by John Carter
A new Order of the Illuminati appeared in 1880, founded by Freemasonic druggist Theodor Reuss in Munich. In 1896 Reuss, and fellow occultists Leopold Engel and Franz Hartmann co-founded the Theosophical Society of Germany, and in 1901 Engel and Reuss produced or forged a charter giving them authority over the re-established Illuminati of Weishaupt. In 1901, Reuss, Hartmann and metallurgist Karl Kellner founded the Ordo Templi Orientis and about 1912 Reuss conferred the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis upon Aleister Crowley, claiming that Crowley already knew the occult secret of that degree. (Crowley—rhymes with holy, remember?—already possessed the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite and the 97th degree of the Order of Memphis and Mizraim.) Reuss later appointed Crowley his successor as Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis. The Inner Head presumably remains invisible and unavailable to the un-Illuminated. (Hint: meditate on the Zen koan, “What wonderful magician makes the grass green?”)
Crowley includes Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the 18th Century Illuminati, among the Holy Saints in his Gnostic Catholic Mass, performed regularly in all Ordo Templi Orientis lodges. But that list of Holy Saints also includes also such odd blokes as King Arthur, Mohammed, Parsifal, Buddha, Rabelais, Pope Alexander Borgia, Swinburne, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Bacon, John Dee, Goethe, Wagner, Nietzche, Simon Magus, King Ludwig II (“the mad king of Bavaria”) and painter Paul Gauguin…
Before dying, Crowley appointed one Karl Germer (a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp) his successor as Outer Head, but Germer himself neglected to attend to that little detail, and when he died suddenly several claimants arose. I counted 1005 competing Outer Heads at one time in the mid-1980s, myself among them. (I had received that honor from a group of rebels against Kenneth Grant, an embattled Outer Head in London, who still calls himself the only real Outer Head. I always carry the card Grant's disloyal opposition sent me; it says “The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, so PLEASE treat him right” and magically/anachronistically has the signature of Aleister Crowley—or of a skillful forger.)
Over on this side of the pond, the federal courts have ruled that the title of Ordo Templi Orientis belongs only and always to the guys and gals represented on the World Wide Web and have further granted it tax-exempt status as a charitable corporation and religious entity. This group descends directly from the 1930s–1940s Agape Lodge of the OTO, the one that Jack Parsons once led.
As we mentioned, Aleister Crowley became an initiate of the OTO in 1912. This happened because he had published a mystic treatise and/or book of dirty jokes perversely or paradoxically entitled The Book Of Lies (Falsely So Called). The Outer Head at that time, Theodore Reuss came to Crowley and said that, since he, Crowley, knew the secret of the 9th degree, he had to accept that rank in the OTO and its attendant obligations. Crowley protested that he knew no such secret but Reuss showed him a copy of The Book Of Lies and pointed to a chapter which revealed the great secret quite openly. Crowley looked at his own words and “It instantly flashed upon me. The entire symbolism not only of Free Masonry but of many other traditions blazed upon my spiritual vision…I understood that I held in my hands the key to the future progress of humanity.”3 Crowley, of course, does not tell us which chapter contains the secret. You can spend many happy hours, days, maybe even months or years, pouring over that cryptic volume seeking the right chapter and the final secret.
We should remember at this point that even before his involvement with the OTO Aleister Crowley also received training, sometimes briefly and sometimes lasting much longer, in such traditions as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism; and we should note that he majored in organic chemistry at Cambridge University. He often reiterated his commitment to “the method of science, the aim of religion.” His work as Outer Head turned the OTO in radical new directions, both scientific and sexual.
Now it gets really scary for the Fundamentalists.
SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL
“In these experiences the ego will be totally altered or completely destroyed in the death that must precede a rebirth into life. The terror, agony and despair that accompany this process cannot be minimized.”
