The Gnostic now wants to heal the universe, or to accelerate its becoming-God, by returning the few traces of the almost vanished Divine, the Logos, to heaven, into the Pleroma. For the magician, by contrast, the Logos (or its traces) left hanging in the material world is the Word: Divine substance now made flesh (“In the beginning was the Logos”), an instrument of power by means of which the will can be imposed upon the supernal and the earthly. Hence the magician requires words and rituals in order to master matter and spirits. For the Gnostic, however, everything is a striving back into the heavenly, a homecoming à la Novalis.[3]
Gnostics and magicians live in two worlds at the same time. Yet while the magician wishes to use the other world in order to rule this one, the Gnostic searches for a divine reality, that is, for a transformed consciousness in this world, which he experiences only as a shadow of the other. Some magicians and Gnostics believe that sexuality can be used as a key, or a door, into other realities (there are, of course, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Tantric versions of this as well).[4] They distinguish between ascetic and libertine approaches.
Gnosticism is an iridescent set of overlapping traditions and permanent self-reinventions, capable of contradicting themselves without contradiction.[5] The fusion of different transmissions produces a curious mixture of unrelated elements in an only apparently unified conception of Gnosis. It is therefore wrong to assume that all Gnostics are Spermo-Gnostics. But in the context of the O.T.O. it is primarily these who must be discussed.
Given the existing abundance of writings, it is impossible to treat exhaustively all areas concerned with Gnosis. I shall only let the complex Gnostic traditions sound in outline; I shall not touch the extensive literature, the individual cosmological models, or the history of earlier Gnostic groups.[6] I proceed directly to the Gnostics of the twentieth century[7] and for the most part leave magical world-views to one side. This essay touches the place of origin of modern Gnosis: namely its worldly level, where the history of organised Gnostics is most heavily influenced. This justifies mentioning what, viewed superficially from a banal frog’s-eye perspective, might too quickly be reduced to milieu gossip. Yet it is in no way intended to satisfy tabloid curiosity, to denounce anyone, or to participate in the increasing public exposure and scandalisation of what was formerly private in the media landscape.
01
Salvation
To exist in a world that is subjectively experienced as rotten (a Gnostic expression) cries out for salvation. This salvation from the vale of tears, from hell, from the oppressive burden, begins with the physical body. It reaches into higher spheres (for example the emotional plane and the intellect) and proceeds by stages until the human being, with the aid of the collected Logos, can once again take his originally appointed divine place in the heavenly Pleroma. This Pleroma, whether defined within the human being or outside in space/heaven, is the Gnostic counter-place to the rotten earth. Two paths may be followed in order to leave rottenness behind: to suppress or avoid it (the ascetic concept), or to dissolve it by living it through completely (the sensual path). On a higher level one may formulate it the other way round. The sensual path leads to homeopathic asceticism: to the weakening of evil by necessarily giving oneself to it. The sensual Gnostic embraces sin in order to experience the rot of the world and to rise, phoenix-like, from its ashes. Sex sweats out the divine Logos, which enters the Pleroma. The ascetic, by contrast, administers contempt for the body as medicine against the poison of existence,[8] since human being and world poison one another. In the ascetic vocabulary this is called “the immediate return of the ‘lost son’ to God is the goal of the Gnostics.”[9]
The world-view of homeopathy introduced above is, astonishingly often, also put into practice by ascetic Gnostics. Homeopathy does indeed have much in common with Gnosticism.[10] Classical homeopathy and Gnosticism both regard the material plane, that is, the body, as the least significant one for the development of the human being, even though matter is regarded as the site of symptoms. Both concepts strive to return humanity and the individual to an original state of order and wholeness, centred at the most important place: in heaven and in the soul.
Both homeopathy and Gnosticism teach that healing/salvation works from Above to Below and from Inside to Outside (according to Hermes Trismegistus). Yet while the Gnostics seek salvation either by Optimum through Maximum or Optimum through Minimum, homeopathy searches for the golden mean of order.
The central concern of ascetic and libertine Gnostics stands or falls with their concept of sperm. For sperm alone contains the divine Logos, which, possibly placed by the man into the woman, must be brought back into the Pleroma.[11] Two questions force themselves upon us: 1. Can women be saved? and 2. What are we to do with the sperm?
These two questions are the most delicate in the history of modern Gnosticism and have provoked heated discussions among members of the various O.T.O. groups since early versions of this essay began to appear as articles from 1995 onward. A number of fruitful comments by those involved have now been incorporated into the following sections.
02
The Misogynists
Since the greed of the female aspect of the creative deity, or Eve’s fall, is said to have caused the descent into the profane, it is now Adam’s duty to restore the universe to its completeness. Physically, woman is punished for her fall with the painful wound between her legs:[12] at precisely that place where man is said to have been formerly connected with her and one with her: then a single body, the perfect androgyne, the complete human being. [13] Thus now only the man experiences the lust that tore the universe apart at the beginning. Woman must suffer. After the tearing-apart of the androgynous Adam, only sperm still transports the Holy Logos. Women have no prostate[14] and are entirely superfluous for the salvation of the man, so long as he does not strive for androgyny with their aid.[15]
Many Gnostic movements, whether old and traditional or new and modern, assign the possibility and task of salvation to the man alone. Women must first become men in order to be saved.[16]
If the ascetic Gnostic experiences the world as rotten throughout, he avoids the begetting and bearing of children and becomes a vegetarian. An ascetic avoids ejaculation even with his own wife and, with the aid of yogic practices,[17] directs his sexual energies into his head, where he defines the direct bridge to the Divine, and lets the woman participate in HIS marvellous ability to produce the Logos.[18] To attain androgyny, he penetrates his wife without orgasm so that she too may profit from his good fortune (in this ideological environment one also finds certain Rosicrucians).[19] The sensual Gnostic, by contrast, uses ALL women in order to sweat out his Pneuma.
If the Gnostic wishes to make use of woman, then she is to serve merely as opening/gate to higher entities and states of consciousness. As a sexual magician he needs only to smear her vaginal secretion or blood upon a crystal ball.[20] In the O.T.O. groups both world-views and practices are mingled.
Our two questions (1. can women be saved? and 2. what are we to do with the sperm?) are inseparable. Only sperm offers salvation, and women must become men.[21] Put differently: contact with sperm, or its consumption, and the body’s ability to produce it, render one capable of salvation or capable of power over the world.[22]
A multitude of themes and questions opens the field for the modern sophists. [23] Is salvation possible without returning to the wholeness of what had previously been torn apart? Could there be a perfection different from that of the original creator-god, without a female aspect, without a fall?
03
The Sophists of the Modern World
The idea that belief is driven by sexual impulses reappears in the course of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the Enlightenment. Systematic arguments for the sexual origin of religions can be traced around 1780. [24] In 1883 James George Roche Forlong uses the expression “Phallo–Solar worshippers” for the population in the Anglo-Indian territories.[25]
Three famous protagonists in the orbit of the O.T.O. phenomenon are: the Austrian Carl Kellner (1851–1905), the German Theodor Reuss (1855–1923), and the Englishman Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). These modern Gnostics (and their followers) are Spermo-Gnostics: they connect sperm with the Holy Logos; and, at least in the cases of Reuss and Crowley, they appear to be misogynists. [26] Yet while Reuss’s biography[27] opens itself to both paths of salvation, the ascetic and the libertine, Crowley’s libertine biography[28] shows an individual whose universe contracts more each day and whose reality becomes populated by magical demons which, even at the darkest moment, do not dissolve homeopathically in order to release the way of the phoenix.
04
The Occult Circle around Kellner, 1895
While H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, active at the same time, warns against unclean yogic practices disapproved of by the Masters, Kellner learns and teaches Hatha Yoga, oriented toward the philosophies of Samkhya, Advaita and his friend Franz Hartmann (1838–1912). He immerses himself in meditations in order to relive earlier incarnations (Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra),[29] in which he worships his wife as the Great Goddess. He himself sees himself as a Babylonian priest. In one of his villas there is a windowless cellar room in which, according to the family’s oral history, alchemical experiments take place in order to produce the elixir of life.[30] The Masonic-like structure of the O.T.O., developed by Theodor Reuss only after Kellner’s death, does not enter Kellner’s private Hatha Yoga circle. No evidence can be found that the term O.T.O. could already have existed during Kellner’s lifetime. His private circle calls itself the Occult Circle or Inner Triangle, and merely rhetorically connotes being bound into something else. With Kellner’s death the existence of this loose private circle around Hatha Yoga comes to an end. Kellner may possibly have led a loose German-speaking group of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light (HBL, see below), which he may have brought to Europe as one of the twelve (new?) founders in Boston/Chicago in 1895. There is, however, no evidence for this. Techniques of this HBL include, among other things, the use of consciousness-expanding drugs or the magical focusing of a particular wish upon a talisman. [31] There may have been dual memberships between this loose HBL group and some organisations annexed by Kellner and Reuss, for example the Memphis–Misraim Rite or the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and indeed the Hatha Yoga circle. [32] [No written documents exist for the speculations in this section.]
05
Fraternitas Lucis Hermetica = Hermetic Brotherhood of Light? [33]
In the 1960s the Swiss O.T.O. communicates to interested parties its opinion on the connections among the various orders: “The true active members of the O.T.O. are called Hermetic Brothers of Light or Illuminati, as was historically established by Fra Peregrinus X° O.T.O. (Theodor Reuss) and Baphomet XI° O.T.O. (Aleister Crowley).”[34]
As to the history: The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor is traced back to Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875). Its inner circle is called the Fraternity of Eleusis. In 1886 the HBL, existing only in Boston, is closed; the Eulis Brotherhood is then founded, which may have influenced Carl Kellner or also the Frenchman Encausse/Papus.
On 22 January 1917 Reuss still presents the O.T.O. in his manifesto “Anational Grandloge & Mystic Temple: Verità Mistica, Or. Ascona” as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light.[35]
It must be assumed, however, that this was merely a piece of Reussian swindle, since in a letter to Crowley he admitted that using the name “Hermetic Brotherhood of Light” was done only for “tactical reasons”. In truth Reuss meant the “Asiatic Brethren of Light”. Whether Kellner’s private HBL circle, if it existed at all, had any connection with this is not demonstrable. The labels wander, the documents limp behind them, and the esoteric filing cabinet performs its little aria.
06
Brothers of the Light of the Seven Churches in Asia
After being expelled in 1780 from the Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross, Baron Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhoffen (1750–1790) lays the foundation in 1781 for the Asiatic Brethren of the Rosy Cross, allegedly by reviving the “mighty and wise Order of the Knights and Brothers of Light”. The Knights of Light claim to derive their origin from the seven wise fathers, the leaders of the seven churches in Asia. The order presents itself as a collecting-basin for Christians and Jews, probably also Muslims from Turkey, Persia and Armenia. This brings about a syncretistic absorption of the most varied elements, above all also Kabbalah and Gnosis. Members first pass through various preliminary stages before finally being admitted into the exalted circle of those who truly know.
