Eighteenth Century Esoterics and Playboys
Emanuel Swedenborg [Graphic Novel] (1982)
Christopher Hasler/John Kaczmarczyk
The Hell-Fire Friars:Sex Politics and Religion (2002)
Gerald Suster
The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003)
Ian McCalman
The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008)
Evelyn Lord
Available at a ridiculously low price from the Swedenborg
Society in Bloomsbury, a graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel
Swedenborg by Hasler and Kaczmarczyk provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the
geniuses of early Modern Europe. He is as important in his way
as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, someone struggling to make sense of the
world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of
perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around
him would have taken for granted.
Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the world far into the future. In Swedenborg's case, his more creative ideas were lost in an age of scientific materialism but they may yet be discovered again as fruitful raw material for a new age that takes us beyond the limits of pure science. But where to begin with Swedenborg without simply reproducing the text of this short work with glosses? In summary, this polymath and undoubted genius was a Swedish representative of a movement, led from Northern Europe, that was to place science and scientific exploration at the centre of Western culture and of which the Royal Society might be regarded as the type. It is now well understand that early modern science and faith-based irrationalism were much more tightly bound than many would like to think - Newton's occult biblical interpretations and alchenical experiments are only the most famous example.
Well travelled and highly intelligent, the first half of Swedenborg's life was dedicated to the service of his country as a politician, as mining specialist and as diplomat. Fortunate to be born well out of the territory of the Catholic Church, he was permitted much freer range to take advantage of that turn towards the inner and the spiritual that can affect many men as they reach middle age. He applied himself to this with the same determination that he applied to the investigation of matter as an engineer and metallurgist - and to whatever other sciences took his fancy.
His revelation was really an adaptation of Christianity (some might say a heresy though no such charges ever stuck in his life time), based on 'visions' that, to him, were undoubtedly real, of what heaven, hell and God's will were really all about. This was a Christianity for the Enlightenment in which he (or rather God and the angels) castigated the existing churches for cupidity and being run like corporations (Catholicism in particular) or for dour joylessness (the Reformed Churches of Northern Europe) while equally claiming that pleasure for the sake of pleasure (in the conditions of eternity) would soon pall and that the spirit was most fulfilled when it worked with and for others.
His vision of Heaven (and Hell) certainly requires a leap of faith today but it is attractive in its basic humanity and downright goodness. It also accords far more with what free men of good will are actually like while his Enlightenment criticisms of conventional Christianity were certainly spot on and stand today. He was, historically, overtaken by events. He was the last gasp of attempts to build an occult supernatural vision of the human potential for goodness within the bounds of orthodox Christianity (he writes nothing that is not consistent with scripture). Less than two decades after his death, the French Revolution and the cult of the Illuminati shifted the creation of Heaven firmly across the boundary from the next world to this and set in motion the wheels of secularism and of secular religions such as liberalism, scientific positivism, communism and fascism.
It might be thought that he is of no consequence except as a historical footnote but his ideas and his genius remain surprisingly 'sticky' in modern esoteric culture. There are, of course, universalist Christians who still find him inspiring and there are non-Christians who do not accept his visions as necessarily true in themselves (and to be culture-bound) but who see his extensive work and writings as raw material for the study of the primordial nature of the mind as spirit and as a consciousness that is more than what it is immediately conscious of. This is territory ploughed by Jung and the psychoanalysts, by drug researchers, by anthropologists and by students of comparative religion and now by cognitive and neuro-scientists.
Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the world far into the future. In Swedenborg's case, his more creative ideas were lost in an age of scientific materialism but they may yet be discovered again as fruitful raw material for a new age that takes us beyond the limits of pure science. But where to begin with Swedenborg without simply reproducing the text of this short work with glosses? In summary, this polymath and undoubted genius was a Swedish representative of a movement, led from Northern Europe, that was to place science and scientific exploration at the centre of Western culture and of which the Royal Society might be regarded as the type. It is now well understand that early modern science and faith-based irrationalism were much more tightly bound than many would like to think - Newton's occult biblical interpretations and alchenical experiments are only the most famous example.
Well travelled and highly intelligent, the first half of Swedenborg's life was dedicated to the service of his country as a politician, as mining specialist and as diplomat. Fortunate to be born well out of the territory of the Catholic Church, he was permitted much freer range to take advantage of that turn towards the inner and the spiritual that can affect many men as they reach middle age. He applied himself to this with the same determination that he applied to the investigation of matter as an engineer and metallurgist - and to whatever other sciences took his fancy.
His revelation was really an adaptation of Christianity (some might say a heresy though no such charges ever stuck in his life time), based on 'visions' that, to him, were undoubtedly real, of what heaven, hell and God's will were really all about. This was a Christianity for the Enlightenment in which he (or rather God and the angels) castigated the existing churches for cupidity and being run like corporations (Catholicism in particular) or for dour joylessness (the Reformed Churches of Northern Europe) while equally claiming that pleasure for the sake of pleasure (in the conditions of eternity) would soon pall and that the spirit was most fulfilled when it worked with and for others.
His vision of Heaven (and Hell) certainly requires a leap of faith today but it is attractive in its basic humanity and downright goodness. It also accords far more with what free men of good will are actually like while his Enlightenment criticisms of conventional Christianity were certainly spot on and stand today. He was, historically, overtaken by events. He was the last gasp of attempts to build an occult supernatural vision of the human potential for goodness within the bounds of orthodox Christianity (he writes nothing that is not consistent with scripture). Less than two decades after his death, the French Revolution and the cult of the Illuminati shifted the creation of Heaven firmly across the boundary from the next world to this and set in motion the wheels of secularism and of secular religions such as liberalism, scientific positivism, communism and fascism.
It might be thought that he is of no consequence except as a historical footnote but his ideas and his genius remain surprisingly 'sticky' in modern esoteric culture. There are, of course, universalist Christians who still find him inspiring and there are non-Christians who do not accept his visions as necessarily true in themselves (and to be culture-bound) but who see his extensive work and writings as raw material for the study of the primordial nature of the mind as spirit and as a consciousness that is more than what it is immediately conscious of. This is territory ploughed by Jung and the psychoanalysts, by drug researchers, by anthropologists and by students of comparative religion and now by cognitive and neuro-scientists.
