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Oh dear, our Ken sounds worried. Will it all be lost no sooner than his ashes are swirling
into the wild mauve yonder? They’ve had their brief holiday in the sun flirting with
Cthulhu, trekking intrepidly down those nightside tunnels, ransacking the world’s
esoteric traditions for better words for “sperm”, and now they must come home to
Aleister Crowley’s stark Thelemic Law lest they be considered by the occult historians
of the future as mere heretics on a joyride and fail the Master Therion. How it must
grate on Grant. For the ultimate aim of his Order is none other than exactly the same as
the ultimate aim of those damned Caliphates that he—the true heir of Crowley—has
brushed off for years as mosquitoes biting an iron bull. So it must have been a source of
some amusement to him when the dastardly Herr Koenig published on the Internet
(http://www.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/doc.htm) a letter supposedly written by Crowley
dated November 18/19 1947 that “unexpectedly” turned up from nowhere, with no
provenance presented, that ratifies Kenneth Grant in the guise of “Frater Aussik 400”
as the legitimate successor of Crowley as Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis.
According to Starfire, Grant did not know about the letter, though it does “confirm a
casual remark made to him at Crowley’s funeral by Lady Frieda Harris concerning
Crowley’s last minute change of mind with regard to his successor as oho of the oto”.
In typical mystery style Grant notes:
The document has only just now come to light, unnecessarily, as time will reveal. Will
time also reveal who discovered it, where, and why it remained concealed for more than
half a century? [“An Instrument of Succession”, Starfire, Vol. II, No. 2, p 173]
Ben Fernee, proprietor of Caduceus Books and former VII° Grand Inquisitor
Commander in the Caliphate oto until he was expelled in 1999 after being accused by
the Supreme Council of selling the Order’s secrets—which he denied strenuously—
commissioned a forensic handwriting analyst when the Grant succession letter appeared
on the Internet at the end of March, 1998. The analyst, who regularly testifies in court
as an expert witness in forgery cases, was 85% certain after detailed comparison with
genuine samples of Aleister Crowley’s handwriting that the succession letter was written
by someone other than Crowley trying to impersonate his hand. One theory doing the
rounds is that the letter may be an old forgery, made with Crowley’s actual notepaper
and seal ring for the red wax impression, and if that is the case the most likely suspect
would be Lady Frieda Harris, who hated Karl Germer. In 1955 Germer proved to be
the doom of Grant’s official succession when he expelled him from the oto, a decision
the Typhonian oto stress that Germer was not in a position to make, pointing to
documentation where Germer admits to Grant that he is not the Outer Head of the
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