CHAPTER FIVE: SADISM AND THE ORGIES OF ROME... . 67
CHAPTER SIX: THE LADIES' WHIPPING CLUBS... 83
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE EROTIC INQUISITION..... .... . 95
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PROSTITUTE...105
CHAPTER NINE: FEMALE DOMINATION . . . . 117
CHAPTER TEN: DE SADE AND SADISM . . . . 135
CHAPTER ELEVEN: FLAGELLATION AT FASHIONABLE GIRLS' SCHOOLS.....143
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE ROYAL SADISTS OF EUROPE..... .... . . .159
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: BLUEBEARD..... .... . .169
INTRODUCTION
Acts of sadism, masochism and sadomasochism are usually accepted as perversions. But as to what exactly is a perversion, there are varying opinions.
In Western society actions such as cunnilingus and fellatio while widely practiced in secret, are commonly accepted as perversions, or at least aberrations (almost the same thing), regardless of these same practices being accepted as mere deviations of love-play elsewhere.
When someone suggests that by perversion we mean whatever practice lies beyond or outside the activities of normal sexual intercourse-this suggestion is far too glib. It presupposes that there is no room for doubt as to what normal intercourse means.
From a strictly biological viewpoint, man does directly and unhamperedly to his goal, coital orgasm. Thus it is with the lower animals, and most probably with the earliest ancestors of modern man.
The sex act is basically an act of violence by the male. Our early ancestors pursued the female they wanted; the female offered resistance, or pretended to do so; she was overcome and taken by force.
It is probable that the female's resistance was intended to intensify man's aggressiveness and thereby enhance the ardor of his lovemaking.
While we may not like the thought, (it is possible that nature invested humans with his challenge and this aggressiveness for the purpose of insuring only procreation of the strongest.) this primitive feature still clings to heterosexual behavior today. (We speak of the conquest of a woman.) And many persons make use of such occasions to give free rein to secret desires under this cover. Rape is all too frequently accompanied by severe physical harm.
Sadistic, masochistic or sadomasochistic acts are a deviation when they are the means for the attainment of coital orgasm. But when they become the ends in themselves-they are perversions, for the performance of these acts have become as important-or more important-than the orgasm itself.
The sadistic pervert who is inclined to violent deeds (rather than fancies), must choose between gratifying his wishes, which will bring him into conflict with the law, or suppressing them-which can lead to neurosis and psychosis.
This was precisely the dilemma besetting the ill-famed Marquis de Sade himself and led him through a checkered course to end his days in the lunatic asylum at Charenton.
The fact that we ourselves do not actually commit crimes of sadism or sadomasochism does not eliminate the fact that we have accepted and encouraged the development of a social situation here in the United states that enables the fight conditions for these to flourish.
Alexander Woolcott once confessed to thinking, every-time he read about a criminal being led to the gallows, "There, but for the grace of God, Go I."
He might have added a comment regarding society's sadistic tendencies in demanding that a fellow human be put to death for what in the main has been a criminal act of violence-for the most part unpremeditated.
THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
The Whip Houses
When Francus comes to solace with his whore, he sends for rods and strips himself stark naked; For his lust sleeps, and will not rise before.
By whipping of the wench it be awakened. I envy him not, but wish I had the power, to make myself his wench but one half hour.
The famous British dramatist Christopher Marlowe wrote the above lines during Shakespeare's time. But this pretty well sets the tone for the brothel flagellomania which was to erupt in Britain during the 18th and 19th
Centuries, to such a degree that the sophisticated Continental Europeans dubbed it "The English Vice." The Victorian "blue laws" of those days merely took the penis prostitutes off the streets and resulted in more business than ever for London's booming orgasm palaces. By actual police count, there were 1,781 such "houses of ill repute" operating in 1837, and a good majority of them specialized in Flagellation.
Prostitutes since the beginning of time have dealt with clients who want to be whipped, kicked around, spanked, or otherwise dominated and tortured to orgasm as well as those who want to strip down the girl and administer the cruelties themselves until she climaxes violently. But it took Victorian England to refine flagellation and sadomasochism into a fine science, and offer it up to the connoisseur on a silver platter in some of the most uniquely elaborate establishments the world has ever seen!
Historians Rattray Taylor and Pisanus Fraxi both make note of the fact that King George IV personally visited the flogging house of one Mme. Colet in Tavistock Court at Covent Garden during his reign, and that the number of such establishments immediately increased. Indeed, flagellation seemed to be the national passion and pastime for the better class of British of all ages and sexes.
Many whipping houses featured young girls of thirteen or fourteen whom a client could order to strip down at the drop of a shilling, and then administer a sound beating to her pretty bottom until the blood ran freely.
Or, if the patron preferred merely to watch, the proprietress would take on the roll on a strong-bodied head priestess would take on the roll of a strong-bodied headmistress and throw the well-built child over her lap, lay the rounded ovals bare, and thrash her thoroughly.
For the masochist trade, big-boned viragoes, tall, beautiful Amazons in tight-laced boots and nothing else, or a beautiful and unspoiled-looking teenager would gladly beat in groveling customer senseless while yelling the vilest obscenities at him.
The women who performed these duties in the roll of brutal female dominatrices were called "governesses." And in an 1830 edition of a book titled Venus Schoolmistress which was prefaced by one Mary Wilson who ran a flogging house at Townbridge place in London's St. Pancreas, we learn why:
Those women who give most satisfaction to the amateurs of discipline are called governesses because they have by experience acquired a tact and a modus operandi which the generality do not possess. It is not the merely keeping of a rod and being willing to flog, that would cause a women to be visited by the worshippers of the birch; she must have served her time to some other women who understood her business, and be thoroughly accomplished in the art. They must have a quick and intuitive method of observing the various aberrations of the human mind, and be ready and willing to humor and relieve them.
Documented accounts of the day list scores of these fashionable flogging establishments by name and address. They literally dotted the entire city with almost the frequency of the blossoming underground stations. Some bore colorful titles like "The White house."
"The Den of Mother Cummins," or "The Elysium of Brydges Street," while others were known merely by the names of their flagellant madames such as Mme. Colet's, Mrs. Mitchell's, Mrs. James's, Mrs. Shepherd's, Mrs. Berkley's or Mrs. Potter's, to mention only a few of the better known places.
Many of these women amassed considerable fortunes in a short time and retired or passed on their name and ill-fame to a new proprietress at great profit.
Mrs. Theresa Berkley, undoubtedly the most notorious of all Britain's Victorian flagellants, amassed over $50,-000 in eight years and retired. Others, such as Sarah Potter, ended up in jail or on the gallows, charged with everything from debauchery of 12-year-old girls, to mayhem and attempted murder.
The subtlety of their advertising would be considered strictly soft-sell by modern Madison Avenue standards, but there can be no doubt that it titillated and teased the sadomasochistic psyches of their potential customers no end. An historical account of the flogging houses in Hot-ten's Library Illustrative of social progress, reprints a business card of that period addressed to "Gentleman Flagellants," with the following message:
The Lady has a house of her own, and her Lecture Room is furnished with rods, cat-o-nine tails, and some of the best prints on Flagellation. The Lady has a stout women in her house, able to take a man on her back when he chooses to be treated like a schoolboy; and she and her maid are willing to be passive sometimes in the use of the rods, when required.
Price: a guinea (about $5.25 at that time). . .and half a crown (about $1.25) to the maid, if employed as a horse on the occasion. N.B. Single gentlemen, who are fond of representing schoolboys, waited by the mistress and maid at any hour, before they are up in the morning, at their own houses, where the delightful divertissement of being taken out of bed, horsed and whipped for not going to school, would be played to admiration.
Latter-day psychologists and historians make much of the fact that the popularity of brothel flogging, and particularly the acting-out of little scenes as suggested above, was due to the established practice of viciously flogging children at boarding schools and orphanages, or at home, for the slightest misbehavior.
Many a young man therefore, with the pleasures of pain instilled in him from an early age, sought to relive the sensuous experience by substituting the paid flagellant for a cruel headmaster or mistress, a warder, or even a parent. Those who went to these places for the purpose of administering pain, on the other hand, were often the older men and women, intent on reviving the sadistic sensations they had once enjoyed from punishing young boys and girl under their tutelage or employment.
A striking picture of the way these establishments operated may be seen in the following two case histories taken from documented court records and other accounts. Mrs. Sarah Potter's was best noted for the nymphet teenagers who most often took the submissive role, only to branch out later in the art of wielding the rod as well; while Theresa Berkley specialized in the bizarre and unusual, laying on the birch herself quite often, or handing it over to any of several other talented governesses, including to historian Fraxi, "Miss Ring, Hannah Jones, Sally Taylor, One-eyed Peg, Bauld Poll, and a black girl called Ebony Bet."
Case History: Mrs. Sarah Potter, alias Stewart.
One published account of this women describes her as.. . . .a bawd of some importance, and at onetime (she) made a good deal of money. During her chequered career she changed her residence requently, having lived at Castle Street, Leicester Square, then in Wardour Street, then in Albion Terrace, Kinds Road, Chelsea, then in Howland Street, Tottenham Court Road, where she was convicted of selling indecent books and sent to prison, then in Old Kent Road, and finally in Lavinia Grove, Kinds Cross, where she died in 1873.
The Flagellations which went on under her auspices were chiefly administered to gentlemen, although girls were at times castigated. Her specialty was procuring very young girls, with whose parents she generally managed to make arrangements beforehand, so as to keep herself free from scrapes. These children she would dress up in imagine clothes and teach various tricks for the amusement of her customers.
That such procurement of extremely young and pretty girls was possible then, became even more clearly documented in 1885 when journalist W.T. Stead bought a beautiful 13-year-old child for ten pounds (about fifty dollars), resold her to a brothel for every kind of sexual abuse, and then wrote a graphic newspaper account of it to expose the practice. (Sex in History, G. Rattray Taylor).
Yet twenty-two years before, the sensational trial of Sarah Potter had produced vivid evidence of the same thing, and the authorities had meted out only a short prison term to her while ignoring the practice generally. In the summer of 1863, Mrs. Potter's operations was exposed in a publication put out by C. Brown of 44 Wych Street, Strand, titled Mysteries of Flagellation. It read in part: "On that date (July, 1863), under the auspices of the Society for the Protection of Females, seizure was made at the then notorious "Academy" of Sarah Potter, alias Stewart, in Wardour Street, and a rare collection of flagellation appurtenances taken to the Westminster Police Court, when the general public, for the first time, became aware that young females were decoyed into Stewart's School of Flogging, to undergo the ordeal of the birch from old and young Flagellists, for the benefit of the woman Stewart. These curious specimens of her stock-in-trade consisted of a folding ladder with straps, birch rods, furze brooms and secret implements for the use of male and female.
"Her method of conducting business was to get hold of very young girls, to board, lodge and clothe them, and in return they were obliged to minister to the lust of patrons of the boarding-house. They were flogged in different ways. Sometimes strapped to the ladder, or flogged around the room, and at times they were tied on the bed. Every device or variation which perverted ingenuity could devise was resorted to give variety to the orgies.. . . "
For the sum of fifteen pounds, or about seventy-five dollars, a noble gentleman or businessman could enjoy the complete program. He might sit in the center of the room with his virile member exposed, while Mrs. Potter, described as a stout-bodied and attractive brunette, paraded five or six of her darling little nymphet "princesses" before him, each one in a cute party dress with starched petticoats. The girls could curtsy sweetly before him, while Mrs. Potter raised her own skirts high to allow a sumptuous view of her big shapely thighs and naked loins, and a brawny Negro maid handed him some birches.
The girls would all shudder at the sight of the rods, then the client would direct Mrs. Potter to sit down and take one across her naked lap, bottom up. The girl would kick and scream while the woman yanked up the skirt and petticoats, then lay the fresh young buttocks and backside bare to take the lashes of the rod from the lust-crazed customer.
If Mrs. Potter thought the violent strokes were drawing too much blood, she might hand the girl over to the tall Negro maid, who had been sitting by her side with dress raised over the hips so she could satisfy herself, and order her to apply unguents, kisses and other medications and ministrations to soothe the girl's pains and provide a pleasant sight.
The client then might order all the remaining young nymphets to drop their drawers, tuck their clothing up under their arms, and bend over to grasp their ankles so that he could walk down the line and apply the birch, or the palm of his hand, vigorously to each naked bottom in turn.
Case History! Mrs. Theresa Berkley.
Theresa Berkley was not only the richest and most notorious flagellant and flogging-house owner in Victorian London, but was a perfectionist and innovator in the art. Her house was at 28 Charlotte Street, Portland, Fraxi placed utmost faith in governess Mary Wilson's recorded account of her which stated in part:
"She possessed the first grand requisite of a courtesan, viz., lewdness; for without it a woman is positively lecherous and she cannot long keep up the affectation of it. She could assume great urbanity and good humor; she would study every letch, whim, caprice, and desire of her customer, and had the disposition to gratify him, if her avarice was rewarded in return. For those whose letch it was to flog a woman, she would herself submit to a certain extent; but if they were gluttons at it, she had women in attendance who would take any number of lashes the flogger pleased, provided he forked out an advalorem duty. Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. For supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant; she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledores made of thick sole-leather, with inch-nails run through, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years of flagellation.
Also holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen called butcher's bush; and during the summer, glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles with which she often restored the dead to life.
Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, currycombed, phlebotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full. Mrs. Berkley had also in her second floor, a hook and pulley attached to the ceiling, by which she could draw a man up by his hands.
But Theresa Berkley was never a woman to be satisfied by simple, everyday things. After all, she must have reasoned, nearly every flogging house in London had pulleys so that a masochistic client could be stripped naked by the governess and hung up to be flogged.
Therefore in 1828, when an imaginative industrial engineer and designer told her that he could make her name famous even after death if she would install his invention, the much-touted "Berkley Horse" came into being. The macabre device consisted of a wooden latter suspended horizontally from the ceiling by a separate pulley at each end.
A client who paid for its use would be stripped completely naked by Mrs. Berkley and one of her assistants, then lashed lengthwise across the top of it, face down. By adjusting the pulleys, he could be drawn up to any desired angle or height.
Mrs. Berkley's memoirs contained an elaborate illustration of the machine in use, which was described by Mary Wilson and quoted by Fraxi;
"....A. man upon it quite naked. A woman is sitting in a chair exactly under it, with her bosom, belly and bush exposed; she is manualizing his emblem, whilst Mrs. Berkley is birching his posteriors."
Miss Wilson then goes on to describe the young woman who was masturbating the client as a "fine, tall, dark haired girl," and mentions such other of Mrs. Berkley's regulars as: The good-humored blonde, Willis; the plump, tight, frisky and merry-arsed Thurlow; Grenville, with the spendour of buttock; Olive, the gipsy whose brown skin, wicked black eye, and Medicean form would melt an anchorite; the mild and amiable Palmer, with luxuriant and well-fledged mount, from whose tufted honors many a noble lord has stolen a sprig; and Pryce, the pleasing and complaisant, who, if birch was a question, could both give and take.
When Theresa Berkley died in 1836 and left a fortune of over $50,000 several publishers threatened to publish an autobiography based on her memoirs, which would have listed the bizarre sexual appetites of hundreds of members of the British nobility. But a Dr. Cork of Vance Street refused to serve as executor of the estate though he had been named administrator in her will. Her money thus went to the crown, and the doctor never sold her memoirs. However, certain portions of her personal story have leaked out over the years. And Fraxi swears to the authenticity of a letter in her collection from a "noble slave to the pleasures of the birch." It provides a penetrating insight into the flagelloamnia of the times:
In my experience I have known personally several ladies of high rank who had an extraordinary passion for administering the rod, and that with merciless severity. I know too, the wife of a clergyman, young and pretty, who carried the taste to excess. I have known only one who liked receiving it, and she was quite of the lowest order; when excited by drink, she would allow herself to be birched until her bottom was utterly raw, and the rod saturated with blood, she crying out during the operation "harder! harder! and blaspheming if it was not well laid on.
At the establishment I have named.. . . .there come twenty young girls who go through all the phases of schoolmistress, and whip fearfully severely. The programs set by the pupils are extraordinary-some like to be whipped as children on the knee, some on the back of a servant, others strapped down.
CHAPTER TWO
The Depraved
Naked from the waist up, the howling, chanting, moaning procession marched 300 miles through the snow and ice of the Swiss Alps and across the French countryside from Basle to Avignon, their backs and breasts soaked with blood from the day and night flogging the seats of their clothing crimson and stuck tight to their scourged flesh.
In Colorado and New Mexico, they beat each other numb with long black snake-whips. Beautiful young women were sprawled out naked on huge wooden crosses. Railroad spikes were driven through their breasts. And they were more permanently impaled by the hammering of ten-penny nails through their hands and feet.
Torchlight parades wound through the streets of European cities in double file, each person lashing out in chanting rhythm across the buttocks and back of the person in front of him. Many passed out on the cobblestone streets from loss of blood. Other died. In the churchyards of France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, they were hung up by their hands, their bodies stripped naked. They were whipped, beaten, scourged, spat upon, and cut with knives to drain away the blood of sin. Five-year-old girls, 85-year-old men, beautiful young married women, middle-aged matrons, and teen-aged youths all were denuded publicly and put to the lash.
Officially a part of Church organization for over 700 years, the penitent and flagellent sects began as splinter religious groups as early as 175 A.D., and exist to this day in secret or subdued form in the Latin countries, and even in the American Southwest.
Krafft-Ebing explained in his classic Phychopathia Sex-ualis, that the members of these flagellant orders were accustomed to whip themselves partly as an atonement and partly to mortify the flesh (in accordance with the principle of chastity promulgated by the Church-i.e., the emancipation of the soul from sensuality).
Yet the scenes of these Church-sponsored punishments, which had begun as devout rites of self-deprivation by the priests and then spread to the masses as a form of penance, are among the most lustful in history. Krafft-Ebing and almost every psychiatrist, psychologist and sociologist since him, have agreed that "sensuality was only the more excited by flagellation." It was the Greek Thesmaphoria, the Roman orgy and the Egyptian fertility rites all over again, but now under the pious guise of the masochistic and deserved punishment often meted out by sadistic ecclesiastics or their proctors, and at other times upon each other in what can only be described as a sexually sadomasochistic frenzy.
Hundreds of priests and other religious men were tried and convicted by the Church hierarchy or civilian authorities, for gross misconduct lewdness, fornication, libidinal sensuality, and even lust-murder. But many of these, plus many never brought to task, had mesmerized their flocks over long periods of time into believing that their ordained orgies of flagellation and the attendant sexual excesses, were paving the road to eventual salvation.
St. Dominic of Spain, founder of the Dominican Order in the 13th Century, translated the penance for atonement of sins into terms of the rod and the whip: one hundred lashes equaled the recitation of one penitential psalm. The Franciscans and other orders either followed suit or had already established their own code, until the screams and wails of the throngs of sinners at the church on "Punishment Day" could be heard to the outskirts of almost every town and village in Europe.
Punishment Day began with a long procession of penitents lining up in the front of the church. Historians tell us that they ranged in age from five to eighty-five, and constituted such individuals as; a chubby six-year-old boy who had been found masturbating by his parents; a young married woman who had tempted the village idiot by exposing her shapely breasts and thighs to him; a beautiful teenage girl who had been caught in flagrante delicto with a traveling man an 83-year-old laborer who was found in bed naked with his 15-year-old great granddaughter; two youths who confessed to an act of "buggary" one up the other, a 27-year-old spinster who admitted having salacious thoughts and dreams of fellating young men; and two attractive married women who confessed to "lying together in sin."
One by one, these and more like them filed into the confessional booth and laid bare their sinful thoughts and acts before the stern priest. Then, the women who had committed sins of the flesh were sent to a special part of the churchyard, thus letting the growing crowd outside know readily of the carnal nature of their misbehavior.
Assistants stripped them to the waist, denuded them completely, or tied their dresses and shifts up about their shoulders and removed their drawers. Their hands were strapped high up the wall to iron rings embedded in the masonry for just that purpose. And those who were not quite tall enough found the excruciating misery of just hanging there by their hands every bit as terrifying as the later flogging.
Most of these naked and semi-naked girls and women, many of them with visually stimulating young bodies with fully developed breasts, thigh and buttocks, were fettered facing the wall, after they had first been humiliatingly exposed full-view to the jeering onlookers who rebuked them piously as they pointed to the "sinful" parts. Others, the women and girls who had actually performed "criminal" sexual "connection with man or beast," were sometimes bound with their backs to the wall so that the very genitalia and breasts which had played so important a part in the guilt, could be brutally fustigated. Likewise, the men who were to be scourged for their fleshly transgression, were lashed to another part of the wall, while the children occupied a separate area, but were nevertheless stripped and fettered just as humiliatingly as the more serious offenders.
During the long wait for the priest, or for one appointed by him to administer the whipping, the crowd would move about restlessly. From their mouths would pour the clucking, self-righteous admonishments and verbal castigations. But their eyes often told a different story as they focused hungrily on a teen-ager's budding breasts quivering naked and firm in the cold, or lingered on the twisting and writhing buttocks of a fully developed woman, or the trembling loins of a lithe young housewife.
And there were those who found perverted pleasure too in the sight of the whimpering young men and children who stood helplessly naked, some stoutly stimulated through and an already corrupt proclivity for the sting of the rod and whip, as they awaited the blows.
A hush would fall over the crowd, perhaps a feeling of guilt as their own lascivious thoughts when the priest came out. He, or his assistants, would then pick up their long whips or leather or cord, or perhaps a well-made knout, a particularly painful and very stout whip made of long leather thongs twisted together with wire for hardness.
A dozen pair of buttocks would stiffen down the line as the whacks landed across the nakedness of the first penitent. The user's force would grow faster, the blows harder, as he himself became caught up in the impassioned fury, his body sweating profusely. The blood would come. The blows would splat a red spray with each whack. But the beating never let up, no matter how tortured the screams and wails and cries of the poor souls, until every last lash which had been prescribed was delivered.
The beautiful young adulteress in the line might be ruined for life by the powerful uppercut of the overwrought wielder's first blow to her naked loins. An unfaithful husband would yelp like a dying dog and pass out, as the bloody knout slammed into the super-sensitive tenderness of his naked testicles.
But the punishment had been ordained. It had to be carried out! And if a victim was to die occasionally, it was only what fate demanded of him for his crime, the nature and degree of which had long ago been forgotten in the insane delirium that gripped both participants and spectators in a sadomasochistic trance of overwhelming sensuality.
Before the penitential and flagellant punishments were meted out to the masses, they had been reserved as a mode of self-castigation for certain monks, priests and nuns. And in reading the early history of the Libri Poeni-tentiales from such authentic sources as the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica and others, it seems as if almost every devout holy man was engaged in a frantically competitive contest to outdo the other in the most excruciating self-torture aimed at atonement for sins and purification of body and soul.
Ponticus Aquila, the Greek-Jewish proselyte who translated the Old Testament in the Second Century A.D., was known to spend winter nights in a fountain so that his flesh would freeze. Around the Fourth Century, the Syrian ascetic St. Simeon Stylites forced himself to sleep at night while racked upon a pillar, and ulcerated his abdomen and waist by wearing an iron belt with spikes.
According to British Historian Taylor's graphic account of the times; "Wild-eyed monks retired to the burning deserts of North Africa to mortify their flesh; flagellating themselves, going without sleep and refusing to wash..... . The attraction of Christianity was that it confirmed the sense of guilt and authorized self-punishment to relieve it.....How closely connected with sexual desire these extravagant practices were is shown by the confessions of the Fathers themselves."
Case History: The Confession of St. Jerome.
Born about 340 A.D., St. Jerome became a brilliant scholar of rhetoric in Rome, and tasted fully and freely of the bawdy and bacchanalian pleasure of that town before deciding to become a man of the cloth.
