Announcements from
Lodge Members and Officers

Balance against each thought its exact opposite.
For the Marriage of these is the Annihilation of Illusion.

Wander alone; bearing the Light and thy Staff.
And be the Light so bright that no man seeth thee.
Be not moved by aught without or within: keep Silence in all ways.

    The "Section Two" reading group at Thelema Lodge meets each month to share literary studies, to cultivate the sacredness of texts, and to expand the possibilities of language as a medium for the work of the will. Meetings consist of reading and discussing together from a selected work or author, or more generally upon an agreed topic. Some are suggested by the A A curriculum, or by one of Crowley's other reading lists, while others we have picked out ourselves along analogous lines, of for our own reasons. The group meets (typically on the third Monday) in the lodge library with Caitlin, from 8:00 until 9:30. This month's gathering on Monday evening 20th August will be devoted to the writings and thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the most interesting and intelligent of the English "Romantic" poets. An impoverished scholar, dependent upon prizes and scholarships for his Cambridge studies, Coleridge (like Crowley a century later) spent three years in college there and then went down without bothering to take his degree. As a young man his associations with radical politics, nonconformist religion, and with poets such as Wordsworth and Southey, promised great things. In fact he lacked discipline and wasted much of his literary career on journalism or on minor and uncompleted projects, dampening his efforts by opium addiction and habitual self-doubt, wasting his time on quarrels with most of his friends. Famous as a revolutionary democrat while still at university, Coleridge and his friends designed a utopian project to emigrate to Pennsylvania among the newly independent United States. There twelve couples would live on a communal farm without individual ownership, educating their children for a new age of enlightenment, free of the bad old moral baggage of prejudice and selfishness and guilt. Raising the money to set out proved beyond the cooperative ability of the leaders who had talked up this scheme, so that it never got off the ground, but the idea of an isolated commune where a mixed fraternity could live and work in harmony was always the foundation for Coleridge's social ideals and lifestyle. He survived to become known as a literary genius on the basis of a dozen or so of his poems, and to retire into respectable Tory Anglicanism.

    I have risen! I have risen! as a mighty hawk of gold!
    From the golden egg I gather, and my wings the world enfold.
    I alight in mighty splendour from the thronéd boats of light;
    Companies of Spirits follow me; adore the Lords of Night.
    Lo! I come to face the dweller in the sacred snake of Khem;
    Come to face the Babe and Lion, come to measure force with them!
    Ah! these locks flow down, a river, as the earth's before the Sun,
    As the earth's before the sunset, and the God and I are One.
    I who entered in a Fool, gain the God by clean endeavour;
    I am shaped as men and women, fair for ever and for ever.

we offer two more early reviews of "The Rite of Saturn." The occasion was its original public performance ninety-one years ago by members of Crowley's early A A group which met (and rehearsed) in the London offices of

    Harmless eccentricity is the chief quality in The Rites of Eleusis, the first of which was performed at the Caxton Hall last night.
    One is told that Mr Aleister Crowley, who presides over these rites, has invented a new religion, and that his idea is to plant Eastern transcendentalism in English soil under the guise of ceremonial magic. But, if one may judge by the first act of the Rite of Saturn, Mr Crowley's sole claim to originality is the belief that what would merely by yawned at in the light becomes impressive in the semi-darkness. And perhaps that error has been made before.
    An atmosphere heavily charged with incense, some cheap stage effects, an infinity of poor reciting of good poetry, and some violin playing and dancing are the ingredients of the rite.
    There is nothing to give offense to the most sensitive. The Mother of Heaven, who plays the fiddle with considerable technical skill, but no inspiration, is probably not intended to represent any figure in other religions. Some of the poetry, such as passages of Swinburne, is mildly erotic, but rendered in a sing-song voice, with little expression, was void of passion.
    Positively the only relief in a dreary performance was afforded by a neophyte falling from his stool, which caused mild hilarity among a bored and uncomfortable audience, most of whom were perched upon small wooden stools a foot from the floor. Mr Crowley says that the end aim of his rites is ecstasy. Somebody ought to tell him that ecstasy of any kind is impossible when your foot has gone to sleep.

