Thelema Lodge Calendar for January 1992 e.v.

Thelema Lodge Calendar

for January 1992 e.v.

The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

Copyright © O.T.O. and the Individual Authors, 1992 e.v.

Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O.Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA

January 1992 e.v. at Thelema Lodge

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Announcements from
Lodge Members and Officers


Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica

Thelema Lodge celebrates Gnostic Mass in Horus Temple on Sunday evenings, usually beginning shortly after 7:30. This is an open ritual, with the public welcome to take communion with us as members of the Gnostic Catholic Church. Please call the lodge for information: (510) 654-3580. Our ritual follows Crowley's Liber XV (except for the "experimental Enochian mass" announced for Sunday 12 January).
Beginning this month, Temple and E.G.C. business will be conducted separately from the general lodge meeting, at a monthly Sunday afternoon convocation under the direction of our presiding Bishop T. Suleiman. The first of these meetings will be held at the lodge on Sunday afternoon 19 January at 4:18. Mass teams (for March) are to be proposed and scheduled at this time, and arrangements made for temple supplies and special ritual events. The mass workshop, led by Bishop Sappho, will be held in conjunction with this meeting, and inquiries for individual instruction are welcome afterwards.
Nefertiti Sanctuary in San Francisco also celebrates Gnostic Mass for the Thelemic community of the Bay Area, with the next date there set for Friday evening 31 January. In addition, a regular seminar on the temple furnishings and their use in the ritual is offered, on the Wednesday evening preceding each mass. To attend either event, call Rick at (415) 566-0675.


Ritus Elusiniae

The fourteenth annual cycle of Aleister Crowley's Rites of Eleusis at Thelema Lodge culminates this month, with planetary rituals planned for every fifth day through 25 January. The Rite of Sol will be held on Sunday afternoon 5 January at 2:22. The Rite of Venus begins at 8:00 on Friday evening 10 January. The Rite of Mercury occurs Wednesday evening 15 January at 8:00. Luna will be held outdoors at the Marin Headlands on Monday evening 20 January, with a nature walk and preliminary ritual at sunset, and the traditional Rite of Luna getting underway that night at 9:00. Following Luna we have a group campground reserved for Monday and Tuesday nights, with everyone invited to stay over. The Rite of Earth, on Mt. Diablo, begins at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon 25 January, and brings the entire cycle to a close. Call the lodge for updated venue information, scheduling details, costumes and equipment to bring, and transportation arrangements. Always bring libations to the Rites!


Mysteria Mystica Maxima

The lodge gathers to conduct initiations into Ordo Templi Orientis on Saturday 18 January, starting in the afternoon. Members please call or arrange ahead of time to attend; the times and degrees to be worked are subject to change. To become a candidate for O.T.O. initiation, obtain an application form at the lodge and contact the coordinator for your current grade to review your progress and the requirements for advancement:

Minerval.....Lola-(510) ... ....
I°................Jerry-(510) ... ....
2°..........Marlene-(510) ... ....
3°.............Ebony-(510) ... ....

Applications are to be reviewed by the Lodgemaster, who will arrange for scheduling and discuss sponsorship with the candidate. Members who sponsor the candidate for initiation should then sign the completed form, using the name under which their own membership is enrolled in the official records of the order. (As it appears on your Magical Link address label may be included in addition to--but not instead of--the name on your membership account.) Additionally, it is important that the candidate and both sponsors include their telephone numbers on the application.