Like Theodor Reuss later, Ecker is accused of having founded his order merely as a money-making enterprise. Yet the Asiatic Brethren are important here because they provide a historical and rhetorical bridge: “Light”, “Asia”, “Brethren”, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah and Gnosis are joined in one symbolic warehouse. Reuss could take up such resonances and redeploy them tactically. The history of the O.T.O. is therefore not the linear continuation of an ancient order, but a modern bricolage of titles, patents, Masonic structures and occult self-authorisation.[36]
07
The O.T.O. under Theodor Reuss
After Carl Kellner’s death in 1905, Reuss transfers Kellner’s Hatha Yoga into a Masonic-like system in which the first seven ritually conferred degrees serve to open the chakras[37], while the final, sexual-magical degrees of knowledge are conferred only per communicatio. The X° designates the national leader, subordinated to the worldwide head, the Outer Head of Order, O.H.O. Reuss expands Kellner’s yogic practices by adding Manichaeism.[38] In Manichaeism, matter is evil, a place of decay. Although Manichaeism in its writings expresses itself in explicitly ascetic terms (no meat, no marriage, no sexual intercourse), there are also other reports. Without going into detail: it is a fixed element of Manichaeism that angels unite sexually with the Archons and thereby loosen their bad fetters. The Archons are the powers that inhabit the onion-layered universe and enslave human beings. The singular Archon is the Demiurge, the world-fashioner/creator. Through the marriage of the good with the bad the souls are washed clean, and what remains is “mixed into all species on earth.”
The sexual organs are regarded as holy, and a Holy Mass symbolically depicts the permanent re-creation of the universe.[39] The basic idea is that the co-operation of woman and man promotes spiritual development. The sexual plane is considered a mirror of the cosmic act of creation. Performed by initiates, the image of primal creation is reinforced. Thus the divine quality of creation is preserved: eternal and perpetual, instead of unique and finished. This differs from Christianity, which assigns God’s act of creation to a specific and past moment. The states of sensual excitation accumulating within woman and man during intercourse do not arise solely from physical points of contact, but also from the woman–man polarity per se. Correctly applied breathing influences the chemistry of the bloodstream and the cerebral environment. Consciousness and ego give way to the Divine. By collecting the sexual fluids, the divine act is continued and condensed. In Reuss’s O.T.O. the sexual act becomes a sacramental act, a mystical wedding with God.[40]
Reuss’s published and unpublished material shows the fusion of Masonic, Rosicrucian, gnostic and sexual-magical motifs. He links ecclesiastical forms, Masonic titles and the language of esoteric illumination with the practical question of what is to be done with the secretions of the body. In this structure, the “higher” degrees contain the alleged secret: the handling of sexual force, the elixir of life, and the sacramental reinterpretation of bodily fluids.[41] Reuss’s system remained unstable: an order, a church, a Masonic substitute, a sexual-magic laboratory, a rhetoric of “light”, and at times a decidedly tactical business arrangement.[42]
By 1920 Reuss is still formulating the construction programme and guiding principles of the Gnostic Neo-Christians O.T.O.[43] He dies in 1923. Crowley’s later claim to inherit or replace him must therefore be read against a landscape of loose authorities, private documents, ritual borrowings, tactical titles and the usual occult paperwork with seals attached. Crowley himself would later write to William B. Crow.[44]
08
The O.T.O. under Aleister Crowley
After Reuss’s death in 1923, Crowley turns the O.T.O. into an enterprise for raising money.[45] He wishes to sell the elixir of life, under the name Amrita, commercially as “Magical Medicine”[46] and to heal patients according to “O.T.O. methods”:[47] by means of yogic practices and sexual secretions.[48] Like many other, sometimes imaginary, orders, Crowley uses the O.T.O. to draw money from his followers’ pockets. To this end he insists that sex is to be avoided for pure pleasure’s sake,[49] and must always be conceived as prayer to his own deity (appearing under various names: Aiwaz, Baphomet, Sheitan)[50] — ultimately as prayer to his own person, identified with an erect penis.[51] Crowley himself likes to see himself as “a Messiah.”[52]
“Bodily secretions, suppressed, infiltrate the tissues, poisoning them. Semen unnaturally accumulated clogs the brain as bile does; morbid mental and moral symptoms result. Sex is a physiological process; interference perverts it. [...] In the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù sex is studied scientifically without shame or subterfuge. Passions are physiologically assayed; all acts are allowed, if they injure not others; approved, if they injure not self.”[53]
And how do Crowleyans proceed scientifically? Everything is written down neatly and must take place according to prescription. In Crowley’s VIII° his followers ejaculate upon medieval demon-seals or meditate with the aid of the statue of a golden phallus in order to come into contact with their own Holy Guardian Angel/superego.[54] In the IX° act the sexual secretions (including sperm) are sucked from the vagina and, if not consumed as holy, placed upon a seal that commands a demon to fulfil a particular wish.[55] In his text “Emblems and Mode of Use”[56] Crowley cloaks the technicalities in alchemical language: penis, vagina, sperm, blood and menstruation become furnace, retort, red lion and serpent.[57]
The elixir of life is not a metaphor merely floating in the air. It becomes test-question, ritual object, commercial fantasy and magical technology.[58] Egregores, magical projections and the bureaucratic afterlife of orders thicken the matter still further.[59] Crowley’s system pushes beyond Reuss: the IX° is not enough; the XI° becomes the darker chamber of the system.[60][61] Crowley could also imagine men as Scarlet Women while masturbating.[62] Modern members have not always found the initiatory language harmless; some have called it sexist, archaic and plainly insulting.[63]
Texts such as Liber Agape and De Arte Magica[64] show the same mixture: sexual act, magical command, Eucharistic parody, and the will dressed up as cosmic necessity. Crowley’s image of woman[65] is not redeemed by occasional rhetoric of polarity. It can be equally contemptuous toward men.[66] His fantasies and wish-images[67], his Book of Lies[68], and his practice of turning body, desire and command into ritual machinery, make clear that in Crowley the Gnostic problem of the Logos is displaced into a magical technology of personal will.
09
A Simple Manual of Sexual Magick
Keep disturbances away, keep the current of thought pure and powerfully directed at the aim, and masturbate before intercourse until just before the onset of orgasm. The properly formed and sexually-magically enlivened sperm is produced during masturbation already before the ritual begins, and precisely during the highest concentration upon the wish to be realised (for example money); that is, as soon as the inner image of the specific will is projected onto the sperm not yet ejaculated.
It is sometimes necessary to use sexual-magical partners who know nothing of all this. Unfortunately, difficulties often arise as soon as these persons notice what is in store for them.
Once the penis has entered the partner, mind and will must be continuously and intensely directed at the wish to be fulfilled. In order to produce perfect agreement between the magician and his partner, a mantra must be murmured during the act (O Highest, or Aum). It is of the greatest importance that during orgasm (which may be extended for several minutes) the will must remain continuously concentrated upon the specific wish — and may come to rest only when the sexual magician’s sperm has mingled with the bodily fluids of his sexual-magical partners. All partners should experience orgasm simultaneously.[69]
The duration of the act should be between two and five hours. The orgasm itself must be extended as long as possible. Success depends upon perfect control. This is the meaning of the sentence “Love is the law, love under the control of will.”
The result of the entire act is called the Philosopher’s Stone or Universal Medicine. The perfectly prepared sexual-magical elixir of sperm, vaginal secretions and other bodily fluids must now preferably be collected by the magician by sucking it from the vagina or anus (if excrement is also to play a part) and shared again with the partner. The correctly prepared sexual-magical elixir is powerful, sweet and strong. It is passed rhythmically from one partner to the other within the mouth-cavities without coming into contact with the air. It must be absorbed by the mucous membranes and must not be swallowed.[70]
In the Asian analogies sometimes invoked here, sperm is imagined as the carrier of subtle energies.[71] In the O.T.O. variation the matter becomes vampiric as well: a sacramental circulation of fluids, command and absorption.[72]
10
An O.T.O. Variation of a Sexual-Magical Initiation
In 1999 the Brazilian Marcelo Santos takes part in England in the sexual-magical rituals of the couple David and Irene Fraenkl–Rietti. In 1996, with the aid of Ralph Tegtmeier, active in the milieu of the Fraternitas Saturni, these two had founded the OTO Foundation. Santos reports: “VII° – bla–bla: how important it is to be fair and just with your brothers etc. VIII° – Three officers. After wasting three hours reading the previous rituals (the candidate is forbidden to speak during this time), the C. is taken to the temple. A bla–bla follows. Then, one of the officers perform the preaching of the Mass of the Phoenix while masturbating. He ejaculates upon the cakes upon ther altar and distributes the disgusting thing between the candidates, telling them to eat it. (Of course, I only pretended I was chewing, and threw that piece of cake under the chair I was sat upon. The brazilian ‘king’ did the very same). After that, the candidates are separated: women go to a place in the temple; men to another. Women hear a bla–bla about the ‘rite of stella maris’, something about female masturbation. Men hear ‘Nuptiis Secretis...’. Another masturbation and ejaculation and distribution of disgusting melted pieces of cake follows. Finis. IX° – The same cerimony of Minerval, including the same words and signs etc, but with the three I°–III° officers: S., E., and W. In the end, Saladin says ‘The journey never ends’ or something like. Then, Saladin tells the W. to perform the Star Ruby. After that, Saladin and Emir perform the Star Saphire. S. and E. copulate. E. collects the moisture of sperm and female fluids from within her vagina and distributes between the candidates. Finis. X° – Firstly, the to–be–king ‘receives’ the ‘highest M–M national degree’, while holding the penis of the initiator with his right hand. Then he’s made an ‘OTO king’ (hahaha). Then the king receives ‘Grimorium Sanctissimum’ as it was the X° instruction and is instructed to perform it as soon as he gets back to his country!!!”
PRK: “who wrote those rituals?!”
Santos: “The british king and David Rietti did. The others were copied from YOUR book [How To Make Your Own McOTO, Munich 1996] (I saw it with my very eyes).”[73]
11
Stranded Bishops
Taking over only half of the duties of the Manichaean Elect — namely, by consumption, to gather again the Divine Light which the Logos spermatikos left behind in traces within the human being when it returned to the Pleroma — Crowley and Reuss neglect the ascetic aspect of Manichaeism (no physical activities, abstention from meat, etc., which would again scatter the Divine Light in the human being) and concentrate upon producing the Divine Body of Light, which by consumption is supposed to make possible the return into the holy region of heaven, the Pleroma.[74] This Body of Light is the host consisting of sperm, vaginal secretions and menstrual blood. Thus the Gnostic Catholic Mass à la O.T.O.[75] and the IX° O.T.O. become a parody of the Christian Eucharist, above all as regards consumption of the host (which is also regarded as Universal Medicine). Chevalier Le Clément de Saint–Marcq[76] also discovered the secret and published in 1906: “How can a man cause his flesh to be eaten and his blood to be drunk without cutting himself, tearing away a limb, injuring himself, or damaging the wholeness of his body? We have no choice; we must take it as science supplies it to us: the sperm of man is edible: semi-solid, semi-liquid, and can therefore be eaten and drunk at the same time; and is thus at the same time flesh and blood.” And: “It is therefore not complete superstition, this absolute faith in establishing a connection between man and God by eating sperm.” That is the central secret of the O.T.O.[77]
Crowley gives an exact recipe for producing his host already six years before joining the O.T.O. in 1910.[78] Today variations are in use. To avoid HIV infection, the American O.T.O. founded in 1977 (the Caliphate) recommends baking the Cakes of Light/host, if they contain sperm, vaginal secretions and/or blood, in the oven at 70° Celsius.[79] In the III° initiation ritual a chalice containing a “bitter draught” is likewise offered.
