thelema.page

Liber XV (or “Book 15”), probably Aleister Crowley’s best-known and most widely performed ritual, is now almost universally referred to as the “Gnostic Mass,” although Crowley never officially called it that, nor is it an accurate description by any stretch of that qualifier. The Latin subtitle of the work, Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ, translates to the “Canon of the Mass of the Gnostic Catholic Church,” but there is precious little “Gnostic” about the mass itself. The Gnostic Catholic Church, which Crowley always referred to by its full English name, was inherited by him from O.T.O. founder Theodor Reuss, as die Gnostisch-Katolische Kirche, a semi-illegitimate offshoot of the French Église Gnostique Universelle.¹

Like e.g. Crowley’s “past incarnation” Éliphas Lévi, Reuss was convinced that Freemasonry was founded, not by some random brick-layers or even by the Knights Templar for instance, but by the historic Gnostic Christians. Some even claimed the “G” in the symbol of Freemasonry stands for “Gnosis” rather than the more commonly suggested “God” or “Geometry.” Crowley, however, was of the mind that it actually stood for “Generation”—as in the procreation of the species through sexual reproduction. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Freemasonry, is thus identified with every other John, Jonah, Dionysus, Janus, Dianus, Oannes, On, and Noah, of myth and song, including the traditional British harvest legend John Barleycorn.

As Crowley declares in The Gospel According to Saint Bernand Shaw, “if the New Testament be the composite document which it is here maintained to be in this essay, I am the truest of all Christians. I agree with practically every word reported of the Yogi Jesus, and nearly every word of the Essene. True, I reject Salvationism, and the Jewish element of prophecies fulfilled, and the praise of the Law of Moses; but trust humbly that any deficiency in these respects may be more than made up by superfluity in another. For not only do I hold the cult of John Barleycorn to be the only true religion, but have established his worship anew; in the last three years branches of my organisation have sprung up all over the world to celebrate the ancient rite. So mote it be.”

Accordingly, the official description of Liber XV from The Blue Equinox simply reads, “The canon of the Mass, according to the Gnostic Catholic Church, which represents the original and true pre-Christian Christianity.” In his Confessions, Crowley refers to it as “the central ceremony of [O.T.O.’s] public and private celebration, corresponding to the Mass of the Roman Catholic Church,” yet strangely he never once performed it in full himself. In fact, it was first published in The International (March 1918), a New York literary and arts journal he served as a contributing editor of at the time. “I resolved that my ritual should celebrate the sublimity of the operation of universal forces without introducing disputable metaphysical theories,” Crowley wrote. “I would neither make nor imply any statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the most materialistic man of science.”

Apparently, Crowley assumed that any average Joe perusing this elaborate ritual script would be able to immediately grasp what he was getting at. Which is all the more generous considering it evidently never occurred to the great Qabalist Crowley that magical weapons could correlate with anything besides lofty things like the Will, and the Soul, and the Holy Guardian Angel, until in 1913, that is, when Reuss accused him of publishing the secrets of the higher degrees of his Order: “During this period the full interpretation of the central mystery of freemasonry became clear in consciousness, and I expressed it in dramatic form in ‘the Ship’. The lyrical climax is in some respects my supreme achievement in invocation; in fact, the chorus beginning: Thou who art I beyond all I am … seemed to me worthy to be introduced as the anthem into the Ritual of the Gnostic Catholic Church which, later in the year, I prepared for the use of the O.T.O.”²

Though Crowley always maintained that his Missal was written “under the influence of the Liturgy of St. Basil of the Russian Church,” it actually closely mirrors the structure of the Tridentine Mass, the traditional Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church.³ The Crowleyan Confession begins with the grandiloquent declaration, “I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes.” Now, in the system of the A∴ A∴, CHAOS is of course associated with the Second Sephira, Chokmah, and all that lofty Qabalistic nonsense, but the higher degree documents of the O.T.O. clearly and simply identify “the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth” as the human male reproductive organ. To mischievously paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a phallus is just a phallus.

