Fraternitas Saturni

“In many ways,” explains Erik Davis, “Crowley stands as the most important ‘ancestor’ of the occult counterculture: he loved drugs, tapped Eastern as well as Western esoteric sources, spear-headed a dysfunctional commune, and placed sexuality at the core of his controversial and counter-normative mysticism.”[1] Another early contactee with Nordic aliens, who met a so-called Venusian saucer in the desert in 1946, was Crowley’s student Jack Parsons (1914 – 1952), who headed the Agape lodge of the OTO in California. Likewise, Crowley claimed in 1919 to have contacted an extraterrestrial named Lam, connected to the Sirius and Andromeda star system, and the sketch he produced of it is a crude version of the iconic “greys” that have now come to be associated with alien contact. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince reported that when the “flying saucer” craze began in 1947, Parsons stated that the “discs” would “help to convert the world to Crowley’s magic religion.”[2]

After the World War I, Crowley founded a religious commune in Cefalù, Italy, known as the Abbey of Thelema, which he led from 1920 through till 1923. Mussolini deported Crowley and his followers from Sicily, after reports of human and animal sacrifice and sexual perversions caused an international scandal. The British Press called Crowley, “the wickedest man in the world.” For a glimpse of the depravity involved at the infamous Abbey, Crowley confessed:

I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident and violence. I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrements and human flesh. I have mastered every mode of my mind and made myself a morality more severe than any other in the world. A thousand years from now the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowleyanity.[3]

In the summer of 1925, Heinrich Tranker, the acting head of the OTO, invited Crowley to the so-called Weida Conference in Berlin in 1925, which was meant to consolidate Crowley’s claims to be the Outer Head of OTO and the expected “World Teacher.” The conference consisted of Crowley’s entourage of Leah Hirsig, Dorothy Olsen, and Norman Mudd and the members of the Pansophia Lodge of Heinrich Tranker, a notable German occultist of the time. Tranker had served as a X° National Grand Master of the German OTO under Theodor Reuss up until Reuss’ death. Also attending the conference were the notable film pioneer Albin Grau (the producer and production designer for F. W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu) and Gregor A. Gregorius.[4]

Also attending the conference were two Theosophists, Otto Gebhardi and the elderly Martha Küntzel, as well as Karl Germer, Eugene Grosche, and Crowley himself. It was Crowley’s disciple, Küntzel, who translated The Book of the Law into German and allegedly sent a copy to Hitler in 1925. According to Crowley, Hitler was so impressed with the book that he corresponded with Küntzel about it for several years.[5] Küntzel, who was acquainted with Blavatsky, was initially a member of Hartmann’s Theosophical Society. She later joined the OTO headed by Theodor Reuss. Küntzel was not only a glowing admirer of Crowley, but also of Adolf Hitler. By 1926 she had come to the conclusion that Hitler was her “magic son.”[6]

Tranker, the acting head of the OTO, invited Crowley to Germany to decide the fate of the Order. It was OTO initiate Karl Germer (“Frater Uranus”) who was tasked with providing funds necessary for Crowley to travel to Germany from France, where he had been staying with a small group of disciples. Germer studied in a university, worked as a military intelligence officer in the First World War and received first- and second class Iron Crosses for his service.[7] Crowley arrived in Thuringia in June of 1925 for the conference that would decide the fate of the Order.

However, Tranker withdrew his support of Crowley, leading to a schism in the Pansophical Lodge, which would be officially closed in 1926. Those members of the Pansophia Lodge who accepted Crowley’s teachings would join Eugen Grosche (a.k.a. Gregor A. Gregorius) in founding the Fraternitas Saturni (Brotherhood of Saturn), which is one of the oldest continuously running magical groups in Germany. Because of its unique approach to modern occultism, which lies more on astrological and Luciferian teachings, Fraternitas Saturni is considered by many modern authors to be the most influential German magical order.[8] According to Stephen Flowers, the order “is (or was) the most unabashedly Luciferian organization in the modern Western occult revival, and its practice of sexual occultism perhaps the most elaborately detailed of any such lodge.”[9]