Collegium Fraternitatis

Members and friends of Thelema Lodge have an opportunity to share their studies and interests, in a variety of classes, seminars, and reading groups meeting throughout the month. These events are free and open to the public, with donations requested to support the lodge premises.
The Cthulhu Culture Club emerges from the writhing ancient muck with a belch, to gather on Saturday evening 4 January, beginning at 6:30. Call the lodgemaster to attend this Lovecraftian mythos appreciation; we'll sing the Dhol Chants, transcribe the Pnakotic Manuscript, review Liber Ivoris, decipher the G'harne Fragments, and ponder the Revelations of Glaaki.
"Jerry's Logorrhea" is quiet in January, overwhelmed by the Rites of Eleusis, but the lodgemaster`s monthly seminar will return on the third Saturday in February with a new topic. Call for information. (The "Videorhea" series, however, has apparently been swallowed up by the Elder Gods. Yuck!)
"Book Four Astral Flight," a two-part class with Drax,offers presentation of technique in concise, pragmatic, realistic yoga, designed to allow conscious transition to the Dreamstate as a means of communion with higher self and the "magick theater" of divine archetypes, commonly referred to as the "Astral". The system being a verbal "tradition" composed by Allan Bennett and the Master Therion, preceding through Thelema Lodge to the O.T.O. Meetings are on Tuesday evenings 14 January and 23 January, beginning at 8:00 in Horus Temple.
All welcome to bring your copy of Magick in Theory and Practice to the lodge on Thursday evenings 9 January and 23 January, for Marlene's MTP Study Circle, beginning at 7:00 (a little earlier than previously). This group is conducting a careful chapter-by-chapter exploration of Crowley's great textbook of magical studies, with open discussion and explication of the text.
"Magik Without Aleister" meets in Horus Temple on Tuesday evening 28 January at 8:00. Our guest this month represents the Arica Institute, a school established on Bolivian Sufi teachings. Frater Majnun (whom you should seek out for details) is the coordinator of this series.
The Magick Theater's dramatic reading for January will be Adonis: An Allegory, Liber CCCXXXV, one of Aleister Crowley's greatest plays in verse. Gather at the lodge on Wednesday evening 29 January at 7:30 to read together; copies will be supplied. (Note the Theater's change of evening to Wednesdays beginning with 1992 e.v.) Adonis is a lyrical masque, set in the gardens of ancient Babylon, and was written in Paris in August 1911 e.v. Crowley described it as "mystic, sensuous and comic by turns; much of it written in the elaborate and exquisite method of closely woven rimes which I myself invented" (Confessions, p. 669).


Conventi Thelemicorum

The monthly meeting of Thelema Lodge will be held on Monday evening 6 January at 8:00. The schedule for Lodgemeetings has been advanced, assigning them to the Monday evening following the first Sunday of each month. At these meetings classes, feasts, rituals, and events are proposed and scheduled, financial concerns resolved, and plans shared for the future. (Lodgemeeting is open to active initiate members of O.T.O.)
Lodge Council and Lodge of Perfection have no formal meeting this month, but members are urged to telephone the lodgemaster or drop by briefly in the early afternoon on Saturday 4 January. Meetings are normally held on the first Sunday afternoon in each month, which will be taken up this time by the Rite of Sol.
Terri invites the Ladies to T-- at Thelema Lodge on Monday afternoon 13 January, beginning at 5:30. Secrets are involved.
Lodge Fun (and Fundraising) Night this month features Gnostic Wrestling in Horus Temple on Friday evening 24 January at 8:00. All spectators and participants please prepare ahead of time a triple batch of lime jello (without sugar!) to bring to this event. Priestesses see Marlene to schedule a match during the evening.
Lodge Clean-Up Day and the Aquarius birthday party will be held on Sunday afternoon 26 January; come lend a hand with temple maintenance beginning at 1:11, and they'll be puffing at the candles around 4:18.

Love is the law, love under will.


from the Grady Project:

Entity

Tenuous it wells and spreads far out across the sleeted sky,
A shapeless bulk against the suns which, immersed, within it lie
And glow a dull red angry hue, convulsed they wave with life aware
Arched tendrils of the galaxies; sentient, they curl and stare
Into the closely crowding gloom, taut filaments of pearl strung light
Stand stiff from where a bursting sun collapsed beneath the crushing might
Of this vast sprawling entity, spawn of the darkness, spherical
Or cubic relativity, a mindless thought, a miracle.

Into a finite consciousness there threads a thought of Being,
Intelligence is wrought to life within a mammal; seeing
With clumsy organs blind to all but one prismatic cord
Yet in that spectrum reveling to rob it of its hoard
Of orange, yellow, green, and gold, amethystine and blue,
Each sharp distinction revealed by some subtle shade or hue
In the glory of the morning, at the brazen gong of noon
Or the swirling dusk of evening lapping at a sated moon.

Some wonder why it clings to earth, to live and live again
To taste with the ephemeral their joy and hate and pain;
Why one who could destroy or build a universe should live
Within the confines of a man, what has a man to give?
That man has sight and taste and smell and touch to guide him by
And he can hear a thousand sounds some beautiful, some wry.
For though his senses may be fogged and though his mind be dim
Each process of perception forms a thought distinct, to him.