The Creed continues: “And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.” Again, BABALON obviously corresponds with the Third Sephira, Binah, and is the female counterpart to CHAOS, but having established the identity of that other counterpart in this conjuncture, it should not be difficult to figure out the rest. “And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET.” The Lion-Serpent, the solar-phallic representation of the spermatozoon; BAPHOMET, the androgynous idol of the Templars, but also in the Greek, βαφη μητεος, the Gnostic “baptism of wisdom.” Indeed, the Creed concludes with the congregants confessing “one Baptism of Wisdom whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation.” However, the existential facts of biology are ultimately—and importantly—paired with an essentialist confession of “my life one, individual, and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.”

What is more, the congregants declare their belief “in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.” Light, Life and Love are the quintessential elements of all creation according to St. John the Evangelist. Liberty, the fourth element added by Crowley, corresponds with Earth, for only a carnal or temporal being can be truly free.⁴ We thus have the entire formula of the Tetragrammaton; or even the Pentagrammaton, if we count the Law of Thelema as the fifth “L” or Spirit. If it is the former indeed that Crowley is applying here, then the formula remains intact even if we divest the ritual of all quotations from The Book of the Law (which seems unlikely to be the intent).⁵ The latter also has the added benefit of harmonizing perfectly with the other all-important five-fold formula Crowley introduced into the Order, namely, ϜIAOϜ.

“The Master Therion, in the Seventeenth year of the Aeon, has reconstructed the Word I A O to satisfy the new conditions of Magick imposed by progress. The Word of the Law being Thelema, whose number is 93, this number should be the canon of a corresponding Mass. Accordingly, he Has expanded I A O by treating the O as an Ayin, and then adding Vau as prefix and affix. The full word is then ויאעו‎ whose number is 93.” Simply put, the ϜIAOϜ formula was Crowley’s way of reconciling the existentialist initiations of Craft (or Blue Lodge) Freemasonry with the essentialist philosophy of Thelema. “FΙΑΟF: 93, the full formula, recognizing the Sun as the Son (Star), as the pre-existent manifested Unit from which all springs and to which all returns. The Great Work is to make the initial FF of Assiah (the world of material illusion) into the final FΙF of Atziluth, the world of pure reality.”

The point of Freemasonry may have been “To make good men better,” but the point of Thelema was to be who you truly are (and always were and always will be).⁶ “In the Aeon of Osiris it was indeed realised that Man must die in order to live. But now in the Aeon of Horus we know that every event is a death; subject and object slay each other in ‘love under will’; each such death is itself life, the means by which one realises oneself in a series of episodes.” Thus we still have the three degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason (with the Companion of the Royal Arch as an appendix), but now also need the Minerval (0°) and Perfect Initiate (P.I.) at the opposite ends to put together the full ϜIAOϜ.⁷ Crowley later further renamed the Craft Degrees Man and Brother⁸ (I°), Magician (II°), and Master Magician (III°)—with the IV° now known as Perfect Magician—but changed little else.

There are, in all, nine initiatory degrees in the O.T.O designated with Roman numerals. Nine is the value of “AVB, the Secret Magick of Obeah, and of the Sephira Yesod, which is the seat in man of the sexual function by whose Magick he overcomes even Death, and that in more ways than one, ways that are known to none but the loftiest and most upright Initiates, baptised by the Baptism of Wisdom, and communicants at that Eucharist where the Fragment of the Host in the Chalice becomes whole.” According to the Crowley, the ubiquitous 93 is also the number of “the Lost Word whose formula does in sober truth ‘raise Hiram,’ and of many another close-woven Word of Truth.” The present author is bound by oath not to disclose this “True Lost Word of the Freemasons,” but nothing prevents him from revealing the Substitute Word used in Regular Freemasonry: MOABON.⁹ This all ties in nicely—and purposely—with the Words of Institution, which in Liber XV take the Greek form Ό ΠATHP EΣTIN Ό ΎIOΣ ΔIA TO ΠNEΥMA ΆΓION, “The Father is the Son through the Holy Spirit.” The Master Mason does not fear death, for he knows that he will live on “in the son.”