It was left to Karl Germer to back Crowley, and thereby the OTO split into three warring factions: the group under Tranker, the Fraternitas Saturni, and the OTO under Crowley, with Germer as his financial sponsor and devoted disciple.[10] Germer moved to America after being released from Nazi confinement for being an associate of the “High Grade Freemason Aleister Crowley.” In 1942, Crowley appointed Germer as his successor, and he fulfilled that position after Crowley’s death in 1947.[11]

Germer was also in contact with Crowley’s close friend, Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language and considered as one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. Pessoa, who was interested in magic, astrology, alchemy Rosicrucianism and Templarism. Pessoa translated into Portuguese the works of many famous English-language poets, but also some books by H.P. Blavatsky, Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant. Crowley travelled to Portugal in 1930 to with meet with Pessoa, with the intent of establishing a branch of the OTO in the country, to be led by Pessoa.[12] Réne Guénon, in a letter to Julius Evola in 1949, claims that Crowley staged his own suicide with Pessoa’s assistance. According to Guénon, Crowley wanted to convince the world he was dead so he could go to Germany and serve as Hitler’s “occult” adviser.[13]

Agape Lodge

The history of the OTO in North America began when Charles Stansfeld Jones (“Frater Achad”) started a lodge of the OTO in Vancouver. Crowley considered Jones his “magical son” and the “one” prophesied in the Book of the Law, and Theodor Reuss made Jones Grand Master (X°) for North America. Jones’ initiate W.T. Smith and his wife Jane Wolfe founded an incorporated Church of Thelema, which gave weekly public performances of the Gnostic Mass from their home in Hollywood. Notable attendees of the church included Hollywood actor John Carradine, and Jack Parsons. Parsons’ story has recently become the basis of Strange Angel, a web television series produced by Ridley Scott that premiered in 2018.

Parsons’ father Marvel, after suffering a near-fatal heart attack, died as a psychiatric patient at the notorious MK-Ultra facility, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC.[14] Prior to discovering Crowley, Parsons became interested in the occult through his reading of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.[15] Parsons had also attended lectures on Theosophy by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti with his first wife Helen.[16] During rocket tests, Parsons often recited Crowley’s poem “Hymn to Pan” as a good luck charm.[17]

Parsons was the creator of solid rocket propellant fuel, who went on to become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston and the Aerojet Corporation. Prior to the World War II, Parsons had been in contact with Wernher von Braun, the central figure in the Nazis’ rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the V-2 combat rocket, after which he was hired through Operation Paperclip to head NASA’s space program. Von Braun, who was nicknamed “The Father of Rocket Science,” once argued that Parsons was more deserving of the name.[18]

W.T. Smith started his own group, Agape Lodge, in California in the 1930s. Smith wrote to Crowley claiming that Parsons was “a really excellent man… He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself… JP is going to be very valuable.”[19] Jane Wolfe, who had lived with Crowley at Cefalù, and who was one of the founders of the Apage Lodge, wrote to Germer that Parsons was “an A1 man… Crowleyesque in attainment as a matter of fact,” and proposed Parsons as a potential successor to Crowley himself as Outer Head of the Order.[20] Crowley concurred with such assessments, informing Smith that Parsons “is the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception!”[21] After Crowley had moved to California, in the words of Francis King, “for the next ten years [until Crowley’s death in 1947] California was the main center of OTO activity.”[22] Parsons became obsessed with The Book of the Law, and began a regular correspondence with Crowley, referring to him as “Most Beloved Father” and himself as “Thy son, John.”[23] At Crowley’s bidding, Parsons replaced Smith as the leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena.

