HELLFIRE 2: The Sun That Never Sets

PRELUDE

The wind is picking up as your carriage trundles slowly snaking up the side of West Wycombe Hill. In your hand is clutched an invitation from the 2nd Baronet of Wycombe, Sir Francis Dashwood. Yourself and five other friends of his have been invited to join him for a most unforgettable night’s reverie.

By the time your carriage draws to a stop, you can hear the rain lashing down. Peering from curtained window, in the failing light you can see near the gate to the Church of St Lawrence, one beckons you over.

In short order you and four others you have met in passing nervously exchange excited yet perplexed intrigue. ‘What the devil is Dashwood up to!?’ one blurts out. ‘He’s there, by the church door!’ another shrieks with unbridled glee.

‘We’re drinking in your church!? That might be a stretch too far even for me, Francis’, says one of the guests. Sir Francis Dashwood, standing before us dressed in full monk’s regalia, simply smiles an assurance and shakes his head, ‘No, no, no…” he says, before he raises his eyes upwards, his hands pressed together in prayer. ‘Higher still than Christ himself…’

Another man appears from within the church and tells us flatly, ‘Its ready’. We enter behind him and immediate peel off to the side ascending the stair that takes us up into the church tower. We find ourselves in a room lit with several candelabra, clearly borrowed from downstairs. A table to the side is laid out with goblets, bottles of wine and several silver cloches covering unseen foodstuffs besides a small stack of plates.

‘Now you are talking, my good man!’ a guest chirps and begins reaching for wine. This provokes a swift but silent rebuke from our host who bats away the reaching rake’s hand, and with his own points up at the ceiling. For a second we all stare at the ceiling wondering what we are supposed to be looking at before, as one, we espy the wall mounted ladder that passes up through a hatch in the roof.

Again we ascend, urged onwards by a silent but delighted Dashwood. Soon, as one, we are on the roof of the church tower. Despite the rain, which is heavy and wet, and despite the wind which is fierce and buffeting, the view is quite remarkable. In the dusk light one can see for miles across the Chilterns, not to mention the veritable armada of black clouds approaching us.

‘Lovely view, dear boy, but this damned rain, it’ll water down the wine a bit, don’t you think?’ At these words Sir Francis - St Francis of Wycombe, as he is supposed to be known in his pious raiment - smiles that infectious smile and again looks up, his finger pointing us in the direction of… of a golden sphere that forms the finial atop the church tower. He pulls a cord and a hatch in swings up and open and lantern light floods out.

Now you see the rungs on the curving steeple roof and realise… this man, this mad man, expects you to clamber up to the very top of the church spire and into the finial at its crest.

You grit your teeth, you make the climb into the surprisingly spacious interior of the sphere, taking a seat on a small wooden bench. Another of the guests thrusts a small glass into your hand just as St Francis, entering, lowers the hatch behind him.

Holding up his own glass he looks at you all one by one and begins to speak, ‘il Diavolo-’ but before he can finish his blasphemous incantation the world is consumed with blinding light and a boom fills the every iota of the air.

As your senses return, and the screams of terror give way to shrieks of exhilaration, you see Sir Francis Dashwood staring at you intently, before raising his glass with a smirk: ‘Now brothers… we drink!’

In the forerunner to this article I had set out with my old friend Ken of the SittingNow podcast to explore the notorious caves of the Dashwood Hellfire Club (to part one click here). They had certainly been interesting but, approaching it as I had, which is to say, completely unknowing, they had been rather inscrutable to my ritual sensibilities.
And… I had ended with the promise of revelation and something entirely new! After the dank hell of the underworld, join me as we climb to the heavens before we walk through the gates of Eden and enter, for a moment, Paradise itself.

THE GOLDEN SPHERE

At the top of the hill beneath which lie the Hell-Fire Caves stands the church of St Lawrence. It is a flintstone church typical of southern England. Though it was built in the 14C, Sir Francis Dashwood repaired and upgraded it, heightening the steeple into a neoclassical arched tower, inspired by those of Venice, and upon the top he commissioned and had erected a large golden sphere in beaten metal.

Inside the church, we are told (because entry is forbidden, no doubt because of some fiendish satanic conspiracy, or more likely because it has fallen into disuse and disrepair) Dashwood renovated the interior with classical and Egyptian qualities inspired by his Grand Tour. We didn’t see any of that, so… moving on.
Back to the golden ball. ‘The Sun,’ I thought, looking at it. I have certainly never seen the like of it before, certainly not on top of a church. When Sir Francis commissioned it, he had it built to be capable of holding six of his friends for drinks. What poppycock! It looks just big enough to house maybe six dogs, certainly not six drunken dilettantes.
But that is an illusion… for it transpires that very much, absolutely, the sphere is big enough to house that many people on little benches within, and there are photos to prove it.

