Lord Drialys
The Beautiful Flagellants of Chicago,Volume one
FOREWORD
The passion for flagellation counts numerous votaries all over the world. Birching lust flourishes in Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In all these countries, womankind is fully alive to the thrilling charm of the rod and its extraordinary effects upon the masculine organization. Innumerable are the lovers of the twigs in high society and amidst artists and intellectual folks.
It is in the United States that birching discipline is best known and most popular, being carried out with artistic, poetical sentiment until it becomes the inseparable, supreme refinement of love.
In France, flagellation has many followers, if one may judge by the fact that there are very few courtesans in Paris or the principal provincial towns who do not possess in a corner of their mirrored wardrobes a goodly selection of whipping instruments which are used by these complaisant cocottes almost every day. Many Parisian closed and shuttered houses of love can show special rooms fitted up with everything needful for the application of flogging pleasure. As priestesses, these mysterious temples are provided with most adorable, beautiful charmers, who exercise their art with finished skill, being perfectly able to lead the man who kneels before them through every delicious by-path of sublime and intoxicating voluptuousness.
The love of birching, active or passive, also exists in the upper circles of Paris. When, now and again, some sensual scandal is revealed, indiscreet newspapers lift a corner of the veil hiding these private practices, and the general public is strangely stirred.
Such propensities are generally put down as bordering on weird insanity.
When voluptuous flagellation is brought into play, it is nothing more than sublime exacerbation of tender affection, forcing a fervent lover to reach the highest pitch of adoration for the weaker sex. In that case, any pain inflicted by the female of his choice becomes a source of joy.
There are certainly many men and even women who cannot understand or permit such proceedings. To fully realise the enthralling influence of the birch, one must be predisposed by nature, instinct, temperament or education; or else specially destined to drain this cup of ineffable delight by some happy hazard of environment.
The women of France are not successful when trying to enact the part of a domineering queen. Young Parisian beauties, delightful types of femininity though they be, care for naught else in love but the simple frolic and merry laughter.
Austria, Hungary, Russia, and even Germany have given birth to haughty, superb females, such as Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa, fated to bend the lords of creation beneath their yoke, curbing manly pride by the power of an inexorable sceptre grasped in the small white hand of a woman.
Petticoated despots are still to be found in these lands. Empresses from the cradle, they have proud dispositions, and when in the flower of womanhood and wonderfully handsome, appreciative men are wafted into a terrestrial paradise, as they humble themselves before such tyrannical, capricious mistresses.
Sacher-Masoch, the powerful Hungarian novelist, used to delight in picturing implacable and haughty women. He is the author of a long series of thrilling tales and romances, where his dominating heroines pass in procession, as ruthless as Roman Empresses and as beautiful as Olympian goddesses. They are all cruel tigresses, but their excessive severity, joined to the fascination of their bodily beauty, causes in men the excessive exaggeration of loving pain, called “masochism.”
Nevertheless, we must distinguish between a “masochist” and a voluptuous flagellant. The latter is an ardent poet, awake to all delirious artistic manifestations, a fervent admirer of women, adoring his sweetheart with an ardour which gives rise to the greatest excesses of throbbing sensuous worship.
A masochist, on the contrary, is always depressed. Beauty without cruelty does not impress him. He never kisses the girl he adores, and his sole delight is to show her that his servility reaches the uttermost limits of disgusting ignominy. The more his mistress forces him to execute nauseating and infamous tasks, the happier he is-a repulsive and unfortunate slavish being. Mentally diseased, he often finishes in a madhouse. His desires are uninteresting; his cravings loathsome, and he can never please his female partner. She pities him, and he affords her but little pleasure.
A voluptuous lover of the rod is generally much sought after by women of refined tastes. He is a most agreeable sample of a suitor; good-humoured, full of gaiety, and brimming over with delicate attention for his companion. Artistic are his tastes; he is a lover of music and verse; his voice is daily lifted skywards, intoning a tuneful hymn in praise of sunny nature, and womankind made brighter and more comely by reciprocal tenderness.
Like all that is good and beautiful in loving passion, voluptuous flagellation has been handed down to us from ancient Greece, whence came penetrating kisses, maddening caresses, and the mystic lasciviousness of Lesbos.
Clyso, an adorable priestess of Venus, first caused the passion of flagellation to arise in Athens. She was one of the most entrancing and renowned courtesans at the epoch when the divine sculptor Praxiteles gave to the world his ideal types of marble beauty.
The story goes that an inhabitant of Creos, a village adjoining the fair city of Athens, had come into town to sell the produce of his fields, when he chanced to meet Clyso, the delicious wanton. Straightway, he fell in love with her, and so mad was his yearning that he offered her the half of his worldly possessions for one hour in her arms. Clyso consented. He was the happiest of men.
Clyso was not only endowed with rare, surpassing beauty, but she was intellectually gifted. Being of an inquiring mind, she asked the peasant, as he shared her couch, a thousand questions relating to his homestead.
She gleaned from his frank and honest answers that the cult of Venus was completely forgotten and neglected. Few sacrifices were made on the alter of love, although Creos was inhabited by robust, healthy males; and many women, as comely as Aphrodite incarnate.
Despite their bodily rigor, these men were stirred by no violent desires when they looked upon the scarcely- veiled nudity of their wives or girlish companions. Never did the frigid village lads seek to pluck the half-open rosebuds ready to their hands.
The senses of the maidens were also dulled by this indifference and the quadruple pink petals of their secret love-blossoms slowly faded and withered, deprived as they were of the divine dew of passionate ecstasy.
Such dreadful news saddened sort-hearted Clyso. Her sole aim in life was the radiant embrace in which her soul mounted to realms of indescribable bliss. She had sworn to Venus to devote her existence to the propagation of the religion of love among mankind, so that the bodies of mortals should quiver in the giddy vortex of deep sensual joy.
She was inexpressibly grieved to learn that at Creos, men as well-proportioned as Apollo, and women equaling Aphrodite in grace and allurement could pass their time on earth without seeking to fathom the mysteries of love.
With a heavy heart, away went saddened Clyso, tripping to the temple of her goddess. The fair priestess carried two trembling doves closely clasped to the tepid twin glories of her young bosom, as she prayed for help and inspiration. While the blood of the poor, white, feathered things gushed forth beneath the knife of the sacrificer, a branch fell from one of the trees of the sacred grove. As it dropped, the twig rebounded from Clyso's tiny, naked foot. It struck her white, firm flesh like a blow from the lash of a whip, but far from hurting her, seemed to vivify the whole frame of the gentle courtesan, causing her young blood to course through her veins with new and powerful ardour.
Recognising an omen of the gracious goddess, Clyso picked up the branch, and taking it with her, was absorbed in deep meditation as she wended her way homeward.
Gathering all her handmaidens around her, she returned with them to Creos. But before entering the hamlet,
