Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
As an inactive Initiate of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis I have some comments & clarifications to post here, and many, many corrections. Read and judge for yourselves.
Edward Alexander Crowley was born in 1875 to an English family who owned a brewery. They were also members of the Plymouth Bretheren, an obscure Christian sect.
Young Edward's iconoclastic spirit so impinged upon this household that his mother nicknamed him the Great Beast 666--a title which he would later accept.
Falling out of favor with the Oxford Dons, he took initiation into the Order of the Golden Dawn, and thus was drawn into the company of W. B. Yeats and S. L. MacGregor Mathers.
This was around the end of the 19th Century, and more than one occult society knew that a new age was waiting to be ushered in, with a new magical formula and a new paradigm for humankind, heralded by an avatar, a Buddha or some such. Blavatsy's Theosophists eventually put up their own candidate, J. P. Krishnamurti, who seems to have become an enlightened man. He wrote some interesting stuff, but he declined the position. Crowley later accepted.
The Golden Dawn were intent on contacting the Secret Chiefs (kinda like Dove's St. Germaine but much more discarnate and much less intrusive into human affairs) to bring about the Shift to the New Aeon.
Meanwhile during a temporary retirement from magic, Crowley married one Rose Kelly, sister of a British painter. They honeymooned in Egypt (which was then like much of the Mideast an extension of the British Empire), and purportedly spent a night in a chamber of the Great Pyramid.
After, Rose began pestering Aleister to demonstrate ritual magic. He finally put together a slapdash invocation to Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, and performed it.
"They're waiting for you," said Rose.
Rose gave her husband information she could not have learned through normal channels. Crowley realized the Secret Chiefs were calling him.
So at noon on April 8, 9 and 10, 1904, Aleister Crowley went alone into a room and received "The Book of the Law." It opens,
Had! The manifestation of Nuit.
The unveiling of the company of heaven.
Every man and every woman is a star.
Every man and every woman is a star. If that sounds like a satanic message or a threat to your identity, perhaps you ought to rethink some things.
Had is short for Hadit, the Egyptian winged globe that represents the innermost core of individual consciousness. Nuit is the sky goddess, representing the universe. When Hadit unites with Nuit (when the individual merges with the Whole), the persona surrounding that particular consciousness becomes Ra Hoor Khuit, or Horus. Such a being does his will upon earth, and reincarnates as he chooses, or takes his place among the Secret Chiefs, or becomes a congealing hydrogen cloud somewhere in some galaxy, or whatever. Needless to say, and lucky for the Forum, I never got that far. So I can write about it.
It's not as simple as that, of course. But there is so much misinfo and disinfo out there about Crowley--and it's now spilled into the Forum--that these specifics need now to be spelled out by someone from inside Crowley's Order.
If you can find a devil in these details, then God be with you.
Back in England, Mathers, head of the Golden Dawn, announced contact with the Secret Chiefs. Crowley judged what then followed from Mathers as metaphysical gibberish, and commenced through a series of magical acts to dismantle the Golden Dawn.
The same process has probably happened many times. An occult society that goes astray of the Light is deliberately taken down, the True Adepts remove to another place and take up another name. Maybe that's what happened to the Knights Templars near the end of the 13th Century. The Templars had almost singlehandedly brought about the Renaissance--global trade, gothic architecture, banking, and were working I guess on the stranglehold of the Church. But they had also grown rich, and with material riches comes spiritual sloth.
In short, occult societies are subject to natural law.
Crowley inherited leadership of the OTO from Dr. Theodore Reuss, purportedly a German spy, after Crowley began publishing thinly-veiled references to certain ritual practices he called "sex magick." The "k" on the end of "magic" stands for "kteis" which is (I forget, maybe sanskrit?) a word for vagina. The German OTO were the guardians of this great secret, and Reuss quickly understood that Crowley knew more about it than he, Reuss did.
The debate on this Forum about Crowley centers on a phrase he wrote in "Magick in Theory and Practice", in a chapter dealing with "the bloody sacrifice". The phrase reads, "...the sacrifice of a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence."
It's metaphor. I know what it means. You don't. I'd like to tell you,but even after all these years I respect my oaths to the Order. If you knew what it meant, you'd instantly understand the need for oaths of secrecy.
A magickal formula of such potency functions on all levels of reality and all levels of unreality. This one in particular is the willed management of the elements and energies of procreation.
