Address delivered by National Grand Master General Sabazius X° to the Twelfth National Conference of the U.S. O.T.O. Grand Lodge Saturday evening, August 5, 2023 e.v. Denver, Colorado
Brothers and Sisters,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Let me start off by thanking Sister Amber, Sister Lori, Sister Diane, the members of Crux Ansata Oasis, the on site team, the security volunteers, and the Conference Committee for their work putting this conference together for us. I also need give a big thanks to Sister Kim for all her help and for always being on top of things.
Our theme this year is “From Gold Forge Steel,” taken from the Book of the Law, Chapter III, verses 31 and 32:
“There cometh a rich man from the West who shall pour his gold upon thee. / From gold forge steel!”
In his Old and New Comments, Crowley confesses that he doesn’t really know what these passages mean, but suspects that it will all be made clear someday.
As a matter of policy, however, OTO will have nothing to do with making it clear, so someone else will have to do that. Probably one of those people who write long, imaginative emails to all of our officers and local bodies.
So, rather than commenting on this passage, I’ll just talk about some random stuff.
First, I’d like to remind all of you that we do accept donations and bequests. Money as well as gold. Donations should be made to Ordo Templi Orientis U.S.A. Although we prefer that you don’t, you can tag your donation for development of a specific local body or for a specific project. However, if it’s a project that we’re not already working on, or your donation won’t cover the whole thing, it’s pretty likely that your donation won’t be used for a very long time. If your donation is tagged for something that we don’t want to do or have no power to do, such as declaring war on Saturn, then we’ll return it to you. If you’re interested in writing a bequest, the GTG has some guidelines on how to do it without causing legal headaches for us or your family.
Second, I have a few thoughts to share about struggle.
Crowley, as we all know, dedicated himself to establishing Thelema as a major world religion. After World War I, he had hopes that this could be accomplished by essentially partnering with one of the new, revolutionary, populist political movements that were rising at that time. It’s widely known that he tried to influence Hitler for a while via his associates Martha Küntzel and George Sylvester Viereck–but he also tried to get to the leaders of the British Communist Party via his friend Tom Driberg, and he even discussed with his friend and New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty the prospect of convincing Stalin’s Soviet Union to officially adopt the Gnostic Mass. But his attempts to gain favor with these mass movements really cannot be seen as an effort to ally himself with any particular right-wing or left-wing political ideology. Instead, he felt that, because these revolutionary movements were fundamentally opposed to the dominance of traditional Christianity in Europe, the vacuum left by their abandonment of Christianity could be neatly and naturally filled by Thelema.
Thankfully, these efforts went nowhere. Crowley ended up denouncing Nazism and Communism when he finally realized that they were much more interested in mobilizing great crowds of conformist bigots than in liberating their people from the conformist oppression of traditional religions. These movements were, of course, never even slightly interested in Thelema. And why would they be? What aspiring populist demagogue wants to be associated with an obscure, bookish, new religion full of puzzles and puns, that goes against most popular conceptions of what a religion should be, is “against the people,” and was founded by someone calling himself “The Beast 666.” That, my friends, is a sure-fire formula for political failure.
read the entire address:
https://sabazius.oto-usa.org/notocon-xiv-keynote-address-from-gold-forge-steel/.
