Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

198 Ordo Templi Orientis
For Further Reading:
Ellwood, Robert S., Jr. Mysticism and Religion.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Melton,J.Gordon.The Encyclopedia of American
Religion. 5 th ed. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,
1996.
Ordo Templi Orientis
Along with the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn, the other major magical tradition to influence
modern Satanism and left-hand path groups
through Aleister Crowley was the Ordo Templi
Orientis (OTO). The OTO was founded in the
1890s by Karl Keller, a German. Aleister Crowley
joined the British branch of the OTO and was
made its head around 1904. When Theodor Reuss
died in 1922, Crowley became the OHO, the Outer
Head of the Order, and essentially made the OTO
the “outer order” for his AA (Astrum Argentinum,
that is, Silver Star) secret society based on The
Book of the Law that he had channeled in 1904.
Crowley was a prolific writer, and issued a semiannual
periodical called The Equinox from 1909 to
1913; the ten large volumes of this series have been
kept in print recently by several publishers, most
notably Samuel Weiser.
The OTO taught a system of sex magic (spelled
“magick” by Crowley and most ritual magic
groups) that was based in part on Oriental practices
and in part on the system devised by P. B.
Randolph of the American organization called
Fraternitas Rosae Crucis. Crowley perfected this
system during the years 1920–1922 at his Abbey of
Thelema in Sicily. Public notoriety over his activities
caused the OTO to be disbanded and banned
in England in 1923.
The OTO had begun spreading to America
with Crowley’s visits there in 1905 and 1915. In
1914 Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad)
opened OTO branches in Vancouver, Los Angeles,
and perhaps Washington D.C. Crowley visited the
Vancouver Lodge in 1915, at which time he met
Winifred T. Smith (Frater 132) and gave him
permission to open a lodge. Smith moved to
Pasadena, California, opened a lodge there, and,
when Jones fell into disfavor with Crowley in
1919, became head of the OTO in America.
In Pasadena Smith entered into what was
apparently an experiment in group marriage with
Jack and Helen Parsons and Helen’s younger sister,
Betty. At some point Parsons became the head of
the Lodge, which was called “The Agape Lodge.”
With the OTO in Germany outlawed and
disbanded in 1934, with the English OTO discredited
and disbanded in 1923, alone in New York
after 1941, the Agape Lodge was practically the
whole active membership of the OTO during the
late 1930s and the 1940s. The Agape Lodge
continued on until 1952, when Parsons was killed
in an explosion in his home laboratory.
Another OTO offshoot had been founded in
Chicago in 1931 by C. F. Russell, who had been with
Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema, but split from
him to found the Chonzon Club, or Great
Brotherhood of God (GBG). One member of the
GBG, and head of its San Diego Lodge, was Louis T.
Culling, who left the GBG in 1938 to join the OTO,
and who published the GBG’s rituals in 1969 as The
Complete Magical Curriculum of the GBG. This
system was also focused heavily on sex magick.
Aleister Crowley’s advancing years had
dramatically curbed his aptitude for sex magick
during the 1930s, and by 1945 he was sixty-nine
years old and had lost his legendary libido.
Crowley was livid with anger at Parsons for this
“debauchery” and also for allowing a young man
to con him out of all his money in a “sting” that
may have been an FBI-sponsored operation. These
two revelations were the causes for the warrant
that Crowley issued to the young Grady
McMurtry in 1946.
Aleister Crowley had run very short of
money during the last few years of his life. His
last big projects were his Thoth Tarot, produced
under his supervision by Lady Frieda Harris, his
Book of Thoth on that Tarot Deck, and the stream
of letters between him and some initiates that
was later edited into Magick without Tears. The
original paintings of the Tarot Deck were exhibited
in London in July 1942, the events in the
background of Magick without Tears were from
about 1941–1944, and the Book of Thoth was
completed about March 1944. He apparently did
not qualify for any sort of pension, and an initiate
in New York City, Karl Germer, was his
primary source of income.