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Secret Sex Cults
SECRETIVE AND EXTREME SEX CULTS, a staple of tabloid journalism today, didn’t begin with Charles Manson and end with Warren Jeffs. They are as old as civilization and their ability to intrigue, outrage and titillate the masses has made them useful to politicians and professional storytellers right from the start. They are as old as organized religion, and there has always been an uncomfortable overlap between the two.
In America, hedonistic secret societies and new religions thrived throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. While love cults and clandestine erotic communities have been journalistic catnip since time immemorial, sensationalist articles by yellow journalists of this period alternatively impeded and enhanced the frisky groups’ unorthodox coital regimens with the kind of lurid prose characteristic of our journalism’s most of startled readers sometimes led them into eager participation.
After World War I, mainstream politicians, in league with civicminded suffragettes and Protestant church leaders, sought to delimit the blatant immorality of the big-city masses. The Federal Government’s implementation of the 18th Amendment was not only a vainglorious attempt to discourage and punish alcohol consumption; it also sought to tamp down other fleshly pursuits of the anti-Puritan and non-Fundamentalist Christian variety. Predictably, the Prohibition edict produced a reverse societal reaction.
“Free love” blossomed big as cigarette-toting young women in hitched-up skirts left home to enter the modern urban workplace. An underground economy proliferated in their path: luxurious nightclubs, neighborhood speakeasies, smoky dance halls, and makeshift brothels beckoned. Once again, furtive, hush-hush sex cults sprang to life in nearly every region of the stiffly virtuous countryside.
In New York City, each of the five daily tabloids covered the wacky panorama of illicit behavior with a sly and ingratiatingly progressive veneer. They hired attractive female sleuths to investigate and “analyze” the nation’s secretive and salacious goings-on. Although long ignored in the scholastic vault of newspaper history, these vivacious flapper-correspondents and their “human interest” featurettes enthralled the reading public and established a permanent place for young women in the mono-gendered American newsroom. None of these penny-press femme-pioneers was more enterprising or outrageously notorious than Marian Dockerill, syndicated columnist in the New York Evening Journal, flagship of William Randolph Hearst’s print armada.
A free spirit long before the Jazz Age unfolded into an endless spectacle of movieland sleaze, municipal corruption, and parlor-room free-for-alls, Marian followed her promiscuous and insatiable heart from one offbeat sect to the next. In 1908, she left her Swiss mother in Long Island to join an Illinois utopian community called Zion City. There, in her late teens, Marian married the cult’s second-in-command and bore him a child.
But uninhibited “sex cravings” addled Marian’s religious vows. The slim-hipped temptress led the procession of Zion communards up the main office stairway, always remembering to apologize for her inappropriately tight dress and glossy stockings, to the top floor, where John Alexander Dowie issued his evangelical edicts between trysts with his more comely acolytes. One year later, the saucy redhead returned to Manhattan and became involved with the Bee Harem on Riverside Drive. This was Dr. W.R.C. Latson’s Mormonish sex temple. There auto-suggestion, bowls of incense and drugs, Hindu music, and masked group orgies concluded each devotional session. A gathering place for Upper West Side society swells, both the male and female participants were chosen for their superior physical appearances, receptive intellects and erotic discretion.
A Dale Carnegie-like mystic, Latson preached the gospel of selfactualization and personal magnetism. His appealing manifesto, The Secrets of Mental Supremacy, fit the mood of the era and remained a bestseller for decades. Of course, its lessons for erotic domination were only covertly implied and Latson’s actual hypnotic power over the fawning ladies in his Bee Harem was somewhat imperfect. A few weeks after cajoling Marian into his Oriental Wedding Chamber and placing her by his side at the Hive Throne, Alta Marhevka, a jealous Bee consort, shot Latson in the face as he was preparing his morning stroll.
Of course, the sympathetic New York City jury predictably dismissed the prosecution’s ironclad case against Alta. Their foreman jokingly referred to Latson’s death as an everyday “sidewalk suicide.” During the uncommonly lurid trial, Marian monitored and scrutinized the sham moral platitudes and legal incongruities that both sides paraded before the bench. It depressed her to the core and she made a life-changing decision while the judicial charade unfolded.
