Rodrigo was a great patron of the arts. He coaxed Michelangelo to undertake the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica and supported many other Renaissance artists in projects that were intended to glorify his reign. Still, toward the end of his life, it was popularly thought that he had made a pact with the devil, a notion which the manner of his death did little to dispel. Rodrigo fell ill following a banquet and died shortly thereafter. In death, his corpse immediately grew bloated and blackened, as if to underscore his corruption in life.
SEX LIFE: As a young cardinal, Rodrigo did his best to emulate the virility of the bull featured on the Borgia family escutcheon. He is said to have been a handsome youth, tall and robust, with penetrating bedroom eyes. His contemporaries called him an irresistible conqueror. But then, who would have dared resist? One of his mistresses, Giulia Farnese, was 16 and already married when he became her lover. The Romans sarcastically called her the “bride of Christ.” Another woman, Vannozza dei Cattanei, bore Rodrigo four (some say five) children before he became pope. Three of those—Lucrezia, Cesare, and Giovanni—followed in their father’s footsteps. Lucrezia may have been sexually available to both Rodrigo and Cesare, among others, and to this day historians debate whether her child was the issue of her father or her brother. Probably she couldn’t have said herself. The family’s notorious preference for sexy entertainments kept the clan’s blood boiling, and tended to obscure trifles such as questions of parentage.
At the age of 29 Rodrigo was rebuked by Pope Pius II for appearing at an orgy in his cardinal’s robes, although he probably retained only his red hat as the evening wore on. This pattern of behavior continued until his death. Rodrigo had the instincts of a Florenz Ziegfeld, and he delighted in sponsoring entertainments featuring lots of nude and nubile dancers.
It was not unusual for him to obstruct the solemn high mass. During one mass he brought giggling women up to the altar, and on another occasion he carelessly trampled the sacred host underfoot. He would celebrate at any excuse, bringing a rowdy crew of prostitutes into the papal apartments. During festivals, an average of 25 courtesans a night was provided for the pope’s entertainment. Discretion was never one of Rodrigo’s strong points, and he used to scandalize Christendom with his traveling arrangements, which often included a coterie of scantily clad dancing girls.
One of the pope’s banquets was chronicled by his master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, Bishop of Ostia, who wrote in his Diarium Romanum: “… 50 reputable whores, not common but the kind called courtesans, supped [at the Vatican], … and after supper they danced about with the servants and others in that place, first in their clothes and then nude … candelabra with lighted candles were set on the floor and chestnuts were strewn about and the naked courtesans on hands and feet gathered them up, wriggling in and out among the candelabra…. Then all those present in the hall were carnally treated in public….” The pope, Cesare, and Lucrezia gave prizes to the men who copulated the most times with the prostitutes.
On the eve of one of Lucrezia’s marriages, Rodrigo arranged a demonstration of the facts of life for her. The pope’s men-at-arms commandeered several mares belonging to some passing merchants. The mares were brought into the papal compound, along with some of the pontiff ’s stallions. While the stallions fought among themselves for the mares, the pope and his favorite daughter stood on a balcony and laughed uproariously.
Unlike a previous pope, Sixtus IV, Rodrigo was a heterosexual. But legend persists that Rodrigo and Cesare imprisoned and raped the most beautiful young man in Italy. Proof, however, is lacking, since the victim was found in the Tiber with a stone around his neck before he could talk. Such evidence as there is seems to indicate that Rodrigo preferred women. In addition to the army of courtesans constantly at his command, he maintained a private harem, and his sons Giovanni and Cesare vied with each other for the pope’s favor by sending him exotic beauties for his collection. At one point Giovanni scored a coup over his brother by scouting up a Rubenesque Spanish beauty who moved Rodrigo to ecstasy. Cesare, jealous of his brother’s secular glory, had Giovanni stabbed and thrown in the Tiber. The murder of his favorite son caused the pope such distress that he briefly reformed. But this reformation turned into more of a rest period, and soon he was back to his decadent ways.
—M.J.T.