Recommended as a quick and easy
introduction to this genius, the real value might be in the encouragement to go to the Swedenborg Society's bookshop
in London and look over some of the biographies and reprints of his
works - and perhaps pick up the works of some of those other writers such as Blake who clearly existed in the same general
milieu of enlightened criticism of the conventional. There is one
footnote to be added here. Christianity was pompous, corrupt and often
vicious, certainly dull and living off negative emotion, but it was
never racist. Scientific materialism constructed, with the discovery by
Darwin of natural selection, a monstrous view of humanity that ended up
in the death camps by way of imperialism, not just as trade with guns
but as a moral imperative to 'improve' the lesser breeds beyond the law
(an attitude that, shorn of racial prejudice, still underlies much
liberal progressivism in its dealings with the emerging world).
Swedenborg was determinedly anti-racist while having a strong view of cultural predispositions (placing we English as far more open-minded than Germans). But, to him, the Africans, treated as slaves, were most beloved in heaven and he saw pagans as more easily brought to God than conventional Christians and the allegedly civilised. These insights place him firmly as superior to the pseudo-universalising arrogance of what was to emerge from the Enlightenment as it decayed into cant (excuse the pun!) even if he might have been a little patronising from ignorance of non-European peoples in other respects. The beauty of Swedenborg is that he believed in science as method but was not enslaved by it. His humanity, his commitment to consciousness or spirit as different from matter and as something that emerged by questioning from within, rather than through acceptance of what was enforced as Belief by others, is a high point in Western thought. Only in recent decades are we coming close once again to that combined respect for scientific method, respect for the individual and a constant critique of authority that marks true civilisation and which is at risk from governments frightened of their peoples even as we write.
Swedenborg was determinedly anti-racist while having a strong view of cultural predispositions (placing we English as far more open-minded than Germans). But, to him, the Africans, treated as slaves, were most beloved in heaven and he saw pagans as more easily brought to God than conventional Christians and the allegedly civilised. These insights place him firmly as superior to the pseudo-universalising arrogance of what was to emerge from the Enlightenment as it decayed into cant (excuse the pun!) even if he might have been a little patronising from ignorance of non-European peoples in other respects. The beauty of Swedenborg is that he believed in science as method but was not enslaved by it. His humanity, his commitment to consciousness or spirit as different from matter and as something that emerged by questioning from within, rather than through acceptance of what was enforced as Belief by others, is a high point in Western thought. Only in recent decades are we coming close once again to that combined respect for scientific method, respect for the individual and a constant critique of authority that marks true civilisation and which is at risk from governments frightened of their peoples even as we write.
The Hell-Fire Friars was a very disappointing book from the late
Gerald Suster who may have been over-indulged by his Editors or perhaps been stubborn in his own right.. The
Disinformation biography of the author noted that "it was a career long aspiration to get it published
without excessive editorial interference". It is sad that he lacked
sufficient self-knowledge to understand that the 'will' is sometimes
insufficient to produce a good book. It is, at times, like a cobbled
together set of notes. Ostensibly it is a book about the Dashwood
circle, wrongfully termed the 'Hellfire Club' and rightly termed the
'Monks of Medmenham', and its influence on the culture and politics of
the mid-eighteenth century. Instead, it is a mish-mash of poorly
co-ordinated speculation on the religious views of Dashwood and on the
politics of the period in the form of short biographies and anecdotes,
entertaining in themselves, but which tell us very little that is not
available on the internet or in general histories.
There are two competing views of the Medmenham circle. The first is the official one from the family that the Wycombe caves (carved out at considerable expense) and the goings-on of the 'set' were merely the typical foibles of unaccountable equivalents of today's private equity bosses, possibly dressed up with a bit of taboo and transgression, much as one might if one had a decent budget to spend at Coco de Mer and on some high-class escorts. The second view, Suster's being typical and seen through the lens of the rise of sub-aristocratic High Magick at the end of the next century, is that Dashwood was an aristocratic radical libertarian with a religious mission, importing Eastern religious ideas, occult and esoteric Magick and pagan revivalism into a new vision of culture, politics and religion. Similar claims are made around the circle of (say) John Dee and there is a vigorous and often ill-tempered debate about the 'politics' of Aleister Crowley which we looked at in an earlier post.
The problem is that - as with Crowley's escapades - the actual information available is so limited that judgements have to be made on common sense and a knowledge of the period and of human nature, preferably without ideological presuppositions. Unfortunately Suster is a full-blown 'thelemite'. His own prejudices seem determined to 'interpret' the evidence much as a Christian author might 'interpret' the Life of St. Augustine.
There are two competing views of the Medmenham circle. The first is the official one from the family that the Wycombe caves (carved out at considerable expense) and the goings-on of the 'set' were merely the typical foibles of unaccountable equivalents of today's private equity bosses, possibly dressed up with a bit of taboo and transgression, much as one might if one had a decent budget to spend at Coco de Mer and on some high-class escorts. The second view, Suster's being typical and seen through the lens of the rise of sub-aristocratic High Magick at the end of the next century, is that Dashwood was an aristocratic radical libertarian with a religious mission, importing Eastern religious ideas, occult and esoteric Magick and pagan revivalism into a new vision of culture, politics and religion. Similar claims are made around the circle of (say) John Dee and there is a vigorous and often ill-tempered debate about the 'politics' of Aleister Crowley which we looked at in an earlier post.
The problem is that - as with Crowley's escapades - the actual information available is so limited that judgements have to be made on common sense and a knowledge of the period and of human nature, preferably without ideological presuppositions. Unfortunately Suster is a full-blown 'thelemite'. His own prejudices seem determined to 'interpret' the evidence much as a Christian author might 'interpret' the Life of St. Augustine.
My reading is that the truth lies
somewhere between extremes. The Medmenham Friars were a louche and
sexually active drinking club but Dashwood was genuinely interested in
finding some meaning in existence that was not the severe Enlightenment
reasonableness of the Freemasons nor the dull as dish water conformity
of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' squirearchy supported by the
parson. Perhaps he could see that religious 'enthusiasm' will 'out' eventually and
that personal freedom from convention (available only to the few in any case)
would be curtailed by something po-faced and worthy like the Methodism
that suited middle class 'ressentiment' of aristocratic
pleasure-seekers. The Victorian effect on the soul, especially on that
of free-thinking women, can make the eighteenth century look like a
Golden Age to some.
