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started by the Mail, and duly reached Dover, went on board the boat, reached Calais, off again by train. Damned a chance did I get till we were within ten or twelve versts of Vienna. Then my dear friend fell asleep, God bless him! The two devils of passengers who had travelled with us all the way from Calais had alighted at the last station—here was a chance!! We lost not an instant. She sat in my lap, her stern towards me! God! what a fuck it was, ‘See Rome and die!’ said I in a rapture. This over we were having what I call a straddle fuck, when lo! Scarsdale woke up! I made a desperate effort to throw her on the opposite seat, but it was no go, he had seen us. A row of course ensued, and we pitched into one another with hearty good will. He called me a rascal for tampering with his fiancée, I called him a scoundrel for seducing so young a girl! and we arrived at Vienna! ‘Damn it,’ said I as I got out of the train with my lip cut and nose bleeding, ‘here’s a cursed piece of business.’ As for Scarsdale who received from me a pretty black eye, he drove off with the sulky fair to a hotel in the Leopoldstadt, while I found a more humble one in the Graben near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, determined, as I had £15 in my pocket to stay a few days and see all I could. But as you will find in Murray a better account of what I did see than I can give you, I will not trouble you with it. I got a nice little note the next day from the fair Julia appointing a meeting the next day at the Volksgarten. How she eluded the vigilance of her gallant I don’t know, but there she was sure enough in a cab—and devilish nice cabs they are in this city of Vienna, I can tell you. So we had a farewell poke and arranged for a rendezvous in England, and the next day I started and here I am, having spent all my money!
     

     
    1. Drawings of coffer lids which nineteenth-century antiquarians supposed to be evidence of the sexual heresies of the Templars (see chapter 9 )
     

     

     
    2. The last degeneration of Priapus as the ithyphallic god of the witches (from a seventeenth-century broadsheet,
The Merry Pranks of Robin Good-fellow
).
     
“So there’s the finish of my tour up the Nile to the third Cataract, to Nubia, Abu Sinnel (
sic
), etcetera. It is very wrong I know, I deplore it! but you also know that what’s bred in the bone, &c., so adieu, and believe me
“Yours very truly
     “ E. SELLON. ”
     
    A month later Sellon shot himself in his room at Webb’s Hotel in Piccadilly. Before doing so he wrote an excessively sentimental and gloomy poem entitled
No More
, 9 which concludes:
     
For I am in the cold earth laid
,
In the tomb of blood I’ve made
.
Mine eyes are glassy, cold and dim
,
Adieu my love, and think of him
                                           
No More
.
Vivat Lingam
Non Resurgam
10
     
    So ended the life of Edward Sellon, pornographer, soldier, coachdriver, and, as will be seen from the extracts from his writings which follow, the man responsible for introducing a Tantric strain into the occultism of the West.
    Sellon’s interpretation of Tantricism was crudely materialistic, for while he seems to have had a fair knowledge of the practical techniques of the cult it does not appear that he had any real understanding of its underlying philosophy. Here he was very much a man of his own time, interpreting the subtleties of Hinduism in accordance with the vulgarly anthropomorphic conceptions of deity that were familiar to him from the writings of theologians of the evangelical school. He wrote:
     
“As the Saivas are all worshippers of Siva and Bowanee (Pavati) conjointly, so the Vaishnavas also offer up their prayers to Laksmi-Nayarana. The exclusive adorers of this Goddess are the Sactas.
“The cast mark of the Saivas and Sactas consists of three horizontal lines on the forehead, with ashes obtained, if possible, from the hearth, on which a consecrated fire is perpetually