Hymn To Pan
ALEISTER CROWLEY (Oct. 12, 1875-Dec. 1, 1947)
HIS FAME: Dubbed by the British tabloid press “the wickedest man in the world,” Aleister Crowley used his inherited fortune to blaze trails in every form of consciousness expansion available to a repressed Edwardian gentleman, making headways in mountain-climbing, drugs, the occult, sex and all-around perversity.
For a time a powerful spiritual figure, Crowley dead-ended in personal dissolution after founding his personal religion of Thelema, based on the individualist credo “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law.” Named one of the 100 greatest Britons in history by the BBC in 2002, his myth casts a long, and dark, shadow over popular culture.
HIS PERSON: Born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire in 1875, Crowley was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, a radically conservative Christian sect. After his father’s death, his faith began to curdle, and Crowley rebelled; his mother referred to him as the “Beast” in the Book of Revelations. A deep chord was struck in the young Crowley: the man would spend the rest of his life trying to fill the abyss left in him by the death of his father, outdoing his father’s with his own proselytizing of a new religion, Thelema, based around the apocalyptic narrative of the Book of Revelations. At Cambridge, Crowley dallied with prostitutes and began to realize homosexual desires before an undefined spiritual crisis in Stockholm led him to believe he was chosen to embark on the Great Work of Magick, as he spelled it; of attaining enlightenment. After school he filled his time writing turgid poetry and applied his fortune to mountain-climbing—he still holds unbroken records—and the pursuit of occult power, ingratiating himself with the infamous Victorian secret society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
He married Rose Kelly in 1904, and they honeymooned in Cairo, spending a night of nuptial bliss in the Great Pyramid. Shortly thereafter Rose went into a trance and instructed Crowley that a spirit was attempting to communicate with him and to go to a certain place at a certain time, where an apocalyptic document called The Book of the Law was “dictated” to him. The long poem prophesied both World Wars, the downfall of all world religions, and 2,000 years of bloody strife and warfare on the world stage. Deciding he had reached the peaks of spiritual attainment, Crowley blew the last of his family fortune on publishing, setting forth his theories and methods in the massive series of books he titled The Equinox, and establishing a magical order, the A.A.o., with his friend George Cecil Jones. Bereft of money by the outbreak of the First World War, Crowley set into a cycle of itinerancy and leeching off students. He also developed a heroin addiction after the drug was prescribed to him for his chronic asthma. The remaining years of Crowley’s life were not kind to him—nor was Crowley himself particularly kind to the women and adoring students who surrounded him, looking for a piece of his mystique. Crowley maintained to the end that the great mission of his life was to prove, via the existence of The Book of the Law, that there were disincarnate beings or extraterrestrials of much greater intelligence than human beings living and operating in the world. His last words were, “I am perplexed.”
SEX MAGICK: One of Crowley’s great projects was taking both theology and religious practice and reinterpreting them in sexual terms. Initiated into the German occult order the O.T.O. after the 1909 publication of The Book of Lies, in which he intuited the details of the group’s secret sexual practices, Crowley was given a stack of sexual magick techniques by the order and proceeded to spend a year in New York testing them along “scientific lines” on one or more prostitutes a night. Sexual fluids were also used as a holy sacrament; Crowley believed that regularly consuming semen commingled with vagi
nal fluid after intercourse would gradually make him superhuman. He regularly sought out hunchback dwarf women, had intercourse with them inside a magic pentacle, then extracted their commingled ejaculations from the woman’s vagina, made the mixture into pills, and sold them as cures for male impotence.
