kaos

The Black Room, the Chamber of
Death, and the Red Room
by Joel Biroco, Jac Partit, & John Day
Crowley’s plagiarism of the 18° Ancient and Accepted Rite for the OTO 5°—& the
demonic doorknocker on the Red Room at 10 Duke Street, St James’s, London
Having noticed that Aleister Crowley had substantially based the oto 5° on the 18° of
the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite—the Order of the Rose Croix of Heredom in
which the Knighthood of the Pelican and Eagle is conferred—I showed a copy of
Crowley’s ritual from Francis King’s The Secret Rituals of the OTO to “Jac Partit” (a
pseudonym), an Englishman who is himself 18°, an occultist, and an initiate of a number
of esoteric freemasonic orders, and asked for his comments. His correspondence I then
relayed to “John Day” (a pseudonym), a member of the Caliphate oto in the United
States, for criticism. The subsequent debate continued back and forth for several rounds,
and is published below. The debate centres on the idea that the 18° contains Christian
symbolism that Crowley failed to wholly expunge in his reworking of the rite, and as
such its narrative integrity is seriously flawed, meaning that the potential effect of the
oto ritual is questionable. It should be noted that Christian symbolism in the 18° does
not necessarily mean that it is ipso facto “Christian”. In fact, Francis King in Ritual
Magic in England (1970) expressed the opinion that the rite was anti-Christian, he
quoted an anonymous “anti-Masonic writer” he said he himself was inclined to agree
with who called the rite “a little sinister” and stated that the 18° or Rose-Croix degree
“carried the unfortunate suggestion that the death of Satan was being mourned”. It’s
been many years since I read Walton Hannah, but that sounds like a quote from him. H
T F Rhodes in his excellent book The Satanic Mass (1954), relying on the 1926 private
printing of the 18° ritual, extracts of which had been reproduced by Walton Hannah in
Darkness Visible (1951), explicitly linked the rite to the Black Mass in his chapter entitled
“The Devil and the Freemasons”.
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