Walpurgisnacht on Mt. Brocken
Walpurgisnacht. This is the night when the witches mount their broomsticks and travel to the Sabat. They dance and feast and fuck til dawn. Great acts of magick and dizzying states of erotic ecstasy combine to create a rift in the walls of time and space whereby the Great Old Ones may enter.
Maria de Naglowska, the self styled "satanic woman", was born in Russia in 1885. This was the year which saw the “Coulomb Letters” scandal which rocked the Theosophical Society. Madame Blavatsky was accused by her housekeeper of forging the teachings of her Himalayan Masters. In London, W. Wynn Westcott, a coroner for the city, was making plans to inaugurate the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society which would teach the practice of ritual magic. Oscar Wilde visited Paris and, influenced by the Decadent movement, began plans to write Salome. Nietzsche was completing his epic work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wagner was in vogue and Sar Peladan, Stanislaus de Guaita and other French Rosicrucians were experimenting with drugs and magic. Huysmans had just published Against Nature, the bible of decadence. Georges Gurdjieff and Willie Seabrook were born in that same year.
Maria spent her youth in a chateau in the Carpathian mountains with her family. It was during this period that her mystical temperment was formed against the background of the wild and isolated terrain where pagan cults still held their sway. She heard tales of the Khlysty, the Skoptzi, the Prygouny, the Chalapoutes and the Nemoliaky. These cults preserved, in a degraded form, the remains of pre-Christian orgiastic ceremonies that had lost their sacred honor and now incorporated themes of the new faith while retaining the ancient practices. The underlying belief was that a man could assume the nature of Christ and a woman could assume the nature of the Virgin Mary through the transfiguring descent of the Holy Spirit during a secret midnight ceremony. The participants, both men and women, wore only a white garment over their nakedness. While chanting invocations, they would begin dancing in a circle. The men would form a circle in the middle moving clockwise while the women would form a circle on the outside moving counter-clockwise. As the dancing became more giddy and wild, some of the dancers would leave the circle and begin dancing alone, possessed and frenetic. Like the Arab whirling dervishes, they would spin in circles as their bodies rise and fall. To increase their frenzy, the men and women would whip each other in erotic ecstasy. At the peak of this exaltation, the participants began to experience the descent of the Holy Spirit. Both men and women would strip off their white garments and copulate promiscuously in religious ecstasy.
A young woman was chosen at the Harvest as the personification of the divinity and a symbol of generative power. She was worshipped both as Mother Earth and as the Holy Virgin of Christianity. She would appear wholly naked and become the focus of a ritual involving the young men of the village.
It is interesting to note that in these sects, sex was severely restricted to ritual and ecstatic use; in every other respect these cults professed rigid asceticism and condemned carnal love and even marriage itself. The Skoptzi were so extreme in their asceticism that they prescribed castration as a show of religious devotion. This was an echo of a cult of the Goddess Cybele in ancient Phrygia. Her castrated priests dressed as women and travelled from town to town performing lewd and lascivious entertainments in return for alms.
The Khlysty became well known in Russia because the staretz Gregori Rasputin had been a member of the cult. The title staretz means “old saint” while Rasputin is derived from rasputnik, or “dissolute”. His influence over the Tsar was widely spoken of and before he was finally assasinated, he survived massive quantities of poison and revolver bullets at close range. His own words were “I have come to bring you the voice of our holy Mother Earth and to teach you the blessed secret which she has passed on to me about sanctification by sin.”
Maria spent her youth in a chateau in the Carpathian mountains with her family. It was during this period that her mystical temperment was formed against the background of the wild and isolated terrain where pagan cults still held their sway. She heard tales of the Khlysty, the Skoptzi, the Prygouny, the Chalapoutes and the Nemoliaky. These cults preserved, in a degraded form, the remains of pre-Christian orgiastic ceremonies that had lost their sacred honor and now incorporated themes of the new faith while retaining the ancient practices. The underlying belief was that a man could assume the nature of Christ and a woman could assume the nature of the Virgin Mary through the transfiguring descent of the Holy Spirit during a secret midnight ceremony. The participants, both men and women, wore only a white garment over their nakedness. While chanting invocations, they would begin dancing in a circle. The men would form a circle in the middle moving clockwise while the women would form a circle on the outside moving counter-clockwise. As the dancing became more giddy and wild, some of the dancers would leave the circle and begin dancing alone, possessed and frenetic. Like the Arab whirling dervishes, they would spin in circles as their bodies rise and fall. To increase their frenzy, the men and women would whip each other in erotic ecstasy. At the peak of this exaltation, the participants began to experience the descent of the Holy Spirit. Both men and women would strip off their white garments and copulate promiscuously in religious ecstasy.
A young woman was chosen at the Harvest as the personification of the divinity and a symbol of generative power. She was worshipped both as Mother Earth and as the Holy Virgin of Christianity. She would appear wholly naked and become the focus of a ritual involving the young men of the village.
It is interesting to note that in these sects, sex was severely restricted to ritual and ecstatic use; in every other respect these cults professed rigid asceticism and condemned carnal love and even marriage itself. The Skoptzi were so extreme in their asceticism that they prescribed castration as a show of religious devotion. This was an echo of a cult of the Goddess Cybele in ancient Phrygia. Her castrated priests dressed as women and travelled from town to town performing lewd and lascivious entertainments in return for alms.
The Khlysty became well known in Russia because the staretz Gregori Rasputin had been a member of the cult. The title staretz means “old saint” while Rasputin is derived from rasputnik, or “dissolute”. His influence over the Tsar was widely spoken of and before he was finally assasinated, he survived massive quantities of poison and revolver bullets at close range. His own words were “I have come to bring you the voice of our holy Mother Earth and to teach you the blessed secret which she has passed on to me about sanctification by sin.”
Maria went on to dedicate her life to the Third Term of the Trinity, the secret of Rasputin. Learn more about Maria at the New Flesh Bookstore and at Lulu.com.
posted by Robert North at 10:18 PM
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