There is no doubt that something 'spiritual' was going on with Dashwood - the tipping of the hat to Rabelais might be no more than hedonism but the elaborate symbolism of Medmenham and the caves at West Wycombe do stand up to scrutiny as an expensive attempt to revive something pagan and dionysiac working at a deeper level (literally). The library undoubtedly contained important material suggesting both Eastern transgression (supplied through the Vansittart Governor of Bengal) and a dabbling in ceremonial magic. The Catholic Church, as so often, appears as the enemy as one would expect in any political ideology that defended a 'republic of aristocrats' against its pretensions. But the silence and secrecy also suggested transgression that even the easy-going British aristocratic system of the period might find unacceptable. This is where analysis must end and speculation take over.
Our own suspicion is that the nearest that we will get to understanding what went on at Medmenham lies in the hint from Dashwood's illegitimate daughter that "the clue to all my troubles can be found in the heart of the hill". This beautiful, slightly disturbed and rather fascinating 'witch', Lady Rachel Frances Antonina Dashwood, apparently had an excellent relationship with her father but he also bequeathed her the Vansittart copy of the Kama Sutra. This alone indicates an unusual intellectual relationship between a father and a daughter. The heart of the hill is a real place (I have been there, deep underground). There is a bad interpretation - of ritual incest - and a good interpretation - of a radical libertarian education before its time (possibly both). Either might work for a woman who suffered deeply and later from her 'spiritual' attitude to sexual freedom in a world whose conventionalism disregarded her in public while being fascinated by her in private. My instinct (no more) is that she was liberated rather than abused - but some fine line may have been crossed more than once and we have to consider that both may have been possible at the same time which is something the modern liberal mind finds impossible to cope with.
Medmenham and probably the caves would appear to have had something to do with sexual initiation into mysteries, the performing of things usually left to fantasy, but there is no necessary conclusion that the women were always exploited. There are hints of a certain equality between men and women that does not exist in the darker world of the Marquis de Sade in France. Perhaps English tolerance and pragmatism was more able to persuade both aristocratic females and high class hookers that the fun and games were precisely that - and if some of the activity became tantamount to a precursor to contemporary sex-positive feminism, then, while there is no proof of this, there is no proof that it was not so. In other words, Medmenham is a blank slate on which we can write what we will. Suster chooses to write on it with a post-Crowleian Thelemite pen without benefit of good editorial direction. I suspect that the bare facts in this case should just be stated against a context produced by a competent historian and that we be left to make up our own minds.
There is no doubt that something 'spiritual' was going on with Dashwood - the tipping of the hat to Rabelais might be no more than hedonism but the elaborate symbolism of Medmenham and the caves at West Wycombe do stand up to scrutiny as an expensive attempt to revive something pagan and dionysiac working at a deeper level (literally). The library undoubtedly contained important material suggesting both Eastern transgression (supplied through the Vansittart Governor of Bengal) and a dabbling in ceremonial magic. The Catholic Church, as so often, appears as the enemy as one would expect in any political ideology that defended a 'republic of aristocrats' against its pretensions. But the silence and secrecy also suggested transgression that even the easy-going British aristocratic system of the period might find unacceptable. This is where analysis must end and speculation take over.
Our own suspicion is that the nearest that we will get to understanding what went on at Medmenham lies in the hint from Dashwood's illegitimate daughter that "the clue to all my troubles can be found in the heart of the hill". This beautiful, slightly disturbed and rather fascinating 'witch', Lady Rachel Frances Antonina Dashwood, apparently had an excellent relationship with her father but he also bequeathed her the Vansittart copy of the Kama Sutra. This alone indicates an unusual intellectual relationship between a father and a daughter. The heart of the hill is a real place (I have been there, deep underground). There is a bad interpretation - of ritual incest - and a good interpretation - of a radical libertarian education before its time (possibly both). Either might work for a woman who suffered deeply and later from her 'spiritual' attitude to sexual freedom in a world whose conventionalism disregarded her in public while being fascinated by her in private. My instinct (no more) is that she was liberated rather than abused - but some fine line may have been crossed more than once and we have to consider that both may have been possible at the same time which is something the modern liberal mind finds impossible to cope with.
Medmenham and probably the caves would appear to have had something to do with sexual initiation into mysteries, the performing of things usually left to fantasy, but there is no necessary conclusion that the women were always exploited. There are hints of a certain equality between men and women that does not exist in the darker world of the Marquis de Sade in France. Perhaps English tolerance and pragmatism was more able to persuade both aristocratic females and high class hookers that the fun and games were precisely that - and if some of the activity became tantamount to a precursor to contemporary sex-positive feminism, then, while there is no proof of this, there is no proof that it was not so. In other words, Medmenham is a blank slate on which we can write what we will. Suster chooses to write on it with a post-Crowleian Thelemite pen without benefit of good editorial direction. I suspect that the bare facts in this case should just be stated against a context produced by a competent historian and that we be left to make up our own minds.
Yet something important probably took place in those caves - but whether it was life-affirming before its time or a particularly egregious example of exploitation cannot now be said. Poor Rachel Frances Antonina Dashwood, Sir Francis' illegitimate daughter, can be interpreted under either scenario - as a child literally 'spoilt' by wealth and sexual vampirism and ultimately by abuse or as a woman whose freedom from convention and boundaries might have made her one of the first feminists if she had been more disciplined and less disordered in her thoughts.
On the other hand, despite the somewhat abrupt start and ending to
the narrative, The Hell Fire Clubs is a fairly solid, evidence-based history of
trangressive male clubs (with a side view at moral majority reactions to
the media coverage of the day and to very real disorder in the streets)
in eighteenth century North Atlantic culture. Unfortunately, the
determination of Evelyn Lord not to speculate beyond the available
evidence is as limiting as Suster's propensity to over-speculate. The organisations being studied (actually very
disparate in nature) are, by definition, secret. This means that, while
the author's conclusions are always sensible and she is probably
reliable in representing the most likely function of the clubs in any
one situation and at any one time, many questions remain about the
motivation and meaning of transgression for the middle and upper classes
of the time.