The Agape Lodge soon came under investigation by both the Pasadena Police Department and the FBI. Both had received allegations of a “black magic cult” involved in sexual orgies. One complainant, a sixteen-year-old boy, claimed that he was raped by lodge members. Neighbors also reported a ritual involving a naked pregnant woman jumping through fire. After Parsons explained that the Lodge was simply “an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical speculation,” neither agency found evidence of illegal activity and came to the conclusion that the Lodge constituted no threat to national security.[24]

Jack Cashill, American studies professor at Purdue University, argues that “Although his literary career never got much beyond pamphleteering and an untitled anti-war, anti-capitalist manuscript,” Parsons played a significant role—greater than that of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey—in shaping the Californian counterculture of the 1960s and beyond through his influence on contemporaries such as L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, and fellow science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.[25]

In 1945, Parsons met Hubbard and introduced him to the OTO, though Hubbard claimed he joined the order as part of an infiltration assignment on behalf of the Office of Naval Intelligence.[26] Influenced by the thought of Norbert Wiener, Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics. Inspired by Wiener, Hubbard considered the brain “an electronic computing machine” and claimed that Dianetics was a “bridge” to “Cybernetics.” [27] Published in 1950, Hubbard’s Dianetics, the founding text of Scientology, would become one of the most translated books of all time, with editions in sixty-five languages, and allegedly more than twenty million copies sold. Hubbard also personally offered his Dianetics training to the ubiquitous Aldous Huxley. Hubbard also studied the effects of benzadrine at the MK-Ultra facility, St. Elizabeths Hospital.[28]

Together, beginning in 1946, Parsons and Hubbard started the “Babalon Working,” a series of rituals designed to manifest an individual incarnation of the archetypal divine feminine called Babalon. The entity was a reference to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, related to the Canaanite Astarte, equated with the “Great Whore” of the Book of Revelation. Parsons wanted to create a Moonchild, as outlined in Crowley’s occult novel by the same name.[29] He and Hubbard continued the procedure with Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons married in 1946. Kenneth Grant suggested that the Babalon Working marked the start of the appearance of flying saucers, leading to phenomena such as the Roswell UFO incident and Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting.[30]

Like Hubbard, Parsons was also interested in science fiction and was connected to the Lost Angels Science Fantasy Society (LASFS). The LASFS grew out of the Science Fiction League of Hugo Gernsback, a wealthy Jewish immigrant who pioneered the science fiction genre with his pulp Amazing Stories in 1926. Gernsback called the stories “Scientifiction” and described them as “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe type of story.”’[31] LASFS eventually hosted weekly meetings where writers and fans converged. Parsons gave talks on rocketry and befriended sci-fi legends like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, German sci-fi pioneer Fritz Lang, and Vril Society theorist Willy Ley.

Heinlein, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, was considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction.[32] Heinlein was also a close friend of L. Ron Hubbard, and the Church of Scientology claimed that Heinlein had been the clandestine Navy operative who had been sent as an undercover agent by the US Navy to intercept and destroy Parsons’ “black magic cult.”[33] Heinlein was also a close friend of Robert Lefevre, founder of the Freedom School. Heinlein’s libertarian classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, regarded as the Atlas Shrugged of science fiction, features a revolution on the moon, where its leaders have read Ayn Rand, and one of them, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is based on Lefevre.[34]

As reported by to authors such as Craig Heimbichner in Blood on the Altar, Martin P. Starr in The Unknown God, and John Carter in Sex and Rockets, Dennis Hopper and Carradine were both members of Jack Parsons’ Agape Lodge of the OTO, alongside actor Dean Stockwell and Heinlein. According to Gregory Mank in Hollywood’s Hellfire Club, John Carradine and John Barrymore were also members of the so-called “Bundy Drive Boys,” who engaged in such practices as incest, rape and cannibalism.

In 1950, FBI investigated Parsons over the theft of rocket documents from the Hughes Aircraft Company where he was working. When he was discovered, Parsons was immediately fired, and would later lose his top secret clearance, because “He planned to submit [the documents] with [an] employment application through American Technion Society for employment in the country of Israel,” according to the original FBI report.[35] Parsons’ case worsened when the FBI investigated Herbert T. Rosenfeld, Parsons’ contact at Technion—a Zionist group dedicated to supporting the newly created State of Israel—for being linked to Soviet agents, and more accounts of his occult and sexually permissive activities came to light.[36]

Parsons died in 1952, in an explosion from an experiment that had gone wrong. The very same day, upon hearing of the death of her son, Parson’s mother, Ruth, took her own life. Upon searching the Parsons’ residence, police investigator Donald Harding and George Santmyer, the latter a close friend of Parsons, discovered a box which contained a film showing Parsons and his mother engaged in sex.[37] One of Marjorie Cameron’s friends, the artist Renate Druks, later stated her belief that Parsons had died in a rite designed to create a homunculus.[38] Cameron postulated that the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident was a spiritual reaction to Parsons’ death.[39]

