The Original Hellfire Club: Where British Elites Practiced Pagan Rites and Bacchanalian Orgies⁉️

Long before the Hellfire Club became associated with the new season of “Stranger Things,” it was an 18th-century gathering of hedonistic British aristocracy.

“Welcome to the River Styx!” beamed Willow Randall, tour guide at the Hellfire Caves in the south-eastern English county of Buckinghamshire. “We’re about to pass off into hell.”
300 feet beneath the village of West Wycombe in the warren-like Hellfire Caves, which were tunneled into the earth here in the 18th century at the behest of local landowner Francis Dashwood. This rural idyll, nestled in the Chiltern Hills in a well-to-do corner of England, seems an unlikely setting for British members of parliament to engage in blasphemous mock-religious rituals and bacchanalian orgies. But that is exactly what was on the menu for the Hellfire Club, a society of blue-blooded rakes who gathered here in the mid-18th century.