To one that broods within the void and is to all receptive;
A planet with encrusted life is but a pawn; perceptive,
Attuned to an infinity of graded radiation
Produces an intelligence that knows but one sensation
A color, it would be white to us, an unbearable glare
It has no shield, there is no help, it can only cringe and stare
Into the fire; or thrust itself into the mind of you or I
Escaping from the bitter cold, the blinding snow fields of the sky.

-- Grady L. McMurtry                              
(Undated)                     

[previously published in Ecclesia Gnostica #4 (1985 e.v.)]

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The Naked Splendour of Nuit

The vulgar New Year begins with the Moon and Venus conjunct in Sagittarius. On 3 January there is expected the year's most abundant meteor shower, emanating from the Quadrantids (a now-defunct constellation near present-day Draco); find a dark unobstructed place and gaze towards the North Star around midnight.
On 4 January the Moon is New in Capricornus, and an annular solar eclipse (dark in the middle, surrounded by a bright ring) should be visible in this area. Speaking of Capricorn, it's a good time to start working things out with the goat. The New Moon in Capricorn starts out a month with many visitors to this part of the sky. At the New Moon the Sun, Moon, Uranus, and Neptune will all be close to the middle of Capricornus. (The Rite of Sol will occur the day after, with Luna still in Capricorn. By the time the Sun leaves Capricorn, in will have wandered Mars (9 January at 1:47 PM), Mercury (9 January at 5:46 PM), and Venus (24 January at 11:14 PM), giving us five planets in Capricorn between 24 and 29 January.
Beware 10 January, when the Moon goes Void of Course, with Mercury and Mars conjunct. There may be misunderstood messages, sharp words too easily uttered, and bragging.
On Sunday 19 January the moon will be full in Cancer (the sign that it rules) at 1:28 PM. It will also be at Perigee, or the point in its orbit when it is closest to Earth.
On 20 January the Sun enters Aquarius at 11:33 AM. The Moon, then in Leo, will be opposite Saturn at 3:42 AM. That evening Thelema Lodge will be doing The Rite of Luna outdoors in Marin.
On 29 January the Sun will be passing over Saturn in Aquarius, which Saturn rules. At 9:28 AM on this very day Saturn will be at its Apogee, or the point in its orbit furthest from the Earth.
The New Moon will be on 3 February at 11:00 AM in Aquarius, and conjunct with Saturn and Sol.

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Crowley Classics

Percy Bysshe Shelley

By Prometheus [Aleister Crowley]

[This essay was originally published in The English Review vol. xxxv (London: July 1922), pp. 16-21.]

           "O like a rose-wing'd pelican
She hath bred blessèd babes to Pan!"
                     --The Wizard Way