Crowley treated his string of “Scarlet Women”—mistresses and spiritual wives—with disdain, invariably leaving them in the lurch after chemical and ritual overload, coupled with Crowley’s gutter lifestyle and insufferable high dramatics, caused breakdowns in his followers. Much of his infamy comes from his time at the “Abbey of Thelema” in Cefalu, Sicily, more or less a classic experiment in drug-based communal living—with Crowley as the guru. Accompanied by one of his favorite “Scarlet Women” Leah Hirsig, their multiple small children, and his followers, Crowley aimed to break down the barriers of perception. In practice, this meant feeding people mescaline and locking them in his “Chamber of Nightmares,” a room covered with Crowley’s childlike drawings of demons. On one lively night at the Abbey, Crowley talked Hirsig into being sodomized by a goat, and slashed its throat at the moment it orgasmed, drenching her in its blood. He was expelled from the country by Mussolini shortly thereafter. He also rewrote the O.T.O.’s rituals to incorporate anal sex; homosexual sex magick was one of Crowley’s fortés.
In 1907, after he had lost his child with Rose Kelly and then lost Rose to alcoholism, Crowley engaged in a long series of homosexual magickal operations with the young poetry student Victor Neuberg in the Algerian desert. Crowley took the passive role in the sexual rites, always preferring for the young, reedy Neuberg to sodomize him. Crowley struggled with his bisexuality from an early age. He barely mentions his countless homosexual affairs in his autobiography, although his surviving diaries are much more candid: in De Arte Magica, he recounts the details of his “9=2 Magus Initiation,” in which he was cluster-fucked by nearly two dozen men in a New York bathhouse. He took to cross-dressing at many points in his life; while in drag referring to himself as “Alys Cusack,” one of many pseudonyms he used throughout his writings. Androgyny, of course, is a recurring, and crucial, theme in the alchemical and shamanic traditions of the world, and in this respect, Crowley was hardly an exception. Despite his infamously bad behavior and reputation, however, Crowley’s writing reveals him as something of a closet romantic. He suffered many unrequited loves and heartbreaks in his life. Magick was Crowley’s great love, and it never abandoned him, even as it dragged him through hell after hell. It is no wonder that his chosen symbol for the Great Work was Babalon, the Whore of Revelations who must take the Adept’s every last drop of blood and utterly destroy him before he attains.
HIS THOUGHTS: “I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”
—J.L.
John Doe, Alias God
FATHER DIVINE (1877-Sept. 10, 1965)
HIS FAME: He was the founder of the Peace Mission cult, which eventually numbered over a million members. Many of his followers considered him God incarnate, an opinion with which he agreed, and many also thought that those who were true believers, i.e., “angels,” would never die.
Father Divine and 21-years-old Edna Ritchings
HIS PERSON: Although Father Divine carefully blurred the events of his early life, he was apparently born George Baker, the son—appropriately—of Joseph and Mary, Georgia sharecroppers. This semiofficial version conflicts with his own later account that he had been “combusted” one day in 1900 on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 134th Street in Harlem. After serving his gospel apprenticeship in Baltimore, he returned to Georgia to promote himself as a “Live Ever, Die Never” black evangelist, but intolerant officials arrested him as a public nuisance, booked him as “John Doe, alias God” (he was already insisting on his divinity), and suggested he leave the state. With 12—it had to be 12, of course—followers, he made his way to New York and set up on West 40th Street the first of many communal living arrangements, or “heavens,” as they came to be known. He found jobs for his little band as cooks, waiters, valets, etc., and accepted their wages in return. Four years later he moved them, now 20 strong, to a house in Sayville, Long Island. There his movement grew rapidly, especially after 1931, when his godly powers were “proved” by the death (of a heart attack) of a local judge who four days before had sentenced Divine to six months in jail for disturbing the peace. “I hated to do it,” Divine lamented from his cell. During the Depression thousands of down-and-outers became angels. (Angelic requirements included abstention from smoking, drinking, swearing, movies, cosmetics, and sex; depositing of all wages in the communal coffers; and a willingness to adore Father properly.) In Sayville, and later in heavenly annexes opened in Harlem, thousands feasted daily on fried chicken banquets that were absolutely free. In subsequent years, rural farms and urban hotels were acquired, all of which Divine visited regularly, descending from a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or Duesenberg although he claimed to own nothing himself and paid no income tax. When he died at Woodmont, his 32-room chateau on Philadelphia’s Main Line, at about age 90, he was to his followers across the country truly “God.”
