point for those English adpets with interest in that direction. 

Chapter 5

RANDOLPH AND BLAVATSKY

At about the same time that Harris and Noyes were experimenting with sexual communism and Vintras was having visions of the Virgin Mary as the Primitive Woman, there was a medical doctor in Boston who was studying sexual magick from a scientific point of view. This was Pascal Beverly Randolph. Randolph had grown up as an orphan in New England. Shipping aboard a whaler out of New Bedford, he spent his early life at sea. Being of mixed blood and infirm health, his life was a hard one, but it seems that these physical difficulties only served to motivate him more strongly in his studies. After teaching himself to read, he immersed himself in medical and philosophical studies. This led him to the doctrines of Swedenborg and Mesmer, as well as the ancient Kabbalah and the grimoires of ceremonial magick. 

In 1848, PBR came ashore into a world exploding with new ideas about Man and sexuality. Mesmerism had been the subject of popular entertainments for ten years. Swedenborg's writings were considered essential reading for an intelligent discussion. The Utopian communities of upstate New York were all the rave. And Andrew Jackson Davis' The Principles of Nature had just been published. In fact, this was the year of the famous Hydesville rapping's of the Fox sisters, generally considered to be the beginning of modern Spiritualism. It was a time when the world was trying to balance the empiricism of science with the faith of religion. And in the realm of sexual magick, P.B. Randolph became the very symbol of this quest. 

Randolph's life is shrouded in mist and shadow, moving wraith-like through the courts and capitals and lodges of the western world. Through most of his adult life, he maintained medical offices on Boylston Street in Boston, which became known as the "Rosicrucian Rooms." However, he traveled frequently between the United States, France and England. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction and much of his writing contains descriptions of the strange places he visited. He numbered among his friends such persons as Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon III, Eliphas Levi and Lord Bulwer-Lytton. In fact, it seems that Randolph was the main concatenating force of the New Flesh during the nineteenth century. 

PBR was fascinated with the doctrines of Agrippa are Paracelsus and their relation to drug induced ecstasies and sexuality. He tried to combine these interests with a career as a political orator, speaking for the rights of women and blacks. Needless to say, he was much persecuted for his ultra-liberalism and there is a certain sadness that permeates his works. Nonetheless, the genius present in his highly original thinking on all these topics makes fascinating reading and he is only now beginning to be respected as one of the truly great voices of the nineteenth century. Randolph taught that various exercises were necessary in order to train the magician, before the forces that were released with drug use and sexuality could be harnessed. He names these exercises: Volantia, Decretism, Posism and Tirauclairism. While they bear some semblance to yoga and Sufi practices, they are, in substance, clearly original with PBR. As such they represent the first formal magickal training program in the west. Up to this time, the secrets of "how to make magick work" were passed from mouth to ear and doubtlessly varied with each magus. Influenced by the need for scientific method, Randolph formalized these techniques under the guise of his magickal order, the Brotherhood of Eulis, also known as the Fratres Lucis, or the Brotherhood of Luxor. 

He also placed great emphasis on astrology, as did Mesmer and Paracelsus. It was by determining numerical values and ratios from an astrological chart, that he chose the perfumes, colors, sounds and other elements of his magickal operations. Following the lead of Harris and Noyes, Randolph believed in the doctrine of Pre-Adamit Man and for him this was the raison d'etre for sexuality (reuniting with one's soul mate in an effort to return to the original grae). In his writings he speaks out against "concubinage," free love and the practice of an older man uniting with a young girl for the purposes of rejuvenation. In practice, however, it seems probable that he indulged in all of these endeavors as well as the taking of opium, hashish, belladonna, laudanum and other consciousness expanding drugs of his day. 

One particular interest of Randolph's was the magic, or magnetic mirror. He recorded complicated formulas for constructing these objects whose purpose was to function much like a modern television. The famous seer Frederick Hockley used a magic mirror regularly for his visions as did Major Irwin who, as we have seen, obtained information about the Fratres Lucis through this medium. The theory of the magic mirror, much like the theory of sex magick, was based on the existence of a universal energy - astral light, odic force, orgone - which was conducted most easily through certain natural substances (fluid condensers.) The making of the mirror consisted, therefore, of gathering these substances in a way which the greatest amount of this energy could be contained, much like a battery. Mesmer had his baquet, Reich his orgone chamber and Randolph his magic mirror. In terms of the New Flesh, we can see these fluid condensers as objectification of the "rain ecstatic." A kind of fetishism in which the object's purpose is to reify sexual ecstasy, gratified desire and intimacy. The "scientific rationalist" defined such sacred technology as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available. It is exactly this existential smugness that Randolph refutes time and again. Of course, anyone who has experienced the taste of the whip or other techniques of behavior modification will instantly recognize the extreme effectiveness of objects which allow the participants to bathe in the pure Aeth. 

One of PBR's most interesting accounts is of one Brother Charsah, a member of the Brotherhood of Eulis, and his experiences with magickal paintings. He recounts that he "found proof that the son of one of our peasants, who made his ardent prayer in Spanish before an image of the Madonna every day, had involuntarily create a succubes." This is reminiscent of the magickal masturbatory techniques of Vintras and Boullan. As the story evolves we learn that the artist who painted the image of the Madonna had made love to the model for the picture on a bed facing the easel. In order to save money, the artist had "cut a square from the drapes of his bed of love" to use as a canvas. The cloth, charged with the energy of the pair's sexual fluids, brought life to the painted image, creating a succubus. As a result, the pious youth became incited to lust by the image of the Holy Virgin. 

Such stories, of course, must be understood on many levels and some of Randolph's followers claim that all of his writings are encoded with secret teachings that only initiates can divine. The one unmistakable message is the objectification of ecstasy, or the power of fetish. 

By the 1870s, Randolph's attempts to practice both politics and magick recoiled on him. When a magician attempts to manifest the world of Spirit in the mundane world of politics great danger is present. The 19th century saw several prominent occultists become involved in the political world and vice versa. Laurence Oliphant, the British statesman who followed Thomas Lake Harris, is one example. H.P. Blavatsky is another. For PBR, the attempt had disastrous consequences. He lost everything in the Great Boston Fire and retired penniless to Toledo, Ohio, where he died by suicide in 1875. His teachings, however, were carried on secretly by his followers in France and eventually became the basis for the doctrines of the Ordo Templi Orientis, perhaps the largest and most famous group of sex magicians in the world. 

In that same year, another very powerful occultist, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky also claimed initiation in the Brotherhood of Luxor. She has been accused, by occult writer Maria de Naglowska, or murdering Randolph with magick, much the same way that Boullan was murdered. Although it is possible that they knew each other, the facts regarding the relationship between Blavatsky and PBR reman clouded in mystery. 

What is not a mystery is the fact that Blavatsky's writings went on to become enormously influential on many generations of occult thinkers. Blavatsky claimed her initiation from Tibetan Masters. Her The Secret Doctrine and The Voice of Silence were the result of texts which she had memorized while undergoing her training. Much like Randolph, Blavatsky was initially attracted to spiritualism, being a powerful medium, but insisted that such practices, without formal training in "the higher worlds," were dangerous. If Randolph was the great Dionysian founder and adept of western magick, then certainly H.P. Blavatsky was the Apollonian guru of eastern mysticism. She maintained that strict abstinence was necessary to spiritual development, although her writings went on to influence many sex magicians. 

After HPB's death, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter took control of a large segment of the Theosophical Society. They encouraged a return to western occultism with less emphasis on eastern religion. In fact, Leadbetter may well have been involved with sex magick. He was ordained a Bishop in the Gnostic Catholic Church, an organization with strong ties to the O.T.O. He later became notorious for a scandal involving acts of mutual masturbation with young boys in the chapel. One of the boys told his mother, "He made me believe it was Theosophical."

Chapter 6

NIETZSCHE, SACHER-MASOCH AND WILDE

In the mid-nineteenth century there appeared three writers whose works, it may be said, constitute the very essence of the New Flesh: Friedrich Nietzsche, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Oscar Wilde. While the early prophets clumsily hinted at the supremacy of Man and power of sexuality, it is in these authors' works that these themes are refined and developed. 

in 1871, Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy set forth the archetypes of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. It was the result of Nietzsche's obsession with philology, the study of the classics, the problem of their authenticity and the links between the works. Apollo and Dionysius became symbols of the extreme, the inhibitory and excitatory modes of thought and action. This is, as we have shown, are the very basis of sexual magick. 

Some twelve years later, the great German philosopher was to write the monumental Thus Spake, Zarathustra, a kind of metaphorical prose-poem whose apocalyptic style seeks to abolish concepts of a metaphysical "higher" world by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of human experience. he teaches the overcoming of self in order to transmute the chaos of life into joy-in-existence and self-sufficiency. It teaches that the business of Man is Man. Zarathustra says, "Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!" When asked why he chose the historical character of Zarathustra, founder of the ancient Persian religion of the powers of light and darkness, Nietzsche wrote, "Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it . . . The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposit - into me - that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth." Zarathustra is a book of parables teaching morality from within, independent of any fear of powers from without. "of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit. He who writes in blood and sphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spole should be big and tall of stature."

A contemporary of Nietzsche, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, also enjoyed a literary reputation during his lifetime. However, it is through Krafft-Ebing and Freud's use of his name in the term sado-masochism that modern readers know of him. In fact, Sacher-Masoch was not born until some twenty years after Sade's death. While Sade's writings are brutal and concerned with the Dionysian animal manifestation of power, Sacher-Masoch's novels are refined and delicate, relying on Apollonian anticipation, damming up the power through restraint and desire. 

Sacher-Masoch is the great technician of the New Flesh and it is his understanding of the fetish that makes his writings so invaluable to the Palladist. The fetish is the image or substitute of the female phallus which is the means by which we deny that the woman lacks a penis. The fetishist's choice of a fetish is determined by the last object he saw as a child before becoming aware of the missing penis (a shoe, for example, in the case of a glance directed from the feet upward). The constant reuturn to this object, this point of departure, enables him to validate the existence of the organ that is in dispute. This is, indeed, the hidden interpretation of the Pre-Adamite doctrine of the original dual sexuality of the Elohim and their fall from grace through the "sin" of penetration of each other. It is by the mechanism of the fetish that the state of divine grace, or New Flesh, is regained.