“This was the inmost secret of the Knights of the Temple, and the Brethren of the Rose Crosse concealed it in their College of the Holy Ghost. From them and from their successors the Hermetic Brothers of Light have we received it directly, and here declare it openly to you. Now then learn that this secret consists in the knowledge of a peculiar rite, an High Mass to be celebrated in the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Are ye not, Kings and Priests unto God, Very Illustrious Sir Knights and Perfectly Illuminated brethren? This is the True Sacrament by which ye are partakers of the very Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, not in His death, but in His resurrection. By this are ye made Children of Light, Fellows of the Holy Ghost, perfect pure, Companions of the Sangreal, illustrious Knights of the Sacrosanct Order of Kadosch. By this have ye the GNOSIS; by this are ye counted among the Dwellers of the Sanctuary. Blessed are they that do this commandment, that they may have sight of the Tree of Life, and may enter it through the Gate into the City.”

The higher degrees of the O.T.O. purported to disclose the hidden mysteries of all the most famous and notorious of secret societies, from the Rosicrucians (V°) through the Knights Templar (VI°) all the way to the Illuminati (VIII°) themselves—and Crowley of course had his own spin on all of their “true” teachings as well.¹⁰ As in the lower or craft degrees, new members were admitted to the O.T.O. based on the Masonic degrees they already held; no initiations took place, even if the rituals existed in written form, until the Order started admitting members that had not previously been raised Masons, first in Canada under Crowley’s erstwhile “magical child” Charles Stansfeld Jones. Even then, the higher degrees were only “read through,” and in England, where Crowley was the Grand Master, not even the lower degrees were ever conferred ceremonially.¹¹ This was simply the done thing in most of the high degree rites of time, not only because the Ancient and Accepted Rite consisted of a whopping 33 degrees while the Egyptian Rite of Memphis boasted 97 in all, but because the United Grand Lodge of England (U.G.L.E.) held an absolute monopoly on conferring the lower three degrees in its jurisdiction.

This alone explains the oft-cited declaration made in Liber LII—or “Manifesto of the O.T.O.”—first published in the Blue Equinox: “The O.T.O., although an Academia Masonica, is not a Masonic Body so far as the ‘secrets’ are concerned in the sense in which that expression is usually understood; and therefore in no way conflicts with, or infringes the just privileges of, the United Grand Lodge of England, or any Grand Lodge in America or elsewhere which is recognized by it.” However, this in no wise prevented Crowley from issuing a Pledge-Form that would demand the candidate to “acknowledge the authority of Baphomet XI°, 33°, 90°, 95°, Grand Master, whose private seal is affixed to this paper, as the sole and supreme authority in Freemasonry; so that the obligations which [they] may take to him supersede and override any and all of [their] previous obligations; and [to] swear never to take obligations to any other authority without his consent.”

Now, the XI° was a peculiar addition to the degrees of the O.T.O. that existed outside “the general plan of the Order, is inscrutable, and dwells in its own palace.” The present author frankly fails to not see any other reason for it than Crowley being able to claim for himself a degree higher than any Reuss had previously instituted. After all, Crowley had entered the Order the same way as any others being admitted back then, by acknowledgment of the degrees already held, and then having their true esoteric meaning revealed to him “Under the Seal of the Obligation.” He had personally rewritten all the initiation rituals and the higher degree lectures with Reuss’ blessing, but Reuss was still technically his superior as X° Anational Grand Master and “O.H.O.” all the while practically living next door to him in London.¹² But merely the rumour that the XI° might be a homosexual inversion of Reuss’ prized IX° guaranteed that the latter wanted no part of it.