Giving up the profligate pastimes of the Eternal City, he committed himself to a six-year existence of penitential deprivation in the desert of North Africa as a hermit. Yet during those lonely years of misery, disease, starvation, and parched thirst even the man who was later to be immortalized as a saint and revise the New Testament into the Vulgate, which is still in use today, could not help but associate his suffering with sex:
How often historian Taylor quotes St. Jerome in illustrating this sexual sadomasochism, when I was living in the desert which affords to hermits a savage living dwelling place, parched by a burning sun, did I imagine myself amid the pleasure of Rome. I sought solitude because I was filled with bitterness.. . . .I, who from the fear of hell had consigned myself to that prison where scorpions and wild beasts were my companions, fancied myself among bevies of young girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled from fasting, yet my mind was burning with the cravings of desire, and the fires of lust fled up from my flesh that was as that of a corpse. I do not blush to avow my flesh that was as that of a corpse. I do not blush to avow my abject misery. Much of the self-assaulting nature of these flagellations and other deprivations and torture can be no more nor less than a substitute for the sex act itself, often resulting in actual orgasm or ejaculation as in copulative relations.
"Psychoanalysts have shown, "Rattray Taylor writes in Sex in History, "how a sense of sexual guilt leads to the inturning of Thanatos (the death instinct), in an attempt to relieve the guilt by continual self-punishment, while flagellation, specifically, which is a kind of assault, may be a substitute for sexual intercourse. It is therefore in no way surprising to find that the celibates often indulged in masochism, and especially in flagellation, and we find cases of confessors making use of their power of absolution to force female parishioners to beat them."
Compare this with Sacher-Masoch's sexual lust for being dominated, whipped and scourged by over-powering females of his own choosing, and a surface examination shows no essential difference in appearance. Both the Austrian pervert and the penitent priests which Taylor mentions, totally submitted themselves to flagellation at female hands.
The cloistered nuns of the penitential proved that they were every bit as devout as the men in the most bizarre and brutal forms of self-prescribed tortures. And again, the competition was fierce, and many of those who excelled at extreme self-cruelty were later canonized.
Krafft-Ebing says of Elizabeth of Genton that she passed into a state of bacchanalian madness as a result of continued whippings, and goes on to explain that: "As a rule, she raved when, excited by unusual flagellation, she believed herself united with her ideal. This condition was so exquisitely pleasant to her that she would frequently cry out, "O love, O eternal love, O love, O you creatures! Cry out with me, Love, Love!"
W.J. Fielding in Love and the Sex emotions mentions that Christine of St. Trong (1150-1224) "....suffered from obsessions which are now generally recognized as transparent sexual hallucinations." Other historians describe how she not only flagellated herself, but "cooked her body in brick ovens, fastened herself on a wheel, had herself racked and hung on a gallows beside a corpse, then partly buried in a grave."
Christine Ebner is said by Fielding to have imagined herself to have conceived a child by Jesus and cut a cross of skin from her chest, in what the writer refers to as demonstrating the linkage of sexual desire and masochism.
The French historical biographer LanguetGauthey cautions his readers against trying to imitate the example of St. Margaret Marie of Alacoque, who as late as the 17th ate only rotten fruit and filthy bread, drank no water from Thursday to Sunday, and when she did drink refused all but the dirtiest wash water, and during one convulsion cut the name of Jesus on her chest and burned in the letters indelibly with a candle.
Case History: St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi-
Described as a daughter of distinguished parents, who became a Carmelite nun in Florence, Italy, about 1580, Mary Magdalene of Pazzi is said to have taken a vow of chastity at the incredibly early age of four.
Historian Taylor reveals that she had simultaneous illusions of being mauled and pushed about and would run around in a frenzy screaming, "Love, Love.. . . . ! "
In the convent garden she was often wont to roll herself on bundles of sharp thorns until they pricked through her naked flesh and drew blood, and then add to the suffering by flagellating her abused body for hours on end.
She had her younger novices tie her to posts and hurl the basest of accusations and insults at her.
She dropped hot wax on her scourged flesh to amplify the pain. And according to social historian E.J. Dingwell, the Pazzi ordered one of her novices to stand upon her mouth, her own eyes in a direct line with the excited apex of the young sister's thighs, while the girl beat her with a stout whip or rod. Kraff-Ebing found St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi such an interesting study that he dwelt on her at some length in his classic Psychopathia Sexualis, reporting particularly on the aspect of flagellation as a strong means of sexual stimulation: It was her greatest delight to have her hands bound by the prioress behind her back, and her naked loins whipped in the presence of the assembled sisters.
But the whippings, continued from her earliest youth, quite destroyed her nervous system, and perhaps no other heroine of flagellation had so many hallucinations. While being whipped her thoughts were of love. The inner fire threatened to consume her, and she frequently cried, "Enough! Fan no longer the flame that consumes me. This is not the death I long for; it comes with all too much pleasure and delight." Thus it continued. But the spirit of impurity wove the most sensual lascivious fancies, and she was several times near losing her chastity.
Thus, once again, we see the recurrent theme of nakedness, attention to the genital area both visually and physically, plus unadulterated sexual excitement through flagellation and other forms of pain, all within the excused context of a religious or other morally accepted practice.
In 1671 Mary Magdalene of Pazzi was made a saint. Astounding as these individual case histories may sound to the average citizen of today, they are no more alarming than the mass hysteria of flagellation which gripped
Europeans by the millions in that long period of masochistic and sadistic flagellomania. The Catholic Encylo-pedia devotes page after page to the activities that went on both officially and unofficially during those centuries of religious sadomasochism.
And the universally accepted Encyclopedia Britannia tells us that by the year 1259, the fraternities of flagellation had enveloped Italy and begun to spread rapidly like a highly contagious disease, "extending as far as the Rhine provinces and across Germany into Bohemia.
"Day and night, long processions of all classes and ages (as young as five, according to Taylor), , headed by priests carrying crosses and banners, perambulated the streets in double file, reciting prayers and drawing the flood from their bodies with leathern thongs."
The Pope finally banned these penitential practices as heresy in 1349, and many leaders were sentenced to death at the stake or by burning. But the mania was too ingrained in its practitioners to suffer a final death blow. In 1414 it reappeared in Germany as "The only way to salvation." In the 16th Century it was still quite prominent in Italy, Spain and southern France, and among the Jansenist convulsionaries in the 18th Century. In 1820 it appeared again briefly in Lisbon.
On this side of the Atlantic, in the New World of America, the Penitents of Colorado and New Mexico performed actual crucifixions on the cross during Holy week, up until 1896, according to Webster's Unabridged. In both the U.S. and south of the border, hundreds were actually nailed and spiked to huge wooden crosses, gasping their last bloody breaths as the wailing mobs chanted deliriously over the human sacrifices they were offering. Some of us today remember the sensational newsreel and press exposes of the 1930's, when the activities of Los Hermanos Penitents in the Southwest U.S. and Mexico were brought to light after a photographer sneaked among some of the groups and photographed actual torture scenes.
Even today in the Latin countries, it is not unusual at festival time to see "brotherhoods of penitents flogging themselves before the assembled faithful."
The very fact that it took over 700 years before Rome could wipe out the bulk of the practice among the majority of flagellant sects and orders, which had spread all over the Christian world, has been blamed by many authorities on the obvious appeal it had for the masses. The pleasure of pain could be used for punishment of sins, a road to salvation. Or, to put it another way, many who submitted to the whippings and beatings fearfully because they wanted to be scourged of sin, discovered or cultivated the masochistic sensuality which evolved into the pleasure of pain.
Either way, the flagellants undoubtedly were pleased to discover that they would have their cake and eat it too. To atone for the sins of adultery, fornication or other fleshly transgressions, they could evoke the same stimuli from flagellating themselves or being flagellated.
This might be compared to punishing a child who had eaten vanilla ice cream after being told not to, by ordering him to eat chocolate ice cream. Assuming, of course, that he would like chocolate as well as vanilla. His appetite for ice cream would thus be satisfied with another flavor of the same, while the flagellant's appetite for sex would thus be satisfied with an acceptable substitute also.
CHAPTER THREE
Lust for the Lash
The tall prioress in her long, flowing robes stripped the younger sister naked and ordered the novices to bind the nude girl's hands behind her back. Then, before a crowd of perhaps a hundred wailing and chanting females, the young maiden's sexual femininity was whipped and beaten mercilessly with a lash of heavy leather thongs until she slumped senseless.....
The group of naked youths danced wildly under the flaming torchlight as the high priests goaded them on to pick up the razor-sharp swords from the racks while their backs were flogged with long rods. Then, one after another, they slashed away at their own sex organs, severing them and waving them in their hands as they ran screaming through the village streets to select a house at random into which they would toss their last remnants of manhood.....
The three stern black-hooded torturers dragged the screaming, full bodied teen-age girl into the dungeon cell and tore off every shred of her garments. Grappling for control of her budding young nakedness, they bound her left hand securely to her right foot, her right hand to her left foot, then moistened the leather straps so they would tighten and cut through the skin. They yelled accusations at the hysterical girl. They plunged thick needles deep into her flesh until they had covered every inch of her body, paying particular attention to the firm young breasts and the vaginal area, pushing the bodkin clear through the sex lips till it scraped on the pelvic bone..... .
At the Temple of Dionysus, a long procession of beautiful young girls were flogged and beaten for hours with long, stringy whips and gashed into their nude, writhing bodies and drew long bloody welts, while the entranced populace huddled around to watch..... .
These scenes are not from the imagination of some fictional pornographer. Each instance is a documented account taken from the pages of some the world's most authoritative and respected historians! Neither do they describe some evil Witches' Sabbath or other orgy of a devil worshippers' cult. They are factual examples of the morally and legally sanctioned sadomasochistic practices of recognized segments of both the Christian and pre-
Christian religions of their times!
The first incident, which occurred about 1580, is taken from the life story of St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, a Carmelite nun who was canonized in 1671. Her tortures will be studied in more detail in a case history account later on.
The horrible rites of self-castration pictured in the second paragraph, which rival a thousand times over the grisly and bloody self-emasculation scene in the fictional The Carpetbaggers, were practiced in Ancient Greece as a pre-requisite for elevation to the priesthood of Cybele.
The girl whose entire body was left a bloody mass after being pricked thousands of times with thick needles was a victim of the witch-hunters of the Middle Ages. The purpose of that sadistic and fiendish violation of a girls flesh was to prove her a witch by finding a spot insensitive to pain.
And recorded history tells us that at the town of Alea in the Greek Peloponnesus, it was a common ritual to subject all females deemed guilty of "misbehavior" to prolonged flagellation at the Temple of Dionysus.
Flagellation and sadomasochism, which are today considered the most dangerous of perversions in their advanced stages, were actually practiced to the most perverted degrees imaginable as forms of religious devotion, and were officially sanctioned state procedures for over six thousand years. It is only in comparatively recent times, in fact, that the Order of Flagellants and Penitents has been driven almost completely underground by the
Church, only to appear openly at certain annual religious festivals of the Latin countries in a highly attenuated form. The flagellant cult of Los Hermanos Penitentes still survives in parts of New Mexico.
When one realizes the strong universality of sadomasochism as expressed through these morally accepted customs throughout history, it is not at all surprising today to read about the police discovering an occasional "Marquis de Sade Thrill Club," or to learn that the lusciously beautiful English playgirl Mandy Rice-Davies was hired to whip members of the British nobility on their bare bottoms while she strutted around in leather boots and stocking, the rest of her body naked. Even in the religious and other sanctioned practices of flagellation, nakedness or partial nakedness has always been an inherent requirement. And the physiological knowledge we have gained through the medical profession shows a clear connection between the sensitive nerves of the buttocks and the erotic response of the genitalia. Thus when the duly ordained "punishers" of the Church flagellated the naked bottoms of penitents, they were more often than not engaging in a psychosexual act, or what many psychiatrists would call a substitute for actual sexual intercourse.
History is also filled with shocking episodes of flagellation where no such moralistic excuse existed. In these instances, still very much with us today and possibly on the increase, flagellation and other forms of sadomasochism have been resorted to simply for the sensual pleasures they provide as an adjunct to sexual intercourse, as a means of reviving potency in the male, or as the sole sex aim in themselves.
Sociological historians and psychiatrists such as Ben-fey and Krafft-Ebing have noted that the ancient Budhists and Egyptians recorded accounts of masochistic sexual behavior thousands of years before the time of Christ.
In ancient Rome, the early cellar brothels or fornices featured a girl stripped from the buttocks down, standing by each bedroom doorway, sternly slapping a flexible ferula against the plump nakedness of her voluptuous upper thighs as she struck provocative poses to lure prospective customers.
The ladies whipping clubs of England and France have been detailed in documented account depicting the noble ladies, their bare bottoms puckered, being thrashed thoroughly by female maid servants as a means of adding spice to their bored lives.
The English flogging houses of the Victorian Era put even the early Romans to shame with such added refinements as the infamous whipping machine, the "Berkley Horse," and a system of star-billing for the more notorious prostitute flagellants of the day. Openly advertised as being both willing to receive the birch or wield it vigorously on "gentlemen or lady clients," according to Hot-ten's Library Illustrative of Social Progress, were such colorful names as "Kitty Cut-a-Dash, One-eyed Peg, Bald Poll, and Mother Birch."
Organized flagellation in an official or unofficial setting existed rampantly during that same period of virtual flagellomania in boarding schools and prisons, by foster parents who had taken in young wards, by governesses, and upon young apprentices and other youthful servants.
Here again, the typical scene consisted of the male miscreant dropping his trousers and shorts, or the young girls tucking their flowing skirts and shifts and petticoats up about their armpits while lowering their drawers to the floor. Nakedness, particularly of the sensitive and sensuous backside, and in most cases of the genitalia therefore, was essential to the punishment." The spreading of the legs was also required more often than not, thus bringing the sex organs into full view-and vulnerability.
When the male youths would often achieve virile erections, and the girls were sometimes wont to manipulate their sex zones during or after such physical excoriation, it could only be the most naive individual who would not recognize that both the punisher and the punished considered flagellation an essentially sexual act. Whipping or spanking to orgasm, as well as the actual flogging or probing of the genitals and breasts themselves was not uncommon at all. And we do not need physicians or psychiatrists to tell us that the human buttocks are not only one of the most sexual-sensitive areas of the body, but one of its most visually erotic as well. The full, rounded rump of a female in a tight fitting dress or other such attire is one of the dominant sex symbols of our time.
The bustle of the last century was an attempt to make the natural protuberance and configuration appear amplified and thus more sexually stimulating to the male. When a young Lothario today sees a shapely girl walking down the street, he is just as apt to notice her ass and remark upon it admiringly, as he is the bust or legs. How often has one heard the expression "man, look at the butt on that broad." Indeed, "broad" means ass.
And in the area of male homosexuality, it is common knowledge that the prize physical catch for a sodomist has always been the slightly chubby youth with full buttocks, a type of male characteristic which also has great sensual appeal for certain sexually sophisticated matrons.
There can be little doubt that flagellation has often appeared under the guise of deserved punishment, the baring of the buttocks is essentially an exhibitionist-voyeuristic act, and that the flogging which follows is erotically sadomasochistic.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who craved and received absolute subjugation at the hands of tall, beautiful women in only the briefest and luxuriant dress, and the Marquis de Sade, who luxuriated in whipping, and slicing up lovely naked nymphets, were the inspiration for the coinage of the words sadism and masochism. But as will be discovered in the page of this book, they were certainly not the first, nor the most original individual practitioners of the passive and active aspects of the passion of pain.
The history of sadomasochism and flagellation is actually a history of mankind itself, which, teeters back and forth between cultures dominated by either aggressive father-image, or the submissive and liberal mother-image, and there are many who believe that the current trend toward new excesses of sadomasochistic expression is merely a case of history repeating itself, something which is just as surely to reach a violent crest before it recedes again, as is an ocean's wave during a storm at sea.
Everywhere around us, these sociologists and historians say, are evidences of a vigorously renewed interest in the whip and the knout, the rod and that thong, the defloration mania for young nymphet virgins, the slave master relationship, the Amazon complex of many males who hunger for servile domination by big-thighed and big-busted females, their gleaming bodies naked except for stark leather or other symbolic attire.
The tremendous upsurge in box-office appeal for such off-beat movies as Chained Girls, Whites of Chinatown and Lash of Desire is another indication of this trend. The lively book sales of titles such as Girl with a Whip, The Tigress Who Bites, or the Awakening of Cindy, about the ravishing of a nubile-bodied 13-year-old nymphet by a lusty middle-aged minister, give additional evidence of the striking hold which sadomasochism has on today's public.
Whipping and spanking parties with the guests stripped from the waist down, are becoming "in" divertissement for some groups of sexual sophisticates, who find eager applicants for invitations among all walks of our thrill-seeking society.
A new adult game known as "Houdini" has shown up on both East and West coasts, in which straws are drawn to determine which participant must strip naked and be tied down hand and foot while the others gleefully satisfy their bizarre whims until he or she can get loose. In some instances there are eager volunteers for the part, who make little effort at gaining freedom from their bondage, preferring to instead enjoy wave after wave of orgasms.
Metropolitian police departments the country over have warned newspapers against taking classified ads for their "Personal" columns which request "Wanda" to contact "Severin," after some of the more well-read members of the vice squads realized what was going on. Wanda is the brutally masterful heroine of Scher-Masoc's Venus in Furs, who lured Severin into a trap, then tied him up helplessly while threatening him with stinging blows from her whip, and various other humiliations.
But we do not have to be satisfied with such sketchy detail as this to achieve a better understanding of the macabre history of sadomasochism and flagellation in its variety of shapes and forms.
Recorded history, present-day court trials, psychiatric case histories, and other documented psychological studies provide us with the most vivid and graphic detail of the passion of pain as it has existed from ancient times, through medieval Europe and Victorian England, right on up to the practices which are going on at this very minute in some clandestine club of flagellants, devil worshippers or "disciplinarians."
Within the pages of this book, psychological and historical research has enabled us to present actual case histories and recorded historical accounts of some of the most astounding instances of flagellation and sadomasochism known to man.
Case Histories: Judy and Charles
We are fortunate to have this most unique case study of a contemporary sadomasochistic relationship, with which to begin.
Judy is a 29-year old blonde with a nice figure-full breasts, shapely thighs and well-rounded hips. She is employed as a stenographer in the office of a prominent professional man. Charles is a self-made intellectual, a physical culturist with two doctor's degrees, who teaches at a large university and is a reserve colonel in the military. At 42-years of age, he stands six feet tall, weighs 180 pounds encased in a muscular bronze frame, and his hair is a virile salt-and-pepper crew cut.
Story is reconstructed from Judy's own words. And it is hoped that her self-revelations may give some insight into the psycho-dynamic factors often connected with the compulsive and persistent behavior of many sadomasochists in today's troubled society;
"I love to be spanked by a man with his bare hands! I love to be kicked around on the floor while I'm naked! I love to be slapped in the face until my eyes are black and blue! I love to be raped! I want to be taken by force, stripped naked, and have a man pin me down while he does it! While he slams his cock into me! Unless he treats me this way, I won't let him have me. That's the price a man must pay if he wants to go to bed with me. That, and nothing more!
"I have been living with Charles as his wife, although we're not really married, for the past six years. I often cheat on him. And then I go right home and let him know exactly what I've done. He flies into a rage and nearly kills me. That's why I do it.
"One day last week when he was working, I became terribly frustrated. I was all tense and in knots. So, I called this fellow I had met at a bar once and asked him to let me come to his apartment. He was thrilled at the idea. I knew he would be because he had begged me to make a date with him after I let him drive me home from the bar that night and feel my legs. He had taken my dress and pulled it above my stockings and kissed my naked thighs. I had told him to stop because my husband might come out and see us. I was disappointed when he took me seriously.
"I knew this night would be different, though, because I had learned how to get what I wanted from a man. We sat around his apartment and had a few drinks, then he began to kiss me and feel my legs. I let him take my breasts out and kiss them. He was so excited he was about to explode. I was bored stiff!
"I laughed when he finally touched me there and discovered how ice-cold I was really was. He became terribly confused and frustrated, just like they all do when I let them go that far, and they find out they haven't made me the least bit hot.
"He began to kiss my breasts more frantically after that, but he didn't bite. He took off my dress, slip, bra, panties, garter belt, and stockings. He did it very slow and teasingly, the fool!
"He never realized it was a complete waste of effort. I've never been able to get worked up that way. Then, he took me over to the bed. He kissed my neck, my ears, my stomach, my navel, my back, my thighs. He kissed me on my cunt too, but it was still nothing.
"When he tried to make love to me, I was like stone--willing but stiff. I was so cold and unaroused that it was impossible for him to accomplish what he wanted to. The sweat was pouring off him and he beat on the bed with his fists, he was so shook up.
"I laughed at him again. I told him he wasn't man enough to make a woman hot. I cursed him every way I knew how, and insulted his ancestry in the filthiest and dirtiest ways I could think of. And all the time I was cursing at him, I just lay then in the bed naked with my legs apart, my body completely unmoved.
"He became furious, like a madman! He called me a piece of trash. He slapped my right breast so hard I could feel the pain all the way to my toes! He grabbed me by the arm and flung me down to the floor! He kicked my ribs and spat in my face! He pulled me up by the hair and slapped each cheek back and forth with his open hand until my whole head felt numb.....and my body was on fire.
"I was delirious with passion! The awful terrible pain and the swelling bruises cried out for him to take me that very second, because I was ready. I knew I couldn't hold off much longer.
"He threw me on the bed and made love to me. Not the sweet and hot love like most people do. He was an animal then, as atavistically savage as I was. We dug Our fingernails into each other. He called me the worst names he could think of-slut, whore, tramp, dog, a perverted nymphomaniac.
And then he kicked me out of his apartment when he was through. It had been wonderful, but not as wonderful as what I knew was coming next. My body was still on fire, anxiously and expectantly on fire.
"Charles was waiting for me when I got home. One look at my black eye and his powerful hands ripped every stitch of clothing from my body in seconds. The other eye was well on the way to being black and blue when he saw the welts on my side and the purple bruises and tooth marks all over my breasts and shoulders. He picked up my 120 pounds like I was a used lunch-bag and slammed me into the corner like a crumpled mass of human trash.
"He let me lie there like a yelping puppy dog licking its wounds, while he took off his clothes. He walked over and stood in front of me, his eyes glaring down at me like I was bundle of refuse with a bad smell. His huge, muscular body was plain naked, and he was terribly excited.
"My body was alive again! I was in an agonized fit of anguished pain mixed up with the fire of passion. I stated to raise up, trembling all over.
"Cheap little whore! Just like your rotten mother!" he said through his teeth. His voice was emotionless. He looked like he could have killed me on the spot, like I was the most disgusting sight he had ever seen. I was going crazy for him!
"I was half-way up when his knee shot out and caught me in the stomach. I thought he was going to literally impale me to the wall. I could feel my stomach move up into my chest. The pressure was awful!
"I was just about to pass out, when I saw his two fingers coming straight for my eyes! "No! No, Charles!
Oh, my God, not that again! No! I promise Charles.. . . . promise I'll never do it again.. . . .ahhhh! I screamed.
"But his fingers plunged right into the lower part of my eye sockets near the nose. His fingertips hooked behind the thin skull bone at the bottom of the sockets, sliding under my eyeballs and forcing them up toward my brain. His fingers were inside my head!
"He dragged me across the floor like that, the pain so deadly terrible I was sure I was going to die, or never see again, or be some freak with my eyeballs up inside my head and nothing but fleshy globs in the sockets.
"He'd done it before, and he'd explained how it couldn't really injure you permanently if it was done right. But when his fingers kept yanking me around by that sensitive membrane just against the lower socket, I was sure that one misstep by either of us, and little chunks of my bloody face-bone would be lying all around where he had pulled it out. It was the most awful suffering I'd ever gone through with anybody.
"Suddenly he yanked his fingers out with one big sweep. The pain was like being stabbed in the eyes. But with the sudden release of the pressure came the most wonderful feeling of relief. And then he flung me facedown over a leather footstool on my bare stomach!
"His leather riding crop came down hard over my buttocks with one stinging blow after another. It bit deep into the fleshy mass, and I worked my pelvis and hips wildly across the leather footstool. When I turned my face up to Charles and looked at his big bronze body all slick with sweat, and saw the sex-mad hate that filled his eyes as he kept beating my buttocks in a faster and faster tempo. I was the most passionate I had been in a month. I was having one orgasm after another! But there were plenty left. And his rod was rigid as a rock!
He dragged me to the bed and took me like a mad rapist, pinning me down by the sheer weight of his strong body. He pinched my buttocks until the blood came. He bit my neck and shoulders until I could feel his teeth meet under the thin flap of flesh he had gathered. His prick plunged cruelly into me, stuffing me to the very bottom of my pussy. He used me and abused me all night long. He was built like a stallion, and he knew how sensitive my inner membranes were. But the more I cried and screamed, the more he was determined to make it last the whole night long.