SEX LIFE: A realistic man, Father Divine must early on have accepted the fact that he was not the average woman’s idea of a lover. Barely 5 ft. tall, squat, bald, he suggested at best a dark-complexioned Cupid. He was attracted to tall women; his two wives—Sister Peninah, later known as Mother Divine, who was black, and Edna Rose Ritchings, “Sweet Angel,” who was not only white but golden blond as well—were considerably taller than he was. Both were, however, wives in name only; the discipline of the cult demanded unswerving celibacy from all. Men slept on one side of heaven, women on the other, and sex was strictly forbidden. The question was whether the Father applied the ban to himself, and more than one angry and grudge-bearing deserter from the flock declared otherwise. Tales of seduction regularly surfaced. In 1937 a woman identified as “Faithful Mary” broadcast an account of orgies in which young female converts (“Rosebuds,” as they were known) were deflowered to such whispered phrases as “Your body belongs to God” and “Mary wasn’t a virgin.” An eager press gobbled up such allegations, but “Faithful Mary” later retracted her statement, so the truth of such charges remains doubtful. More than one D.A. assigned a female undercover agent to pose as a new disciple and obtain conclusive evidence of immorality in the heavens, but not one of these attempts was successful. Family court judges regularly branded the Father a “home breaker,” but that was because of his habit of welcoming to his fold every unhappy wife who abandoned married life for the nearest heaven.
Why did Father Divine insist that married couples, too, abstain from sex—that this natural function be declared taboo? First because he was determined to achieve racial equality and real integration in the Peace Mission. He was well aware that in the 1920s and ‘30s and ‘40s the slightest trace of sexual impropriety in an interracial setting would be disastrous. At the first hint of miscegenation, every heaven would have to close down. Better forbid sex entirely than risk that. True, his own second wife was white, but he had made it clear that Sweet Angel, who was 21 when he, in his late 60s, married her, was and would remain his “spotless virgin bride,” which apparently she did. Besides, she was, he said, the reincarnated spirit of his first wife, Mother Divine. The notion of “spotless virginity” fascinated the Father. His 26 secretaries—13 black, 13 white, mostly young—were known as “Father’s Sweets” and were all virgins, at least theoretically. He had been known to “restore virginity” to a particularly attractive young convert with good typing and shorthand skills who otherwise would have been barred because of an unfortunate indiscretion in her past. The secretaries adored Father—purely, of course; otherwise this inner circle was not unlike a harem, with all the jealousies and intrigues peculiar to such.
The second reason for the sex ban was simply Father Divine’s own basic need to be the one and only with his
disciples. He wished to be a father-husband-lover-God. Female angels in particular, denied the catharsis provided by their former sexual outlets, tended to form passionate emotional attachments to him. A physical expression of that emotion, known as “vibrating” and resembling an extraordinarily sensual ballet, was an approved sex substitute for those who required it. It allowed for a sublime spiritual climax, and at times an actual physical orgasm. Father Divine—the exalted, the beloved, the God incarnate—would watch complacently.
HIS ADVICE: “The spirit of the consciousness of the presence of God is the source of all supply and will satisfy every desire and it does.”
—N.C.S.
The Infallible Healer
MARY BAKER EDDY (July 16, 1821-Dec. 3, 1910)
HER FAME: Mary Morse Baker Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science Church. Her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which at the time of her death had appeared in 160 editions, was the basic tract for her church and dealt in large part with mental healing. Mrs. Eddy was also responsible for establishing the newspaper The Christian Science Monitor.
HER PERSON: Mary Morse Baker, the youngest of six children divided equally between boys and girls, was born in Bow, N.H. Her father, Mark, was a pious, hardworking farmer. Mary was small, delicate, and rather pretty, with wavy brown hair and striking blue eyes. She was a sickly child who suffered from hysterical seizures, often throwing tantrums to get her way. As a result, she was sometimes treated by the family doctor with mesmerism and mental suggestion. Mary was also a romantic child with a penchant for writing flowery verse, and in adulthood she fancied herself an author.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 58