Typhonian OTO

After World War II, Kenneth Grant (1924 – 2011) became Crowley’s personal secretary. When Crowley died in 1947, Grant was seen as his heir apparent in Britain and was appointed as such by Germer. In 1951, Germer granted Grant a charter to run an OTO Camp in England and put him in contact with W.T. Smith of the Agape Lodge, for his experience in founding a lodge. Historian Dave Evans noted that Grant was “certainly unique” in the history of British esotericism because of his “close dealings” with Crowley, Spare and Gardner, the “three most influential Western occultists of the 20th century.”[40]

Grant promoted what he termed the Typhonian or Draconian tradition of magic and claimed that Thelema was only a recent manifestation of this wider tradition. In his books, he portrayed the Typhonian tradition as the world’s oldest spiritual tradition, claiming that it had ancient roots in Africa. One of Grant’s most controversial theories was his discovery of the “Sirius/Set current,” which is purportedly an extra-terrestrial dimension connecting Sirius, the Earth and Set, the Egyptian god of chaos, who was later associated with Satan. According to Grant, Aiwass, Crowley’s entity who dictated the Book of the Law, came from the planet Sirius, which he described as being a powerful center of “magickal” power, and as holding the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Egyptian and Typhonian traditions.

The anthropologist Justin Woodman noted that Grant was “one of the key figures” for bringing H.P. Lovecraft’s work into magical theory and practice, serving as a significant influence over other currents of occultism, including chaos magic, the Temple of Set and the Dragon Rouge.[41] Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Colin Low has suggested that Lovecraft’s wife, Sonia Greene, had an affair with Aleister Crowley months before she met Lovecraft, to whom she confided the idea of the Necronomicon, which she would have learned from Crowley.[42] Grant suggested in his book The Magical Revival that there was an unconscious connection between Crowley and Lovecraft. He thought they both drew on the same occult forces—Crowley through magic and Lovecraft through the dreams which inspired his stories and the Necronomicon. Grant claimed that the Necronomicon existed as an astral book as part of the Akashic records and could be accessed through ritual magic or in dreams.

In 1954, Grant had begun the work of founding the New Isis Lodge. Grant added to many of Crowley’s Thelemite teachings, bringing in extraterrestrial themes and influences from the work of Lovecraft. As this was anathema to Germer, Grant was excommunicated from the OTO. Grant’s Order became known as the Typhonian OTO, absorbing the New Isis Lodge in 1962. Its formula is that of the XI° a form of sex magic involving anal intercourse. Grant stated that the Typhonian OTO devotes itself to Kundalini Yoga and “establishing a gate in space through which the extraterrestrial or cosmic energies may enter in and manifest on earth.”[43]

When Germer died in 1962, Ray Burlingame, a member of the Agape Lodge, initiated Georgina “Jean” Brayton, which led to the creation of the Solar Lodge of the OTO in 1965. In 1969, police raided the Solar Lodge’s compound, after which eleven members of the sect were charged with mistreatment of the six-year-old son of one the members, in a case that came to be known as “The Boy in the Box.”[44] When the deputy sheriffs arrived at Solar Ranch, they found the boy sitting inside a six-foot by six-foot box, with a chain padlocked to his left leg and attached to a heavy metal plate.

The scandal led to a leadership squabble in the OTO as part of efforts to distance the organization from the Solar Lodge. Following Germer’s death, several others had also proclaimed themselves Outer Head of the OTO, like Kenneth Grant, Hermann Metzger of Switzerland and later Marcelo Ramos Motta of Brazil. However, the title was disputed by the American Grady McMurtry, who had been introduced to the OTO by Jack Parsons, and who during World War II had became a personal student of Aleister Crowley. McMurtry decided to restore the Order by invoking the “emergency orders” issued to him by Crowley.