Nothing less than that. Producing the precisely intended results requires that the practitioner be in total control of all his energies (although startling results via a species of complete psychic "wipeout" have been reported). Personal experience with this formula suggests that it never fails of a result, though that result is rarely identifiable with the original conscious purpose of the adept. That variance depends, I figure, on the degree of congruence between the mundane will of the adept and his True Will--the purpose for which he was incarnated. Knowledge of one's True Will in this system requires coherent contact between the individual and a discarnate entity who serves as that person's eternal & nonincarnating Self. So "Do what thou wilt..." aint a license to party.
Crowley laid it out there. Looks like the Illuminati or NWO picked up on it, distorted it, and used it for their own nefarious ends. If you blame Crowley for this, you must blame Galileo for the shuttle accident, and Jesus for the Inquisition.
We pause in this journey between Crowley's Thelema (Greek for Will) and that philosophy's possible linkage with Their Satanic Majesties, the babykilling Epopts of the Illuminati. Let's correct some errata.
Jack Parsons was never Crowley's "elected son." Parsons claimed a certain attainment in the A.A., an order roughly parallel to the OTO but more along the lines of the Golden Dawn (The spiritually serious initiates of the OTO gravitate to the A.A. as well.). I have read the marginal notes on Parson's reports to the head of the Order ("He attains to Master of the Temple and immediately opens a joint bank account with a total stranger?"). The total stranger was of course L. Ron Hubbard, a Naval Intelligence operative who was never, as far as I know, an initiate of the OTO or the A.A, but word has it he was on some kind of mission.
The name "Cameron" surfaces. She was one Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons and Hubbard found sitting on a doorstep. The three of them would go on to perform the Babalon Working. Nobody is qualified to judge the success of that working. My guess is that Parsons wanted to bring down a female counterpart to Crowley's "Great Beast 666 (666 is a numerical glyph of the Sun. Get out of Revelations; it's full of flaws) in order to balance the yang with yin. The fact that no perfect painted lady appeared in the night streets of Pasadena immediately after the invocations proves nothing. This level of the occult has nothing in common with superstition.
(I could tell you a story about a shriveled baking potato, doctored to resemble a shrunken head and nailed to a kitchen door that caused the resident to leave town. But that's mojo, magic based on the victim's belief in superstition.)
My own theory is that the Babalon working spawned the Womens' Movement, which before it got co-opted like everything else by the Illuminati-controlled media told tens of millions of women that they had rights, they had dignity.
Either Parsons dropped or somebody else threw a vial of fulminate of mercury into Parson's garage/home lab, and the place exploded. Parsons was alive when rescue workers arrived. So the claim his body was never recovered is false. Hence, speculations about time travel are not only irrelevant, but only serve to enhance Crowley's mystique. For more on Parsons, check out J. Orlin Grabbe's take at
http://orlingrabbe.com/jack_parsons.htm
An excerpt: "Satanism (whatever that was) was a standard term of abuse applied by certain groups to anyone who disagreed with their religious beliefs."
Crowley was a shameless self-publicist. Even Hemingway mentions him in his Paris memoirs. He apparently launched a lawsuit in England for no other reason than to gain publicity. Dubbed by the press as "the wickedist man in the world," Crowley shaved his head and paraded his succession of Scarlet Women before all of Europe. He walked across China. He climbed mountains. He wrote treatises on Magick, he wrote poetry, he wrote fiction...mostly under his own signature, but often under a variety of pen-names--among them 'Oliver Haddo'.
The message of the Master Therion (Crowley's magickal name) is short and simple: the complete emancipation of every human being from all forms of enslavement--spiritual, political, economical, intellectual, artistic, physical or sexual.
Why then, is Crowley so universally detested? Part of the answer is his public persona: self-aggrandizing, abrasive and blatantly bisexual. Another part is that other so-called occultists just didn't or wouldn't understand him. I recall leafing through the intro to a survey of modern occultism, wherein the author dismissed Crowley's writings as "incomprehensible" and thus refused even to discuss his work. This writer was supposedly an authority on the occult. Do tell! Another part is that embracing Thelema requires a clean break with the religion of one's childhood. Since most Thelemites are former Christians, there's a strong anti-Christian flavor to their thought and writing. That offends people.
And another part of it has to do with something nearly universal that's been drummed into the human psyche: the largely unexamined idea that freedom is terrifying. Know your place in the hierarchy of Authority, and stay there. Accept the slops oozing down from your betters and be grateful. Attend the church most of your neighbors attend. Always keep within the artificial lines that the System has taught you are there.
I joined the O.T.O. in 1979. A few years later I helped establish, then led, a Chapter of the Order in a major US city. I was on friendly terms with two successive leaders of the Order. Never once did I sense the slightest trace of what we here would label "satanism."
Love is the law, love under will.
oliverhaddo