    The first Rites of Eleusis was held at Caxton Hall last night by the mystical society of which Mr Crowley (of the "Equinox") is the chief. It was the Rite of Saturn. The rites of Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, and Luna follow on successive Wednesdays, and unless a more cheerful tone is imparted than Saturn gave, the people who have paid five guineas for the whole lot will have committed suicide before they reach Luna.
    The Leader worshiper sneezing through a fog of incense, entered the temple of Saturn, which was lit by one feeble blue light. Most of the ritual was held in total darkness, though once there was a methylated spirit fire, which betrayed an audience of ladies and gentlemen in evening dress, sitting most uncomfortably on very low bamboo stools. After a litany of lamentation, the lights went out. After that it was all lamentation -- though once there was a jolly interval when a traitor in the temple was discovered, and slain, howling bitterly. The ritual is really an appeal to Saturn to explain the riddle of the universe. He explains it, "Death." "There is no God." "There is nothing behind the Veil but a pinch of dust." In the end, the veil is rent asunder, and the Master of the Temple is found dead, having recited "O melancholy brothers, dark, dark, dark!" and committed suicide.

    Whenever it occurs to anyone to cut a new canal of any kind, he will be well advised to look out for trouble. If it be the isthmus of Suez, the simple-minded engineer is apt to imagine that it is only a question of shifting so much sand; but before he can as much as strike the first pickax into the earth he finds that he is up against all kinds of interests, social, political, financial, and what-not. The same applied to the digging of canals in the human brain. When Simpson introduced chloroform, he thought it a matter for the physician; and found himself attacked from the pulpit. All his arguments proved useless; and we should probably be without chloroform today if some genius had not befriended him by discovering that God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep before He removed the rib of which Eve was made.

    Nowadays a movement has to be very well on the way to success before it is attacked by any responsible people. The first trouble comes from the gutter. Now the language of the gutter consists chiefly of meaningless abuse, and the principal catch-words, coming as they do from the mouths of men who never open them without a profane oath or a foul allusion, are those of blasphemy and immorality. The charge of insanity is frequently added when the new idea is just sufficiently easy to understand a little. There is another reason, too, for these three particular cries; these are the charges which, if proved, can get the person into trouble, and at the same time which are in a sense true of everybody; for they all refer to a more or less arbitrary standard of normality. The old cry of "heresy" has naturally lost much of its force in a country nine-tenths of whose population are admittedly heretics; but immorality and insanity are today almost equally meaningless terms. The Censor permits musical comedy and forbids Oedipus Rex; and Mr Bernard Shaw brands the Censor as immoral for doing so. Most people of the educated classes will probably agree with him.

    As for insanity, it is simply a question of finding a Greek of Latin name for any given act. If I open the window, it is on account of claustrophobia; when I shut it again, it is an attack of agoraphobia. All the professors tell me that every form of emotion has its root in sex, and describe my fondness for pictures as if it were a peculiarly unnatural type of vice. It is even impossible for an architect to build a church spire without being told that he is reviving the worship of Priapus. Now, the only result of all this is that all these terms of abuse have become entirely meaningless, save as defined by law. There is still some meaning in the term "Forger," as used in general speech; but only because it has not yet occurred to any wiseacre to prove that all his political and religious opponents are forgers. This seems to me a pity. There is, undoubtedly, a forged passage in Tacitus and another in Petronius. Everyone who studies the classics is, therefore, a kind of accomplice in forgery. The charge of blasphemy is in all cases a particularly senseless one. It has been hurled in turn at Socrates, Euripides, Christ, El- Mansur, the Baab, and the Rev. R. J. Campbell.

