Critical dossier note
Crowley maintained that the task of his sex-magical organisation, the Ordo Templi Orientis, was “to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar–phallic religion.” The structure of the O.T.O., like that of Freemasonry, is based on a staged series of initiations or degrees. The essence of the Order was located in its higher degrees; strictly speaking, only members of those degrees were considered members of the O.T.O. proper.
VII°Adoration of the phallus, both within and without; in this framework, Lacan’s symbolic phallus may be remembered as a sign of authority, power, castration, and social arrangement, not merely anatomy.
VIII°Interaction outside the closed vessels of the vagina and anus; sexual fluids, saliva, and anointing procedures appear in the technical lore.
IX°Interaction within the vagina, involving menstrual blood or the secretions of an aroused woman.
X°Impregnation and fertilisation of an egg; also the act of creation or succession, for example the election of the Outer Head of the Order.
XI°Two-fold: isolation in the anus with no interaction, and interaction with excrement, small amounts of blood, mucus, and mucous membranes.
ElixirIn Crowley’s O.T.O. sexual magic, everything ultimately returned to semen, later compared to a hard disk pre-formatted for software.
Crowley wrote: “I am inclined to believe that the XIth degree is better than the IXth degree.” Elsewhere he claimed: “The industrial use of Semen will revolutionize human society.” His instructional text Amrita presents semen as counteracting “Asthma, Bronchitis, Neurasthenia, Obesity, Stricture, Some cardiac distress, Greying hair, Loss of interest in sex.” To avoid charges of quackery, the current American O.T.O., or “Caliphate”, denies any medicinal use of this “Elixir of Life” and says that it “does not practice medicine.”
For sacramental purposes this O.T.O. uses hosts made with honey, meal, and wine-lees called “Cakes of Light”, which may contain small quantities of blood or semen: “ashes from burned cakes of light prepared according to Crowleys’ Liber AL III;23[–25] would be acceptable as an additional ingredient.” From 1963 to 1967 the Swiss O.T.O. used a total of 3,000 hosts obtained by the Crowleyites from a genuine Catholic convent; the incense grains were supplied by the Chief Sacristan of St. Gallen Cathedral, and the wine for the Mass came directly from the Bishop.
According to Crowley, these Cakes should include menstrual fluids; he also wrote: “In my Mass the Host is of excrement.” Magically speaking, blood and excrement attract spirits, while sperm keeps them alive. He also noted in his diary on 30 May 1923: “The Dalai Lama is right to have the faithful eat his excrement.” Other doctrinal elements have proved unfriendly to public relations: the requirement for the crucifixion of a frog in one O.T.O. initiation ritual, advice that members may consider those outside the Order inferior beings, anti-democratic elements in O.T.O. constitutions, antisemitic statements, and texts that could be said to interfere with religious freedoms.
Theodor Reuss, the German founder of these Oriental Templars in 1906, went further. In his O.T.O. community the use of money was to be forbidden. Every member over 18 was obliged to labour daily; those refusing work were to be punished by forced labour. In Reuss’s O.T.O. utopia, children were to be brought up by the community, where doctor-priests, under parental supervision, would teach them from the earliest age that the sex organs were holy. Those judged by a “medical board” incapable of producing healthy children were not allowed to breed; those producing children despite this decree were to be punished by forced labour. These extreme ideas have not survived in modern versions of the O.T.O., if indeed they were ever espoused beyond Reuss’s essay.
The O.T.O.’s initiatory system is a bureaucratic club game, but it also has a religious association: the Gnostic Catholic Church. It intends “to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar–phallic religion.” In 1906 Chevalier Le Clément de St.-Marcq published L’Eucharistie, a booklet on sacred spermatophagy. Reuss described this as the ultimate secret of the religious aspect of the O.T.O.: the more sperm one eats, the more the manifestation of Christ takes place within; no women are required for that.
The consumption of sexual secretions borders on anthropophagia: the assimilation of selected individuals thought to possess awe-inspiring powers, either to neutralise those powers or to use them. The Gnostic aim is to release the human being from stifling entanglement with the physical universe and to help pure Spirit return to its divine potential. One common characteristic of the Spermo-Gnostics in the context of many O.T.O. versions is the reduction of sexuality to male physiology. Orgasm for lust alone is avoided unless ejaculation is withheld, or the intention is redirected toward wishes that appear worldly in the extreme. Sperm remains the point of focus. In the enthusiastic high of genetic and gnostic male superiority, femaleness vegetates in a bizarre no-man’s-land of androgynous necessity and almost reprehensible superfluousness. The female Logos remains mute.
In the O.T.O.’s Gnostic Mass, a host called a Cake of Light contains the Logos. Its ingredients are sperm, blood, and vaginal secretions. This Cake is made outside the ritual of the Gnostic Mass; it is given its character in the making. It is consecrated, but not transubstantiated. The deity in the Cake of Light is the “Childe”, properly an aspect of Horus, or a kind of homunculus, not Osiris or the cognate Christ.
Transmutation is a change of form, in this case by the chemical processes of digestion. Transubstantiation is a change of essential quality without a change of form. Transmutation is physiological; transubstantiation is non-physical. A Cake of Light is thus transmuted in preparation to acquire a character appropriate to the “miracle of the Mass”: it is a sex-magical medium of the participant’s Will, while the ritual itself may be interpreted as a mirror of the perpetual creation of the universe. Similar passages appear in the VIII° ritual of the O.T.O.: “and, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass. […] This is the Blood and the Body of the Logos.”
Consumption of the host is necessary: body contact. Some say that it is not the host that is changed, but the consumer of the host, through saliva, chewing, and stomach acid. This is the transformation, the unification of the host with the consumer. The Thelemic host changes the consumer, contrary to the Roman Catholic host. A Roman Catholic host is said to be transubstantiated during Mass: an invisible change of essence, the entry of the real presence of Christ, without alteration of appearance or chemical qualities. If such a thing were both transmuted and transubstantiated into body and blood, it would become actual bleeding meat by transmutation.
The technical term for the episcopal claims in the O.T.O. Phenomenon is “Wandering Bishops”, or Episcopi Vagantes. This status is not defined by character, education, or theological position. Such bishops are not elected by a canonical church, not proposed as ordinands by a suffragan, not bound to a historical episcopal see, and not consecrated by an official bishop according to canonical procedure. A real bishop is not the successor of a single apostle, because only the synod or college of bishops in toto is heir to the college of apostles. Therefore, no Wandering Bishop has real apostolic succession. There is no Holy Ghost in Wandering-Bishop consecrations. The instrumentum consecrationis has no apostolic value. Nevertheless, Wandering Bishops are collectors of papers and diplomas.
In this context, Reuss tried to make Crowley’s Gnostic Mass the “official religion for Freemasons” in 1920. Yet nowhere in the constitution of the O.T.O. was the office of O.H.O. connected with leadership of any church. In his introduction to the Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae (Zürich, 1955), p. 4, Hermann Joseph Metzger claimed the “Antiochite-Jacobinic Succession, Syro-Malabarite Line of Mar Athanasius.” Today, some new O.T.O. groups, including the “Caliphate”, try to copy this scheme; see the related Parareligion dossier. For the anti-democratic and misanthropic aspect of these occultists, read “The Templar’s Reich — The Slaves Shall Serve”.