There is no documented evidence of Dashwood’s use of the sphere, though he would allegedly also use it at night with a torch inside to shine a light to a friend of his in a distant tower. It is entirely my own dramatic addition to suggest it would be used as a faraday cage in a lightning storm. There isn’t much more to say right now, but we’ll come back to the golden orb periodically, though not quite so closely as the ladies in the picture.

There is another more mysterious thing in or near the churchyard… the Dashwood Mausoleum.

THE DASHWOOD MAUSOLEUM

The mausoleums I am familiar are more like family vaults. Quite often small temple-looking, neo-classical buildings in graveyards. Not Sir Francis’ one. His is a colossal octagonal - no, hexagonal, not octagonal… no definitely hexagonal… mostly - walled enclosure. The confusion arises in part because the place is so big, and because when you peer through it the walls don’t line up properly. One corner feels like its a right angle… the answer is simple. Its a squashed hexagon. And I’ve never seen the like before

Walking around it we pass numerous pillars and these great big arches. We peer through the gates and the interior is almost entirely bare save for a squared pillared inner structure at the centre of which on a pedestal higher than head height is a single urn. The occupants of the mausoleum are Dashwood’s family, and a whole bunch of his friends and brothers in damnation, the Friars of St Francis, also called the Mad Monks of Medmenham, also had their ashes placed therein.

As we stood and gawped at the immense structure, Ken said casually, “Its design reflects that of the Abbe de Theleme from Rabelais - a big influence on Dashwood.”

Dashwood was a BIG fan of Rabelais whose fictional Abbe de Theleme was avowed libertarian and freedom focused and which gave us the much maligned phrase, ‘Do What Thou Will’, a term taken up by both occultist Aleister Crowley, and also the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe.

As for the reading of the place, I am pleased to see it was an easy thing to discover plenty of others online have done similar, but I found myself standing at the main front arch (pictured above) and looking up at the church for the golden sphere. Naturally I assumed it would have been centred on the gate in line with the urn in the centre of the Mausoleum. It is not. Here is its location from the centre of the main gate:

It struck me as odd that the whole mausoleum was itself not aligned directly with the church, even on a straight line with the whole church, being kind of ‘off to the side’ a bit. I tried to centre everything in the mausoleum and, behold, the golden sphere peaking through from the church tower behind is not aligned. In my previous article I mention how often when reading a ritual site we look for symmetry. Symmetry denotes organisation, and can in some cases suggest the imposition of a higher order on the chaos of nature. So when we find some symmetries the idea is confirmed and then when we find things that seem to fumble the symmetry we must ask why that is. It would seem careless to have specially commissioned both the golden sphere and the whole mausoleum and made everything line up, except each other.
So I changed my orientation, stepping to the right slight until the sphere was ‘above’ the central square pagoda thing. Like so:

We can see in the rather expertly aligned golden sphere and central urn that I am standing quite off centre. If looking forward does not make sense, turn around and see what else is aligned with this new trajectory…

In the distance, in a line with where I stood was what I called a Roman Road - a long straight road typical in England and generally attributed to the Romans. There was the alignment. It was then that Ken said something to the effect of, ‘Its not Roman, that’s Dashwood Road, Francis Dashwood had it built.”
Well, I’ll be!
Now that really is an intentional alignment. I am still not sure why the whole Mausoleum was not oriented directly to the road and the golden sphere… and indeed in the following old photograph I have found, presumably taken from the tower around the sphere, we can see just how almost aligned everything is.

Maybe it is close enough and it’s unfair to expect alignments of pyramidal exactitude. Even if I am not able to discern an actual ritual meaning it does tell us that alignment was important to Dashwood, but with examples of the deviation from alignment, that only certain alignments were important and other irregularities were either due to as-yet-unknown hidden alignments or just not important enough.

And then something occurred to me… had we heard somewhere that the Inner Temple at the far end of the caves, some 300ft underground was also supposedly directly below the church!? I then recalled the weird crooked shape of the caves and hypothesised, would that place the Mausoleum directly above the ‘Banqueting Hall’ of the Hell-Fire Caves?
Then I remembered the only other piece of significant decoration in the caves is in that chamber:

A rather exquisite skull, whose quality far exceeds that of the wailing faces carved elsewhere. The skull, icon of death in the banqueting hall of the caves, potentially directly below the Mausoleum of the deceased club members… if the Inner temple is below the Church like some kind of blasphemous ‘undermining’ of the Christian faith above it, is the Mausoleum supposed to send its members directly down, ‘straight to hell’ where they could continue their partying ever more in their beloved hidden heresy?

What delightful if wild speculation…

That was it for us, up on the hill; it was time for us to visit the stately home of the man himself… they open the doors of the house quite rarely - as the Dashwood Family still live therein! - and today was the last day of it being open for the season… REAL REVELATIONS ABOUND…

Share The Ritualist