Marian would faithfully report the excesses of secret societies devoted to sex worship even if it meant joining in with those excesses to reveal them. The most degenerate and fanatical groups deserved especially frank, fearless, and truthful accounts. Latson had initiated Marian to the core principles of all love cults: “Love much, love often. The physical union and abandonment to physical love is the most lasting and significant human tie.” At the same time, he had shown her what lay beneath the surface of this seductive call to universal intimacy.
For the next two years, Marian toured the Midwest with debonair “sex guru” Alain De Lysle, then with a less-dashing sideshow mentalist known as “Ugolino the Great.” Both were roguish charlatan clairvoyants who exploited impressionable minds, particularly those of attractive and vulnerable women. In darkened mansion chambers, these con artists tossed out snippets of Vedic philosophy laced with modern psychotherapeutic mumbo-jumbo and then urged their naive clientele to disrobe. Ugolino showered his naked flock with perfumed mists of a chloroform-ether elixir. De Lysle knocked out his charges in a more conventional fashion, using dense clouds of opium and hashish.
Once reduced to a semi-conscious dreamstate, the sex-muddled victims were manipulated into compromising positions and duly photographed. Blackmail threats followed. Marian, who played the part of their Queen of Ecstatic Fulfillment, managed to avoid incarceration before De Lysle and Ugolino were hauled to local night courts in handcuffs.
British diabolist Aleister Crowley's self-portrait.
For over a decade, the infamous explorer and poet experimented with sexmagick rites and advanced his counter- Christian religion, Crowleyanity. Blending astrology, Kabbalah, Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, and Gnosticism, Crowley promulgated the Laws of Thelma. (“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 obdurate personality, addiction to cocaine and heroin, abusive manipulation of his zombielike followers, and, especially, his enthusiasm for perverse diversions—including ritual masturbation and anal sex—earned him the rubric “the Wickedest Man in the World.”
In September 1918, Crowley selected an American to be his Babylonian “Scarlet Woman,” his cultish plaything and living mannequin for “erotomagic” experiments. To Marian’s horror, the person in question was her mousey, younger sister, Lea Hirsig. Kneeling on the chalked floor of his
Washington Square apartment, the nude Lea watched in fascination as the Beast of the Apocalypse prepared a glowing-hot dagger on his stovetop. Using the tip of the blade, he branded an enormous pentagram over her snow-white breasts. This ritually consummated their relationship, he announced: Lea was his official slave-bride, his crimsonshrouded handmaiden, Crowleyanity’s newest “Dead Soul.”
When Lea revealed the occult imprint to Marian a few days later, the older sibling requested an immediate appointment with Crowley. It was not a felicitous encounter. The beaded-eyed Satanist quickly intuited that Marian would have nothing to do with his Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). He later referred to her as an “ancient and fishlike prostitute.”
To protect her sister, Marian attended Crowley’s OTO ceremonies. Much to Marian’s skeptical astonishment, Manhattan’s “smart set” quickly succumbed to the celebratory orgiastic rites, pungent drugs, obscene chants and philosophical blather of the British Antichrist. On one occasion, Marian even upended a devil-inducing séance by smashing a “magic scepter” across Crowley’s shoulder. Her life-and-death struggle to liberate Lea proved futile. Lea Hirsig, the hapless Bronx high-school instructor, retained her station as Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman,” Alostrael, mistress to the “Great God Pan.”
The climax of the Pan-worshiping orgy witnessed by Marian Dockerill in Berlin. The live goat was slain to arouse the revelers.
After the Armistice, Crowley returned to Europe with his hard-core Village colony in tow. Although Master Crowley chose a younger Scarlet consort in 1924, Lea did not abandon her “Prophet of the New Aeon” for another five years.