Sacher-Masoch's most famous novel is Venus in Furs and in it he retells the story of a manuscript entitled Confessions of a Supersensualist. He often quotes from Goethe, "The sensual, supersensual libertine, a little girl can lead thee by the nose." "Be the anvil or the hammer." In the first chapter, he writes, "Woman's power lies in the passion she can arouse in man and which she can exploit to her own advantage unless he remains always on his guard. Man has only one choice: to be a slave or to be a tyrant. If he surrenders to her the yoke will begin to weigh on his neck and soon he will feel the touch of the whip." He adds, "I have been thoroughly whipped myself and it cured me. Would you like to read about it?"

We learn that the true libertine is not afraid of being treated in the way he treats others. The pain he suffers is an ultimate pleasure, not because it expiated by feelings of guilt, but because it confirms him in inalienable power. It is the supreme affirmation of his Will to Power. As Sade says, "he rejoices in his inner heart that he has gone far enough to deserve such treatment." The libertine's experience of his own pain is related to a stimulation of his "nervous fluid"; it is therefore scarcely surprising that "he moves the object of his pleasure by the same means that affect him". 

It may be asked if The New Flesh Palladium is open, or even possible, to women since the language and goals of its perversions appear to be so exclusively sexist on the surface. This is, of course, an illusion. In fact, Woman is intrinsic to the New Flesh. However, as A.O. Spare wrote in Earth: Inferno, we are speaking of "the desertion of the Universal Woman, lying barren on the parapet of the sub consciousness in humanity; and humanity sinking into the pit of conventionality. Hail! The convention of the age is nearing its limit and with it a resurrection of the Primitive Woman," as Austin Osman Spare wrote in Earth: Inferno, In The Magic Flute,  Mozart writes "A woman who is not afraid of the night, or death, is worthy and will be initiated." In other words, The New Flesh Palladium is open only to initiates, male or female, and exists as an overcoming of their maleness or femaleness. Thus chauvanist sexual attitude becomes part of the arsenal of techniques for overcoming rather than restrictions to be feared. 

In Masoch's writings there seem to be three archetypes of women that reappear throughout his stories. The first type is that of the Grecian Woman, the pagan Hetaera or Aphrodite, the generator of disorder. She is the Scarlet Whore who believes in the Independence of Woman and the fleeting nature of love. For her, the sexes are equal, she is a hermaphrodite. The other extreme is the Sadistic Woman. She enjoys hurting and torturing others, but her actions are prompted by a man and therefore dependent on him. She is the Dark Mother, bound symbiotically to her man as either "the hammer or the anvil." The third Woman about whom Masoch writes is his ideal, a combination of the pleasure-loving whore and the sadistic mother, yet transcending both in her warmth and caring. In other words, she holds the potential for intimacy. 

In The Aesthetics of Ugliness, he describes the mother of the family as "an imposing woman, with an air of severity, pronounced features and cold eyes, who nevertheless cherishes her little brood." Martscha is "like an Indian woman or a Tartar from the Mongolian desert," she has "the tender heart of a dove together with the cruel instincts of the feline race." Lola likes to torture animals and dreams of witnessing or even taking part in executions, but "in spite of her peculiar tastes, the girl was neither brutal nor eccentric; on the contrary, she was reasonable and kind, and showed all the tenderness and delicacy of a sentimental nature." In The Mother of God, Mardona is gentle and gay, and yet she is stern, cold and a master torturer: "Her lovely face was flushed with anger, but her large blue eyes shone with a gentile light." In moonlight we finally come upon the secret: Nature herself is cold, maternal and severe. The Primitive Woman is sensual, yet cruel and it is her maternal, instinctual caring that allows us to overcome ourselves in supersensual love, intimacy with Nature. This is the experience of the New Flesh, the reuniting of the Spark with the Fire on a higher octave. If Nietzsche provices us with the gospel and Sacher-Masoch with the methodology of the New Flesh, then it is Oscar Wilde who has written the ultimate ritual of the New Flesh. The scandals surrounding his imprisonment for homosexuality and his witty critiques of Victorian society are well-known. But it is a ritual drama that he composed, Salome, which holds the greatest interest for Palladists. Richard Strauss set it to music, Sarah Bernhardt wanted to play the lead role and Aubrey Beardsley scandalized London with his illustrations. In the drama, Wilde uses his consummate skill with the English language to create a sensual liturgy. As sex magicians throughout the ages have learned, the combination of planned ritual with the spontaneity necessary to complete sexual release can be very difficult to effect. It is a blending of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche gives us the theory, but Wilde presents the ultimate example. 

Much like the stories that H.P. Lovecraft would compose many years later, Salome presents little plot and less character development. But the atmospheric created by the liturgical reiteration of the themes of sensuality and death within the exotic, biblical setting of the palace of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Judea bring on supersensual charms.

1.  Jokanaan (John the Baptist) prophesies annihilation as the reward of sin.

2. Salome falls in love/lust with Jokanaan and is spurned by him.

3. The Captain of Herod's guard, who is enamored, of Salome kills himself. 

4. Salome seduces Herod with her dance of the seven veils in return for one favor. 

5. Salome asks for the head of Jokanaan and is rewarded.

6. Her perverse behavior with the severed head causes such revulsion in Herod that he orders: "Kills that woman!"

7. Salome is set upon by the soldiers. 

All the elements of the New Flesh are contained therein. Volumes could be written in commentary, but that would detract from the transcendent layers of meaning which can only be experienced from Wilde's text. We are reminded of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu' comment on Liber AL, "Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence." In other words, since the very nature of the New Flesh experience is the attainment of intimacy through extremes, it would be improper to impinge upon anyone's personal experience of the ritual by coloring it with one's own impressions. Suffice it to observe that the drama Salome has more than once been performed in settings where dominance and submission are the key factors. 

Chapter 7

OTO: THE CURATORS OF SEX MAGIC

The Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Temple of the East, must certainly be the most well-known exponent of sex magick in modern history. Although its predecessors managed to conduct their rituals and teachings in relative secrecy, the O.T.O., as such, first came to the public's attention in 1912 when it published, in the "Jubilee" edition of its newsletter, The Oriflamme, the following statement:

"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."

While the O.T.O. has done much to publicize these teachings, it will be seen that the organization has, for the most part, maintained a rather conservative view towards sexuality and therefore is of only marginal influence on New Flesh doctrines. Its most famous leader was Aleister Crowley. While his life has been chronicled extensively (although never accurately), it is worth noting that he seems to have been one of the few Templars to have employed extreme forms of sexuality in his magickal rituals. His erotic The Paris Working, his bloody sacrifice and sodomitical "goat ritual" at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, his sacramental use of feces on attaining the grade of Ipsissimus and, indeed, many excerpts from his magickal diaries show him to have been a lively experimenter in things forbidden. In contrast, most of the sexual teachings of the O.T.O. proper, which Crowley rewrote, deal primarily with "vanilla sex" and the practice of consuming the combined sexual fluids of the male and female as a sacrament, or utilizing those fluids to trace a sign, symbolic of the intent of the operation. For this reason, the Order is seen more as a curator and preserver of some of the less complex doctrines of the New Flesh, rather than an innovator. 

The real beginnings of the O.T.O. are to be found in the "Egyptian Freemasonry" of the Count Cagliostro. Variously described as a rogue or a master, Cagliostro was a contemporary of Franz Anton Mesmer, but adorned himself with the trappings of a magician rather than a scientist. He was famous for practicing clairvoyance using a child as a medium and moved about in the courts of Europe. He proclaimed himself the "Grand Copt" of Egyptian Freemasonry, an organization that practiced skrying, magnetism and ritual magick. It may well have been a development of an earlier Masonic/magickal order known as the Elus Cohens, founded years ago by Martinez Pasqualez in Paris, or the result of an initation from the legendary St. Germain. 

Cagliostro became notorious for traveling about with his beautiful wife, Lorenza, who also presided over initiations of Egyptian Freemasonry. The order admitted both men and women and there can be little doubt that some form of sexual magick was practiced. It is said that Cagliostro appeared in the "Ladies' Lodge" as a naked Hierophant clutching a serpent and seated upon a golden orb and lectured the female Masons on sexual techniques. A ritual orgy completed the evening's entertainment. 

Eventually, Cagliostro was imprisoned by the Holy Inquisition in Rome and his papers were seized. He died in prison and it is believed that his rituals are still preserved in the Vatican library, reputed to be the greatest collection of magickal manuscripts in the world. 

The rituals of Egyptian Freemasonry were also preserved by its Initiates in Paris, and it is in Paris where these arcana re-emerged, after the Revolution, as the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim. Indeed, the French Revolution had a major impact on the various magickal and religious groups in Paris. During that time, the successive revolutionary governments refused to recognize the authority of the Pope in Rome and consequently, the phenomena of "Wandering Bishops" began. Several self-appointed Bishops continued to celebrate the mass, while maintaining some highly unorthodox beliefs. In an effort to maintain the Catholic Church during the anarchy of the Revolution, Rome agreed to recognize these Bishops as such, thereby beginning lines of transmission which taught dogma that was not necessarily sanctioned by the Pope, particularly in the areas of mysticism and sexuality. 

It was in this manner that the Gnostic Catholic Church was born. The history and influence of this group demands a book of its own, but suffice it to say that their belief in the magickal power of Apostolic succession, combined with Gnostic religious views and a liberal attitude towards sexuality, made the E.G.C. (Ecclesia Gnostica Catholicae) an important influence on the O.T.O. Perhaps, the most interesting manifestation of the E.G.C. is its manifestations in the Caribbean where it crossbred with the African magick of Voodoun and Santeria. Charles Poyen, the famous magnetist of Providence, was an early practitioner of the rites of African Obeah combined with Gnostic Catholicism and Ritual Magick. Much later, Michael Bertiaux and the Ordo Templi Orientis Antigua would also become known for combining Gnosticism, Freemasonry, and sex magick. 

Besides the tremendous influence of Cagliostro and the Wandering Bishops on the O.T.O., the Templar connection must not be overlooked. This surfaced in Paris, after the Revolution, in the person of Bernard Fabre-Palaprat. He claimed to represent a line of Grand Masters of the Knights Templar descended directly from Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the wealthy crusaders who was burned at the stake when the Knights Templar were disbanded by King Phillip of France in the 14th century. Palaprat established the Order of the Temple in 1804. This group enjoyed a shadowy existence throughout the nineteenth century, as did the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim and the Gnostic Catholic Church. Other secret societies of the day, like the "Strict Observance" and the "Swedenborgian Rite" also contained strong Templar-Masonic elements. 

