Ordo Templi Orientis

The OTO is the clearest case in this atlas of an existing initiatic body being rebuilt around the teaching of a single later figure.

Before Crowley

The order was established in the German-speaking world in the first decade of the twentieth century by Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, on a Masonic-style system of degrees. Reuss admitted Aleister Crowley around 1910 and authorised him to lead an English-speaking section.

After Crowley

Crowley then rewrote the rituals to align them with Thelema, the system announced in the Book of the Law, whose maxim, that the whole of the law is to do what thou wilt, became the governing principle of the order. The central public ceremony, the Gnostic Mass, dates from this reworking. After a period of decline the order was revived in the later twentieth century, and litigation in the United States recognised a principal successor body as the continuation of the order and holder of the Crowley copyrights, which is why the modern OTO is inseparable from the management of one body of authorship.

The order that Kellner and Reuss assembled was a fringe Masonic body offering a ladder of degrees, and its distinguishing claim was that the higher ones taught a sexual secret. Crowley took charge of the British section around 1912, and once he had accepted the Book of the Law as authority he rebuilt the system around it. The degrees remained; what they conveyed changed.

The most public product is the Gnostic Mass, written in Moscow in 1913. It is a ceremony for a congregation with a priest, priestess, deacon and children, and it is performed openly today by bodies in the order's lineage. Anyone can attend one. That is worth stating plainly, because an order best known for a secret about sex conducts its principal rite in public.

After Crowley died in 1947 the succession was disputed for decades between claimants in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and the United States. It was settled, in the United States at least, by litigation in the mid 1980s, when a federal court recognised the body led by Grady McMurtry as the successor holding the copyrights and the name. Other lines continue to dispute it.

The point for a reader is that lineage claims in this tradition are frequently decided by courts rather than by initiates, and the documents are therefore public.