I am perplexed as to where these speculations are coming from ?  We appear to have slipped into some Dennis Wheatley-type alternative reality where Occult Sodalities are synonymous with Gentlemen's Clubs, inhabited by people of "superior social background".
(I am reminded to a considerable extent of the social and historical milieu in which E.F.Benson's supernatural and ghost stories are set with gentleman writers of considerable leisure and who inevitably have servants - although it has to be noted that some of the tales are damn good  - yes, I'm still reading them).

Don't we have enough O.T.O's already, without speculating on the existence of secret orders for superior people !?

Is this a reaction against poor little Peaches Geldof and her rather touching enthusiasm for AC and Thelema and something that she understands as the o.T.o (perhaps the exaggerated phallic symbolism of her little tatoo speaketh more than it knows).  Don't you even get booted out of the Conservative Cabinet for going around calling people 'proles' or 'plebs' these days ?

In conclusion, I can only invoke Liber AL Chapter II:

58. Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty.

Ray Burlingame, one of the "vice-presidents," took action immediately and began initiation within 5 days of Germer's death (even though he didn't know about Germer's death for some time to come). The result was Solar Lodge, which continued the tradition until 1972. McMurtry was "mobilized" because he heard about Solar Lodge and its questionable activities, and came back to Calif (Caliph  😀 ) in 1969 to investigate.

Never mind that Solar Lodge is considered clandestine by current OTO standards. The point is that there was activity.

Also, I believe, throughout the so-called "Caliphate" period, activity in Switzerland that was by no means "clandestine". I'm not sure how much effort McMurty made to reach out to the "Swiss OTO".
Re OP: Golly! Holy David Ickes, Batman!

Thanks for the interesting info.

So there could have been some activity that McMurty was aware of but did not become involved with for whatever reason.  It still seems to me that he may have been ostracised.  In the 1950-60's Britain was still to some extent looking back on Empire.  McMurty in my opinion would have definitely been seen as a 'colonial', especially by people coming from the same social background in Britain as Crowley had (his peers).  So whilst we cannot say that these others who had charters (and who can say how many were given out), formed groups or orders.  It is reasonable I feel to argue that if they had got something going.  On the basis of pure snobbery they would not have wanted the likes of McMurty.

In the current day most OTO people are well..... not affluent financially(UK).  For example in my area less then 10% of OTO membership that I have heard about:  have their own home, a car or can even drive.  It would seem then that here in the UK at least, the OTO is appealing primarily to only one segment of British society.  Could it be possible that some of those who are very wealthy in Britain are interested in Crowley's wonderful magickal technology and fascinating religious philosophy.  However they may feel dis-inclined to rub shoulders with the 'great unwashed'.  Perhaps they form groups or orders along Thelemic lines or join pre-existing secretive ones as I have suggested.  One rationale that might have been permitted to have been filtered down, even via people in lower socio-economic groups is the adage that 'a poor magician is a poor magician.

All just wild assumptions and supposition, I fear. And to what end?

Hm.  I'm in MMM, which I understood was specifically for proles.  Maybe I should apply for advancement since I own my own home, car and have money in the bank?  Or maybe not.

According to Tobias Churton's biography on Crowley, his family background was Hampshire bourgeoisie. His mother's family was not elevated, while his father's family was involved in commerce through the brewing of beer, and "the brewing of beer was stigmatized in aristocratic as well as strictly religious circles until money superseded religion after the 1950s. Beer was common. According to the diktats of temperance, its profits derived from exploitation of human weakness." It is claimed in this biography that Crowley would be fastidious about his abstention from drinking beer.

And, according to the same biography, Crowley's immediate family had separated themselves into a religious non-conformity by joining the exclusive Christian sect of the Plymouth Brethren.

Such a family background would not be respectable to "people from a superior social background" in Crowley's lifetime. But I don't know how much this was of a hindrance for Crowley in recruiting "people from a superior social background", or at least getting such people to accept O.T.O. charters.     

Crowley's family was affluent and so was he a lot of the time.  When Crowley went to school the majority of people in Britain finished school before 14yrs.  A very small segment of the population attended any university.  The majority of British people in Crowley's time could barely feed the family and keep the house warm in winter.  Crowley's peers and friends were distinctly 'well-to-do'.  They were in the upper part of a society that boasted it was the most powerful in the world 'the sun never sets.....'.

