THE HELL FIRE CLUB
SALE CATALOGUE
OF
A PRIVATE COLLECTION ANCIENT AND MODERN
From Medmenham Abbey, West Wycombe House &c.
Description of contents:
The catalogue is composed of items from the Hell Fire Club divided into three sections with a live link to the owners website with each item in the catalogue.
- Original items 18th century
- Original items 20th century
- Original items contemporary
Items owned by persons connected to the Hell Fire Club are exceedingly rare, items of a private devotional nature and items connected to ritual and religious observance have never been available before.
The collection includes ritual and religious objects, books, prints, drawings, personal memorabilia and occult paraphernalia extending over two centuries and collected over a thirty-year period of active involvement with the famed ‘Society of St Francis of Wycombe’ (aka The Hell Fire Club).
ORIGINAL ITEMS:
1) Provenance Medmenham Abbey Chapter Room : A pair of early Regency gilt bronze candlesticks with doves, serpents and tri-form lions paw bases used in ceremonial and ritual observances having mystical and occult significance.
The symbolism of these candlesticks and the significance of the serpent and dove in The Hell Fire Club is amply discussed in the authors book: ‘Secret Symbols of the Hell Fire Club’
Measuring just over 30 cm tall these candlesticks once formed part of the furnishings of the Hell Fire Club Chapter Room at Medmenham Abbey leased by Sir Francis Dashwood in the middle of the 18th century. At the dissolution of the Abbey the candlesticks and other furnishings passed to Dashwood’s house at West Wycombe, after his death and the succession by John Dashwood King much of the original material was burnt or sold. In the case of these candlesticks they travelled north to Skelton in Yorkshire, the home of John Hall Stephenson whose ‘Demoniacks Club’ was modelled on Dashwood’s earlier Hell Fire Club.
The candlesticks later passed to the author of the book ‘Secret Symbols of the Hell Fire Club’ and formed part of the furnishings of the principal Chapter of the organisation in its modern period.
Original Serpents and Doves candlesticks from the Chapter Room of the Hell Fire Club at Medmenham Abbey
The design is unique being based on an Etruscan incense burner sacred to the goddess TURAN once in the collection of the Cortona Antiquarian Society which Dashwood visited as a young man on the Grand Tour in the company of his mentor the Duke of Westmorland. The Etruscan incense burner was later purchased by a Meister Humboldt in 1839 and is now object number CO27 at the Leiden Museum in the Netherlands.
Object CO27 Leiden Museum
The Cortona Aniquarian Society which Dashwood visited published a volume of their collection called ‘Museum Cortonense’ 1750, in which the Etruscan incense burner was listed as having been donated by the Chevalier Carazzi (plate 80 in the 1750 publication):
Armorial device of the Cortona Antiquarian Society Est. 1727
It is noteworthy that Sir Francis Dashwood’s curious font at St Lawrence’s Church West Wycombe is a wooden object of precisely the same esoteric design, believed to be circa 1680 and possibly from the collection of a esoteric humanist circle meeting around the scholar Antonio Magliabechi.
Sir Francis Dashwood’s Italiante wooden font
at the Church of St Lawrence in West Wycombe
