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

In Vienna, Franz Saettler founded his own private sex cult in 1925. A noted scholar and linguist of medieval Persian, north Arabic dialects, and conversational Farsi, Saettler claimed that he discovered the ancient source of all religions in the ruins of Olbia, near Mount Olympus, in 1913. It was called Adonism. Its extant rites could be seen in secret ceremonies carried out among the Druses and Yezidis (so-called Devil-Worshippers) in the mountains of Syria, the Caucasus rim, and in an unchartered area of western Persia known as Nuristan. The polytheistic rituals involved animal sacrifice and fornication with temple prostitutes, performed under the enchanting glare of a full moon.

Writing under the nom de plume “Dr. Chakum Musallam,” Saettler published over 30 books on the urreligion Adonism and its occult application to modern times. Besides subscriber-only tomes and monthly journals, Saettler, through his Master Lodge Hekate, sold astrological readings, aphrodisiacs and “oriental” talismans, pendulums, invisible inks, alchemic formulas, magic gems, and counterfeit resident permits.

In 1927, Saettler joined with the Berlin mystic, Rah-Omir (Friedrich Wilhelm Quintscher), head of the New Order of Mental Builders, to form the International Adonistic Society. Rah-Omir Quintscher’s previous claim to fame involved his infamous Tepha machine that projected lethal “astral electro-magnetic” rays into the bodies of his enemies. Like flattened Voodoo dolls, photographs of the beleaguered targets were bombarded by invisible long-range waves.

Saettler and Quintscher’s dubious enterprise attracted thousands of mail-order adepts from Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, France, Spain, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States. In a sense, it was a classic pyramid scheme. Wealthy Adonists were induced to buy their way into the higher branches of the association and then sell lesser titles to more naive initiates or purchase shares in the “Olbia 209 209 Goldbank.” Besides occult tchotchkes—including a mysterious elixir called Biogon—and overnight dividends, the Adonistic Society’s main appeal was Sex Magic lessons, in pamphlet form, written by an authentic Nuristan seeress, madam to a sacred harem.

In April 1932, the Viennese Vice Police busted Dr. Musallam for mail fraud and sexual misconduct. According to newspaper reports, all they found in Saettler’s apartment were roomfuls of Adonic documents and a foxy secretary named Justine Schnattinger. Evidently she was the Society’s “High Nuristani Priestess.”

Although both the crafty doctor and his accomplice died of natural causes (Saettler in 1942 and Quintscher three years later on the day Germany surrendered to the Western Allies), contemporary Adonistic study groups and reprints of Musallam’s serialized publications can be found today on the Internet.

America’s new religions, like Christian Science and the Latter Day Saints, washed up on German shores following the Armistice. Frequently these foreign creeds developed in perverse and hysterical ways. Minor aspects of their stated principles were often emphasized and exaggerated. Naturally the occult elements transfixed German converts and missionaries alike. Two invented faiths also contained original sexual precepts. These were Karezza and Mazdaznanism.

Created in Chicago in 1896 by Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham, one of the most extraordinary American life-reformists of her generation, Karezza borrowed heavily from the abandoned and much-maligned eugenic practices of the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York and Dravidian tantric customs from a polyandrous tribe in British India. Stockham, one of only five licensed female physicians in the U.S., proposed a radical and scientific means for marital bliss: long-term coitus sublimatus. Unlike John Humphrey Noyes, who championed “multiple marriage,” male continence, and socially directed human breeding for his Oneida collective during the 1870s, Stockham thought both male and female orgasms harmed the health and perennial joy of all wedded couples. She traveled to the Malabar Coast and observed the matriarchal habits of the Nayars. Tantric sex there, where harems of husbands engaged in non-climactic intercourse with their wives, seemed to improve the Nayars’ appearance and intellectual well-being.

In a self-published pamphlet entitled Karezza Ethics of Marriage (New York, 1896), Stockham explained the spiritual rational behind Hindu Sacred Sex. “In the physical union of male and female there may be a soul communion giving not only supreme happiness, but in turn to soul growth and development.” Quaker-educated, Stockham thought sexual self-control equally heightened love interest while it redirected “wasted,” finite creative energy into solving vexing social problems. Rather than a philosophy of abstinence, Karezza actually encouraged erotic contact but in an exalted, protracted, and always emission-less form. Her booklet even provided detailed instruction for the basic tantric interchange.

Outside Berlin, Werner Zimmermann established a Karezza colony and translated Karezza texts, which had long been discarded in the land of their birth. A 72-year-old American supporter, William Lloyd even blessed Zimmermann’s efforts, which had added vegetarianism, lectures on human electrical impulses (Magnetation), meditation, nudity, and Aryan renewal to Stockham’s medical thesis. The German Karezzalites believed European qualms over declining birth rates were responsible for their lack of substantial growth. Berlin tabloids had a field day exposing a sex cult that militated against sexual relief.

Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish fashioned a more successful German-American fusion. Born in Leipzig, Hanish studied Zoroastrian doctrine in southeast Persia. He moved to America at the turn of the century and estab-lished the first Mazdaznan temple, the Church of the Master of Divine Thought, off Manhattan’s Central Park. Unfortunately, his well-heeled congregation was riled when Hanish was charged with immoral behavior and sodomy with his boy-acolytes, their children. Hanish moved the Mazdaznan presses and center of operations to Chicago and then to Los Angeles. Vice squads in both cities issued fresh warrants for his arrest.

In 1917, Hanish established the Mazdaznan World Centre, Aryana, on the edge of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. From there, his pseudo-Zoroastrian regimens of sexual hygiene and racial purity quickly spread. Hanish schooled his parishes in yoga-like exercises of breath control, rhythmic gymnastics (the Egyptian postures), and proper mastication. The Mazdaznan diet not only dispensed with meat and processed foods, it forbade all “impure” substances. Week-long fasts, vomit fêtes, high colonics, and “natural laxative” tonics—made from linden and elder blossoms—ensured a craving for Mazdaznan bean stews and hot fruit juices. Their prayer services involved symbolic color projections and Near-Eastern chants. These devotional acts and constraints were said to “super-activate” the glands that produce rejuvenating sex hormones.