In a story by Lord Dunsany Fame says to the poet, "I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years." If Shelley has been more fortunate-- though it hardly matters to him!--it is not on account of his poetry, which passed as readable even among his contemporary detractors, but of his prophetic gift and the moral wizardry which made serious people consider seriously that in him Diabolus incarnatus est, et homo factus est. ["the Devil is incarnated, and mankind perfected"--trans. ED.]
It seems at first sight astounding that Shelley was sent down from Oxford for theological views which are accepted today by the youngest average undergraduate with scarce a mumbled protest from the oldest average don; that he should have been robbed of his children on account of a moral attitude which modern children themselves find reactionary rather then advanced; and that he should have been practically exiled from England because of political notions which the most case-hardened Tory of today would hardly dare to whisper in the gloom of his club.
The truth is that the "Sun- treader" (as Browning calls him in Pauline) happened to be on the crest of a true dawn. The world, save for sporadic outbreaks of Bourbon folie des grandeurs, ["foolishness of the great"--trans. ED.] has rolled steadily towards that slight, shrill angel figure in the East. The power of Shelley hardly matters, in a sense, by comparison with his ethical ideals. He was the voice of the Zeitgeist; and it is relatively unimportant that it should have been, to English ears, so matchlessly musical.
Many of the best judges of poetry prefer Keats to Shelley; but the verdict implies purism. A poet is one who "makes" or "does" things, and Keats was preoccupied with eternal "Truth-Beauty"--to coin a term like the "Space-Time" of Einstein--of a far less potent and intricate quality.
In Egyptian lore Tahuti, the god of language, is also the god of wisdom and of creative thought; the word "gramareye" (dear to Sir Walter Scott) is indeed, like the French word grimoire, etymologically equivalent to "grammar." Poets must not be ranked by their lyrical exaltation any more than by their technical ability: wisdom is justified of her children, and a poet of his!
The children of Keats are people like Rossetti, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, whose eyes were fixed sadly and languorously on the sunset of things.
But the spilth of Shelley's seed flooded foreign and innumerable fields: James Thompson, Swinburne, and other poets of revolution and passion are only a minor branch of his great family. The reformers, the humanitarians, the feminists, the transcendentalists, from Bradlaugh and Huxley to Nietzsche and Anna Kingsford, were all suckled on that pale gold wine of Dionysus which issued from his martyred veins. The young lady was within her rights when she asked "What are Keats?"; and if she was a wise child she knew hew own father to be Shelley.
Keats remains perfect and imperishable like his own Greek Vase; he is the chief treasure of the Museum of Humanity; but Shelley is the High Priest of the Temple of Spiritual Progress, the Prophet of the most High God of Freedom, and the King of the Republic of "gentleness, wisdom, virtue, and endurance."
He is dynamic as Keats is static; and the nature of the Universe is Becoming rather than Being. The nineteenth century stripped the gilded rags of religion from the mummy of existence, and found a crumbling corpse, but the twentieth sees that dust dissolved into a glittering film of motion and light.
Modern physical and mathematical research are making it clearer every day that the structure of matter is indeed that subtle spiritual vibration which Shelley perceived it to be. By a parallel argument, man himself is no longer conceived as a fixed quantity established in a world six thousand years old, and subject to a single law. He is an immutable Essence indeed, perhaps, in some ultimate spiritual sense, but his manifestation is mutable; his sensible form is a vehicle of Energy surging in infinite variety against the shores of experience. Shelley speaks of an immanent Spirit of the Universe, and is sufficiently a Pantheist to have identified himself, or any other existing thing, with that Spirit, had he been challenged directly on the point by, let us say, Mr. Eddington or Mr. Bertrand Russell. If Shelley is not always explicitly in line with the latest mathematico-mystical thinkers, it is because the world was so far behind his intuitive perception of truth that there was no intellectual instrument capable of registering his vibrations, except possibly the ambiguous jargon of the school of Fludd. But he everywhere implies, more by the sheer form and tone of his verses than by their rational meaning, that existence is an unconditioned Unity (or Nihil), which has invented infinite modes of phantasmal and illusory duality for the purpose of becoming conscious of itself. It is not necessary for an animal to use our arbitrary language to express its feelings intelligibly; and, in point of fact, poets who have made the attempt to explain their spiritual consciousness in terms of philosophy have obscured their light rather than made it manifest. Blake is a notable example of this circumstance. We learn more of the essence of his soul-structure from "Tiger, Tiger", "The Crystal Cabinet", or "The Mental Traveler" than we do from his professedly "prophetic" books. The English language, as understood by scholars and developed by them, is an instrument of doubtful value to the poet. The soul of man lurks rather in the lilt of a lyric than in the most imposing lavallière that glitters on the velvet of the shop- window of literary effort.
Now Shelley was saturated with the spirit of the planet in its subtlest and strongest distillation: and that spirit overflowed into song. He possessed the utter simplicity and self-confidence of an immortal; if our ears are attuned to his thought, we can catch the choral rapture as is swings with the stars through the centuries. But his conscious efforts to express his essential idea are relatively lame.
Identical phenomena occur in every connection; and this is the ultimate reason for the apparent failure of the poet to maintain his hold on our hearts as we reach an age when our spirits are less sensitive to subtle and subconscious stress. Mr. Augustine Birrell remarks that Browning in later life lost his enthusiasm for this "strange and unaccountable being" [A. Birrell, "On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning's Poetry," in Collected Essays and Addresses, 1922-- ref. ED.] We are not all, fortunately, so middle-class and middle-aged as either of these gentlemen; but, even so, it is hard to read Shelley with enjoyment after one has turned forty. The reason, however, is this: one either has or has not assimilated the Unconscious of the poet in one's youth; in the one case the verse seems a mere husk, while in the other it screams the doom of spiritual death. The damned detest him, therefore, and the redeemed can only find pleasure in remembering the raptures which wrought the white-hot steel of their youth into the shapes of royalty and righteousness.
It is in the nature of things that even the greatest intellectual attempts to grapple with any given problem appear ill-adjusted in after years; for the thought has been frozen into crystalline beauty, while the problem has changed with the succession of suns. It is always an error for an artist to abdicate his throne in eternity in order to enter the lists of temporal things: ne sutor ultra crepidam ["the shoemaker is no better than the sandal"--trans. ED.]. Few people, even among philosophers, seem to understand that eternity differs in quality from time. It is commonly supposed to be a mere unlimited extension thereof. Yet the consideration that time is but one of the conditions of dualistic consciousness ought to make the true aspect of the matter immediately apparent. It is the prerogative of men like Shelley to think in terms of the absolute, which is out of all relation with the measurable, and not to be obtained therefrom by removing the landmarks, any more than one can make Beauty by effacing the marks on a steelyard, or prolonging the lever indefinitely. When, therefore, Shelley says