The head of this group, William Breeze, comments: “The original ritual specified blood and laudanum. The use of either of these substances is against O.T.O. regulations for very sound reasons of medical and legal liability.” Recommended instead are: “Angostura bitter, Fernet Branca, or a mixture of vodka and powdered myrrh.”[80] A little ash from Cakes of Light prepared according to the original recipe (Liber AL III;23ff.) may, however, be added to the host.[81]
Discrepancies of an eschatological nature are settled by vote within the corporate cadre: “the Supreme Council voted to recognize that that Aeon of Horus exceeds 2,000 Solar years in length–––this is a position statement for the official view of the Order.”[82]
Crowley also uses a very particular mixture for his host. Between 1920 and 1923 he indulges in cocaine, ether and heroin,[83] in coprophagy and in sadomasochistic fantasies in which he functions as slave. “In my Mass the Host is of excrement [of his Scarlet Whores],[84] that I can consume in awe and adoration; while I make my Holy Guardian Angel the latrine of my imagination.”[85] In sadomasochism all forms of religious piety come to expression (kneeling, praying, adoring, sacrificing, invoking, punishing) and are lived out in their ideal roles: the discovery of the perfect Superior and the perfect slave (Crowley). The eternal feeling of guilt is transferred to the slave’s environment and contaminates it: whoever loved Crowley or became tender toward him had therefore to be destroyed by him, for Crowley can love only the unattainable: the Great Absent Father and his impersonal Scarlet Whore (which is, after all, an office, a ritualised stereotype, and can therefore also be a man), who rides upon him, the self-proclaimed Beast (as in his Tarot card). Self-denial expresses itself in the protection of the principle Thelema; the dulling of the body in drug consumption and yogic bodily exercises. Lustful inferiority seeks itself in resistance to all reason. In this way Crowley (in the system of the A.·.A.·.) is forced to recognise the limits of his personal god, logic (in the Abyss, Choronzon),[86] and to drive self-destruction so far that the possibility of rational thinking is destroyed (Egg of the Abyss).[87] Crowley expresses his guilt through coprophagy: by judging and punishing others (his followers and the non-Thelemites), he makes himself his own authority (the Eternal Great Absent Father-figure), while at the same time seeking protection himself. Together with his religious longing to lose control before a higher being (Aiwaz, his Holy Guardian Angel) and to act as the messenger of a higher power (therefore himself becoming usable material for manipulation),[88] he reaches with open arms for the deadly wound of self-erasure by means of self-abasement through complete identification with the low. To become manipulable maya himself: the excrement of the Scarlet Whore purifies the slave and additionally lets him seize a divine relic that supplies him with energy.[89] In other words, Crowley’s overcompensation of inferiority leads to a striving for Divine Normality, that is, for the Gilded Excretions.[90] Long before discovering sexual magic, the twenty-two-year-old Crowley dreams in 1898, in a poem, of his submission:
“Thy head beneath the mire / And dung of worthless women shall desire [...] Woman must trample thee till thou respire / That deadliest fume.” And “I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave.” He gladly follows the summons of his Scarlet Whore Leah Hirsig to eat her excrement, served on a silver tray, while she extinguishes her cigarette on his chest. And when she empties her urine over him, he writes “Straddle your Beast, My Masterful Bitch [...] Now from your wide Raw cunt, the abyss / Send spouting the tide / Of your sizzling piss / In my mouth; oh my whore / Let it pour, let it pour!”[91]
Into his diary of 12 August 1920 he writes: “And I the Worm have trailed my slug–slow slime across Her Breasts; so that Her mother–mood is turned and Her breasts itch with lust of Incest...” [the long passage follows in Crowley’s own English in the source tradition, and is retained in the German apparatus of this article as evidence of the rhetoric of abasement, sexualised blasphemy and self-erasure].
In Crowley’s case sadomasochism fails because of the inability of the chosen Scarlet Whores to be correct sadists[92]: he chooses potential alcoholics whose weak ego-barrier must be broken through in trance by non-human entities during magical rituals. Crowley then turns against them, attacks them, discards them as objects of use. Thus his humiliation is not followed by a satisfying glorification. His Guardian Angel, to whom he submits as to one of his Scarlet Whores,[93] withdraws from him,[94] becomes, over time, an external being and finally disappears altogether.[95]
If any Gnostic superstructure ever gave stability to the O.T.O. under Reuss, with Crowley religiosity is definitively displaced by magic and so-called self-deification.[96] Although Crowley’s O.T.O. still speaks of the Sanctuary of the Gnosis (meaning the sexual-magical degrees), little Gnosis seems to remain. The meaning of sperm as Logos is no longer used by Crowley, who for the most part uses it practically-magically for his worldly interests. The human being become God à la Crowley merely wishes to command earthly beings by the power of his divinity. Until final deification is achieved, he wishes merely to stimulate himself through ritual identification with the Divine.[97] The latter is also the centre and aim of Reuss’s O.T.O. Reuss’s “act of love performed under control of the will in God,” “a sacramental act, a mystical marriage with God,” a communicating, a uniting with God, turns in Crowley into becoming God oneself.[98] As magician, Crowley does not dissolve in the light; he lives through a process of becoming in the earthly realm. He misses, as a Gnostic, the dissolution into the flowing light of the Divine. Crowley’s universe consists of theoretical ritualisations of concepts of self-dissolution, strategies of uncoupling personality, identity and action, which in Crowley himself and in his followers degenerate into narcissistic self-stylisations and experiments in self-training.
The Gnostic Church attached to the Caliphate parodies the Roman Catholic Church by introducing offices such as patriarch, archbishop, bishop, novice, priest and deacon (naturally also in the feminine form). Reuss and Crowley had already supplied the impulse for this with priest and deacon in their Gnostic Mass of the 1910s. Today the offer is extended by further ceremonies: infant baptism, adult baptism, confirmation, ordination of the deacon, wedding, funeral celebration and an exorcism. In addition there is a ceremony for visiting the sick and for maintenance visits, blessings of animals[99] and, of course, a list of saints (which, except in special cases, contains no women). Deceased O.H.O.s automatically become holy.
Christian prayers of the Roman Catholic Church are attached to the V° ritual: “The Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus”, “The Litany of Saint Joseph”, and the “Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary”.[100] This is to be understood as reference to the Great Magician (Jesus) of the past Aeon, as a reminder that the Great Cycles build upon one another and that the True Master Jesus was by no means the political drill-master which Paulinism (that is, the Pope) makes him out to be. These prayers and O.T.O. rituals are accompanied by music by Mozart, Holst, Strauss and Mahler.[101] Regardless of the traditional meaning of the term wandering bishops, some American O.T.O. bishops call themselves landed bishops.[102]
In 2010 the Caliphate promotes itself as a “Church you can believe in.”[103]
12
Do clogged chakras sweat out Pleroma?
The O.T.O. was and still is part of the ethnological underground of culture, which seeks and attracts the attention of the mainstream. At the bottom of this shaft, no longer quite so dark in the meantime, lies merely a handful of sperm. And because this fact is too simple, and perhaps too embarrassing, it is wrapped by the adherents of these teachings in euphemisms. The ancient Gnostics were less prudish and named their religious-sexual techniques (avoidance of ejaculation or consumption of sexual secretions). The modern Gnostic, by contrast, shops in the supermarket of Western and Eastern traditions outside traditional Spermo-Gnosticism[104] in order to hide the sperm in the innermost sanctuary of his temple.[105] The fracture in the universe is to be patched up — at least outwardly — with rituals, liturgies, songs, mantras, consecrations and grand words. Thus the mystery has been lost: too much materialism prevails in the O.T.O. groups, dragging the seeker down and preventing him from becoming one with the Divine. After many years of membership and numerous membership fees, after buying all the books of the adored prophet Crowley, after reading them and rather quickly learning the secret, the O.T.O. member may notice that membership cannot convey any organised and channelled Gnosis. These O.T.O. members never come closer to Gnosis than through sex with their bishop. All this, together with the complex order-structure,[106] the orientation of the teachings toward Crowley’s deficient biography, and the mixture of Gnostic doctrines with projections of charismatic leaders, makes the O.T.O. itself appear as an unbearably rotten place. Unbrotherly behaviour, inflated egos,[107] lies, intrigues and hysteria produce endless O.T.O. splinter-groups which threaten one another with lawsuits and seem to produce anything rather than the Gnosis originally sought.
Crowley’s O.T.O. groups are filled to the belly with his concept of Thelema, used as a filter against history, religion, philosophy, magic and everyday life.[108] Many Crowley followers are shocked by the implicitly homosexual background of the view that only sperm transports the Holy Logos[109] and believe this to be a mishandling and misunderstanding of the act of creation. In a more contemporary tone they propagate a Gnostic equality of the feminine with the masculine and place procreation, that is, creation, at the Gnostic centre. Nevertheless they continue to force a Qabalistic understanding of sperm as bearer of the Logos: namely by still treating the woman as the “giver of form” and using her magically-Gnostically only as such.[110] In Thelema the Gnostic propositions are adapted to the doctrine of the True Will: every man and every woman has a reason for existence; they have wilfully decided to descend to the rotten earth and fulfil a mission, even though they have forgotten it — so the Caliphate says. Their task is not merely to escape the rotten earth again[111], but also to discover why they came[112] and which function they are to fulfil.[113] All in all, Thelema seems per se to radiate rottenness.[114] Thanatos, no longer much favoured in psychology, seems to assume the form and mask of Eros.
In 2002, one year after the publication of an early version of this essay, David Scriven, X° of the Caliphate, arrived at the following thoughts: “Before the processes of mitosis and meiosis were fully understood, there was a great deal of speculation and contention about which sex was responsible for carrying the true Essence of Life ... Crowley reproduced Hartsoecker’s Homunculus on the Hermit Trump of the Thoth Tarot Deck.” Scriven continues that advocates of Crowley’s “scientific religion” must be prepared to discard scientific doctrines when they become obsolete, even where such doctrines support spiritual and social paradigms. Holy books, historical writings and customary rites may be revered for their historical, symbolic, spiritual and talismanic value; but the order must not bind itself to interpretations based on outmoded and discredited ideas about nature. “A true symbol is not merely a cipher.”[115]
Although all the O.T.O. groups as a whole seem a rotten place in which the seeker could easily enter the Pleroma, hardly any Gnosis takes place[116] and dia-gnosis is required. The order becomes a maternal projection screen upon which father figures (for example Crowley) are thrown. The sexual revolution of pleasure and Gnosis degenerates and suffers psychological deformations.[117] This Gnosis brings neither homeopathic (sensual) nor allopathic (ascetic) salvation.