McMurtry’s witnesses were Dr. Israel Regardie and Gerald Yorke, a personal friend and secretary to Aleister Crowley, who both offered their support. Yorke was a veteran British intelligence agent, working “with American intelligence in an attempt to absorb the OTO into the ideological warfare network of the political right.”[45] Yorke annotated a copy of Mein Kampf, showing its similarities with The Book of the Law.[46] Yorke was responsible for an immense collection of Crowley manuscripts hosted at the Warburg Institute. Yorke, who had also been the personal representative of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to the West, is the man credited with “almost single-handedly bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West.”[47]

Wicca

Hugh Urban, religious studies professor at Ohio State University, cites Parsons’ witchcraft group as precipitating the neopagan revival of the 1950s.[48] Modern paganism, also known as neopaganism, is a group of contemporary religious movements influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of the dying-god and goddess cuts of pre-modern Europe and the Middle East. According to historian Carole Cusack, the modern pagan revival is largely understood to be the result of the influence of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, whose rituals were developed with Aleister Crowley.[49] Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the VII° of the OTO, and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could perform its preliminary initiation rituals.[50] After Crowley’s death in 1947, Gardner was regarded as the chief representative of the OTO in Europe.

Gardner was the founder of Wicca, a modern cult of witchcraft which is based on the worship of the goddess and her consort the “horned-god,” who is identified with the dying-god of the ancient mysteries, although denying his association with Lucifer. Wicca was an attempt to revive the premise of Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Europe, which suggested that medieval witchcraft represented the underground survival of ancient paganism in Europe. Although Gardner claimed to have been initiated into Wicca by a member of an ancient coven, Aidan Kelley has conclusively demonstrated that he did not revive an old religion, but rather created a new one. Gardner’s main sources were the ritual magic in the tradition of Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, and popular works of folklore and mythology, such as Charles Leland’s Aradia and James Frazer’s Golden Bough.[51]

As a supposed survival of ancient dying-god cults, Wiccan rituals take place during the four Greater Sabbats, including Candlemas (February 2), May Eve (April 30), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31). The Lesser Sabbats are those marked by the midsummer and midwinter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes. Like the ancient ceremonies, Wicca claims to be a fertility-based cult, where a sex ritual, presented as the worship of the “sacred feminine,” is performed by a priest and priestess personifying the union of the “god” and “goddess.” This in ancient times was called the Hieros Gamos, or sacred marriage.

Wicca involves three levels of initiation. For the first degree, Covens often request that candidates fast for several days, then are asked to bathe and are brought naked (“sky-clad”) and blindfolded to the sacred circle, usually with their hands bound with ritual cords. Once the new candidate has been accepted within the circle, he or she is welcomed by the initiator, who kneels and bestows kisses upon the new candidate on the feet, phallus/womb, breasts and lips. For the second degree, candidates will need to find an opposite sex partner with whom they can work in partnership. An important feature of the second-degree rite includes a mystery play called the “Legend of the Goddess,” in which the initiate and other coven members enact the descent of the goddess into the Underworld.

The third and more important degree in Wicca, which is referred to as the Great Rite, is bestowed upon two individuals who are already a couple. The union can be enacted symbolically, by ritually plunging the athame dagger into the chalice, when it is said to be performed in “token.” Or, two partners taking the role of God and Goddess may enact their “sacred” sexual union, the high priest offers the third degree to his partner in “token,” and the high priestess returns it to him in “true.” The final part of the Great Rite is performed in private after other coven members have left the circle. These rites may even include incest, being performed by a family member, as symbolized by the dying-god and goddess who were regarded as father and daughter, as well as mother and son.[52] Although there is also a usual practice in Wicca that a man must be initiated by a woman and a woman by a man, as stipulated by Gardner, a parent may initiate a child of the same sex.[53]

The incestuous tradition of Wicca is alluded to by Alex Sanders, who was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca in 1963, before founding his own coven, known as Alexandrian Wicca. Sanders claims to have stumbled on his grandmother naked and standing in a circle drawn on the kitchen floor. She told Sanders to step into the circle, take off his clothes, and put his head between his thighs. She took a sickle-knife and nicked his perineal (between the anus and scrotum), saying, “You are one of us now.” And then proceeded to “initiate” him. His grandmother was purportedly a hereditary witch, a descendant of the Welsh chieftain Owain Glynder, the last man to have called himself “King of the Witches.”