It may be that such questions will never be answered. One school of thought likes to push the clubs into the territory of the esoteric. Another likes to explain them more sociologically in pragmatic or merely playful terms. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The evidence tends to drive us away from the esoteric and the spiritual but the evidence is also so sparse that we can never be sure of our ground - hence the interpretative vacuum in which so many, often quite demented, speculations are allowed to flourish. Still, this book is an excellent starting point for further investigation. The difficulty with it is that the author's reluctance to analyse in favour of just telling the story leaves that burden with us. We, the readers, have to try and order a narrative that is fairly clear as to what happens when and to whom but remains unclear as to the story's full meaning.
Sometimes it descends into the anecdotal with short sections on many one-off clubs, some of which (like the Beefsteaks) seem far from transgressional and others (like the Kingdom of Dalkey) merely carnivalesque and very public. If we learn anything, it is that transgressional clubs (with the probable exception of the Beggar's Benison movement) are exceptional, marginal and isolated even if, on occasions, they may be culturally innovative and sometimes highly entertaining to read about. Perhaps we can start by trying to break down the phenomenon into its probable components ...
First, there is a political story about how a class of psychologically vulnerable young aristocrats, returning from exile after a puritanical bourgeois revolution against their kind, and dependent on a strong Crown for patronage, threw their victory in the face of the still-strong middle class urban establishment as gross bad behaviour and the type of extreme sexual transgression that is represented in literature by the Earl of Rochester. The establishment had permitted the return of monarchy but Charles II did not return to England except by invitation and it was an invitation that might be withdrawn at any time. The struggle between executive authority and its 'court' and a ‘country’ which had re-ordered itself completely after the execution of Charles I would continue in many forms over many decades.
The frustration of some elements in the aristocracy at their uncertain condition (alongside a natural bit of youthful revolt against their elders) often expressed itself in transgressive behaviour - in drinking and whoring 'clubs' sometimes with a link to Jacobitism after the arrival of the Hanoverians. The more personally unstable members of the aristocracy exhibited wild behavior closer to that of, say, the tabloid image of a Pete Docherty than, say, that of a people’s princess like Cheryl Cole. In this context, the transgressive behaviour of Anglo-Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy might be regarded as the most 'in yer face' of all as far as the wider population were concerned. If aristocrats in England were insulting the mores of tradesmen, at least the tradesmen were free men on middle class incomes. In Ireland, the aristocrats were insulting a vast under-nourished and depressed peasantry whose entire culture was alien to them. To drink toasts to the devil (if this ever happened) was not just arrogant and contemptuous of 'ordinary folk', it was rubbing a crushed people's noses in the aristocrat's own shit. No wonder the peasants clung to their simple Catholic faith against such people - or at least as the latter were presented to them in the media of the day and by story-telling repute.
This leads us to the second factor. Much of this transgression in the first third or so of the century was taking place amongst late adolescents and early twenty-somethings with too much money, expectations of future inheritance (and so too easy credit) or hoping for the patronage of others. The book is good on the role of the new hack media and pamphlets in fuelling what we would now call tabloid accounts of what went on amongst what were really little more than local gangs of testosterone-fuelled lads. This was the sort of behaviour that footballers are now said to get up to in hotel rooms with willing groupies and hookers - but with added violence. Eighteenth century England was becoming, for a while, before various ‘reform’ movements began their back-lash, an increasingly libertarian culture with no effective restraint in terms of public morality, one where the majority were pruriently fascinated by transgression and yet seeking to control it as socially damaging - the analogy with aspects of contemporary culture (or at least our culture before the new puritanism started to set in about a decade ago) is surprisingly close although Lord determinedly avoids such comparisons.
Young males of wealth were also being sent on the Grand Tour by mid-century as a matter of course. Although most travelers probably conducted themselves much as expected by their elders, we have a creative minority who developed a fascination with what they saw and who sought to bring new ideas back to England where they fuelled a new aristocratic high culture that was more private, less urban, based on their estates and, because behind closed doors, more able to adopt transgressive forms where the will existed. This brings us to the third model of transgression - the so-called 'Hell-fire Club' of Sir Francis Dashwood and friends which we encountered in Suster's book. The name is a journalistic creation and there is no point in reproducing the detail of the story here. In conformity with the author's concern only to deal with available evidence, this undoubtedly sexually transgressive Club, which has to be seen in the context of the significant and fertile contribution of Dashwood and his high aristocratic and intelligent bourgeois friends to wider British culture, is dealt with a bit cursorily in the book, repeating material easily found elsewhere (if with more judgement).
However, what is clear (a visit to the re-modelled Parish Church in West Wycombe is sufficient evidence of this) is that Dashwood was seeking to recreate a pagan Mediterranean sensibility behind the hedges and fences guarding the one final truth of the English revolution - the right of an estate-holder to do what he willed without interference of the State on his own property so long as he treated other English people as men and women with free choices (and so distinct from continental aristocratic practice). Basically, a whore could decline to be used if the price was not right and staff must be paid in coin. The most charged speculations have always surrounded the sexual and esoteric aspects of the Club and the degree to which the highly intelligent but self-avowedly dilettante Dashwood was cocking a snook at the respectable establishment of the day. Even the significance of the sexual element has probably been exaggerated at the expense of the convivial because it is fairly clear that Dashwood was merely taking existing eighteenth century attitudes and just playing them out to their logical culmination under conditions where money and privacy were no object. Dashwood just added intellect to the mix.
In a world where men were married off for reasons of property as much as women, it was widely understood that pleasure and affectional relationships would have to operate within a parallel system to that of the conventional. The attraction of paganism would simply have been that it endorsed emotional reality (a precursor of romantic sensibility) rather than forced men of wealth into a 'tyrannical' Judaeo-Christian straitjacket, an imposition on the wealthy by those people who could not afford their natural instincts to be openly expressed under urban or small town scrutiny. The longing for the pagan will be a constant theme in the writings of sexual 'inverts' and dissidents for a century and well beyond. Pepys diary (not covered in this book) is full of perfectly reasonable affection and regard for a wife alongside erotic and affectional regard for other women, including the wives of friends. This was quite normal for the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, 'reformers' (so often the bane of the lives of free men alongside the good they do for the truly oppressed) had made such freedoms a matter of censure for both men and women alike, moving England slowly but steadily towards the era of High Victorian morality where no respectable member of society could put a foot out of place in any social space, even the otherwise private space of the club unless it were to be truly secret (and we may come to that in a later review). All that misplaced sexual energy was soon expanding an empire and slaughtering natives ...