13
Sperm as Homeopathic Medicine?
Gnostic and homeopath both try to bring the human being closer again to the Divine Order of the universe. The Gnostic seeks the immediate presence of the Divine, while the homeopath strives for the greatest possible equilibrium of the individual in order with the universe. Hippocrates held that illness came from God; from Above; and that the material plane was to be regarded as wounded divinity. Some Gnostics now see in sperm the universal (alchemical) medicine that heals everything.
During my investigations of the O.T.O. phenomenon I encountered various ascetic Spermo-Gnostics who practise homeopathy. For this reason I now attempt to discuss the possible homeopathic aspect of sperm-consumption.
It is my view that, once sperm is defined as the vehicle of the Divine Logos, it CANNOT at the same time function as a homeopathic medicine, since the similarity of the homeopathic medicine correlates with the similarity of a sick patient on the level of an absolute and individual unity of all symptoms, and with the peculiarity of a superordinate disease/disorder. Freudianly speaking, in homeopathy every prescription is based on the totality of symptoms in which the working of the defence mechanism finds visible expression. Logos as homeopathic medicine would, per definitionem, dissolve Logos. In order to function as a homeopathic medicine, sperm would first have to become medicine, which as a substance it is not (yet). It would therefore have to be prepared according to homeopathic procedures in order to assume a new nature on a higher level and to influence the patient’s superordinate disease/disorder. This homeopathic method is called potentisation. The substance is diluted, sometimes beyond the limit at which scientists can still detect its molecules, while the product is additionally shaken or struck according to a particular method. Up to now neither scientists nor homeopaths have found an explanation of the action of homeopathy satisfactory to both sides. Practice, however, shows that homeopathic methods transfer the substance into a higher energetic state: into a healing state; the procedure recalls the transubstantiation of a Catholic Mass. But what would be the Gnostic benefit of such a process, since according to the Gnostic view the substance (that is, the sperm) contains the Logos from the outset? And what about the human-energetic aspects, for example a potentised miasmatic predisposition such as syphilis, or the case of HIV? What would be triggered by a potentised HI virus? This question has not yet been answered.
I have met homeopaths who would use sperm (as they already use other substances produced by the body, such as urine, or even disease-products). In their view, sperm as homeopathic medicine would not, however, produce divinity: the vision of homeopathy does not explain the introduction of divinity. While Gnostics and mystics move beyond their everyday consciousness, and magicians attempt to control matter, homeopaths merely transfer their remedies out of the realm of matter by potentisation.
The use of homeopathic sperm would depend upon the totality and uniqueness of the symptoms produced by sperm (whether potentised or perhaps not) in a healthy individual. These effects could then be applied to similar symptoms in a sick patient.[118] [Further thoughts in the chapter on “Correct Gnosticism” in The O.T.O. Phenomenon RELOAD, Munich 2011].
There is also the question of the religious sense or nonsense of the practice of some O.T.O. groups of baking their host of blood, sperm and vaginal secretions (used in their Gnostic Masses) at 70° Celsius in the oven beforehand in order to kill a possible HI virus. What effect does heat have upon the Gnostic Logos? In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, on the theme of heat and Logos/Jesus, it says: “And Jesus said: He who is near me is near the fire.” Others place their sperm in a mouthful of brandy: Spiritus Sanctus? And what exactly does the AIDS-denier Harvey Bialy, who sits in the Cabinet of the Caliphate, actually recommend?[119]
What about the salvation of all the women who are forced by men to swallow sperm? Should these women not then be far more saved than their oppressors? Can such women really not be saved, but would have to become oppressors themselves?[120]
14
Isopathy?
Even if sperm is seen as carrier of the divine Logos, it could hardly be used as a homeopathic remedy, since the similarity of the homeopathic dose is based on the level of the holistic individual total symptomatology and peculiarity of a superordinate disease.[121] In order for sperm to unfold pharmacological effects as a homeopathic universal medicine, it would first have to become a medicine, which as a substance it is not. It would become such only if one treated it according to Hahnemann’s method of preparation, that is, transferred it from its material into its energetic state. To potentise it, however, would be unnecessary if the Logos were already immanent. Since the human aspect would moreover not be eliminated but potentised, and since miasmatic/homeopathic predispositions may possibly be transmitted not only through DNA but also through the influence of diseases during the lifetime of the parent via conception to the next generation (for example syphilis),[122] sperm for these reasons should not be considered as a homeopathic dose/universal medicine, even in potentised form, without the most exact prior proving. This problem of ideal sperm would show itself consistently in an HIV-infected substance.[123] The vision of homeopathy does not explain the introduction of divinity. So far, however, no homeopathic provings with sperm, whether potentised or not, have become known, so that all related questions remain open.
A possible connection between sperm-consumption and the healing art could be established through isopathy. While homeopathy works with foreign substances, bodily substances and disease-products, isopathy prefers substances foreign to the body and those produced by the body, for example blood and urine, as disease-causing agent (substance, pathogen), also in potentised form. Isos pathos means equal to the suffering. Here the spiritual kinship of isopathy with Spermo-Gnosis reveals itself. Keep the following scheme in mind:
Arsenic in arsenic poisoning
Streptococcal potencies in streptococcal infection
Sperm in sperm-poisoning
Logos in Logos-poisoning.[124]
With the suppleness of Gnostic thinking this should be practicable without further difficulty; it does, however, raise additional questions: which divinity or which Logos acts poisonously upon whom or what — or whether it would not be simpler to continue supplying oneself with the Logos, or uniting oneself with it, in the old-fashioned Gnostic-Tantric-yogic manner without a homeopathic and/or isopathic concept.
There is also the question of what effect the Caliphate’s practice of heating the host in Crowley’s Gnostic Mass (if consisting of sperm and menstrual blood) in the oven at 160° Fahrenheit (in order to kill the HI virus)[125] has upon the substance from a Gnostic, homeopathic or isopathic point of view. Is the Amrita really supposed to coagulate?
How is this seen by a Thelemic woman? Linda Falorio, who belongs to no organised Crowley O.T.O., but to the so-called Ma’at Continuum, developing toward a Thelemic Aeon of Ma’at striving for balance (also, for example, in Kenneth Grant’s English O.T.O. group, the Typhonian O.T.O.), commented specifically for this essay.[126]
“A complex question concerning the HI virus. From my human point of view I see no advantage in such an intruder, neither for the Great Work nor for the individual concerned. I think one should ‘banish’ the virus like any entity that takes possession of one, as I understand the retrovirus, which takes over cells for its own purposes [...] or one should trap the virus in the triangle (that is, the condom). Naturally one can then no longer profit directly from the psychosexual fluids, but must make use of them on subtler levels. A powerful magician should be perfectly capable of this, I believe, though he would need a suitable person for it.
Similar questions occur to me regarding physically disabled persons, for example also in cases of vasectomy, or women with hysterectomy, or those beyond menopause.[127] [...] In such cases perhaps a qualified priest or priestess is required, not necessarily the life-partner, to distil the elixir out of the physical. Is not a powerful person capable of producing endogenous endocrines even when the glands have been removed?”
Not all branches of the O.T.O. adopted Crowley’s Thelema. “The reason that [...] aspects of Thelema are omitted is the current problem of how to present Thelema publicly as a religion, in order to be recognised by the state. Thelema is quite clearly counter-normative and at the edges of normative society. Thelema rejects normative values and morality and aims at the transgression and violation of precisely these norms. The inclusion of drugs in the rituals, the positive emphasis on sexuality, which may be seen as promoting promiscuity, and the authoritarian and pro-Nietzschean aspect of Thelema force normative society to reject it, while at the same time Thelema encourages its adherents to reject most aspects of normative society.” [Journal of Thelemic Studies, 1;2, 2008, page 40, translated]
See also
The Milieu of the Templar Reich — The Slaves Shall Serve. Hanns Heinz Ewers — Lanz von Liebenfels — Karl Germer — Arnoldo Krumm-Heller — Martha Kuentzel — Friedrich Lekve — Hermann Joseph Metzger — Christian Bouchet — Paolo Fogagnolo — James Wasserman. Inconvenient aspects in the history of the O.T.O. and Thelema.
- English version: The Templar's Reich — The Slaves Shall Serve.
- French translation: Le Milieu du Reich des Templiers. Les Esclaves Serviront.
- Portuguese translation: O Ambiente do Reich dos Templários — Os Escravos Servirão.
- Romanian translation: Reich–ul Templier — Sclavii trebuie sa serveasca.
15
Transgender
The term gender is now generally used in the social and health sciences to designate the socially constructed roles, behaviours, forms of expression and identities associated with “male”, “female” or gender-diverse; the term sex usually refers to biological characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy, and is today often described more precisely as sex assigned at birth. In occult discussion of sexual magic, the word sex continues to carry its older connotations of semen, spermatozoa and sexual fluids.
The growing awareness of the often clichéd occult topoi of sexuality, gender, male, female (and indeed the entire esoteric topography of the sexes and their multiple representations, including Spermo-Gnosis and sexual magic) has recently brought the relationship between esotericism and transgender more strongly into focus. In contemporary clinical and sociological terminology, transgender functions as an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth; older terms such as transsexual or transident survive mainly in medical or regional contexts and are used — if at all — only for those who explicitly choose this self-designation.[128] The counter-term cisgender denotes people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth.
Alongside the fact that the various O.T.O. groups have become more publicly visible through new media, new styles of thought and internal guidelines have emerged regarding gender-specific questions, which do not leave untouched the traditionally rigid role images of the occult scene. In contemporary Thelemic milieus, debates about gender identity, pronouns and ritualised functions now overlap with discussions of non-binary identities, queer occultisms and so-called gender modality (the relation between gender identity and sex assigned at birth). The O.T.O. occupies a special position here because, on the one hand, it propagates a form of religious transcendence and proclaims that all are welcome, while on the other hand its rituals still imitate traditional gender clichés.
In some O.T.O. jurisdictions, diversity statements and informational material now explicitly emphasise that participation is open to all people — trans, cis and gender-nonconforming — regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. At the same time, the official rubric of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass (Liber XV – Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae) still presupposes a male Priest and a female Priestess; non-binary members and some trans persons are more likely to be referred to intermediate roles (Deacon, Children, congregation). This tension between inclusive self-presentation and binary liturgical structure is among the visible fault-lines of current Thelemic practice.[129]
Crowley’s Gnostic Mass raises tricky questions about the status of semen and transgender persons precisely because it dramatises a sacramental polarity between solar phallus and goddess. Anyone reading the ritual in a strictly gender-essentialist manner will bind the efficacy of the sacrament to a body coded as male (and at least in principle sperm-producing) in the role of the Priest and a body coded as female in the role of the Priestess. Others, including many queer and trans* participants, simply shift the biological aspect of semen and spermatozoa, as well as the question of gender, onto the symbolic plane, where — at least theoretically — everything can be solved without difficulty.