When Crowley devotees and sex magick enthusiasts debate the XI° or even the IX°, they tend to debate the operation of the degree, not the secret, although they almost invariably confuse the two.¹³ The secret of the IX°, clearly articulated in the higher degree lectures written by Crowley, is simply this: “All true religions are solar and phallic in nature.” This may not seem like much of a revelation and goes a long way towards explaining why the O.T.O. discontinued the policy of admitting people to the IX° “soon as they showed a hint of knowing the secret.” However, for an Edwardian man-about-town, this meant the possibility of safely venturing into any local church and hearing any sermon and immediately being able to read the solar and phallic symbolism between the lines. Suddenly, the “Rod of God” didn’t seem as terrifying.¹⁴ However, if we follow this logic into the XI° and if it is indeed some sort of inversion of the IX°, then the secret of that degree could be that all false religions are lunar and anal.¹⁵ Interestingly, many of Crowley’s homosexual encounters took place in Islamic North Africa (at a time when Sodomy was a crime in England), though not exclusively with Muslims—Mohammed ibn Rahman being the most famous of the latter.

Much has also been made of the fact that Crowley ultimately substituted the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff with the story of the Sufi martyr Mansur al-Hallaj. But just like in the case of Saladin taking on the role of the Most Mysterious Master, there was really no other Middle Eastern figure that would fit the bill. Mansur was Persian and Saladin a Kurd, and neither of them were exactly uncontroversial among mainstream Arab Muslims of any period—but both men were well loved by Western Orientalists like Sir Richard Francis Burton whom Crowley greatly admired. Though Idries Shah would much later notoriously assert that the Islamic Sufis were behind the teachings of Western Freemasonry, he would also make the same outlandish claim about their influence on such historical figures as Roger Bacon, Raymond Lully, St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross, and even Geoffrey Chaucer. Currently, Freemasonry is illegal in all Arab countries with the exception of Lebanon and Morocco, and Islamic nations do not allow any Masonic establishments within their borders.

The Catholic Church also famously bans its members from joining any kind of Masonic fraternity, under the penalty of excommunication, for reasons similar to the Islamic prohibition. Pope Leo XIII’s 1884 encyclical Humanum Genus asserts that the ultimate purpose of Freemasonry is “the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.” What is more, the Papal bull Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo, promulgated by Pius VII in 1821, alleges the Masons “profane and defile the passion of Jesus Christ by certain of their impious ceremonies, that they despise the Sacraments of the Church (for which they seem to substitute other new things invented by themselves through their supreme wickedness).” Which brings us to Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason (1794), who in 1805 wrote that “The christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: both are derived from the worship of the Sun.

“The difference between their origin is, that the christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.” Crowley goes a step further and declares that “the Christs alike of the Lutheran, Latin, and Anglican Churches are but the machine-gods of all fraud and oppression, being stolen and prostituted from that Christ in whom our fathers in the Gnosis strove to synthesize the warring Gods of Syria, Greece, Chaldea, Rome, and Egypt at the time when the growth of the Roman Empire first made travel possible, and the intercommunication of the priests of Mithras, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Isis, Astarte, Venus and many scores of others. Traces of this recension are still visible in the Mass and in the Calendar of the Saints, all major Gods and Goddesses of universal import receiving the same honour by the same rites as before, while the local Gods were replaced by Saints, virgins, martyrs, or angels, often of the same name, always of the same character.”

In a twist of ultimate irony, in 1972, following the Second Vatican Council’s 2,165-to-9 decision to “reinstate” the catechumenate, Pope Paul VI promulgated the Order of the Christian Initiation of Adults, Ordo initiationis christianæ adultorum. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church—unveiled by John Paul II on the 30th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II—puts it, “The sacraments of Christian initiation—Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist—lay the foundations of every Christian life. ‘The sharing in the divine nature given to men through the grace of Christ bears a certain likeness to the origin, development, and nourishing of natural life. The faithful are born anew by Baptism, strengthened by the sacrament of Confirmation, and receive in the Eucharist the food of eternal life. By means of these sacraments of Christian initiation, they thus receive in increasing measure the treasures of the divine life and advance toward the perfection of charity.’”