"I could never love anyone else in the world as much as I do Charles. Not even my own father!"
Judy's last statement, of course, is the give-away. Her father too was a brilliant, handsome, well educated man who showed no mercy when either his wife or children misbehaved, but seldom paid them any attention otherwise.
Even when Judy had reached puberty, and her body was blossoming into full bloom, her father punished the slightest transgression by taking her across his lap, pulling her skirt and slip up to her hips, and spanking her shapely young buttocks either naked or through the thin nylon panties she wore. At about the same age, she recalled seeing her brother spanked in the same manner, and noticed his erective excitement at times. Thus her own biological reaction combined with the symbolic representation her brother's condition presented, and left a permanent impression on her.
Since these punishments began in earliest childhood. Freud's theory of the polymorphous perversity undoubtedly plays a part in her retrogressive fixation on the association of spanking and other authoritarian brutality with the act of sex. The sexual feelings generated by her father during these early spankings, of course, had to be denied because of their incestuous nature. But they were free to become revived in the later male-female context, even though Charles represents a clear father-image.
Judy also admits that she was witness to the flogging of her own mother one time when her father had accused her of infidelity with another male. Thus, the desire for attention and love, which could only be gained from her father by her being bad enough to get a spanking, has been carried over into her own tormented adult life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ancient Cruelties
A dozen of the town's most wealthy and beautiful young women sat beside a marble pool in a sumptuously colonnaded patio on the ancient Greek island of Lesbos. Lovely teenage Jewish and Egyptian slave girls served up wine and fruits in abundance. One sensually built young lady went into a dance and stripped off her cumbersome chitin, to expose her youthful nakedness in full bloom. Immediately, three of the other ladies pushed her to a pallet, bottom up, and began to scourge her quivering buttocks with clumps of stinging nettles that turned the pleasantly rounded orbs a deep fiery red.
This brief picture of the Greek Thesmaphoria or Feast of Demeter, taken from Weigall's famous historical volume Sappho of Lesbos, describes what was done each year by wealthy women of the Greek city-states, about the years 100 to 500 B.C.
Men were absolutely forbidden entrance to these Lesbian bacchanals of sadomasochism. These annual fertility rites were not at all unlike fashionable ladies' whipping clubs of 18th and 19th Century England, which will be described later. The older women of these Greek tours had an absolute mania for attractive young girls, and would invite them into their company for the debauches on the pretext of offering tutelage in the refinements of proper womanhood. Sappho herself often wrote about tweaking the breast or buttocks of one of these nymphet maidens while bathing with a group of them in her private pool.
But the Thesmaphoria knew no such genteel practices. After the formality of digging up pig's carcasses which had been buried a year earlier, and mixing them with the planting seed for fertilization, the slave girls brought on the nettles and rods. The younger females were stripped and fondled by the women, all by them heady with the sensuous buzz of wine and dancing, then administered the whippings as a lesson in discipline.
Soon the entire affair became a giant mass flagellation festival, with naked young bodies, and older ones too, writhing and twisting across the pliant pallets. Buttocks ran red with blood, breasts heaved with passion, which was soon fulfilled with unbridled displays of triadism, cunnilingus and other forms of lesbian accommodation, including beating and being beaten to orgasm.
These sadomasochistic socialites of Ancient Greece were preceded by the Egyptians, who also used the worship of fertility god as the excuse for limitless flagellation and its attendant sexual license.
Herodotus, the Father of History, tells us how in 4000 B.C., male and female citizens alike would gather each year at the festival of Isis, goddess of motherhood and fertility, and whip themselves into a sex-mad frenzy while beseeching the throned idol to bring them a season of plenty.
The very posture and props of the common representations of Isis were filled with sexual symbolism. She was seated high upon a throne or pedestal, a long rod held in her right hand and between both legs-the phallic symbol so omnipresent in ancient fertility worship, and also representative of the rod with which the devotees beat each other. The rationale of this pre-Christian flagellomania was that the benevolent goddess would shed tears over the bloody and sometimes fatal sacrifices made to her, and that these tears would flow into the Nile, thus causing the great river to inundate and irrigate the surrounding farmlands with the assurance of an abundant harvest.
The erotic frenzy which resulted from the wild beating of each others' naked buttocks ended up, of course, with the planting of many non-agrarian seeds and assured a good human harvest in autumn as well! The Spartans of 2000 to 1000 B.C. preferred the later English custom of letting the children take the brunt of the floggings, which in this case they meted out as ritual sacrifice before the alter of Artemis Orthia, the goddess-protector of women and children. Screaming youth and nymphet teen-agers were hauled in front of the great goddess, where the elders of the town stripped them naked and flogged them mercilessly, always until the blood flowed, sometimes until they died.
Later cultures which have always held the Spartans to be synonymous with strict discipline and deprivation; the words deprivation and deviation may also be added.
The Hindu practice of Suttee, which required that the wife must throw herself onto her husband's funeral pyre when he died and thus voluntarily cremate herself, contained no outward element of flagellation. Yet the German historian, Richard Lewinsoh, describes Suttee-which flourished from around 2000 B.C. to 1865 A.D., as an "unparalleled sexual slavery imposed on women by men and society," and considers it "the crudest of all sexual practices known in antiquity".
It is conceivable that many of these Indian martyrs to the Hindu philosophy of non-violence, did gain some kind of spiritually mystic peace from barbecuing themselves alive and joining their husbands in death in the promised world beyond. But no such merciful hope of a peaceful after-life could soothe the tortured agonies of a young Amazon girl of Asia Minor, when they strapped her down and burned off her breasts with hot coals so that those very attractive mammary appendages would not get in the way while she was wielding a lance or fighting with box and arrow. The word Amazon literally means without breast.
Herodotus, as well as the later Roman geographer Diodorus, have passed down vivid accounts of these savage, bellicose female warriors who had the audacity to try to conquer Athens in bloody hand-to-hand combat, and who held complete and total female domination over their households, government, economy, and men. It was only when they took on the large and superiorly trained and equipped Greek armies that they were finally put back in their place.
With the first signs of puberty in a young girl of an Amazon village, she was taken by the older women and strapped down on her back to a marble slab, her nubile body completely naked. When she was thus fettered, the big female "doctors" would take hot coals from the grate and apply them to her young breast-buds until her chest was seared flat, and further growth stunted.
It can only be left to the imagination as to what other uses these luscious young females were put to before the operation, and perhaps even during it, as a means of assuaging the awful pain, as they lay helplessly secured to the table in front of these muscular viragos, their vaginas exposed and targeted by eager tongues.
At about the age of sixteen, the Amazon girls went into a basic training every bit as rugged as that of today's marines or paratroopers. And once in battle, from about age eighteen to twenty-eight, they proved to be every bit as ruthless and savage as any of their male counterparts. One can visualize how they took delight in torturing a well-endowed Greek soldier to wrest some tactical secret from him, as he lay racked up before them, their razor-sharp swords probing his manliness.
Except for the Amazon generals, most of these women retired from combat to turn to running the government and propagating the race, before they were thirty. The husband was a mere slave or vassal, to be used and abused by the vicious female dominators; he was made to perform all the housework, take care of the babies and older children, and so forth.
The Amazon women, having been sworn to a life free of intercourse with men until they retired from battle, had little regard for male love-making techniques, and considered connubial sex little more than a necessary chore which might provide a little sadistic pleasure along with it.
We can picture the Amazon woman slamming her meek husband down upon a straw mat and ordering him to get aroused quickly, then copulating vigorously from the top position as she slaps him around, Sacher-Masoch would have been in a virtual seventh heaven of ecstatic bliss had he been able to suffer the base indignities of a pitiful male at the savage hands of these huge, muscular women!
The later Roman Empire had its era of pornocracy when the harlot Theodora and her equally profligate daughters ran things in the 10th Century, and the history of mankind to this day records many instances of women rulers. But never before and never since, has the place of man and woman been so totally and forcefully reversed as in the cities of the Amazon women in Asia
Minor. Comparably to this utter de-feminization which the Amazons underwent to help them achieve prowess as warriors on the field of battle, the Galli priests of ancient Anatolia literally castrated themselves with highly-honed swords at wild rites of flagellation which swept the Greek Empire around 200 B.C. The Symbolic religious "emasculations" of the Jewish circumcision and the tonsure of the Roman Catholic monks, were later to become civilized refinements of the savage ceremonies of respect to the nature goddess Cybele, who required the zenith of masochistic abuse from his disciples. The fury and sadomasochistic frenzy that was literally beaten into those desirous of becoming eunuch priests, has been recounted vividly by the Greek historian Lucian:
"On certain days a multitude to the temple, and the Galli in great numbers, sacred as they are, perform the ceremonies of the men and gash their arms and turn their backs to be lashed. Many bystanders play at their pipes, while many beat drums; others sing divine and sacred songs. All this performance takes place outside the temple.....
"As the Galli sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on some of them, and many who had come as mere spectators, afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I shall narrate what they do.....
"Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands his penis which he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will-and from this house he receives a woman's raiment and ornaments."
CHAPTER FIVE
Sadism and the Orgies of Rome
The only reason the viciously sadistic Romans did not systematically flagellate every one of their beautiful young slave girls to death was probably that they cost too much to replace.
The Romans, unlike their Greek, African and Asian predecessors who found noble excuses for the most violent excesses of sadomasochism, and the later Christians looked on it as penitence, enjoyed sex and sadism strictly for the fun of it.
It was just plain fun to spank pretty young girls on their naked bottoms. It was a real fun sport to watch men, women and children get chewed up by lions in the arena, or hack each other to death with knives, swords, daggers, spiked clubs, chains or lances. It was good, clean, fraternal fun for young students to lash the servant girls down to the dining room table and stick red hot rods into their vaginas. It was just plain fun to have three immense Nubian slaves spread-eagle a screaming nymphet, while the dinner guests watched a hulking African giant tear up her insides in a brutal defloration, skewering her savagely with his gigantic penis.
There was probably never a more depraved period of general popular sadomasochistic debauchery than that of Ancient Rome from about 100 B.C. to its fall. Human beings, in the form of thousands of Egyptian, African, Asian and Jewish slaves, were the playthings of the sex-crazed citizenry. Wife-swapping, homosexuality, the mass rape festivals of the Lupercalia-where men ran naked through the streets, flogging and coiting with any female they could catch-had seriously jaded the appetites of the thrill-hungry Romans by Caesar's time. Something new was needed for kicks!
The slaves, many of them extremely beautiful young girls, helped to provide the answer.
As in the later slave markets of New Orleans and Memphis, the male homosexuals found great delight in fondling freely the genitalia and buttocks of the healthy young lads up for sale, and applying an occasional stinging swat to their backsides in order to provide a lusty chuckle at the expense of the youth's screams.
The noblewomen, meanwhile, had the husky males brought into a private room one-by-one, where they might expose their breasts or thighs to the helpless men in order to determine if the size of his aroused member was pleasing to them. They too were quite fond of wielding the ferula to his backside as two attendants held him down, then turned him over to demonstrate the results, if any, to the lecherous lady.
The lesbian and bi-sexual women of Rome-and the latter were quite in abundance-delighted in having young girls brought to them for "free home demonstration" usually in groups of two or three, which constituted the normal package-purchase plan for a noblewomen's chambermaids.
Brandishing one of the long, thin whips which were so popular among these women, the prospective purchaser might request the burly slave-master to spread-eagle one of the girls so she could probe her sensitive loins and inspect the tender treasures with close scrutiny. The squirming girl only proved the more amusing to her prospective mistress if she yelped helplessly when the whip's hard tip dug deep into her belly.
The men of more or less normal desires generally had nothing to do with such secretiveness when they went about inspecting the human goods for sale. They meticulously checked over the muscles of the males with a practical eye out for the heavy work load they could expect from them, then enjoyed themselves more freely in the huge oval room where the female slaves were displayed. There, they could walk among hundreds or even thousands of naked girls, some lashed to iron rings in the iron rings in the wall, others striking provocative poses for their enjoyment.
The noble citizens could amuse themselves as they pleased while checking over the merchandise, so long as they did not actually copulate with the girls. A pregnant slave was virtually worthless to a dealer, and was usually thrown into the arena to be torn apart and eaten by the lions as an added spice to the fun-loving Roman's daily diet of spectator sport.
Since the length of a female slave's life depended more on her looks and guile than anything else, the girls up for sale used every trick in the book to excite the senses of any man who looked like he might be a good master.
A buyer browsing through the market could snap his whip and ask two of the naked beauties to make lesbian love, and they would jump right to it. He could order a trio of them to disrobe and bend over while he applied the lash for his amusement, and they would immediately obey. He could hand over stout ferula to a quartette of them and say he would enjoy watching them flagellate each other, and it would be accomplished in a second. But all this was merely the teaser, the appetizer, a tasty hors d'oeuvre to the afternoon slaughters in the arena, or the week-long house party orgies that often followed.
From art work uncovered only recently near the ruins of ancient Pompeii, which at one time served as the vacation retreat of wealthy Romans, Richard Lewinsohn has added richly to the already voluminous historical data available on the legendary orgies of those jaded Sybarites. Here is a typical historical account of a Roman Orgy:
The noonday summer sun shafted brightly through the skylight in the roof of the huge atrium of the rich Roman merchant's Pompeiian villa. But the two dozen guests who shouted, gulped wine by the goblet, gorged themselves with fruit, cakes and roasted meats, vomited uncaringly on the marble floors, skewered a fat young slave with a pitchfork for laughs and otherwise amused themselves, had lost track of the days and nights.
"The orgy had been going on for almost a week. The impluvium, the large swimming pool in the center of the floor, was being drained, and a queue of black slaves toting huge buckets of water had already lined up to start the process of refilling it. Two days had passed since the last cleaning, and the host had severely flogged his chief slave for letting it get so dirty with the malodorous stench of the vomit which many over-indulged guests had chosen to deposit there, plus the reddish tinge of blood the water had taken on after they tossed a dozen lacerated slaves into it following a whipping and knife-throwing contest the day before.
"On the covered terrace just outside, three women were reeling with laughter as they watched the spectacle taking place in the slopes of the long-terraced garden in front of them, which extended right down to the beach of the Gulf of Naples.....
"They had given long birch rods to a trio of husky Greek slaves, and instructed them to chase three young Jewish slave girls to the beach and back in a perverted version of a relay race. The rods came down with a wet splat over the raw buttocks of the naked girls, time and time again. The point of the game was to see if the girls could run one entire length, either to or from the beach, without letting the pursuing males get close enough to hit them. A loud scream suddenly pierced the air. The three women in the shade of the luxuriantly covered terrace supported by massive pillars of white marble, jumped to their feet. One of the slave girls, a beautiful young thing with heavy breasts and broad buttocks underpinned by full, tapering thighs, had fallen to the ground. Her body heaved, twisted and writhed on the grass, turning the verdant green a dark ugly red where her bleeding backside pressed across it. The women called inside to the others to come and watch. Those who were not otherwise occupied came out to form a circle around the prostrate victim and the big, panting Greek slave.
"Again and again, he struck her body with the rod. It slashed across her right breast with tremendous force, laying the supple flesh wide open in a wound that somehow failed to draw much blood. The crowd roared their disapproval.. . . .
"A woman pointed to the perspiring Greek's erect penis, which his flapping loin cloth did little to conceal, and another drunken spectator crept over and yanked the solitary covering away, to the rapturous delight of all those present.
"The shouting spectators widened the circle as the other two slaves dragged their wriggling young captives into the center and flung them to the ground. One of the men poured his pitcher of wine over the girls and laughed uproariously. Another guest, whose stomach was not quite so strong, brought his hand up to his mouth and looked for a quick exit. But two laughing women pushed him into the center of the circle so that he stumbled across the slave girls and threw up all over them..... .
"The cheering of the crowd carried clearly into the atrium inside, where the bright sun of high noon spotlighted a most bizarre tableau. A giant African slave was strung up by his hands, his sweat-streaked ebony body totally naked. A dozen men and women lazed sensuously in groups of two or four, and sometimes three, on the soft-cushioned couches surrounding the scene. One man stroked the exposed genitalia of his wife at his left, while fondling the budding breasts of a young serving girl to his right, his eyes glued meanwhile to the slow, teasing beats of the thin leather whips which two slaves applied to the trussed Negro's muscular buttocks.
"Two Arabian girls, no more than nineteen or twenty, performed lesbian love acts on a pad just below the big slave, their heads buried between each others' thighs. And the whole purpose of this strange scene was to keep him constantly aroused, while a talented leather craftsman imported from Rome fashioned a lifelike penis, using the African's immense manliness as a living model.
"The Artisan, a Jewish freedman who was still much at the mercy of his Roman employers, sweated profusely as the guests goaded him on to hurry and finish the unusual task. He had already cut out a long piece of jet-black leather and stitched it up length-wise nearly all the way. Then he tapered the end into a glans and pleated it at the juncture with the main shaft, stuffing his finished product tightly with wet oakum until the leather device was as firm and solid as its throbbing model.
"A wild cheer went up from the entranced onlookers. The man who had been enjoying both his wife and the young serving girl simultaneously, flung them both toward the fettered Negro with a tremendous laugh, and suggested that he be cut down and made to enjoy them both for the amusement of the crowd.
"But the others were too excited over the outstanding quality of the leather priapus, and cheered the Jewish freedman loudly. The others streamed in from the terrace, bored with the whipping exhibition outside and disappointed that the first slave girl had passed out and died so quickly. They raised up the old leather-worker and carried his emaciated, struggling form in a circle around the atrium, cheering him hero style in a praise of the almost foot-long priapus he had fashioned so faithfully.
"Three more young and voluptuous slave girls were brought in and stripped naked. A giggling woman stepped out of the crowd, and fondled the oversize breasts of one of them, making lewd remarks as her hands roamed the rounded fullness of hips and thighs and explored the intimate orifice of delight. More goblets of wine were brought in from the storage area in the cooling subterranean springs, and toasts raised to the use with which the immense priapus would be put in deflowering the three virgin slave girls.
"But the host snapped his fingers and ordered them taken away. A new idea of debauchment had suddenly occurred to him. His eyes fell on the beautiful drunken noblewoman who had been amusing herself with the slave girl. He announced to the crowd that having fun with the slaves was old-hat. They needed something new and different to add spice to the week-old orgy.
But what? What, they asked could provide some new titillation? What could they do which they had not already done a hundred times over?
"The host grasped the giant priapus in his right hand, a strange smile curling his lips, and he pointed it directly at the tall noblewoman beside him. She was dressed in a flowing white toga that barely let one know of the high-rising breasts and fullness of shapely buttocks and thighs which lay beneath.
"The woman screamed "no" at the top of her voice when she suddenly realized what he was suggesting. She sobered immediately from the pleasant stupor of the wine and the genteel pleasures she had enjoyed with the young slave girls. But the crowd roared. What novelty to subject one of their own, and one of the proudest and richest women of Rome at that, to the Rites of Priapus! The incredible ludicrousness of it gripped them all.
"And it was the astonished woman's own brother-in-law who sneaked up behind her to yank away the toga and lay bare the abundance of her sumptuous breasts. Cheers and howls went up from the crowd, and they began a sensuous chant accompanied by the strains of weird lute music from the entertainers in the background.
"The host lashed the hard priapus across one quivering breast, and commanded the woman to dance, as if he were ordering a common slave. The proud woman screamed her protests vigorously and tried to run, but the crowd closed around her and demanded 'More! More!'
Again and again he struck her hard across the breasts, then ripped away the gauzy underskirt and smacked her naked bottom with a sound that could be heard all over the big room. She whirled around to get away, but he whacked the huge priapus against her pelvis, then stepped around and applied it to her rear, again and again.
The contagious eroticism of the orgy, the headiness of the wine and the hard smacks of the artificial priapus began to stir the woman in spite of herself. She danced in time with the chants, the music, the stinging blows to her buttocks and thighs.
It became a wild Corybantic ballet, a flurry of frenzied motion to escape the building pain of the hard priapus pounding against her bare loins and tenderized backside, which was a mass of livid red welts.
Some of the couples fell back to the convenient comfort of the couches, their revived bodies lost in coital embrace. Others lay spread-eagled on their stomachs, arms wrapped around each other, while slaves thrashed their naked bottoms with nettles or palm leaves. A pair of wives whose husbands had chased two teen-age Greek girls into the bushes, undressed each other and fell into a mad tribade embrace, their white-hot bodies rolling over and over on the pallets while they spanked each others' buttocks with open palms.
But the noblewoman in the center of the floor had now become a raving maniac. She screamed and yelled for a lover, her mouth hanging open in a wild beseeching, a begging for relief from the roiling passion that flooded her tormented body with the violence of an emotional inundation that knew no equal. She fell to the marble floor, taking each thud of the huge priapus that welted her yearning body as a treasured love-slap.
And then to provoke the final humiliation, the host tossed the priapus-the leather dildo-to the screaming nymphomaniac, forbidding her access to anyone else. She thrust the life-like device home. Her body twisted, rolled, convulsed, squirmed. Her legs flailed the air, her buttocks bounced and thumped to the heated tempo of her sex-crazed torso, emulating the ecstatic heights of substitute coitus which had overtaken all else in the Roman Rites of Priapus. Then she convulsed in climax screaming shrilly.
It is small wonder that this age of sadistic sexual insanity and sensual excesses produced some of the most vicious female monsters of history.
Julia Agrippina, fourth wife of the Emperor Claudius, was well-known for having younger women executed immediately if she feared they might appeal to her husband. And when Claudius refused to die of natural causes at the ripe old age of forty-four, she poisoned him so that her own son, Nero, could ascend the throne.
It was not long before Nero completely capitulated to the seductive qualities of a woman who was to become known as one of the most beautiful empresses in the history of Rome, Poppea Sabina, called aptly "The Vamp of Rome," she was married to a captain of the Pretorian Guard when Nero first set eyes on her. He immediately announced to the astonished officer that he was going to share her sexual favors.
When the captain, Otho, objected, Nero simply had him shipped off to Lusitania, and took on Poppea Sa-bina as a mistress to supplement the bland sex diet fed him by his wife, Octavia.
But Poppea refused to be a mere mistress when she might be an empress. By using her gifted body both wisely and well, she influenced Nero to have Octavia killed, and thus made her wish come true. Even in death, Poppea Sablna was immortalized by the repentant Nero, who elevated her officially to diving rank through apotheosis after he accidentally killed her during one of his fits of madness following the great fire of Rome.
However, it is neither Julia Agrippina nor Poppea Sabina whose name will be recalled most vividly as symbolizing the acme of female cruelty and capricious sadism combined with insatiable nymphomania. That dubious distinction belongs to the Emperor Claudius' third wife, who strangely enough was the mother of the somnolent Octavia. Her name was Valeria Messalina, described by many as the true sex monstress of the imperial throne of Rome. Kraflt-Ebing, in fact, was so impressed by her life story that he named a special kind of incurable and violent nymphomania after her-but it never caught on with other professionals like sadism and masochism, which he also, of course, named after individuals in history afflicted with those respective perversions.
Case History: Valeria Messalina.
When the voluptuously beautiful Valeria was only fifteen years old, her own mother assigned a 17-year-old Jewish slave to take her maidenhead one night as she slept, then ordered the youth put to death.
But there was method, a coldly calculated plan, in the apparent madness of Lepida Messalina. The ambitious woman was determined to make her abundantly developed teen-age daughter the prize catch of all Rome, a dish designed to seduce none other than the Emperor Claudius. Lepida had detected the early signs of budding sensual impatience in the restless Valeria, and felt that experience would be the best teacher for her, as well as provide a means of keeping the tempestuous girl satisfied and more relaxed.
Messalina proved only too eager a student, and was soon delighting in the way the youths and men fawned and subjugated themselves before her in the hope of obtaining the ultimate favors from this lush-bodied Roman beauty whose very being simmered with the promise of unbridled passion and lust. A split toga that revealed the rich fullness of her young thighs, while the top balanced precariously over her bountiful breasts, became as much a trademark as the single-thonged, silver-handled whip she wielded gleefully on friend and foe alike. One writer states that she often whipped it out viciously at some startled and over-amorous youth, curling it about his stout member with a burningly painful snap. Even when she married Claudius and became. Empress of Rome, all the bloody cruelties of the gladiatorial spectacles plus the fervent marital attentions of her husband and an endless parade of fiery lovers could not quench the insatiable fire of lust that burned inside her turbulent body. Historian Lewinsohn declares strangely that Messalina was not a sadist in the true sense of the word, but rather an exceedingly cruel woman whose central interest was sexual adventure of the wildest kind. Yet he also states:.... .Valeria Messalina ranks as the prototype of the man-mad, man-destructive nymphomaniac.