Whether the semen contains spermatozoa or not, whether Priest or Priestess are cisgender or transgender — certain present-day participants in the Gnostic Mass take the view that ultimately only what the congregation actually experiences (or wishes to experience), regardless of genitals and gender identity, counts during the Mass. From this perspective, sacred efficacy and initiation depend more upon consent, intention and embodiment than upon reproductive biology. Critics reply that a purely symbolic Mass ceases to be catholic in the Crowleyan sense, because it dissolves precisely the sexual polarity which the ritual is supposed to stage. On this delicate topic there are numerous debates, lectures and online polemics — no unified solution is in sight.
Within the Fraternitas Saturni, the complex issue of semen is certainly not the central point of contention around which lodge debates revolve; rather, there seems to be a tacit understanding that such questions are to be left within the general social context of personal freedom and responsibility. Today’s Saturn lodges, which connect to the FS tradition to differing degrees, generally refrain from publishing programmatic declarations on transgender or non-binary members; questions of gender identity are negotiated more pragmatically at lodge level than dogmatically from above.
In 2005 a thirty-six-year-old FS member “came out” by disclosing that she had undergone male-to-female transition (today more often described as gender affirmation) — although she was only too aware of the “homophobic attitude of some of my brothers.”
She continued: “How can I make you understand what happiness it means for me to be allowed to be as I feel myself to be? I would especially like to thank my dear sisters, who accepted me into their midst with astonishing matter-of-factness and now help me in the trusted circle with female acclimatisation [sic]. Yes, I realise how alien my development must seem to some of my siblings, primarily from the male sex, how threatening my condition must appear to those who perhaps themselves fear sensing things within themselves.”
Unfortunately, personal problems in the outside world cast a shadow over her membership, and since 2006 she had to take a break from the lodge. Her story nevertheless shows how trans* embodiment in a Saturn lodge can, on the one hand, disturb inherited homophobic reflexes and, at the same time, be accepted as biographical fact — by those brothers and sisters who connect initiation more with consciousness and Saturnian discipline than with policing genital arrangements.
Obviously, for many Gnostics and magicians the fracture in the universe is still open: an abyss between heaven and earth over which they try to build a bridge, ascetically or libertinely.
The growing awareness of the often clichéd occult topoi of sexuality, gender, male, female (and indeed the entire esoteric topography of the sexes and their multiple representations, including Spermo-Gnosis and sexual magic) has recently brought the relationship between esotericism and transgender more strongly into focus. In contemporary clinical and sociological terminology, transgender functions as an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth; older terms such as transsexual or transident survive mainly in medical or regional contexts and are used — if at all — only for those who explicitly choose this self-designation.[128] The counter-term cisgender denotes people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth.
Alongside the fact that the various O.T.O. groups have become more publicly visible through new media, new styles of thought and internal guidelines have emerged regarding gender-specific questions, which do not leave untouched the traditionally rigid role images of the occult scene. In contemporary Thelemic milieus, debates about gender identity, pronouns and ritualised functions now overlap with discussions of non-binary identities, queer occultisms and so-called gender modality (the relation between gender identity and sex assigned at birth). The O.T.O. occupies a special position here because, on the one hand, it propagates a form of religious transcendence and proclaims that all are welcome, while on the other hand its rituals still imitate traditional gender clichés.
In some O.T.O. jurisdictions, diversity statements and informational material now explicitly emphasise that participation is open to all people — trans, cis and gender-nonconforming — regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. At the same time, the official rubric of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass (Liber XV – Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae) still presupposes a male Priest and a female Priestess; non-binary members and some trans persons are more likely to be referred to intermediate roles (Deacon, Children, congregation). This tension between inclusive self-presentation and binary liturgical structure is among the visible fault-lines of current Thelemic practice.[129]
Crowley’s Gnostic Mass raises tricky questions about the status of semen and transgender persons precisely because it dramatises a sacramental polarity between solar phallus and goddess. Anyone reading the ritual in a strictly gender-essentialist manner will bind the efficacy of the sacrament to a body coded as male (and at least in principle sperm-producing) in the role of the Priest and a body coded as female in the role of the Priestess. Others, including many queer and trans* participants, simply shift the biological aspect of semen and spermatozoa, as well as the question of gender, onto the symbolic plane, where — at least theoretically — everything can be solved without difficulty.
Whether the semen contains spermatozoa or not, whether Priest or Priestess are cisgender or transgender — certain present-day participants in the Gnostic Mass take the view that ultimately only what the congregation actually experiences (or wishes to experience), regardless of genitals and gender identity, counts during the Mass. From this perspective, sacred efficacy and initiation depend more upon consent, intention and embodiment than upon reproductive biology. Critics reply that a purely symbolic Mass ceases to be catholic in the Crowleyan sense, because it dissolves precisely the sexual polarity which the ritual is supposed to stage. On this delicate topic there are numerous debates, lectures and online polemics — no unified solution is in sight.
Within the Fraternitas Saturni, the complex issue of semen is certainly not the central point of contention around which lodge debates revolve; rather, there seems to be a tacit understanding that such questions are to be left within the general social context of personal freedom and responsibility. Today’s Saturn lodges, which connect to the FS tradition to differing degrees, generally refrain from publishing programmatic declarations on transgender or non-binary members; questions of gender identity are negotiated more pragmatically at lodge level than dogmatically from above.
In 2005 a thirty-six-year-old FS member “came out” by disclosing that she had undergone male-to-female transition (today more often described as gender affirmation) — although she was only too aware of the “homophobic attitude of some of my brothers.”
She continued: “How can I make you understand what happiness it means for me to be allowed to be as I feel myself to be? I would especially like to thank my dear sisters, who accepted me into their midst with astonishing matter-of-factness and now help me in the trusted circle with female acclimatisation [sic]. Yes, I realise how alien my development must seem to some of my siblings, primarily from the male sex, how threatening my condition must appear to those who perhaps themselves fear sensing things within themselves.”
Unfortunately, personal problems in the outside world cast a shadow over her membership, and since 2006 she had to take a break from the lodge. Her story nevertheless shows how trans* embodiment in a Saturn lodge can, on the one hand, disturb inherited homophobic reflexes and, at the same time, be accepted as biographical fact — by those brothers and sisters who connect initiation more with consciousness and Saturnian discipline than with policing genital arrangements.
Obviously, for many Gnostics and magicians the fracture in the universe is still open: an abyss between heaven and earth over which they try to build a bridge, ascetically or libertinely.
Endnotes
- [1] Short versions of this essay were delivered as lectures for C.E.S.N.U.R. at the University of Rome in 1995 and at the Crowley Congress in Cefalù, 1997.
- [2] Heraclitus: 'The nature of things lies in their tendency to hide' (Fragment 123), and 'Latent structure governs manifest structure' (Fragment 54).
- [3] 'I wander across, and every pain will one day be a sting of voluptuousness,' Hymns to the Night, 1800.
- [4] The term Left-Hand Path denotes the use of sexuality for the expansion of consciousness. This also includes the overcoming of social and cultural taboos. It is questionable whether the impetuous drive toward self-realisation among left-hand adepts can express itself within organised occultism, such as the O.T.O. In summary, the following elements may be identified in the Left-Hand Path: the transformation of human consciousness through sex into divine consciousness; particular attention to the female aspect (for example, the maya to be manipulated flows from Kali's vagina); radical rejection of tradition, society and culture (here Gnosis can also be placed); election or chosenness; emphasis on the manipulation of earthly corporeality in the Here-and-Now through sex — hence the bridge to sexual magic.
- [5] Thus there is no final interpretation of what Thelemites understand by Thelema, nor of what magic is supposed to be, whether there is black, grey or white magic, or whether Thelema is Gnosis. The uninterrupted flow of world-views is presented in the third volume of RELOAD, using Johannes Maikowski as an example.
- [6] A selection: Leonhard Fendt, Gnostic Mysteries, A.R.W., Munich 1922/1980; Peter Sloterdijk, World Revolution of the Soul, I, Artemis, Munich 1991; J.P. Asmussen/A. Böhlig, The Gnosis, III, Artemis, Zurich/Munich 1980; Robert Haardt, The Gnosis, Salzburg 1967; E. Haenchen/M. Kraus, The Gnosis, Artemis, Zurich/Munich 1969; Wilhelm Bousset, Main Problems of Gnosis, Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, Goettingen 1907; Kurt Rudolph, The Gnosis, Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, Goettingen 1980; Hans Jonas, Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, Stuttgart 1934; Johann Maier, From Cultus to Gnosis, Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg 1964; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Random House, New York 1979; Wolfgang Schultz, Documents of Gnosis, Matthes + Seitz, Munich 1986; Hans Leisegang, The Gnosis, Kröner, Stuttgart 1985; and many more.
- [7] L. Ron Hubbard, too, called his Scientology 'gnosticism', in False Purpose Rundown, 5 June 1984.
- [8] Peter Sloterdijk, World Revolution of the Soul I, Artemis, Munich 1991, 19.
- [9] E.C.H. Peithmann (a member under Reuss), Tibetan and Gnostic Magic, in Central Journal for Occultism, Leipzig 1931/32, 566. More on Peithmann later.
- [10] Sources on homeopathic research: Georgos Vithoulkas, Scientific Homeopathy, Goettingen 1986; Marco Righetti, Research in Homeopathy, Burgdorf-Verlag, Burgdorf 1988; J.T. Kent, On the Theory of Homeopathy: J.T. Kent's Lectures on Hahnemann's Organon, Leer 1954.
- [11] Example in Robert Haardt, The Gnosis, Salzburg 1967, 66.
- [12] Ernst T. Kurtzahn (a member of Theodor Reuss' O.T.O.), in The Gnostics, Baumann-Verlag, Schmiedeberg 1925, 77–82. In the Fraternitas Saturni under Grosche, too, woman is regarded as 'the bleeding wound of the cosmos', and her lunar forces as a negative manifestation of Saturn. The task of man is said to be to overcome the demonic drives thereby released, just as the task of woman is said to be to spiritualise her demonic dispositions. Grosche, Woman as Cosmic-Demonic Principle, in Pages for Applied Occult Living, August 1952 / issue 29. More on Kurtzahn later.
- [13] 'Once the form had been cut in two, each half longed for its other half; they came together, threw their arms around one another and embraced, desiring to grow together again, and they died of hunger and other neglect because they would do nothing apart from one another. [...] Then Zeus took pity on them and provided another arrangement, moving their genitals to the front; before that they had carried these too on the outside, and generated not in one another but in the earth, like cicadas. [...] Thus love for one another has been innate in human beings from so long ago, seeking to restore the original nature, attempting to make one out of two and to heal human nature. Each of us is therefore a piece of a human being, since we have been cut, like flatfish, and made two out of one. Each always seeks its other piece,' Plato, Symposium, 189d–191d.
- [14] Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, Sacred Plants, Buenos Aires 1931, 72. More on this later.
- [15] Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, The Gnostic Church, Berlin 1931, 71.
