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O.T.O
Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.; ) is an occult initiatory organization founded at the beginning of the 20th century. The origins of the O.T.O. can be traced back to the German-speaking occultists Carl Kellner, Heinrich Klein, Franz Hartmann and Theodor Reuss. Later, the O.T.O. was significantly shaped by the English author and occultist Aleister Crowley. After Crowley's death in 1947, four main branches of the O.T.O. have claimed exclusive descent from the original organization and primacy over the other ones. The most important and visible of these is the Caliphate O.T.O., incorporated by Crowley's student Grady McMurtry in 1979. Originally it was intended to be modeled after and associated with European Freemasonry,Sabazius X° and AMT IX°History of Ordo Templi Orientis Retrieved June 13, 2006. such as Masonic Templar organizations, but under the leadership of Aleister Crowley, O.T.O. was reorganized around Crowley's Thelema as its central religious principle. Similar to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grady McMurtry
Grady Louis McMurtry (October 18, 1918 – July 12, 1985) was a student of author and occultist Aleister Crowley and an adherent of Thelema. He is best known for reviving the fraternal organization Ordo Templi Orientis, which he headed from 1971 until his death in 1985. Early life and career He lived in various parts of Oklahoma and the Midwest, and graduated from high school in Valley Center, Kansas in 1937. He then moved to Southern California to study engineering at Pasadena Junior College, where he made friends with some students at the nearby California Institute of Technology. Among them was Jack Parsons, who shared his enthusiasm for science fiction, and who introduced him to Thelema. In 1941 McMurtry was initiated into the Minerval and I° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a secret society headed at the time by Aleister Crowley. In February 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, McMurtry's entire Reserve Officers Training Corps class was called to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theodor Reuss
Albert Karl Theodor Reuss (; June 28, 1855 – October 28, 1923) also known by his neo-Gnostic bishop title of Carolus Albertus Theodorus Peregrinus was an Anglo-German tantric occultist, freemason, journalist, singer and head of Ordo Templi Orientis. Early years Reuss was the son of an innkeeper Franz Xavier Reuss and his wife Eva Barbara Margaret Wagner at Augsburg. He was a professional singer in his youth, and was introduced to Ludwig II of Bavaria, in 1873. He took part in the first performance of Wagner's ''Parsifal'' at Bayreuth in 1882. Reuss later became a newspaper correspondent, and travelled frequently as such to England, where he became a Mason at the Pilger Loge No. 238 of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1876. He also spent some time there as a journalist and as a music-hall singer under the stage name "Charles Theodore." In 1876, Reuss married a woman ten years his senior, Delphina Garbois from Dublin, and moved to Munich in 1878. Their marriage was a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley (; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life. Born to a wealthy family in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Crowley rejected his parents' fundamentalist Christian Plymouth Brethren faith to pursue an interest in Western esotericism. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he focused his attentions on mountaineering and poetry, resulting in several publications. Some biographers allege that here he was recruited into a British intelligence agency, further suggesting that he remained a spy throughout his life. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was train ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica
Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (E.G.C.), or the Gnostic Catholic Church, is a Gnostic church organization. It is the ecclesiastical arm of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), an international fraternal initiatory organization devoted to promulgating the Law of Thelema. Thelema is a philosophical, mystical and religious system elaborated by Aleister Crowley, and based on ''The Book of the Law''. The word ''Catholic'' denotes the universality of doctrine and not a Christian or Roman Catholic belief set. The chief function of ''Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica'' is the public and private performance of the Gnostic Mass (''Liber XV''), a eucharistic ritual written by Crowley in 1913. According to William Bernard Crow, Crowley wrote the Gnostic Mass "under the influence of the Liturgy of St. Basil of the Russian Church". Its structure is also influenced by the initiatory rituals of the ''Ordo Templi Orientis''. Its most notable separation from similar rites of other churches is a Priestess of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thelema
Thelema () is a Western esoteric and occult social or spiritual philosophy and new religious movement founded in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), an English writer, mystic, occultist, and ceremonial magician. The word ''thelema'' is the English transliteration of the Koine Greek noun (), "will", from the verb (): "to will, wish, want or purpose." Adherents to Thelema are called ''Thelemites'', and phenomena within the scope of Thelema are termed ''Thelemic''. Crowley wrote that, in 1904, he had received a text or scripture called '' The Book of the Law'', dictated to him by a potentially non-corporeal entity named Aiwass. This text was to serve as the foundation of the religious and philosophical system he called Thelema. Crowley identified himself as the prophet of a new era in humanity's spiritual development, a novel age he termed the Æon of Horus. According to Crowley, the facticity of his prophethood was mainly predicated upon his reception ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Kellner (mystic)