—John Whiteside Parsons4
Two recent books that shed some light on all these murky matters deserve some attention at this point—The Hiram Key and The Second Messiah.5 The authors of both books, Knight and Lomas, both Freemasons themselves, claim that they have received “support and congratulations” from “hundreds” of other masons—athough they admit that their research has been greeted with hostile silence by the United Grand Lodge of England, one of the more conservative masonic bodies.
Basically, Knight and Lomas try to prove that masonry not only dates back to ancient Egypt—as only the most Romantic masons have hitherto claimed—but that it also served as a major influence on “Jerusalem Christianity,” the earliest form of the Christian faith, which St. Paul and other sex-maniacs persecuted and drove underground. When the official Romish Christianity became dominant, primordial or “Jerusalem” Christianity survived by hiding within various Gnostic “heresies,” Knight and Lomas say, and became a major force again only when rediscovered and accepted as their own secret inner doctrine by the Knights Templar. When the Templars were condemned by the Inquisition (1308) the surivivors used various other names until emerging again as “Freemasons” in the 17th or 18th Centuries.
Parts of this thesis have appeared in other books—the underground survival of primordial Christianity, for instance, underlies the entire argument of the famous Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh—but Knight and Lomas have put the puzzle together in a more convincing way an any of their precursors.
But what about the original Egyptian “mystery” out of which this underground tradition emerged? Do Knight and Lomas attempt to delve that far back and claim to find a convincing answer?
Indeed they do.
The central masonic “myth” of the widow's son, Hiram—the builder of Solomon's temple, murdered for refusing to reveal “the mason word” to three ruffians—derives from actual events in Egypt, they aver. The “mason word” does not mean a “word” in the usual sense but acts as coded euphemism indicating a secret. (“Another damned secret?” I can hear you howl. Patience!)
Every new pharaoh, before ascending the throne, had to visit heaven and become accepted among the gods. Only after this otherworldly journey could the pharoah be accepted by the priests, and by himself, as one fit to fulfill the divine, as well as political, functions of kingship, as conceived in those days. This voyage to the highest stars, where the gods live, involved a magick ritual employing what Knight and Lomas call a “narcotic.” When the last pharaoh of the native dynasty refused to reveal the secrets of this ritual to the new Hyskos dynasty, they killed him in the manner of the widow's son. The lost “word” = the details of the Ritual of Illumination and the name of the “narcotic” used.
It seems to me that Knight and Lomas have this last detail wrong, due to their ignorance of psycho-pharmacology. Narcotics do not allow you to walk among the stars and communicate with superhuman intelligences. They kill pain, they numb anxiety, they knock you unconscious; and they usually get you addicted: that's all they do. Almost certainly, the magick potion used in the ritual did not belong to the narcotic family but to the entheogens—the type of drugs also called psychedelics. Entheogens produce “mystic” and godly experiences, and at least one of them, and perhaps two, had widespread religious usage among the Indo-European peoples from ancient times, Amanita muscaria definitely and psilocybin possibly, both of them members of the “magic mushroom” group.
You can easily find learned works supporting this interpretation of how humanity first became aware of Higher Intelligences. See espcially Pujarich's The Sacred Mushroom, Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Wasson's Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Wasson et al., Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion, LeBarre's Ghost Dance: Origins of
Religion, Peter Lamborn Wilson's Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma, my own Sex, Drugs and Magick—and especially see Terence McKenna's Food of the Gods, which argues that all existing religions evolved from paleolithic rituals using entheogens and group sex to achieve ego-transcendence and cosmic consciousness. You can still see the ancient sexual symbolism even in such romish ikons as the Sacred Heart and the Cross: the former does not look like a heart at all but like a tumescent vagina and the latter has the shape of a penis and testicles.
Jack Parsons’ magick and John Parsons’ science have a closer unity than most people can imagine. They both aimed at the stars.
By the way, all over northern Europe traditional art shows the fairy-people and sorcerers surrounded by mushrooms, usually the “liberty cap” mushroom, now identified as psilocybin, the same used by Native American shamans for around 4000 years. The Irish Gaelic name for this fabulous fungus, Pokeen, means little god. (“Little fairy” in modern Gaelic, but pook derives ultimately from bog, the 2 Indo-European root for “god.”)
