by Vadge Moore
Oct 24, 2004
from
DragonKeyPress Website
I was twelve years old.
I had read about
Aleister Crowley in a British music magazine called
Sounds. The article was actually about Genesis P-Orridge founder and
lead singer of the Industrial Noise band Throbbing Gristle and then
later the occult, atmospheric band, Psychic T.V. Crowley had been as
much of an influence on P-Orridge as P-Orridge was on me, so I
figured that I had to look into this mysterious Mr. Crowley. I went
to a rather esoteric bookstore near where I lived and went right for
the Occult section. Low and behold there it was:
Magick in Theory
and Practice by one Mr. Aleister Crowley. I must admit to not
understanding a word of Crowley’s doctrine. His book was filled with
ideas, terms and language that flew right over my young, budding
intellect.
I spent hour upon hour
trying to decipher the meaning of each chapter. Occasionally I would
stumble upon a ray of lucidity only to be dumped back into a bed of
ignorance. I just couldn’t get it. “What was this man trying to
say?!” Regardless of my inability to understand Crowley’s esoterica,
I just could not put his book down. I began collecting his other
books: Book Four,
777,
Magick Without Tears. I started picking up
books by his disciple Israel Regardie: The Tree of Life,
The Middle
Pillar, Garden of Pomegranates. Now the fog in my head began to
clear. I began to understand that it wasn’t so much what Crowley was
trying to convey that made understanding so difficult, but the way
he said it. Crowley was so well-educated that even when he attempted
to dummy up his doctrine for the masses, it was still way over most
readers heads. His disciple Mr. Regardie was able to make this
doctrine much more clear.
Crowley’s magick, revealed in the proper context and correlated with
more recent philosophies, was easier to understand. Crowley’s magick
is based on the secrets and ceremonial rituals of an occult
organization known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In the
late 1800s the Golden Dawn flourished under the leadership of one S.L. Macgregor Mathers. The idea was to ritually invoke
various
God-forms in a hierarchical fashion from the lowest gods to the
highest in order to reach the original primal God-head and achieve
supreme enlightenment. Put in a more modern context: The aim is to
become possessed by various archetypes in order to make your very
limited self whole.
The God-forms are the
archetypes (figures taken from the worlds mythologies) that
represent various aspects of the human psyche. This was
understandable. I had read Carl Jung, so having Magick put to me in
this way was not a problem. I could now read Crowley with a minimal
amount of discomfort and I could pretty much understand most of the
things he wrote about. But he would still refer to certain things in
a cryptic manner. He would say things like “But this doctrine is
only for the initiated”, or “Only members of the IX degree would
have any understanding of the meaning behind this symbolism.” So
here I was again. I had penetrated the veil of obscurity regarding
one aspect of Crowley’s magick Yet was faced with a wall of secrecy.
But not for long.
In my constant search for all things Crowley, I had come upon a book
called
The Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson revealed to
me the key to Aleister Crowley’s Magick. The secret was - sex!!
Crowley had combined yoga breathing and concentration techniques
with the sex act. I had heard about Tantra, the Indian Left-hand
path. In religious rituals the male would take on the identity of
the Hindu God Shiva, and the female would play the role of the Hindu
Goddess Shakti. In the act of sex they would combine the duality of
male/female, dark/light, positive/negative represented by their
coitus and achieve the trance of Oneness where all opposites are
melded into a unity: the unity of the Cosmos. This ritual awakens
the fire-snake or the Kundalini that is believed to lie dormant at
the base of the spine. The Kundalini is the primordial power that
lies behind all phenomena. This is what Crowley was doing, but
instead of putting it in an Eastern mystical context he was bringing
it to the west and utilizing our God-forms as well as the God’s from
Ancient Egypt.
Now I understood Crowley’s basic secret. I began to find books that
revealed more and more about this sexual magick. The best author on
this subject turns out to be Mr. Kenneth Grant, an Englishman who
was actually under the tutelage of Crowley during the last few years
of Crowley’s life. I learned that there is more to this magick then
just utilizing the sex energy to reach higher states of
consciousness. There is also a method of sorcery in which the
genital secretions of the partners of this rite are co-mingled and
imbibed as a sacrament. This sacrament can grant the magician almost
unlimited powers.