Prescriptions for pedophilia and incest are also found in the Church and School of Wicca, founded in 1968 by Gavin and Yvonne Frost. The Frosts also have a number of important friends in the Wiccan community, including Oberon Zell. The Frosts have written several books on magic, Wicca, and related subjects such as the Witch’s Bible, first published in 1972, and later republished as the Good Witch’s Bible. The Witch’s Bible stated that a child was ready for sexual initiation when they began puberty, or rather when “the physical attributes of reproduction are present.” Girls are given two wooden phalluses of different sizes and instructions on how to use them in order to prepare for sexual intercourse over a period of one month. It is also stated that they should be helped by their father or sponsor if they have any pain or difficulty using them.[54] The boys, meanwhile, receive instructions from their sponsors, sometimes their own mother, on how to have sex and what will be expected of them during initiation.

Enneagram

Towards the end of the 1950s, Idries Shah, the author of The Sufis, established contact with Wiccan circles in London and became secretary to Gerald Gardner. In 1961, Shah met Robert Graves, a close friend of Gordon Wasson, and who helped edit his friend Tavistock Institute and MK-Ultra doctor William Sargant’s Battle for the Mind about brainwashing. Graves was the author of The White Goddess, a key book for modern Pagans and Wiccans, in which he proposes the existence of a European deity, inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, and which is the origin of the goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. Graves later wrote to Wasson that he was researching ecstatic religions, and that he had been “attending… experiments conducted by the witches in Britain, into mushroom-eating and so on.”[55]

Graves’ introduction described Shah as being “in the senior male line of descent from the prophet Mohammed” and as having inherited “secret mysteries from the Caliphs, his ancestors. He is, in fact, a Grand Sheikh of the Sufi Tariqa…” Graves confessed, however, that this was “misleading: he is one of us, not a Moslem personage.”[56] The Sufis explores the impact of Sufism on the development of Western civilization from the seventh century onward through the work of such figures as Roger Bacon, John of the Cross, Raymond Lully, Chaucer and others. Shah implies a link between the Rosicrucians and the Qadiriyya Sufi order of Abdul Qadir al Gilani, and reflecting the universalism of his successor Ibn Arabi, suggests that Sufism is just the outward expression in Islam of a single occult tradition shared by all the major religions:

The connection between the ancient practical philosophies and the present ones is seen to have been based upon the higher level unity of knowledge, not upon appearances. This explains why the Muslim Rumi has Christian, Zoroastrian and other disciples; why the great Sufi ‘invisible teacher’ Khidr is said to be a Jew; why the Mogul Prince Dara Shikoh identified Sufi teaching in the Hindu Vedas, yet himself remained a member of the Qadiri Order; how Pythagoras and Solomon can be said to be Sufi teachers. It also explains why Sufis will accept some alchemists to have been Sufis, as well as understanding the underlying developmental factors in Rumi’s evolutionary philosophy, or Hallaj’s ‘Christianity’; why, indeed, Jesus is said to stand, in a sense, at the head of the Sufis.[57]

This is the ancient secret which Freemasons believe they inherited from the Templars, who in turn supposedly gained it from Sufis, or Ismailis, during the Crusades. The ultimate mystery learned is the central teaching of the Kabbalah, that man is God. Graves, in his introduction to Shah’s book The Sufis, explains that the real builders of Freemasonry were, “not Solomon’s Israelite subjects or Phoenician allies as is supposed, Abdul Malik’s Sufi architects who built the dome of the rock on the ruins of Solomon’s temple, and their successors. Their names included Thuban Abdel Falz (‘Izz’) and his ‘great grandson’ Maaruf, the son (disciple) of David of Tay, whose Sufic code name was Solomon, because he was the ‘son of David’.” Therefore, the universalism of the Sufis is found in Freemasonry, as explained in The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, by Manly Palmer Hall:

The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.[58]