Many authorities also believe her to have been a sadist. The man who satisfied her-obviously no easy feat-became her prot�g�; the man who did not at once give way to her desires forfeited his life. The old sources describe her as a pretty, rather heavily built brunette. She waded to power through the blood of the Roman nobility; she had at least one man executed because he once rejected her favors, another because he coveted her garden.
Other historical accounts describe her lust for watching people beaten, or stabbed or raped to death. But Lewinsohn certainly seems correct in tagging her as a "man-mad, man destructive nymphomania." For once she had succeeded in pushing Claudius to the background and establishing herself as the real ruling power of Rome, her greedy lust knew no bounds. She threw aside all restraint in her choice of lovers. If she happened to see a virile actor to whom she took a imagine at the theater, Messalina would stop the play and summon him to the nearest bedroom to make love to her for hours on end. It was there and not on the stage that the young man's performance was judged, and if Messalina was displeased, it could mean the end of his career, if not his life.
Like most nymphomaniacs, Messalina became furious and flew into a rage when a lover could not immediately perform a second, third, or fourth time without the usual rest and period of detumescence. Often, she would bring down the whip heavily over the man's naked buttocks as he lay atop her, his body totally spent. And if that did not suffice to revive him, she might have him flogged by a slave, or perhaps have the obedient and well endowed Nubian servant make love to her on the spot, as she scoffed at her paramour's temporary impotence in the most vile and humiliating terms.
When she ultimately grew weary of snatching a nobleman here, an actor there, for her boudoir rutting, Messalina ordered the owner of one of the filthiest brothels in Rome to assign her a room and keep her supplied with a steady stream of the most demanding customers. And as the dirty sailors and other riff-raff of the street filed in to buy the favors of the new girl who had hung the name "Lysisca" on her door, they knew they had found an exceptionally good thing, but hardly dared believe they had tasted of the perverted yet fascinating fruits of their own empress.
All Rome was agog at the well-substantiated stories that were going the rounds, about the bawdy outrages of Messalina. But when Claudius refused to pay any attention to them she became bolder yet. While the emperor was away on business of state in Ostia, she demanded that one of her lovers, Gaius Silvius, divorce his wife and enter into a formally bigamous marriage with her. She promised that she would kill Claudius and make Gaius the new Emperor.
Messalina may have controlled the populace, and even many of the influential senators, but she did not hold sway over Claudius' Pretorian Guards or the military. As soon as he heard of this latest escapade, he had Messa lina put to death in the year 48 B.C.-only to fall later into the equally treacherous grip of Julia Agrippina.
CHAPTER SIX
The Ladies' Whipping Clubs
They laid her flat on a goose down pillow, and scourged her butt with twigs of willow. Her bottom so white, grew pink, then red, then bloody, then raw, and her spirit fled.
From "EPITAPH ON A YOUNG LADY Who WAS BIRCHED TO DEATH"
The preceding verses are taken from Cythera's Hymnal, a book dedicated to the art of flagellation, and printed in London in 1870. Pisanus Fraxi believed it was written anonymously by a well-known Oxford graduate. And indeed, if we are to believe what has been stated time and again by reliable documentaries about the period of Victorian flagellomania which gripped England, it appears that the whipping and spanking orgies of that day had their greatest appeal to the educated classes and nobility.
The elaborate flogging houses of the 18th and 19th Centuries have studied previously. But the "English Vice," as it was called, was far too wide-spread to be confined merely to the brothel and the paid flagellant. It was common practice for those with young apprentice servants to bare their firm youthful buttocks at least once a day and scourge them thoroughly. If a reason for punishment was not readily available, then one was invented. It was simply the custom. A cartoon of the period showed a map of the British Isles distorted into the shape of one big blood-red, lacerated pair of buttocks poking up from the Atlantic off the coast of France! Every teacher, foster-parent and real parent birched the posteriors of their children with painful regularity, and it became the saying that the nationality of anyone between five and twenty-five could be immediately proved to be British, simply by having them drop their drawers and observing how red the buttocks were!
Many schools of thought abounded as to whether men or women were generally more fond and adept at wielding the rod. The brothels, of course, consisted of almost 100% female flagellants, and the customers ran about ten men for every one woman, because females were ordinarily reluctant to go to the flogging houses unless they were very daring or were overt lesbians.
It remained then for the women of England who had been smitten with the flogging mania to find a submissive boy friend, husband or girl friend to either give or take of the rod and whip. But there also evolved from this sadomasochistic frenzy of the times, what was known as the "Ladies" Whipping Club," generally made up of married women from 30 to 40 years of age, plus as many younger women and young servant girls as they could recruit for apprentices. Their activities bore an amazing resemblance to those of the Greek Thesmaphoria, but without the religious trappings. These British girls were out for purely perverted pleasure, it seems.
Writing in Bon Ton of December, 1792, a popular fashion and entertainment magazine of the late 18th Century, a sociologist of that period explained that: These females are chiefly matrons, who, grown weary of wedlock in its accustomed form, and possibly impatient of that cold neglect and indifference which, after a certain term, become attendant upon Hymen, determined to excite, by adventitious applications, those ecstasies which in the earlier period of marriage they had experienced.....
By perusing the contents of this valuable old document even further, we are able to get a vivid picture of the typical activities of one of these clubs which was located at Jermyn Street, Piccadilly. And later, from the pages of an expose printed in 1868, we will present what is reported to be a true autobiographical account by Margaret Anson York, an attractive 19-year-old lady's maid, of her bizarre initiation into the Merry Order of St. Bridget.
The respectable society, or club, of which we now treat, are never less than twelve in number. There are always six down, or stooping down, and six up. They cast lots for the choice of station, and after a lecture which is every evening read or spoken extempore, upon the effects of flagellation, as experienced from the early days to the present moment, in monasteries, nunneries, bagnios, and private houses, the six patients take their respective stations.
Thus aroused by the tales of spanking and whipping, the six other women stand behind the ones who are leaning way over, and bring their skirts, shifts and petticoats up over their heads, and yank their drawers down to their feet. The entire buttocks and backsides are thus completely exposed, and from the extremely stooped posture of the girls, the genitalia is puckered outward. The thighs, of course, are bare only to the gartered hose just above the knees.
The "fugal-women" as the chairwoman is called, then initiates the rites with a heavy paddle or leather strap, which she applies with a sound whack to each set of quivering rounded protuberances. Then, each of the other five take up whips, knouts, rods or paddles, as the fugal-woman directs, and begins to scourge the fleshy orbs in earnest. Most times though, a standard rod or whip of thin flexible birch is used, and the procedure is as follows:
"Agreeably to the imagine of the chairwoman, sometimes the operation is begun a little above the garter, and ascending the pearly inverted cone, is carried by degrees to the dimpled promontories, which are vulgarly called buttocks; until the whole as Shakespear says, from a milky white, becomes one red!! Sometimes the wanton, vagrant fibers are directed to the more secret sources of painful bliss! Sometimes the curious, curling tendrils bask in the Paphian grove! And sometimes, as the passions of the fair directress rise, they penetrate even the sacred cave of Cupid!
There it is that the submissive patients generally, with one voice, cry out "It is too much!" and rising from their stations, express in the most feeling language, their several sensations. The fair president now resigns her rod, the emblem and engine of her office, to whom she thinks the most adroit and capable and together with the remaining five, take the several stations of their predecessors.
The curse is recommenced with whatever additions and improvements the new performer pleases; sometimes the process is reversed, and beginning at the grove and cave already mentioned, with gentle applications proceeds to the swelling mountains, where the strokes growing more fierce and frequent, the second file of patients cry out in turn fro mercy! Some writers have alleged that occasionally the women became so overly excited by the perverted flame of sadistic insanity that they would actually beat a girl to death as was suggested by the verses at the head of this chapter. However, while there is some documentation that the whipping club members often flagellated each other until much blood was drawn, there are no court records of any deaths resulting.
The abundance of murder trials in that era which did involve flagellating to expiration, occurred in schools, at brothels, or with children and adolescents who were wards or apprentices. The case of Mrs. Brownrigg, who beat her teen-age apprentice, Mary Clifford, to death through prolonged and vicious naked spankings and whippings in 1767, will be studied later. Scholars and psychologists alike have frequently made mention of an infamous "Chateau at Tours" in France, where a similar club of female flagellants went through a ritual of confessing certain sins, after which they were stripped naked and birched by their comrades, almost to orgasm. Yet the authority for this, and the stories of the wild lesbian orgies which are alleged to have followed, appears to be an account in the History of the Rod from the house of the British publisher, J. C. Hotte, about 1870. A close examination of this work, however, clearly indicates that the legend of the "Chateau at Tours" is entirely fictional, for the account itself attributes the story to "an old French novel".
Of far greater merit, it seems to this writer, is the reportedly autobiographical work the York woman. This book contains a series of twelve letters written by Miss Anson York to a female friend, and it is from these and other available data that we construct the following, some of it in her own words, from the letters she is said to have written.
Case History: Margaret Anson York.
At the time that Margaret was attending a regal lady of the British nobility at her French vacation villa, she was invited to join the Merry Order of St. Bridget as a novice apprentice. This mystic organization, devoted to the mutual application of the birch, was made up of several wealthy ladies who spent most of their summer months in this French resort area.
Margaret was nineteen at the time, apparently a rather pleasingly plump girl of around five-foot-two, with long blonde hair. Instead of her usual maid's uniform, on the occasion of these initiation ceremonies, she described her required dress as follows:
A chemise trimmed with Valenciennes lace and insertion; a soft white flannet petticoat worked round the bottom with silk; another of white caslimere, very fine, with a flounce round the bottom edge with sky blue velvet. For bodice I had one of my lady's embroidered ones, and over all the handsome blue peignoir; with racings of white; no stays or drawers, and nothing on my feet except blue morning slippers with tine white rosettes.
At first, Margaret was put in a small room adjoining the salon, and blindfolded. She began to perspire as the time went on and on, while she waited and waited in the tiny enclosure, a hundred crazed ideas running through her eager and imaginative mind. But finally, she tells us, "Mrs. D., an English Lady, fat, fair and forty, full of life and fun," came in and let her out to the big chamber, where the sound of suppressed giggles echoed all around her.
Then, Margaret continues, a voice from the end of the room called "Silence, if you please ladies!" and three knocks sounded on a table, and the same voice asked "Who comes there?" Prompted by Mrs. D., I answered, "A candidate for a place in the Merry Order of St. Bridget."
"Are you prepared to serve the Merry Order to the best of your power, and to assist, as bidden by your mistress, in the ceremonies thereof?"
"I am."
And do you bind yourself never to reveal aught that you see, hear, or do in this room on peril of losing your place without a character?
"I do."
"Do you know the object of the Merry Order."
"I do."
"Detail it."
Again prompted, I replied, "The wholesome and pleas-and discipline of the rod, to be enforced by its members one upon another during their social meetings in this room."
"Have you ever been whipped."
"I have."
"Do you promise to submit to such flagellation as the Merry Order shall ordain for you without rebellion or murmuring thereat?
"I do."
I heard more tittering when this order was given and I could feel that Mrs. D., was shaking with suppressed laughter as she obeyed the command, and took off my peignoir. She pinned up the petticoats and chemise to my shoulders, and then my dear, I knew what was coming. Then someone else took hold of one of my hands, and Mrs. D., the other, and a waited the word of command.
"Advance."
They led me forward, and at the first step a stinging blow from a birch fell on my hips from one side, then from the other, till I had gone the length of the room. I screamed and struggled, but it was all in vain; my guides held me tight; and by the time they stopped I could only sob and writhe. Then came another command, "Kneel down," and I knelt in front of the square ottoman; the ladies held my hands across it, and Lady C. came down from her dais and whipped me till I hardly knew where I was. Then they made me stand up, and her ladyship said:
"Ladies of the Order of St. Bridget, do you receive Margaret Anson as a member and servitor sworn to do your bidding?"
"We do," said those who were not laughing.
Thus initiated, Margaret's blindfold was removed and she was presented with a rod "made of lithe and strong twigs, tied up with ribbons, that corresponded to the colors of her dress" and declared to be "a servitor of the Merry Order of St. Bridget allowed to join their ceremonies, and bound to do their bidding."
The most ludicrous sight for this young and unsophisticated servant girl, however, must have come later when she was treated to the view of all these haughty and proper ladies with their voluminous clothing tied to their shoulders, and their entire bodies from the breasts down, as naked as the day they were born, each set of fleshy buttocks a fiery red.
The masochistic role which Margaret so eagerly accepted as a "servitor" seems quite plausible if one considers that she was probably used to being severely whipped by her parents or guardians from earliest childhood. And the fact that she considered her gracious mistress as being most kind to have invited her to enjoy these painful pleasures at the hands of women in the upper social strata, appears vividly evident in her closing remarks:
There is no enjoyment.. .in the use or endurance of the rod when it is vulgarly used, like a woman would strike in a passion; but when an elegant high-bred woman wields it with dignity of mien and grace of attitude, then both the practice and suffering become a real pleasure.
The very same idea also appears in another period work of female flagellation titled Exhibition of Female Flagellants, published in 1872. And it tends to bear out the theory that the proclivity for wanting to be whipped, in many cases, accompanied pleasurably by visions of a regal lady of rank wielding the rod. This particular analysis upholds Miss Anson's contention of a certain necessary skill and delicacy in doing this properly, a kind of sensual refinement that actually helped to make the painful thing a pleasure.
The view presented in this book is also noteworthy because if describes with a kind of euphoric sensuality the whipping of a young girl by the parent, guardian or teacher, and thereby tends to show how an association with early environment, either consciously or subconsciously, could establish a regressive behavioral pattern in accord with acceptable Freudian theory. To illustrate this point more clearly, the following is quoted directly from the Peacock edition of the Exhibition of Female Flagellants:
. . .There is a manner in handling this scepter of felicity, that few ladies are happy in; it is not the impassioned and awkward brandish of a vulgar female that can charm, but the deliberate and elegant manner of a woman of rank and fashion, who displays all that dignity in every action, even to the flirting of her fan, that leaves an indelible wound.
What a difference between high and low-life in this particular! To see a vulgar woman when provoked by her children, seize them as tiger would a lamb, rudely expose their posteriors, and correct them with an open hand, or a rod more like a broom than a neat collection of twigs elegantly tied together; while a well-bred lady coolly and deliberately brings her child or pupil to task, and when in error, so as to deserve punishment, commands the incorrigible Miss to bring her the rod, go on her knees, and beg with uplifted hands an excellent whipping; which ceremony gone through, she commands her to lie across her lap, or to mount on her maid's shoulders, and then with the loveliest hands imaginable removes every impediment from the whimpering lady's buttocks, who all the time, with tears and entreaties of the sweetest kind implores her dear mother or governess, to pardon her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Erotic Inquisition
An Irish country priest strips a lovely four-year old girl naked, flings her on the bed, jumps on top of her, nearly beats her to death, then strangles her with the rim of an iron tub pressed against her neck!
A beautiful, full-bodied Spanish teen-ager is stripped of her clothing by three men , who jab her gorgeous young body in a thousand places with thick, sharp, needles. They leave her tied hands-to-feet in a rat-infested dungeon cell overnight, then toss her, still alive and fettered, into the river, where she drowns.. .
In Grenoble, France, a priest hears confession from an attractive young wife, then proceeds to stuff a gag in her mouth, rape her, kill her, cut her body into little pieces, and throw them into a stream.. .
In Massachusetts, a young man and his wife are pilloried in the village square. Mobs of people spit on them, kick them, lob stones off their heads, tear off their clothes and flog their buttocks and breasts.. .
This was the Inquisition, the religious and civil descendant of the brutal Flagellants and Penitents who were banned by the Pope in 1349. This new wave of perverse and psycholit sadomasochistic behavior which swept a-cross Europe and spread to England the American Colonies in the form of Puritanism, had as its noble aim the casting out of demons and witches. A less violent form has survived to this day as a part of the English language in the oft-heard expression "witch-hunt," meaning a particularly sever search and interrogation aimed at finding some evil which does not exist.
In the main, the elaborately contrived tortures and humiliations meted out to the "sinning or erring" masses in the name of religion from the 12th to the 19th Century, were merely refinements of flagellation. Starting with the aim of stamping out heresy, soon witchcraft, lechery, demonology, female impurity and unchasteness became the prime offenses to be reckoned with by both the Inquisitors and their Puritan offshoots. Sex, which was directly or indirectly connected with all these charges, was the big bugaboo of the times. Any female from a five-year-old toddler to an 85 year-old grandmother, might be accused of witchcraft and pilloried. Confessions were obtained by the crudest tortures imaginable.
Case History: A Witchcraft Hearing of the Spanish Inquisition, c. 1600
A beautiful 17-year-old serving girl at the Royal Palace has been accused of being a witch by one of the King's soldiers, sho reported that he saw her talking with demons while taking a walk one night near the servant's quarters.
Three black-robed Inquisitors glare down menacingly at the young girl as she drops to the floor before them and pleads for mercy, swearing by all that is holy she was only singing to herself as she strolled in the moonlight. The stern-faced judges ignore her tearful pleas. They step down from the bench and approach her. They drag her twisting body into a cell and declare that they will prove to her and everyone else that she is, in truth, a genuine witch.
One man tears the clothes from her trembling, young, pubescent body. They demand a confession. Naked, her breasts quivering with fright, she kneels contritely and swears again and again that she is not a witch.
"Enough!" shouts the head Inquisitor impatiently, and hands each colleague a bone needle over a foot long.
Inch by inch, the three men pierce the screaming girl's entire body with the sharp-pointed bodkins. With each deep penetration of the long needles through the soft flesh of her belly, her breasts, her buttocks, and even through the tufted Mound of Venus until it strikes and scrapes the pelvis bone, the girl screams anew. The blood flows, then clots in ugly red patches. Angry now, the Inquisitors prick her faster and more furiously, for this is not considered torture, but merely a test. If they can find a single spot on her body insensitive to pain, she will be proved a witch. In the meantime, however, should the girl choose to confess, the "testing" would stop, and she would be immediately relieved of her life. Ridiculous? No more so than the next method, in case the first should fail of results:
Still naked, the girl is made to stoop over while the Inquisitors bind her left hand to her right ankle, and her right hand to her left ankle. In this degrading and back-breaking posture, she is tossed into a small dungeon cell for twenty-four hours. If after that time, any kind of louse ant, water-bug, rat, mouse, or insect or rodent of any kind is found in the room, she is also proved to be a witch-because witches give suck to demons, thus attracting them.
But the next afternoon, the Inquisitors are furious! There is not a bug or rodent to be seen anywhere in the dungeon cell. And, worst of all, the girl is still alive. For if she was dead, the problem would also have been solved in that she would have been deemed to have suffered divine judgment for being a witch.
By now, a great crowd has gathered. Everyone has heard of the serious problem in proving the accused girl a witch. So one of the Inquisitors suggests that they now torture the girl with whips and knives until she either confesses or dies, which would also be a sure sign that she was a witch. The tortures, of course, are only "common justice" for the poor girl, meant for her own good. Because if she should die falsely protesting her innocence, her tortures in the after-life would surely be far worse.
The people, meanwhile, are getting restless. They want proof. They demand to be shown clear-cut irrevocable evidence that this beautiful and lush-bodied young naked teen-ager is in reality a witch.
The Inquisitors go into a huddle. The torture gimmick may not satisfy the crowd. But this presents no real problem for any Inquisitor worthy of his robes. It is announced that the girl will be given the water test.
The nude and bloody young maiden, still fettered hands-to-feet, is tossed screaming into the icy waters of the river. If she sinks or otherwise dies of drowning, it is God's divine punishment to her for being a witch. If she floats, or somehow miraculously manages to stay alive, she is also a witch. Because the Inquisitors would do their duty and execute the girl without further delay, to the satisfaction of the convinced crowd.
And next, the Inquisitors summon the soldier who reported he had seen the girl communicating with demons. For he too must be a warlock or other demon, else how would he have recognized the untold alliance of the poor servant girl?
It was only through the efforts of various public administrators that these sadomasochistic excesses in the name of religion were gradually curtailed. In 1611, the Spanish government investigated 1,3000 persons accused and found not one valid instance of guilt. Young girls who had been "proven" and even confessed to being witches and having sex relations with incubi or other demons, were found upon medical examination to be virgins.
Within the Church itself, reform often proved more difficult. The Cathari, the Stedingers and the Waldensians who protested many of the Inquisitorial practices, found themselves indicated for witchcraft, demonology and sexual immorality. The cat, whose relation to witches is still a Halloween legend today, was associated with the "heretic" Cathari. And the other groups were accused of worshiping felines and performing a ritual whereby they kissed and suckled the anus of live cats. Individuals as well as groups continued to be persecuted as witches, devils and demons well into the 1800's. Two of the most infamous cases on record were reported in 1824 in Atrocious Acts, a book published by John Fairburn of Broadway, Ludgate Hill, London:
Case History: The Rev. John Carroll.
Father Carol was known throughout the County of Wexford for his practice of committing personal acts of violence on people under the pretense of casting out witches and devils. His most frequent method of operation was to jump up and down upon them while they lay prostrate. His parishioners tolerated him with a blind obedience and submissiveness that is unbelievable today.
On Friday, July 9, 1824, Father Carroll was accompanied by about 50 people to the house of one Thomas Sinnot, a nailmaker, in the village of Killinick. The official transcript of the case goes on;
At this time a child (a fine little girl between three and four years of age), then in bed in the room in which he was, began to cry; he consulted his breviary, and immediately confirmed that there was a devil in the child. He jumped into the bed, and on the body of the infant. The father of the little innocent entered at the time-the child piteously cried out, "Oh save me! save me!" which he was proceeding to do, but some miserable fanatics present actually held him back! It may be asked who was holding the mother of the child? No one-she was as free as any of the spectators, and like them, had a full conviction that her child was, as the priest had stated, "possessed," and that he was performing a miracle to drive out the evil spirit!
Nay, the infatuated mother was not only without restraint, as to any relief she might have been inclined to have afforded her infant, but actually assisted the Priest in the performance of his horrible work! He ordered her to get a tub of water and some salt; these she instantly procured. The innocent little sufferer lay bleeding and insensible in bed; he poured the contents of the tub upon her; and as the water mingled with the stream of life, he cried out with enthusiasm to those around him: "Behold a miracle! I have turned the water into blood! He then turned the tub over upon his victim, the edge of it coming upon the child's neck, mercifully completing the tragedy by putting an end to its sufferings! Having ordered the parents of the child not to allow anyone to enter the room, nor to touch the child till his return, he departed for Wexford.
Case History: Father Mingrat.
The priest Mingrat was a man of "low extraction but of Herculean strength; " he was Curate of St. Quentin, and had become enamored of Marie Gerin, wife of a disbanded soldier residing at Get, near St. Quentin, a woman of remarkable beauty.
After making some amorous advances to Marie, hidden under pretended pious discourses, Mingrat desired her to call on him the next time she went to St. Quentin; this she did, and entered the church about six o'clock in the evening. On seeing Mingrat she saluted him respectfully, and said she came to confess to him. He, on some pretext or other, got her into the Presbythery, where he lived, adjoining the church. There, it appears, he consummated the double crime of violation and assassination, in doing which he must have gagged the mouth of his victim, as low, inarticulate, and stifled moans were heard by his servant maid.
In order to get rid of Marie's body, Mingrat cut it to pieces, and threw it into a neighboring stream. On being suspected, the priest declared that his victim was possessed by the Devil, and that he saw Satan carry her away in his arms, and plunge with her into the abyss of hell.
In the 17th Century, the Puritans were well established in England and exporting their own forms of protestant torture rapidly to the American colonies, particularly Massachusetts. Anyone who has seen Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, may have gained a small idea of the sadism involved in the old Salem Witch Trials, as well as what a man might expect if he was accused of lechery.