As for the esoteric, there is no strong evidence of some serious 'cult' in Dashwood’s circle (although we think the circumstantial evidence still points in thart direction to some extent). It is mostly evidence of free-thinking men and probably women exploring transgressional ideas and adding transgressional behaviour to spice up their sexual lives - perhaps with foreign travel, the collection of texts and the plots and schemes of English politics creating an air of secrecy and resistance to the growing air of worthy conformity that was to be almost totalitarian in its effect on English culture by the mid-Victorian era. The fact that Dashwood and his circle were (outside the influence of Benjamin Franklin on the American Revolution) effectively political failures suggests a degree of boredom behind the transgression. What do you do when you are a rich man without gainful employment? Wilkes became a 'success' by making a career of political transgression but only after he had broken with this set and was forced into extremity in order to be noticed. It must be said that these transgressors were all rich enough to indulge their tastes. They tended to flaunt (like modern financiers) their wealth and freedom in front of struggling tradesmen engaged in six day trudgery and church on Sunday. There is no evidence that Dashwood did not pay his bills but many aristocrats did not. Failure to pay a tailor's bill could ruin a family. In a world where such tailors read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, this aping of French disregard of 'ordinary folk' was not liberation to them but oppression.
The final turn to this aspect of the story, before the arrival of the next generation of dull establishment political clubs, such as the Beefsteaks where Gladstone and royalty ate comfortably, is the association of Dashwood with Benjamin Franklin and the work that they did together to simplify the Book of Common Prayer. It is implied in many quarters that they might have talked of liberty in terms that would be understood in the American taverns that later revolted against local tyranny, first against local puritanism and then, at the right time, against a Crown whose only interest seemed to be to tax the middle classes to maintain wars to benefit the 'big men' of their day. So matters turned full circle - eighteenth century transgression had started as an aristocratic revolt against an embedded establishment. A century later transgression is placed partly, if marginally, at the service of revolt by the more libertarian small man of property against that very same establishment, now in office for over a hundred settled years and probably to reach its apogee of sclerosis under Wellington and Castlereagh in the 1820s.
This brings us to the second half of the book which is an eye-opening account of a community of apparent transgression, based in Anglo-Scottish culture, that was clearly a revolt against the tendency of the Kirk to claim rights on all private life. This expressed itself as a network of voyeuristic and masturbatory clubs of prominent establishment males which may have been much more widespread than the remaining evidence (at St. Andrew's University) suggests and which spread through northern trade routes. This 'Beggar's Benison' movement seems to have started around the Firth of Forth at mid-century, to have had no or little connection with English aristocratic transgression (although it had some possible link to the emergence of pornographic literature in London) and to have spread through the Baltic to the 'British' community in Russia and West to the United States. As it spread, it seems to have 'cleaned up' (as it did over time in Scotland) and become part of the tavern club culture that we noted above as potentially revolutionary in force.
The customs of this Movement are so counter-intuitive to our vision of Scottish sexual puritanism that they can only be explained by our making a major mental paradigm shift back into the world of Scottish modernisation and, at least for its precursors, into the debates over the Union with England (analogous to the debate over the European Union today) and the role of the Kirk. Secrecy about being pro-English or anti-Presbyterian might have been as sensible at one time as, amongst other political choices, being pro-Jacobite. However, the Scottish-origin transgressive clubs appear to have been cultural rather than political. The real interest here is in the nature of Scottish sexual repression where the prime interest (and this appears to occur elsewhere in the story) is not in sexual conduct per se so much as in 'scientific' observation of female genitalia and in proving manhood through public (or rather private to the club) production of semen.
This is 'behind the bike sheds' stuff. It seems like an extension of all-male education into adulthood as fixed and fetishistic sexual behaviour. There is none of that implied 'Eyes Wide Shut' eroticism of high English aristocratic transgression with willing whores and mistresses. This is paying servant girls to show their pussies and then expelling from the club the man who got so excited that he actually touched one ... the nearest analogy here is with the modern lap-dancing club and the 'no touch' rule. You can imagine the girls laughing all the way to the bank.
So, the author is offering us two separate narratives. The first is of the increasing attempt by some of the people considered to be natural rulers of their country, frustrated at having to bow down before a restrictive cultural conformity, to take their revolt from the streets as arrogant kids and back into the safety of their private estates before finally giving up and joining the establishment, reserving their subsequent sexual pleasures to the whore house and the mistress. The second is of a repressed modernising and increasingly libertarian middle class of traders and businessmen trying to come to terms with their sexuality without risking their property and using the cover of Enlightenment investigation to find some low risk non-homosexual male bonding and a bit of sexual titillation behind closed doors.
The two narratives never quite converge though there are other stories - of the emergence of pornographic literature, of high aristocratic interest in radical libertarian ideas and of 'tavern' culture as a form of resistance to the power of the established church - that overlap a little with both. Transgressive clubs are interesting less because of what they say about their members than that they were ever necessary in the first place. These clubs are a back-handed compliment to the power of the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were embedded. Think of the growing power of methodism, of anti-alcohol and anti-sex industry campaigns, of the evangelical drive against slavery, of the promotion of the place of the woman as angel of the home, of the increasing need to be sexually discreet, of the relationship between sexuality and property and the increasing expectation that order be imposed by the State. On top of this, observe the perils of rapid modernisation and the management of emotion into 'sentiment' (and away from its raw expression as violence or lust).
All this is combined into one dominant culture that was eventually structured to repress any sexual dialogue and then channelled it back into faux-pagan performance art and that peculiar British attitude that sex is 'naughty but nice', much like a cream cake, to be eaten and enjoyed only occasionally, in private and with considerable guilt at its presumed bad effects on both body and soul. The roots of the decadent rebellion of the 1890s (with its faux-paganism and its fetishistic attitude towards sexuality) were linked to this same culture. Both rebellions, whether of the Hellfire Club or the decadents, certainly based on any sensible assessment of what happened afterwards, only point up the extent of the repressed sexual culture of the bulk of the British in history. Repression has been the national cultural norm of the British people from the Glorious Revolution to the 1980s. Even now, occasional moral panics from our modern tabloids and the commercialisation of sexuality suggest that underlying attitudes remain driven by either the 'sensational' and or ‘naughty but nice’ voyeuristic cream cake model of sex. Again, look but do not touch.