If "9. Every man and woman that is of full age, free, and of good report, has an indefeasible right to the III°." (Liber LII) then might it not be argued that any theoretical quasi OTO that limited its membership to some supposed elite, at least as far as the Man of Earth Triad is concerned, would be in breach and therefore have invalidated itself?

Would it not also have to be headed by a man named Mocata and, therefore, limited as far as its selection of a leader is concerned?

I always wondered that, if "9. Every man and woman that is of full age, free, and of good report, has an indefeasible right to the III°." (Liber LII), why even bother having Degrees below it?

I believe it was AC's style to initiate newcomers with the whole MMM (Minerval through III*) in one day, or one afternoon - however long or short it was.

The reason every man and woman had/has the right was/is that these degrees represent Birth-Life-Death, which of course we all endure to the end. The IV* represents the world after death, and it actually presents a bar to advancement wherever holographically seen (that is, the fourth degree of freemasonry, the 4*=7*, and the 4th initiation of the Transhimalayan White Brotherhood). "Bar to advancement" means you had/have to be invited, or some other form of difficulty is inherent in the number 4.

I see. Thanks for the explanation.

So, Philip, does one assume that you regard yourself as coming from a "superior social background"?

By the way, it's "McMurtry", not "McMurty", though I expect that accuracy is a preoccupation of the proles . . .

My social background is irrelevant here.

So, the common OTO looks more like the scene from "Perfume"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TlcZLdEFmfk#!

... and the aristocratic OTO looks like "Eyes Wide Shut" -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnZzOZ6CvRA

lol good call!

The argument that I have presented in this thread does have a very obvious answer and riposte.  Would you like me to say what it is?

Speaking only for myself: Not especially, thanks. Bit then I was raised on Dennis Wheatley novels and have just read James Herbert's 'Ash' where this sort of fantasy is done to death!

I think the society of which you may possibly be thinking is the ultra-exclusive “Hemlock Club”, about which & regarding the conditions of entry Aleister Crowley accordingly wrote in The International for November 1917:

In keeping with the general eccentricity of the place, the entrance to the Club was mean and small, almost squalid; a narrow oaken door, studded with iron.  [Once inside it was] a kind of private edition de luxe of Westminster Abbey.  [It was] a vision of Paradise, the most exclusive club in London.  Only one scandal marred its fame; early in the eighteenth century, a struggling painter of portraits, who had been rejected by the Academy, was blackballed by mistake for an Archbishop of York, whom nobody wanted.  They made it up to the painter but there was no getting rid of the Archbishop.  So the committee of the club had dismissed all its servants, and filled their places with drunken parsons who had gone to the bad; in a month the Archbishop withdrew what dignity remained to him.  They had then hung his portrait in the least respected room in the club.  To consolidate their position, and arm themselves against counter-attack, they passed a rule that no man should be eligible for membership unless he had done something “notorious and heretical,” and it had been amusing and instructive to watch bishops attacking cardinal points of their faith, judges delivering sarcastic comments on the law, artists upsetting all the conventions of the period, physicists criticising the doctrine of the conservation of energy, all to put themselves right with the famous Rule Forty-nine.  Most of these people had no real originality, of course, but at least it forced them to appear to defy convention; and this exercised a salutary influence of the general tone of Society.

On the club walls were portraits and caricatures of most of the club worthies, with all their heresies inscribed.  Wellington was there, with his “Publish and be damned to you!”  So was a great judge with the great speech on the divorce law which begins, “In this country there is not one law for the rich, and another for the poor,” and goes on to tell the applicant, a working tailor, that to secure a divorce he need only arrange to have a Private Act of Parliament passed on his behalf.  Geikie was there with “I don’t believe that God has written a lie upon the rocks”; Shelley with “I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus”; Byron with “Besides, they always smell of bread and butter,” Sir Richard Burton, with a stanza from the Kasidah, “There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man;  Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began.”  Swinburne was there too, with “Come down and redeem us from virtue”; and a host of others.  There was even a memorial room in which candles were kept constantly burning.  It commemorated the heretics whom the club had failed to annex.  There was William Blake, with “Everything that lives is holy”; there was James Thomson, with “If you would not this poor life fulfil, then you are free to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death”; there was Keats, with “Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty”; John Davidson, with a passage from the Ballad of a true-born poet:
“We are the scum
Of matter; fill the bowl!
And scathe to him and death to him
Who dreams he has a soul!”
Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Beddoes, Crackenthorpe, were all represented.  They even had Victor Neuberg, with “Sex is one; go now, be free.”

