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

On January 30th, Hitler came to power. Three weeks later, Hanussen inaugurated his Palace of the Occult in the center of Berlin. Opening night was, to be sure, a bizarre blend of slinky glamour, politics, and over-the-top occultism. Blonde, blue-eyed docents (in diaphanous togas) led the visitors into the Palace’s Hall of Silence, where they heard the Great Clairvoyant pontificate from a throne set on a hydraulic lift. Most of the guests came for the devilish theatrics and high-society party atmosphere, but, at midnight, a history-shaking séance took place in the Room of Glass.

In front of Berlin’s leading editors and tastemakers, Hanussen spookily predicted the destruction of the Reichstag by “divine fire.” It was yet another amusing forecast from the Fourth Dimensional Telepath. Twenty hours later, however, the Reichstag did ignite in flames. It signaled the end of democratic Germany and, one month later, cost Hanussen his life.

In 1937, Thoma quietly relocated to London. For several years, he collaborated with Alexander Cannon, Britain’s most prominent parapsychologist, and befriended Aleister Crowley, a former head of Germany’s OTO.

The O.T.O., or Ordo Templi Orientis, emerged from the chaotic Austro-Hungarian underground of secret Occult-Scientific societies and fragmenting Masonic orders. A prominent Austrian chemist and yoga enthusiast, Carl Kellner plotted its development in 1904 and envisioned his organization as a twentieth-century priesthood with selective borrowings from past esoteric organizations. At first, he sought to combine the successive hierarchies and initiation rites of French Rosicrucianism with the transnational and Gnostic elements buried in Madame Blavatsky’s much maligned Theosophy.

In Vienna, Kellner had studied fakir body magic—such as arresting his pulse, popping his eyeballs out of their sockets, piercing his tongue—and later mastered the psychophysical work of India’s wonder-working sadhus. Yogic breath control and Sex Magic were to be the OTO’s practical and signature centerpieces.

Kellner wrote that each of the ten chakras could be regulated through directed breathing. He experimented with an inverted form of Kundalini yoga, where sexual energy from the genitals, or the Naga chakra (which he called Napa), was channeled into the solar plexus through meditation and rhythmic inhalation. Dressed as a Babylonian priest, Kellner and his wife practiced a new form of tantric Sex Magic. They firmly believed that their ceremonial conservation of sperm and vaginal fluids was life’s Elixir, liquid prana or the watery solution found in the Holy Grail, the very source of wonder-working White Magic.

Kellner did not live long enough to fulfill his occult aims. He died in his laboratory, following an episode of a paranoiac panic. A former opera singer, German-British war correspondent, and Prussian spy, Theodor Reuss claimed to inherit Kellner’s mission in 1905. He named it the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Reuss supplemented Kellner’s tantric teachings with Manichean and Wagnerian concepts regarding the division of Spirit and Material Worlds. Only Sex Magic brought them into direct contact.

According to Peter-Robert Koenig’s insightful and extensive explanation of early OTO practice, “The sensations that form slowly within Man and Woman sexually joined come not from the conjunction of the physical parts, but from the male and female sexual polarities in contact. Correct breathing patterns affect the chemistry of the bloodstream and so bring about a change in the internal environment of the brain. Consciousness ego moves away to make room for divine power. Sexual energy then can be preserved. Using correct breathing, both lead to the transmutation of energy, where the Magician becomes a Clairvoyant.” (“O.T.O. Phenomenon,” 1994)

The German OTO and its British subsidiary (Mysteria Mystica Maxima) attracted equal numbers of Jazz Age mystics, horny intellectuals, genuine nirvana seekers, and power-mad opportunists. Its international membership was never large—in the hundreds—and its leadership utterly unstable, disagreeable, or transitory.

Unfortunately Reuss suffered from a debilitating stroke in 1920 and more hedonistic and darker personalities entered into the OTO Berlin scene. For six years, beginning in 1924, Heinrich Tränker organized OTO Black Masses at the Club Amazon near the Halleschen Gate. Each Walpurgis Night (one stroke after midnight May 1st) began with the ravings of a naked virgin tied to a wooden crucifix. While OTO members sipped from flutes of champagne, the trance-speaker offered up visions of the coming year. Afterward three or four initiates were inducted into Tränker’s Great Lodge. The men swore alliance to the Order by placing their left hands on their exposed and erect penises.

The English-speaking Reuss had been in contact with Aleister Crowley since 1911. Their relationship was one of approach-avoidance. For seven years in Great Britain, New York, and Paris, the radical mountain-climbing artist and poet experimented with Sex Magick rites and advanced his counter-Christian religion, Crowleyanity. Mixing astrology, Kabalah, Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, and Gnosticism, Crowley promulgated a Left-Handed Magic known as the Laws of Thelema. (“Love is the Law.” “Do What Thou Wilt!”)

In many quarters, Crowley (Master Therion or the Great Beast 666) was considered something of a genius. But his uncompromising personality, devotion to drugs (cocaine, hashish, opium, and heroin), abusive manipulation of cultish followers, and, especially, his enthusiasm for sometimes lethal “erotomagic” diversions earned him the rubric “the Wickedest Man in the World.”

Crowley devised a System of Twelve OTO Degrees of initiation, five of which related to Sex Magic: 7th, Adoration of the Phallus; 8th, Masturbation; 9th, Vaginal Intercourse; 10th, Fertilization; 11th, Anal Intercourse. Some scholars ascribed Crowley’s ritual perversions to his repressed homosexual character. Although he mostly slept with women, he preferred anal contact and often needed homely or masculine women to dominate him.

In June 1926, Crowley was invited to a German OTO conference in Hohenleuben. (Although the ailing Reuss had declared Crowley’s Book of the Law Bolshevik in spirit, he was determined to appoint its author his heir and Outer Head of the Order (OHO) in 1922.) The meeting, which took place three years after Reuss’ demise, was puzzling and self-defeating. The OTOers splintered into three groups: the Pansophic Working Group (headed by Tränker, who soon denounced the Englishman’s elevation to “World Savior”); the Thelema-Verlag Society, which translated and published Crowley’s works (led by Martha Küntzel, a rabid Nazi supporter in the next decade); and the OTO-Pansophy, a pro-Crowley outfit that was nominally controlled by Karl Germer.