"Next came Fraud, and he had on,
    Like Eldon, an ermined gown"

he risks his intelligibility only in a slightly less degree than Mr. Frankau in One of Us, or the ephemeral leader-writer of this Ile des Diurnals. Eldon is already for us merely a judge who happened to annoy Shelley. One of Us is a very valuable historical document, of its kind, but the more it is history the less it is literature. It has already become difficult to identify the mourners for Adonais, immortals though they be. And Shelley was preeminently the "Sun-treader":--he should have remembered Phaeton.

Much, however, of this defect of Shelley is inseparable from his supreme quality as a technician. He was the first to realize the rhythmical power of the intonation of the English language, to see in it an armoury of striking and stabbing weapons. Shakespeare, with all his vigorous rhetoric, never understood the possibilities of pure form to play upon the passions; he trusted to the rational meaning of the words themselves. Milton made but a slight advance in this respect. Samuel Butler forged a hammer of the rhythm of Hudibras; but the stroke does not vary. Some of Shelley's contemporaries made the way plain for him by introducing freedom of metre; but none of them, not even Byron, was able to consummate the marriage of poetry and music. The result of the alliance was to unite the intellectual and emotional power of words with the direct spiritual action on the nerves which even the West African drum or the Papuan bull-roarer can exercise.
It is not too much to say, therefore, that Shelley was to the Revolutionary Epoch what Shakespeare was to the Renaissance. He created, in fact, a new heavens and a new earth of language. The perfection of Keats, the sublimity of Blake, the simplicity of Wordsworth, the mystery of Coleridge, the independence of Byron: these are feathers in the scale against the sword of Shelley. For language is the word which "was with God," and "was God"; it is the most intimate sheath of the soul, its first and simplest expression. The creation of a new language is therefore a stupendously significant event in the history of a planet, as important as the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of a fundamental principle in Nature. The influence of Shakespeare and the Bible is due not to their contents, or even their style, but to their having conferred upon the English people a new intellectual instrument. We are not yet at a sufficient distance from Shelley to estimate the real effect of his work. We are apt to be misled: we observe the triumph of many of his ideas, and associate that phenomenon with his success. The truth lies much deeper. Such questions as atheism are really of transitory importance: the tides of human opinion sway with the moon of popular favour, and (to a less degree) with the sun of the enlightenment of the ruling classes. But the advance in the development of the larynx marks off definitely man from monkey, and the perfecting of the weapon of speech by Shelley made the essential difference between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. The issue is masked for the moment by the Press. The English language is fallen into disrepute and impotence. But the wood pulp period of brain and paper will soon pass. Unless England is destroyed altogether by the vermin that are gnawing at her entrails, unless the speech of the greatest minds on earth since the Fall of Rome is rotted through by the cancer of senseless slang, venal vulgarity, alien abominations, the weapon of Shelley will wing its way through the centuries, and enable mind to inform mind by virtue of subtle cadences, harmonies, and hammer- strokes.
That is, above all, the problem of the day, now that the "hard facts" of materialism are thawing into a gossamer dew. It is becoming impossible to write sober science in prose: the subtleties of Nature demand rhythm to respond to, and to record, their own. By Wisdom, that is, by the Word, He created the worlds; and the Wonder-World of today has been created by the Word of the Winged Serpent, whom the men of his own day took to be Satan, him whose centenary we celebrate under his pseudonym of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

finis

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BOOK REVIEW:

Crafting the Art of Magic: 1939-1964. A History of Modern Witchcraft, Book I. By Aidan A. Kelly, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1991, ISBN 0-87542-370-1, $10.95.

Reviewed by Kathy Fleck.