The twelve-cardinal commission that prepared the first draft of the Catechism was chaired by none other than Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, who as the Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith famously reiterated the prohibition of Catholics from enrolling in Masonic associations. Thus, a full quarter of a millennium after the founding of the United Grand Lodge of England (est. 1717), the Catholic Church decides to start using a three-stage system of ritual initiation in admitting new members of full-age.¹⁶ As the English translation of the Rite tells us: “In the liturgical year the Easter Vigil, the pre-eminent commemoration of Christ’s paschal mystery, is the preferred occasion for the celebration in which the elect will enter the paschal mystery through baptism, confirmation, and eucharist. Candidates for reception, who in baptism have already been justified by faith and incorporated into Christ, are entering fully into a community that is constituted by its communion both in faith and in the sacramental sharing of the paschal mystery.”

“In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathens took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature.” (J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough.)

When the “O.T.O. declares that Brotherhood of ALL THINGS CREATED is a Fact in Nature,” it refers to the biological facts of reproduction. As Crowley explains, “sex is justly hallowed in this sense, that it is the eternal fire of the race. Huxley admitted that ‘some of the lower animalculæ are in a sense immortal,’ because they go on reproducing eternally by fission, and however often you divide x by 2 there is always something left. But he never seems to have seen that mankind is immortal in exactly the same sense, and goes on reproducing itself with similar characteristics through the ages, changed by circumstance indeed, but always identical in itself. But the spiritual flower of this process is that at the moment of discharge a physical ecstasy occurs, a spasm analogous to the mental spasm which meditation gives. And further, in the sacramental and ceremonial use of the sexual act, the divine consciousness may be attained.”¹⁷

The Catholic corollary is that “Faith makes us taste in advance the light of the beatific vision, the goal of our journey here below. Then we shall see God ‘face to face’, ‘as he is’. So faith is already the beginning of eternal life.” According to the Constitution issued by Pope Benedict XII in 1336 On the Beatific Vision of God, “the souls of all the saints who departed from this world before the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and also of the holy apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins and other faithful who died after receiving the holy baptism of Christ … immediately (mox) after death and … since the ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into heaven … joined to the company of the holy angels. Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, these souls have seen and see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision.”¹⁸

The “Saints” portion of the “Collects” of Liber XV calls upon “Lord of Life and Joy, that art the might of man, that art the essence of every true god that is upon the surface of the Earth, continuing knowledge from generation unto generation, thou adored of us upon heaths and in woods, on mountains and in caves, openly in the marketplaces and secretly in the chambers of our houses, in temples of gold and ivory and marble as in these other temples of our bodies, we worthily commemorate them worthy that did of old adore thee and manifest they glory unto men… Sons of the Lion and the Snake! with all thy saints we worthily commemorate them worthy that were and are and are to come. May their Essence be here present, potent, puissant and paternal to perfect this feast!” The names themselves may be “rhetorical flourish”—as Crowley himself put it—but the rest is pure Darwinism.¹⁹

The three levels of the guild system—apprentice, journeyman, and master—allow the experience of one generation to be passed onto the next while allowing new skills, knowledge, and understanding to be brought in. The Latin for guild is collegium or universitas, and these terms were adopted by teachers—or “masters”—and students who came together in the Middle Ages to form what we now call universities. While other craft guilds mostly died off during the industrial revolution as their increasingly exclusive, conservative, and monopolistic practices, coupled with their selective entrance policies, gradually eroded their economic utility, the scholars’ guilds retained their power over membership, training, and offices. Medieval guilds shared religious and well as social functions, such as collecting and distributing charity, providing for common religious festivals²⁰ and banquets, aiding distressed members and burying dead members. Masonic funerals, afforded to all Master Masons in good standing with their Lodges, remains the only public ritual in regular Freemasonry.