In the 1890s, a wealthy German industrialist named Karl Kellner seems to have come into contact with the sex magick teachings of P.B. Randolph through his followers in Paris, known as the Brotherhood of Eulis or Fratres Lucis. Kellner, in turn, passed this knowledge on to three other German occultists named Joshua Klein, Franz Hartmann and Theodor Reuss. About 1904, these three purchased the rituals and charter that would become known as the O.T.O. from an English Masonic scholar, John Yarker. These rituals were originally known as the Rite of Memphis and Mizraim, but it seems that in an effort to reflect the Templar and sex magickal influences, the name was changed to the Ordo Templi Orientis. Reuss corresponded frequently with the French occult leader Papus, who was a Bishop in the Gnostic Catholic Church. Reuss granted Papus a charter to work the rites of Memphis and Mizraim and from that time on the E.G.C. and the O.T.O. have been closely connected. 

If all this sounds more like prurient businessmen tittering about sexuality in a Masonic hall, rather than iconoclasts stretching the barriers of the human imagination, then so be it. The O.T.O. is, perhaps, most important for its function in preserving Randolph's teachings and passing them on to such fascinating sexual magicians as Rudolph Steiner, Aleister Crowley, Eugene Grosche and Austin Osman Spare. 

The most enigmatic adept associated with the O.T.O. is Rudolph Steiner. He was a true renaissance man and polymath, a man whose learning and insight enabled him to cross the barriers of the arts and sciences, concatenating this knowledge into a wisdom that speaks to persons in many walks of life. Such diverse subjects as farming, government and economy are all addressed by Steiner in his prolific catalogue of books and lectures and, in many ways he reminds us of a latter-day Swedenborg.

Like Swedenborg he was a devout, if unorthodox, Christian and there is no hint of the libertine in his biography. However, it does seem certain that he did explore the doctrines of sexual magick with his second wife, Marie von Sievers. She owned the Theosophical headquarters in Berlin and was a formidable esotericist. It was not until meeting her that Steiner was transformed into a charismatic leader. Theodor Reuss granted Steiner a charter to operate the Mysteria Mystica Aeterna chapter of the O.T.O. in 1906. Steiner did not operate the chapter for long, but went on to found his own esoteric/Rosicrucian movement, the Anthroposophical Society. Any direct reference to sexuality was always avoided. However, Steiner's readings from the Akashic Record and his cosmological theories of the natureof reality will be found to be of great value to the Palladist of the New Flesh.

The name Aleister Crowley has become synonymous with the O.T.O., although the circumstances surrounding his initial contact with Reuss and subsequent initiation into the Order remains one of the few mysteries left concerning Crowley's life. A.C. was a rabid diarist, sometimes keeping several concurrent records of his activities and, because of his personal notoriety, most of these documents have been saved. Crowley, much like Lovecraft, gave little thought to the world of mundane humanity and went about his business without regard to the scandalous publicity that he attracted from the yellow press. In fact, it seems at times he even encouraged it. Both Crowley and Lovecraft considered themselves aristocrats, above consideration of the squalid hoards of humanity. The difference was that A.C. had inherited enough money to support such a life-style at least for the early part of his adult life. The result that the Master Therion became a symbol, placed before the public by the media, of the blood-drinking, sexually wanton black magician -- a bogeyman image that Crowley seemed to cultivate symbolically. Thus, he attracted persons from all over the world who were involved with the dark side. 

One such person was Theodor Reuss. Reuss was an adventurer, entrepreneur and counterspy for the British and German governments in the political chaos of the post-Bismarck era. He frequently traveled between London and Berlin and formed an Order of the Illuminati with Leopold Engel in 1899. By the time that he was promulgating the O.T.O., he would have been well aware of Crowley's notoriety and, perhaps, thought that this would add impetus to the foundering organization. It was a clever ploy and sometime around 1912, he confirmed A.C. as the "Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis." Crowley had described the event in a mystical story that has long since been discounted by biographers. It has also been suggested that Reuss and the Master Therion may have been lovers at the time, but there is no hard proof for this. 

Whatever the truth of the matter, Crowley immediately set about rewriting the rituals and instructions of the O.T.O. to conform with his own revelatory book, the Book of the Law. This was a short prose-poem in three chapters which A.C. had received through a kind of clairaudience in Cairo in 1904. Its contents are highly reminiscent of Dr. Dee's Enochian material, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, and a folkloric account of Italian witchcraft by C.G. Leland called Aradia. Since most of the O.T.O. membership at that time was German-speaking, this went unnoticed and the two O.T.O.'s continued in separate directions. Some of the issues which separated them were Crowley's claim to be the prophet of the new Aeon of Horus which superseded the era of Christianity, the generally anti-Christian sentiment of the Book of the Law, and A.C.'s wholesale revisions of almost every order document. 

Finally the matter came to a head when Reuss resigned his Chieftainship in 1922 due to poor health. He nominated Crowley for leadership as Outer Head of the Order, but died the following year, before a meeting could be called to decide the matter. Such a meeting did take place in the summer of 1925, but led to divisions in the Order which still exist today. THere exists a description by Crowley of the "Conference at Weida," whose events would go on to affect the sex magicians of the O.T.O. for decades to come. The Master Therion had been invited to stay with Hienrich Tranker, one of the German chiefs, and Crowley's own account makes for rather humorous reading if one reads between the lines. He dwells on Tranker's lack of hospitality, by which he refers to his host secretly eating dinners in the kitchen and referring to the vil of morphine addiction. If one realizes Crowley's usual expectations of being wined and dined and provided with large quantities of drugs, one cannot help but feel a little sorry for Tranker, being invaded by the self-styled Beast 666, whose luxuriant demands may well have been beyond his means. 

The meeting between Crowley and Tranker had initially been set up by Charles Stansfeld Jones, A.C.'s "magickal child", his representative in the United States at the time. Jones, known as Frater Achad, would later break with Crowley, claiming that he was the prophet of yet another superseding Aeon, the Aeon of Maat. This created another line of sex magicians whose Maatian magicks in Cincinnati, Ohio are some of the most interesting original work in the field in recent years. 

One of the Germans who was present at the Weida conference, Eugene Grosche, also went on to combine Crowley's doctrines with other teachings to create a truly fascinating system of sex magick. Grosche, known as Gregor A. Gregorius, founded the Fraternitas Saturni, as Masonic society of thirty-three degrees which encompassed teachings on sex magick, magick mirrors, magnetism, theosophy, runes and a vast array of occult knowledge.

A purely Germanic aspect of sex magick was the adaptation of the Runes to sexuality. Guido von List, folklorist and linguist, was the great pioneer of the rediscovery of these ancient symbols of the Northmen. In 1902, during an eye operation that left him virtually blind for several months, List received revelations of these Germanic hieroglyphs. Subsequent researchers related the runes to gymnastic movements and, accordingly, to sexual positions. The details of the practices of these sexual researchers have recently been made available to the English-speaking world and represent a very powerful modality. 

Since the Weida conference a great many "authorities" have presented themselves as the real O.T.O., but most are simply not very interesting or innovative in the realm of occult sexuality. In fact, some O.T.O. leaders, who claim to espouse Crowley's doctrines have been at pains to establish themselves as legitimate Bishops in the Gnostic Catholic Church. Why anyone who believes that Christianity represents an obsolete and archaic formula would be interested in receiving "apostolic succession" is difficult to understand. It does serve to emphasize the focus on titles and gossip that has plagued the Ordo Templi Orientis since its inception. One representative of the O.T.O. who is very much associated with original forms of sex magick is Kenneth Grant. Grant had studied with A.C. during the old man's last years and went on to form his own Typhonian O.T.O., based on his personal revelations. While he has published several books on the subject, those volumes were difficult to come by until recently because of legal complications regarding some of the O.T.O. symbols. In all fairness, mere possession of the books does not give one a very complete idea of Grant's thoughts, since he often invokes oaths of secrecy. It is significant that much of his writing seems heavily influenced by tantric doctrine, positing the female as a Shakti, whose kalas, or energy secretions, are carefully purified by various magickal techniques in order to create powerful alchemical elixirs. Menstrual blood seems to be an important factor in these techniques. But unfortunately, they are often described in terms of personal revelations about which Mr. Grant feels obliged to secrecy.  In New Flesh doctrine, the only recognized secrets are those which could be "shouted from the rooftops," but require intense, Inner Initiation to be understood. 

Perhaps Grant's greatest contribution to the New Flesh  has been his intriguing biography of Austin Osman Spare. Spare was a masterful artist, who combined his art with a personal occult philosophy influenced by nineteenth century eroticism, Crowley, Zen Buddhism and a witch named Mrs. Patterson, who personally tutored him in magickal eroticicms. A.O. Spare published several books of his art and thought during his lifetime. Kenneth Grant met him in the later years of his life and has done much to preserve his work. All books relating to Spare are of special interest to New Flesh Palladists, as he certainly represents the high water mark of the Crowley legacy.

Chapter 8

WILHELM REICH: SEXPOL, BIONS AND ORGONOMY

Wilhelm Reich! Man of mystery and of science, Reich was a modern sexual alchemist who preferred white lab coats to ceremonial vestments. Scientist philosopher and artist, he was a pupil of Freud who had disagreed with the master. he was expelled by the Communists, hounded by the Nazis and persecuted by the United States government and they all burned his books. He was credited with discovering a new form of energy, a cure for cancer, the secret to flying saucers and rain-making. 

We mused on what a fascinating life this man had led as we drove through the backwoods of northwestern Maine, near the Canadian border, on our way to visit the site of his institute, Orgonon. 

It is now known as the Wilhelm Reich Museum and is located in the little town of Rangely, Maine. Rangely is a beautiful, rustic place, still too far off the beaten track to be spoiled by tourism, where the trout fishing is excellent and you can hear the cry of the loon across the lakes and mountains at sunset. To call it idyllic is to understate the natural serenity one finds there. 

The main building at Organon is a massive stone structure that Reich had built as a combination laboratory, studio, library and living quarters. The view is breathtaking and the main house is preserved almost exactly as it was when W.R. lived and worked there. The ancient electronic equipment, his library, paintings, and examination room remain as if frozen in time, all preserved by a trust fund that he set up for that very purpose. There are a few newer adjoining buildiongs through which a few tourists and various "researchers" troop and a couple of large cabins where study groups may spend a weekend trying to fathom the depths of this remarkable man. But one gets the feeling that none of these new disciples will ever have a clue to the mysteries that lie sleeping at Organon. 

