Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Marian Dockerill, a Swiss-born American journalist, described the activities of European and American occult sex societies in a sensational eight-part series, “Confessions of a ‘High Priestess’ in Notorious ‘Love Cults.’” Her illustrated report was syndicated in the Hearst press in March and April of 1926 and later published in a re-edited pulp version, My Life in a Love Cult: A Warning to All Young Girls (Chicago: Better Publications, 1928).

The sister of Lea Hirsig (Aleister Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman”) and a strikingly beautiful woman herself, Dockerill was able to infiltrate and participate in several private Berlin ceremonies in the spring of 1923. Her eyewitness portrayals were unusually graphic and detailed. No contemporary German reportage could rival Dockerill’s astute and in-depth accounts.

Marian remembers entering an elegant Berlin apartment, remade into a hellish sanctuary, lined with black and crimson silk curtains. Blue and red lights created an otherworldly chapel-like atmosphere. Men in black hooded robes, and women in white, sat silently on church pews, where they faced a black-curtained altar. Flutes and violins could be heard playing in an adjoining studio room. The “Priest”—reportedly a real defrocked Catholic priest—entered slowly from a side entrance. Inscribed on his black cowl was a red Satanic pentagram. Behind him was a bare-footed “High Priestess,” wearing a revealing, diaphanous scarlet gown. She swung a censer of burning incense as the “Priest” intoned Latin phrases. It sounded like a traditional Catholic Mass; only the words “Satan” and “evil” were substituted for “God” and “good.” From the ceiling hung an upside-down crucifix.

The “Priest” pulled the altar curtain open. On a tiny black-velvet platform lay a naked 18-year-old girl, the daughter of two cult society members. Her neck and limbs were contorted in severe right angles to her stunning face and torso. The “Living Altar’s” blonde hair touched the floor. Balanced on her smooth breasts stood a golden chalice. The girl appeared to be in a trance, lifeless, like a wax statue. The blue and red lights struck her translucent body in such a way that she seemed to be a Biblical figure in a stained-glass window.

While the “Priest” chanted the Black Mass liturgy, the congregation periodically stood, prostrated themselves, and returned to their benches. After 30 minutes, the “Priest” placed a holy communion wafer on the “Living Altar’s” chest and lifted the cup from her body. He tasted the wine and, in a violent gesture, flung the remaining red liquid across her nude lower torso. In a final sonorous plea, the “Priest” urged Satan to redeem his flock from “all good,” from “all Godly virtue.”

To Dockerill, despite the anti-Catholic provocations and public nudity, the demonic consecration was only symbolically offensive and relatively chaste. She was to learn that it was mere preparation for an entirely different kind of Satanic sex ceremony.

The following night Marian was invited to the mansion of a much talked-about and promiscuous Hungarian countess (probably Agnes Esterhazy) in Berlin West. Eighty guests arrived around midnight, decked out in high fashion. They were separated by gender and directed into two dressing rooms, where costumes and tables of intoxicants awaited them. Besides champagne and brandy, there were boxes of powdered heroin, cocaine, hashish, bottles of morphine, assorted pills, and hypodermic needles. Only a few of the women dabbled with the hard drugs. The others good-naturedly donned the party animal skins, loincloths, and togas.

In the brightly lighted ballroom, an orchestra played strange syncopated music. A huge drum overpowered the musicians with a relentless, frenzied thump. The crowd, mostly in solo positions, moved in jerky steps to the primitive percussive beat.

The room is illuminated in red. A black altar is covered with a white cloth, which has an inverted red Pentagram sewn on it. Over the altar is a five-branch candelabrum, which contains five, burning red candles. Between the altar and the council-chamber table is a flaming tripod. In the corners of the room, red candles flicker.

A hymn “In These Holy Halls” is played. A gong is struck five times.

The Master of the Chair, the Priestess, and the Master of Ceremonies wear red masks. All of the participants and observers are naked underneath their robes.

Tethered to a center platform was an oversized black he-goat. More than frightened, it seemed to be repulsed by the constant din and unnatural movement around it. The bucking animal bleated in counterpoint to the deafening tom-tom. When the music died down, a bearded man with a leopard skin covering his loins leaped to the wooden stage, and began to sing, in a deep bass:

The drunken celebrants responded with disjointed refrains of “Io Pan” and started to disrobe. Then the Dionysian-like festivities began in earnest.

Dockerill described the scene with some care: “I saw a woman turn like a tigress and sink her teeth deep into the shoulder of a man who leaped in front of her. He tore her hair until he broke the grip of her teeth and screamed; he began kissing her brutally. I saw others cutting each other with knives, and a man dragging a woman by her hair and striking her naked shoulders with a whip until they were streaked with blood. And finally, as the culminating horror, I saw a nude woman, with a dagger, leap upon the huge, now completely terrified goat, and cut its throat from ear to ear, so that the blood gushed out in a stream while men and women fought and clawed and tore at each other to bathe in the blood. […] The mad orgy lasted until dawn.”

Over 200 mystic cults and secret societies were active in Central Europe during the interwar period. Most fell into distinct categories: Aryan brotherhoods, American-style Spiritualist organizations, “scientific” astrological circles, chic Satanist clubs, Freemasons, Gnostic associations, Buddhist and pseudo-Buddhist leagues, ascetic Sufi-like communes, Christian dissenters, Theosophical breakaway unions, Rosicrucians, and outlandish occult-political movements. Most groups had their own insignias, liturgical rites, uniforms, publications, and often distinct cuisines. Altogether some two million Germans formally belonged to these non-conformist sects. Another eight million expressed interest in them, sometimes subscribing to a variety of journals or attending multiple services. Berliners veered to the most self-gratifying new-age religions.