More serious offenses were punished by public flagellation which sometimes led to death. But the average adulterer or fornicator of either sex was usually fastened to the wall in iron collars or jougs or otherwise pilloried or put in stocks. There, the sadistic masses could heap endless abuse on him, tear off his clothes to point to the "sinful parts," or bounce stones off his helpless head for hours or days on end.
Many unmarried pregnant girls killed themselves or attempted unsuccessful abortions. Others went as far as bearing an illegitimate child in secret and drowning it, rather than face the jeering, howling harangue of the stone-throwing mobs. And it was not at all unusual for an accused to commit suicide while pilloried, if the mental anguish, verbal humiliation and abuse and the pain of the rack and the rocks became absolutely unbearable.
CHAPTER EIGHT The Prostitute
In a $50 per day New York hotel suite, a 45-year-old Kansas City businessman pays a hundred dollars for three naked Puerto Rican teenagers to tie him up spread-eagled on the bed and whip his stomach, legs and genitals with a riding-crop, a razor strap and a fraternity paddle.. .
At a secluded spot just off Malibu Beach in California, a film personality lies prostrate on the sand while a high-priced call girl beats huge red welts into his squirming, twisting backside with long bunches of seaweed tied together.. .
A beautiful young London prostitute prances around her bedroom in a pair of high-heeled leather boots, black stockings and a little garter-belt, while a fat German industrialists crawls across the floor naked after her. She beats his buttocks almost raw with a jewel-handled walking cane, then stands astride his face to urinate.
A rich Alabama landowner on a business trip walks cautiously down Washington, D.C.'s notorious 9th Street looking for "Big Em." He knows that for a bargain $20, the mammoth-breasted and big-thighed 200 pound young Negress will whip his buttocks a beet red with her bare hands, then sit on his chest while he wallows around naked beneath her massive nude weight in a veritable orgasmic spasm of perverted delight, sucking her juices. Since before the days of ancient Rome when each girl in the fornix slapped her thighs with a stiff ferula to entice her lusty customers, flagellation and sadomasochism have played an important role in the profession of prostitution. Some girls have specialized in playing slave or master, whipping their clients or allowing themselves to be beaten and otherwise abused, and thereby charging much higher rates than for oral or genital intercourse. Others have merely resorted to the pleasures of pain when it was requested, but usually at a much greater fee.
It is certainly safe to say that there is probably not a single prostitute on the face of the earth who has not been approached at one time or another by a client who wanted to engage either in active or passive flagellation or other algolagnic acts of pain, punishment or humiliation.
Many a hardened street girl will shy away altogether at even the suggestion of whipping or beating. Yet many others, a surprising number of young and beautiful ones among them, have made a near fortune by specializing in female domination and flagellation.
Krafft-Ebing related countless tales of his masochistic male patients who patronized prostitute flagellants and sadomasochistic specialists almost exclusively. And in his Psychopathia Sexualis, he quoted the results of on-the-spot observations regarding the extent of prostitution flagellation: The number of masochists, especially in big cities, seems to be quite large. The only sources of such information-since men do not reveal these things-are statements by prostitutes, and since they agree on the essential points, certain facts may be assumed as proved.
Thus there is the fact that every experienced prostitute keeps some suitable instrument (usually a whip) for flagellation, but it must be remembered that there are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end.
On the other hand, almost all prostitutes agree that there are many men who like to play "slave"-i.e., like to be so called, and have themselves scolded and trod upon and beaten. As has been said, the number of masochists is larger than has yet been dreamed.
Now, seventy years later, little had changed. Flagellation at a high price,performed by lovely young girls, such as Mandy Rice-Davies, played a big part in England's recent Christine Keeler scandal. And in research conducted by this author for the current book, as well as for The Prostitutes of Europe and Sexual Misbehavior: Truth and Myth, the results could well be looked upon as a corroboration of the findings in Krafft-Ebing's day.
Case History: Phyliss C. Prostitute
A beautiful young redhead of twenty-four, Phyllis has made a specialty of whipping and other cruelties since she first came to London at eighteen from an orphanage near Brighton.
Introduced to flagellation at the institution where she grew up, and forced into prostitution because of an aggressive personality that made it impossible to keep a regular job, she now combines her past experiences with her lucrative work. With her $2,000 supply of special leather whips and straps, birch rods and paddles, plus a wardrobe of sexually symbolic leather attire, she is one of the most successful flagellants and leather fetishists in London today.
A true sadomasochist, Phyllis can play either the active or passive role in flagellation, domination, bondage or disciplinarian relationships. According to her statement, though over 80 percent of the men who approach her for sadomasochistic relations want to be dominated by this very young, cute and well-built little redhead.
Her special wardrobe of unusual leather attire includes a brown corset which laces up the back and can reduce her 26-inch waist to 20-inches by almost squeezing the life out of her. It covers her midsection from just above the pubes to just beneath her large, rounded breasts.
She also has a pair of very pliant high-heeled leather boots that are lined with fur and lace up almost to her knees. There are leather stockings too, which come almost to the apex of her thighs and must be oiled inside to facilitate their application.
Completing this bizarre wardrobe is a leather bra with circular open spaces in front, which forces out her nipples and aureoles like tooth-paste from a tube when she tightens the back fasteners!
During the course of a recent psychological interview, Phyllis made brief mention of some of the requests which her customers make. A reconstruction of her remarks follows:
"Most English chaps who come to me like it when I put on the high-heeled boots and walk around cracking the whip like I was a bloody lion tamer gone cracked. One of my best clients, quite an important businessman in the West End, just goes off his blooming rocker when he sees me naked except for the boots.
He drops his trousers and hands me the long whip from the table. I snarl at him like a tiger and crack it right across his instrument. He grabs hold of himself there and howls like a castrated banshee. And, believe it or not, that's all it takes for him to finish what he came here about.
"The American is my favorite. Oh, not just any Yank, mind you.. .but this perfect gentlemen who comes to London once or twice a year from Chicago. He must own half the city, the way he has money to give out. A hundred dollars he gives me each time. And it's quite a thing with him, too.
"He has me dress up so cute and girlish with those bobby-sox, he calls them, and a little short skirt and blouse like I was a bloody school kid. He strips himself down all the way and lies on the bed, belly down. I tie his hands and feet to the posts with strips of leather. And then I walk around the bed threatening him with all kinds of terrible things. He simply adores it. The more trashy I talk, and I mean really obscene garbage, the bigger sweat her works himself into.
"Then I get terribly mean and use the long leather whip with the one handle that gets thinner and thinner as it stretches out to sex foot. By the time I get through, his whole bottom is striped red and good, and the bed's a bloody mess!
"And I've one old fat German from Hamburg who gets his greatest charge from my dressing up in all the leather goods-stockings, girdle, bra, and a black mask that covers my eyes and nose. The crazy boob has me lie on the bed while he licks up the leather like he was sucking on an ice-cream goodie.
"He has me order him about like he was pure gutter scrum. The more terrible things I tell him to do, the more excited he gets. I always aske him to undress and I insult his big fat stomach and his puny little engine, his idiot look, his kraut ancestry, his stinking lousy personality.
"When he's got nothing at all on, I make him crawl about the floor like a trained pet. I spank his bottom till its red, with a jeweled walking cane he brings along. I kick him right where it bloody well nearly kills him. And he loves it. I make him give me a bath, dry me, rub my whole yummy body with oil, wipe it off with his expensive white shirt, and the to ady about some more on his hands and knees.
"He finally gets his when I take the paddle to his rump and thighs after I tie him up by his hands. He can go three or four times like that, sometimes more. And you can believe me, I give it to him till he's got a seat that's bloody and red as a guy's had the knife put to him, because he pays ten pounds a go-that's twenty-eight dollars in your stuff. Once, he went seven times, and I took off to Brighton for a week!
Case History: A New York Pimp.
By posing as an out-of-town businessman, it is not too difficult to contact Jaime, a Spanish-speaking man in New York who claims he can supply anthing in the way of girls for someone who wants to be mistreated.
He pointed out two women of about 30, who were eating beans and rice in a cheap restaurant. They were chubby and not unattractive, and Jaime said one of them had a 40-inch bust. For 20 dollars they would spank a man tied down to a bed, or let him tie them up naked and spank them with his hands.
At the mention of a hundred-dollar bill, he took out some nude photos from his wallet. They depicted three very cute girls in their mid-teens sitting beside each other on a bed. In the background was a middle-aged man with his trunk exposed. A riding-crop, a leather razor-strap, and a wooden paddle lay on the girl's laps. Naked, they were kissing each other's breasts and fondling themselves genitally.
Jaime said that these girls were available for one hundred dollars. He dramatically described in broken English, what they had done recently for a customer from
Kansas City:
" "They tied him up good in his hotel room. Juanita, the girl with big breasts-she pop him so hard he scream like crazy with great big paddle. He like so good she do it more time and cuss him-good in Spanish.
"All girls get good naked for him see everything they got, Mister! They get big bath towel and soak it wet. The beat him so hard so he don't know what time it is. That man go crazy, they get him so good. Keep him tie up for two.. .mebbe three hour. He can do nothing, they tie him so good. He beg like crazy man they let him up. But them girl know he want it more.
"They pop him big rear with towel, with whip, with paddle. He ruin that bed, he do it so many time. For hundred dollar you get same thing like that. All right? Okay?"
Case History: Non-Flagellational Sadism
The following case of a very strange male masochist was reported in Transactions of the Colorado State Medical Society: X., a model husband, very moral, the father of several children, visited brothels, chose two or three of the largest girls and shut himself up with them. He bared the upper portion of his body, lay down on the floor, crossed his hands over his abdomen, closed his eyes, and then had the girl's walk over his naked breast, neck and face, urging them at every step to press hard on his flesh with the heels of their shoes. Sometimes he wanted a heavier girl, or some other act still more cruel than this procedure. After two or three hours he had enough. He paid the girls.. .rubbed his blue bruises, dressed himself.. . and went back to his business, only to give himself the same strange pleasure again after a few weeks.
Occasionally it happened that he had one of the girls stand on his breast, and the others then turn her around until his skin was torn and bleeding from the turning of the heels of her shoes. Frequently one of the girls had to stand on him in such a way that one shoe was over the eyes with its heels pressing on one eye, while the other shoe rested across his neck.
In this position he endured the pressure of a person weighing about 150 pounds for four or five minutes. Hammond presumes with reason that this man had become impotent for intercourse with women; that in this strange procedure he found an equivalent for coitus; and that, when the heels drew blood, he had pleasant feelings accompanied by ejaculations.
Case History: Flogging To Orgasm.
A gentleman of high standing, age twenty-eight years, would go to a house of prostitution once a month. He always announced his coming with a note reading thus: Dear Peggy, I shall be with you tomorrow evening between 8 and 9 o'clock. Whip and knout! Kindest regards.. .
He always arrived at the appointed time carrying a whip, a knout and leather straps. After undressing, he had himself bound hand and foot, and then flogged by the girl on the soles of his feet, his claves and buttocks until ejaculation ensued. The fact that he disdained coitus seems to point to the fact that he resorted to this method simply as a means to gratify his masochistic inclination and not as a ruse to restore potency.
Case History: Bondage By The Prostitute
Tarnowsky writes of a male masochist who "had a person in his confidence rent a house.. .and instruct its personnel (three prostitutes) in what was to be done with him. Whenever he came there, he was undressed, masturbated and flagellated as ordered. He pretended to offer resistance, and begged for mercy; then as ordered, he was allowed to eat and sleep. But in spite of protest, he was kept there and beaten if he did not submit. Thus the affair would go on for some days."
ACaseHistory: "Situation Comedy"
From the pages of the classic Archivio di Psichiatria we learn about the strange and bizarrely humorous habits of a 38-year-old married professional man who:
Visited periodically a prostitute who had to enact previous to coitus, the following comedy. As soon as he entered her compartment she took him by the ears, and pulled him all over the room, shouting: "What do you want here? Don't you know that you ought to be in school?" She would then slap his face and flog him soundly, until he knelt before her, begging pardon. She then handed him a little basket containing bread and fruit, such as children carry with them to school. He remained disobedient until the girl's harshness produced orgasm in him, when he would call out; "I am going! I am going!--and then performed coitus.
Case History: "Big Em "
At 19-years of age, "Big Em" was a very chubby, round-faced Negro girl whom few men found physically desirable when they went out looking for a prostitute. She was about five foot-two, and her 190 pounds were distributed over measurements of 42-35-44. Her face was young and attractive enough, her skin almost black.
By soliciting around Washington, D.C.'s notorious 9th Street area, she was lucky to find a five or ten dollar customer to take to her bug-infested tenement room.
Then one night, to "Big Em's surprise, a Southern businessman changed all of this. More eager than any of her other customers, this relatively handsome man in his forties paid her 20 dollars for a spanking.
Since that time, she has found many others of the same inclination, mainly white men, and has moved into a nicely furnished apartment. She explains that she usually treats customers very rough, cursing and hurling obscenities at him as she orders him to bare his buttocks.
The man usually lies naked across the bed with his legs apart, and she applies her big hands liberally to his rear with swift, hard strokes. If orgasm does not result, she usually masturbates her guest while her hand is still warm from the beating..
Many clients like for "Big Em" to be stripped completely while she abuses them, some requesting her to sit on top of them and twist around after they are both perspiring. In keeping with her dominating character, she does not perform fellatio, will copulate only from the active position, and makes the male beg her on bended knees before allowing him cunnilingus, which she claims over half of them desire. She enjoys both psychic orgasm from her sadistic spankings, and contact climaxes from cunnilingus. Copulation is no longer attractive to her. She will not use a whip or any other instrument for fear of hurting a client and getting into trouble with the police.
CHAPTER NINE
Female Domination:
"In a holy night of love he lay at her feet and besought her in supreme ecstasy: "Maltreat me, so that I may endure my happiness, be cruel to me, give me kicks and kisses!" The beautiful (naked) woman bent on her adorer a strange look from her green eyes, icy and devouring, then she went across the room, stepped slowly into a splendid loose coat of satin, richly trimmed with princely ermine, and took from her dressing table a whip, a long thong attached to L.'Jhort handle, with which she was wont to punish her great mastiff.
"You want it," she said, "then I will whip you!"
"Whip me! cried her lover, still on his knees, "I implore you!"
Under the Whip by Leopold Von Scher-Masoch Leipzig, 1873
Case History: LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH
De Sade was no more obsessed by the depraved enjoyment of inflicting painful tortures on beautiful women than was Sacher-Masoch by the depraved pleasure which could be derived from its opposite-sadistic female domination at the hands of an over power and ruthless woman.
Venus in Furs was his most well-known book. But the same theme of fetishistic masochism was dominant in almost all of his works. The tall and imperious, yet strikingly beautiful woman with the whip was always the sadistic female dominator. The fetish was supplied by her ermine furs and leather boots. Otherwise, his ideal dominating female would be naked, and he would crawl at her feet like the lowest slave. In the excerpt quoted above, the woman was a baroness. Sacher-Masoch, of course, was represented by the man who received the vilest of punishments at the imperious woman's hands. And when the baroness suggested that he be tied up to be whipped, the slave rejected the proposal indignantly, because if would appear that he was protesting the punishment.
That, of course, was not the case Sacher-Masoch reveled in the slavish maltreatment and beatings. The worse the beatings with the stiff rod, the kicking around, the pin pricking of his naked body by the fiery woman, the more pleasure he experienced, the more orgasms he could achieve.
If Sacher-Mashoch went through any evolution in his lifetime of female-dominated masochism, it was a change from his obsession with the brutality of his real and imagined female partners, to the pure pleasure he obtained from passively enjoying the results of their brutality.
Female domination and flagellation were rampant throughout Europe and Great Britain during Sacher-Masoch's time. It was at this period that the flogging houses and whipping clubs and spanking in general had engulfed England in a bloody mania of suffering that the hands of female flagellants and other authoritarian images. Vienna was filled with well-heeled prostitutes whose primary claim to fame and fortune was the ability to use the whip and the rod with utmost skill.
Yet it remained for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to depict the suffering viewpoint so vividly and in lengthy detail. It remained for Sacher-Masoch to take the male and female roles in love-making, switch them around, and play up the most perverted excesses of sadomasochism in so' doing. The tremendous appeal to his writings, and the resultant popularity of female domination during this era are not too difficult to understand when one expolores the psychological factors involved.
Sacher-Masoch appealed to the secret instinct of a great number of woman to be the master, even if only temporarily, over their male love partners. Whether the woman's reason was revenge because of her constantly being forced to take the passive role, or whether it stemmed from a simple desire to switch around occasionally, the idea of female domination enjoyed wide popularity with girls and women who were sexually mature as well as those already deviant in their desires.
On the other hand, Sacher-Masoch dressed up his domineering female characters in all the trappings which appealed to any normally virile male. The woman was always extremely beautiful with a fully developed body of voluptuous breasts, hips and legs.
She was never completely naked during the course of love-making, but partially clothed in elegant bits of velvet or fur and high-heeled boots to set off the contour of the legs and give prominence to the rounded buttocks--the very same kind of appeal exploited by today's strip-teaser, or the lace and lingerie poses in a hundred or more magazines. And after the male reader was virtually hypnotized by the overpowering female voluptuousness, the sensuous symbolism and realism Sacher-Masoch's oversexed women possessed, the whip in the hand and the sadistic brutality could not tear them away. There were few men with the normal mixture of sexual emotions who did not find in the situations described by Sacher-Masoch some degree of sexual stimulation.
Krafft-Ebing, somewhat of a puritan himself when it came to a code of sexual morality, detected immediately this universal appeal of Sacher-Masoch's writings and the personal experiences from which it undoubtedly sprung:
"During recent years," the pioneer psychiatrist wrote in Sacher-Masoch's lifetime, "facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with this anomaly."
The brilliant author of Psychopathia Sexualis also explained why he chose the name of the Austrian writer to represent the condition: "I felt justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism, because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to this time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the sub-stratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism, from Dalton, the discoverer of color-blindness."
Kraft-Ebing came across some personal letters written by Sacher-Masoch to a patient of his, who also was a slave to female domination, and had corresponded on the subject with the Austrian masochist. The very letterhead of the writer's stationery contained a print depicting "a luxurient woman, with imperial bearing, only half covered with furs and holding a riding whip as if ready to strike".
In the body of this unusual correspondence, Krafft-Ebing relates how Sacher-Masoch told of one of his love affairs with a Danish woman who:
. . .Yielded her favor to no man until he acted the part of slave to her for a considerable time. She would have several of her lovers tied together and make them lick the soles of her perspiring feet and her naked buttocks. She had her adorers put in chains and whipped until they obeyed her demands to lick her feet clean. Once she had the "slave" fastened to her bedposts and thus made him witness granting the highest favor to another. After the latter left her she had the fettered "slave" whipped by her servants until he yielded to her demands to lick every bit of her buttocks and anus while he sat on the floor and she stood with her rear to him. Up until the time Sacher-Masoch was about 30, he led the most normal and promising life. He was described as a gifted child of an old and noble family. His father was a captain of police in Prague, and later Chief of Police in Graz, Austria. The ancestry of his parents on both sides was of the highest order-intellectuals, physicians, professors, military officers-and there was not a trace of mental illness on which to pin your Leopoldn's sudden leap into female-dominated masochism at age thirty.
Lewinsohn says that it was at this period in life that Sacher-Masoch suddenly changed and "sought and found women stronger than himself, and his greatest pleasure lay in submitting himself, absolutely to them. He laid himself at their feet like a dog and made them maltreat and humiliate him; the more violent they were, the greater his pleasure.. .he soon gave literary expression to these feelings. In his Das Vermachtnis Kains (Cain's Heritage), a collection of short stories published in 1870, he wallows in descriptions of cruel women and abject men. Here and there he moralizes a little, but it is evident that this relationship between women and men answered his own sexual needs."
Many authorities do not consider Sacher-Masoch as polished a writer as De Sade. Except for the inevitable whipping scenes which are masterfully described in all their prolonged and naked sensuousness and brutality, it's often said that the rest of his writing is dull and vapid.
Yet, in his time, Sacher-Masoch was not only considered a great writer, but also as a pioneer of psychology. On the 25th anniversary of his first serious literary work, congratulations poured in from Victor Hugo, Ibsen, Zola, Pasteur, Gounod, and many other Europena luminaries in the arts and sciences.
In addition to the rods and whips wielded by Sacher Masoch's tall beauties of female domination, other forms of subjugation enjoyed a heady revival in this era. Passive scatological practices, being hung by the neck with the help of a beautiful and semi-nude woman, playing the part of a pet dog or riding horse to a brutal mistressthese were all signs of the sadomasochistic times of male submission.
CCase History: Addiction To Female Domination In The Role of MA Mistress Horse
This patient was a 50-year-old city official with a tall, muscular, healthy built. For years he dreamed that he was a "proud, fiery steed, ridden by a beautiful lady. He felt her weight, the bit he had to obey, the pressure of her thighs on his flanks; he heard her beautiful, joyous voice. The exertion threw him into a perspiration, the touch of the spurs did the rest, and always induced pollution with great lustful pleasure."
Later, the patient created an opportunity to put his dreams into practice with the help of some women of his acquaintance who found the little "game" he contrived to mesh with their own domineering traits. He tells how he managed this: I knew how to arrange it so that on an occasion she would of her own will seat herself on my back. Then I endeavored to make this situation as pleasant as possible, and easily arranged it so that on the next occasion she said spontaneously, "Come, give me a little ride! Being of tall stature, both hands braced on a chair, I made my back horizontal, and she mounted astride, after the manner of a man. I then did the best I could to imitate the movements of a horse, and loved to have her treat me like a horse, without consideration. She could beat, prick, scold, or caress me, just as she felt inclined. I could carry on my back persons weighing from sixty to eighty kilos (132 to 176 pounds) for half or three quarters of an hour without interruption..... .After about a quarter of an hour I was rested and placed my self again at the disposal of the mistress. When time and circumstances allowed it, I did this three or four times in succession.. .when possible, I liked to bare my trunk, that I might feel the riding whip more sharply. The mistress had to be decent. I liked her best in pretty shoes and stockings, with short closed drawers reaching to the knees; with the upper portion of her person completely dressed and with hat and gloves.
This patient considered his practice a perfect substitute for sexual intercourse, and nearly always ejaculated during the course of a strenuous "ride".
It is interesting to note that this patient wanted his mistress to be fully and "decently" clothed, while he was predominantly exposed, often naked from his shoulders, where his trousers and shorts were bunched. This undoubtedly added to the humiliation for him. Yet other patients with similar desires often spoke of the "tremendously exciting experience" which a big woman's thighs created when she was astride them. In other words, the painful pressure of the woman's upper leg was important for the gaining of optimum enjoyment. Many of those addicted to female domination became so enamored of one particular woman that they begged them to keep in touch by sending threatening letters whenever they were away from each other. Krafft-Ebing quotes one such coprolalic missive which "an elegant and beautiful young woman" sent to a patient:
Lick the Stinking Sweat From A Woman's Foot:
I take the utmost delight in conjuring up the moment when you will lick my toes, especially after a long walk. A facsimile of my foot I shall send you soon. It will intoxicate me like nectar when you will lick up my sweaty feet. And if you will not do it voluntarily, I shall force you to it; I shall treat you as my meanest slave. You shall witness how another favorite sucks and licks the dirty perspiration form my feet, whilst you shall whine like a dog under the lashes of my servants.
I shall declare you outlawed. I shall find the most exquisite pleasure in seeing you in pain, breathing your last under the most cruel tortures, licking my toes in extreme agony.. .You challenge my cruelty very well, I shall crush you under my foot like a worm.. .
You asked me for a stocking? I shall wear it longer than usual. But I demand that you kiss it and lick it that you soak the foot of it in water then drink the latter. If you do not carry out my pleasure absolutely, I shall chastise you with my riding whip.
I demand unconditional obedience. If you do not obey, I shall have you whipped with the knout. I shall make you walk over a floor well spiked with sharp nails. I shall have you bastinadoed and cast to the lions in the cage. It will give me the utmost delight to see how the wild beasts enjoy your flesh.
Case History: Female Domination.
In referring again to Hotten's library Illustrative of Social Progress published in 1872, we find the account of
Case History: Female Domination.