The estate lies in a heavily wooded mountainous area that reminded Reich of his native Austria and is still tended by the same caretaker who used to run errands for the good doctor and intercede with the local townspeople when they became afraid that his "cloudbuster" might invoke some vague evil on their land. It is a setting pregnant with psychic energy and if all this sounds slightly reminiscent of the Frankentstein castle, so be it. 

Reich was always somewhat secretive about his early life, but we do know that he studied medicine in Vienna in 1919. In one of his letters he wrote, "I have come to believe that sexuality is the centre around which revolves all of social existence and the inner life of the individual." Several years later, he became a clinical assistant in Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Here, he disagreed with Dr. Freud, maintaining that if libido was the energy of sexual instinct, it should be possible to measure it, like electricity. 

Finally, in 1922, W.R. developed his revolutionary Orgasm Theory.Orgastic Potency is "the capacity for surrender to the flow of biological energy without any inhibition, the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body." He put forth that the result of not achieving orgastic potency is neurosis. He revised the Freudian "sexual satisfaction" to "genital satisfaction", maintaining that the purpose of foreplay was to concentrate pleasure in the genitals. Then, when discharged, the energy would flow through the whole body, which constitutes gratification. However, any unspent energy would result in "sexual stasis" and feed the neurotic symptoms of the patient. It is interesting to compare these ideas with the tantric practice of raising the kundalini through the chakras until until it bathes the entire body in nectar (amrita) and the importance of completely vivifying each chakra.

W.R. also developed his theory of Character Analysis by comparing the unconscious to geological layers of the earth. Each layer is formed during a different "era" in someone's personal history. These layers constituted "Character Armor" which manifested itself through bodily attitudes and physical behavior. In fact, Reich postulated, this Character Armor was the result of the unspent sexual energy of sexual stasis. He identified three phases during which the family turns its children into armored characters: sexual inhibition during infancy, puberty, and pre-marital continence.

At this time, Reich joined the Austrian Communist Party. He began to combine his sexual theories with politics, founding the Socialist Society for Sex Consultation and Sexological Research. He began to see the bourgeois family as a tool of capitalism, with the father as a central authority figure protecting the growth of private property. Primitive societies were based on communal marriage, so that sexual energy could be diverted to more lofty goals in the service of society. These thoughts echoed some of the principles of the American Utopian Communities a hundred years earlier. 

During this period W.R. went to live in the Soviet Union, hoping to find a receptive climate for his beliefs. However, the harshness of Stalinist Russia was no place for a sexual revolution. Again, in one of his letters, he wrote, "The sexual resignation which characterizes the overwhelming majority of people means indolence, emptiness in life, paralysis of all healthy activity and initiative, or brutal, sadistic excesses; but at the same time it provides a relative calm in life. It is as if death were already anticipated in the way of living." 

From Russia, he traveled to Berlin where, in 1931, he began the famous German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics, better known as SEXPOL. As he watched the Nazis rise to power, W.R. published books and pamphlets proclaiming his views including "The Sexual Struggle of Youth," which gave concrete advice on masturbation, orgasm, birth control and taught that sexual satisfaction was the primary aim of socialism. For his trouble he was expelled from the Communist Party. As the Nazis burned his books, Reich quietly returned to Austria, rejected by both sides. 

W.R.'s SEXPOL continued to be persecuted as Nazi expansion forced him to flee to Denmark and then to Sweden. Renounced by the Freudian psychoanalytic community, he was asked to leave Sweden and finally found a home in Oslo, Norway where, in 1936, he founded the Institute for Sex-Economic Research.

In Norway Reich seems to have let go of his political passions and returned to the study of Character Analysis. Up to this point, his research had led him to believe that Character Armor had its origin in situations in childhood where the child has been denied satisfaction of some instinctual drive, and the energy of such a drive has been split up in a way that makes one part of it hold the other part in suppression. These repressed ideas and emotions are bound in Muscular Armor, in the spasms, holdings and of which the person has no conscious awareness or understanding. 

By loosening these holdings and tensions, one can bring into consciousness emotions and memories which have hitherto been completely repressed. There may also appear new and unexpected experiences: feelings of streaming in the patient's body.  These streamings stem from the vegetative, or autonomous nervous system, and are therefore called Vegetative Streaming.

Wilhelm Reich elaborated his technique of Character Analysis throughout his turbulent political years based on these findings. Once in Oslo, he shifted more and more to attacking the Muscular Armor and the layering of the Character Armor came to play a lesser role. Working with hands directly on the muscular tensions would eventually liberate the repressed emotional energies, which also manifested themselves in the "vegetative streamings." This more physical technique Reich termed "character-analytic vegetotherapy" or simply Vegetotherapy. Breathing technique was also heavily emphasized at this time. 

Working on the Character Armor as well as on the Muscular ARmor in order to release the suppressed organismic energies and establish orgasmic potency, he had long noticed that when chronic spasms and tensions were dissolved, spontaneous movements would appear, movements of quite another order than the formerly stiff, jerky, mechanical ones. The new movements were soft, harmonious and graceful and showed a tendency towards an even and natural rhythm of breathing. When the breathing rhythm was allowed to accelerate spontaneously it would encompass the whole body and end in a reflex convulsion This was the discovery of the Orgasm Formula. 

His description of the process was as follows: "Mechanical Tension leads to Bioelectric Charge leads to Bioelectric Discharge leads to Relaxation" He first called this "the Orgasm Formula" and, later, "the Formula of Biological Tension and Charge."

Having established a close connection between psychic and sexual tension, Reich wished to study the exact nature of sexual excitation. Could it be shown, by electrical measurement, that surface tissues which, when aroused and dilated and filled with fluids, registered a higher "charge" or "potential" than did tissues where were not aroused? To measure this, equipment was built with the help of physiologists at the Oslo Physiological Institute which amplified and recorded on photographic paper changes of 1/1000 of a volt in the electric potential on the erogenous zones of the body. The subjects were Reich himself, students and friends, and the data included approximately thirty pieces of photographic tape. 

The results showed that, in the first place, the entire surface of the body possessed a steadily higher potential than the electric circuit to which is was compared. This varied only slightly from person to person. More importantly, the erogenous zones (lips, anus, nipples, penis, mucus membranes of the vagina, earlobes, tongue, palms and forehead) exhibited a much higher or much lower potential than the ordinary skin. 

The charge at the skin's surface varied with the emotional response of the subject. What was experienced ("felt") as pleasure showed an increase in charge. Unpleasurable experiences showed a reduced charge. It was also found that the degree to which the surface potential changed with pleasure and un-pleasure varied greatly from individual to individual.

Reich called this measurement "psychogalvanic phenomenon." Although it may not have been his intent, W.R. had scientifically proven the existence of the "Astral Fluid" spoken of by Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. John Dee, Franz Anton Mesmer, Karl Reichenbach and other expositors of human energy fields. 

He had also shown the direct link between this energy and sexuality, as well as implied the importance of any chemical substance which could be ingested to increase the skin surface potential (drugs). 

Furthermore, the Orgasm Formula demonstrates that the amount of sexual tension built up is equal to the potency of the charge, thus explaining the necessity of a highly erotic content to the rituals of sex magick. In fact, his research concerning the need to destroy the Character Armor and Muscular Armor in order to properly build sexual tension suggests the use of bondage and fetish techniques in certain rituals. The rhythmic, harmonious movements of the orgasm reflex and the vegetative streamings also provide good indications as to the effectiveness of a given ritual. 

It seems that from this point in his life, he became inextricably linked with the fantastic and arcane forces of life. Although he never voiced belief in any forces that he did not consider to be proven by scientific method, the rest of his life would be filled with controversy and disbelief. 

From the formula he saw working in the orgasm, W.R. claimed that "the life process is determined by a four beat rhythm," the Orgasm Formula. As he studied inorganic matter under the microscope, he claimed that they were transformed into microbes. In other words, he believed that he had discovered the process of spontaneous generation, life arising from non-living matter. 

A large body of evidence existed which suggested that life could be organized from non-living matter, inorganic chemical substances as well as organic remains of dead plants and animals. Louis Pasteur had performed experiments in the 1820s which convinced many scientists, particularly the prestigious French Academy of Sciences, that living things can come only from other living things. Still, experiments contradicting Pasteur's interpretation were performed well into the twentieth century, and work on the origin of life in the foremost of modern biochemical research today. Cinematic shades of Dr. Frankenstein! Furthermore,  Reich discovered the bions gave off a kind of blue radiation, which he called "Orgone Energy" or "Life Energy" (L.E.). In essence, he had moved into the realm of alchemy. He had discovered the First Matter, the Stone of the Philosophers.

In 1937, the Norwegian press began a slanderous campaign against him, accusing him of pornography, false claims and a host of other charges. After two years of persecution, Reich finally left for New York, hoping for a free climate to continue his work. He quickly became a United States citizen and immersed himself in researching Orgone Energy. 

He found that Orgone is the energy of all living organisms and it is the motor force of the Orgasm Reflex, which is the key to health. It can be measured with an electroscope, a Geiger counter, or an Orgone Energy Field Meter. It is present everywhere, in space and in vacuums. Gravity, electromagnetism and light all function through the medium of Orgone. All material reality comes from it. Hurricanes, sunspots, tidal movements and other aspects of weather are caused by the "superimposition" of several cosmic energy systems. The human equivalent is coitus, where two separate energy systems "superimpose," often producing a third. In other words, it is the same essence known to the Chinese as chi and to the Hindus as akasha.

His next project was to build an "Orgone Accumulator" This is a device constructed in such a fashion as to accumulate Orgone Energy. In his work Construction of a Three-Fold Orgone Accumulator he wrote:

"The atmospheric O.E. is accumulated and concentrated by the use of a combination of non-metallic material --  celotex, beaver board, felt, plastic, glass, wool -- and metal -- sheet metal or steel wool. The materials are arranged in layers with the organic or non-metallic material on the outside. The strength of the accumulator is based on the number of alternating layers with the organic or non-metallic material on the outside. In a large accumulator in which a person can sit, the outermost layer would be a rigid structure such as celotex and the innermost layer would be sheet metal or wire mesh. The non-metallic material attracts the atmospheric orgone energy and tends to hold it, reflecting it slowly. The inorganic material, the metal, also attracts the energy but it lacks the absorptive quality of the nonmetallic material and thus reflects it rapidly. The accumulator functions on the basis of what is known as the orgonomic potential, i.e. orgone energy moves from the weaker system to the stronger. In other forms of energy, e.g. electromagnetic energy, the energy moves from the stronger system, the energy source, to the weaker system. Reich's Orgone Accumulator is reminiscent of Franz Anton Mesmer's "baquet," used to accumulate "animal magnetism" in the late eighteenth century. It also reminds one of the chamber in which Eliphas Levi conjured the shade of Apollonius of Tyana to visible appearance. It would certainly be the ideal surrounding for any sex magickal operation. 

