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The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O.
CHAPTER THREE
PART ONE
The Birth and Development of the O.T.O.
The Early Years of the O.T.O.
*
Somewhere about the year 1896 Karl Kellner, a wealthy German iron-master who had journeyed through
India and the Middle East in search of occult wisdom, decided to found yet another Templar group, its
purpose to revive the sexual magic which Kellner believed had been the real secret of the original Order
of the Temple.
Kellner claimed to have rediscovered this secret doctrine by means of a thorough study of the sexo-yogic
teachings he had orally received from three oriental adepts, two Arab and one Hindu. He therefore
decided, reasonably enough, to call his fraternity Ordo Templi Orientis — the Order of Oriental
Templars — thus properly acknowledging his intellectual debts to his teachers.
Whether these teachers ever actually existed, or if they did, whether they taught Kellner the things that he
claimed that they taught him, is of no great importance. The fact remains that from somewhere or other
this German occultist obtained the knowledge of a remarkable magical system bearing some resemblance
to both Bengali Tantrism and certain highly unorthodox forms of Sufism.11
It is probable that for many years the O.T.O. existed only in its founder’s imagination, for nothing seems
to have been heard of it between 1895, the date of its supposed establishment, and 1904, when it began to
be mentioned by name in a periodical called the Oriflamme.
The Oriflamme was a supposedly masonic production, the official organ of the magnificently entitled
‘Berlin Grand Lodge of the United Grand Council of Rites of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of
33 degrees, of the Ancient Primitive Rite of Memphis of 95 degrees and the Egyptian Rite of Misraim of
90 degrees’.
To understand the real nature of the Berlin Grand Lodge of Memphis and Misraim — for such is the
conventional (and merciful) abbreviation of the organization’s title — it is necessary to make a brief
excursion into nineteenth-century masonic history.
Both the Rite of Memphis and the Rite of Misraim, originally quite separate organizations, had come into
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