The structure of the O.T.O. is based on the corporatist hypothesis (from the Latin corpus, “human body”) that society will reach its peak of harmonious functioning when each of its divisions efficiently performs its designated functions, just as the bodily organs individually contribute to the general health and functionality of the living organism. While corporatist ideas have been expressed since ancient Greek and Roman societies, they have been integrated in particular into Catholic social teaching and form the basis of all Western religious orders, including not only monasteries but military orders such as the Knights Templar. Corporatism made a big comeback in Europe during the period following the First World War, when the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini adopted the system and named his version Fascism.²¹ Crowley initially voiced admiration for Mussolini and his Blackshirts, but had a change of heart after being evicted from Sicily in 1923, soon to be accompanied by the other members of his modern-day “Abbey of Thelema” in Cefalù.

It was during this period that Crowley felt the need to temper Liber CXCIV and the corporatist constitution of the O.T.O. with Liber Oz, or a declaration of the Rights of Man. Later, when this laundry list of negative rights had proved self-defeating, he penned a corresponding list of “chief rules of practical conduct to be observed by those who accept the Law of Thelema,” published posthumously simply as Duty. He certainly spent more time and effort on these two short tracts than he did on Liber XV, which “never went through revision” even though he wrote it “practically in one sitting.” His Mass was thus not only left with instructions that were impossible to follow without at least some minor changes, but more importantly, without a way to actually perform it in public, since it utilizes private signs of recognition from the I°, II° and III°. The substitute signs used today were invented²² at Winfred Talbot Smith’s Agapé Lodge No. 2 in Hollywood, which was the first and only O.T.O. body to publicly perform the ritual in Crowley’s lifetime.²³

But are we also really to believe that Crowley changed his mind about the efficacy of ritual initiations when he completely discontinued them in the A∴ A∴ and never conducted any within the British Section of the O.T.O.? As he writes in his Confessions concerning his own initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, “I took the Order with absolute seriousness. I was not even put off by the fact of its ceremonies taking place at Mark Masons’ Hall. I remember asking Baker whether people often died during the ceremony. I had no idea that it was a flat formality and that the members were for the most part muddled middle-class mediocrities. I saw myself entering the Hidden Church of the Holy Grail. This state of my soul served me well. My initiation was in fact a sacrament. The rituals have been printed in The Equinox, Vol. I, Nos. II and III. There is no question that those of neophyte and adept are the genuine rituals of initiation, for they contain the true formulae. The proof is that they can be made to work by those who understand and know how to apply them.”

He specifies that the magical formulas involved were true, yes, but he has so little respect for his solemn oaths of secrecy that he publishes the rituals themselves in his trailblazing periodical—and gets sued by Mathers for doing so.²⁴ The I.A.O. formula is “is also identical with the Word Lux L.V.X., which is formed by the arms of a cross. It is this formula which is implied in those ancient and modern monuments in which the phallus is worshipped as the Saviour of the World. … We find it the basis of many important initiations, notably the Third degree in Masonry, and the 5°=6° ceremony of the G.D. described in Equinox I, III. A ceremonial self-initiation may be constructed with advantage on this formula. The essence of it consists in robing yourself as a king, then stripping and slaying yourself, and rising from that death to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. There is an etymological identity between Tetragrammaton and I A O, but the magical formulæ are entirely different, as the descriptions here given have schewn [sic].”

It could thus be credibly argued that the modern O.T.O., as incorporated with the State of California in 1979, is a revival not so much of Crowley’s British original, but of Smith and Parsons’ Agapé Lodge, with physical initiations, regular Sunday Masses, and official religious status granted by federal tax authorities. However, if you are a contested leader of an organization whose authority is built on the proper physical performance of group rituals, you might not be too keen on its members realizing that the premier Thelemic order, which “first proclaimed the Law to the world” and whom you work “in close alliance with,” is basically just a glorified correspondence course that relies completely on “self-initiation.” You might even come up with some phony credentials and claim to represent this “Inner Order” as well, now of course complete with group activities and reinstituted ritual initiations.²⁵

Is it then any surprise that Crowley’s rewriting of the O.T.O. rituals, originally meant to promulgate Thelema among Freemasons, has currently only succeeded in driving Thelemites into regular Freemasonry?²⁶ The “Caliphate O.T.O.” lacks the capacity and authority to represent all Freemasonry, or even act as “Academia Masonica” as conceived by Reuss and Crowley, but more damningly, is unable to promulgate Thelema even among Thelemites. Its leaders like to pretend that merely altering a phrase here and a gesture there can transform commonplace Masonic rituals into actual magical ceremonies to rival those of genuine mystery schools of old.²⁷ Logic and tradition have been sacrificed at the altar of wokeness—one could say that Agapé has replaced Thelema figuratively and literally, poisoning both the well and the chalice.