The book covers none of this cultural ground in depth but it is very good on the politics and sociology of the eighteenth century. Evelyn Lord is not interested in 'lessons from history' but only in telling the story as she finds it. It is also a mine of amusing anecdotes with the added advantage that Lord is very good at sifting fact from fiction and ensuring that we understand that most tales of transgression were probably fictional and certainly over-blown. On that basis, the book is recommended but you will still have to make up your own mind as to its 'meaning' as I have tried to do.
It may be that such questions will never be answered. One school of thought likes to push the clubs into the territory of the esoteric. Another likes to explain them more sociologically in pragmatic or merely playful terms. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The evidence tends to drive us away from the esoteric and the spiritual but the evidence is also so sparse that we can never be sure of our ground - hence the interpretative vacuum in which so many, often quite demented, speculations are allowed to flourish. Still, this book is an excellent starting point for further investigation. The difficulty with it is that the author's reluctance to analyse in favour of just telling the story leaves that burden with us. We, the readers, have to try and order a narrative that is fairly clear as to what happens when and to whom but remains unclear as to the story's full meaning.
Sometimes it descends into the anecdotal with short sections on many one-off clubs, some of which (like the Beefsteaks) seem far from transgressional and others (like the Kingdom of Dalkey) merely carnivalesque and very public. If we learn anything, it is that transgressional clubs (with the probable exception of the Beggar's Benison movement) are exceptional, marginal and isolated even if, on occasions, they may be culturally innovative and sometimes highly entertaining to read about. Perhaps we can start by trying to break down the phenomenon into its probable components ...
First, there is a political story about how a class of psychologically vulnerable young aristocrats, returning from exile after a puritanical bourgeois revolution against their kind, and dependent on a strong Crown for patronage, threw their victory in the face of the still-strong middle class urban establishment as gross bad behaviour and the type of extreme sexual transgression that is represented in literature by the Earl of Rochester. The establishment had permitted the return of monarchy but Charles II did not return to England except by invitation and it was an invitation that might be withdrawn at any time. The struggle between executive authority and its 'court' and a ‘country’ which had re-ordered itself completely after the execution of Charles I would continue in many forms over many decades.
The frustration of some elements in the aristocracy at their uncertain condition (alongside a natural bit of youthful revolt against their elders) often expressed itself in transgressive behaviour - in drinking and whoring 'clubs' sometimes with a link to Jacobitism after the arrival of the Hanoverians. The more personally unstable members of the aristocracy exhibited wild behavior closer to that of, say, the tabloid image of a Pete Docherty than, say, that of a people’s princess like Cheryl Cole. In this context, the transgressive behaviour of Anglo-Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy might be regarded as the most 'in yer face' of all as far as the wider population were concerned. If aristocrats in England were insulting the mores of tradesmen, at least the tradesmen were free men on middle class incomes. In Ireland, the aristocrats were insulting a vast under-nourished and depressed peasantry whose entire culture was alien to them. To drink toasts to the devil (if this ever happened) was not just arrogant and contemptuous of 'ordinary folk', it was rubbing a crushed people's noses in the aristocrat's own shit. No wonder the peasants clung to their simple Catholic faith against such people - or at least as the latter were presented to them in the media of the day and by story-telling repute.
This leads us to the second factor. Much of this transgression in the first third or so of the century was taking place amongst late adolescents and early twenty-somethings with too much money, expectations of future inheritance (and so too easy credit) or hoping for the patronage of others. The book is good on the role of the new hack media and pamphlets in fuelling what we would now call tabloid accounts of what went on amongst what were really little more than local gangs of testosterone-fuelled lads. This was the sort of behaviour that footballers are now said to get up to in hotel rooms with willing groupies and hookers - but with added violence. Eighteenth century England was becoming, for a while, before various ‘reform’ movements began their back-lash, an increasingly libertarian culture with no effective restraint in terms of public morality, one where the majority were pruriently fascinated by transgression and yet seeking to control it as socially damaging - the analogy with aspects of contemporary culture (or at least our culture before the new puritanism started to set in about a decade ago) is surprisingly close although Lord determinedly avoids such comparisons.
Young males of wealth were also being sent on the Grand Tour by mid-century as a matter of course. Although most travelers probably conducted themselves much as expected by their elders, we have a creative minority who developed a fascination with what they saw and who sought to bring new ideas back to England where they fuelled a new aristocratic high culture that was more private, less urban, based on their estates and, because behind closed doors, more able to adopt transgressive forms where the will existed. This brings us to the third model of transgression - the so-called 'Hell-fire Club' of Sir Francis Dashwood and friends which we encountered in Suster's book. The name is a journalistic creation and there is no point in reproducing the detail of the story here. In conformity with the author's concern only to deal with available evidence, this undoubtedly sexually transgressive Club, which has to be seen in the context of the significant and fertile contribution of Dashwood and his high aristocratic and intelligent bourgeois friends to wider British culture, is dealt with a bit cursorily in the book, repeating material easily found elsewhere (if with more judgement).
However, what is clear (a visit to the re-modelled Parish Church in West Wycombe is sufficient evidence of this) is that Dashwood was seeking to recreate a pagan Mediterranean sensibility behind the hedges and fences guarding the one final truth of the English revolution - the right of an estate-holder to do what he willed without interference of the State on his own property so long as he treated other English people as men and women with free choices (and so distinct from continental aristocratic practice). Basically, a whore could decline to be used if the price was not right and staff must be paid in coin. The most charged speculations have always surrounded the sexual and esoteric aspects of the Club and the degree to which the highly intelligent but self-avowedly dilettante Dashwood was cocking a snook at the respectable establishment of the day. Even the significance of the sexual element has probably been exaggerated at the expense of the convivial because it is fairly clear that Dashwood was merely taking existing eighteenth century attitudes and just playing them out to their logical culmination under conditions where money and privacy were no object. Dashwood just added intellect to the mix.