Carl Kellner (1 September 1851 – June 7, 1905) was a chemist, inventor, and industrialist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he made significant improvements to the sulfite process and was co-inventor of the Castner-Kellner process. He was a student of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Eastern mysticism. He was the putative founder of Ordo Templi Orientis and is sometimes referred to as "Spiritual father of O.T.O.". Career Carl Kellner is reputed to have developed the Ritter-Kellner process while working for Baron Hector Von Ritter-Zahony in 1876. In 1889 he established the Kellner-Partington paper pulp Co in association with Edward Partington. The process for making caustic soda and chlorine by electrolysis of brine using a mercury electrode was developed independently by Mr Hamilton Y. Castner and Dr Carl Kellner in 1892. They established the Castner Kellner company jointly to exploit their patents in 1895. It is not known when he obtained his doctorate but he used the title o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gérard Encausse
Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse (July 13, 1865 – 25 October 1916), whose esoteric pseudonyms were Papus and Tau Vincent, was a French physician, hypnotist, and popularizer of occultism, who founded the modern Martinist Order. Early life Gerard Encausse was born at A Coruña in Galicia (Spain) on July 13, 1865, of a Spanish mother and a French father, Louis Encausse, a chemist. His family moved to Paris when he was four years old, and he received his education there. As a young man, Encausse spent a great deal of time at the Bibliothèque Nationale studying the Kabbalah, occult tarot, magic and alchemy, and the writings of Eliphas Lévi. He joined the French Theosophical Society shortly after it was founded by Madame Blavatsky in 1884–1885, but he resigned soon after joining because he disliked the Society's emphasis on Eastern occultism. Career Overview In 1888, he co-founded his own group, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix. That same year, he and his frien ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scottish Rite
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction in the United States often omits the ''and'', while the English Constitution in the United Kingdom omits the ''Scottish''), commonly known as simply the Scottish Rite (or, in England and Australia, as the Rose Croix although this is only one of its degrees), is one of several Rites of Freemasonry. A Rite is a progressive series of degrees conferred by various Masonic organizations or bodies, each of which operates under the control of its own central authority. In the Scottish Rite the central authority is called a Supreme Council. The Scottish Rite is one of the appendant bodies of Freemasonry that a Master Mason may join for further exposure to the principles of Freemasonry. It is also concordant, in that some of its degrees relate to the degrees of Symbolic ( Craft) Freemasonry. In England and some other countries, while the Scottish Rite is not accorded official recognition by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swedenborg Rite
The Swedenborg Rite or Rite of Swedenborg was a fraternal order modeled on Freemasonry and based upon the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). It comprised six Degrees: Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Neophyte, Illuminated Theosophite, Blue Brother, and Red Brother.Albert Gallatin Mackey and H. L. Haywood, ''Encyclopedia of Freemasonry Vol. 2'', p. 997 reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2003 It was created in Avignon in 1773 by the Marquis de Thorn. It was initially a political organization, although the political ideology was eventually discarded from the rite. This version of the Swedenborg Rite died out within a decade of its founding. Starting in the 1870s, the Rite was resurrected as an hermetic organization. This version faded out sometime around 1908. In 1982 a patent of the Swedenborg Rite was transmitted by the English Freemason Desmond Bourke, in his office at the British Museum, to Masonic author Michele Moramarco Michele Moramarco ( Reggio Emilia, 6 Oct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martinist Order
Martinism is a form of Christian mysticism and esoteric Christianity concerned with the fall of the first man, his state of material privation from his divine source, and the process of his return, called 'Reintegration'. As a mystical tradition, it was first transmitted through a Masonic high-degree system established around 1740 in France by Martinez de Pasqually, and later propagated in different forms by his two students Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. The term ''Martinism'' applies to both this particular doctrine and the teachings of the reorganized "Martinist Order" founded in 1886 by Augustin Chaboseau and Gérard Encausse (aka Papus). It was not used at the tradition's inception in the 18th century. This confusing disambiguation has been a problem since the late 18th century, where the term ''Martinism'' was already used interchangeably between the teachings of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Martinez de Pasqually, and the works of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (Rosicrucian Society of England) is a Rosicrucian esoteric Christian order formed by Robert Wentworth Little in 1865,King 1989, page 28 although some sources acknowledge the date to be 1866-67. Members are confirmed from the ranks of subscribing Master Masons of a Grand Lodge in amity with United Grand Lodge of England. The structure and grade of this order, as A. E. Waite suggests, were derived from the 18th-century German Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross. It later became the same grade system used for the Golden Dawn. History The society claims to be inspired by the original Rosicrucian Brotherhood but does not allege a provable link thereto. It bases its teachings on those found in the ''Fama'' and ''Confessio Fraternitas'' published in the early 17th century in Germany along with other similar publications from the same time. The society was founded in 1867, derived from a pre-existing Rosicrucian order in Scotland (which bore no relation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
