March 1999: several newsgroups ben@cadu.demon.co.uk Subject: Concerning my recent booklist (2)
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Greetings! I am writing to you as I sent you a copy of my recent email list of books. While many folk have been been kind enough to express their appreciation at seeing so many rare and significant items described in an informative manner I did receive one negative response. The three member committee which governs an organisation called the Ordo Templi Orientis thought I should not be selling some of the items because they considered them to be their secrets. I joined this organisation about a dozen years ago, though have not been active in it for some years. I consider the reasons for their objections rather ill-founded, so I have published the following defence - though I rather doubt it will have much success. I rather think the have made up their minds, and we have argued about other things too. I do apologise if all this is rather alien to you, and I can well appreciate that it must appear to be a storm in a very small teacup. Perhaps you may recognise the same group dynamics that afflict train spotter clubs, Womens Institute Jam Making societies and other such august occult orders! If alien, I hope you find it at least entertaining. Please do not think it is sinister and heavy, rather a squabble between friends.
Everyone involved is on the same side as far as the really important things in life are concerned. Fear not - my future postings will return to my usual fare of esoteric and occult books for sale! I have also posted this message to the news group alt.magick and the email list Thelema 93 My best regards Ben
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. My name is Ben Fernee, I have been trading as Caduceus Books selling esoteric and occult books for ten years. I have been a member of the OTO (Caliphate) for about a dozen years, rising to VIIth degree, Grand Inquisitor Commander, and bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church. In recent years though I have not been involved in the administration of the Order. I was recently asked to catalogue and sell a collection of items by Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, A.E. Waite and others. This was posted on my webpage, and also issued as an email list and physically incarnate catalogue that is available on request. I then received a letter from the Supreme Council informing me that my membership of the OTO has been suspended and that I will be automatically expelled if I did not offer a suitable defence to the charge of "offering for sale our confidential documents". I asked the members of the Supreme Council for clarification of which items in my catalogue they considered their confidential documents and received replies from Bill Heidrick and Soror Helena. The principal items were:- Order No.5344 Crowley, Handwritten manuscript by Crowley of Liber CCXXVIII De Natura Deorum.
A variant form significantly different from that published in Francis King, Secret Rituals of the OTO, Weiser 1973 or C.W. Daniel 1973 or Brocken Mountain Lodge OTO 1986 or from the original manuscript available for study at the Warburg Institute in London. Order No.2073 Koenig (Ed.), How to Make Your Own OTO, ARW 1996 Presents copies of Crowley manuscripts and typescripts held at the Warburg Institute, part of the University of London Order No.5299 Lodge of Perfection IVth Degree typescript with a handwritten note by Gerald Yorke stating this to be an early version abandoned by Crowley because of objections from the freemasons that it was too close to their Royal Arch ritual My full description of these items can be found on my web page or in my email list or in my physically incarnate catalogue available on request. I robustly and utterly deny the allegation that I have offered for sale the "confidential documents" of the Supreme Council. This allegation conjures shabby images of my selling items obtained through my membership of the Order. This, I most definitely have not done. I make this defence public so that this is clearly and generally understood. I am not in the least ashamed of my position.
The phrase "our confidential documents" is an absurdity. To suggest that a bookdealer is offering for sale items that do not truly belong to the seller is about the most serious allegation that can be made against someone in the trade. However the documents in question are clearly and unequivocally the legal property of the present owners, not the Supreme Council of the OTO. Originally, legal ownership of them was transferred to Gerald Yorke, who was not an OTO member. The documents presented in item 2073 he lodged at the Warburg Institute where they are now. Peter Koenig and ARW then published an edition carrying facsimile reproductions of them. Items 5299 & 5344 were sold by Yorke to a private collector and they have been in private hands since. If the Supreme Council seriously believes it owns these documents it should commence legal action against the present owner in front of an independent judge who can order the documents to be handed over if he should agree with the Supreme Council Æs claims. However, instead of entering an arena where this claim can be properly judged and resolved, they threaten me with expulsion, which resolves nothing - but avoids the testing of their claim to ownership.