In a world where men were married off for reasons of property as much as women, it was widely understood that pleasure and affectional relationships would have to operate within a parallel system to that of the conventional. The attraction of paganism would simply have been that it endorsed emotional reality (a precursor of romantic sensibility) rather than forced men of wealth into a 'tyrannical' Judaeo-Christian straitjacket, an imposition on the wealthy by those people who could not afford their natural instincts to be openly expressed under urban or small town scrutiny. The longing for the pagan will be a constant theme in the writings of sexual 'inverts' and dissidents for a century and well beyond. Pepys diary (not covered in this book) is full of perfectly reasonable affection and regard for a wife alongside erotic and affectional regard for other women, including the wives of friends. This was quite normal for the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, 'reformers' (so often the bane of the lives of free men alongside the good they do for the truly oppressed) had made such freedoms a matter of censure for both men and women alike, moving England slowly but steadily towards the era of High Victorian morality where no respectable member of society could put a foot out of place in any social space, even the otherwise private space of the club unless it were to be truly secret (and we may come to that in a later review). All that misplaced sexual energy was soon expanding an empire and slaughtering natives ...
As for the esoteric, there is no strong evidence of some serious 'cult' in Dashwood’s circle (although we think the circumstantial evidence still points in thart direction to some extent). It is mostly evidence of free-thinking men and probably women exploring transgressional ideas and adding transgressional behaviour to spice up their sexual lives - perhaps with foreign travel, the collection of texts and the plots and schemes of English politics creating an air of secrecy and resistance to the growing air of worthy conformity that was to be almost totalitarian in its effect on English culture by the mid-Victorian era. The fact that Dashwood and his circle were (outside the influence of Benjamin Franklin on the American Revolution) effectively political failures suggests a degree of boredom behind the transgression. What do you do when you are a rich man without gainful employment? Wilkes became a 'success' by making a career of political transgression but only after he had broken with this set and was forced into extremity in order to be noticed. It must be said that these transgressors were all rich enough to indulge their tastes. They tended to flaunt (like modern financiers) their wealth and freedom in front of struggling tradesmen engaged in six day trudgery and church on Sunday. There is no evidence that Dashwood did not pay his bills but many aristocrats did not. Failure to pay a tailor's bill could ruin a family. In a world where such tailors read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, this aping of French disregard of 'ordinary folk' was not liberation to them but oppression.
The final turn to this aspect of the story, before the arrival of the next generation of dull establishment political clubs, such as the Beefsteaks where Gladstone and royalty ate comfortably, is the association of Dashwood with Benjamin Franklin and the work that they did together to simplify the Book of Common Prayer. It is implied in many quarters that they might have talked of liberty in terms that would be understood in the American taverns that later revolted against local tyranny, first against local puritanism and then, at the right time, against a Crown whose only interest seemed to be to tax the middle classes to maintain wars to benefit the 'big men' of their day. So matters turned full circle - eighteenth century transgression had started as an aristocratic revolt against an embedded establishment. A century later transgression is placed partly, if marginally, at the service of revolt by the more libertarian small man of property against that very same establishment, now in office for over a hundred settled years and probably to reach its apogee of sclerosis under Wellington and Castlereagh in the 1820s.
This brings us to the second half of the book which is an eye-opening account of a community of apparent transgression, based in Anglo-Scottish culture, that was clearly a revolt against the tendency of the Kirk to claim rights on all private life. This expressed itself as a network of voyeuristic and masturbatory clubs of prominent establishment males which may have been much more widespread than the remaining evidence (at St. Andrew's University) suggests and which spread through northern trade routes. This 'Beggar's Benison' movement seems to have started around the Firth of Forth at mid-century, to have had no or little connection with English aristocratic transgression (although it had some possible link to the emergence of pornographic literature in London) and to have spread through the Baltic to the 'British' community in Russia and West to the United States. As it spread, it seems to have 'cleaned up' (as it did over time in Scotland) and become part of the tavern club culture that we noted above as potentially revolutionary in force.
The customs of this Movement are so counter-intuitive to our vision of Scottish sexual puritanism that they can only be explained by our making a major mental paradigm shift back into the world of Scottish modernisation and, at least for its precursors, into the debates over the Union with England (analogous to the debate over the European Union today) and the role of the Kirk. Secrecy about being pro-English or anti-Presbyterian might have been as sensible at one time as, amongst other political choices, being pro-Jacobite. However, the Scottish-origin transgressive clubs appear to have been cultural rather than political. The real interest here is in the nature of Scottish sexual repression where the prime interest (and this appears to occur elsewhere in the story) is not in sexual conduct per se so much as in 'scientific' observation of female genitalia and in proving manhood through public (or rather private to the club) production of semen.
This is 'behind the bike sheds' stuff. It seems like an extension of all-male education into adulthood as fixed and fetishistic sexual behaviour. There is none of that implied 'Eyes Wide Shut' eroticism of high English aristocratic transgression with willing whores and mistresses. This is paying servant girls to show their pussies and then expelling from the club the man who got so excited that he actually touched one ... the nearest analogy here is with the modern lap-dancing club and the 'no touch' rule. You can imagine the girls laughing all the way to the bank.
So, the author is offering us two separate narratives. The first is of the increasing attempt by some of the people considered to be natural rulers of their country, frustrated at having to bow down before a restrictive cultural conformity, to take their revolt from the streets as arrogant kids and back into the safety of their private estates before finally giving up and joining the establishment, reserving their subsequent sexual pleasures to the whore house and the mistress. The second is of a repressed modernising and increasingly libertarian middle class of traders and businessmen trying to come to terms with their sexuality without risking their property and using the cover of Enlightenment investigation to find some low risk non-homosexual male bonding and a bit of sexual titillation behind closed doors.
The two narratives never quite converge though there are other stories - of the emergence of pornographic literature, of high aristocratic interest in radical libertarian ideas and of 'tavern' culture as a form of resistance to the power of the established church - that overlap a little with both. Transgressive clubs are interesting less because of what they say about their members than that they were ever necessary in the first place. These clubs are a back-handed compliment to the power of the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were embedded. Think of the growing power of methodism, of anti-alcohol and anti-sex industry campaigns, of the evangelical drive against slavery, of the promotion of the place of the woman as angel of the home, of the increasing need to be sexually discreet, of the relationship between sexuality and property and the increasing expectation that order be imposed by the State. On top of this, observe the perils of rapid modernisation and the management of emotion into 'sentiment' (and away from its raw expression as violence or lust).
