The cult rapidly grew, but not all those who desired to consider themselves as witches shared Gardner’s voyeuristic and masochistic preoccupations, and a gradual process of evolution led to the emergence, on the one hand, of groups of the utmost respectability, some of which even went so far as to eschew the traditional nudity, and, on the other hand, of covens which emphasised sexuality even more than Gardner himself. For a time Gardner managed to act as a sort of unitary centre and to keep these diverging trends in some sort of co-operative relationship with one another. After his death in 1964, however, the evolutionary process seems to have accelerated and today the cult is more segmented than ever before. At the present time there are at least five competing splinter movements (each, inevitably, claiming the sole orthodoxy) varying from one with an almost puritanical attitude towards sex, and largely concerned with traditional ritual magic, to another which incorporates almost every variety of sexual perversion, from anilinctus to zoophilia into its rituals.4
It was into one of the more extreme of the sexually inclined covens that “my” witch, Marian, had been initiated. It will be remembered that the first-degree “Gardnerian” rite involved scourging. In many covens this “suffering in order to learn” has become symbolic, no more than a few token flicks administered by either the High Priest (to female candidates) or the High Priestess (to male candidates). Exactly the opposite process had taken place in Marian’s coven; at her initiation she had been stripped, tied up so tightly that her circulation had been impeded, and heavily beaten on the back, buttocks and even breasts by not only the Priest but by each member of the coven. This heavy scourging was continued until Marian was bruised and bleeding—she told me that she had been so badly scarred that it had become impossible for her to wear a low-cut dress.
Marian’s admission to the third degree—by which she became a High Priestess in her own right—was even more traumatic an experience. She had expected to undergo ritual sexual intercourse with the High Priest, but she found that the High Priestess, who seems to have been the dominant figure in this coven, had decided that she herself would “initiate” Marian with the aid of a dildo. The High Priestess justified this plan with the argument that a sodomitical interlude between the High Priest and a young male initiate had “reversed the physical plane polarities of the Chiefs” and that to restore the balance it was essential that she herself should play the male part in what she primly referred to as “an act of lesbian love-making”. “Love-making” is hardly the term I would have chosen to describe what actually took place. For the dildo used was very old, unlubricated, and made of wood. Marian found the experience extremely unpleasant, suffered great pain, and eventually had to have medical treatment in order to remove splinters from her vagina. Nevertheless, there were clearly masochistic elements in Marian’s psychological make-up, for it was apparent that she extracted a certain amount of emotional stimulation and fulfilment from telling me this unpleasant story. I wondered whether Marian and the other members of her coven were simply sado-masochists, using witchcraft as a means of living out their own pathetic fantasies, or whether, just possibly, they were something more, whether, in fact they were following the ancient and almost forgotten tradition of using pain and sex as a means of achieving ecstasy—ecstasy in the full sense of God-intoxication.
Over the next three months I had many conversations with Marian. As time passed, and she became aware that I was a reasonably sympathetic listener, she told me more and more about her coven’s beliefs, the sado-sexual techniques used by its members, and, most important of all, what those techniques were designed to achieve.5 Almost against my will I gradually came to the conclusion that these people were no ordinary “bunch of perverts”, out for kicks, but were (however misguided their beliefs might be), genuinely striving to transcend the limits of ordinary consciousness and to reach what Hindus call samadhi—that Union in which subject and object become one.
Marian’s revelation fascinated me. I began to devote a good deal of puzzled thought to the complex interconnections between sexuality, religion and western occultism and decided to undertake a brief study of the subject. As I read books, letters and manuscripts my puzzlement grew. For, from my knowledge of present-day sexual magic, I knew that there was present in western occultism an underground strain of the oriental sexual-religious-magical philosophy known as Tantricism, and I had always assumed that this had ultimately derived from Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis6—but to my surprise I found what seemed to be a Tantric element in western occultism before Crowley was even born! I found it, for example, hinted at in the allegedly Rosicrucian writings of Hargrave Jennings.7 I determined that my first task must be to trace down the source of these first faint echoes of Bengali and Tibetan sex-magic and I decided to start with Hargrave Jennings, whom I knew had both been obsessed by sex and friendly with several dubious scholars, anyone of whom might have been the link for which I was looking.
I approached Timothy d’Arch Smith, a bibliographer whose knowledge of the more obscure byways of Victorian literature is unequalled, and asked him for his help.
“Do you by any chance know”, he asked me, “whether Jennings was friendly with a pornographer named Edward Sellon?”
I replied that I not only thought it possible but was fairly sure that such a friendship had existed; for in a copy of an anonymously written, wretchedly illustrated, Victorian pornographic novel—the property of a private collector with whom I was acquainted—I had seen Hargrave Jennings’ bookplate. An MS note on the flyleaf of the same volume, presumably written by Jennings himself, conveyed the information that the illustrations were by a certain Captain Edward Sellon, now deceased, and that the writer of the note had known him well.
“There,” said Timothy, “is almost certainly your connecting link. Have a look at Sellon’s Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus and see if it gives you any clues.”
Taking Timothy’s advice I went along to the library of the British Museum, where I found Sellon’s own copy of the Annotations, a splendid volume in which he had bound up many of his own watercolours and drawings along with the printed sheets.
As I read I began to find that the material before me was oddly familiar; I soon felt sure that I had previously read parts of it, or at least something very similar to parts of it. I turned to Jennings’ book Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial. To my astonishment I found that the sixth and fifteenth chapters of it had been lifted bodily, without the benefit of quotation marks, from Sellon’s Annotations!
Timothy d’Arch Smith had been quite right; Sellon was the man for whom I had been looking, the man whose writings had first brought Tantricism to the attention of occidental occultists.
1 See Appendix A—“The Dildo in History”.
2 A more detailed examination of the origins of this movement is made in Chapter XXI