In referring again to Hotten's library Illustrative of Social Progress published in 1872, we find the account of a young man in his twenties who craved punishment and domination from a beautiful, lithe-limbed, young French ballerina who had taken up residence in his own house-old as his father's mistress. The story is related in the words of a girlfriend and confidante of the sensuous ballerina:
He had not any opportunity for some days of courting the felicity he panted for from her hands, but at length he obtained it. His father was gone to Picardy about some pressing business, and they were left alone. The lady showed the young gentleman the most engaging fondness, and he in return called her his charming mamma.
One evening as she sat if full dress, ready for her carriage to take her to the opera, he kissed her lips and hands in mad transport, then threw himself at their feet and kissed them a hundred times. He declared to the lady from whom I had this relation, that on beholding her at this time his passion mounted to such a blaze that he was near being deprived of his reason. Her shoes were spangled in the richest manner, and the quarters ornamented with a gold fringe; she had a pair of large brilliant buckles of the Artosi fashion, and a stocking of the richest silk, ornamented with a gold clock. All this, with a gold fringe to her petticoat, had such an effect on him as he lay at her feet, that he wished to expire at them. She took this as the gambols of a fond boy, and would have done so if he had not caught hold of her hand and kissed it a hundred times. Her hands and arms were finely formed, and were as fair as snow, and were adorned with the richest jewels, particularly her arms, which had two brackets set with diamonds and fastened on with many strings of pear. She had an eye full of the liquid moisture of love, and a bosom full, and fair as alabaster, which was quite bare.
He attempted to put his hands up her petticoats, which she removed, nor would she suffer him to approach the seat of bliss while she lived with his father. When he found it would not do, he went on his knees and confessed to her how fond he was of being whipped by a lovely woman. This was an amusement the lady had no objection to, as it was quite common in her country (France); but there was no rod at hand. However, she let down his breeches, at his desire, and slapped his ass with her hand, promising him a whipping to his liking the instant she returned from the opera, if he would procure a rod. She returned before eleven o'clock and he had a bundle of birch ready for her. When supper was removed and the coast clear, he put the bundle into her hand, and two yards of pink ribbon which he bought to tie the rod. She selected from the bundle what she thought would tickle him to her mind, and at his desire she stripped him to his shirt. "Oh!" said he, "who can describe the raptures of that blest moment! An angel of earthly felicity about to administer the sweetest bliss on this side of heaven! All the ravishing beauties of woman blazing in this object! A form princely! A face full of loveliness! Hands are arms, legs and feet, cast in the finest mould of beauty, and decorated with the neatest ornaments of art and genius!"
When he was stripped to his shirt, she laid him across her lap, and having removed the tail of his shirt to his shoulders, she took the rod in hand and whipped him smartly, according to his desire. When she had given him about fifty strokes, he turned about and exhibited his tarriwags, but it would not do. She took them in her hand and played with them, but she had too much honor to suffer the amorous youth to insult his father by a connection with her. As to whipping his ass, she considered it a matter of amusement, as indeed all the French ladies do.
In addition to cutting, whipping, beating, riding like a horse, scatological defilement, and other forms of basest humiliation, a certain few masochistic males of the 19th Century went so far as to find their virility increased, or in some cases totally satisfied, if they were hanged by the neck by a beautiful woman.'
Case History: Female Domination By Hanging
On September 16, 1791, the public heard the lurid details of one of the few cases of this type ever to be aired officially. De Sade had written about it, and Gamiani was filled with anecdotes about the ability of strangulation by hanging to evoke penis erectus in a man otherwise impotent, either temporarily or permanently. Yet it was the hanging of one Francis Kotzwarra at the residence of a London prostitute named Susannah Hill, which brought the mystic practice out into the open. The account of her testimony at the trial, as reported in Modern Propensities, tell us: That in the afternoon of 2nd of September, between one and two o'clock, a man whom she had never seen before, and who was the deceased, came past the house where she lived. That he came into the house, the street door being open, (as usual, it was observed by the Counsel) and asked her if she would have anything to drink. That she replied, if she chose anything, it should be a little port. The deceased said he should like some brandy and water; and gave her money to buy both port and brandy-with two shillings for some ham and beef which she accordingly bought.
Some time after this, they went into a back room, where several acts of the grossest indecency passed; in particular he pressed her to cut off his means of generation, and expressly wished to have it cut in two. But this she refused. He then said he should like to be hanged for five minutes; and while he gave her money to buy a cord, observed that handing would raise his passions that it would produce all he wanted. But as a cord large enough could not be immediately procured, she brought two small ones, and put them round his neck.
He then tied himself up to the back parlor door, a place where he hung very low, and bending down his knees. After hanging five minutes, she cut him down; he immediately fell to the ground; she thought he was in a fit, and called to an opposite neighbor for help.. . . The prisoner was dismissed.
Further admission by Susannah Hill revealed that Kotzwarra did actually achieve a violent and "pulsating" state of erection during the last moments before his. death. And other accounts to hanging at the hands of prostitutes and inamorata, which did not prove fatal, also indicate that during the desperate gasps for breath, erection resulted in those who been either impotent for years, or who had achieved several ejaculations shortly prior thereto.
Case History: George Sand.
George Sand was a tall woman who wore men's clothes, smoked cigars, and worked seven days a week at her famed writings so that she could be totally free of depending on any man for support. In 1865, Jeff's Le Chassepot represented her as "more depraved than Messalina, in fact an utter slave to Lesbian passion." Yet historians generally agree that she was not a lesbian, and never had so much as a single sexual affair with another woman.
She was, however, according to reliable authorities, an incurable cruel and insatiable nymphomaniac and demanding female dominator in the style of Messalina. Raised in the sheltered surroundings of her family chateau and schooled in a nunnery, Aurore married a wealthy young baron at eighteen, only to cuckold him by going to bed with nearly every man she could seduce after her first child was born. One of these lovers took her to Paris, but there she began to take on others for either a few days or a few years, depending on how long they could put up with the complete mastery and subjugation which she demanded. The composer Chopin lived with her for ten years and emerged a total wreck, a man broken in body and spirit, where virility and genius once had bloomed.
The 23-year-old poet Alfred de Musset went to Venice with her. Her insatiable sexuality could not be satisfied even by this virile youth, and he broke out with a high fever from over-exertion and fatigue. And to add insult to his injury, when he was too ill and near dying to cater to her insatiable demands of the flesh, Aurore scoffed at his inability and took up with the first man who came along-the very doctor who attended him!
Prosper Merimee, the author of Carmen, and reputedly one of the biggest Don Juans in all of bawdy Paris, lasted only two days with this over-sexey nymphomaniac.
Lewinsohn says that: "To the outer world she remained a huntress and devourer of men, a wild nymphomaniac.. . she needed young men to stir her senses. Nearly all her lovers were younger than she. But even youth, wit and beauty were not enough to pass the test before this capricious Princess Turandot."
Most paintings of George Sand bring out the masculine qualities, picturing her in male dress and with a cigar so that she appears a veritable virago. But Darwin's own insists that she was all woman, "and a beautiful and charming one at that, with thick black hair and deep dark eyes, finely-chiseled features, and a delicate, well-proportioned body.. . "
It is no wonder that with an appearance like that, plus the steaming sultriness and sensual magnetism of her personality, that she presented much to be desired by the great men of her day, and that: "In the 1830's, to share the bed of this woman was regarded as a crown of intellectual glory." But also quite a challenge to the potency and stability of all who shared this dubious glory!
In Vienna of the 1800's which was dubbed "Europe's biggest love market" and was estimated to have one working prostitute for every seven male citizens, female domination and the rod and whip became the most popular items since Adam and Eve discovered what sex was all about.
The love salons featured pin-pricking, flagellation, hanging, fettering, spankings by 10-year-old girls or big fat Negresses-anything a masochist could get his teeth into.
The richest whore of all Vienna in this period was a woman named Henrietta, who was also known as "The Thousandguiler Weed" because of her exorbitantly high fee. She walked the streets in boots and spurs, often slapping a riding crop against her lavish thighs when she was dressed in tight-fitting men's clothes.
If a girl was big and well-built, she had it made, and the bigness could even mean fatness. Another favorite of Viennese masochists was known as "Elefantweibl" or "The Elephant Girl", and she was said to be almost six feet tall, weighed 200 pounds, and measured 46-33-45, with tremendously large and solid thighs.
A strange contrast is noted in the method of female domination during what might be called the Sacher-Masoch era, and the period of the troubadors of Europe several hundred years before. While many people picture the troubador as a fun-loving playboy who wooed and won the favors of many a noble and married beauty with the cleverness of his poetic serenading, he was more often than not the passive and submissive partner in his frequent love relationships. It was decidedly the woman who controlled and dominated the troubador, often in a sexually sadistic and diabolical manner.
As these young love-ballad improvisers traveled from village to village seeking a boudoir tryst with a countess here, a marquise there, they were much in the position of the slave rather than the master. The practice soon evolved from the mythically chivalrous picture of bold knight trying to win the hand of fair lady through romantically delightful song, to nothing more than a straggly group of sex-hungry amateur folk-singers actually begging to be the slave or page of a good-looking girl during a quickie sex session.
Historian Lewinsohn sums up this institution as a "woman-cult developed to the pitch of masochism." The French moralist of the times, Marcabru, blamed them for seeding a "tree of perversity." And this "Vassaldom relationship of the knight to the noble lady" was incorporated by Krafft-Ebing into a sub-division of perverted masochism, which he called "pageism." An Austrian knight by the name of Ulrich von Lichtenstein was so slavishly devoted to many of his women that he bottled the water in which they bathed their entire bodies and genitalia, so that he could refresh himself with it while traveling. To prove his willingness to sacrifice for one of his noble bedmates, he cut off a finger and dispatched it to her by courier.
Duke William IX of Aquitane in southwest France literally ruined himself by over-indulgence in sex with masterful women, and his original philosophic contemplations of literary value which he put to song, degenerated into the crudest obscenities.
There seems no doubt that the average troubadour of the Middle Ages was simply a forerunner of Sacher-Masoch, a foot and buttocks licking toady who reveled in the role of virtual slave to an imperious and beautiful woman, and was humiliated himself naked before her and was subjected to brutal whippings and other debasements.
According to some historical analysts, the popularity of female domination, like other sex radices, occurs in cycles. And if this theory is to be reckoned with, the period of rampant male masochism of the 1800's is only now in its second phase. What is called the current trend toward passive flagellation by the male is only an extension of the British flogging houses, the big Viennese strongwomen, and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs.
The previous "up" cycle of female domination, according to this reasoning, was that of the troubadors from 1000 to 1250 A.D. Thus with 1800 as the starting date for the current period, there may be close to a hundred years to go before the cycle hits the downgrade and the roles of the male and female regain their proper places in a healthy majority of sex relations.
CHAPTER TEN
De Sade and Sadism
An unfortunate young virgin is stripped naked by a nobleman and his lackeys. Her flesh nakedness is tied spread-eagled to the ground, each hand and foot secured to the trunk of a tree. The lecherous and sadistic men whip her frantic young body with long hard rods and drown out her screams with a mouthful of mud, as the blood oozes from the long red welts on her pelvis and stomach. And to revive her when she passes out, a pack of thirsty bloodhounds is set loose to feast upon the crimson liquid that trickles from her belly, bosom and buttocks.
A imagine-dress ball is being given at a private resort on the French coast. The guests are all ravishingly beautiful young women. The hosts are a French Count and his valet. There is dancing and drinking. And then suddenly, every girl present turns into a screaming, yelling, insatiable, uncontrollable nymph!
They beg and plead for their hosts to rape them, beat them, hit them, cut them. They fall into Sapphic embraces of unbridled lust with each other. One screams, "I am on fire!" and leaps out the window to her death.
The count doubles up with laughter and makes his valet commit sodomy on him as a final insult to the insanely passionate females who snake their twisting bodies across the floor and grovel at his feet. But to the sodomized count and his valet it is all a monstrous joke they have played. He has filled the women's drinks and appetizers with tremendous overdoses of Spanish Fly. And many of the girls are literally killing themselves by using any kind of object they can to relieve the horrible, burning, itching passion induced by the highly irritating powder of the blister-beede.
A pretty teen-age girl begs money from a handsome army colonel who passes her way. He takes the child to his house on the pretext of feeding her. But once inside, he strips her trembling body naked, ties her hand and foot to the wall, beats her unconscious with a long whip, then, with the help of his servant, copulates her young body after inflicting knife wounds on the breasts, the thighs and threatening to plunge the sharp instrument all the way through her heart.
Case History: The Marquis de Sade
The three preceding incidents, plus a thousand others of an equally perverted and sadistic nature, are all attributed to one man-Donatien Alfonse Francoise, Marquise (actually Comte, or Count) de Sade (1740-1815).
The noted 19th Century French historian Paul Lacroix tried to prove that the "Crazy Marquis" considered himself justified "in attempting to pervert the whole human race."
"Posterity has made a monster of the Marquis de Sade," writes J. Rattray Taylor in his Sex in History, going on to say that: "No better expert in (the) black arts.....could have been found than the Crazy Marquis."
Pisanus Fraxi declared that "nature has produced some strange abortions (sic), both physical and mental, but probably never a greater mental monstrosity than Sade. The Marquis de Sade is perhaps one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived.. . . . " The current edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary simply describes him as: "French soldier and pervert."
There are many apologists for De Sade, who point out that the only two crimes of which he was ever officially convicted involved the poisoning incident where he gave out the overdoses of Spanish Fly to the girls in Marseilles, and the sadistic violation of the teen-age beggar girl when he was an army officer. The third instance mentioned at the start of this chapter, these apologists say, was merely a fictional episode from his most famous novel, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, which is also known by the title of Justine and Juliette.
According to the official record, they are right. Although several of the girls in Marseilles died from the overdose of the aphrodisiac, De Sade was able to get murder conviction reduced to "excessive debauchery" and escaped with a fine, the equivalent of one hundred dollars. In the case of the naked violation of the minor girl, and the cutting up of her breasts, when he was an army colonel in Paris, intervention from high places got him off with a few days in the stockade.
In view of these documented accounts, plus the face that DeSade was governor-general of the provinces ol Bresse, Bugey, Valmorey and Gex, and was appointed a colonel of cavalry by the King himself, there is no doubt that he could have just as easily escaped punishment through influence in high places.
However, one of the strange aspects of De Sade's insanity was that he considered his depraved sexual atrocities as a kind of religion, a bizarre part of his over-all political and moral philosophy. He was a politician of the French Revolution who sincerely and devoutly believed that evil triumphed over good, not the other way around.
De Sade's novels harped on this inverted moral theory in the most macabre ways. In Justine, two girls are left to make their own way in life after their father dies. The one who immediately takes up work in the most debauched brothel of Paris, comes out the "heroine" and millionairess, inflicting inhuman punishment and agonizingly slow death on various pitiful "little people," just for sadistic pleasures. She locks up a peasant and his family in their little wooden house, then sets it on fire, standing by to watch them all burn to death in the holocaust.
The virtuous sister, on the other hand, is violated, beaten, raped, threatened with vivi-section and being drawn and quartered, tied to trees where she is beaten, and harried and bitten by ravenous bloodhounds. In the end, after still trying to defend what is left of her virtue with each new ravishment that befalls her shy and tender young body, the hapless girl is unjustly sent to prison as a murderess.
In De Sade's Aline and Valcour, he mixed sadism with incest, in what has been described as a family counterpart to Justine.
Aline, the virtuous, obedient, modest, constantly persecuted young girl of extreme "delicacy and beauty," is pursued by her own father. Frustrated to the point of madness because he cannot enjoy the delicacies of his own daughter's fresh and virginal body without a terrible scandal, he arranges for her marriage to an incredibly filthy and lecherous old man. He makes an agreement with this depraved old debauchee that in return for his giving his daughter to him in marriage, the man must share with him the favors of this "tender and juicy young morsel of delicious and succulent fruit," who is his own daughter.
But the virtuous Aline, after hearing of the perverted scheme, kills herself rather than submit to incest and lechery at their hands, while her cruel and hated sister Leonore, who loves depravity for its own sake, prospers handsomely.
Interlaced with these sadistic, fiendish and heinously erotic descriptions of every kind imaginable, are De
Sade's wrapped theories on government, morality, education, political economy, and other serious matters of state over which this demented beast actually had influence in his various official capacities.
No one who has any knowledge of this infamous career, and the general corruption which existed in the French ruling circles of that period, can have any doubt that he freely indulged in the most base of the practices about which he wrote, with relative freedom from prosecution.
Along with his profusion of writings, much of which contained a great deal of literary merit and were copied not only by later pornographers but by several writers of some legitimate renown, De Sade also perverted his talent for architecture to the abuses and misuses of sexual sadism. Among the memoirs of the "Crazy Marquis" was discovered the elaborate and detailed floor plan of a Paris brothel devoted to flagellation, phlebotomy and other forms of bloody torture and lust-murder upon its attractive female inmates. Each room in this masterfully designed castle of carnality was dedicated to a particular kind of torture.
There might be one chamber, for instance, where a customer could lash a young girl to the rack and pull and stretch her nubile nakedness until the arms and legs were literally torn out of their sockets and only the bloody torso remained. Another room had accommodations for scalding women in huge vats of lye or boiling water, with an intricate pulley system so their kicking and flailing young bodies could be lowered gradually to their searing death.
And yet another chamber provided facilities where naked young victims could be fettered to the wall and carved up with several different types of knives, each devised to perform a particular kind of incision.
In still another cell, a man might select from a dozen different styles of whips, knouts, rods, leather thongs, etc., and beat one or more girls to death-while he amused himself with yet another girl in a special device which bound her facing him in a position of easy access, her legs spread widely.
Each of these diabolically planned rooms was further equipped with little troughs along the back wall, and the floors tapered down to the rear ever so slightly, so that the blood of the victims would run off quickly into the sewer. And De Sade provided a cemetery within the very walls of his brothel, so that the bodies could be disposed of quickly and with utmost discretion.
Did this chamber of horrors actually exist? Was the lust-mad Count able to conceal its very existence during his lifetime, only to let later historians discover the blueprints and instructions in his own handwriting? Or had it never really gone beyond the planning stage?
We may never know the answer to this question, or to the countless others which lie buried forever in the monstrous brain of the Marquis De Sade and his influential partners in crime, who protected him throughout life from the punishment he deserved. Perhaps the best and briefest summary of De Sade's life by a qualified authority, is that given by Pisanus Fraxi:
Donatien Alfonse Francis Marquis (really Comte) De Sade was born at Paris, June 2, 1740, and died in the hospital of Charenton, December 2, 1814.. . .
Sprung from a stock which was most pure and honourable, reared and educated with the greatest care and simplicity, this mental monster burst forth suddenly, as it were without apparent cause, and became at once the most depraved libertine, the crudest debauchee, the lewdest writer, and the most persistent propagator of immorality the world ever saw.
The list of authors who have had their weak moments is not small.. . . . but as a rule erotic composition was with them the exception, the delirium of the moment, soon to be forgotten and expiated by nobler pursuits; whereas it was the occupation, the all-absorbing labor of Sade's whole life. From his school days to the hour of his death, at the age of 75 years, he continued practicing (when he could), and teaching continually the most abominable licentiousness; to his dominant passion he sacrificed everything-family, fortune, position, friends, liberty, and died in prison, still laboring at his infamous writings, and perverting everyone who approached him. No life of idleness was his; numerous as are the works which have been printed, he left a great quantity of MSS which have never seen the light."
It is small wonder indeed that Krafft-Ebing coined the term Sadism for what Rattray Taylor calls "the most repulsive of all sexual perversions," the compulsive desire to inflict pain, torture, and even death upon a sex object for the gratification of erotic lust.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Flagellation at Fashionable Girls' Schools
"Oh! the unspeakable agony of that first murderous lash! Legions of scorpions fastened on my flesh and dug their fangs into my vitals. Vainly I hung back and screwed my front against the block, the rear would not recede; I could only diminish its width by muscular contraction. Whir-r Whisp! Whir-r Whisp! Nature cannot endure the pain..... a few strokes of which would probably have killed or maddened."
-From the Romance of Chastisement, Hotten, There can be little doubt that the tremendous popularity of flagellation among British men and women in the
18th and 19th Centuries was due largely to the sadistic schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, foster parents, and others with wards or apprentices in their care. Flogging of youngsters, as has been noted before, was almost a British institution. And although the continued beatings and whipping meted out by those in authority were ostensibly for the purpose of instilling discipline and respect, such lofty goals were more often than not forgotten in the maelstrom of lust which enveloped the participants.
In Sex in History, G. Rattray Taylor speaks of this taste for flagellation acquired from schooldays. And while he dwells on the male side of the picture from the standpoint of the practice in boys' schools, we will soon see a vivid example of the situation as it was carried out at fashionable girls' academies with overtly sadistic lesbian overtones. "The extent," Taylor writes, "to which aggressive and destructive impulses were fused with sexual impulses-and often with homosexual impulses-during this period is displayed still more clearly by the extensive development of flagellation, both of passive and active type. Otway had already introduced a masochistic scene in Venice Preserved as early as the Restoration, and in Shadewell's The Virtuoso, a character demands to be flagellated, saying that he acquired the taste at Westminster School; the names of Flagellatory headmasters are numerous: from.. . . . Dr. Busby of Westminster, Dr. Bowyer of
Christ's Hospital and Dr. Gill of St. Paul's in the 17th to Drs. Drury and Vaughan of Harros, an Drs. Keate, May and Edgeworth of Eton in the 18th and 19th."
At many of the more exclusive boarding schools for girls, as well as many of the poorer ones, sadomasochistic lesbian relationships were encouraged by the perverted instructresses and house-mothers, under the not-so-veiled guise of deserved punishment.
The renowned 18th Century English poet William Shenstone gained literary fame for his verse, The School mistress, in which he gives sensual mention to the practices at girls' schools:
Who, brandishing the rod, doth straight begin to loose her pants-she trembles with affrightAdown they drop, appears the dainty skin, Fair as the furry coat of finest ermine. Flogging of both boys and girls by parents or teachers is mentioned prominently by the Dutch scholar Erasmus, by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Specimens of Table Talk, by essayist Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia and Recollections of Chirst's Hospital. America's Edgar Allan Poe held that: "Children are never too tender to be whipped; like tough beef-steaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become." And in Lord Byron's Don Juan, he beseeches:
"Oh ye! who teach the ingenuous youth of nations, Holland, France, England, Germany or Spain, I pray ye flog them upon all occasions, It mends their morals, never mind the pain.. . "
Time and again these famous men of letters emphasize poetic sensuality, the pleasures of pain, the sexual manifestation of sadomasochism, nakedness of the sex organs and secondary erotogenic areas, contact with these areas, and the giving and receiving of pain co-mingled with lust. In enumerating these instances of fascination bordering on obsession with school flagellation by so many prominent writers, Pisanus Fraxi includes a letter written in 1859, by a person whom he leads us to believe may have been one of those celebrated authors:
"In my boyish days it was customary in preparatory schools to have boys and girls together under a woman, and where the rod was used on all occasions with the utmost severity. We used to be birched in the presence of each other, the girls across the knee, or held under the arm, the boys on the back of a maid servant. That later would often to come to our rooms, and play the schoolmistress, so did most of the girls.
"I have a vivid recollection of some extraordinary scenes in this line which have given me the perfect conviction of numerous women possessing the taste in question. In the school mentioned above, the female who always assisted the mistress was evidently most fond of seeing the operation, though she liked us all, and was herself a great favorite with the boys, but it was always with a giggle and a joke that she told several boys almost every morning that they were not to get up until Missus had "paid them a visit," or after seeing them in bed telling them they were to keep awake until Missus should have had "a little conversation with them," that moreover she might be expected every moment with a couple of tremendous rods.
This girl put us up to a great deal, and I fear developed our puberty far too precociously; she had a very large breast, and she arranged her dress so that while being horsed we had our hands completely slipped into, and feeling her bubbies; and the rocking and plunging used repeatedly to bring on emission. Many of the boys used to try to get whipped merely to experience this sensation. Although forty years have elapsed since all this, yet the remembrance is as vivid as if it had occurred only yesterday."
Can there be any doubt that such a youth-mounted on a voluptuous woman's back, his hands exploring freely the fullness of her breasts beneath her clothing, his naked bottom being beaten, his sexuality thus excited gluteally, and experiencing orgasm as a result-would carry this dynamic experience with him through life and continue to associate it with all sex relations?