I would suggest that this is because they realise that their claim to ownership of these items is spurious and empty. Secondly the documents are not confidential to the Supreme Council of the OTO. I deny any suggestion that I break my OTO oaths of secrecy by selling these items. The oaths of secrecy of the Order are simple and straight forward. In a ritual one undertakes to keep secret what one is about to be told and experience. One contracts to receive certain stated penalties if one breaks these oaths.(1) I consider these oaths to cover the initiation ritual one experiences, and that which derives from membership of the OTO associated with it, such as study guides, correspondence, identity of other members etc. The oaths do not cover texts, books and information about the OTO in the public domain (2) which I have received from non-OTO sources. Members of the Supreme Council may wish that this material does not exist, but the reality of the Universe is that it does. They may wish that the initiation oaths prevent me from selling them (as every other specialist occult bookdealer of note also does, though without interference from the OTO).
However the reality is that the oaths do not, as they refer to that which one learns "within the guarded border" of the OTO. Crowley never envisaged that so much information about the OTO would be so readily available from non-OTO sources. It is meaningless to speculate what his response might have been aside from noting that the oaths as written by him take no account whatsoever of this material. Surprisingly the oaths as rewritten by Hymenaeus Beta do not either! In the past some members of the Supreme Council have suggested that they do by proposing convoluted pseudo-legal implications to the oaths, presumably present in the ritual as some form of inaudible small print. I am pleased to reject these as spurious confusions of what is in fact clear. The oaths mean what they say. I would note that the position taken by members of the Supreme Council leads them to the absurd pretence that information available to any serious student is their secret. Yet more absurd is that they claim item No. 5344 to be their secret and that I have betrayed it when I have only given a broad description and they do not even know what it says!
This secret is for the purchaser, as the present owner and myself are prepared to enter into confidentiality agreements. Bill Heidrick suggests:- As an OTO member, notably also one holding the VIIth degree, your sales descriptions on those IVth & VIIth degree would be an oath violation in itself. It amounts to saying: "that's it". No. I compare both items to publicly accessible versions of the ritual NOT to that which I have experienced through my membership of the Order. If my identification of Liber CCXXVIII De Natura Deorum to be a VIIth degree sex magick instruction is grounds for suspension I demand the same be done to Hymenaeus Beta. On page 482 of Magick, Weiser 1997 he identifies De Natura Deorum as " A secret instruction of the VIIth degree" Heidrick also suggests that:- As a bookseller, you are in violation of copyright by marketing Koenig's copyright violations. I would note that a plethora of books are published in violation of the Caliphate OTO's copyright claims. The titles are far too many to mention here, but include important Thelemic texts such as the Auto-Hagiography, Magical Record of the Beast 666, Rites of Eleusis, the Fish, White Stains, Giants Thumb etc.
The Caliphate OTO should pursue its copyright claims with publishers and the other claimants of the copyrights in courts of law rather than hassle one particular secondhand bookseller for selling secondhand copies of books issued by publishers that do not recognise the Caliphate OTO's claims to copyrights.(3) I would observe that no other bookdealer is so treated. It can be arranged for an independent judge in a court of law to decide whether the copyright claims of the Supreme Council are legitimate, and, if so, whether I infringe them by selling secondhand books. However, rather than do this they choose instead to expel me from the OTO which is irrelevant to the purpose of establishing their claims. It should be noted that I have been advised that the Supreme Council's proposed actions appear to be unlawful under British law as an "unfair restraint of trade". It might be suggested that my oaths of obedience would prevent me from selling such items against the wishes of the head of the Order. I would note that when I took the crucial oaths, being then as written by Crowley, they were different to those applied now.
Furthermore, these issues have been debated before and on that occasion Hymenaeus Beta explicitly refrained from instructing me thus. It might be asserted that regardless of oaths, copyright issues etc. it is simply inappropriate for a member of the OTO to sell items that contain certain information about the OTO. This is untrue. I have been selling copies of Francis King (Ed.), Secret Rituals of the OTO, for ten years. During this time I have received advancement in the Order and performed numerous initiations. I explained to candidates the true situation - that with some scholarship, familiarity of the library system etc. they can obtain substantial information concerning the Order's rituals etc. However, I would advise them that prior knowledge of the ritual might lessen the psychodramatic effect. Properly informed candidates, as sensible adults, were well able to make their own decisions as to whether to seek out these texts. I made no secret whatsoever of the fact that I was so selling the book Secret Rituals. Indeed I was pleased to send Hymenaeus Beta a copy of a catalogue which clearly listed it. He was kind enough to promote the catalogue in the pages of the OTO journal the Magickal Link.