Shah was responsible for popularizing that European witchcraft, as well as the occult tradition in general, was derived from Sufism. Specifically, in The Sufis, Shah mentions as a source of this occult tradition the Aniza tribe, which originally issued from Khaybar in Arabia, which was initially inhabited by Jews before Islam. It is the same tribe to which belonged not only Jane Digby’s husband Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab, but most importantly, the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. According to Shah, Abu el-Atahiyya was the leader of the “Maskhara” Dervishes who were also known as the “Revellers.” The name Aniza, he maintains, means goat and el-Atahiya, he claimed, was commemorated by the “Revellers” with the symbol of a torch burning between the horns of a goat, in obvious allusion to the Baphomet of the Templars, as depicted by renowned eighteenth-century occultist Eliphas Lévi. After el-Atahiya’s death, a group of his followers supposedly migrated to Moorish Spain where they influenced the spread of the witch cult in Europe.[59]

Although The Sufis, which appeared in 1964, is disguised Luciferianism, Shah came to be recognized as a spokesman on the subject of Sufism in the West, lectured as a visiting professor at a number of Western universities, and has played a significant role in popularizing Sufism as a “mystical” dimension of Islam. However, the internationally renowned Annemarie Schimmel, author of The Mystical Dimensions of Islam, commented that The Sufis, along with Shah’s other books, “should be avoided by serious students.”[60] Though Shah’s works have been criticized by Orientalist scholars, he has nevertheless been defended by the famous novelist, Doris Lessing. In 1960, Shah founded his publishing house, Octagon Press, one of its first titles being a biography titled Gerald Gardner, Witch, which Shah wrote under the pen name of Jack L. Bracelin.

In 1962, a few of years prior to the publication of The Sufis, Shah also established contact with members of the movement that had formed around the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. A press article had appeared describing Shah’s visit to a secret monastery in Central Asia, where methods similar to Gurdjieff’s were being taught. The purported monastery had, it was implied, a representative in England. One of Ouspensky’s earliest students, Reggie Hoare, who had been part of the Gurdjieff work since 1924, made contact with Shah through that article. Through Hoare, Shah was introduced to other Gurdjieffians, including John G. Bennett, Gurdjieff’s noted student, who was head of British Military Intelligence in Constantinople. According to Bennett, “Knowing Reggie to be a very cautious man, trained moreover in assessing information by many years in the Intelligence Service, I accepted his assurances and also his belief that Shah had a very important mission in the West that we ought to help him to accomplish.”[61] Bennett became convinced that Shah was a genuine emissary of the “Sarmoung Monastery” in Afghanistan, the purported brotherhood mentioned by Gurdjieff. Graves’ introduction described Shah as being “in the senior male line of descent from the prophet Mohammed” and as having inherited “secret mysteries from the Caliphs, his ancestors. He is, in fact, a Grand Sheikh of the Sufi Tariqa…” Graves confessed, however, that this was “misleading: he is one of us, not a Moslem personage.”[62]

[1] Erik Davis. The Occult World (Routledge, 2014).

[2] Picknett & Prince. Stargate Conspiracy.

[3] “Masters of Darkness: Aleister Crowley - The Wickedest Man in the World.” Channel 4 (2002).

[4] Stephen Flowers. Fire & Ice - The History, Structure and Rituals of Germany’s Most Influential Modern Magical Order: The Brotherhood of Saturn (Llewellyn Publ. 1994), pp. 14-20.

[5] Henrik Bogdan & Martin P. Starr. Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2012).

[6] David Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (Potomac Books, Inc., 2012).

[7] Richard Kaczynski. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (second edition) (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2010).

[8] Ibid., pp. 53-63.

[9] Ibid., p. xv.

[10] Peter Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 136.

[11] Bro. Martin P. Starr. “Aleister Crowley: freemason!” In Robert A. Gilbert. ARS QUATUOR CORONATORUM. Transactions of Quatuor Coronati Lodge N. 2076 (vol. 108 ed.) (Frome and London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1995), pp. 150–161.

[12] Marco Pasi. Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 104.

[13] Ibid., p. 96.

[14] George Pendle. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt Books, 2006), pp. 103–105.

[15] Ibid., p. 171.

[16] Ibid., p. 146–147.

[17] Ibid., p. 238.