In the first of a two volume series, Aidan Kelly attempts to reconstruct the history of Gardner's Witchcraft movement. Mr. Kelly is well equipped for the effort: Teacher, writer, and founder of two of the largest American Witchcraft organizations, Mr. Kelly's impressive credentials include a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Laying the groundwork for his thesis, Kelly asks what Gardner contributed, and in so doing, attempts to separate myth from history. The principle he used to make the separation gave him too much leeway and led to imaginative speculation, inaccuracies and obvious research flaws. In his Introduction the author concludes Gardner was dyslexic. "He could not spell or punctuate well enough to meet minimal standards for being published, his grasp of grammar was shaky at best." Dyslexia is generally defined as a reading disorder marked by the reversal of r, c, f, j and sometimes reversal of entire words, e.g., "saw" for "was." Gardner's typed material shows he was not a proficient typist, but there is no evidence of dyslexia.
In his first Chapter Kelly finds a strong Masonic influence on the Craft, but there are a number of inaccuracies in his work:
Pentagram Waite was not a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD) as Kelly states, but was a member of Stella Matutina.
Pentagram The break in HOGD was not primarily from Mathers elevating Crowley in the Order. It was the result of Mathers declaring the founding charter a forgery.
Pentagram Mathers' credits are inaccurate:1
       -- The Greater Key of Solomon was not a translation, but a transcription from English language MSS;
       -- Mathers' Kabalistic treatises were plagiarized, notably his introduction to Kabbalah Unveiled from Ginsberg's essay; and
       -- Mathers' "major" book on the Tarot was only 35 pages long.
Some of these inaccuracies, in all fairness, would be discovered only after years of research. But in answering the question, "what did Gardner contribute?" one has the right to expect a broader base from Kelly. On not finding a reference to the scourge and cord in his research of outside materials, the author credited Gardner with their introduction. The scourge and cord can be traced. Aleister Crowley shows a scourge and chain on the plate that accompanies Chapter I, Part II, in his 1911 edition of Book Four; the same work gives details on the use of the scourge in ritual and how it is made. An Egyptian style scourge was part of the regalia of officers of HOGD; Crowley makes occasional use of this in his workings, remarking that he saw it in visions. Crowley's Liber Aleph refers to Babalon as applying Her Scourge to him. The Equinox has numerous references to the scourge in metaphor, and in Vol. I, No. 1, suppliment pg. 48: "I think the Postulant should be actually scourged..."; Crowley (pg. 60 sup., Equinox, Vol. I, No. 1) mentions in the "John St. John" that he used the scourge, dagger, chain and Holy Anointing Oil in his own rituals; (Vol. I, No. 10) "The Ship," Crowley's Mystery Play, has one character use a scourge and rope in an allegory of initiation (parts of the Gnostic Mass were first printed in this work, notably the Anthem.). The scourge is also used in the "Rites of Eleusis"; "Liber Stellae Rubeae" uses the scourge on the altar; "Liber Pyramidos" uses it in a ritual of self initiation; Liber 777 lists the scourge with No. 5, Geburah; etc., etc..
Kelly acknowledges Crowley's influence on the Gardnerian rituals, but his truncation of research is a puzzlement, especially on the point of Masonic influence. O.T.O. rituals are much more heavily influenced by Masonry than the HOGD rituals; and, under Crowley, Gardner became a member of the O.T.O. In 1945 Gardner received his IVth and P.I. O.T.O. initiations. O.T.O. archives contain letters exchanged, after Crowley's death, by Freda Harris and Karl Germer in which FH asks if Gardner will be taking over headship. To be considered for such a position, it is probable that his initiations went higher than P.I. Gardner's certificate was part of the Ripley Museum Collection in the 1970s when Kelly researched their material.2
For a large part of his book, Kelly dissects two versions of Gardner's Book of Shadows and concludes Gardner was incapable of its writing. Kelly also states that witch practices are based directly on Crowley's methods; but, because of Gardner's drafts and revisions of the original Book of Shadows, he claims it could not have been written by Crowley. There is internal evidence that Crowley did some of the writing. In his 1977 manuscript, "The Rebirth of Witchcraft," part of his research on the Gardnerian ritual material, Kelly includes on page 202, "By the Great and Holy Name V,V,V,V,V..." This is Crowley's motto, and clear evidence of his involvement in Gardner's Book of Shadows.
Crowley's work on Magick is monumental, both in depth and breadth, yet in his bibliography, Kelly lists only one of Crowley's books, Magic in Theory and Practice, and mentions skimming through "The Equinox and several other of Crowley's books." This is a major flaw in Kelly's work. "Tyche" is an example. Regarding the "Hail Aradia" invocation, page 81 of Crafting the Art of Magic, according to Kelly: "The Farrars say that it is a poem by Aleister Crowley, originally addressed to Tyche. (...Crowley mavens I know beg to differ, and I have not been able to find it...)" It took five minutes to locate "La Fortuna" in The Works of Aleister Crowley, from the index of first lines in the back: "Hail Tyche! From the Amalthean horn." When Crowley wrote this sonnet on the monumental sculpture of Balzac, Auguste Rodin was so impressed that he commissioned Crowley to write other sonnets on his works.3 It really is unfortunate that Kelly abbreviated his study of Crowley.
Kelly mainly based his thesis on the Weschcke documents, The Ripley Museum Collection, and a few "safe" authors. The subject was timely and important, but because of its narrow scope of evidence, the treatment is inconclusive. Kelly did shed light on an attempt to hide Crowley's influence: "Gardner himself borrowed wholesale from Crowley; and Valiente rewrote the material to disguise the borrowing." Kelly's comments are sometimes inaccurate and his conclusions questionable. He calls Gardner's nurse "Con" instead of "Com" and declares Gardner and Valiente creative geniuses, after challenging their honesty.