I was pleased to supply the Order archives with photocopies of a number of other items listed in the catalogue. How things have changed! I suggest that the Supreme Council, by making a false allegation and by its inability to respect a principled and reasonable position, has brought itself and the OTO into disrepute in this matter. I have heard it suggested that certain items should have been offered for sale discreetly, not advertised publicly and that my intention was to embarrass the Supreme Council. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would point out that this was a collection that the owner wanted to see fully catalogued as a permanent record and then sold. He specifically instructed me to allow no sneak previews. The reason for this was to circumvent the informal arrangements between interested parties that are so often made in advance when significant items come up to auction. There was no desire to embarrass anyone. It has been suggested that this conflict is an inevitable result of the position taken by the Supreme Council. Material concerning the OTO is in the public domain. The reason for this is that there was a break in the continuity of the Order.
Prominent members such as Frater Achad, Frank Bennett, Lady Frieda Harris and Crowley himself entrusted their OTO texts to non-OTO members, such as Gerald Yorke, rather than an OTO that did not really exist. These texts were passed on to other non-members, lodged in libraries and published. It need not have been so, but part of the role of members of the Supreme Council has come to be the denial that this break in the continuity of the Order ever occurred. The existence of the public domain books and documents are testament that it did. Rather than accept the reality of the situation they attack me, the messenger, for presenting these texts that are now outside the parameters of the Order and its oaths. It should be noted that there is more to this matter than may initially meet the eye. The members of the Supreme Council are well aware that the owner of these items is himself a publisher of Crowley books who does not recognise their claims to copyrights. He is closely associated with John Symonds who has rival claims to control the copyrights which have never been legally challenged by the Caliphate OTO.
Now the three members of the Supreme Council of the OTO claim that I have violated its copyrights and that I am selling "our confidential documents" but avoids seeking redress in a court of law where these issues could be independently judged and that judgment enforced. Instead it prepares to expel me, which resolves nothing. I suggest that the members of the Supreme Council are partisan in these matters. I have no confidence in their ability to independently and fairly judge the allegation made against me. They have consistently avoided the arenas where the claims upon which they base the allegation against me might be independently judged and resolved. Instead the choose to enact a process where they are both prosecution and judge. I supect that they wqould have prefered if no one but themselves had heard my defence. I feel my expulsion is a foregone conclusion. In summary I robustly deny the allegation made by the Supreme Council of the OTO that I am "offering for sale our confidential documents":- The documents do not belong to the Supreme Council. They are outside the parameter of OTO confidences (the oaths of secrecy) as I received them from non-OTO sources.
The allegation that I have broken my oaths in my identification of certain items is spurious unless the head of the OTO is likewise suspended and expelled. The criticism that I am in breach of copyright by selling secondhand books published by companies that do not recognise the Caliphate OTO's copyright claims is ludicrous as no other secondhand bookdealer is so hassled. This is a matter for the OTO to pursue in court with publishers and other claimants of the Crowley copyrights - not secondhand bookdealers. The allegation should be withdrawn, and my membership should be reinstated. Ben Fernee
Love is the law, love under will.
(1) Personally I do not interpret these penalties literally, but rather see them as allegorical descriptions relating to karmic consequences upon the subtle body. They are no less serious for that. Certainly they are not of the nature that they can be meted out by the members of the Supreme Council! (2) I use the term public domain here and hereafter to mean obtainable by members of the public from published books available on the open market (new and secondhand), published books available through public libraries, manuscripts in research libraries available to students and private scholars, manuscripts and photocopies held by private individuals who are not members of the OTO etc. I do not use it here in the sense that there are no copyright claims made upon this material. (3) Concerning my catalogue description of Order No.2073 How to make your own McOTO I should note that Peter Koenig has denied that this work was suppressed by Caliphate legal action. He states that he does remember that there was a short exchange of solicitors letters a year after it came out in which Hymenaeus Beta sought, and did not receive recognition of his copyright claims. The book was out of print anyway, at this time.
Ben Fernee, Caduceus Books, PO BOX 5349, Stoney Stanton, LEICESTER, LE9 4ZJ. Tel. 07071 880742, +44 7071 880742 from overseas Fax. 0870 0552982, +44 870 0552982 from overseas Email ben@cadu.demon.co.uk Web page http://www.io.com/~albion/caduceus/ from alt.magick