Crowley spoke for this tradition when he said true religion always invokes Dionysus, Aphrodite and the Muses, which he also called “wine, women and song.”
Nowadays we call this magick trinity Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, and celebrate them at Raves that hauntingly resemble the earliest stirrings of cosmic questing by ancestors who dressed in animal skins and looked even more like gorillas than we do.
I have saved the worst shock to “good, decent Americans” for the end of this section. In 1986, researchers found another (approximately) 2000-year-old manuscript near the same Nag Hammadi caves where the “Dead Sea Scrolls” had come to light. Translated into English by Mohammed al-Murtada and Francis Bendik under the title The Secret Book Of Judas Of Kerioth, this text depicts Jesus as the bisexual lover of both Mary Magdelene and St. John, and also describes the Last Supper as an entheogenic sacrament involving magic mushrooms. It has an introduction and running commentary by Dr. Maxwell Selander of Briggs-Melton Theological Seminary and you can get a copy from Abrasax Books in Corpus Christi, Texas. It will blow the circuits of any Fundamentalists you know…
Sort of sounds like the historical Jesus (as distinguished from the mythical Christ) had a lot in common with Jack Parsons, doesn't it?
THE ANTICHRIST
“The time to fight for freedom is the time when freedom is threatened, not the time when freedom is destroyed, for that later time is too late. Freedom is threatened now, the destruction of freedom is not far off. Now is the time to fight.”
—John Whiteside Parsons6
In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, “traditional family values” denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)
Our government's war against “sin,” i.e. against all forms of individual taste and whimsy, currently costs the taxpayers (federal and local) 450 billion dollars ($450,000,000,000) every year, according to Peter McWilliams.7 This makes up the bill for all forms of government interference in people's private lives—i.e. the footless and hopeless attempt to stomp out “consensual” or “victimless” crimes—porno, prostitution, gambling, recreational or religious use of entheogens, etc. Who decides what consensual or victimless acts should become “crimes”? The so-called Christians who drove original “Jerusalem Christianity” underground, established the Holy Inquistion and still seem to suffer from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time”: the “lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police” denounced by John Whiteside Parsons in 1946. (Crowley, with his usual flair for humorous melodrama, called them the Black Brotherhood in his books, and it took me years to figure out whom he meant…)
In Newark, California, recently, police broke into the home of a Korean family, beat them all up and smashed all their furniture and dishes while allegedly looking for verboten drugs. They found no drugs, but the narcs explained to the press, “This is war.”8
In Minneapolis, more tragically, the police also broke into the home of an elderly black couple, using flash-bang grenades which set the building on fire and killed both husband and wife. They offered the same “explanation” as in Newark: “This is war.”9
As Oliver Steinberg wrote, “It is inaccurate to speak of a War on Drugs…You don't lock drugs up in jail, you lock up people…You can't kill drugs—you kill people. Our government is not waging a war on drugs—it is waging a war on the people.”10
Due to a strange and nefarious union of the Fundamentalists and the fanatic wing of Feminism, we have had more than 60 witch-hunts or Satanic Panics since 1980. Thousands of lives ruined, mass hysterias, millions of dollars wasted on prosecutions that usually collapsed in court for lack of real evidence: a large price to pay for the destruction of the Bill of Rights. After digging in countless “mass graves” of alleged victims of human sacrifice, the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, which deals with serial killers, found no victims at all, at all, and concluded that the whole mania had no basis in fact—which led, of course, to charges that the FBI itself functioned as part of the Satanic conspiracy.11
And none of this has anything to do with the original Jerusalem Christianity. It emerged only from the Papist pretenders in Rome and their Protestant imitators, who make up the whole of what most people think of as “Christianity.”