Nor should there by any doubt concerning the future sex proclivities of young girls brought up in the environment of a luxury boarding school like Dora Doveton describes in Hotten's The Romance of Chastisment;
Case History: Flogging of a Female Student and Her Reactions, C. 1870
At the point where Dora begins her narrative of the unusual flagellations in which she participated, and their effect upon her, the headmistress, Martinet, has just instructed another of the teachers to bring her "two No. 6 rods" and to unlace Dora, if necessary, in preparation;
"Renardeau (the French instructress) darted her hand beneath my clothes and reported that I wore no stays. Nor do I now; my waist is naturally small, and a little stiffening in the body of the dress suffices to keep my breasts in order, Steinkopf (German Teacher), who had resumed her place, and Armstrong, then laid hold of me, and despite my prayers and tears, while one held my hands above my head, the other opened my dress behind and stripped off skirt, petticoats and drawers; then with one shamless drag she furled up my shift in front and rear and pinnned it over my shoulders.
"The next moment I was forced upon my knees on the block, with four hands grasping my arms and pressing my neck down. The breeze from the skylight fanned my back, and I felt that the eyes of all present were riveted on my naked person. Could it be I that was subjected to such indignity? Though my arms were squeezed I felt it not, all my sensation seemed to have retreated to another quarter. My skin is so tender that even when bathing I tremble to expose it, and here was I fixed as in a vise, with nothing intervening between that thin skin and the murderous implements behind me.
"A pause, it seemed to me an hour long, ensued, till my spine grew cold as ice twixt fear and waiting. Something had rattled on the floor, but the sound had died away, and still the expected blow came not. I looked round with half a hope. Martinet was leisurely re-adjusting a bracelet on her road arm, her eyes the while devouring my form with a wild impassioned gaze like a lover's. Can she be relenting? Alas! the brows contract the grasps of the holders tighten on my arms. Whir-r-r Whisp! "Yah! Yeous! Yeoiks!" Oh! the unspeakable agony of that first murderous lash! Legions of scorpions fastened on my flesh and dug their fangs into my vitals. Vainly I hung back and screwed my front against the block, the rear would not recede.
"I could only diminish its width by muscular contraction. Whir-r Whisp! Whir-r Whisp! Nature cannot endure the pain! I struggle to my feet, receiving a fifth rasper in the act, and my shrieks rival the loudest howls of Patty (who had just before been chastised). This was a "whipping proper," a few strokes more of which would probably have killed or maddened.
"The two strong women soon resumed their clutch and dragged me to my bearings on the whipping stool-less reluctantly-for already the charms had worked; the mere act of rising seemed to have brought relief, and a change next to miraculous took place in all my thoughts and feelings. I noted the impressions shortly after they occurred, and shall endeavor to describe them.
"Fear and shame were both gone; it was as though I was surrendering my person to the embraces of a man whom I so loved I would anticipate his wildest desires. But no man was in my thoughts; Martinet was the object of my adoration, and I felt through the rod that I shared her passions. The rapport, as the magnetizers have it, was so strong that I could divine her thoughts; had she wished me to turn my person full front ot her stripes, I should have fought and struggled to obey her. Then too, there was a thrill in a certain part, I knew magnetically, of both our persons, which every fresh lash kept on increasing.
The added pang unlocked new floods of bliss, till it was impossible to tell in my case whether the ecstasy was most of pain or pleasure. When the rods were changed, I continued to jump and shout, for she liked that, but believe me or not-I saw my nakedness with her eyes, and exulted in the lascivious joy that whipping me afforded her. This state would have continued as long as my strength, for I had no power to quit the spot till my other self willed it.
"The punishment over, I broke from the assistants, and from Atkinson, who, crinoline on arm, would have acted as lady's maid, and rushed toward Martinet, intending, I believe to throw myself at her feet, when my course was forcibly arrested by Helen (her bed-fellow). With a whispered, "Steady!" she unpinned my shift, and directed my attention to the last act in this day's drama, which was now commencing."
Dora is still confused, however, about her luxurious yearning sensation toward Martinet, her executioner. And the following morning, a conversation takes place between Dora and Martinet's friend, Helen:
"Oh, Helen, it was dreadful!" exclaims Dora.
"Dreadful at first it always is, but was it so throughout?" answers Helen.
"No. I can't explain' there was a change, and it was certainly ecstasy at last. How can that be?"
Helen then offered the same hints about magnetism which I gave you in the beginning of my letter. She asked me when the change took place.
"Directly after I was pulled down again."
"Exactly so-when you were struggling to rise you had one knee up, the other down, and Martinet seized the moment to give the cut up. The rod was so large probably only a single twig got in. One will do, or even a smart cut in the immediate neighborhood. Martinet won't give these cuts to all; there's a lot of the girls she prefers whipping against their wills, unless she foresees any danger of their making a row about it out of school; then she whips in and enslaves them"
But why does she select some more than others?"
"I can't say; imagine, I suppose, I was the first girl she whipped in this house. It was long ago, when I was not half the size I am now; so she mounted me on her lap and gave it to me the very first cut, forcing my legs open. Ever since, though I don't love, I admire her so that I am always ready to take my own share for the privilege of seeing her noble style of birching. How much of her own passions she imparted to you, you best know; but few get it so tight home as the Hon. Miss de Vere."
This "cut up" is illustrated in the authoress' own words by a description of the punishment of Miss de Vere, a big mean girl who had to be tied down on the bed and stripped stark naked:
"After some thirty such stripes as only she could give, had exhausted her strength, Martinet dropped the stump of the third rod, passed a scented handkerchief over her face and neck, and gloated on the mangled spectacle before her. And now came the strangest of all that day's strange proceedings.
"When Martinet had recovered her wind, Renardeau, withdrawing it from somewhere beneath her dress, presented her principal with a weapon in ludicrous contrast with its gigantic predecessors. This consisted of a tiny switch, only a few inches in length, formed apparently of twisted wire. With this between her finger and thumb, Martinet took her stand by the bedside about half way up, and stooping over the broad end, looked expressively at us. Helen from experience, I by tuition, guessing her design, sprang wide bearing each a leg with her,-when Martinet by a dexterous turn of her wrist applied the minute lash between them.
"The blow, though a light one, was followed by a cry so wild and startling, my overwrought senses could stand no more. Her Majesty gave her two flicks more in the same place, and then bade them cut her loose.. .
"Miss de Vere flung herself at her Majesty's feet, kissed her hand, pressed it to her breast, and I declare to you she implored her pardon with tears, calling her Mistress-like a little child, and promising thenceforth to do only Martinet's will and pleasure."
Dora then describes the dress most suitable for application of the birch, and how it is arranged:
Buckram and farthingale were out, and in revenge the rising generation looked like dolls and scare wore anything but shift and gown. Stays there were none, the waist served up the breasts as on a dish, and clasped behind between the shoulder blades, the skirts adhering to the shape below. This led to shocking scenes in girls' schools, where, as I said before it was customary to whip those of quite a marriageable age. To insure a thorough strip, little more was needed than to take down the web-drawers, which hooked in front and came up breast high to keep the vitals warm. This was seldom done without more or less resistance, and when done the skirts were furled to the armpits front and rear, and fastened round the throat The nudity of the bath would have been decent compared to these fights and the sexual exposure they involved. Any system which held young girls and women in such low esteem that they were easily made the pawns of perverted adults under whose guardianship they were helpless but to obey, quite naturally spawned even more depraved outrages. One such corrupt practice, and there were many others like it, was exposed in Lock'es Guardian of Female Innocence, published in London in 1792:
Case History: The Croesus of Broad Street
An old debilitated Croesus of Broad Street, whose riches are as extraordinary as his present propensity, has for some years past supported a kind of sensual traffic with the mistresses of two Boarding Schools; one near Hackney, and the other in the neighborhood of Stratford, to whom he pays large weekly sums, merely for the enjoyment of visual prospects, which, among the generality of mankind, one would imagine rather disgusting than gratifying.
To each of these accommodating matrons he pays his visits in regular rotation, and the indulgence is carried on as follows: All the faults of the preceding three or four days are kept an exact account of, and that upon which Croesus makes his visit is always set aside for general punishment. He is fixed in an adjoining closet, and the infant convicts are called in, one by one, stretched upon a long low table, made for the purpose, and flogged upon their bare posteriors, in proportion to their several transgressions. From the position in which they lie, they cannot possibly know of being observed by any other than the mistress; and Croesus, who, upon every fresh occasion steals from his lurking hold, with the assistance of a pocket glass, examines the progressive effects of the several flagellations; towards the end of the scene, and which seems to be the winding up and summum bonum of his passion, he assumes the office of executioner himself.. .
The system of apprentices, which still forms an integral part of the domestic and retail economy of both Europe and Britain, provided another ready-made outlet for those in positions of authority to take out thier sadistic leanings on helpless youngsters.
Children from the ages of ten to eighteen were often employed in households and small shops, where they lived in and were at the absolute mercy of their employers. Because of their tender age, it was just as much the custom to subject them to brutal floggings and other inhuman punishments, as it was to chastise school children or wards in this manner. And since a great number of the apprentices were orphans, who could be sent to the reformatory on the slightest complaint of their employer, they were in the position of having no one, not even a parent, to look out for their welfare.
Case History: Mrs. Borwrigg.
The fact that a young apprentice girl died as a result of severe beatings and other mistreatment at the hands of her warder-employer, was not a particularly unusual occurrence in London during the Age of Reason. What made the case of Mrs. Brownrigg unique was that she was given the death penalty and executed at Tyburn in 1767.
The severe treatment of apprentices was so very general in that day that a much publicized defense of both the institution and Mrs. Browrigg was published right after her trial, and received wide attention and acclaim throughout England. Titled Mrs. Brownrigg's case fairly considered, it made the following points:
The death of Mary Clifford, following on her punishment, has nothing in it which should deter Parents, Guardians, Masters and Mistresses, Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses, from using all the modes of correction, which the good old customs of this country allow, and by which the peace and order of this community are chiefly maintained.
First-it is evident to any man of sense that Mrs. Brownrigg was the victim of her own imprudence. She might have whipped her apprentices all she did, and even more, and attracted no public notice whatever, if she had only fed them well, ledged them commodiously, treated them with general kindness, when not correcting them, and, before all, paying due and proper attention to the healing of their sores and their general health.
Her neglect of their bodies after whipping is positively surprising. If not from humanity, yet even for the gratification of her own taste, one would imagine that she would prefer to have clean and fresh skin to flog rather than corrupt and ulcerated flesh; it is quite inexcusable. In all well ordered Seminaries the Bottoms are dressed as regularly and neatly as the pupils. When the Rogue has been flayed at the Cart's butt, or the soldier scarified at the triangle, he receives the best medical assistance to promote his recovery.
A good Master or Mistress will have rags and ointment ready as Rods, and although it may be sometimes necessary to return to a Back or Backside, before the marks of a former flogging have disappeared (else a sore bottom would be an excuse for any fault), yet the repeated punishment should always be followed by redoubled care. The evidence of the surgeon of the hospital, to which Mary Cliffornd was conveyed, was to the effect that the wounds she had received at the whippings, for want of proper care, occasioned her death.
There is no reason to believe but that, if she had been humanly and skillfully attended to after her six whippings, she would have been as well as ever; thought, no doubt, six successive whippings in one day are sharp practice; yet on this point we can form no opinion till we know the amount of each whipping, and the separate provocations; the whole may have been three dozen lashes, and we remember, in our school-experience, seeing a lad, now an Alderman of this City, horsed ten different times till he confessed that he told a lie; he perhaps owes it to those ten successive whippings that he has been so honest a man ever since; but he was three days in the hands of the Doctors, and looked very rueful, when he returned to school. Mary Jones, another prentice girl, seems to have been none the worse for her punishments, the mode of which was both convenient and ingenious and will certainly be adopted in many households, when they come to hear of it. Two chairs were laid down on the kitchen floor in such a manner that one supported die other; the girls was then fastened tight on their backs, either naked or with her clothes over her head, and received her allowance.
But this foolish woman, in addition to the plentiful flogging, shut them up in horrid cellars, starved them, beat them with sticks and other hard substances over the head, and allowed the wounds on their heads and bodies to grow and putrefy. For this she was properly hung and her family disgraced, but this must not be confounded with the honest satisfaction with which the Master, the Schoolmaster, and even the Parent wields the Rod or the Whip over the posteriors of the wrong-doer, and imprints his moral lessons in fair red characters on the person of the offender.
Providence has evidently implanted this instinct in the human breast to counteract the excessive fondness of parental affection, and the torpid carelessness which would leave the young people under our care to grow up in idleness, ignorance and vice. The road has the quality applied elsewhere by our immortal bard-"It blesses him that gives hand him that takes."
I now come to my second Proposition, viz. that the sold event of the death of Mary Clifford should not in any degree limit the Quantum of castigation to be administered in our establishments and in our homes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Royal Sadists of Europe
A young honeymooning couple out for a stroll along the Seine are accosted by two government agents. At the point of a gun, the beautiful young blonde bride is stripped to the waist while one of the agents measures her breasts. The raging groom is tied up, and the girl is whisked off to the palace, where she is made to disrobe completely and lie across the velvet covers of a sumptuous bed.
The door springs open. A short, stocky young man dashed over to the bed like a raving maniac, tossing his clothes in the air wildly. He literally pounces on top of the girl. He devours her with kisses, and copulates like a vigorous bull with an overdose of Spanish Fly. It is only later, when he looks more closely at the young girl to remark that his men have done a good job in finding just what he asked for-a beautiful young blonde with large breasts-that she realizes she has been raped by the Emperor himself!
The ten-year-old Prince giggles like an idiot as his servants obediently pull down the drawers of the little five-to-ten-year old girls they have gathered from a nearby village, and proceed to beat their childish bottoms raw with long leather whips. Later in the evening, the Prince will amuse himself by sleeping in the stable next to a big stallion. And in the morning, he will laugh like an idiot. as he cuts off the penis and testicles of the screaming horse and plunges swords through its convulsing body.
At the afternoon tea party in the royal palace, the Queen orders her female guests, most of them the wives of princes and noblemen, to strip completely naked while two big muscular women come in and almost flog them to a bloody death with a cat-o-nine-tails. When the Queen grows tired of these tea parties, she orders the police and army to kill 50,000 of her subjects in what was to one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of mankind-just because they didn't go to the same church that she did.
Today, it would be unthinkable that a ruler of any civilized nation could be so debauched as to try anything like the above-using the power of office to rape, commit acts of the most perverted and flagrant sadism and pedophilia, and murder thousands of citizens simply because they are of a different religious belief.
Yet it was only in the last century that the Emperor Napoleon of France would often have his agents abduct a pretty girl for him to assault like a madman in his private chambers!
And it was at the royal court of the most pious country in all of Europe that Spain's ten-year-old imbecile Prince Don Carlos, Philip II's some used to clap his hands and giggle insanely while the servants brought in little girls and beat them, and then commit bestial acts with the horses in the royal stable. But the romps of Napoleon and the insanely sadistic playtime Pranks of young Don Carlos, pale miserably beside the most vicious and perverted ruler that Europe had seen since Nero and Messalina:
Case History: Catherine De Medici (1519-1589).
France's reputation for sexual promiscuity goes back far beyond the days when syphilis was known throughout Europe and the Mediterranean countries as Morbus Gallicus, "the French Disease." But while the French were proud of their reputation for sexual prowess, they were never ones to admit to homosexuality. And when sadistic lesbianism became the rampant theme of the Royal Court in the 16th Century, they promptly name it "The Italian Perversion"-and put the blame right where it belonged, on Queen Catherine, nee De Medici, who had been brought from Italy as the bride of Henry II. It was one of the usual political marriages of covenience so common in monarchist Europe, and the lovely little 14 year-old Florentine bride had all the right credentials. She was the well-built and attractive daughter of one of Italy's most illustrious ruling royal families; she had been raised by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, well schooled in the fine arts, and with a flair like DeSade's for architecture.
In those early days, before Henry was to mount the throne, few people paid much attention to "that cute little Italian teenager" as she busied herself around the palace. After all, another uncle had been Pope Leo X, and a girl from both a noble and religious lineage like that just couldn't help but be all good and sweet.
Some 50,000 murders and hundreds of lesbian flagellation orgies later, the people of France had learned just how wrong they were.
Historian Rattray Taylor calls her "one of the craftiest sadists of modern history," adding that "it would be vain to try to cleanse her memory from the deeds of blood for which she was responsible. In mitigation, it may perhaps be remarked that it was a thwarted sex life that turned her into the paths of cruelty."
The Encyclopedia Britannica states simply that she used "lies, tricks, and assassination, and in her passion for power she spent extravagantly and encouraged immorality."
Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathis Sexualis, compares Catherine de Medici with Messalina, and states that "her greatest pleasure was to have ladies of her court whipped before her eyes, etc." Imagine, if you can, this beautiful young Queen of France-the niece of two Popes; the mother of three future Kings of France (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III), one King of Poland, a Queen of Spain, and a husband of Mary Queen of Scots-having an afternoon tea party for the royal ladies of the court at the sumptuous Louvre Palace:
The lovely young ladies in their flowing skirts and d�collet� bodices bow servilely before the smirking Queen Catherine as they arrive. She gazes rapturously down the bulging cleavage of each young woman's breasts, her heart pumping faster as she snaps a little whip symbolically against the palm of her hand.
The noble ladies are nervous and apprehensive as they chat animatedly with their Queen. They had been terribly afraid to come to the party. Their husbands had been afraid for them. But there had been no choice. The other alternative, to refuse an invitation of the Queen, could mean exile or death.
And then Catherine spots the young fianc� of a distantly related Prince, one too far removed from the line of royal succession to cause trouble, and beckons her forward. The luscious young blonde maiden stands trembling before the Queen, who suddenly grabs the bodice of her clothing and rips it away from her voluptuous young breasts. Catherine beckons to her two big female maid-servants, and the strip the girl's skirt and petticoats from her.
The other guests are terror-stricken, backing away toward the doors, which are guarded by other viragos just as menacing as those who hold down the young woman. The queen laughs menacingly as she struts around the naked girl, eyeing jealously the long shapely thighs, the tensed roundness of her firm buttocks, the shaky quiver of the full youthful breasts, the nipples excited from fear now, rather than erotic emotion.
Two long rods are handed to the viragos. The nude young Prince's fianc� is laid face down on a soft pallet. They pull her legs wide apart, exposing her femaleness. The other women join the helpless victim in screaming and begging the sadistically smiling Catherine for mercy. But she will not listen to their soul-felt and agonized pleas. And then the whole room becomes one big bedlam of yelling, screaming, cursing, running females, as a square of viragos, each with a long birch rod, comes marching in. The clothing is ripped away from the bodies of the dozen or so guests, exposing their sex. Some fall to the floor to receive the stinging blows on their thighs, buttocks and breasts. Others try unsuccessfully to elude the big women, only to be whacked and kicked on the run, and eventually wind up cornered, where they are beaten all the more severely.
And Catherine, sipping from a goblet of wine as she surveys the mass mayhem from her throne, experiences the ultimate in erotic pleasure. Her eyes dash from one bruised body to another, and then settle on the sobbing maiden lying across the pallet in front of her, focusing sharply on the more gentle probing of the long birch rod as it is handled dexterously in the job of ridding her of her maidenhead.
The Queen sighs with a feeling of lassitudinous satisfaction over the gratification achieved by her psychic orgasms. Then she beckons to one of the big women to bring the Prince's blistered fianc�e to her private chamber where she may administer unguents, kisses and more personal attention to her bruises.
Had this sadistic court lesbianism been the limit of Catherine de Medici's abominable excesses with other human beings, she might have gone down in history merely as one who overindulged her perversions on occasion. But not only did her lust for power and hatred of Protestants drive her to order the brutal slaughter of 50,000 Huguenots in the bloody St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, but the bad seed was passed through her fruitful womb to other generations.
"Her favorite son, France's Henry III," Taylor writes, "was a chaser of petticoats who neglected the business of government for his mistresses, until the age of twenty-three, when underwent a curious sexual change. His minions, the friends of his bosom, made him a laughingstock in the eyes of the world. One of Catherine's daughters, Margot, who married Henry IV of France was a nymphomaniac."
But it remained for Catherine's step-grandson by the daughter who had married Philip II of Spain, to become the most infamous and precocious roay degenerate of all Europe-Prince Don Carlos.
Case History: Prince Don Carlos
It was late at night in the big barracks-like room of the Royal Palace in Madrid where the young serving girls slept. Candles illuminated the drab chamber as the attractive and full-figured girls undressed freely, talking and laughing among themselves during the few free hours they had.
One big girl was chasing two naked teenagers in and out between the beds. Another girl laughed as she played with the mammoth breasts of the girl they had nicknamed "The Cow." Two others huddled in the corner, amusing themselves as they talked about their latest escapades with two of the footmen. And then suddenly, the door burst open. The frolicking and merry-making stopped abruptly. Not a sound could be heard. Each girl drew back in abject horror, gasping for a sheet or quilt to conceal her nakedness.
Standing in the doorway, his crippled leg cocked at an odd angle, saliva drooling down his cleft chin, a crazed look in the huge eyes that peered through the disarray of hair hanging over his face, a razor-sharp dagger glistening as he held it tightly in his hand-was nine year-old Prince Don Carlos, the son of King Phillip II.
The Prince limped forward. One of the girls screamed. Another fainted. One of the older maids tried to shield her teenage sister, but the Prince's crazed eyes had already picked out the budding young nymphet and he advanced on the pair. He poised the knife directly in front of the older girl's breasts and ripped away the sheet. He jabbed at the soft flesh. He giggled insanely at the little driblets of blood that dripped over the nipple and spatted on her thigh as she tried to push him away with her leg.
The teenage sister bolted away and ran, but she tripped over a cot and went sprawling to the stone floor. Don Carlos leaned over her trembling and bruised, prostrate form, and started to carve his initials in her quivering buttocks.. .
It was antics like this that forced his parents to try to keep him away from all women. But a strange alliance, born either of pity or some kind of abnormal sexual attraction, developed between the crazed and crippled Don Carlos and his stepmother-the Queen, Catherine de Medici's daughter. Whenever the Prince's father or grandfather caught him trying to carve up the pretty serving girls or biting their bare breasts, he tried to have him confined. But the Queen's boudoir was always open to him. And the stories around the castle were that he slept naked with his stepmother many times, and had also been found secreted in bed with her during the daytime, in what could only be called "very unusual circumstances". But whatever incestuous and bizarre perversions may have been going on between Don Carlos and the Queen, were nothing compared to his other activities. Servants loyal to his stepmother aided in catering to such whims of the young Prince as rounding up groups of five-to-ten-year-old girls for a whipping and spanking party.
The deranged Don Carlos would sit astride his 16th Century version of a teeter-totter and slash at the air wildly with his dagger, screaming and laughing crazily, as the lovely female children were undressed and tied up. His delirious cries easily drowned out their terrified shrieks of anguish and pain, when the servants brought out long whips and blistered their little bottoms and thighs.
All Madrid became terrified. No parents would allow their young girls outside the house for fear that the palace servants or guards would abduct them for Don Carlo's sadistically insane amusement. The word spread to other lands, and many Kingdoms tried to break off social relations with Madrid for fear Philip would try to negotiate a future marriage between the idiot Don Carlos and a daughter of foreign royalty.
And back at Spain's Royal Pake, the doctors discovered that the maturing young Prince was completely impotent with girls in attempts at natural copulation. He preferred instead, it appears, acts of bestiality with mares and stallions alike. He would lock himself in the stables all night long, sleeping and amusing himself with the horses. When morning came, Don Carlos might tie up one or two of the animals and run his sword through their bellies, chop off their sex organs, or hack away at their legs or heads.
The early death of Don Carlos saved Spain from being ruled by a mental and physical monstrosity, the likes of which no kingdom had ever seen. All of European royalty breathed a deep sigh of relief.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Bluebeard
The black-robed Priests of the Devil walked down the row of hung virgins and children who were fettered helpless and naked, their bodies lashed.
One by one, amid blood-curdling screams and pitiful wails, the men drove razor-sharp knives into their chaste loins, they tossed the severed sexual parts into a cauldron, boiling with this witches' brew. Over eight-hundred perished this way before the carnage was brought to a close..