There was in this room a votive tablet with the names of those who had been invited to join the club, and refused; notably Whistler, below whose portrait of himself was his letter of refusal, which he had sent with it; “I could not possibly consent to meet people of my own kind; my friends tell me it is very painful.”

King Edward VII, also, was in this group, with the letter from his secretary: “His Majesty commands me to inform you that greatly as he appreciates the good wishes and loyalty of the President and members of the Hemlock Club, he cannot possibly take an oath declaring himself a Republican or a Jacobite, as he understands is necessary to comply with Rule Forty-nine.”
There were many other curious rules in the Club; for example, a fine of a guinea for failing to eat mustard with mutton; another of five pounds for quoting Shakespeare within the precincts of the Club. 

The fine goes to a most worthy object: the Society for Destroying Parliamentary Institutions [which] is very powerful.  It carried through Payment of Members; it has greatly enlarged the Franchise, and is now working to have it extended to women.  These measures are directed towards reducing the whole thing to a farce.  Already the power of Parliament is in the opast; authority is concentrated in the cabinet – nay, in a Camarilla within the cabinet, and even this Camarilla is very much in the hands of permanent officials whose name the public never hears. 

The wearing of a white rose or a plaid necktie was punishable by expulsion; this dated from the period when it was heretical to be a Jacobite but dangerous to display it.  Many other customs of the Club were similarly memorial; the Head Porter was always dressed in moleskin, in honor of the mole whose hill tripped the horse of William  the Third; the members whose Christian names happened to be George had to pay double the usual subscription, in memory of the Club’s long hatred of the Four Georges; and at the annual banquet a bowl of hemlock was passed round in the great hall, decorated for the occasion as a funeral chamber; for it was always claimed that Socrates was the real founder of the Club.  There was a solemn pretence, every year, of a search for the “missing archives of the Club.”  On November the fifth there was a feast in honor of Guy Fawkes; and on the eleventh of the same month the Lord Mayor of London was burned in effigy…The Hemlock Club thought no more of snubbing an Emperor than a child of plucking a daisy.

For a modest fee of £666.99 I have certain contacts to whom I would be willing to pass on a letter of introduction on your behalf to enable you to enter this très elegant society of upper class mages (who are also all members of the Bilderberg Group, tap nose.)  There is no guarantee that acceptance will be given to you, of course, and I wish to make it plain to you that I can take no responsibility for any part therein, but as the great poet once sayeth: “you have to take the rough with the smooth.”

Or could what you're thinking of be the Lamp of the Invisible Light (otherwise known as Lilywhite LIL), an organisation which is so secret it is reputed to have not only no members in the working or peasant class as well as bourgeoisie, but none whatsoever either in the upper class nor nobility either, & it is rumoured that its right royal members have to have mastered not only the art of invisibility, but that of incorporality also…

Yours planely Arch, I.Y.K.W.I.M.,
Norma N. Joy Conquest 34[sup:1fit22lj]o[/sup:1fit22lj]

J.B.

Did you re-edit the Crowley quote above for the present purpose or did you get it from somewhere else in that condition?

(academic interest only)

OK

It's enough that you have confessed to the word "argument."

I am afraid I am responsible for the former, which I very sparingly jigged about.  However although I may have slightly "re-edited", I have not changed a word [except where indicated].  Might I be cast evermore into eternal Flame as a result?

(Lavaly if so!)
N. Joy

OK then 🙂

Hello Philip,

I am taking it that “OK then” is a satisfactory indication 😉 that you are still wishing to take up my proposal of effecting an introduction to ‘pave the way’ and set the wheels in motion for your becoming a member of the Hemlock Club.  If you could let me know of any other masonic affiliations which you might have, this could possibly prove of some assistance, although of course by its very nature the Hemlock Club may simply choose to disregard them as irrelevant and immaterial.  Please do not be offended if this is the case.  If you have any ‘Jacobite’ connections I would imagine they would be all to the good - if your family were involved in any of the Highland Clearances, even better! – but I deem silence wiser if they are more of the ‘Hanoverian’ persuasion.

If you would therefore make the necessary arrangements by PayPal (if you elect to do so) to transfer the sum of £666.99 (or 666 guineas, again if you prefer - let's be old-fashioned?) into Lashtal’s coffers, I will then arrange with Paul to donate therefrom a significant & generous intermediary’s fee which will be of financial assistance in helping towards the advancement of Lashtal’s excellent diverse operations.