In the New Aeon, Christianity, tainted as it is with Old Aeon thinking, no longer represents the “Great Sorcery.” When Crowley referred to the O.T.O. as “the first of the great religious Societies to accept the Law,” he was not just hoping the rest of Freemasonry might follow, or the Theosophical Society, or any number of fringe groups. His was “the Law that Jesus Christ, or rather the Gnostic tradition of which the Christ-legend is a degradation, attempted to teach; but nearly every word he said was misinterpreted and garbled by his enemies, particularly those who called themselves his disciples. In any case the Aeon was not ready for a Law of Freedom.” So did Crowley actually think that the Catholic Church itself was eventually going to adopt the Law of Thelema? Probably not. But did he think they ought to? Almost definitely.

1 All three names translate to Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in Latin.

2 It is traditionally the Churches that have their own chivalric orders and not the other way around.

3 However, it is safe to say that Crowley was mostly influenced by the Book of Common Prayer (first edition 1549) whose liturgy Archbishop Thomas Cranmer based on sources ranging from St. John Chrysostom to Martin Luther; conversely, Doinel’s existing French Gnostic liturgy seems to have had no influence of Crowley’s Mass whatsoever.

4 Strangely, people generally assume that by Liberty, Crowley meant the newfangled negative liberty (freedom “from”), when he very clearly is talking about the classical positive liberty (freedom “to”); see e.g. Liber CL de Lege Libellum L-L-L-L-L.

5 And this is before even considering what Crowley writes in the chapter of Magick in Theory and Practice dedicated to this formula: “It will now be recognised that to devise a practical magical ceremony to correspond to Tetragrammaton in this exalted sense might be difficult if not impossible. In such a ceremony the Rituals of purification alone might occupy many incarnations. It will be necessary, therefore, to revert to the simpler view of Tetragrammaton, remembering only that the Hé final is the Throne of the Spirit, of the Shin of Pentagrammaton.”

6 Instead of “Thelema for Freemasons,” the modern O.T.O. has unfortunately become “Freemasonry for Thelemites,” thereby defeating the purpose of both.

7 While Reuss first introduced the Minerval degree, there was no Minerval ritual until Crowley.

8 Or “Woman and Sister”—the original plan was to have men and women be segregated before the V°.

9 The words, signs, and grips of each degree constitute the only real secrets in Freemasonry—the ritual scripts themselves are made fully available to the general public with just the above items blacked out or omitted.

10 To be fair, Thelema is a law, not a system—one applies it to existing systems.

11 This may seem like cheating to the uninitiated, but rest assured that no-one will be able to fully process the intended lessons of these degrees unless they have gone through the regular Masonic versions first.

12 Technically, Reuss only assumed the title of “Anational Grand Master” after relocating to neutral Switzerland during WWI, but that was de facto the office he held as Outer Head of the Order.

13 There is, of course, more than one operation and not all of them involve the same two “instruments,” but none of that is within the scope of this essay.

14 Pathological sex negativity can be a pretty shrewd tactic when you do not want anyone suspecting that “Every tower of a church is the symbol of the manly organ; every nave or transept is a symbol of the feminine organ.”

15 Once you realize it is not a crescent and a star that are depicted in the symbol of Islam, you cannot unsee it.

16 However, it should be noted that like every mainline Christian denomination, the Catholic Church still recognizes all baptisms by any person (a layman, a woman, or even an unbeliever) performed using the correct Trinitarian formula (“I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”). The sacrament of baptism cannot be repeated (a feature of so-called “Born-Again Christianity”) and is not undone even by excommunication.