Marian’s determination to unmask the sexual charlatanism that had victimized her sister had only grown more resolute through the intervening years. In the spring and summer of 1923, Marian continued her investigations in postwar Europe. In Berlin, she witnessed a traditional Black Mass, led by a defrocked Catholic priest. Before an audience of hooded congregants, the cleric pulled the altar curtain open to reveal a naked 18-yearold girl, lying prostrate on a tiny black-velvet platform. The “Living Altar’s” neck and limbs were contorted in severe right angles to her stunning face and torso. Balanced on her smooth breasts stood a golden chalice. The “Priest” tasted the wine and, in a violent gesture, flung the remaining red liquid across her nude lower torso. In a final sonorous plea, the “Priest” urged Satan to redeem his flock from “all good,” from “all Godly virtue.”
Marian described what followed: “I saw a woman turn like a tigress and sink her teeth deep into the shoulder of a man who leaped in front of her. He tore her hair until he broke the grip of her teeth and screamed, then began kissing her brutally. I saw others cutting each other with knives, and a man dragging a woman by her hair and striking her naked shoulders with a whip until they were streaked with blood. And finally, as the culminating horror, I saw a nude woman with a dagger leap upon the huge, now completely terrified goat, and cut its throat from ear to ear, so that the blood gushed out in a stream while men and women fought and clawed and tore at each other to bathe in the blood. The mad orgy lasted until dawn.”
Over the next three years, Marian infiltrated several more love cults. She gained access to G.I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Mankind on an estate outside of Paris. There, affluent society matrons were forced into heavy manual labor and schooled in the Sufi art of “selfremembering.”
Before public fountains that sprayed champagne, blank-faced disciples in diaphanous costumes performed acrobatic movements and haunting Oriental dances. Back in the New World, the flapper journalist participated in Pierre Bernard’s Tantrik Order at suburban Nyack, New York. This mystic “love colony” was widely rumored to have been the site of numerous garish and erotic fêtes since its inception in 1921.
Blanche DeVires, a former vaudeville headliner and yoga instructor, provided the theory for the “Great Oom’s” unconventional activities: “Half the domestic tragedies, threefourths of the divorces, many of the nervous breakdowns and not a few suicides and murders in America are due to the inherent ignorance and stupidity of the average Anglo- Saxon man and woman on the subject of love! We will teach them!”
Taken with Marian’s dynamic personality and Myrna Loyish sex appeal, the Loving Guru anointed her as his “Imperial Consort,” the sexual duties of which she performed resolutely while gathering the information that would later fire her lurid newspaper accounts.
In Massachusetts, Marian joined one of Charles Garland’s free-love “peasant” communes known as April Farm. The son of a millionaire Bostonian merchant, Garland was determined to bequeath his vast inheritance to back-to-the-land urban revolutionaries. At April Farm, East Coast intellectuals in Russian serf duds played the part of merry sharecroppers, but only their unfettered nocturnal sexual appetites were genuinely primitive.
Naturally, Marian indulged in the April Farm’s smutty evenings, which greatly surpassed their crack-of-dawn horticultural efforts in perspiration and whimpering moans.
In March and April 1926, Marian Dockerill published her startling experiences in an eight-part tabloid expose, Confessions of a High Priestess in America’s Notorious Love Cults. It was reprinted in an expanded mass-market paperback, My Life in a Love Cult, two years later. Marian’s firsthand reportage became one of the most widely discussed hot topics of the time.
During the Depression, the tell-all author married a wealthy Brooklyn realtor and started yet another career as an avantgarde painter. The great-great-grandmother hottie and wild woman of the early Jazz Age died in 1980 after a long and colorful life of fully participating in the scandals of her age before bringing them to light.
It’s hard to picture any of the sober-sided correspondents of our own era engaging in such “participatory journalism,” but Marian Dockerill’s pursuit of the truth about hucksters who mix sex and spiritualism to amass wealth and satiate their own appetites is as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.
Lost souls of all classes and backgrounds remain as susceptible to the allure of charismatic sex shamans as ever, and with the same unfortunate consequences. In fact, the industry of fleecing believers has grown to greater and more sinister proportions than she could ever have imagined, reaching into the highest levels of government and industry as the never-ending cavalcade of sexand- politics scandals peculiar to our own era grows longer each day.
Marian Dockerill, where are you when we really need you?
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Mel Gordon, Professor of Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, and The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity.
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