- [16] Gospel according to Thomas: 'Until the man has become woman and the woman man, you cannot enter the Heavenly Kingdom.' Thus not all Gnostics are misogynists, even though the period milieu was extremely misogynistic. Women as men appear in Crowley's III° initiation ritual, where women are addressed as 'Brother' during the 'Ordeals'; William Breeze, III° Master Magician, New York 1996, page 82. In occult thought, the Will, which plays such a large rôle in Thelema, is of course also an expression of male control over the universe.
- [17] Yoga is one of the preconditions for mastering the body before it can be used as a temple. In the West, yoga is misunderstood as physical gymnastics intended to make the body supple and the mind calm. Yet the original meaning of the word yoga is union with the source of all being.
- [18] Ernst T. Kurtzahn, in The Gnostics, Baumann-Verlag, Schmiedeberg 1925, 77–82.
- [19] Approximately Samael Aun Weor (from the milieu of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller's Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua), Buddha's Necklace, without place or date, 1–95. A member of Weor's group is more explicit: 'I can't find this quote in any of his books but besides from having an antiquated view on the place of woman in society, both men and women should refrain from the sexual spasm (to avoid ejaculation is SECONDARY), it's the orgasm which is to be avoided (the sperm is brute mercury, but what is more important is the subtle mercury = sexual energy and the saturated mercury = kundalini) and both man and women have the possibilities to benefit from this sexual magic. It's also clear that when a spouse does not want to practice Sexual Magic and the other does, the one that doesn't practice DOESN'T benefit at all of his partner who does practice.' ***, email of 18 April 2011.
- [20] If the Gnostic is Christian-oriented, he calls menstrual blood the Blood of Christ and consumes it as religious nourishment.
- [21] Example in Kurt Rudolph, The Gnosis, 2nd edition, Leipzig 1980.
- [22] But what about men whose ejaculate contains no spermatozoa?
- [23] According to Hannah Arendt, 'it belongs to the actual historical substance of the nineteenth century that it produced a wealth of ideologies, all of which claimed to hold the great key for deciphering human history, while in reality all of them were nothing but desperate attempts to evade political responsibility for actions and events. In this sense the ideologists of the nineteenth century are the sophists of the modern world.' The Origins of Totalitarianism: Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarian Rule, New York 1951, Munich 1986, 40.
- [24] Bradford J.M. Verter, Dark Star Rising: The Emerging of Modern Occultism 1800–1950, dissertation, Princeton University 1997, 72.
- [25] James George Roche Forlong, Rivers of Life, London 1883, cited after Verter, Dark Star Rising, 75. Other authors who wrote on the worship of the phallus: Hodder Westropp and Staniland Wake, Ancient Symbol Worship (1874); Thomas Inman, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbols (1884); Hargrave Jennings, Illustrations of Phallicism Consisting of Ten Plates of Remains of Ancient Art with Descriptions (1885); Hargrave Jennings, Phallism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-yoni in Various Parts of the World (1889); Jennings, Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial (1884).
- [26] Crowley: 'A man who is strong enough to use women as slaves and plaything is all right,' 'Woman is a creature of habit, that is, of solified impulses. She has no individuality,' 'Monogamy is only a mistake because it leaves the excess women unsatisfied,' 'A woman is only tolerable in one's life if she is trained to help the man in his work without the slightest reference to any other interests soever.' 'Women don't count, they only exist insofar as they seduce or otherwise destroy men,' in Confessions, edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. From Liber Aleph: 'tell not the Truth to any Woman. For this is that which is written: Cast not thy Pearls before Swine, lest they turn again and rend thee. Behold, in the Nature of Woman is no Truth, nor Apprehension of Truth, nor Possibility of Truth, only, if thou entrust this Jewel unto them, they forthwith use it to thy Loss and Destruction,' for example at beyondweird.net/crowley/liber/aleph/tbwf3.html.
- [27] Ellic Howe/Helmut Möller, Merlin Peregrinus, Königshausen + Neumann, Würzburg 1986; details in P.R. Koenig, The Small Theodor Reuss Reader, ARW, Munich 1993; P.R. Koenig, The Great Theodor Reuss Reader, ARW, Munich 1997.
- [28] John Symonds (IX° of Crowley's O.T.O.), The Great Beast 666, London, first edition 1951. The expanded edition of 1997 is the final version, since Symonds died in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Symonds.
- [29] Reuss and Krumm-Heller hold that Patanjali's path is not sufficient for Western requirements and that only Reuss' path of White Magic should be followed, Rosa-Cruz VI;9, Berlin, 27 December 1932, 66.
- [30] Examples of the elixir of life in the course of religious history in Heinz Hunger, The Holy Wedding, Wiesbaden 1984. A kind of overview of the meaning of sperm is available on the internet at www.Sacredsemen.com. At www.semenex.com the elixir can be purchased.
- [31] P.B. Randolph, Magia Sexualis, Paris 1931/69; Elias McGregor (ed. Robert North, 1988; North was a member of Motta's O.T.O., 1951–2010), Magia Sexualis by P.B. Randolph; Gordon J. Melton, P.B. Randolph – America's Pioneer Occultist, Lyon 1992; Joscelyn Godwin, series of articles in Theosophical History, volume 2–3, Fullerton 1988–1991; David Board in Theosophical History, Volume 3,3, Fullerton 1990; and a letter by Joscelyn Godwin, dated 13 October 1994, in P.R. Koenig, A Life for the Rose, A.R.W., Munich 1995.
- [32] Among others, Reuss' magazine Oriflamme, Bad Schmiedeberg 1902–1914; manuscripts; Josef Dvorak, self-styled Satanologist, in Flensburg Notebooks 63, Flensburg, December 1998.
- [33] Karl R.H. Frick (himself a Freemason), Light and Darkness, II, Graz 1973–86, 429. Reuben Swinburne Clymer (Rosicrucian), Book of Rosicruciae II, 70 and Rosicrucian Fraternities in America I, Quakertown 1935, 411. Joscelyn Godwin in Theosophical History (as above).
- [34] Hermann J. Metzger's Attest, 9 January 1963. Similarly also in Oriflamme 23, Zurich, January 1963, 266. This probably refers to Reuss' Synopsis of 1917, in which only grades VII°–X° are called real active members.
French translation: Synopsis of the Degrees. - [35] 'for tactical purposes', Reuss in an undated letter to Crowley, probably from 1917.
- [36] https://www.parareligion.ch/2007/reuss/asien.htm.
- [37] Circa 1979: 'I think [James] Wasserman found some sort of document, a marginal note by Crowley in a copy of the Equinox. I do not remember with any degree of certainty. I do know that Heidrick informed me of the find and conveyed the information in a backward order,' Kristopher Dowling, former IX° of the Caliphate, email of 8 December 1996. In 1982 a long discussion on the allocation of the chakras flared up in the Caliphate journal The Magickal Link, since evidently no one could understand Crowley's notes.
- [38] J.P. Asmussen/A. Böhlig, The Gnosis 3, Artemis, Zurich/Munich 1980.
- [39] Theodor Reuss in his translation of Crowley's Gnostic Mass: The Gnostic Mass, translated from the original text of Baphomet into German by Merlin Peregrinus, Bad Schmiedeberg 1917; facsimile in P.R. Koenig, The Great Theodor Reuss Reader, A.R.W., Munich 1997. The holiness of the sexual organs is revealed in Crowley's VII°.
- [40] Reuss, Mysterica Mystica Maxima, in Jubilee Edition of the Oriflamme 1912, Baumann, Berlin and London 1912, 23. In this context Reuss does not speak of the Gnostic.
- [41] Reuss, Parsifal and the Revealed Grail Secret, Bad Schmiedeberg 1920; the 1914 manuscript with handwritten notes is transcribed in P.R. Koenig, The Small Theodor Reuss Reader, A.R.W., Munich 1993.
- [42] Viennese Masonic Newspaper 9/10, Vienna 1926, 28; facsimile in P.R. Koenig, The Great Theodor Reuss Reader, A.R.W., Munich 1997. Excerpts in the first volume of RELOAD.
- [43] Reuss, The Programme of Construction and Principles of the Gnostic Neo-Christians O.T.O., Bad Schmiedeberg 1920; transcript in P.R. Koenig, The Small Theodor Reuss Reader, A.R.W., Munich 1993.
- [44] Crowley to William B. Crow, 11 November 1944.
- [45] 'business association,' as Crowley puts it in his diary of the 1940s. His English treasurer George M. Cowie to Crowley: 'I have done my best to keep out of letters anything that would injure you & confirm the police anew that it's only money that is the object of the Lodge, & to head you off from shouting for it,' 6 January 1918.
- [46] The new American O.T.O. of 1977, the Caliphate, 'does not practice medicine,' in Thelema Lodge Newsletter, Berkeley, September 1993.
- [47] Crowley: 'the industrial use of Semen will revolutionize human society', diary entry of 8 August 1923. In the manuscript Amrita on 23 January 1933 he lists the following fields of application: 'Asthma, Bronchitis, Neurasthenia, Obesity, Stricture, Some cardiac distress, Greying hair, Loss of interest in sex.' See also Naylor/Koenig, O.T.O. Rituals and Sexmagick, Thames 1999, 412.
- [48] Aleister Crowley, Amrita, King Beach 1990; Gerald Yorke, 'Sex' and the O.T.O., in AHA 6, Bergen an der Dumme, 1991.
- [49] 'Pleasure as such has never attracted me. It must be spiced by moral satisfaction,' Crowley, Confessions, http://hermetic.com/crowley/confessions/chapter9.html.
- [50] 'Thanks to Aiwaz, our Lord God the Devil,' 'I sing for God, our Lord, Aiwaz,' diary entries of 22 and 28 July 1920.
- [51] Most rituals still celebrated by his adherents today revolve somehow around Crowley himself. For this purpose he uses The Mark of the Beast, a seal made from a shortened penis which he found in Inman's 1868 book on Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names.
- [52] Gerald Yorke, circa 1929, cited after Bradford J.M. Verter, Dark Star Rising, Princeton 1997, 184.
- [53] Crowley, On Sexual Freedom, sekhetmaat.com/wiki/Documents/On_Sexual_Freedom.
- [54] Here an instruction from the milieu of Kenneth Grant's Typhonian O.T.O.: 'Fragmentary Notes on VIII° Elixirs [...] I combine my elixir with spit & then annoint the absorbtive tissues of the anus & perianum, as well as the external analogs to the other chakras (solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, & crown). Depending on my mood, I may annoint the internal anus, & then transfer a bit of the tri–une elixir (semen, anal elixirs, and spit) back to my mouth. I may also annoint my eyelids &/or my entire middle pillar with the combined elixir,' William Siebert, until 1980 co-editor of Kenneth Grant's order magazine Mezla, in which members of the Caliphate were also active; article planned for Mezla, Vol. III;2, 1986.