In 1940 Reich demonstrated his Orgone Accumulator to Albert Einstein, but the experience did not seem to leave much of an impression. At this time W.R. formed a small group of fellow scientists around him based on his idea of Work Democracy. His slogan was: "Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life." He also established his work residence in Rangely, Maine and created the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund "to safeguard the truth about my life and work against distortion and slander after my death."

Although W.R. had always been an atheist, during this period he wrote a book, The Murder of Christ, which explains Christ's healing power as a result of his powerful energy field. It suggests that the biopathic world with its Character Armor could not abide an orgasmically healthy being like Christ and therefore must murder him over and over again in each generation and in every aspect of life. 

In fact, Reich began to see the world as being contaminated with Emotional Plague, a disease resulting from sexual repression. He also discovered a manifestation of this Emotional Plague which he named Deadly Orgone Radiation (D.O.R.). This is the destructive energy which represses sexuality and begets disease. It is to combat D.O.R. that Reich (or, the Silent Observer S.O. -- as he refers to himself at this time) invented the "Cloud Buster."

The Cloud Buster was a group of hollow pipes, somewhat resembling a "ray gun" from a science fiction movie, on a turn table which could be turned and pointed in any direction. The pipes were connected to cables placed in a source of flowing water. These pipes were supposed to draw D.O.R. out of the clouds and into the water, something like a lightning rod for Orgone Energy.

Reich called the project Cosmic Orgone Radiation Engineering (C.O.R.E.). He found that it could also create rain from the clouds and in 1954 went to the Arizona desert where he successfully did cause it to rain after a long dry spell.

After this, W.R. turned his attention to nuclear, began the ill-fated ORANUR experiment, whereby he hoped to heal radiation poisoning with orgone by the accumulator. However, work with radioactive isotopes resulted in radiation poisoning and the experiment was abandoned. After this disappointment, Reich turned his attention to Flying Saucers (which he termed "Ea's") and came to believe that D.O.R. was actually the exhaust given off by these machines, which he believed were fueled by orgone. 

However, for Reich, this was the beginning of the end. The Food and Drug Administration brought an injunction against him for selling orgone accumulators across state lines. Actually, he had only sold the plans and would probably been found innocent but he chose to ignore the courts entirely. Eventually, he was found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to two years in prison. The court ordered that all materials dealing with the accumulator were to be destroyed, but many of Reich's other books which made no mention of the accumulator were burned also. On November 3, 1957 Reich died of a heart attack while still in prison. He is buried at Orgonon in a crypt that he designed.

Chapter 9

THE GODS OF SEX MAGIC: LOVECRAFTIAN CULTS

We have strolled down Prospect Street in Providence, Rhode Island, beneath eldritch trees amid spires and domes that spoke of cyclopean horrors to that town's most famous resident, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In such a setting, it seems highly improbable that this "scientific rationalist" could have had no more than fictional diversion in mind when he created the blind idiot god Azathoth, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep and other trans-dimensional deities of his "Cthulhu Mythos." Yet this is what Lovecraft and most of his literary critics would have us believe.

In fact, most Lovecraft scholars have been at pains to erect a bulwark of disbelief in anything occult on their prat or Lovecraft's. They seem distinctly uncomfortable when confronted by the ebony clad, long haired faithful whose constant questions about the Necronomicon seem to elicit terse and repetitious answers. It's a little bit like trying to explain to the Pope that Jesus Christ didn't really exist. 

That HPL held these forces in great awe and terror, it requires only a brief perusal of any of his stories to ascertain. It seems reminiscent of the stories that were told of the New World subsequent to western Europe's discovery and rape of the mysterious region. We know that Lovecraft was untrained and unprepared to deal with any kind of trans-mundane, supernormal experience, yet he was compelled to record these tales, which he claimed arose from dreams and reveries. Perhaps the proof is in the pudding, "Let success be thy proof," as Aleister Crowley would say. Since the Cthulhu Mythos was let loose upon the world it has been embraced wholeheartedly by occultists and magicians whose efforts have produced some fascinating results. In short, it works. To quote Crowley again: "In this book it is spoken of ... Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things, which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow."

H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, often referred to the Akashic Records. These were ancient writings containing the great truths of life, preserved only on the astral plane, a real that scientific rationalists will recognize as the imagination. And woe unto the artist who cannot obtain a visa to that wonderful land. Indeed, it is here that the venerable Necronomicon is to be found. Not on the shelves of the bookstore at the local shopping but on the Plateau of Leng or within the sunken city of R'lyeh. These are places accessible only to magicians: Men and women who have sacrificed their comfortable rational processes and secure material lives on the blood soaked altars of Yog Sothoth and the other dark gods that lie waiting on the very borders of consciousness itself.

It is to these modern Fausts that Lovecraft's stories speak loudest and most directly. For those stories are practical manuals for those who have the strength to dream. And they have been proven to be Strong Medicine in the hands of those philosophers who do not despise the higher worlds. As for the tight-lipped, pallid critics of the old, grey land, who like to think of HPL's work as quaint tales of fancy, they hold little interest for those who have experienced the trans-dimensional realities of Lovecraft's ritual dream world. 

These critics might as well maintain that sex is no fun and drugs don't open doorways (in fact, many of these people maintain exactly that, by example). This is merely denial resulting from fear of the unknown. For those who would essay the journey into the worlds electric, aethyric and fluidic, situated beyond the frontiers of the material world, Lovecraft is a magickal Christopher Columbus. His strange, sometimes timid, but always intriguing explorations into the twilight lands and unknown places serve as signposts to those who are driven to follow.

It is not for the smirking "rationalists," secure in their smug, mechanical little worlds, but for the bold dream-warriors that these tales are written. A quiet walk down Prospect Street will convince any magician of that. 

Our first encounter with Lovecraft's vision came shortly after I had discovered Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice. What a delightfully mysterious book that was on first reading. It was like a jigsaw puzzle that had some of the pieces missing. However, it definitely taught things about forbidden subject and secret realities that our mothers never told us about. It was the same with H.P. Lovecraft. Every sentence hinted at some dark, hidden knowledge, not available through ordinary channels. As we have walked the magickal path, we have learned that this knowledge is the knowledge of Self, the primal atavisms that lurk deep beneath conscious levels where objectivity and subjectivity are as alike as two hairs. 

We mention this forbidden quality in Lovecraft's writings in an effort to explain why this quiet, conservative recluse should have come to be identified with ritual sex magick and strange, ecstatic states of consciousness. HPL was a quiet child, not given to socializing with other children. Both his father and mother died in Butler Hospital for the Insane. He did not finish high school, being a sickly child, and lived most of his life in extreme poverty. Although he was married for a brief period in New York, he spent most of his life living in Providence with his aunts. His was an interior life, spent primarily writing letters and stories and dreaming those marvelous dreams. Perhaps he was simply too busy with those interior worlds to have much time for the daily life. 

Within his interior worlds, HPL was more like some necromantic alchemist who had perished at the inquisitorial stake when the witchcraft trials were at their height, only to be reborn as a sorcerer supreme, magus of the cryptic mysteries of some forgotten race. His vision was based on the fundamental knowledge that beings of another race came to Earth from a far distant star-system, several hundred million years before recorded history. They came as interstellar pioneers to colonize Earth and in so doing created the first protoplasmic life on Earth, probably, at first, to serve them. Then other forms of life developed and evolved, including humankind's primal ancestors, the Elohim, the Sons of God. At some point those Elder Gods lost their power over the Earth through their abuse of the magickal arts, calling up creatures of ultimate chaos from other dimensions. These Great Old Ones of cosmic evil were eventually bound by the Elders' spells and imprisoned in the secret places of our universe, where they lie sleeping. 

As Abdul Alharzred wrote:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons eve death may die". 

Towards the beginning of the Pleistocene Age, the first civilizations of mankind -- Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis -- began to flourish. THese were ages when humankind existed as a fluidic, magickal being, the Sons of the Sons of God (Cain's children), only partially involved with material substance. Humanity cohabited the Earth with the Gods in a supra-physical etheric state that was the Gold Age. Then, with the approach of the Ice Age, some 500,000 years ago, the Elder Gods abandoned the Earth for warmer climes. The great ice and subsequent melting of the polar ice-caps destroyed the prehistoric civilizations, leaving strange architectures like Stonehenge and Easter Island and the legends of a great flood that are preserved in cultures the world over. 

Some tribal groups survived the Ice Age and retained a fragmented tradition surviving in India, Egypt the Andes and other remote places. These tribes also retained esoteric practices of dream-control, ritual and sacrifice through which they continue to exert an influence on modern humankind. Although people of our Post-Atlantean Epoch are mired in materialism, these ancient tribes have established contacts with visionaries like Dr. John Dee, H.P. Blavatksy, Wilhelm Reich and, certainly, H.P. Lovecraft. 

The purpose of these magicks is to release the power of the Great Old Ones to seed the process of matter's revivification and regenerate mankind to the divine/human nexus. This is the Great Work of transcendent Gnosticism which is the underlying theme of HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. Among many modern magickal orders that are involved with the Lovecraftian dream world, the rituals center around forging a psychic link with the Great Old Ones through erotic stimulation and effecting their release by orgasm combined with meditation upon the secret signs associated with these deities. This often results in a borderland consciousness, known to the Hindus as swapna (dream-state). This includes not only dreams which occur during sleep, but vision: hallucinations and reveries which my impinge on waking consciousness. These altered states take on a surreal, or sidereal, abstraction of the senses establishing contact with the atavistic forces of the Great Old Ones. 

During the 1960's many young Americans experienced similar abstractions while taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs an reacted with the same unreasoning terror that Lovecraft describes as the result of his dream encounters with these super-realities. Shamans and worshipers of ancient cults throughout the world have experienced these dream states, inflamed by rhythmic breathing, mantra, ecstatic dancing, scarification and rites of perverse sexuality. The formula to inducing contact with these forces seems to lie in pushing the mind to such extremes that it "short circuits," thus allowing trans-mundane forces to reify within the dream state. 

