The Hellfire Club was the popular name for what is supposed to have been an exclusive English club established by Sir Francis Dashwood which met irregularly from 1746[citation needed] to around 1760 as an extension to his Society of Dilettanti.
They used a number of other names, such as the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe, Order of Knights of West Wycombe and later, the Monks of Medmenham. Other clubs using the name "Hellfire Club" were set up throughout the 18th century, most notably the "Hell-Fire Club" founded around 1719 in London by Philip, Duke of Wharton.
The members addressed each other as "Brothers" and Dashwood as "Abbot".
Female "guests" (a euphemism for prostitutes) were referred to as 'Nuns'. Unlike the more determined Satanists of the 1720s, the club motto was Fait ce que vouldras (Do what thou wilt) from François Rabelais, later used by Aleister Crowley. According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."
more
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellfire_Club
They used a number of other names, such as the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe, Order of Knights of West Wycombe and later, the Monks of Medmenham. Other clubs using the name "Hellfire Club" were set up throughout the 18th century, most notably the "Hell-Fire Club" founded around 1719 in London by Philip, Duke of Wharton.
The members addressed each other as "Brothers" and Dashwood as "Abbot".
Female "guests" (a euphemism for prostitutes) were referred to as 'Nuns'. Unlike the more determined Satanists of the 1720s, the club motto was Fait ce que vouldras (Do what thou wilt) from François Rabelais, later used by Aleister Crowley. According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."
more
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellfire_Club
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