- [55] Francis King, The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O., London 1973. O.T.O. members can also find this ridiculous: ' the fuck and make a wish idea is ludicrous,' Ruthanne d'Antuono, email of 4 October 2002. Non-members seem to profit: ''I’ve practiced Crowley Magick so I know it works,' Tyler writes of channeling the power of the mutual orgasm to achieve wider goals. 'I’m not saying that every girl I slept with came at the same time or that I asked her to pray for the same thing I was praying for; namely that Aerosmith would become the greatest American band.'' Thus Steven Tyler, singer of Aerosmith, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/05/top-ten-revelations-in-steven-tylers-memoir-does-the-noise-in-my-head-bother-you.html.
- [56] Written for Max Schneider on 14 March 1942. Published in Mezla I.111,1, Ithaca/NY 1985. 'We published Mezla as a 'Heretical Organ of the O.T.O.' with the idea of transcending partisan politics and getting down to the basic work of 'doing' magick instead of wasting time fighting about who was the 'real' O.T.O. One of the traditions of Mezla was to publish a previously unavailable writing by Crowley. I posessed [sic] a copy of the infamous 'Emblems and Modes of Use' which we published in that issue. For this I was expelled from the order and pronounced 'Anathema' from Thelema by Hymenaeus Beta [Breeze] himself over the phone. (how medieval Roman Catholic or even Marcello [sic] Motta like). I have still never received the courtesy of formal written notice. He also seemed particularly upset that we had no money to turn over to him on demand as we had not bothered to charge anyone anything for the issue,' email from Cliff Pollick, 4 March 1997. Emblems and Mode of Use was also published by William Breeze on BaphoNet-by-the-Sea: 718/499-9277, June 1992, though allegedly someone falsified Breeze's identity in the publication; translated and commented in Koenig, The OTOA Reader, ARW, Munich 1994. All rituals of Reuss and Crowley in Naylor/Koenig, O.T.O. Rituals and Sexmagick, Thames, autumn 1999.
- [57] Sexual magicians use alchemical symbols: the penis becomes the athanor; sperm becomes the Blood of the Red Lion or The Serpent; the vagina becomes the retort or cucurbit. Crowley's IX° text Emblems and Mode of Use is a typical example of such usage.
- [58] 'How does one make the Elixir of Life?,' 'What are the uses of the Elixir of Life?,' test questions for potential IX° candidates, proposed by Phyllis Seckler, the former wife of the late Grady McMurtry, founder of the American O.T.O. Allegedly, however, this questionnaire is not in use; facsimile in Koenig, Still More Materials on the OTO, Munich 2000, 417ff.
- [59] More on egregores in the chapters The Magicians and The Creative Power in RELOAD.
- [60] Further chapters in RELOAD are devoted to this topic.
- [61] Crowley: 'I am inclined to believe that the XIth degree is better than the IXth degree,' diary of 26 August 1916. More on this in the chapter Palace of Secretes.
- [62] When masturbating, Crowley also imagined men as Scarlet Whores, diary of 16 November 1914.
- [63] 'I think the language of the initiations is sexist and archaic and to a feminist such as myself, quite frankly, insulting. I feel that there's this sort of old boys' club running thing which is quite literally an old BOYS' club which again, is to me, frankly insulting,' the opinion of the male member Leon in Claudia Kowalchyk, A study of two 'deviant' religious groups: The Assemblies of God and the Ordo Templi Orientis, NY 1994, 162. In prudish America, a Nathaniel remarks on the initiations: 'Certainly men and women dress in different rooms [...] Here is a group whose teacher is very concerned about sex in a sacramental nature and all that stuff, and yet when it comes to something simple, like changing our clothes, people act like a bunch of Baptists,' page 164.
- [64] Crowley, Liber Agape, in P.R. Koenig, How to make your own McOTO, A.R.W., Munich 1996; and Crowley, De Arte Magica.
- [65] On Crowley's image of woman also in Frédéric Monneyron, Aleister Crowley et l'Androgyne: Imaginaire Decadent et Magia Sexualis, in Cahier Victoriens et Edouardiens 33, 1991.
- [66] This applies equally to men, as shown by his diary entry of 25 May 1941: 'I do not give one meagre molecule of fart-fog for any person or thing.'
- [67] 'I have had lots of phantasies and wish-images of this type,' diary entry of 13 August 1920.
- [68] Book of Lies, London 1913, http://sacredtext.gang.pk/oto/lib333.htm.
- [69] Neuroscience has shown that images viewed in a state of arousal (including sexual arousal) are stored by the brain more clearly and more intensely. These images can later be recalled more easily, and the same applies to the associated sensations and memories. The hormone oxytocin released during orgasm even triggers a certain capacity for learning.
- [70] During consumption, initiated techniques must be observed. Absorption occurs through the mucous membrane of the palate, since gastro-intestinal acids would decompose the proteins containing the subtle essences before the mind-body symbiosis could take place. In the mouth, too, one must reckon with a destructive effect of saliva; accordingly, the length of time during which the host is kept under the palate must be adjusted.
- [71] This resembles Asian practices in which sperm is conceived as a carrier of subtle energies.
- [72] This points to the vampiric aspect.
- [73] Santos, email of 9 December 1999, online at https://www.parareligion.ch/dplanet/collect/ok4.htm.
- [74] Thelema uses new euphemisms for concepts long in existence. The Gnostic Pleroma is now called Nuit, to which the sperm alias Hadit returns home. Nevertheless, the current Caliph, William Breeze, claims: 'In Thelemic cosmogony there is no pleroma as in Gnosticism. This place, Kether in the Tree of Life, is occupied by Ra Hoor Khuit [...], and our own silent selves, our Jechidah in Qabalistic terms, our Guardian Angels,' The Magical Link, new series 1, Fall (December!), Stockholm 1997, 9.
- [75] Crowley's Mass, allegedly written in 1913, is however merely a medieval Tridentine Rite/Roman Latin Mass inflated with Thelemic verbal husks; its text can be found in P.R. Koenig, Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, Munich 1998, 17.
- [76] More about him later.
- [77] Le Chevalier Le Clément de Saint-Marcq, L'Eucharistie, Bilsen 1906; facsimile in P.R. Koenig, The Great Theodor Reuss Reader, A.R.W., Munich 1997, transcript at https://www.parareligion.ch/eucha.htm; Reuss describes the publication of this pamphlet as a revelation of the O.T.O.'s most secret secret: namely, that no women are required for the consumption of the Logos. More on this in the chapter on Correct Gnosticism in RELOAD.
- [78] 'As perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood. The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or drops from the Host of Heaven; then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what. This burn: of this make cakes & eat unto me. This hath also another use; let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me.' Liber AL, III;23–25. http://tguild.oto.de/libri/Liber_Al.htm. Similarly described, for example, in Carl Schmidt, Coptic-Gnostic Writings, volume 1 (this book contains the first German-language translation of the Pistis Sophia), Leipzig 1905 (several reprints, e.g. Berlin 1981); already mentioned by Epiphanius in Panarion, in Robert Haardt, The Gnosis, Salzburg 1967; E. Haenchen/M. Krause, The Gnosis 1, Artemis, Zurich/Munich 1969.
- [79] Magical Link I;5, New York 1987; Thelema Lodge Newsletter, Berkeley, January 1991. Supreme Grand Council meeting, 3 April 1993: 'Cakes of Light should be prepared only according to the formula previously published; but ashes from burned cakes of light prepared according to AL III;23 would be acceptable as an additional ingredient.'
- [80] Breeze, III° Master Magician, New York 1996, page 72.
- [81] Minutes of the Supreme Grand Council, 3 April 1993.
- [82] Magickal Link III;9, Berkeley, September 1983, unpaginated.
- [83] On the one hand, Crowley recognises the cause of his years of fear of death and depression in the consumption of these drugs; on the other hand, he refuses to accept the contents of his visions as drug-induced, diary of 28 July 1923.
- [84] 'Scarlet Woman [...] is any Woman that receives and transmits my Solar Word and Being,' in Djeridensis Comment, in John Symonds/Kenneth Grant, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries, Montreal 1974, 307.
- [85] 5 July and 13 August 1920.
- [86] The concepts Holy Guardian Angel and Choronzon are dealt with in a separate chapter of RELOAD.
- [87] Self-analysis serves as the membership card of the A.·. A.·.
- [88] Unless women take over his rôle as medium by proxy.
- [89] Feces and sperm become fetishes for Crowley. The fetish is a magically charged object or idea that can be anything. What matters is access to the grandiose, to the gleam in one's self-feeling. Since the fetish is larger than the individual, it has no quality in itself, but refers to a set that must be regularly visited and repeated. Otherwise the fetish would be emptied. It is a means of preserving undirected instinctuality. In the domain under discussion, instinctual satisfaction undergoes a change of function: it serves religious illumination. Finally, the founder of the religion, Crowley, and the O.T.O. itself mutate into fetishes for many of his adherents.
- [90] In the world-view of Tantrism, this would be left-hand Tantrism, which concerns itself with overcoming conditioned cultural stereotypes. See Nikolas and Zeena Schreck, Demons of the Flesh – The Complete Guide To Left Hand Path Sex Magic, Washington 2002.
- [91] http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/25110-Aleister-Crowley-Leah-Sublime.
- [92] On the meaning of this expression, see Terence Sellers, The Correct Sadist, NY 1983.
- [93] On Aiwass: 'I am to Thee the harlot, crowned with poison and gold, my garment many-coloured, soiled with shame and smeared with blood, who for no price but of wantonness have prostituted myself to all that lusted after me [...] I have made my flesh rotten, my blood venomous, my brain hag-ridden, I have infected the round world with corruption.'
- [94] Crowley's visions fade. Although at this time Crowley is already seeing the newest silent films in cinemas, he does not recognise the potential of film art for the optical representation of visions. His screenplays for films of his own read like lurid occult penny dreadfuls. 'I see my fault about this matter of scenarios: I despised the movie mode of art; I could not take it seriously. I could not believe in my own work; I deliberately tried to be bad when I thought badness might please producers. I thank Jane [Wolfe] for the change; she has made me genuinely interested (besides teaching me some technique) and my last two scenarios have been my own, not sneers at other people's. I can't get Beauty in them, for they have no form; save only that balance, neatness, and smoothness of action are not unbeautiful, as in a chess problem. But my new interest is a little more than the intellectual pleasure of handling forces, by agreed rules, as in chess: I begin to play with live pieces. My old scenarios were rigid as algebra; cause and effect were cast, not wrought. Each piece had its move, and I knew it; given the 'position', the mate came in so many moves. Now pawns complain: The King dead? Bah! What happens to me?' And I like my folks to be my friends, to refuse to clerk for me, to urge their claims,' diary entry of 21 August 1920. By 1922 he also writes a handful of horror stories, published posthumously by William Breeze: The Drug and Other Stories, London 2010. In 1944 Crowley tries, via Jean Phillips (later Shivonen, then Schlepp, an IX°), to establish contact with Orson Welles, for whose Mercury Production he works; Crowley to Karl Germer, 29 November 1944.