17 It is certainly no accident that the French dub the orgasm le petite mort. “The old pagan worship of the Mother-idea was superseded by the word IAO or its equivalents, which asserted the formula of the Dying God, and made the Male, dying to himself in the act of love, the engineer of the continued life of the race. This revolution cut at the root of all previous custom. Matriarchy vanished; self-sacrifice became the cardinal virtue, and so through infinite ramifications.”

18 Crowley equates the Beatific Vision with Tiphereth, the Sun, and the Vau of Tetragrammaton. To him, it is therefore just the first step on the path to enlightenment, not the end. “This Christian teaching [of the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse concerning the Bride of Christ] (not its qabalistic equivalent) is incomplete. The Bride (the soul) is united, though only by marriage, with the Son, who then presents her to the Father and Mother or Holy Spirit. These four then complete Tetragrammaton. But the Bride is never united to the Father. In this scheme the soul can never do more than touch Tiphereth and so receive the ray from Chokmah. Whereas even St John makes his Son say ‘I and my Father are one.’ And we all agree that in philosophy there can never be (in Truth) more than one; this Christian dogma says ‘never less than four.’ Hence its bondage to law and its most imperfect comprehension of any true mystic teaching, and hence the difficulty of using its symbols.”

19 Ironically, whereas every study shows atheism to be more prevalent among seminary-trained clergy than among habitual churchgoers, the reverse appears to be true for the average officiant of Crowley’s naturalistic ritual.

20 In some of the larger cities, the guilds also produced and performed mystery plays (possibly from the Latin ministerium, “craft” or “occupation”), the earliest formally staged dramas in medieval Europe, with each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of biblical narrative from the Creation to the Last Judgement.

21 All variants of corporatism are marred by a flawed understanding of how the human body actually functions, but that comes dangerously close to saying “Real corporatism has never been tried.”

22 Technically, they merely kept using the old Masonic signs from before Crowley’s revision of the O.T.O. initiation rituals, so it was less an innovation and more don’t-fix-it-if-it-ain’t-broke.

23 One might think that Crowley would have been overjoyed that his now most famous ritual was being performed on regular basis by his American acolytes, but he was genuinely less than impressed: “In the case of Smith in particular, his conduct is entirely unspeakable. He has done nothing whatever to justify his position except the mere performance of the Mass and this, I gather, cannot have been done any too well, or we should have raised a great many storms of one kind or another long before now.” (Crowley to Jane Wolfe, 16 February 1943.)

24 Oath breaking is so prevalent among high ranking magicians that one could almost assume it was a part of the initiation—might it not be an accident that the word Warlock literally means an “oath-breaker”? Again, as Crowley puts it, “A real Magical Oath cannot be broken: you think it can, but it can’t. This is the advantage of a real Magical Oath.” He is referring of course to the Oath of Abyss and its cognates: “I, O.M. &c., a member of the Body of God, hereby bind myself on behalf of the whole Universe, even as we are now physically bound unto the cross of suffering: that I will lead a pure life, as a devoted servant of the Order: that I will understand all things: that I will love all things: that I will perform all things and endure all things: that I will continue in the Knowledge and Conversation of My Holy Guardian Angel: that I will work without attachment: that I will work in truth: that I will rely only upon myself: that I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul. And if I fail herein, may my pyramid be profaned, and the Eye be closed upon me!”

25 Combine this with the newly imposed secrecy and you have all the tell-tale signs of a cult.

26 The same thing, of course, happens with Liber XV and Catholicism, C.S. Jones becoming the first nominal Thelemite driven into the arms of the Holy Mother Church as early as 1928—if it’s just sacramental liturgy or dramatic ritual you’re looking for (or at), obviously nothing beats the original.

27 At the same time, they seem confident that foregoing the use of narcotic substances prescribed by Crowley does not affect the rituals, only their non-profit status.