One of the first magickal groups to call upon the gods mentioned by Lovecraft was the Church of Satan, led by Anton LaVey. In his book, The Satanic Rituals (first published in 1972), LaVey printed two rituals written by Michael A. Aquino, The Ceremony of the Nine Angles and the Call to Cthulhu, which are intended to reify the forces of the Great Old Ones: Nyarlathotep, Shub Niggurath, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. These writes are written in English as well as the "Aklo" language quoted by HPL in several of his stories. The language sounds like a kind of goetic growling in practice and can be quite effective when used in cojunction with the forms of energized enthusiasms mentioned above. 

This Aklo language seems highly reminiscent of the Enochian language that was put forth by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly as a result of experiments they made by skrying in a magick mirror in the late 1500s. In fact, Lovecraft mentions Dr. Dee in his tale, The Dunwich Horror. In the story a sorcerer, Wilbur Whateley, has "the priceless but imperfect copy of r. Dee's English version" of the dreaded Necronomicon. He is seeking "the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' Latin Version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century," so that he can collate the two copies and discover a certain passage which will unleash the power of Yog-Sothoth. Of course, as in most of Lovecraft's tales, the experience drives him mad. Lovecraft claimed to have invented many of the names in the Cthulu Mythos, However, careful research can often reveal the true sources of these names. Olaus Wormius surely refers to Ole Worm, whose work Codex Wormius was one of the earliest surviving Scandinavian texts recounting the magickal exploits of the Norse gods.

The Enochian language of Dee and Kelly is so well known in esoteric circles that I need hardly recount its history. It was reclaimed from obscurity by Elias Ashmole, one of the founders of English "Blue Lodge" Freemasonry and later adapted to the magickal rituals of the Order of the Golden Dawn by MacGregor Mathers. Aliester Crowley published the Angelic Calls and other Enochian material in his journal The Equinox. Anton LaVey created "Satanic" versions of the Calls and, more recently more recently Gerald and Betty Schueler have advanced a system of "Enochian Magic" which incorporates influences from H.P. Blavatsky. The Order of the Sacred Word, perhaps the most complex group of magickal teachings ever, has their own system of Enochain magick and there are several Enochian dictionaries currently in print. Perhaps the most accurate version of the original workings by Dee and Kelly are recounted  by Robert Turner and there is yet another grimoire, The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee, by Geoffrey James. The Enochian language has the distinct sound of a Native Amerindian language. Since many of Dee's workings were done with the aid of a black stone of obsidian, brought back from the New World (Mexico), it is tempting to wonder if an ancient, pre-cataclysmic tribe may have been communicating with the Elizabethan Mage. In fact, a later group that experimented extensively with the magick mirror, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, believes that the forces they contacted through the mirror were directed by living men.

Believe it or not, with so very many of HPL's sources identified within the occult world, many literary critics still try to believe his claim to have simply invented the names in his stories.

The Necronomicon also know as " AL Azif -- The Book of the Arab,"is  similar to Al vel Legis -- The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley. Lovecraft's "The Great Old Ones" reminds us of the Golden Dawn phrase "The Great Ones of the Night Time." "Yog-Sothoth" recalls "SetThought," an Egyptian deity often referred to in Thelemic magick, "Kadath in the Cold Waste" sound like "Hadith, the Wanderer of the Waste," a title used by Aleister Crowley. "Azathoth" is "Azoth," the alchemical formula composed of the first and last letters of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. "The god Nyarlathotep, the Faceless One" reminds of of "The Headless One," a well known Graeco-Egyptian invocation used in the western magickal tradition. The list is seemingly endless. 

The point is that an authentic occult tradition has evolved from Lovecraft's stories based, as they are, on his dream experiences. Was HPL consciously aware of Aleister Crowley or magick that was practiced during his lifetime? In volume V, page 120 of Lovecraft's Selected Letters there is a passing reference to A.C. (in a letter written to Emil Petaja: 6 march, 1933) and we do know that Crowley is mentioned in a novel entitled The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline, which Lovecraft comments on in his article On the Supernatural in Literature. 

If Lovecraft was only marginally aware of Crowley and the western magickal tradition, subsequent followers of A.C. have been fascinated with him. Kenneth Grant, who studied with Crowley during his last years, attributed the gods of the Cthulhu Mythos to the "Tree of Life", a familiar system of magick, as follows: Kether-Pluto to Yuggoth, Chokmah-Neptune to Kadath, Binah-Saturn to Cthulhu, Daath-Uranus to Yog-Sothoth, Chese-Jupiter to Nodens, Geburah-Mars to Hastur, Tiphareth-Sol to Azathoth (at the center of creation), Netzach-Venus to Shub-Niggurath, Hod-Mercury to Nyarlathotep, Yesod-Moon to Yig, and Malkuth-Earth to Geh. In HPL's story The Lurker on the Threshold (posthumously written in "collaboration" with August Derleth), we read of globes, or bubbles that comprise "That tentacled amorphous monster, whose mask was as a congries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoh, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost out posts of space and time."  This would seem to be an accurate, albeit terrified, description of the vision of the Tree as an underlying bases of super-mundane existence.

Kenneth Grant's writings abound in reference to Lovecraft and the importance of the Cthulhu Mythos to ritual sex magick. It is evident from his published works that his magickal order, the Typhonian O.T.O. has found the imagery of the Great Old Ones useful in their magickal working

More recently another Englishman, Peter Smith, has written extensively on HPL and ritual magick  in the Thelemic magazine, Starfire. Mr. Smith draws parallels between the work of H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, showing that Lovecraft, like Crowley and Blavatsky, was the receiver and transmitter of hidden knowledge, but in this process was intutive  rather than conscious."

American sex magicians also work within the Lovecraftian vision. Frater P.V.N., one of the most adroit exponents of sex magick techniques is the "Alchemist" Co-coordinator of the "Miskatonic Alchemical Expedition of the Esoteric Order of Dagon" in upstate New York. He describes the order as "a Lovecraftian Mystery School descended from the Sirius mystery cults of Egypt, Babylon and Sumeria, by way of Gateways within creative Individuals who are capable of Dreaming the Mythos."

Further south in Cincinnati, Ohio, Allen Holub of the Bate Cabal has produced The Book of the Forgotten Ones. In his comment on the book, he states that "The Mage must invoke his most primal self by the sacramental use of the proper drugs (blood, raw meat, cocaine, etc.. and sex). The blood of the moon should be present within the chalice of the priestess . . . By Elder Gods I mean the dark primal forces that reside deep within the subconscious . . . They are the forces of the great deep from which the spirit of Nodens ariseth." In Chicago, Michael Bertiaux has become well-known as the Voodoo-Gnostic Master of the Monastery of the Seven Rays, a cell of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antigua. M. Bertiaux claims to have "established contact with the 'Deep Ones,' the fearful haunters of Outer Space that Lovecraft has brought so close to earth in his terrifying fictions." Bertiaux founded "the Lovecraftian Coven which is led by a priestess of the Black Snake Cult. The Coven is structured upon the basic law of sexual polarity. The priestess embodies the type of sea-shaktis, or fluid elixir, typified in turn by the Atlantian deities of which Dagon was the Chief. She is mated with the male principle . . . equated with the Dunwich country of Lovecraftian lore . . . This magical current is concentrated in Shub-Niggurath..."

And in St. Petersburg, Florida, we were initiated into The Starry Wisdom Sect, an order named after a group described in HPL's Hound of the Dark which possessed a Shining Trapezohedron through which the Great Old Ones could be loosed upon the world. We were taught that "the true born magician must know within his soul that there are certain keys within the phenomenal world that open doors to the noumenal world. And that these keys consist of certain combinations of diagrams, perfumes, invocations and other symbols of magick art that can summon beings of other dimensions into our own reality." These keys often involved extreme forms of sexuality. 

But it is not only trained occultists that have been influenced by the scope of Lovecraft's vision. Clark Ashton Smith, a correspondent and member of the "Lovecraft Circle" of writers produced a huge number of paintings, drawings and sculptures based on HPL's weird images. In fact, Peter Smith of Starfire has pointed out an astonishing similarity between some sketches by C.A. Smith and a letter to Lovecraft (11-16-1930) and some of the sigils in Aleister Crowley's grimoire, Liber 231. Robert Bloch, famous for his film script of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, sent his childhood crayon drawings based on Lovecraft's stories to HPL -- they are chilling! Perhaps the most fascinating Lovecraft-oriented art was discovered by Joel Biroco, editor of the English magazine Kaos. We have found no better example of weird geometry and cyclopean architecture than the computer generated images published by H.O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter in their book The Beauty of Fractal. 

However, the ultimate power zone of Lovecraft's images must be his beloved city of Providence. The winding streets and domes and spires of College Hill provided constant inspiration for the Master on his nocturnal forays through the sleeping city. Across from Brown University quadrangle is the John Hay Library, repositor of Lovecraft's manuscripts and books. Just up Prospect Street is the house from whose second floor room he penned The Haunter of the Dark. Across Meeting Street is the Grandiose Christian Science Temple, resembling some antique shrine to the Great Old Ones, dwarfing the rest of the surrounding buildings. At the end of Creighton Street lies the Halsey Mansion, the prototype home of Charles Dexter Ward, where noxious rituals laster late into the night. And from Prospect Terrace, one can view Providence. "All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows," Randolph Carter Saw in  The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. 

We have walked these paths with Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep, Sub-Niggurath, Azathoth and Cthulhu. The Great Old ones abide and their influence is ever present. 

Chapter 10

THE PRACTICE OF SEXUAL MAGIC

The New Flesh Palladium is a sexual-religious cult that is not really cult or religion. In previous chapters, we have shown the historical predecessors and prophets of the New Flesh, since it is based, for the most part, on ideas about dominance and submission and otherworldliness which have been evolving since the time of Swedenborg. However, for modern usage, it is important to clearly define just what The New Flesh really is, so that we may most efficiently serve that purpose. 

To do this we must examine the formula of  Gratified Desire. Desire is a powerful response to things outside ourselves that we feel we need in order to be satisfied. Those feelings of need can be reduced to three basic categories: Sex, Power and Intimacy (the overcoming of alienation). As we examine this triangle of desires, we can see that many people use Sex to gain Power, or Power to gain Sex, both Sex and Power are often attempts to gain Intimacy. Sex can be seen as the Dionysian archetype and Power as the Apollonian. If we equate those desires with the Greek gods, then Intimacy would correspond to Eros. 