Nietzsche, who lived too soon to learn of that original Christianity, regarded what passes under that label as the worst disaster to ever befall humanity. As he wrote in The Antichrist:
The hatred of intellect, of pride, courage, freedom of intellect, is Christian; the hatred of the senses, of the delights of the senses, of all delight, is Christian…the concepts of “the other world,” “the last judgement,” “the immortality of the soul,” “soul” itself: they are torture instruments, they are systems of cruelty by which the priests became masters.12
Against this system of cruelty Nietzsche rebelled; and Crowley rebelled; and Jack Parsons rebelled: and because of them we now stand on the brink of an explosion of consciousness that literally can extend our minds and carry our bodies to the farthest stars.
THE BABALON WORKING: ROCKET TO HEAVEN
“No God. No Master.”
—Margaret Sanger13
As you have gathered by now, I do not regard Parsons and Crowley as Black Magicians or Satanists or anything of that sort. Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of “psychology” (or neuro-linguistic meta-programming) to train us to break out of the cage of the socially conditioned ego and, by plunging directly into the Chaos and Void from which we emerged, experience a rebirth into a new sense of self, of world, and of chaos and void, knowing directly, by experience, that all these names hide the same hidden unity—the wonderful magician who makes the grass green, makes the sad man sad, makes the angry woman angry, and makes the loving heart overflow with further love endlessly.
Dr. John Lilly called this process “metaprogramming the human bio-computer”; Dr. Timothy Leary, conscious of his debts to both Crowley and Parsons, called it “serial re-imprinting” of our “reality-tunnel.”
As Terence McKenna often says in his lectures, you can do all this by yoga—but only if you can spare seven years of your life, or longer, sitting around an ashram meditating. Magick works faster, especially when united with the ancient shamanic ecstasies of full sexual release and the proper en-theo-gens.
Crowley said, and Parsons liked to quote him on this, “THERE IS NO GOD BUT MAN.” (That sounds “sexist” these days, but you all know what he meant. He also said “EVERY MAN AND EVERY WOMAN IS A STAR.”) To confuse this with atheism seems to me as wildly off the mark as confusing it with “Satanism.” It quite simply means that all ideas/perceptions/experiences of the divine or the immortal refer directly back to the latent powers of the mind that contains them. (In
this context, see John 10:34.)
As Jack Parsons knew, and as Freudians will readily see for themselves, the whole magickal struggle in Parsons’ Babalon Working recounted in Chapters Seven and Eight unleashed, on one level, a violent confrontation with Marvel's Oedipus Complex. Babalon represents the Mother and the Whore, the opposite archetypes of the male mind. To say it aloud, when making love to Babalon as Cameron, Jack Parsons did consciously what all men do unconsciously: he fucked his mother. After 2000 years of Christian sex-hate and sex-guilt, only in that total life-and-death battle with all inner inhibitions could he achieve that liberation which all of us seek, all of us fear, and all of us confront eventually, in the hour of our death, when we finally don't give a damn anymore about what other people think.
“Only in the irrational
and unknown direction
can we come to
wisdom again.”
—John Parsons, letter to Cameron, 1946
* * *
1. Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, by John Whiteside Parsons, Falcon Press, Las Vegas, 1989, p 10.
2. Freedom, op. cit., p. 10.
3. The Book Of Lies, by Aleister Crowley, Samuel Weiser Inc., York Beach, 1988. Introduction, p. 7.
4. Freedom, op. cit., p. 56.
5. The Hiram Key by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, Century, 1996; The Second Messiah, by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, Element Books, 1997.
6. Freedom op. cit. p. 39.
7. http://www.mcwilliams.com.
8. Pissing Away The American Dream, ed. by David Ross, Digit Press, Norcross, Georgia, 1991.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Satanic Panic, by Jeffrey S. Victor, Open Court, Chicago, 1993.
12. As cited in The Heretic's Handbook Of Quotations, ed. by Charles Bufe, Sea Sharp Press, San Francisco, 1988, p. 177.