So where did Crowley obtain this information? Where did all of these
very esoteric and specific rituals come from? In the year 1913,
Crowley was approached by a man named Theodor Reuss. Reuss claimed
to be the Grand Master of an organization known as the O.T.O.: The
Ordo Templi Orientis or The Order of the Templars of the East.
Reuss
accused Crowley of revealing very important secrets of the O.T.O in
one of his books. Crowley was dumbfounded. He had done no such
thing! Well, apparently he had. Reuss went to Crowley’s book shelf
and took down his
Book of Lies. Turning to chapter 36 Reuss read:
“Let the Adept be
armed with his Magick Rood (and provided with his Mystic Rose).”
Later in the same
chapter it is written:
“Let him drink of
the Sacrament and let him communicate the same.”
The Rood is the
penis
and the Rose is the vagina. Drinking of the Sacrament is the
imbibing of the genital secretions. Without even knowing it Crowley
had revealed the most esoteric secret of Western Ceremonial Magick!
“It instantly flashed upon me,” wrote Crowley. “The entire
symbolism not only of Freemasonry but of many other traditions,
blazed upon my spiritual vision.”
After this meeting Reuss
immediately made Crowley the Head of the O.T.O of Great Britain. As
the British head of the O.T.O Reuss had to make Crowley privy to
where these secrets had germinated from. In the latest Crowley
biography,
Do What The Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, by
Lawrence Sutin, the author quotes Crowley’s good friend Gerald Yorke who
remembers speaking with Crowley about this meeting:
“[Reuss] explained
to Crowley the theory behind that school of Alchemy which uses
sexual fluids and the Elixir of Life. He enlarged upon the
Baphomet tradition of the Knights Templar and traced its alleged
survival through the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light [a nineteenth
century esoteric society]. He then showed the connection with
those Tantrics who follow the left hand path [utilizing ritual
sexual intercourse as a means of spiritual union with the
godhead], and the Hathayogins who practiced sexual mudras
[sacred postures].”
Now there were two more
connections: the Knights Templar and their idol of worship, the
Baphomet. But where had the O.T.O come from and what was their
relationship to these Knights of Christ?
The O.T.O and
The Knights Templar
The
O.T.O had been founded in 1895 by a man named
Karl Kellner. Kellner had been a high grade Mason. This fact will appear more
important later in this article. Kellner died in 1905 and was
replaced by his partner Theodor Reuss. The secrets that the O.T.O
possessed had been handed down from various organizations the most
notable being the Knights Templar. The Templars had been accused of
all sorts of blasphemous things.
They were accused of holding
rituals that contained rites which culminated in participants
spitting on the crucifix, trampling on the crucifix, and basically
blaspheming the name of Christ and the Church. They had also been
accused of holding rites of a sexual nature. According to the O.T.O
these are the rites that have been passed down for centuries,
culminating in the IX degree rite of the O.T.O.
According to Lawrence Sutin:
“…the esoteric
lineage of the O.T.O, drew both from Indian Tantraism and from a
host of past Western secret societies, including (as the name
O.T.O confirms), the Knights Templar.”
The one Order which was
supposed to protect the
Roman Church and its followers, an order
that represented themselves as Knights of Christ, were, according to
the O.T.O., practicing sex magick!
As soon as Crowley had been made the British Head of the Order he
took on the name Baphomet. This is the idol that the Templars were
alleged to have worshipped. The Baphomet has many meanings but for
Crowley he believed the name came from a Greek word meaning “baptism
of wisdom” or “absorption into wisdom.” The 19th century occultist
Eliphas Levi designed an image of the Baphomet depicted as a goat’s
head with a hermaphroditic body (representing the uniting of male
and female).
Baphomet lore was considered by
Theodor Reuss to be
crucial to the O.T.O. I think that, principally, in the uniting of
opposites within this image; above and below, waxing and waning Moon
symbols, and the female breasts combined with the male generative
organs, that this symbol represents all the secrets of the western
esoteric tradition, specifically: sacred sexuality.
