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Ordo Templi Orientis 199
A young army corporal, Grady McMurtry, an
initiate of the Pasadena Lodge, visited and
attended Crowley from 1943 to 1945, and was
later, in 1946, given a emergency warrant to take
command of the OTO in the United States and
correct the problems that had been caused by Jack
Parsons’s questionable administration of the
American OTO. For the next 20 years, this emergency
warrant was all but forgotten.
In March 1945, Crowley moved to a decrepit
boarding house in Hastings, which is not far from
Southampton or, for that matter, the New Forest
area. The OTO and the AA have always taken pride
in their Rosicrucian affinities, so it is very likely
that Crowley would have gravitated to the
Rosicrucian Theater and its members.
The first Tenth Degree to emerge after
Crowley’s death was Karl Johannes Germer, who
had worked with Crowley in England, but had
returned to his native Germany in the 1930s.
Arrested and placed in a concentration camp
during a Nazi purge of occultists, Germer was
fortunate enough to be deported from Germany
in 1941. Arriving in America, he sold heavy equipment
in New York City, and lived on a fraction of
his salary, sending the lion’s share of it to Crowley
in England, so that Crowley could have some
money to survive on in his last couple of years.
Crowley made him a high initiate in the AA for
this, and at Crowley’s death in December 1947,
Karl Germer became the heir of his literary estate
and the Supreme and Holy King of the OTO. At
this point Parsons refused to recognize Germer’s
authority, and defected from the OTO.
During the sixteen years that Germer was the
head of the OTO he apparently initiated no one,
and the organization faded, almost to destruction.
Kenneth Grant formed the Nu-Isis Lodge of the
OTO in London and, during the 1950s, this was a
hotbed of Thelemic activity. This eventually sent
Germer into a paranoid fit, and he expelled Grant
from the order in 1952. The Nu-Isis Lodge continued
to do fine on its own. Germer died in 1962,
and did not designate a successor. Karl Metzger
(Frater Paraganus) of Basil, Switzerland, was a
very respectable member of the OTO and the
ranking member of the order, so he became
known as the head of the order, although he was
never designated the Supreme and Holy King
(Tenth Degree) by anyone, even himself. Germer’s
wife Svetlana tried to present herself as the head of
the order at this time, but aside from having been
married to Germer, she had no qualifications for
this office.
Around 1966, Grady McMurtry retired from
the army, and lived modestly on his pension until
his death in 1985. Once freed from the regimentation
of military life—he had worked in the
Pentagon for a while—he began to openly
promote the OTO. Using the warrant from
Crowley that he had received in 1946, Grady
declared himself head of the order in the United
States in 1969. He rejected the claims of Kenneth
Grant, who reemerged as an OTO leader in
England in the 1970s, pointing out that Grant had
been legally expelled from the order by Germer in
1952. He also rejected the claims of Metzger in
Switzerland, on the grounds that his election had
been spurious according to the OTO rules then in
effect. Around 1976–1979, he performed “battlefield
promotions” of several younger proteges to
the exalted Ninth Degree of the OTO, although
they had not been through the long series of initiations
and training generally required. Although
this has created some problems within the order,
the OTO in California grew and prospered as
never before, and by the time of McMurtry’s
death, had chapters and lodges across the U.S. and
Canada and in ten other countries.
The initial warrant from Crowley may not have
quite justified Grady’s assumption of the Tenth
Degree (Supreme and Holy King), but his later
actions clearly demonstrated his fitness for it.
When Grady declared himself head of the OTO,
the order was virtually dead and had been since
Jack Parsons’s defection in 1947. When yet
another claimant to be the OHO appeared in the
person of Marcelo Ramos Motta, a Brazilian initiate
who claimed an essentially spiritual rather
than legal authority, and who was defaming
McMurtry and all other OTO members in his new
volumes of The Equinox, McMurtry sued Motta
for libel. The case ended up in the United States
Supreme Court, which in 1985 ruled that
McMurtry was in fact the legal OHO, and did own
the copyrights to all of Crowley’s writings, and