    Legal blasphemy is, of course, an entirely different thing. In the recent notorious case where an agent of the Rationalist Press Association, Harry Boulter by name, was prosecuted, the question proved to be not a theological one at all. It was really this, "were the neighbours being annoyed?" "was the man's language coarse?" and the Judge and Joseph McCabe agreed that it was. But in modern times no one has ever been prosecuted in any civilized country for stating philosophic propositions, whatever may be their theological implications. We have no longer the Casuists of the Inquisition, who would take the trouble to argue from Bruno's propositions of the immanence of God that, if that were so, the doctrine of the Incarnation was untenable (and therefore he shall be burned). It is only the very narrowest religious sects that trouble to call Herbert Spencer an Atheist. What the man in the street means by Atheist is the militant Atheist, Bradlaugh or Foote; and it is a singular characteristic of the Odium Theologicum that, instead of arguing soberly concerning the proposition, which those worthies put forward, they always try to drag the red herring of morality across the track. Of all the stupid lies that men have ever invented, nothing is much sillier than the lie that one who does not believe in God must be equally a disbeliever in morality. As a matter of fact, in a country which pretends so hard to appear theistic as England, it requires the most astounding moral courage, a positive galaxy of virtues, for a man to stand up and say that he does not believe in God; as Dr Wace historically remarked, "it ought to be unpleasant for a man to say that he does not believe in Jesus;" and my dislike to Atheism is principally founded on the fact that so many of its exponents are always boring me about ethics. Some priceless idiot, who, I hope, will finish in the British Museum, remarked in a free-thinking paper the other day, that they need not trouble to pull down the churches, "because they will always be so useful for sane and serious discussion of important ethical problems." Personally, I would rather go back to the times when the preacher preached by the hour-glass.

    I have always been very amused, too, in this connection of blasphemy by the perusal of Christian Missionary journals, on which I was largely brought up. They are full from cover to cover of the most scandalous falsehoods about heathen gods, and the most senseless insults to them, insults penned by the grossly ignorant of our religious population. It is only in quite recent years that the English public have discovered that Buddha was not a God, and it was not the missionaries that found this out, but scholars of secular attainment. In America, particularly, the most incredible falsehoods are constantly circulated by the Missionary Societies even about the customs of the Hindoos. To read them, one would suppose that every crocodile in India was fed with babies as the first religious duty of every Indian mother; but, of course, it is most terribly wicked for the Hindoo to make fun of the deities of the American. For my part, who have lived half my life in "Christian" countries and half my life in "heathen" countries, I cannot see much to choose between the different religions. Their arguments consist, in the end, of passionate assertion, which is no argument at all.

    There is an excellent story - much better known in India than in England - of a missionary, who was explaining to the poor heathen how useless were his gods. "See!" said he, "I insult your idol, he is but of dead stone; he does not avenge himself, or punish me." "I insult your God," replied the Hindoo, "he is invisible; he does not avenge himself, or punish me." "Ah!" said the missionary, "my God will punish you when you die;" and the poor Hindoo could only find the following pitiable answer: "So, when you die, will my idol punish you." It was from America, too, that I obtained the first principle of religion; which is that four to a flush are not as good as one small pair.

    Still I suppose it is useless to contest the popular view that anyone whom any fool chooses to call an Atheist is liable to conduct "orgies." Now, can anyone tell me what orgies are? No? Then I must reach down the Lexicon. Orgia, only used in the plural and connected with Ergon (work), means sacred rites, sacred worship practiced by the initiated at the sacred worship of Demeter at Eleusis, and also the rites of Bacchus. It also means any rites, or worship, or sacrifice, of any mysteries without any reference to religion; and Orgazio means, therefore, to celebrate Orgies, or ceremonies, or to celebrate any sacred rites. It is really a poor comment upon the celebration of sacred rites that the word should have come to mean something entirely different, as it does today. For the man in the street Orgie means a wild revel usually accompanied by drunkenness. I think it is almost time that someone took the word Orgie as a Battle Cry, and, having shown that the Eucharist is only one kind of orgie to restore the true enthusiasm (which is not of an alcoholic or sexual nature) among the laity; for it is no secret that the falling away of all nations from religion, which only a few blind- worms are fatuous enough to deny, is due to the fact that the fire no longer burns in the sacred lamp. Outside a few monasteries there is hardly any church of any sect whose members really expect anything to happen to them from attending public worship. If a new Saint Paul were to journey to Damascus, the doctor would be called in and his heavenly vision diagnosed as epilepsy. If a new Mahomed came from his cave and announced himself a messenger of God, he would be thought a harmless lunatic. And that is the first stage of a religious propaganda.