Apparently, after the
Templars had been disbanded in 1307, various members (those who had
not been executed) had carried on the Templar traditions and had
passed on the secrets. They formed other esoteric societies and kept
the secret doctrine alive. This secret doctrine passed into the
hands of those later to be known as the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons
and finally the O.T.O. But how had the Templars obtained this
information? From what source had these rites been handed over to
them? According to many sources the Knights Templar were carrying on
the tradition of the one and only Jesus Christ!
Christ, Simon
Magus, and the True Secret Doctrine
According to the latest research being conducted by certain New
Testament scholars, Jesus Christ and his consort Mary Magdalene
had
been practicing sex magick, or sacred sexuality rituals. It is
believed that Mary herself had initiated Christ into a sex magick
order. The book
The Templar Revelation by Lynn Pickett and
Clive
Prince meticulously goes over the latest findings to make a very
good case for this theory. It is well known in most occult circles
that the archetype of Jesus Christ - the dead and risen God - is the
same archetype as Osiris from Egypt.
Every culture has a
mythological figure that represents the dying of the worldly ego and
the rebirth of a higher stage of consciousness. Christ was well
aware of this. Having spent much time in Alexandria he was extremely
aware of the myth of Osiris. It is believed that Christ went out of
his way to emulate the Egyptian God Osiris, to the extent of
actually having himself crucified so that he could experience a
near- physical death and live out the myth of the dead and risen
God. What is left out of the Bible is that Christ needed a female
consort to complete the myth.
Osiris had his
Isis, Shiva had his Shakti, and
Christ had his Magdalene.
In the myth of Osiris, the God is cut to pieces by Set. Yet,
Isis
manages to scrape up all of his parts and glue them back together,
except for his penis, which in some versions of the story has been
eaten by a fish. Nevertheless, magickally, Isis is able to
impregnate herself with this emasculated corpse, and gives birth to
their son, the "Crowned and Conquering Child" Horus, who eventually
avenges his fathers death. The key to this birth or rebirth is sex!
It is believed that in Egypt sex had been used as a sacrament and a
religious rite for centuries.
Picknett and Prince write:
“Some of
the most sacred ancient Egyptian rites were sexual - for example, a
daily religious observance on the part of the Pharaoh and his
consort that involved him being masturbated by her. This was a
symbolic re-enactment of the god Ptah’s creation of the universe,
which he effected by similar means. Religious imagery in palaces and
temples unequivocally depicted this act…”
A contemporary of Jesus Christ was
Simon Magus. Simon had been
accused of holding blasphemous sexual rites and practicing sorcery.
As Osiris had his Isis and Jesus his Mary,
Simon had Helen. Simon
Magus had been known as a sorcerer and a sex magician, and was seen
as representing the satanic opposite of Christ.
But according to Picknett and
Prince:
“Simon Magus and
Jesus were, as far as the early Church was concerned,
dangerously alike in their teaching, which is why Simon was
accused of having tried to steal the Christians’ knowledge. This
is tacit admission that his own teaching was, in fact,
compatible with that of Jesus-even that he was part of the same
movement.
The implications of this are disturbing. Were the
sexual rites of Simon and Helen for example, also practiced by
Jesus and Mary Magdalene? According to Epiphanius, the Gnostics
had a book called the Great Questions of Mary, which purported
to be the inner secrets of the Jesus movement and which took the
form of ‘obscene’ ceremonies.”
As contemporaries
and as rival cult leaders, I think it’s pretty obvious that what
one man knew, so did the other! This is the secret doctrine that
was passed onto what later became the Knights Templar, then the
Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and later the O.T.O."
Crowley has hinted in
many of his publications that he held the real secrets of Christ.
The pre-Church Gnostics were revered by Crowley as carriers of the
true secrets of Jesus Christ. In one of Crowley’s most important
publications, The Equinox of the Gods he writes:
“Refuse the Law, you
put yourself beyond its pale. It is the Law that Jesus Christ,
or rather the Gnostic tradition of which the Christ-legend is a
degradation, attempted to teach; but nearly every word he said
was misinterpreted and garbled by his enemies, particularly by
those who called themselves his disciples.”
But Crowley knew the
real Law of Christ. The Templars knew, the Masons knew and the
Rosicrucians knew. The way to true enlightenment was also the way to
life. Sex is the basis of all things. The uniting of opposites is
the secret of the world: God and Beast, Lingam and Yoni, Good and
Evil, Creation and Destruction.
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