The well-known tale of Psyche and Eros tells of the beautiful Psyche making perfect love with the god, but with the stipulation that she must not gaze upon him. When she did gaze at his sleeping form, Eros instantly awoke and fled away. Thus, when examined too closely, love disappears. This is the very raison d'etre for the Palladium, the safe and secret place. This is the importance of the mystery. And this is the reason that so many seek Eros through Dionysus or Apollo and fail in their quest utterly. While the techniques and doctrines of The New Flesh Palladium may seem strange or confusing or even frightening to some, it is important to remember that their purpose is to confer Gratified Desire, that most precious of all treasures that humans may possess. 

William Seabrook, the bohemian journalist who traveled the world in search of the odd and unusual, recorded some of his experiments with bondage and discipline techniques that resulted in a release of psychic energy and clairvoyance in his book  Witchcraft. He and his lady friend, Justine, decided on  "dervish dangling as the best and least dangerous" method for this. Seabrook would tie Justine's wrists to a hook in the ceiling and she would stand on tiptoe on some telephone books. If the rope sagged she would "push one or more books out from under with her toes to restore the tension." At fist these sessions were conducted in the dark, the purpose being that of meditation and the experience of the visions. As time went by, Seabrook had a tight fitting mask made for her, to more completely shut off the external senses. These experiments in sensory deprivation resulted in Justine having visions that accurately predicted events that later occurred in their lives. This type of light bondage, in conjunction with sensory deprivation is an excellent practice for the budding Palladist. It should be noted that a degree of tension in the binding is important to achieve the desired effect. It will make the victim much more receptive than, say, a flotation tank, where no constricting force is present. Among other things, it recreates the sensory memory of the womb, of being in a small, dark place. 

Gerald Gardner is best known to the world as the first spokesman for Wicca, or witchcraft. He created a Book of Shadows which contained teachings and rituals with which many individuals have formed groups, or coven to practice the ancient, nature-based religion.In order to gain clairvoyance, or "second sight," Gardner also used light binding, but he added the elements of nudity and light flagellation. He felt that nudity aided the flow of energy. The flagellation was carried out with silken cords or horse-tail hair, and was lightly switched across the buttocks to induce more trance. In fact, the effect of these additions is to more readily draw the blood to the skin, producing the "love-light" flushed appearance so often associated with sex. Modern Gardnerians are always quick to point out that the bindings and scourgings are done lightly, albeit with many repetitions, and have resulted in some remarkable clairvoyant states. Some witches even believe that this is the best method for initiation on the astral plane, which many regard as the only true initiation. 

Magdalene Graham also sees flagellation as a means to initiation, but believes in a somewhat more spirited whipping. In her story, Initiation, she tells the story of responding to her occult master by accepting the role of his "slave/pupil." As her narrative unfolds, she offers a rattan cane to "the master" and strips, so that he may explore her body "Bamboo is for beginners, rattan is for real," he tells her and orders her to bend over the desk. She experiences "a real whipping" that "sends shivers of pain and ecstasy through my body." Magdalene describes "heightened sensation, an awareness of everything. To compare it to an orgasm would be to degrade this experience. It could be called enlightenment." After caning, the master "used me cruelly in a way to which I could not respond, and this, too was part of my initiation."

From Justine to Gardner to Magdalene, we can see the effects of stronger and stronger medicine. If we follow Wilhelm Reich's orgasm formula, it will be seen that the greater the amount of tension induced, the greater amount of energy will be released. As with all situations of erotic dominance and submission, it is the responsibility of the master to know the limits, the slave is just along for the ride, a Silent Observer of the worlds electric and fluidic. It will be seen that competence and success in New Flesh techniques is a matter of training that can last a lifetime, or longer. For those approaching The New Flesh Palladium,  there are some important considerations. First, that we are dealing with sensory stimuli and the resulting feelings, or thought patterns, which occur in the brain. The outward appearance of the rituals (restraints, whips, sigils, incense, etc.) do not reveal the inner experiences of the Palladists involved. The rituals provide insights into aspects of ourselves we may not even know, and cast doubts on things we thought we were sure of. We're dealing with fantasy, but that doesn't make it unreal. On the contrary, the sensations of the New Flesh can be more real than anything ever experienced in the old, gray world. To bathe in the "pure Aeth" is more intense than orgasm, yet it has little in common with vanilla sex. It is "to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and to see the world with new eyes." It is the paradox of transcendence. For this reason, Palladists have often employed "wine and strange drugs," as well as other "poisonings" of they body to aid the act of transcending. Perhaps, the best example if J.K. Huysman's description of the Black Mass in La Bas, when a young woman inhales burning herbs during the ritual and, later, brings the narrator to a be covered with sacramental wafers for bizarre sexual purposes. 

Lest anyone be in doubt, it is the darkside. It is the luxuriating in the forbidden dreams of evil intent and wicked delight. It is Strong Medicine (S.M.). But, as we have stated before, Strong Medicine is required to combat the alienation of the knowledge that we are alone. Ultimately, it is hot, volcanic; the acid of the soul that dissolves boundaries and violates all that represses the spirit. This is guerilla warfare against despair. 

A typical description of initiation into  The New Flesh Palladium is given in the beginning of the Story of O by Pauline Reage. In that narrative, the woman named O is instructed to take off her undergarments so that she is naked beneath her clothing. She is taken to a chateau where her lover delivers her into the hands of man who will train her in "discipline." 

In practice, aspirants will holdout their wrists in anticipation of being handcuffed or bound. This gesture is the universal sign of the New Flesh, signifying many levels of meaning. Traditionally, the aspirant will be stripped, handcuffed and bound in a position of extreme vulnerability -- "hands over head, "staked out, "presenting posterior" or other popular bondage positions. 

The Slave, or Bottom, may then be blindfolded, masked or gagged, according to the desire of the Master (or Top). Plugs and dildos may also be inserted and strapped into the appropriate orifices. 

It is at this point that the initiation into dominant touch begins. The master will probe and inspect the Slave's body thoroughly. The Master may decide that the shaving of body hair is in order and, therefore, facilitate that practice after the above conditions have been achieved, the secret ritual of X (ecstasy) takes place and intitiation into  The New Flesh Palladium  is conferred. 

Once initiated, then the Palladist beings to train the mind-body so that greater extremes may be attained. P.D. Randolph outlined the basic training methods necessary for the successful practice of ceremonial magick in his seminal work,  Sexual Magic. There is little that we can add to his brilliant exposition of the subject, composed in the 1870s. The exercises of Volantia, Decretism, Posism and Tireauclairism are so basic to the Palladist's training, as are his instructions regarding Astrology, Perfumes, Colors, Sounds, Fluid Condensers and the other elements of magickal ritual. Likewise, the Divine Respiration techniques of breathing, as taught by Thomas Lake Harris have survived over the past century and one half as the preeminent method of controlling the body's energies. The essential focus of this method is the ability to hold the breath within the body while abdominal, throat and sphincter muscles are tightly contracted and to exhale the breath from the body while the same muscles are at rest. This technique is dimly reflected in the Golden Dawn practice of the four fold breath and in the yoga techniques of  Mun Bandha and Vajroli Mudra. It is the regular exercise of the pubococeygeus anal, urethral and vaginal muscles in cojunction with the muscles that assist in breathing. The Randolph exercises are essential for good magick, the Harris exercises are essential to good sex. 

To these studies, we must ad  the knowledge of sigilization of desire and the neither-neither/death posture practices of Austin Osman Spare. These Zen-like magicks are the most effective modern methods to reify the WIll of the Palladist, although many magicians will incorporate the Voodoun vevers, the Norse runes or the Hindu tattwas in their sigilications. 

Since the details of these studies have been explained in detail elsewhere, we will not belabor the subject here. But it must be stressed that without experience and success in the three areas outlined, no attempt should be made to experiment with the operations of the New Flesh that we will proceed to describe. For without the strength and ability that these exercises confer, such practices become mere debauchery and can only lead to sorrow and death. 

The New Flesh is the direct path to Intimacy. It blasts suspicion, envy, hatred and the rest of the unwanted legacy that humanity has inherited. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."  Transcendence is the key. Every mundane man and woman has limits, humiliations that seem unthinkable. Yet, each limit is really an edge, the  beginning point of a new ecstasy. Obviously, such belief requires great strength and it is for this reason that we strongly enjoin each Palladist to undergo serious training before entering the Palladium.

Once success in these practices has been attained, there is a special meditation that should be rehearsed many times before a ritual of the New Flesh is entered into. It is a four part visualization based on the doctrine of Pre-Adamite Man (i.e. that all humans are twin-sexed, as were the Elohim before Adam). It is essential to success in these practices. Many Palladists rehearse the visualization in four parts. 

For the man, the vision begins with the breasts growing and becoming heavy, signifying the Androgyne. Then the breasts shrink, to create the Strong Male. Then the penis shrinks into the body becoming the clitoris and the scrotum retracts into becoming the womb, signifying the Gynander. Then the breasts grow to become the Strong Female.

For the woman, the vision begins with the clitoris swelling into and becoming the penis and the womb expanding outward to form the scrotum, signifying the Androgyne. Then the breasts shrink to become the Strong Male. Then the penis shrinks into the body becoming the clitoris and the scrotum retracts to become the womb, signifying the Gynander. Then the breasts grow to become the Strong Female. 

These mental exercises must be practiced many times until each detail and every sensation is perfect. They are to be done in conjunction with the breathing exercises mentioned above. The transformations must appear absolutely real to the Palladist, so that the resulting brain chemistry and endocrine system reactions will be effective. When performed properly, the Sex Mutation vision banishes all trepidation and enforces the Will to Power. 

All New Flesh ritual is interaction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and their combined invocation of Eros. The players share and negotiate power. Whips, chains, knives and other paraphernalia are frightening images to outsiders, but important tools to the Palladist The Dominant is the Top, the Submissive is the Bottom -- Two parts of the whole. 

In his magnum opus,  Sexual Magic, P.B. Randolph included a table of "Combined Planetary Influences," which gives a description of the influences produced by any two planets when one is dominant and the other submissive. For example, Randolph's table shows that when the Moon is dominant and Jupiter is submissive, the "combination is good Dominatrix force." We have already seen that PBR's teachings were extremely influential on the O.T.O.'s vanilla sex magick, but they can also be decoded to provide may valuable formulas for New Flesh workings. Two Palladists may assume planetary masks in order to attract one of the influences listed by Randolph. The Paris Working  quatrains composed by Aleister Crowley and one of his lovers can also be of great help in achieving the desired goal. 