    Now the real messenger of God can always be distinguished in a very simple way. He possesses a mysterious force which enables him to persist, heedless of the sneers and laughter of the populace. It then strikes the wiser people that he is dangerous; and they begin on the blasphemy and immorality tack. In the life of our Lord, this will be noticed. In the first place, there was just the contemptuous "he hath a devil," which was the equivalent of our "he's just a crank," but when it was found that this crank had adherents, men of force and eloquence like Peter, to say nothing of financial genius like Judas Iscariot, the cry was quickly changed into wild accusations of blasphemy and allegations of immorality. "He is a friend of publicans and sinners." A same Government only laughs at these ebullitions; and it is then the task of the Pharisees to prove to the Government that it is to its interest to suppress this dangerous upstart. They may succeed; and thought the Government is never for a moment blind to the fact that it is doing an injustice, the new Saviour is crucified. It is this final publicity of crucifixion (for advertisement is just as necessary in one age as another) that secures the full triumph to him whom his enemies fondly suppose to be their victim. Such is human blindness, that the messenger himself, his enemies, and the civil power, all of them do exactly the one thing which will defeat their ends. The messenger would never succeed at all if it were not that he is The Messenger, and it really matters very little what steps he may take to get the message delivered. For all concerned are but pawns in the great game played by infinite wisdom and infinite power.

    It is, therefore, a negligible matter, this abuse, from whatever source it comes. It should waste my time if I were to prove that the rites of Eleusis, as now being performed at Caxton Hall, are orderly, decorous ceremonies. It is true that at times darkness prevails; so it does in some of Wagner's operas and in certain ceremonies of a mystical character which will occur to the minds of a large section of my male readers. There are, moreover, periods of profound silence, and I can quite understand that in such an age of talk as this, that seems a very suspicious circumstance!

This oral history interview tape provided by Sirius Oasis records a conversation twenty years ago with Aleister Crowley's Caliph. With some slight cutting to minimize repetition and confusion, our selections have included nearly all of it, and we are now nearing the end of the conversation. There will be just one more extract next month before the tape runs out.