Notes:
1. According to Bill Heidrick.
2. Allen H. Greenfield bought Gerald Gardner's O.T.O. Charter from the Ripley Museum.
The Charter, circa 1945, refers to Gardner as "Prince of Jerusalem" (P.I.) and charters
him to constitute a camp "in the degree of Minerval."
3. "La Fortuna", originally published in Crowley's poems written for Auguste Rodin, called
Rodin in Rime and found in The Works of Aleister Crowley, Vol.3, pg. 120.


From the Outbasket

Most unusual donation pitch of the Season:

from PADMA SHEDRUP LING SANGHA NEWS

FULL MOON FISH LIBERATION

Saturday, December 21, at 1 p.m.
Sunday, January 19, at 3 p.m.
Tuesday, February 18, at 5 p.m.
Loch Lomond Bait Shop in San Rafael. Call (415) 485-1356 for directions.

Donations for the fish can be mailed to the PSL P.O. Box, or call in the amount at (415) 485-1356 at least one day before liberation. Onju Updegrave will coordinate this event.

Address: Padma Shedrup Ling; P.O.Box 117, Fairfax, CA 94978. A nonprofit organization unconnected with O.T.O.

This appears to be Tibetan Buddhist. I hope somebody told them that the SF Bay is brackish! Fish not acclimated to it might die. Anyone desiring to contribute to the liberation of the captives in the bait shop should contact this group. Sorry, O.T.O. cannot accept donations on behalf of other charitable organizations.

-- TSG (Bill Heidrick)

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FROM THE HISTORY HEAP

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law -- Liber AL vel Legis I:40

January 2
This is the birthday of the Sumerian Queen of Heaven and Earth, INANNA. She journeyed into the underworld only to find herself turned into corpse. The only way for her to leave was to provide a substitute. The substitute she provided was her husband!

January 3, 1946
Karl Maria Wiligut died on this date, the man responsible for the establishment of castle Wewelsburg as the Nazi SS college & 'ceremonial centre' in November of 1933, and who designed not only the often stated 'satanic SS rites', but the Totenkopfring, or 'Death's Head Ring' worn by its members. Actually he joined the SS under the alias 'Weisthor', some claim to hid the fact that he had been certified insane in the Salzburg mental asylum some six years earlier. Regardless, he became known as Heinrick Himmler's private 'Magus'.

January 4, 1893
Documents survive showing that Boullan and his followers (The Church of Carmel) engaged, or thought they engaged in copulation with angels, cherubim, seraphim and the spirits of famous people like Cleopatra and Alexander the Great. Abbe Boullan's death on this date, came at the climax of a "Battle of the Magicians" between the Church of Carmel and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix.

January 4, 1918
To most people Roddie Minor's (Sister Achitha) visions would appear to be no more than hallucinations produced by 'The Lady of Our Dreams' (opium), lacking any real occult significance. Crowley was much impressed by them. Through Roddie Minor, Crowley contacts the Wizard Amalantrah on this date.

