Pascal Beveryly Randolph was inducted into the Order of the Lion in 1999 e.v. Here’s an excerpt of the posted essay:
“Dr. P. B. Randolph is either the author or the key Western transmitter of the core magical teaching of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Either way, the only thing remarkable at this point is why his name did not appear initially among the list of Saints read out in The Gnostic Mass. His elevation to the Order of the Lion by U.S. Grand Lodge of the OTO has done much to redress this omission. His contributions to the core teaching of the Western Magical Tradition are difficult to measure but very substantial–essential, in fact.
“Paschal Beverly Randolph was born in New York, September 5, 1825 EV. He is sometimes described in the literature as a “mulatto” which is technically correct, but considering Randolph was born in the America not only before the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, but before the Abolitionist Movement even came into being, his life will not be understood unless we place the matter in context, for P.B. Randolph was an Afro-American born into a society that had yet to confront its own soul as a nation on the question of black slavery.
“It should come as no surprise that he spent a great deal of time, particularly in his youth, traveling the world. According to his own account, he became Supreme Hierarch of The Brotherhood of Eulis upon attaining his majority, that is, on the 5th of September, 1846. However that may be, he soon became involved in spiritualism, seances and the occultist fad of that period, utilizing magic mirrors, so-called, for obtaining visions. Occasionally, he himself avers, “magnetism” was mixed with such mind-altering drugs as were available in that time. Though he seems to have had great success , he later came to a bitter disillusionment with both drugs and spiritualism as such. By 1850 he was beginning to map out a book on trance channeling with magical mirrors, published as Seership a dozen years later on the eve of the American Civil War. In the late 1840s he embarked upon a European Tour which brought him into contact with the great occult notables of that period, including Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliphas Levi and two men who proved to be lifelong friends of influence, the English Rosicrucian writer and professed adept Hargrave Jennings, and, the American General and mystic Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who he met in Paris. Hitchcock facilitated contact with Napoleon III, the mystically inclined French Emperor whose life seems so connected with Randolph’s. General Hitchcock later introduced Randolph to Abraham Lincoln.”
You ought to read the whole thing. Some of his doctrines are pretty cvlt in O.T.O.
http://oto-usa.org/usgl/lion-eagle/paschal-beverly-randolph/.
