Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Come now - the Bullingdon Boys were engaging in blood rituals, drawn from the initiation ceremonies of, most probably, the Hellfire Club....

Quote:There is a strong tradition that there was a club in Brasenose in the late 1820s which modelled itself on the infamous Hell Fire Club and took the same name. It is reputed to have revelled in vice, drunkenness and atheism in the teeth of authority. It is also the subject of one of the most famous College stories, which is supposed to have taken place in about 1828. This is an account of 1872, taken from the journal Odds and Ends:

'Brasenose Lane was always dismal and dreary in the daytime and barely lighted by two or three lamps at night. The Brasenose windows were fitted with close upright iron bars to prevent any going in or out of the undergraduates' rooms at night. Besides this the windows of the rooms on the ground floor were secured by a strong netting of stout wire with openings too small even for a hand to pass through.

Between eleven and twelve o'clock one night in December a Fellow of Brasenose was returning home along this lane. He saw a tall man, seemingly wrapt up in a long cloak, standing before a window of the rooms of an undergraduate of bad reputation and known to be one of the most active members of the Hell-fire Club. As the Fellow rushed by he saw that the occupier of the rooms was being slowly drawn through the wire netting and through the iron bars.

It was but a few steps to the college gate round the corner of the lane. At the moment that the porter opened the gate there came also a cry and a rush of men from one of the rooms on the right hand of the quadrangle. There had been a meeting of the Hell-Fire Club and in the middle of one of his blasphemous speeches the owner of the rooms had broken a blood vessel and fallen dead upon the floor.'

The inference, of course, is that the tall man in the long cloak was the Devil come to claim the soul of his own. Needless to say there is no direct evidence for this in the archives, although on 3rd March 1834 Edward Leigh Trafford died in his College rooms on Staircase III, one of the staircases which has rooms on Brasenose Lane. He was a 21 year old undergraduate from a Cheshire family with long established Brasenose connections and later tradition says that he was the president of the Brasenose Hell-Fire Club and that he died by delirium tremens.

There is no documentary evidence for the existence of the Brasenose Hell-Fire Club or that the Phoenix, the College's famous dining club, was ever so called.

Quote:The Hellfire Club was a name for several exclusive clubs for high society rakes established in Britain and Ireland in the 18th century, and was more formally or cautiously known as the "Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe".[1] These clubs were rumoured to be the meeting places of "persons of quality"[2] who wished to take part in immoral acts, and the members were often very involved in politics. Neither the activities nor membership of the club are easy to ascertain.[3][4]
The very first Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1719, by Philip, Duke of Wharton and a handful of other high society friends.[5] The most infamous club associated with the name was established in England by Sir Francis Dashwood,[6] and met irregularly from around 1749 to around 1760, and possibly up until 1766.[7] 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 were dispelled.[8]
The club motto was Fais ce que tu voudras (Do what thou wilt), a philosophy of life associated with François Rabelais' fictional abbey at Thélème[7][9] and later used by Aleister Crowley.

Quote: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 recognised institution.[44] 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, and to this day the dining society abides by many of its predecessor's tenets. Its motto uno avulso non deficit alter is from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid and is relevant first in the more overarching sense of having replaced the Monks of Medmenham; then in 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 until the present day is a matter of great pride to the college.[45]