T Omphalos lectures on Thelema in the U.S. : Feb 20 – Mar 6, 2010 e.v.
THE VERY ILLUSTRIOUS SIR KNIGHT T OMPHALOS VII° from the Valley of Trondheim, Norway
Lectures Thelema in the United States including:
A Sword in my Hand: The War-Machine of the Great Beast 666
Step into the Sunlight: Monasticism in the New Aeon
and more
Knights Templar Oasis, O.T.O., Salem, MA : Feb 20-21: http://knightstemplar-oto.org/
Sekhet-Maat Lodge, O.T.O., Portland, OR : Mar 2-6 : http://sekhetmaat.com/wiki/T_Omphalos_04:17
A Sword in my Hand: the War-Machine of the Great Beast 666
The O.T.O. came under Crowley’s authority with his crowning as the Supreme and Most Holy King of the British section of the Order in 1912 ev. With the head of the Order, Theodor Reuss, being almost in daily communication, Crowley set out at his suggestion to rewrite the entire ritual and instructional corpus that formed the basis of the Order’s teachings.
Crowley would later declare, in a letter to his magical son Charles S. Jones, that the Secret Chiefs of the A∴A∴ had put him into contact with Reuss because he had failed to keep the aspirants to that august fraternity from socializing with each other, creating the first blow to his plans for establishing the Law of Thelema as an essence religion. When you can not keep them from socializing, he wrote, you have to treat them as a group and enforce discipline. To this end he created what he thought was a perfect system of ethics based on the Law of Thelema, centered around its yama of self-discipline and its niyama of minding one’s own business.
The O.T.O. became in effect, as he noted to Jones, a preliminary training academy in ethics—in addition to teaching “the secret behind all practical magick” in its higher degrees—for the aspirants to the A∴A∴. All this changed, however, when he attained the Grade of Magus in the A∴A∴ with its associated duty of preaching his Word. From that day and onwards the Great Beast 666 was primarily and increasingly concerned with promulgating and establishing this Law of Thelema, and he quickly realized that O.T.O. would be his war-engine that would win this effort. It has become in effect a godly religion run by men who practiced an essential religion.
To this end he started reformulating the rituals and instructional corpus of the Order yet again, adding a magical regiment that would crown one above and beyond all other people as a Knight-Monk that had not only accepted The Book of the Law as the Letter and Word of Truth but also as the Supreme Rule of Life. He formulated a battle plan to establish centers that would develop into communities and eventually colonies where everyone could live under the aegis of the Law of Thelema. Today this vision is popularly known as the “Blue Equinox Model”. Crowley would revise this many times as a result of further insight garnered from his Initiations and tribulations, but the main focus of establishing the Law of Thelema in the temporal sphere remained its focus.
The Very Illustrious Sir Knight T Omphalos VII° is a scholar of the history of O.T.O. Over a decade ago he created the research group, Academia Masonica Borealis, to focus on these subject matters and has studied and accumulated most of the materials, published as well as unpublished, available on the subject matter.
This lecture will treat the history and the function of O.T.O. from its beginning, through the Equinox era, his attainment of the Grade of Magus and subsequent fallout with Theodor Reuss, leading him to use his materials in his Order of Thelemites, to his assumption of the Grade of Ipsissimus, becoming the Outer Head of O.T.O., and his revisions to his plans late in his life. It will track the evolution of these ideas and trace them to the specific Initiations and tribulations that informed this evolution. T Omphalos will also present materials hitherto unpublished, offering much insight and a few startling revelations about the actual plans the Great Beast 666 had for his war-engine and how this relates to the three Grades of the Order of Thelema.
At the end of the lecture T Omphalos will present a finalized model that takes into account all of the writings of the Great Beast 666 on the subject of the Order and how to cultivate it organically from a small cell of interested individuals to a National Grand Lodge, and how such a community, fully established under the aegis of the Law of Thelema, would operate.
Step into the Sunlight: Monasticism in the New Aeon
The monastic life has at all times been associated with the attainment of the Great Work, due to its effectiveness for the Magician in removing distractions. This formula of the Black School of Magick (which centered on withdrawal from society) rendered their insight, experience, and attainment incomplete and stagnant. By removing themselves from society they could become all that they were, but not what they are not.
This formula was destroyed with the commencement of the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child, opening a new formula of monasticism: one that involves embracing life in all of its many facets, where sorrow and happiness are transmuted. This formula necessitates undergoing an internal Apocalypse that is the sevenfold task of the earth, the shattering of the seven palaces with the ten sephiroth.
Of those that have completed these preliminary steps on the path of Initiation, having attained the grace of our Lady of the Stars, or the certainty of the consciousness of the continuity of existence, it is written: they have become free and independent, destroyed all fear, whether of custom, or of faith, or of other men, or of death itself.
The Very Illustrious Sir Knight Omphalos VII° has made a deep study of the training program that the Great Beast 666 outlined for the novice who wishes to become a Knight-Monk of Thelema, where he, freed from the bed of Procrustes, can live in harmony with the Law of his inner being that by necessity must be in harmony with the Law of Thelema. This is his first lecture about the complete spiritual work to be undertaken from the Minerval through the Fifth Degree which crowns one above and beyond his fellow men as a Knight-Monk of Thelema.
While lecture is open for all individuals, it is delivered in the spirit of the twelfth house of the duties of the members of the O.T.O.: “The general principles of the Order may be fully explained, so far as they are understood below the VI°; as it is written, ‘The ordeals I write not: the rituals shall be half known and half concealed: the Law is for all.'”