January 4, 1946
The 'Spear of Destiny' or the Spear of Longinus is rescued by the allied forces from the Nazis.

January 4, 1946
Jack Parsons begins the rites known as 'The Babalon Working'. The ritual took place over twelve consecutive nights to he strains of a Prokofiev violin concerto. Parsons made a series of eleven invocations. Parsons was to write to Crowley: "nothing seems to have happened. One night, there was a power failure, but nothing more eventful, until..."

January 5, 1915
In Aleister Crowley's "Rex de Arte Regia" (The King on the Royal Art), he writes on this date: "Women in America seem purely animal. They come like water and like wind they go. Not one of these operations in this country has ever had the flavor that one gets all the time in Europe."

January 6, 1915
"The best book I've read in years is about Aleister Crowley. He was said to be a satanist, a black magician, a sadist, a nut, a heroin addict and a sexual degenerate of monstrous proportions, and one wonders a bit if some of Aleister's infamous reputation was exaggerated..." Thus stated Alan Watts, who was born on this date.

January 7, 1943
A federal judge ruled him to be the inventor of the radio. He stated that a crystal is a living being. In a New York hotel room Nikola Tesla dies on this date.

January 8, 1744
The Divan Club is founded by Lord le Despencer or Sir Francis Dashwood, in London.

January 18, 1824
Joseph-Antoine Boullan, founder of The Church of Carmel, was born on this date. He seems to have been fascinated by the human excretory organs and their functions. He participated in rites that were scatological in nature.

January 18, 1946
Parsons performed rituals which led up to "an operation of symbolic birth", and settled down to wait. Then, on this date, at sunset, "while the scribe (Ron Hubbard) and I were on the Mojave desert, the feeling of tension suddenly snapped...I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me." The woman was Marjorie C____, she went on to be Parsons' 'Scarlet Woman'.

January 19, 1990
In Poona, India, Bhagwan Rajneesh dies of a heart attack at the age of 58, without any Roles Royces.

January 24, 1986
Death in hiding of Lafayette Ron Hubbard, hack science fiction writer and pop psychologist, at Creston (near San Luis Obispo), CA. According to a devoted follower who knew him well, "He was a mixture of Adolph Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, and Baron Münchhausen. In short, he was a con man."

Love is the law, love under will. -- Liber AL vel Legis I:57

                              Cornelius/Herndon.

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Events Calendar for January 1992 e.v.

1/1/92New Year's Day
1/4/92Cthulhu Culture Club 6:30 PM w/JerryThelema Ldg.
1/4/92Lodge Council 1 PMThelema Ldg.
1/5/92Rite of Sol 2:22 PM
1/5/92Gnostic Mass 7:30 PMThelema Ldg.
1/6/92Thelema Lodge Meeting 8PMThelema Ldg.
1/9/92Magick in Theory and Practice
Study Circle with Marlene 8PM		Thelema Ldg.
1/10/92Rite of Venus 8:PMThelema Ldg.
1/12/92Gnostic Mass 7:30 PMThelema Ldg.
1/13/92Ladies' T 5:30PMThelema Ldg.
1/14/92Book 4, Astral Flight class
with Drax 8 PM		Thelema Ldg.
1/15/92Rite of Mercury 8 PM
1/18/92Initiations (call to attend)Thelema Ldg.
1/19/92E.G.C. Schedule & Business 4:18 PMThelema Ldg.
1/19/92Gnostic Mass 7:30 PMThelema Ldg.
1/20/92Rite of Luna 9 PM (prelim rit. sunset)
1/21/92Book 4, Astral Flight class
with Drax 8 PM		Thelema Ldg.
1/23/92Magick in Theory and Practice
Study Circle with Marlene 8PM		Thelema Ldg.
1/24/92Gnostic Wrestling 8 PM
(bring Sugarless Lime Jello)		Thelema Ldg.
1/25/92Rite of Earth 2 PM
1/26/91Lodge Clean upThelema Ldg.
1/26/92Aquarian Birthday party 4:18 PMThelema Ldg.
1/26/91Gnostic Mass 7:30 PMThelema Ldg.
1/28/92"Magick without Aleister" with
Fr. Majnun 8 PM		Thelema Ldg.
1/29/92Magick Theater Reads Crowley's
Drama Adonis (Liber CCCXXXV)
7:30 PM at Thelema Lodge		Magick Thea.
1/31/92Gnostic Mass in SF 8 PMindependant

The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

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