I have been excited to start reading some of Manon Hedenborg-White’s analysis of gender within Thelema and O.T.O. as it comes into official publication. Hedenborg-White is a scholar from Sweden who has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the United States on gender within Thelema and O.T.O., and I have had the privilege of talking with her about her work in the past.
Her recent article, “To Him the Winged Secret Flame, To Her the Stooping Starlight: The Social Construction of Gender in Contemporary Ordo Templi Orientis,” published in The Pomegranate, is now available through her academia.edu page (check out her whole page, there are a number of gems there).
The essay is quite good. Although I am looking forward to work that provides even more depth of analysis in dialog with broader issues of gender within religion (and esotericism specifically), this essay both provides a well grounded ethnographic snapshot on the various ways contemporary O.T.O. members engage with gender in their spirituality and within O.T.O. and a solid argument for the value of ethnographic fieldwork in the study of Western Esotericism.