[18] Richard Metzger. Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (second ed.) (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari, 2008), pp. 196–200,

[19] Pendle. Strange Angel, p. 172.

[20] Ibid., p. 175.

[21] Martin P. Starr. The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites (Bollingbrook, Illinois: Teitan Press 2003) p. 263.

[22] Francis King. The Secret Rituals of the OTO, (London: C.W. Daniel, 1973) p. 45.

[23] Gary Lachman. Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Red Wheel Weiser. Kindle Edition).

[24] Pendle. Strange Angel, p. 214–215.

[25] Jack Cashill. What’s the Matter with California?: Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and Why the Rest of Us Should Be Shaking (New York City, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 43–46.

[26] Kenneth Grant. Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, (London: Frederick Muller, 1973) p. 28.

[27] Thomas Rid. The Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).

[28] “L Ron Hubbard, Benzedrine, and Secret CIA projects in 1950.” The McClaughry’s Blog. Retrieved from https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/l-ron-hubbard-benzedrine-and-secret-cia-projects-in-1950/

[29] Lachman. Turn Off Your Mind.

[30] John Carter. Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (new ed.) (Port Townsend, Washington: Feral House, 2004), p. 188.

[31] Cited in [1993] in: Brian Stableford, John Clute & Peter Nicholls. “Definitions of SF”. In John Clute & Peter Nicholls. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit/Little, Brown and Company, 1993). pp. 311–314.

[32] “The Big Three and the Clarke–Asimov Treaty”. wireclub.com

[33] Pendle. Strange Angel, pp. 273–274.

[34] J. Neil Schulman. The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (Mill Valley, CA: Pulpless, 1990), p. 23,

[35] Carter. Sex and Rockets, pp. 170–172.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Phillip Keane. “Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL.” Space Safety Magazine (August 2, 2013).

[38] Carter. Sex and Rockets, pp. 184-185.

[39] Spencer Kansa. Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2011), pp. 74–79.

[40] Dave Evans. The History of British Magick After Crowley. n.p.: (Hidden Publishing, 2007), p. 284.

[41] Justin Woodman. “Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the Demonic in ‘Lovecraftian Magick’”. Cited in Dave Evans (ed.). Journal for the Academic Study of Magic: Issue 2 (Oxford: Mandrake, 2004). pp. 13–47.

[42] The Necronomicon Anti-FAQ. Retrieved from http://www.digital-brilliance.com/necron/necron.htm

[43] Frater In Profunda III. “Typhonian Tomes.” Herald-Tepaphone (OTO Newsletter Volume 1 No 1).

[44] McGowan. “Inside The LC,” Part VII.

[45] Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 103.

[46] Lachman. Aleister Crowley.

[47] Tim Cummings. “Beyond belief,” The Guardian, (Saturday 10 July 2004).

[48] Hugh B. Urban. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2006), p. 136–137.

[49] Carole M. Cusack. “Discordian Magic: Paganism, the Chaos Paradigm and the Power of Imagination.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2.1 (2011) p. 132

[50] Morgan Davis. From Man to Witch: Gerald Gardner 1946, www.geraldgardner.com.

[51] Souter J. Hanegraaff. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (SUNY Press, 1997) p. 88.

[52] Adrienne. “Sex, Wicca and the Great Rite.” The Blade & Chalice, (Issue 3, Spring 1993)

[53] Gerald Gardner. Witchcraft Today (Rider, London 1954) p. 78

[54] The Good Witche’s Bible, Chapter IV, Table 5.  Use of the Phallus (Instructions for Female Novice). Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20130622124101/http://www.freewebs.com/controversialstudy/WB/ChapterIV.htm

[55] Paul O’Prey. Between Moon and Moon – Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1946–1972 (Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 213–215.

[56]  Ibid.

[57] Shah. The Way of the Sufi, p. 124-5

[58] Manly Palmer Hall. The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, (The Philosophical Research Society, 1940), p. 65.

[59] Idries Shah. The Sufis, p. 213

[60] Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press), p. 9.

[61] John G Bennett. Witness: The autobiography of John G. Bennett (Tucson: Omen Press, 1974). pp. 355–363.

[62] O’Prey. Between Moon and Moon, pp. 213–215.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio