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

Although the heyday of bizarre sectarianism paralleled times of economic crisis in Europe—the Inflation (1921- 1923) and the Great Depression (1929-1933)—cultish examples of sex-frenzy could be found much earlier. One phallic-worshipping band surfaced in Schwarzenburg, a German-speaking district in Switzerland, around the 1890s. Founded by Johannes Binggeli, a dwarfish trance-author, the Forest Brotherhood proselytized incest as a “divine” calling. Binggeli referred to his genitals as the “box of Christ” and offered up his urine as a universal healing balm. And when necessary, he slept with his coven of Forest women in order to properly exorcise them of nefarious spirits. Binggeli was finally arrested and tried after it was discovered that he had impregnated his own daughter during one such vision-ceremony. Binggeli was sentenced to a Swiss insane asylum but his specter lingered into the new century.

Master of the Chair: “Jallah! Greetings, my Brothers and Sisters. Are you prepared to enact the Five-fold Alpha ritual with a pure heart and without deceit?”

The Congregation: “We are!”

Master of the Chair: “Brother First Guardian, what is your duty?”

First Guardian: “To determine if we are all Masters of the 18°; if we all bear the sign and the know the grip.”

Master of the Chair: “Execute your office!”

The First Guardian leaves his assigned position and listens to each member. Individually, they whisper the secret password in his ear. He returns to his station and replies, “To Me!”

The Congregation makes the sign of the Master and then the sign of the Magnus Pentalphae.

The First Guardian: “Venerable Master, all those present have made both signs of the 18°. No one here is uninitiated.”

The gong is struck five times, followed by five rings of the silver bell.

The Second Guardian: “All is in order, my Brothers and Sisters!”

Master of the Chair: “Stand, my Brothers and Sisters, and proclaim the oath!”

The Congregation stands, extending their right fists with outstretched thumbs: “We all swear and vow to live and act according to the Holy Laws of the Five-fold Alpha. We will guard and retain the secrets and conceal them from outsiders -- even from our Brothers and Sisters who have not attained the 18°. Death and ruin to traitors! A curse upon their souls! Blessed be the true Chalice of Light, whose strength may preserve us from all temptation! Om!”

They sit.

Master of the Chair walks to the altar: “In Nomine Sator, Rahator, Etan! In Nomine Baphomet. Hal yac yin! Jallah! I call and invoke you, Forces of the Fire Element. Flow into my hands, my heart, and my brain! And give me the power to awake the Serpent!”

The Master of the Chair gestures to the Priestess’ chair. She stands and walks to him in measured steps.

The Master of the Chair traces the sign of the Pentagram over her head and says: “Let the power of the Serpent, the ancient Dragon, awake in you, Daughter of Lilith. She raises up from the darkness of your womb and flows into us with all the power and strength of the Uridaphne!”

The Priestess kneels down and hands a dagger to the Master of the Chair. He lifts it, kisses the blade, and lays it on the altar. Then he goes to the burning tripod and throws a handful of incense and powder into the flames. It flares up bloody red.

The Master of Chair walks to the kneeling Priestess and lays his hands on her head: “Rise up, you blue-lidded Daughter of the Dawn! Do you know me?”

Priestess: “I know you!”

Master of the Chair: “Sister of the Five-Flamed Star, do you feel me?”

Priestess: “Brother, I feel you!”

The Congregation: “Om! Om! Rahalon!”

Master of the Chair: “Sister, give me the sign of recognition!”

The Priestess rips the hood from her head; her mask remains in place: “Placet Magister!”

Master of the Chair: “I still do not recognize you!” He removes his hood.

Priestess: “Jallah!” She unbuttons the upper part of her robe and exposes her breasts.

Master of the Chair: “I still do not recognize you!” He exposes his chest.

With an ecstatic gesture, the Priestess loosens her belt and drops her robe. Naked, she spreads her legs, bends slightly forward, and lifts her arms with her thumbs turned out. She responds ecstatically: “Jallah! Son of Osiris! Do you recognize me now?”

In a corresponding ecstatic gesture, the Master of the Chair tosses aside his robe, so only his mask and the five-sided silver star on his chest remain: “Kufankh-hor!”

The Priestess: “Kuf-ankh-Herpokrat!” She jerks her arms downward and grasps the penis of the Master of the Chair. If it is hard and erect, the Priestess lies down on the altar, spreads her legs, and allows his penis to enter her womb.

At this moment, the Brothers and Sisters stand and circle the altar in a chain, chanting in unison: “Jiyallah! Jiyallah!”

In Ascona, a tiny Alpine village at the southern tip of Switzerland, Central European naturalists, pacifistic vegetarians, Nietzsche-obsessed writers, radical anarchists, Runeists, and devotees of free love and Ausdruckstanz set up various ramshackle campsites and sanatoriums. In the shadow of Monte Verita, between 1900 and 1915, Ascona’s bohemian leaders preached new health regimens, new diets, new communal values, and new sexual practices. By the end of World War I, their teachings had spread to Germany. It was the beginning of an international counterculture.

An embodiment of Carl Jung’s “cosmic man,” Rudolf von Laban in the Twenties restored to dance a super-masculine ethos that many thought classical ballet had leached from the European stage. Most scholars credit Laban with the invention of German Expressive Dance. The movement of the body, he taught, must remain absolutely pure and independent of music and storytelling. In addition, every gesture had to express the ineffable essence of man-in-space, or Body Wisdom.

A self-proclaimed magician and a Grand Master in the Swiss OTO, Laban began to formulate his somatic innovations in 1911. At the edge of Ascona, over a three-year period, he gathered an adoring collective, who listened to his rapturous preachments against modern civilization and how it ripped mankind from its celestial roots. To restore humanity’s Edenic past, Laban devised the concept of abstract movement choirs and community festivals that were organized on the principles of ecstatic movement and a shared Germanic history.

Seeking the physical paradise that their protean teacher nurtured in his gestural experiments, the Laban-dancers lived communally, dining solely on nuts, dried fruits, and grain beverages. They confronted their less enlightened neighbors with nude recitals and a pre-Christian notion of “group marriage.” But Ascona could not contain the indefatigable trickster.

In 1919, Laban founded his first Dance-Theatre Studio in Stuttgart. (Within ten years, there would be 25 Laban studios in Germany and Switzerland alone.) Intellectually, Laban borrowed shamelessly from Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Rudolf Steiner but his abilities to transform other people’s theories into novel and gripping action set the nomadic womanizer apart. It was long rumored that waiting outside the stage doors of Laban’s many repeat concerts were scores of Madonna-faced mistresses, rocking fatherless infants in their arms.