But, You’ve got to get in to get out!
Norma N. Joy Conquest 34[sup:31riddzp]o[/sup:31riddzp] I.Y.K.W.I.M.

Mr. Philip Harris-Smith has a double barreled name (if it is even his real one), so I therefore asume he has illusions to granduor at the very minimum. Probably best he keeps what he thinks he has to say to himself.

I think Satan's Advocate wrote something like "Is this a reaction against poor little Peaches Geldof and her rather touching enthusiasm for AC and Thelema and something that she understands as the o.T.o (perhaps the exaggerated phallic symbolism of her little tatoo speaketh more than it knows).  Don't you even get booted out of the Conservative Cabinet for going around calling people 'proles' or 'plebs' these days ?"

I think this brings up a point I'm curious about. Did AC have any tattoos himself?

Any tattoos? You tell me. 8)

No spoilers please 😉

I may have got the wrong idea here but just to be clear.

I am NOT peaches Geldof and I do not have any tatoo's

It's OK, "Philip"; your secret's safe with us.

Just to be clear I was referring to Magickal`s post (As Phillip-Harris-Smith post was devoid of smileys ;)).

The Swiss O.T.O. ran under their Charter from Theodore Reuss. They never fell under Crowley's M.'.M.'.M.'. but they have been known to give O.T.O. members some sort of gauge of amnity., so XI' Patrick King once told me, he traveled there in the '80's. I gather that the signs & grips remained the same between organizations, and they performed the Gnostic Mass, although they never adopted Crowley's Initiation Rituals.  I'm not even certain they're an active organization any more, from what Koenig says, I gather that there's still a group there that performs the Mass regularly, but they no longer call themselves "O.T.O."

From Koenig's "O.T.O. Phenomenon":
"Hermann Metzger died on 14th July, 1990, of a pulmonary embolism “after lengthy sufferings and great misfortunes.” He left a power vacuum out of which emerged two concurring camps within the Swiss O.T.O.. One was led by Markus Kumer, who made an unsuccessful bid to open the group to the public again with a “Society for Humanitarian Research” (doubtless adapting it to the prevailing ‘New Age’ zeitgeist). The opposing group was led by a teacher called Olaf Raederer; both Raederer and Kumer were then resident in Austria. But Annemarie Aeschbach, who had supported the Swiss O.T.O. financially since the early 1950s, rose to the occasion and assumed leadership for the time being, since Metzger had named his successor neither verbally nor in his Will. She transferred (with two removal lorries) all her household furniture and goods from Zuerich to Stein. The printing presses were dismantled and the “Aeschbach-Stiftung” was founded on 21st November, 1995. Fraeulein Aeschbach ... died in April 2008."

I recall reading a letter many years ago from Germer to Yorke in the early or mid 1950s, in which he said he had been approached by Metzger. Germer was satisfied that, though unchartered, they were a group formerly working under an associate of Reuss's called Pinkus, and on that basis Germer recognised them. Although by all accounts he grew dissatisfied with them, he never closed the Lodge as he had done with Agape Lodge. Thus to the best of my knowledge, at Germer's death in 1962 the Swiss O.T.O. was the only active O.T.O. Lodge  recognised by Germer.

Ah! Thanks for straightening that point out!

Anybody remember the Suicide Cult from Switzerland called Order of the Solar Temple?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Solar_Temple

Oh yeah, I remember! We all were searching for their charters and lineages (or the lack thereof) to make sure we could assure people that Those Nuts had nothing to do with the local Loyal Order of Cashews.

Cashew? Gesundheit!

I feel sometimes that if Crowley were alive today, that he wouldn't want anything to do with any of us; except for a modest donation. His Victorian education far outweighs almost anything in existence today, at least in America. Hubbard was keen enough to say, I'll go after celebrities; or wannabes in the case of Peaches, in order to get to the real Gold, which is Geldoff. You can see how it was done with the Elvis Presley Estate; and the further attempt to get Michael Jackson by Lisa Marie.

Anyway, Ed Sanders, who at least has a serious background in Greek Classical Studies; was drawn into writing "The Family", and then retracting the bit about Manson and Crowley.

What was my point again? Never trust a hippie? I forgot.

Actually thought of that the other day, only in reverse. If he were alive today, I'd probably want nothing to do with him. Especially not

And that's not meant to sound snarky, or even sarcastic, as one may want to think. It just is what it is.