- [95] 'Where is Aiwass now?' Crowley looked at me and gave his head a minute shake and then spread his arms with upturned palms as if to say, 'Where?', or even 'God knows!'. Then he spoke, 'I think the fault is mine', cited after the Grant-O.T.O. magazine Sothis II;II, London 1977, 2; Crowley in conversation with Lawrence Amos Miles/Shir Gurudeva Dadaji Mahendranath 999, article by Dadaji: The Londinium Temple Strain. Dadaji founds AMOOKOS – Arcane Magic Order of the Knights of Shambhala. He dies on 30 August 1991.
- [96] In his Gnosis, which diverges from Crowley's Thelema, Jack Parsons introduces Sophia as the wife of Jesus.
- [97] In Crowley this is interpreted Qabalistically: 'As God, the energy radiates entirely from oneself (Kether), that is, one is completely identified with Hadit – as Priest the energy passes entirely through one (Chokmah) – as communicant the energy strikes wholly upon ourselves (Geburah).' Cited after Metzger's Equinox III, 51.
- [98] Preface in Reuss' and Crowley's Gnostic Mass, Schmiedeberg 1918, 8. Reprinted in Metzger's EOL Bulletin 40, Stein 1957, 2 — see Great Theodor Reuss Reader, 226ff.
- [99] 'Those rituals seem a parody of Christianity and Catholicism. Of course, the Benediction of Animals is to be expected in a country where pet psychiatrists can make more than an engineer. What if the animal really did have some religious ideas? Would non-Thelemic (as if there could be an orthodox Thelema) animals then be: a Pagan Pussy, a Heretic Hamster, Demonic Dog? Do these people have so much time on their hands that they must now impose their religious views on their pets?!? The confirmation and baptism ceremonies could too easily attract worshippers. These are hardly going to be productive members of a Thelemic order. Such people will spend much time proclaiming how they had some level of spiritual awareness bestowed upon them through such a ceremony. Perhaps it is useful to have such rituals to keep the masses happy, but I do not think that they contribute to the work at hand (Great Work, 'Knowledge & Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel', whatever).' Stephen Luzny (former member of the Caliphate), email of 2 July 1998.
- [100] Thus in the handbook for the V° available here, 8 April 1989, Newport Beach, CA, signed by Lon Milo and Constance DuQuette.
- [101] III-1 O.T.O. Man of Earth Rituals Rev. 4.2B, Fall IIIxxx, by Fr.H.K. Kapellmeister, O.T.O., New York 1990, 1. For the I°: Gustav Holst, Neptune from The Planets; Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; W.A. Mozart, Great Mass in c minor. In addition, Leos Janacek, Bela Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Samuel Barber for the further degrees.
- [102] A wandering bishop is not distinguished by character, education or theological position. He has neither been chosen by a canonically erected local church, nor proposed as a candidate for consecration, nor connected with a historical episcopal see, nor consecrated by a lawful bishop in accordance with canonical provisions. Until the Second Vatican Council, the validity of the sacraments depended solely on the right intention and the essential observance of the external rite. Since 1962/65, however, the bishop is no longer the successor of an individual apostate; rather, the college of bishops in its entirety is the successor of the college of apostles. Thus the Gnostic bishops are definitively excluded.
- [103] http://tahutilodge.org.
- [104] A superficial stroll through Crowley's collection of keywords seems to suggest that the Thelemite requires no salvation. Deus Est Homo quem creavit Elohim. This nevertheless looks like a Gnostic expansion of the psyche: the worshipper becomes the worshipped.
- [105] Reuss as well as the current Caliph, William Breeze, hold that true O.T.O. membership begins only with the VII°, simultaneously with sexual magic. The grades VIII°–XI° are also called the Sanctuary of Gnosis. Order structure in P.R. Koenig, Materials on the O.T.O., A.R.W., Munich 1994, 22–23, Synopsis 1917.
- [106] There are O.T.O. groups without Masonic structure, for example Kenneth Grant's English O.T.O.
- [107] For example, William Breeze, the current Caliph, calls himself 'His Sacred Majesty'; others call him 'Lord Caliph.' He is ennobled as a knight by his own people, as during his election as Caliph in September 1985; transcript online.
- [108] 'It means shifting the Centre of Gravity of the Human Race!' Crowley's diary of 6 August 1923.
- [109] The Gnostic Pleroma is now called Nuit, to which the sperm alias Hadit returns.
- [110] Polarity of Chokmah (the illuminating intelligence) and Binah (the sanctifying intelligence).
- [111] 'The Order is in part putting out a call to the poor, the tired, the hungry; but it also promises to raise them up from this wretched state,' Claudia Kowalchyk, A study of two 'deviant' religious groups: The Assemblies of God and the Ordo Templi Orientis, NY 1994, 148.
- [112] 'There's something honorable in suffering, you know. There's something– one of the reasons I hate Christianity so violently is I don't WANT anybody to die for my sins,' Kowalchyk, 140.
- [113] Communicated in detail by the X° for the USA of the Caliphate, David Scriven/Sabazius, by email in November 1996. The entire correspondence with annotations on Megafile.
- [114] Crowley: 'I need a rotten stage of things to work on,' diary, 1 June 1920.
- [115] David Scriven, Agape IV;1, California, 1 May 2002, pages 2 and 3.
- [116] The Caliphate can be viewed as a bureaucratic firm with copyright interests and no spirituality whatever, as communicated by James Eshelman, former deputy of Caliph Breeze. 'O.T.O. [Caliphate] is just a club. A simple club. A wholly mundane thing. Its fate is in no sense tied into that of the Aeon itself,' thus James Arthur Eshelman, former deputy of the Caliph, on 8 April 1997. And on 12 April 1997 Eshelman says of William Breeze, the current Caliph: 'he is willing to sacrifice the spiritual development of the present generation [of members] since it's impossible to reform the post-Grady version of the Order anyway [i.e. the Crowley or Reuss version of the O.T.O.]) in order to lay the best foundation for the spiritual growth of humanity for the next couple of thousand years,' by publishing Crowley books.
- [117] See the chapter The Creative Power in RELOAD.
- [118] For that one would have to know what divinity is, or what it looks like: whether the rotten condition is perhaps felt psychically and whether the calm induced by sperm globules, and the suspension of psychic suffering, is experienced as divinity. In Crowley's A.·. A.·. this is sometimes called crossing the Abyss.
- [119] More about his rôle in the Caliphate in the chapter on The Play Game version of an O.T.O. Fata Morgana in RELOAD.
- [120] I am speaking here generally of oppression, not specifically of the O.T.O.
- [121] Against self-deification or religious delusion?
- [122] Georgos Vithoulkas, Scientific Homeopathy, Goettingen 1986, 129ff.; in addition Marco Righetti: 'More honestly: we do not know how homeopathic predispositions are transmitted to the next generation,' letter of 6 March 1995 (see the footnote after next).
- [123] What do HI viruses do in a potentised, or energetic, state? Would they perhaps be a kind of Gnostic counterpart to the Logos?
- [124] Conversation with Marco Righetti on 2 March 1995, author of Research in Homeopathy, Burgdorf-Verlag 1988.
- [125] Magical Link I:5, 1987, 2 and Thelema Lodge Newsletter, Berkeley, January 1991.
- [126] Several emails in September 1996.
- [127] The already mentioned IX° questionnaire by Phyllis Seckler places special emphasis on the urgently needed good 'physical condition' for the use of sexual magic, which raises the question of whether physically disabled persons can become members of the Caliphate. This is affirmed at least for the lower degrees. Theodor Reuss' 1917 invitation to an Alliance Internationale des Dames de la Rose+Croix, under the letterhead Ordo Templi Orientis – League for International Reconciliation, addresses the 'physically and psychically most perfect human being possible' (facsimile in P.R. Koenig, The Great Theodor Reuss Reader, Munich 1997, 175). David Scriven, USA-X° of the Caliphate: 'the imperfections of each individual can be viewed as magical expressions of individuality rather than as deviations from an abstract ideal,' email of 3 November 1996. Here, however, is an anonymous report by a member: 'Here is a tidbit that both you and Peter may find interesting. I was in the process of applying for my III° initiation in COTO when this accident occured. Everything was looking good. All my application paperwork was complete. I had arranged for a body to perform the initiation, paid my fees (please giggle here, it will make me feel better). When I informed the local 'big man' – I am fortunate(?) to have one of the 'Electoral College' members as a personal friend and we are members of the same body (Me, him, his wife, and 2 other single males form the body), that I was going to have to delay the initiation (which had been tentatively scheduled for October), he informed me that my physical condition might be grounds to deny me the initiation. Even after the rehab and all. On page 157 of 'The Equinox volume III number 10', edited by Hymenaeus Beta X° – William Breeze, copyright 1986, 1990 O.T.O, in Liber II – Manifesto of the O.T.O. it states '9. Every man and woman that is of full age, free, and of good report, has an indefeasible right to the III°.' When I brought this to his attention he responded that the scope of the words 'good report' included physical condition. This is not stated in any published document (and some that aren't 'published' but issued privately to members). I cannot even find wording that can be construed to indicate such. 'Good report' is normally defined as being current with dues and not having been disciplined by your local body (you aren't in trouble, or a trouble-maker, and generally liked by members). I am current with my dues, I am not now nor have I ever been disciplined by my bodymaster, I am very well liked by most of the members in the Alabama-Georgia area, and have even impressed several members of COTO of far higher degree (2 VII's and an VIIIth.). I teach yoga classes free to members, and have been heavily involved in the grunge work of setting up for events and initiations and have a history of helping other members in any way I can. In short, there is no reason why I should be denied my III°. I am not disgruntled by this in itself, I had been having doubts about going forward to III° for some time. It just bothers me that this action is in direct violation of the order's own published rules (the constitution makes no mention of physical abilities in connection with qualification for initiation).' Email, December 2001.
The Old Testament idea of physical intactness, indicating the cultic purity of a priest (Leviticus 21:16–21), also proves tenacious in Christianity. Well into modernity, for example, in the canon law of the Latin West, physical intactness remains a prerequisite for receiving the higher ecclesiastical orders; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts. Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Age, 2 vols., Berkeley 1996, vol. 1, 114. Physical intactness and beauty are a sign of the morally good and pure — ugliness, injuries and bodily defects, by contrast, point to impurity and malice. This aesthetic concept can already be found in Greek antiquity as Kalokagathia: the knowledge of the beautiful soul in the beautiful body. - [128] The term transident is used mainly in the American psychiatric milieu.
- [129] lashtal.com/nuke/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-4629.phtml, lashtal.com/nuke/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-1825.phtml. In connection with the O.T.O., the singer Genesis P-Orridge should also be mentioned here; more about this appears in the chapter on The Play Game version of an O.T.O. Fata Morgana in RELOAD, as does the topic of transubstantiation (in the chapter on The Gnostics), which is absent from Crowley's Gnostic Mass.
Publication and lecture
© 2011 P.-R. Koenig. Extract from The O.T.O. Phenomenon RELOAD, Munich 2011 — and the English O.T.O. Rituals and Sexmagick (1999).
Also delivered as a lecture for C.E.S.N.U.R. in 1995 at the University of Rome and in 1997 at the Crowley Congress in Cefalù.
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Spermo-Gnostics and the Ordo Templi Orientis
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