In the autumn of 1955 the American avant garde filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, embarked on a three-month sojourn to Italy where he uncovered a trove of erotic frescos in an eighteenth century farmhouse near the Sicilian fishing village of Cefalù. Thirty years earlier, the farmhouse, known as the Villa Santa Barbara, had been inhabited by the English occultist, Aleister Crowley, who along with a small band of disciples had founded a quasi-religious cult called Thelema. This amalgamation of western and oriental beliefs sparked controversy because of a series of extravagant rites and rituals that Crowley deemed ‘sex magick’. In 1923, Crowley and his followers were chased out of the country by Mussolini’s secret police. The erotic murals that he had painted on the interior walls and doors of the farmhouse were covered over and the building was abandoned.

Anger wrote an account of his restoration of these murals in letters to the British diplomat and author Gerald Yorke, who was both a former disciple of Crowley and the keeper of his vast paper archive in London.¹ Working day and night with the aid of a kerosine lamp and some simple tools, Anger uncovered parts of the frescos by scraping with a knife and daubing at the whitewash with a wet cloth. One after another images would reveal themselves: ‘a blue grotesque foot with brilliant red claws’, ‘a huge green snake... winding around red legs’, ‘demonic half circle eyes’ and a phallus in ‘rich red brown’. Even in their fragmented form, the frescos evinced vivid colouration that was remarkably intact. Damage that would have resulted from the buildings abandonment was held at bay because of the protection afforded by the whitewash. Anger made some of his most significant discoveries in the room that Crowley had used as his sleeping quarters. Painted in blue on a stripe of pumpkin orange was a phrase of bawdy poetry, Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, soak me in cognac, c...t and cocaine. A crack in the lime mortar cut through the word c...t and zigzagged across a painted portrait that Anger identified as one of Crowley’s disciples. On an adjacent wall Anger uncovered a key protagonist in the cult of Thelema. The scarlet woman was depicted lying prone with her flaming red hair thrown back and a sharp red tongue sticking out. A figure in dark purple stood over her in what Anger interpreted as a sexual ritual.

In the shadow of the prudish mores of Victorian England, Crowley had emerged as a path-breaking sexual dissident. The orgiastic rites that he concocted at Cefalù were reminiscent of his peers in the decadent movement: ‘every device and artifice of the courtesan’ and ‘every stimulant known to the physician’ were to be employed to arouse the libido of his disciples until they attained spiritual transcendence.² By the 1950s Crowley’s reputation for debauchery had eclipsed his erudite theoretical writings on ‘magick’ – the term he coined to differentiate his esoteric system from theosophy, spiritualism, occultism and mysticism. The religion of Thelema had failed to catch on and its rites and rituals were derided as eccentric obscenities. All of this would have consigned Anger’s efforts at Cefalù to obscurity had he not been joined that autumn by his good friend, America’s most famous biologist, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey.

Kinsey was touring Europe in the wake of the avalanche of media attention surrounding his landmark scientific studies, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). He had just testified before a British parliamentary committee urging the repeal of severe punishments for homosexual offences, when he travelled to Italy to join Anger in Cefalù. Kinsey was not coming to judge these paintings aesthetically. He wanted to evaluate them as data, sex data to be precise.

In the 1948 male book, Kinsey argued that modern sex researchers would need to look beyond a dearth of material in the scientific treatises of their peers and embrace a wealth of raw sexual data spread throughout diverse fields of human activity. He compiled a list for reference, which became the basis of the ever-expanding sex library at the newly founded Institute for Sex Research in the US state of Indiana.³ Categories encompassed biology, medicine, psychology, marriage counselling and law enforcement. There was a detailed enumeration of literary and artistic genres, including those considered morally dangerous. At the bottom of the list after ‘Fetishistic objects’ was the section ‘Materials on sex cults’.⁴

The presence of Kinsey at Cefalù was a newsworthy event. Anger was able to convince the Picture Post to commission a magazine feature on the discovery of the Crowley murals and the Italian photographer Fosco Maraini was hired to document the paintings. Kinsey explained to the Picture Post that he knew little about ‘the magic side’ of the Cefalù cult. He was interested in the sex: ‘I have interviewed several people who knew Crowley when he was in America and I have his books in my library. The amazing thing is that Crowley lived a life that would not normally have been tolerated…’⁵

At Cefalù, a variation of phallic worship, in which the sex organs were said to be the physical symbols of God and the Sun and a source of creative power, came face to face with a Victorian-bred guilt complex harboured by Crowley’s Anglo-American followers. Frank Bennet, a disciple, put it succinctly in a diary composed at Cefalù in 1921. He writes of the ‘sorrow and trouble’ he could have avoided if he had known Crowley’s philosophy of sexual freedom earlier in life, instead of the ‘damnable teaching that all desires were of the flesh and therefore the devil’. With indignation he exclaims, ‘I, a perfectly healthy man doing all I could to suppress these perfectly natural desires, and yet all the time finding that they were... as strong, if not stronger than ever…’⁶ There is a clear parallel between Bennet’s sexual anguish and the impassioned letters that Kinsey received from ordinary Americans in the wake of the success of the male and female studies. Soldiers on furlough, drug store clerks, marine recruits and a swathe of US citizens targeted by the police for so-called sex crimes against nature had posed urgent questions to Kinsey concerning their intimate lives. He was moved to help because the human sexual behaviour research project had convinced him that a great many of the deviations described by clinicians and punished by the criminal justice system were familiar and commonplace.

Kinsey departed radically from his predecessors in sex research. His zoological training and years spent studying varieties of the North American Gaul wasp underpinned a novel approach. He applied large scale taxonomic research methods, gleaned from biology, to the study of human sexuality. At the heart of the research was the one-to-one interview, a three-hour stint of rapid fire questioning. For the 1948 male volume, nearly six thousand Americans took part. Kinsey reported the findings in the cold statistical language of means, medians and coefficients. His hypothesis that ‘nature rarely deals with discrete categories’⁷ was evinced by striking variations in men’s sexual activity over a lifetime. Long held notions of what was normal or pathological, moral or immoral, hetero or homo proved insufficient, so erotic experience was graphed along a sliding spectrum that entered 1950s parlance as ‘The Kinsey Scale’.

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