Six ladies in masquerade costumes and four men with false beards entered the room where the lovely 17-year-old girl in elegant party dress bowed servilely before them. They undressed her slowly, pricking her tender body with pins and spanking her brutally with a riding whip as each new section of flesh was laid bare. Then she was tied to a ladder and assaulted both sexually and with stinging nettles, rods, whips and a leather scourge tipped with fine steel points.
The moaning young women suddenly fell to the floor of the ornate chapel and rolled around on the carpets as in a mad trance.
". . .Her eyes suddenly convulsed in a horrible squint, clucked like a hen, then, fallen dumb, gaped with wide-open jaws, the tongue retracted till its tip touched the palate high up, another, her face puffed and livid, pupils, dilated, rolled back her head on her shoulders, then stiffened in a sudden spasm and tore at her bosom with her nails; another, grimacing horribly, shot out a white tongue which she could not draw in again, from a bleeding mouth guarded by a portcullis of re teeth.. . "
And all the time, the black-robed High Priest of the Devil Worshipers chanted in a dirge like rhythm the Black Mass:
"Blessed be the rebels against God! Blessed by our father Cain! Blessed be Judas, Chief of the Apostles! Blessed be their great brother, the Angel of Eternal Darkness. Do what thou wilt. This is the one and only law!"
The most heinous sacrilege of Western man, the brutal, fiendish, bizarre and foully sadomasochistic service of the Black Mass, originated almost 550 years ago in the dungeons of three French castks at Tiffauges, Machecoul and Champtoce.
The ceremony is still practiced today in many places by super-secret societies of perverts and sadists who, not content to be mere pagans, heathens or blaspheming atheists, have chosen to worship the very Devil himself as the greatest and most powerful of deities.
Basing their cult on the exact opposite of conventional Judaeo-Chirstian doctrines, the Devil Worshipers claim to believe that Satan was the elder son of God who was unjustly throw out of heaven. And they give their total allegiance thereby to the Devil, this deity who allows free reign to all the sadistic and sensual pleasures. The Devil then, or whatever comparable form he takes in the various faiths that accept him as evil incarnate is veritably God Almighty to the devotees of the monstrous Black Mass.
The most sacred rituals of Christian worship are travestied in the most abominably obscene manner possible. With Satan as their God, the Devil Worshippers heap reverence and placations upon him by performing every imaginable outrage and blasphemy against the accepted practices and beliefs of the Christian and Jewish faiths. The Ten Commandments are twisted right around to read: Thou Shalt kill, thou SHALT commit adultery, thou Shalt steal.. .
Vivisection of young virgins for the pure pleasure of rape and lust murder, bathing in vats of blood drawn from beautiful young children, feasting on the barbecued corpses of babies and toddlers-these were the original documented divertissements of the Devil Worshipers. Today this universally outlawed sect is limited oft times to mere symbolic worship of evil. But every few years in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, California-the police uncover murders and other outrages traceable to the clandestine rites of a new cult of Satanists.
The most popular present-day offshoots of this overtly antimoral cult are the S-M Clubs, cliques of sado-maso-chists who get together for the mutual enjoyment of the pleasures of pain and sex, but without any attachment to religious dogma, rites, or chapel ceremonies and vestments.
The general theme of the Devil Worshipers was apparent in many of the non-religious flagellant groups of 19th Century England too. And they did the current S-M Clubs one better in they usually kidnapped or enticed their victims, while the present S-M practices are entirely voluntary for all concerned.
The true father of the Black Mass, the "Pope" of the Devil Worshipers, the man who originated the most grisly and depraved rites in the history of mankind, was undoubtedly a hundred times more fiendish and demented than the Marquis de Sade. Like the "Crazy Marquis" though, he came of noble lineage, was a multi-millionaire, and was considered by many to be a political and military hero.
Case History: Marshal Gilles De Rais (1440-1440), The Bluebeard of France
Marshal of France, Baron of Rais, the richest person in the entire country with a personal fortune of over a hundred million gold francs, personal bodyguard to Joan of Arc and commander of her forces in the victories at
Orleans, Jargeau and Patay, director of the coronation of King Charles VII at Reims, a munificent patron of the arts-all these and more was Gilles de Rais.
Lust murderer of over eight-hundred men, women and children, terrorizer of Brittany with hundreds of kidnappings and the desecration of churches, chapels and cathedrals, sodomizer of scores of young boys, eater of roasted human babies and the boiled sex organs of both animals and young girls, debaucher of a hundred or more virgins aged three to twenty-three, whom he raped and tortured to death to enjoy sexual sadism to the utmost nadir of depravity, worshiper of the Devil and avowed high priest of every blasphemy the human mind can devise against both God and man-these too were Gilles de Rais.
The Jekyll-Hyde character of this most monstrous of all sinners and saints combined, was not an on-again-off-again thing. He did not torture and kill innocent children one day and win battles for the glory of God and country the next. Although he was alleged by one historian to have been taught the doctrine of "might makes right" at the age of seventeen by a dissolute grandfather, the only official records of his gross misdeeds against mankind in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, concern the last eight years of his tormented life, from 1432 to 1440. Some romanticists claim that de Rais was so de voted to his beloved Joan of Arc that he went completely out of his mind following her death in 1431, and began to seek solace with practitioners of alchemy and the black arts. And it was indeed during this period that the entire countryside of Brittany lived in abject horror of his vile outrages.
Hundreds of young shepherd girls and boys were kidnapped and never seen again, scores of other youngsters were taken from their homes by force; chapels, cathedrals and churches were ransacked of their sacred tabernacles, altars and other furnishings. De Rais' private army brought the human sacrifices and religious trappings to the dungeons of his three castles, principally the one at Tiffauges.
There, the rites of the High Black Mass were performed by "Pope" de Rais and his equally perverted, sadistic assistants. Prompted by the writings of the Roman Historian Suetonius, who described in detail the penchant of the degenerate Caesars for having youths and virgin maidens slaughtered and vivisected, or eaten alive before their eyes, De Rais seemed determined to do them one better!
The capacity for the human body to endure the crudest tortures utterly obsessed him, and he took delight in personally torturing to death hundreds of beautiful young children, virgins, and assorted adults, in the most diabolical ways imaginable.
Victims' legs were pressed between sets of two heavy planks tied together. Wedges were then driven between the two boards on each side of the screaming sufferer's limbs, thus breaking the bones into bloody and jagged tatters.
Many of the male prisoners were laid on their backs across a trestle, their hands and feet fettered to iron rings in the floor. Their mouths were forced open by driving a steel peg between the roof and the jaw. And then water was poured down their throats until they drowned.
Beautiful young virgins were raped repeatedly by De Rais and his assistants, then tied down to a wheel or rack to have every bone in their bodies broken with sledgehammers. Others were quartered-each wrist and each ankle tied in separate directions.
Any member of the Marshal's private army who complained about pay or working conditions had a circle burned into his brow with a red-hot iron, which was then applied to his lips and stuck through his tongue.
But these were only the appetizers for the solemn depravity of the High Black Mass. Using the Authentic robes of priests and bishops, plus a unique chapel furnished with the stolen fixtures from a dozen churches and cathedrals, De Rais and his followers concocted witches' brews of human and animal sex organs and offal, and offered the bleeding corpses of their infant and virgin victims are sacrifices to the Devil himself.
Human and animal blood was mixed together in huge vats, to be bathed in and consumed along with the boiled genitals and excrement, in mockery of the break and wine of the Christian Mass. Bulls and stallions were connected with screaming young virgins tied down spread-eagled over stone pallets. Infants were roasted, barbecued, boiled, or eaten raw, their skulls and bones tossed into deep pits. Young boys were tied down over wooden horses and sodomized day and night until they died of blood loss, pain or starvation.
Little girls were raped to death, and the heads of the more beautiful ones sliced off and preserved for use as altar decorations in the unholy Shrine of the Devil.. .
Official records in the Bibliotheque Nationale show that the ecclesiastical and civil courts of relatively shockproof France were so outraged at the nature of De Rais' unspeakable crimes that over half of the charges against him were dropped for the sake of propriety. He was indicted for only 140 brutal rape-murder-mutilation-tortures. And the court ordered that the crucifix over the head of the judges be veiled during the entire trial. Krafft-Ebing, who studies the records of de Rais' monstrosities quite diligently, stated that over eight-hundred children alone suffered mutilation-murder at his hands.The monster "confessed that in the commission of these acts he enjoyed inexpressible pleasure," Krafft-Ebing worte, "The bodies of the unfortunate children were burned, and only a number of heads of particularly beautiful children were preserved-as memorials."
When Gilles de Rais, Marshal of all France, Baron of Rais, coronator of the King, was hanged in 1440, a mob of thousands stormed the scaffold pleading that he be spared. But the executioners were unmoved. They had heard his own confession of every vile, filthy, perverted, and debased crime with which he was charged. They also heard him mutter with ironic incongruity as the noose tightened: "There is no sin so great that heaven in its eternal wisdom will not forgive it."
But they listened with deaf ears.
Case History: The London Society of Aristocratic Flagellants (1878-1879).
The Society of Aristocratic Flagellants were allegedly headed up by a retired colonel, and met irregularly in the Mayfair section of London during the latter half of the last century. An account of the organization, claiming authorship by the colonel himself, was reviewed by Fraxi shortly after it was written. The bizarre hetero-homosexual-sadistic aim of the group is summoned up in the opening of the papers:
The emotion of voluptuousness can only be excited by two causes: firstly, when we imagine that the object of our desire approaches our idea of beauty, or when we see this person experiencing the strongest possible sensations. No feeling is more vivid that that of pain, its shock is true and certain. It never misleads like the comedy of pleasure eternally played by women and seldom felt. He who can create upon a woman the most tumultuous impression, he who can best trouble and agitate the female organization to the utmost, will have succeeded in procuring for himself the highest dole of sensual pleasure. Like De Sade, the Society emphasized the moral humiliation as well as the physical torture and blood letting of its victims. And like de Rais, they claimed to have carried out their sadistic rites by kidnap or lure, as noted in Fraxi's review:
In order to carry out this diabolical idea, the Colonel rents a house in Mayfair and forms the Society of Aristocratic Glagellants which includes "at least half-a-dozen of the most beautiful and fashionable ladies of the day." So we see that the author considers that females are also pleased with a little occasional cruelty practiced upon one of their own sex.
Our blue-blooded viragos are tired of vulgar, consenting victims, who submit to torture for the sake of lucre, so the Spanker fiend decoys "a young lady known to most of them, Miss Julia Ponsonby, a lovely young blonde of seventeen, whose widowed mother being compelled to go abroad for a time, is seeking a suitable lady to whose charge she can trust her daughter during her absence " The suitable lady is merely a procuress to the Society, and Miss Julia soon finds herself a prisoner, in the house in Mayfair, the conservatory of which is fitted up as a lecture Hall, where is the midst of flowering plants fountains, and other luxurious surroundings, stands the apparatus, "something like a large pair of steps, only made of mahogany," to which the victims are attached while undergoing punishment. The Colonel appears on the scene, and after tantalizing Julia, who treats him with the scorn he deserves, begins by terrifically slapping her naked bottom, then takes other "dreadful liberties," and sends her to bed.
The next morning he awakes her, rod in hand, and despite her shame and terror, assists at her toilette, which he aids by sundry cuts with the birch. When half dressed, he forces her to walk up a ladder, holding open her own drawers, while strokes of the merciless birch enforce obedience. Her executioner makes her stand on her head against the wall, and then leaves her. She is now decked out in an elegant ball costume, and after being flogged with a ladies' riding whip on the bare shoulders, is presented to the eagerly expectant company of flagellants: six ladies in masks and dominoes, and four gentlemen with false beards.
The Colonel now expounds his ideas and theories, interspersed with blows, to which Julia has to submit, and he gives the whole secret of the delight of flagellation, much more fully explained than we have ever met with it before. She is now forced to submit to the indecent caresses of all the company, the little whip is put into requisition once more, and she is slowly undressed, being still tortured at every stage of her toilette. She is pricked with a pin, pinched, and made to recount several erotic experiences of her school-days. Miss Debrette one of the company, is now placed under the house and Julia is forced to flog the lady, who likes it exceedingly, although ill-treated until she "bleeds all over." More frightful indecencies, to prove that "the floggee as well as the flogger experiences voluptuous pleasure, "are perpetrated, and now begins what the colonel grimly calls "flagellation in earnest." Julia is tied up to the ladder with her back to the rungs.. .
Next there is a recitation, of Miss Debrette's experiences of flagellation. A male member of the company follows suit, and after their cynical and extraordinary confessions, Julia is tortured again, a bundle of stinging nettles being now used. Her position on the ladder denotes the manner in which this vile description is given. She is turned with her back to her pitiless audience, and after more tales of torture related by the Colonel, she undergoes fresh anguish from a kind of cowhide, until she almost faints.
They play leapfrog over her poor bruised back, and after that variety to their disgusting entertainment, we are treated to a story of a wife who was humiliated and brutalized on her wedding night. Now a leather scourge tipped with fine steel points is called into play while the victim is turned upside down on the ladder.
A general melee takes place, which is utterly impossible to describe; suffice it to say that each gentleman flagellant satisfies the lascivious feelings which all this cruelty is supposed to excite, of course at Julia's expense. She has again to suffer a fearful onslaught with a heavy riding-whip and a still greater torture than all-she is brutally ravished, with every addition of bitter humiliation and savage cruelty.
Ritualistic Black Mass ceremonies by Devil Worshiper cutis, as well as the relatively tame S&M Clubs, have been uncovered in our own 20th Century, both in Europe and the U. S.
Berlin of the 1930's under the Nazi regime was reputedly a headquarters for several Satanist groups headed by tremendously built, female dominator-priestesses of the Black Mass. And Joris Karl Huysmans has written of High Black Mass celebrations at an abandoned chapel set away back in the high-fenced private property of an estate near the Rue de Vaugirard, near the Paris slaughtering houses. Communion with the Devil, ceremonies of trance like babbling, writhing and crazed lust, were the highlights of this cult, according to his account.
In 1957, an elaborate torture chamber was discovered in the basement of a house in Germany's Bavarian Alps. Consisting of a lethal electric chair, deadly acid bath, racks, devices for shackling and torturing victims and cutting out their genitalia.
This aforementioned was the brainchild of a crazed electrician named Edgar Groth and his sultry brunette mistress, Rosina Reisinger, whom many believed to be a priestess of the Black Mass. Here in the United States, traces of the Devil Worshipers have cropped up in several large metropolitan areas, but no cult of any size has been completely uncovered. One High police source states that many unsolved disappearances, particularly in the cases of attractive teen-age girls last seen in the company of strangers or getting into cars with unknown persons, may have been instances of abduction connected with sacrificial Black Mass rites.
In the depression years of the early thirties, similar luring and kidnapping of young girls who were never heard from again nearly always meant a white slavery operation. But since such forced practices are almost unknown in today's unorganized prostitution, the number of these girls who have been lured away from high schools, colleges and shops since 1945, has led many to believe that they may have been offered up as virgin sacrifices at Satanist ceremonies.
In Washington, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has files on scores of girls from twelve years and age on up, who have been missing for five, ten, and even twenty years. All have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, yet no trace of them, either dead or alive has been found after years of police and private investigative manhunts.
Can they have fallen victim to the ghastly rapes, mutilations and murders of the practitioners of the fiendish Black Mass?
Can their beautiful young virgin bodies have been strung up naked in some Devil's chapel to be whipped, beaten and scourged by crazed and perverted Satanists? Many observers believe sincerely that such an explanation offers the only answer, and that their bodies have subsequently been burned, butchered, boiled, partly eaten, and then buried in places where they are not likely to be uncovered.
The new general interest in group sadomasochism, particularly spanking and flagellation, is of a much milder though equally perverted nature. The organized elements operate much along the same lines as wife-swapping clubs-coded newspaper advertisements, word-of-mouth contact, and highly-guarded introductory conversations at bars and restaurants where homosexuals and other sophisticates gather.
One very popular modus operandi for those forming an S-M Club is the insertion of an ad in the personal columns of a large newspaper. To the general public, the wording appears quite harmless:
Social Minded group forming. Parties and dances planned. Couples and singles invited. For information call Wanda at..... .
The first two words are capitalized with the code, S-M Interested parties are asked to call Wanda. This means that a new S-M Club is in need of active flagellants or sadists, or more specifically perhaps, female dominators like Wanda in Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs.
If the ad had requested people to call Mr. Severin, the situation would have been reversed. The need would have been for submissive partners, probably male, like the passive Severin in the Venus legend.
Since most of these clubs seldom let a situation get out of hand, careful that not participant is seriously injured or killed, they usually stay out of trouble with the police. In the swank and expensive, yet Bohemian atmosphere of Washington, D. C.'s "in" Georgetown section, where sophisticated homosexuality has flourished for years, much of the talk at the cozy and intimate little bars now revolves around flagellation and S-M arrangements. The restrooms abound with messages in neat script asking for a big bruiser to whip a young man with a wet towel, or spank him silly. And at least one ladies' room recently offered phone numbers alleged to be those of lesbian flagellants.
But the S-M atmosphere is by no means entirely homosexual. One gentleman, a frequent visitor from New York, told of his experience on a previous trip to Georgetown when he was in Washington.
Case History: The S-M Club
I had met this girl at one of the big government offices downtown where I had some business that day. I asked her for a date, and she said it was a deal if I took her to a little place in Georgetown she knew where the drinks were good and the people way out. Being somewhat of a swinger myself, I didn't need any more persuasion than that.
Nell was a tall and slim redhead with a figure like a high school cheer-leader. Her light sprinkling of freckles only added to her sweet, innocent look.
Did I say innocent? Wow! Innocent like La Dolce
Vita! We sat down at a long table in one of the joints up the street, where all the groups of drinkers huddle together like they're plotting a Communist takeover. We were immediately joined by a bunch of Nell's friends, and she blurts out to me in front of everybody: "Do you like to spank pretty little girls?"
I choked and my face turned red, but I tried to answer the question logically by replying that I used to spank my little sister when she was bad.
When two of the other girls leaned forward to ask eagerly what else I'd done with my little sister, I knew what kind of crowd I was in.
We drank several more martinis there and talked about spanking, whipping, getting tied down, and a bunch of other crazy things.
I felt ashamed of myself for being excited, but Nell and the other three girls-a chubby brunette and two 30 year-old-blondes with bodies out of this world-kept my interest up while the three guys didn't act like fags. I wasn't about to get with another switch party where the men play both ways. A half-hour later we were in the basement rec room of a Georgetown row house. One of the guys asked the girls if they wanted to draw straws but Nell was half loaded and volunteered to be first, if I took the active role.
We piled up a bunch of pillows on the floor. Perspiration was rolling down my face, and I noticed the same response from the others. It wasn't from exertion, it was just plain old mother lust that was taking over!
Nell lay face down with the pillows right under her pelvis. She told me to hurry while we removed her skirt, half-slip, panties, girdle, and stockings. She was really a sight that way-those long slim legs and the bare bottom.
I started to lay it on, kind of nervous at first, until both Nell and the others kept yelling at me, "Go! Go! Harder! Beat it out of her, man!"
My hand got redder than her buttocks did at first. But I kept laying it on. I got real squeamish when she started crying and begging me to stop. But one of the guys came around and held her feet down, while a girl went around front and stood on her hands in stocking-feet.
To my left, another guy pulled out his belt and dropped his trousers. His whole bottom was striped with half-healed marks. His girl friend grabbed the belt, whacked him across the face with it, and snarled like a tiger when he fell to the floor. The first time she cracked it across his rear, the old wounds opened up and started bleeding.
"Hit her again, damn you!" the girl who was standing on Nell's hand screamed at me.
I took out my own belt and raised it up to strike, but the guy who was holding her hands stopped me.
"She doesn't play that way," he explained quickly. "Just the hands, fella, Okay?"
It was all right with me. Anything was all right with me. He took over and spanked Nell while I undressed. Everybody else was stripping down then. And I was surprised to notice all four of us guys had hard-ons.
Both of us kept hitting Nell, one on the left buttock, the other on the right. Suddenly, I felt the sting of that leather belt right across my rear, and I yelled out and jumped up. It was one of the little blondes, naked as the day she was born. Nell screamed at me to "Kill the little bitch! That's what she wants!"
But the guy who had been holding down Nell's hands beat me to it. He grabbed my belt from the floor and tanned her hide until it was almost raw. The chubby brunette got down on her knees and rubbed her fat breasts over Nell's blistered rear, then gave me some medicated ointment to rub over the reddened part. And then, everything seemed to center on the little blonde, who was getting it good from the guy who had my belt.
They threw a rope over one of the steel beams in the ceiling and tied her up by her thumbs. Her toes could touch the floor all right, but it was still hurting her. The chubby one got out two rolls of real thin sewing thread and tied a knot tight around each of the hanging girl's nipples.. .tight enough so she screamed and begged her to quit.
Two of the guys unrolled the thread to either side and tied the other ends around exposed pipes on the opposite walls. She looked real crazy like that-tied up by her thumbs, and both breasts pulled away to either side by the thread around her nipples. It was cutting her, too.
I have to admit that up until then, all these sexy goings-on had me worked up plenty. But when I saw the guys put the ropes around her ankles to keep the legs slightly apart, and then heard her screaming and begging for them not to do it, when they got the tweezers, scissors and pliers out of one of the girls purses, I had had enough.
I was kind of glad Nell was ready to go, too.
I've dated her a couple of times since then, but we've never been with that group again. I spank her a lot and tie her up when I'm at her apartment. Sometimes she likes to switch around and abuse me.. .you know, the old Sacher-Masoch bit? We can both get our kicks either way.
Sure, it's perverted, I guess. But I'll bet there's not many a guy around who says he's a hundred percent man, who wouldn't get fired up when that cute little doll of a redhead pulls down her panties and begs to have it laid on! I've never been to any other club meetings, but I know from what Nell and others have told me that there's a lot of that going on. Some of it gets pretty rugged, others are only mild whipping and spanking stuff.
I hate to think what they did to that blonde!
Julius Caesar was generally held to spend much energy and money on his lusts and to have seduced many women of high rank. His friend Augustus was known to employ procurers who roamed the town stripping and inspecting as if the whoremonger was selling them. He would walk the streets with his guards and look for attractive women or girls. If they were inviting he would unclothe them, squeeze their breasts, check their shape and rub them for his pleasure.
Nero was a homosexual since an early age, but he was none the less a victim of lust for women. He opened a brothel in his palace setting apart a number of rooms and furnishing them to suit the grandeur of his palace. Matrons and freeborn youths would stand exposed. Like an hor d oeuvre, it was there for the guests to nibble and eat. Nero was a rapist.
I think it would be wrong to regard him as essentially insane. He had the misfortune to have been brought up in circumstances, and to have a heredity which could not have failed to damage the life and happiness of anybody. His ancestors on both sides were tainted with sadism. A great mistake was made by his mother who placed Nero under the tutelage of Seneca, a man of feeble will and strong homosexual inclinations.
Early in his reign Nero began to spend his rights in unusual pastimes. Dressed as a slave he would sneak into town at night and rob, rape and assault. Encouraged by his immunity, his orgies and rapes became bolder, committing sexual assaults on both men and women. He would banquet in public in the arena, waited on by all the whores of the town. The sight and his indecent behavior with his tongue and mouth would sicken any body. He had a great passion for his mother and whenever he traveled with her in a litter he abandoned himself to his pleasure. No one example of sexual behavior of the Roman is as significant as this.
Nero prostituted his own chastity, that after defiling every part of his body he devised a new game. The arena would be filled with spectators and then men and women were bound to stakes. He covered himself as an animal, with the skin on him and then let loose from a cage he would attack the private parts of men and women who were bound to the stakes. He toyed with the idea of castrating himself, but finally settled for circumcision. At night he would go to a brothel, drive out the prostitutes, and wearing a wig stand in the door himself, soliciting trade. He even set a room aside in the palace in which he indulged in similar fantasies. He tried to induce physicians to make him into a woman promising great sums should they succeed. He created great spectacles and orgies that kept Rome buzzing for a long time.
Today there are many Neros, only the costume has changed.
Both sadism and masochism are almost invariably acquired, they are not hereditary or congenital conditions. They cause endless harm to the subject himself, and not infrequently to one or more of his fellow men. But because they are acquired, they can be prevented.
An intelligent and satisfactory solution must be found.