This brings up the experience of possession. The journalist William Seabrook, referred to earlier, documented a case of possession in which a set of  Yi King wands was used. He describes a technique which he had been taught by Aleister Crowley, in which one visualizes a door with one of the hexagrams from the Chinese oracle on it. After holding the image firmly in one's mind, "you arise out of your body and walk through the door." Once through the door, the "spirit could stroll into the past or future, walk through walls, across the ocean, across the mountains, to heaven, hell or Honolulu -- depending on which hexagram you tossed." Seabrook tried this experiment with Natalia Filipovna, a Russian refugee who had known Rasputin and was living in Greenwhich Village in the 1920s. After gaxing at HeHexagram 49, ko,  she went into a trance and experienced an atavistic return to the life of a wolf on the Russian steppes, snarling and crawling on all fours. 

Kenneth Grant also wrote that Crowley had taught him the techniques of going through the door, this time with the assistance of inhaled ether. Years after A.C.'s death, Grant witnessed another form of possession. The story revolves around a young woman, "Clanda," who had been a member of Gerald Gardner's witch coven and left to join the Nu Isis Lodge of the O.T.O., run by Kenneth Grant. Gardner contacted Austin Osman Spare in an attempt to influence Clanda to return, but telling Spare only that he needed a talisman "to restore lost property to its rightful place." Spare accordingly created a picture of "a sort of amphibious owl with the wings of a bat and talons of an eagle" and consecrated it to its purpose. 

Subsequently, Clanda participated in a Nu Isis Lodge ceremony to invoke and be possessed by the Black Isis, the dark side of the Goddess. During the rituals she shook with convulsions and terror as the magicians present felt a cold wind blowing about and sense the presence of a creature similar to the drawing that Spare had created. Clanda felt that she was lifted up by some birdlike creature and carried off into the night sky. Finally, after struggling, she seemed to break free and fall back to Earth, when she awoke from her trance. Grant claimed that a frosted window showed the talon marks of a large bird and there was still a "gelatinous substance, resembling seaweed" on the window sill. 

Thus we have examples of simple and complex possession. Seabrook's experiment was a case of a simple atavism as might be experienced by a submissive in a "crisis." The case of Clanda, on the other hand, is a complex interaction of possessions, especially considering that the dominant possession was a reification of Spare's drawing. In both cases, the seer was confronting the Dweller on the Threshold -- that entity representing the Palladist's greatest fear, which must be overcome and transmuted into ecstasy. As we have remarked before, the supreme ritual of the New Flesh is Oscar Wilde's drama,  Salome, in which multiple possession and complex S/M technique is required. Of course, one must learn to walk before one can run, but these examples will serve as a guide to the budding Palladist. 

Mention of the Yi King and the Nu Isis lodge naturally brings up the question of symbol-systems. It is a question which occultists have been historically obsessed. We have mentioned such systems. the planetary tables of Randolph, the Armanic runes of Guido von List, the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft and many more. In this matter, it is important not to mistake the forest for the trees. There are many gates to The New Flesh Palladium, but the relevant point is that the gate exists to be entered. It is said that the central experience of the New Flesh is entering  the Body of Babalon. When entering the Body of Babalon, depravity is a sacrament, the perversions are the basis of style. There are traditionally six "modes of congrex" by which entry may be achieved.

1. Oral-Oral: The Seraphic Kiss, also known as the kiss of the serpent.

2. Oral-Genital: The Palladist becomes the idolator and beseecher of the Holy Image for a drink offering. 

3. Genital-Genital: The saltes are leached from calcined material; this refers to humanity, the tears of the sun. 

4. Genital-Anal: Love comes in at the eye, the infernal sun in its down-going

5. Oral-Anal: The Osculum Infamum, or Kiss of Set, the eye is the window of the soul. 

6. Anal-Anal: Kotha, Hollow One, Beast of the Reeds, I know how to to Love, the Janus Phallos. 

As we probe the borders of the New Flesh, it becomes necessary to speak symbolically -- not to mystify, but one does not touch the blood which will bruise . . . instead (wickedly!) he stands incapable of denying his longing, gazing wistfully at his un victim. 

This brings us to the principle of the bloody sacrifice. In fact, all magick is based on sacrifice, or exchange. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. And the process of transformation is what sacrifice is all about. Venification, practiced in a bath of hot water with a sharp razor, has long been a favorite of many adepts, although it has been known to result in death. "The blood is the life" and therefore the most potent sacrifice is the blood, by which we can also infer the sexual fluids. As we have seen, Andrew Jackson Davis referred to the "seminal secretion" as "the sacred menstrum of live . . . the ultimate essence of the blood." P.B. Randolph taught that within the vulva there were little glands, called the glands of Duvernay, and that those glands were "the seat of all vaginal and uterine life." He suggested that their purpose was to store Magnetic fluids and that "trouble seals them up; Love only keeps them open." Similarly, the Cowpers gland in the male collects, stores up and discharges Electric fluid in the semen. PBR saw Man's expulsion from Eden as the separation of these fluids and therefore the mingling male and female essence became the supreme elixir, the Elixir Vitae. Thus it can be seen that the energy of life is present in the blood and, to a greater extent, in the sexual fluids.

The training of these glands will be seen to be of the utmost importance and it is precisely the SM techniques of the New Flesh that are most effective. The artful stimulation and then restraint of the slave by the master can train the glands to collect the odic force completely and to discharge it completely. FOr the male, it is the perfect blending of the testosterone from the testes, the sugary secretion from the seminal vesicles, the electrical fluid from the Cowpers and the lymph from the prostate that creates the semen, which is one half of the complete elixir. From the female, the ovaries and the ducts of Duvernay create the menstrum of magnetic fluid. Thus when the two are combined in love, sometimes manifested by extreme emotion, the supreme elixir I fluid condenser is created. The Top becomes the Master Alchemist and the Bottom the crucible of creation The penis and vagina are actors in the drama, the mouth, palms, breasts and anus are the supporting characters. The potency of the elixir is known by its scent, taste and viscosity. 

Not must the importance of scarification and branding be overlooked. When we that it it love, Eros, that opens the Cowpers and the ducts of Duvernay, it is a love that ever seeks refinement and sophistication. Master Palladists utilize these techniques as physical manifestations of their love. Of course, these are advanced practices and should only be entered into when both Top and Bottom are fully prepared and, indeed, long for the experience. It is significant to note the the relationship between scarification and spirit possession in so-called primitive societies. This is the ultimate form of sigilization, since the blood flows directly out of the body in the very design of the intended sigil, creating a powerful gateway for the desired forces. Practices of scarification are echoed and recorded in the art of tattoo. 

Other "primitive" methods of the New Flesh include piercing and encumberments. While piercing is usually thought of as a cosmetic practice, when it is performed on the genitals and breasts it is more erotic in significance. Especially the various ornaments for penis piercing, like ampallangs and Prince Alberts, can substantially increase sexual pleasure. It also takes on a consciousness altering flavor when combined with suspension. The American Plains Indian ritual of the Sundance in which the initiate hangs from flesh hooks piercing his chest is known to many. Of course, there are many variations to this and, as with all New Flesh practices, imagination is the key. Encumberments (the wearing of heavy bracelets, anklets, neck ornamentation, footwear, manacles, and so on) can be used separately or in conjunction with these techniques. Also, the encumberments can may be used to create constriction, as with corsets, ligatures, rubber clothing and other methods to bring the blood to the surface of the skin and turn on the "love light".

The application of clothespins, an invention of the Shakers, to the nipples and other erogenous zones is a well known SM practice that can produce supersensual effects. Another technique of stimulation is the application of hot wax, dripping from candles to the erogenous zones. If the Palladist is in a state of extreme sexual excitement, this can effectively "push him through the door". 

One of the more esoteric aspects of the New Flesh is the erotic enema. Certain herbal elixirs, such as those used by Dr. Randolph can induce some very special states of consciousness when introduced fully into the bowels. 

A good deal of technical knowledge and planning is required for the Master and the erotic enema is frequently used in conjunction with suspension and other techniques listed previously. The double-enema can be employed to achieve the anal-anal mode of congress. This involves the use of two special "Bardex" nozzles and a T-valve, by which the two participants can pass the elixir solution back and forth from each others' bowels during periods of sexual excitation.

As part of his initiation into the grade of Ipsissimus, the highest initiation possible to man, Aleister Crowley used the faeces of his Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig, as a sacrament. This practice is, in many ways, the supreme act of SM because it is the ultimate gesture of humiliation and therefore establishes the identities of the Top and Bottom most completely. It is considered to be a ritual of an extremely advanced nature and should never be entered into lightly. 

Perhaps the most bizarre rite of faecal worship involves The Ingolstadt Closet. It consists of a brightly illuminated, clear crystal toilet pedestal with a mirrored surface on the underside of the seat cover. Instead of a conventional water trap, the victim's shaven head and face is clamped into position. A rubber collar insures a leak-free seal. 

The ceremony involves the induction of an elixir of sweat, saliva, vaginal secretions, urine and feces of the high priestess into the mouth, nose and eyes of the victim. Some effects of this treatment are known as "Venus Blistering." This is the appearance of hundreds, or thousands, of small blisters all over the victim's face and body, especially centered at the genitals. The ritual is extremely dangerous and has been known to result in death. 

The dominatrix-priestess who presides over this rite is known as a "frotteuse," or fluffer and is often obese or deformed. Sometimes the fluffer well add make-up and body ornaments to more thoroughly represent the Dark Mother. It is in her expertise of monitoring the symptoms of his body, that the victim literally places the trust of his life. 

We have seen that erotic dominance and submission is an exchange of trust and, curiously, respect. It is sexual ecstasy, power and intimacy. It is drama and the building of intensity. It is the religious impulse harnessed to the understanding of Self. All this would seem to imply two separate people uniting, male and female reuniting after separation and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. However, some medical doctors and renegade surgeons have come to believe that both sexes still physically exist within each human being. They think that the organs of the opposite sex are merely dormant and can be revived either through eugenics or surgery. They postulate that such twin-sexed humans could conceive progeny which would not be susceptible to the weakness and short life-span which children of two parents must suffer. It is well-known that such thinkers have implanted sex glands from animals into humans, performed vasoligatures and engaged various experimental surgeries on willing as well as unwilling patients. There can be little doubt that such research is going on today, but the secrecy which surrounds it is impenetrable. If, in fact, these twin sexed beings exist, they would certainly represent the final development of The New Flesh Palladium. For if the Elohim walk amongst us, then it it time to go to the next step. Long live the New Flesh!