The OTO & the CIA
Ordis Templis Intelligentis
by Alex Constantine
alex@directnet.com
Copyright, 1996
Flying saucer mythology took hold in a big way in the 1950s,
wrapped in gaudy pulp covers and flashed on movie screens.
Jack Parsons, the CalTech rocket pioneer and high priest of
the OTO's Agape Lodge in Pasadena - and one of the first
Americans to report a UFO sighting - was addicted to science
fiction. He regularly attended meetings of the L.A. Fantasy
and Science Fiction Society, where in 1945 the black adept
(he took "the Oath of the Anti-Christ" in 1949) met Lt.
Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who made "alien" visitations an
integral part of a religious doctrine he called
Scientology.
The OTO was founded between 1895 and 1900 by a pair of
powerful Freemasons, Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss.
Politically, the order was right-wing in the extreme,
proposing the creation of a pan-German world based on pagan
spiritual beliefs. Kellner died in 1905, and Reuss, a former
spy for the Prussian Secret Service, assumed the office of
high caliph. While living in London, Reuss spied on German
socialist expatriates. In 1912 he made the acquaintance of
Aleister Crowley, and appointed him head of the OTO's
British chapter. But The Beast's political loyalties have
always been an open question.
While living in the States, he wrote pro-German diatribes
for two fascist publications, The Fatherland and The
Internationalist. After WW II, there were calls for his
head. But Crowley offered that his pro-German stance was a
ruse of MI6, the military intelligence division in the UK.
In 1912 he had informed the secret service of his
correspondence with Reuss, the German spy. Throughout the
'20s and '30s, Crowley gathered intelligence on European
Communists, the Nazi movement and Germany's occult lodges.
Crowley died in 1944, willing the copyright for his books
and unpublished manuscripts to the OTO, and leadership of
the order to Karl Germer, otherwise known as Frater Saturnus
X., formerly Crowley's Legate in the U.S. Germer was born in
Germany, served in WW I and was reportedly tossed in the
prison by the Nazis for his involvement in Freemasonry.
(Crowley believed Germer to be a Nazi spy, but admitted him
to the OTO anyway. Typical.)
He settled after the war in Dublin, California and died on
October 25, 1962 "under horrifying circumstances," according
to his wife in a letter to Marcelo Motta, an OTO official in
Brazil. She informed him that Germer, on his death bed, had
insisted that Motta succeed him as the Outer Head of the
occult order. But the mantle was not passed on to Karl
Germer's chosen successor because the CIA orchestrated a
coup. But not as an OTO spokesman tells it: "Recently the
United States government has legalized our opinion....
[McMurty's] leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis rests on
several rather clear letters of authorization from Crowley
himself. They met while McMurty was a young First Lieutenant
during World War II. He had been admitted to the OTO in 1941
[by] Jack Parsons."
In fact, the choice of McMurty was not entirely "clear."
Motta's advocates insist the court decision was based on the
perjured testimony of McMurty and attorneys with CIA
paymasters. The cult's position on a successor is moot
since, according to charters signed on March 22, 1946 and
April 11, 1946, The Beast of the Apocalypse had left it to
Germer to veto or amend his designation of a successor. As
Motta saw it, no one had a legitimate claim to the title but
he. Unfortunately, Herr Germer died during the period the
CIA had chosen to move mind control experimentation from
academic and military labs into the community. An inner
circle of Heironymous scientists experimented on cult
devotees, and sometimes collaborated in mass murder to
silence the subjects (Jonestown, SLA, Solar Temple). It was
a sweet arrangement. Occult societies are secretive and
often highly irrational. They follow a leader. They exist on
the edge of a society that ignores them because weird
religious rhetoric is obnoxious.
A number of intelligence agents with occult interests
already had their hooks into the OTO. One of them was Gerald
Yorke, a veteran British intelligence agent working, an
advocate of Motta argues, "with American intelligence in an
attempt to absorb the OTO into the ideological warfare
network of the political right." Before the horns of
Thelemite succession were bestowed upon Grady McMurty, Yorke
the prelate spy "misinterpreted" Germer's will and named
Joseph Metzger, a ranking Thelemite (and the son of a former
Swiss intelligence chief), to the office of high caliph. One
order adept, Oskar Schlag, was an alleged "psychological
warfare" specialist from Israel. Even McMurty (with his
degree in political science) was a State Department
bureaucrat the day Herr Germer died. The coup was sealed
while Marcelo Motta, a writer for Brazilian television,
fended off operatives of the CIA bent on destroying his
sanity and leaving him financially crippled. It was a ritual
that subjects of mind control conditioning would come to
know well. Strangers approached his friends and filled their
ears with lurid stories of debauchery. He was suddenly
unable to find work. His mail was opened. Motta took a job
teaching English, studied self-defense. "He had begun to
doubt his sanity," the advocate says. "He constantly
suspected people who approached him. He saw in himself all
the clinical symptoms of paranoia."
After a few years of harassment and squabbling over the
leadership of the OTO, Motta came to the realization that
the McMurty junta and "the American 'intelligence' network
behind them had a worry, and a pressing one; Motta's
proposed 'New Manifesto' [did] not mention ... Grady at all.
Since their purpose was to create an American 'intelligence'
tool at the expense of a religious organization, it was
necessary to either bring Motta to concede Grady further
authority or to discredit Motta completely." They did what
they wilt. In 1967 Germer's entire occult library and
manuscripts were stolen from the home of his widow. Without
the royalties these brought in, Mrs. Germer was destitute
and literally starved to death. Motta was cast out of the
OTO. Trouble brewed in the cult's cauldron. At least one
Cotton Club killer passed through. The OTO's Solar Lodge
in San Bernardino was founded by Maury McCauley, a
mortician, on his own property. McCauley was married to
Barbara Newman, a former model and the daughter of a retired
Air Force colonel from Vandenberg. The group subscribed to a
grim, apocalyptic view of the world precipitated by race
wars, and the prophecy made a lasting impression on Charles
Manson, who passed through the lodge. In the L.A.
underworld, the OTO spin-off was known for indulgence in
sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child
molestation and murder. The Riverside OTO, like the Manson
Family, used drugs, sex, psycho-drama and fear to tear down
the mind of the initiate and rebuild it according to the
desires of the cult's inner-circle.
On the East Coast, a series of murders created an atmosphere
of fear in New York City. Before the world had ever heard of
Son of Sam, an obscure Vietnam vet named David Berkowitz
moved into an apartment on Pine Street, a rotting gantlet of
hovels in Yonkers. Like much of the bloodshed for which he
is known, Berkowitz did not make the decision to live on
Pine Street. Key decisions in his life were made by the
leaders of a religious group based in Westchester, a hybrid
of OTO members and acolytes from the Process Church of the
Final Judgment. Members of the cult mingled with others in
Manhattan and Brooklyn, and had contact with similar groups
across the country. The leader of the Westchester "family"
was a real estate attorney with a practice in White Plains.
He was active in local politics. Balding, lean with years,
he directed Berkowitz and his "brothers" to kill in the name
of an old cause. The group's meeting place was an abandoned
church, a decrepit hulk on the grounds of the abandoned
Warburg-Rothschild estate. The church, partially eaten by
fire, was the group's "eastern Headquarters." Most of the
pews had been removed from the church long ago. On one wall
was hung a large silver pentagram, festooned with silver
insets in the shape of Waffen SS lightning bolts.