Hellsfire Club: London
Hellfire Club was a name for several exclusive clubs for high society rakes established in Britain and Ireland in the 18th century. The name is most commonly used to refer to Sir Francis Dashwood's Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe. Such clubs were rumored to be the meeting places of "persons of quality" who wished to take part in socially perceived immoral acts, and the members were often involved in politics. Neither the activities nor membership of the club are easy to ascertain. The clubs were rumored to have distant ties to an elite society known only as The Order of the Second Circle. The first official Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1718, by Philip, Duke of Wharton and a handful of other high society friends. The most notorious club associated with the name was established in England by Sir Francis Dashwood, and met irregularly from around 1749 to around 1760, and possibly up until 1766. In its later years, the Hellfire was closely associated with Brooks's, established in 1764. Other clubs using the name "Hellfire Club" were set up throughout the 18th century. Most of these clubs were set up in Ireland after Wharton's had been dissolved.
Hellfire Clubs in contemporary life
Keepers of Harpocratis
In 1825 a group of young men were spurned from the rooms of the Hellsfire clubs, and founded a splinter group. The Harpocratis Union epitomized the ideals of the leaders, founding their rituals on the ideal of Silence. In doing so they found a new path of magic revolving around sound and darkness. Their worship of Harpocratis, a bastardization of the worship of Horus from Egypt, found power and a paradigm that was difficult to master. Some of their teachings came down from early Roman texts that taught them paths known to a group known as the Ambulatis Niger. Current membership includes:
Phoenix Society
In 1781, Dashwood's nephew Joseph Alderson (an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford) founded the Phoenix Society (later known as the Phoenix Common Room), but it was only in 1786 that the small gathering of friends asserted themselves as a recognized institution.[46] The Phoenix was established in honour of Sir Francis, who died in 1781, as a symbolic rising from the ashes of Dashwood's earlier institution. To this day, the dining society abides by many of its predecessor's tenets. Its motto Uno avulso non deficit alter (when one is torn away another succeeds) is from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid and refers to the practice of establishing the continuity of the society through a process of constant renewal of its graduate and undergraduate members. The Phoenix Common Room's continuous history was reported in 1954 as a matter of note to the college.
