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

Tränker’s former assistant and a decorated spy, Germer financially sustained the peripatetic Crowley through the remainder of the Twenties. It was a difficult task. Master Therion was hopelessly addicted to heroin and spent much time and treasure in London court-rooms, defending his fading reputation. Crowley’s relationship to his core flock and Scarlet Women fared no better. Some died; others abandoned him thoroughly.

In April 1930, the 55-year-old Crowley settled in Berlin. He hoped to sell a gallery room of Thelema-themed paintings and portraits but was utterly unsuccessful. The Berliner Tageblatt identified him “as something between Karl May [the pulp novelist] and Schopenhauer.” Most of Crowley’s efforts went into securing his position as a committed Sex Magician and visionary philosopher. Eventually even Germer, who claimed the Great Beast once attempted to seduce him, became alienated from the Thelematic lawgiver.

Crowley returned to London in 1932 and the fabled OTO Lodges virtually disappeared from the country of their birth.

Of all the interwar German cults devoted to applied Sex Magic, Eugen Grosche’s Fraternitas Saturni (FS) had the greatest visibility and stimulated the most controversy. It also attracted the largest number of participating female adepts and survived the Nazi regime, World War, and Allied Occupation.

Born in Leipzig in 1888, Grosche just managed to escape the abject poverty of his youth. At age 22, he joined a Berlin publishing firm, where he edited a long list of business and trade journals. In 1919, he was appointed People’s Commissar and a district organizer for one of Berlin’s tiny revolutionary parties. After serving a brief prison sentence, he opened a bookstore of esoterica.

In 1921, Tränker appointed Grosche the Berlin head of the Pansophical Lodge. Over the next few years, the antiquarian founded the independent Inveha Verlag and studied astrology, hypnosis, crystal-gazing, trance art, Hollow-Earth theories, and magic healing. During the years of Pansophy’s slow disintegration, Grosche took the occult name Grand Master Gregor A. Gregorius. He had only a fleeting interest in Crowley’s OTO dominion (although later published a number of Master Therion’s tracts).

Between 1926 and 1928, Grosche established, with Albin Grau (the set designer for F.W. Murnau’s vampire epic Nosferatu ), a new occult secret society. They called it the Fraternitas Saturni. Forty members of Tränker’s group broke with the German OTO and enlisted en masse in the FS’s more vital and notorious enterprise.

Grosche attempted to link all aspects of Twenties’ Occult-Sciencism into a unified system of beliefs: Pharaonic architecture, psychoanalysis, hormone-inducing substances, Kabalah, non-Euclidean physics, yoga, Peruvian sacrificial rites, electro-magneticism, and astrology combined with Sex Magick and hypnotic ritual. The principal text that animated the FS’s cryptic philosophy was the Gnostic Gospel of John. In the discarded Palestinian bit of apocrypha, three divinities granted humanity occult powers: Satan, the Virgin Mary, and Berbelo, God’s female mirror image. According to the ancient writing, Creation only began when God saw his reflection in a stream of water. The female face, Berbelo, implored the Ain-Sof to conjure up other life-forms.

The Berbelo Gnostics, Grosche wrote, performed a peculiar array of pre-Renaissance Satanic rites. At their communal celebrations and prayer sessions, they drank an especially intoxicating sparkling wine and ate forbidden foods. Following their blessed feasts, the female Gnostics were instructed to find new sexual partners—“Rise up and give yourself to my brother!” The ejaculate and menstrual blood from these unions (discharges from virgins were considered to be the most efficacious) was then mixed with honey, pepper, and other spices to craft a sacred potion or ointment that mimicked “Spermatikos Logos,” the seed carrier of divine reason. The priestly consumption of that strange liquid (“stolen lightning”) became the climactic moment of their worship of Christ and Saturn.

In the backroom lecture hall of his antiquarian store, Grosche taught mirror magic and astrological positions for sexual intercourse. He also prescribed cocaine, peyote extracts, and advocated the use of hashish.

Most of the leading OTO personalities thought little of Grosche’s character or Satanic preachments. Frau Küntzel ridiculed him as a “Black Brother.” Germer denounced him as a “sex-maniac” and “one of the lowest types of occultist” that he ever met. But Grosche’s FS grew.

By 1929, FS Lodges had formed in Berlin, Dresden, and Bucharest. They aligned with Saettler’s International Adonistic Society and issued Magic Newsletters and a three-color quarterly, the Saturn Gnosis . At Grosche’s bookstore, one could not only buy FS pamphlets on astrology and karma, pendulum forecasts, and sacred coitus but also hear lectures on “Homosexuality and Esotericism” and “Vampirism and Blood-Magic.”

Membership in the FS involved a five-year apprenticeship and its Berlin headquarters tutored at least 200 neophytes. Trance-painting and “astrological music” were presented at their meetings but the organization was unable to outlive the Great Depression and unending financial collapse that followed.

In 1930, Grosche was forced to sell his Berlin center of operations. He reportedly set up shop as a psychoanalyst. After the Gestapo seized his private library in 1936, Grosche escaped to Ticino, in the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland. He returned to Berlin after the war and attempted to revive the FS. Three years before he died in 1963, Grosche published a fanciful novel, Exoriale , which apparently documented the FS’ sex practices from the 1920s.■

The social boundarybetween vicious criminal behavior and unconventional sex became increasingly blurred during the Weimar era. For one, German courts gave voice to public defenders and criminologists who believed that domestic and street violence, underworld pursuits, and outlaw activity in general were deeply rooted in implacable hormonal imbalances. Some psychologists maintained that all crime, from kleptomania to strangulation, was a form of sexual discharge. The puzzle of how and why the criminal mind functioned differently and required hypererotic and illicit sources of gratification intrigued not only Germany’s academicians and social scientists but permeated the pages, canvases, and screens of Weimar’s popular culture.