THE FALL OF OTO & THE RISE OF CONGREGATIONAL ILLUMINISM PART ONE OF TWO
THE FALL OF OTO & THE RISE OF CONGREGATIONAL ILLUMINISM PART ONE OF TWO
Copyright © 2007. Allen Greenfield. No reprint without permission.
“The governing body within the consistory is therefore supposed to be selected from those who stand highest and have achieved the most as Masters…
“The Grand Master in such a body assumes the role of guide, instructor and proficient, in every lesson taught, every obligation assumed, from first to last.
“The Grand Master who usurps power or prerogative, or fails to take every opportunity for counsel and co-operation, will find honors in the end but an empty show, and himself monumented in execration as a pretender, recreant to the plainest duty and the grandest opportunity.”
J.D. Buck, 1907
“Executive unilateralism thus allowed the administration to use tools such as coercive interrogation and rendition to generate the evidence it wanted. Then the executive branch used the same unilateralism to limit public and congressional scrutiny of its claims.
“Unchecked executive power, in other words, is based on a false assumption that an unchecked executive will govern judiciously. It assumes that bureaucrats and politicians, freed from the need to account for their conduct, will be effective and just. History abundantly proves this wrong. Power without accountability lurches too easily into the loss of innocent lives.”
Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq , 2007
Mission Statement
Ordo Templi Orientis U.S.A. is the U.S. Grand Lodge (National Section) of Ordo Templi Orientis, a hierarchical, religious membership organization. Our mission is to effect and promote the doctrines and practices of the philosophical and religious system known as Thelema, with particular emphasis on cultivating the ideals of individual liberty, self-discipline, self-knowledge, and universal brotherhood. To this end, we conduct sacramental and initiatory rites, offer guidance and instruction to our members, organize social events, and engage in educational and community service activities at locations throughout the United States.
Aleister Crowley, Grand Master Baphomet XIo died in 1947, having preserved the Masonic character of the Order to the end of his life. 1 and was succeeded by Karl Germer, the Treasurer General of the Order. Germer acted more as a conservator of OTO than an active Grand Master, being a refugee from Nazi Germany resident in America. The Crowley rituals continued to be carried on by Agape Lodge in California until the early 1950s, but was minimally nurtured by Germer, who died without naming a successor.
With more foresight than is always credited, Crowley, not an outstanding organizer as such, at the end of his life had anticipated a development of this sort, and had cultivated several students who might carry on his various efforts, including the MMM OTO rituals. Among these was Grady McMurtry, initiated in the primary OTO degrees at Agape Lodge and, during his military service in World War II, was brought up to the highest degrees directly by Crowley.2
Upon Major McMurtry’s return to America, he was invested with certain emergency authority, which McMurtry activated some time after Germer’s death, when it became obvious to him that the Order had fallen into schism and decay. As Acting Outer Head of the OTO, McMurtry restored the Order and the Crowley rituals from the remnant of Agape Lodge. In the heady occult revival of the 1960s and 70s, McMurtry grew the Order from a mere handful to some hundreds of people by the time of his death in 1985, mostly in America 3. Rather than name a successor, McMurtry asked that a college of (temporary, so called “battlefield”) IXth Degree members elect a new acting Frater Superior. This was done, and, as McMurtry had been designated Hymenaeus Alpha, his successor, William Breeze, a member of modest degree, took the name Hymenaeus Beta.
As Acting Frater Superior, McMurtry had operated primarily to preserve and revivify the MMM rituals, avoiding much in the way of innovation. Perhaps the most notable change of emphasis during his tenure was the great prominence placed upon the Templar-ecclesiastic aspect of OTO embodied in Crowley’s Gnostic Mass. This reflects an emphasis on the Masonic-Templar tradition of an “internal church” but was seen, in the McMurtry era, largely in a much more symbolic sense, or even merely as a legal convenience that gradually became more literal under his successor.
Crowley in his late years had warned a student that his system “…is a religion just so far as a religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines…Call it a new religion, then, if it so please your Gracious Majesty; but I confess that I fail to see what you will have gained by so doing, and I feel bound to add that you might easily cause a great deal of misunderstanding, and work a rather stupid kind of mischief.”
Hymenaeus Beta is understood to have entered office under pledge to implement the program as laid out by Crowley in the Equinox III:I.4 Unavoidably, being the first acting chief not directly schooled by Crowley, Beta’s attempts to implement (and more than occasionally, alter) the Crowley “paper program” was controversial and appears self-serving, and various challenges to his methods, means and motivations arose. He has even changed the OTO initiation rituals in key places, blurring their ritual function, in the III, IV, PI, and KEW Degrees, to cite specific examples. The changes to the IV Degree, in our opinion, raises serious questions about the validity of subsequent degrees, as these changes voided an element Crowley termed an ‘essential bridge’ to higher degrees. Some of the legal claims were settled in civil courts in the U.S. and Great Britain. By the middle 1990s, the Acting Frater Superior appointed a National Grand Master General for the United States, termed Sabazius Xth Degree 5 This move was generally regarded favorably, and, by the end of the Twentieth Century, the organization had grown laconically to several thousand members over time. However, it had failed to advance more than a literal handful to formal working knowledge of the central gnosis of the Order, and had incurred the disfavor of many detractors, both internal and external, to various of its policies.
Early in the new century, and under debatable circumstances, a National Grand Lodge for the United Kingdom was Chartered, followed by an equally debatable “grand lodge” in Australia. 6 But the overall membership since McMurtry’s time had shown much attrition on the individual level, and a net growth that was statistically flat, even for beginning initiates, and approached zero growth at the highest levels. Even the few that were initiated are highly questionable in terms of how these came about. Undeterred, the increasingly isolated leadership seemed to be unaware that the failure to initiate was a fundamental failure of management, though initiation (where deserved) was a primary - in fact, the primary purpose of the Order.
Continues in Part Two