    Grady: Hum. Okay; so anyway - Now we had - I had another uncle, who was living in Sentinel, Colorado - I guess it's Sentinel, Colorado; it's called Grand Junction. This is where a couple rivers that come to there gather, and there is a little place called Fruita. It's just a little town - just a -
    Glenn: This in Colorado?
    Grady: In Colorado, south from Grand Junction, okay. We used to go out to the river and catch carp. Carp are bottom-feeding fish, but that's it; we were hungry. And shoot rabbits, with our twenty-twos. And Dad had a job with a rancher, where he was doing a butcher trip, and there was this creek, where the muskrats were living, and we were about a mile and a half from town, aprox. They didn't have any school busses, to pick me up. Every morning, in the cold of winter, when it was literally so cold that you could see the snowflakes condensing out of the air, I had to walk down a mile and a half into town to go to school, and a mile and a half back in the evening. On the mile and a half back in the evening I would pick, like asparagus - wild asparagus -
    Glenn: Oh, wow. So you lived there for, what - ?
    Grady: For about a year.
    Glenn: - for about a year. So did you enjoy the schooling stuff that you were doing, or was it sort of, I guess, like any young person, or - ?
    Grady: Um, actually, at the time, it just seemed like everyday ordinary existence. Only looking back at it do I think that there may have been something remarkable about it. Ah, I enjoyed it, yes. Look, I love education; I'm a print junky.
    Glenn: Right. Let's go through some of this quickly, and see if we can get up to when you started getting into occult things.
    Grady: Oh; that's very simple -
    Glenn: Is that later in your life, or - ?
    Grady: No; all right - yes and no. Okay, yes - and no. The story is -
    Glenn: Okay.
    Grady: Okay, now, what happened was this. Uh - you can call it stupid if you want to. It's entirely up to you. But what happened was this. As you know I'm a double Libra, and a romantic, and all that sort of jazz, right? Now, ah - but I'm not stupid, either. I may be dumb, but I'm sure not stupid. So, anyway, um - there came a time in my life when I was very very young, and I was living with my grandfather and my grandmother - and my grandmother I remember with great affection; my grandfather, I remember him with great respect, but not necessarily affection - ah - like on Sundays and Wednesday evenings. Wednesday evenings we had prayer meeting, right? It's Holy Roller, right. Wednesday evening you have prayer meeting, right. Sure; always, always. It's part of ancient Presbyterian tradition, or whatever they call it. Okay, fine. So, ah - we're, ah - living here, and, um - so what happened, what really happened was this: the reason I became a Thelemite. We had a woman preacher. Now in unordained ministry, which the Holy Rollers are, of course, it's nothing unusual. In fact, in your modern witchcraft tradition you might take note of the fact that, among unordained ministries you've had women ministers for years.
    Glenn: Yeah.
    Grady: All right; okay, fine. And one of them was. Now, I had a rather painful decision, very young, very innocent, and very open. I fell in love with her.
    Glenn: With the minister?
    Grady: Yeah?
    Glenn: Oh.
    Grady: She would be up there on the podium, you know, preaching away. And then one day she disappeared. And I said, "Why," you know; "what happened?" And they told me, "Oh, well; she was doing a sex trip with Joe Blow." What - what? This is my hero, this is my - what?
    Glenn: You mean - ?
    Grady: At that moment I became an anti-Christian.
    Glenn: You mean they got rid of her because she was doing this?
    Grady: No, they didn't get rid of her.
    Glenn: She just - ?
    Grady: She just split.
    Glenn: Oh, she just split with so-and-so.
    Grady: But I was so completely disillusioned -
    Glenn: Uh-huh.
    Grady: Now I have hypoglycemia, which means I love sweets. Now, in depression Oklahoma there's only one place I can get sweets, and that was at Christmas. Cause at Christmas they brought out all the candy, right. I walked away from it. "No!" I walked away from it; I said "No, I won't. I can't."
    Glenn: You somehow equated the sugar with the Christian - ?
    Grady: The point was, I'd made a commitment I will not, under any circumstances, submit to that type of trip. I mean, seeing as she had done something - what can I say?
    Glenn: So what was the "trip?" I'm not quite sure what - ?
    Grady: The trip was that, um - that, um - by, um - balling this guy, and disappearing from our scene, she had -
    Glenn: Broken her commitment or something?
    Grady: - broken her commitment to being a preacher of the faith. And that's when I became disillusioned. Um, that's when I split from the Christian church. And, um - I went out looking: where, what, will, you know - where do I belong?
    Glenn: So did you feel identified with her, or did you feel angry with her?
    Grady: Both. Like Margot Adler, you know, who wrote Drawing Down the Moon, or something -
    Glenn: Yeah.
    Grady: - said to me on that TV tape - which is upstairs if you want to hear it, by the way -
    Glenn: Yeah, I'd like to, at some point.
    Grady: She said, "Anger and ecstasy, both at the same time." I said, "Yes, I know." She said, "There's your problem."
    Glenn: What was that, at the same time?
    Grady: Anger and ecstasy.
    Glenn: Uh-huh.
    Grady: In other words, I was angry with her, and at the same time, I just split; I said "fucking forget it!" So I went out looking. I looked for many years.

   Grady and the Gauls:

   Here are two more letters from Grady McMurtry to Aleister Crowley, written in 1944 e.v. Grady was attempting to find public support for "La Gauloise", a song Crowley wrote "for the fighting French" and hoped to see adopted as a new French national anthem. That was a considerable long-shot, since even getting it sung in public appeared to be a sufficient difficulty. Considering the salute to the liberating troups in flowers and ripe tomatoes, perhaps it was just as well... These letters also discuss Grady's poety in passing and the difficulty in getting money to Crowley.

Thelema Lodge Events Calendar for August 2001 e.v.

    The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O. Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA

Phone: (510) 652-3171 (for events info and contact to Lodge)

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