The Hell Fire Club
How did it begin?
We six international friends first met about a few years ago whilst completing our PhDs in one of England’s most famous ancient seats of learning. There are only two…so think of one and you may be 50% right.
We all lived together. We all studied together. We all fucked together.
Together we formed the Hell Fire Club.
The Hell Fire Club was inspired by that legendary club for society rakes in London 1719 by Philip, Duke of Wharton and other high society rakes into debauchery. There have been many incarnations since. Ours was a very tongue in cheek one with humble and horny pretensions.
The original Hell Fire Club credo became ours: “Fais ce que tu voudras” (Do what thou wilt).
This credo was taken from philosophical polemic of François Rabelais’ fictional abbey at Thélème to mock authority and societal norms for freewill and pleasure:
“Do what thou wilt…because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.”
The Hell Fire Club was then a private place for aesthetic debate, dirty discussion….and definitely debauchery. Actually more debauchery than discussion (but then again, no one is complaining).
As we pursued our varied PhDs we also committed ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure through a feast of fucking with each other and a few select friends and partners.
We tried to form our own libertine philosophy that help us rebel against the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy lurking behind the façade of modern bourgeois moral standards.
Modern libertines can be traced back to the Restoration of Charles II and the erotic literature he inspired with his bawdy court that included many libertine women that were his mistresses. They inspired onstage adaptations of female libertines by writers also interested in Epicureanism.
Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers imagined the female libertine in representative comedies and fiction written from the 1670s to the 1720s.
These include John Dryden’sMarriage A-la-Mode (1671), George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra Behn’s late comedy, The Luckey Chance, or an Alderman’s Bargain (1686), and novella, The History of the Nun (1689), Catharine Trotter’s epistolary narrative, Olinda’s Adventures (1693), and only comedy, Love at a Loss, or the Most Votes Carries It (1700), and Daniel Defoe’s novel, Roxana (1724).
Of course we explored de Sade even as - or even during - we fucked each other. But we read him with a skeptical mind and put him alongside other contemporary writers such as his arch-rival pornographer Nicolas Rétif de la Bretonne but also looked how his ideas enshrined in some pretty poor pornographic writing has influenced us.
Simone de Beauvoir (in her essay Must we burn Sade?) and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade’s writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years.
He has also been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis in his focus on sexuality as a motive force.
The surrealists admired him as one of their forerunners. The first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) announced that “Sade is surrealist in sadism”, and extracts of the original draft of Justine were published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.
More recently, women themselves have weighed in on the legacy of de Sade. Camille Paglia considered Sade’s work a “satirical response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau” in particular, and the Enlightenment concept of man’s innate goodness in general.
In The Sadeian Woman the very smart and clever Angela Carter gave a feminist reading of the Marquis de Sade, who is seen as a “moral pornographer” putting pornography into the service of women, or at least creating room within it for “an ideology not inimical to women”.
In our evolving view and even as we sexually experimented with his ideas we felt that Sade nevertheless is at the limit of the tolerable.
We all endure his words and ideas because they push to a limit what can barely be said. But his legacy is undeniable and his literary existential erotic genealogy can be traced down to George Battaile, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, and Michel Houellebecq, or even edgy classic art house films, such as Bunuel’s Belle du Jour, Passolini’s Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom, than, say, Spring break: Girls Go Wild.
De Sade offered an exploration of the boundaries of the erotic and violence, and unpicked social frontiers around individuals. But making people into tools, as a literary device, or a wish, is in the end a mere shard of human being and for all its ability to pierce is not sharp enough to cut into the real basis of what makes us enjoy and suffer in the world. Sade showed, in short, a mere aspect of humanity, and, not the most important one. Love.
De Sade’s inability to concern himself with love that tells the most. Sade was intensely moral – but his role is rather like Nietzsche in philosophy: he leads to a re-evaluation of all values, without offering us alternative ones of any lasting worth.
This sounds so heavy but it never was. Indeed we spent a lot of time debauched out of our minds as we were inspired by the erotica of later Victorian underground as well as later 20th Century classics of erotica.
In this we would include such forbidden classics as: Venus in Furs (Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch), Fanny Hill (John Cleland), My Secret Life (Walter), The Autobiography of a Flea (Anon) , The Way of A Man with a Maid (Anon), Venus in India (Charles Devereux), The Pearl (Various), Emmanuelle (Emmanuelle Arsan), Sadopaideia (Anon) and of course The Story of O (Pauline Reage) etc.
We are in our own way in search of discovering and living out an alternative way. The journey never stops.
We are at best moral pornographers to use Angela Carter’s phrase.
“The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all genders, and projects a, model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of the current relation between the sexes.”
If so, then we continue to push the boundaries to critique sexual norms in ourselves and society.
We believe that the pursuit of virtue, as well as that of vice, are both for the sake of pleasure, as “pleasure” is the ultimate goal of mankind and of life.
Pain can be good, too, insofar as its removal results in pleasure (not just physical but also emotional and even spiritual).
We try to go against accepted tradition.
Vice and virtue are subjective but have their place in the a fallen world. Even heightened pleasure, the will to power is the will to pleasure, using reason towards that chimeric goal.
We are libertines for life. For us erotica is a pleasure that wears a Janus faced mask. We all wear such masks. This tumblr is our mask.
In real life we are bound to relationships and the every day responsibilities of careers but the legacy of our time together has forged a strong erotic bond between us.
We share similar aesthetic tastes for cultured things as we do for refined libertine pleasures.
We take our erotic pleasures with discrete erotic élan.
We meet each other when we can. Sometimes we all meet in the chateau of Rochester and Juliette in the heart of the French countryside.
We bring other like minded initiated friends and partners for a weekend of virtue and vice.
There we fulfill the champagne credo of the Hell Fire Club “Fais ce que tu voudras” (Do what thou wilt) to our heart’s content.
A final word….
It was George Santayana who said “It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine then out of a prig”….so don’t take us or this tumblr too seriously :-)
May your scars be small ones (Afghan tribal saying)
XXXXXX
The Hell Fire Club founders
Rochester & Juliette
Lucrezia, Hildegarde, Vanessa, Shaka