All this is combined into one dominant culture that was eventually structured to repress any sexual dialogue and then channelled it back into faux-pagan performance art and that peculiar British attitude that sex is 'naughty but nice', much like a cream cake, to be eaten and enjoyed only occasionally, in private and with considerable guilt at its presumed bad effects on both body and soul. The roots of the decadent rebellion of the 1890s (with its faux-paganism and its fetishistic attitude towards sexuality) were linked to this same culture. Both rebellions, whether of the Hellfire Club or the decadents, certainly based on any sensible assessment of what happened afterwards, only point up the extent of the repressed sexual culture of the bulk of the British in history. Repression has been the national cultural norm of the British people from the Glorious Revolution to the 1980s. Even now, occasional moral panics from our modern tabloids and the commercialisation of sexuality suggest that underlying attitudes remain driven by either the 'sensational' and or ‘naughty but nice’ voyeuristic cream cake model of sex. Again, look but do not touch.
The book covers none of this cultural ground in depth but it is very good on the politics and sociology of the eighteenth century. Evelyn Lord is not interested in 'lessons from history' but only in telling the story as she finds it. It is also a mine of amusing anecdotes with the added advantage that Lord is very good at sifting fact from fiction and ensuring that we understand that most tales of transgression were probably fictional and certainly over-blown. On that basis, the book is recommended but you will still have to make up your own mind as to its 'meaning' as I have tried to do.
The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro is a solid and entertaining account of Guiseppe
Balsamo, self-styled Count Cagliostro, charlatan, magician, healer,
adventurer, Freemason and populist radical. McCalman's book has
the virtue of placing him within the right context as an important minor
player in the unstable pre-revolutionary politics of eighteenth century
Europe where command of the mob and of intrigue within courts were two
sides of the same coin of influence. A slip too far in either direction
could cost a man his liberty or his life.
Cagliostro's life is one of those examples (a theme of many of our reviews and our writings elsewhere) of how history must be reconstructed from gaps in the official record as much as from the facts that are available. McCalman keeps his feet on the ground throughout. The result is a quite impressive and readable addition to the literature of eighteenth century political culture. Cagliostro's final brutal treatment at the hands of the Vatican is inexplicable unless you take seriously his potential to mobilise the Parisian and indeed the European mob against traditional values. Freemasonry in this period was not clubbability for the middle classes as it is today but a movement of cultural resistance that we may now understand much better in an age of 'leaderless resistance' strategies against the system by potential insurgents and insurrectionists. We will probably come back to this when we look more closely in a later review at the Illuminati and early Masons in more detail.
The French Revolution and the consequent vicious reaction which led to the conspiracy theories of Abbe Barruel about Freemasons grew out of an atmosphere of liberal and radical protest to dynasticism and 'ignorance' that really did lead to radical change. Freemasonry and its associated liberalisms were as dangerous then as Islamism and its associated irrationalisms are today, at least in the perceptions of that perennial personality type in politics, the security-minded hardliner charged with defending the ruling order from Washington to Tehran, from St. Petersburg to Rome. Just as today if an Islamist or 'extremist' steps over a line, any means seems to be permissible to bring them to heel so Cagliostro stepped over that line in the 1780s. Any means were then regarded as permissible to take him off the chess board when the crisis came.
It was no accident that he was seized in 1789 in Italy as the Papacy watched the French Revolution unfold or that two years after his death in jail in 1795 the incoming French-commanded liberatory Polish Legion, according to legend, ordered his bones dug up and drank to his memory with wine from his whitened skull. McCalman does not spend too much time analysing the man and his time. What he does is provide a sensible. highly readable and cohesive narrative that allows us to make up our own minds about this curious figure who contained in equal measure both charlatan and semi-criminal aspects to match those of the dynastic flummery amongst which he lived and the sort of universalist ideals that are now the dominant ideology (now to excess) of the modern international liberalism. Cagliostro is in at the birth of middle class liberal hegemony just as we are at the early stages of its death.
Cagliostro's life is one of those examples (a theme of many of our reviews and our writings elsewhere) of how history must be reconstructed from gaps in the official record as much as from the facts that are available. McCalman keeps his feet on the ground throughout. The result is a quite impressive and readable addition to the literature of eighteenth century political culture. Cagliostro's final brutal treatment at the hands of the Vatican is inexplicable unless you take seriously his potential to mobilise the Parisian and indeed the European mob against traditional values. Freemasonry in this period was not clubbability for the middle classes as it is today but a movement of cultural resistance that we may now understand much better in an age of 'leaderless resistance' strategies against the system by potential insurgents and insurrectionists. We will probably come back to this when we look more closely in a later review at the Illuminati and early Masons in more detail.
The French Revolution and the consequent vicious reaction which led to the conspiracy theories of Abbe Barruel about Freemasons grew out of an atmosphere of liberal and radical protest to dynasticism and 'ignorance' that really did lead to radical change. Freemasonry and its associated liberalisms were as dangerous then as Islamism and its associated irrationalisms are today, at least in the perceptions of that perennial personality type in politics, the security-minded hardliner charged with defending the ruling order from Washington to Tehran, from St. Petersburg to Rome. Just as today if an Islamist or 'extremist' steps over a line, any means seems to be permissible to bring them to heel so Cagliostro stepped over that line in the 1780s. Any means were then regarded as permissible to take him off the chess board when the crisis came.
It was no accident that he was seized in 1789 in Italy as the Papacy watched the French Revolution unfold or that two years after his death in jail in 1795 the incoming French-commanded liberatory Polish Legion, according to legend, ordered his bones dug up and drank to his memory with wine from his whitened skull. McCalman does not spend too much time analysing the man and his time. What he does is provide a sensible. highly readable and cohesive narrative that allows us to make up our own minds about this curious figure who contained in equal measure both charlatan and semi-criminal aspects to match those of the dynastic flummery amongst which he lived and the sort of universalist ideals that are now the dominant ideology (now to excess) of the modern international liberalism. Cagliostro is in at the birth of middle class liberal hegemony just as we are at the early stages of its death.