I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

Some, like Aleister Crowley, have embellished the myth Reuss created for
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their own cynical purposes. Others were sincerely hut naively swept up in the
mystique and a deep need to believe in it all.
From his first announcement of the O.T.O. to his death, Reuss
contended that he was only the second head of the Ordo Templi Orientis,
and that he had inherited the Order from the real founder, supposedly Dr.
Carl Kellner, upon the latter's 1905 death. This fable has led many authors to
follow the false lead of trying to establish Kellner as the mastermind of the
0.1.0., while ignoring Reuss as merely a secondary player. In fact, the
O.T.O. was solely the brainchild of Theodor Willson Reuss, and it is to him
we must turn to begin to make sense of the O.T.O.'s influence on Western
sex magic.
Theodor Reuss And The Sexual Religion Of The Future
Reuss was primarily known in his day as a ceaselessly scheming small-time
occult swindler scrabbling together an erratic living by selling questionable
charters for quasi-Masonic Orders. Like many figures in the occult revival of
the time, Reuss was an on-again off-again player in the shadow world of
intelligence. His Anglo-German ancestry allowed him to move easily
between two worlds. While working for the German Secret Service in
London, he is said to have infiltrated the Socialist League, where he
befriended Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor. Originally trained as a chemist,
Reuss also acquired a professional singing voice, performing the gamut from
Wagnerian opera to British music-halls. Bilingual, he wrote for a wide
variety of English and German newspapers and magazines. But these
worldly occupations all took a back seat to Reuss's life-long metier: the
tireless founding of pseudo-Masonic Orders.
Reuss was the self-appointed head of many impressive-sounding
institutions, the existence of which rarely extended beyond printing suitably
imposing stationery on which to send out bombastic decrees. In contrast to
the freewheeling magical subculture of today, in which one-man occult
societies are founded at the blink of a website, the majority of magical
activity in the early part of the twentieth century was deeply embedded in
the stuffy formalities and inflexible apparatus of Freemasonry. It was a
world of grand titles, secret passwords and handshakes, solemnly conferred
degrees, and elaborate scripted ceremonies, all performed whilst garbed in
extravagant uniform seemingly on loan from an opera house's wardrobe.
The Masonic-magical community of the early twentieth century
from which the O.T.O developed was strictly an old boy's club. One of
Reuss' innovations was to allow women full membership in some of his
Orders, which of course would have been a necessity for the sex-magical
pursuits of O.T.O.
A full account of Reuss's adventures in quasi-Masonry would take
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us far afield from our search for a Western left-hand path. But to understand
something of the background from which O.T.O. emerged, it's sufficient to
know that by 1902 Reuss was claiming full authority in Germany over
several irregular Masonic Rites operated from Berlin. ("Irregular" Rites are
those not recognized by the official body of Freemasonry as legitimate.) The
most prominent of Reuss's Orders were the Sovereign Sanctuary of the
Ancient and Primitive Rite 95° of Memphis and Misraim (MM), and the
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the AASR. MM and AASR, like the
O.T.O. that later emerged from them, were essentially commercial vehicles;
their raison d'etre was to collect dues from members with a craving for the
pompous titles and cryptic mumbo-jumbo of Masonry As a side business,
Reuss also peddled admission into questionable aristocratic Orders which
granted would-be "Knights" permission to officially call themselves "Sir."
Reuss was already indulging his penchant for myth-making and