Tim Maroney and the OTO August 1991 Dear Diane, DV> What exactly did happen between you and the OTO ten or so years ago? This qualifies as a "frequently asked question", though I rarely bring the subject up myself. I'll try to be brief and to the point. In October 1980, I was initiated by LAShTAL Lodge in New York, following an interesting correspondence with the lodge master, Kris Dowling. Some months later, I had completed the Minerval work and gotten back in touch, only to find that my teacher and his wife had been forced out of the Order in a power struggle. This left me confused and divided my allegiance. I queried both sides on their role in the matter, and continued my correspondence with Kris for a while. During the next four years I worked sporadically on my practices, with only a few months of concerted daily practice here and there, and letting my membership in the O.T.O. lapse from time to time. Some four years after the initiation, I found myself with enough money to afford a spare bedroom which I turned over to magical practice. I retook the entire Minerval curriculum with a vengeance, with daily LBRs, Liber Resh the hard way, "Will" at meals, daily meditation on the Book of the Law; and augmented it with advanced invoxcation practices, attaining to proficiency in a daily Liber V vel Reguli and achieving good success with an extended (daily for two weeks) invocation of Pan culminating in a complete mystical identification with the god (but only inside the circle, y'know -- must prevent obsession). I also promulgated the Law of Thelema through a series of widely-read and well-liked essays on an electronic mailing list. After doing these things for about a year, I asked for initiation into the first degree at a Canadian camp headed by a guy named Brian who Josh referred me to through e-mail. Brian said he would tell me when their next initiations would be. A few months later, he called me to say that I had missed the initiations, didn't I get his e-mail with the schedule, and no, sorry, they were never having any more initiations at that camp, but he could recommend that I go to James Wasserman (the victor in the power struggle with Kris) or William Breeze in New York. His tone throughout was nervous and suspicious. I remember at one point the question, "Who *are* you?" I knew, of course, that the schedule story was a lie; our e-mail path was a very short, reliable and fast one. I was also familiar with the Jewish tradition of ritually turning away converts. You know how I feel about being lied to, but I decided to work through it in this case. (Josh has since confirmed that this is an O.T.O. custom at the entry to the first degree; he has also confirmed that it is usual to go for a second, postponed session at the same body of the order, not to cancel it.) I didn't like being rescheduled into a scene I had intended to avoid for my own peace of mind, and I didn't like having to once again consider the possibility that I was dealing with fallout from that old struggle. But the thing did bear an uncanny resemblance to a loyalty test. Deciding not to go to New York, I thought I would try California. I called the number given in the newsletter for scheduling initiations. This was a long distance call (Pittsburgh to San Francisco). When the call completed, a faint recording of some indistinct instrumental music began. And went on. And on. And on, for minutes. (Tony Iannotti has very recently said that this was his answering machine, and that it was set up that way to discourage James Wasserman from calling from New York; it was certainly an effective strategy for alienating long-distance callers.) Eventually I hung up and called the Lodge main number, reaching Bill Heidrick's answering machine and asking the group to call me back concerning the scheduling of an initiation. This call was never returned. This I interpreted, perhaps incorrectly, as "Look, we've told you where you need to go, so go there." As I said, I don't like being lied to in any circumstances, and that basic frustration was heightened by the west coast Lodge's closed doors. My only alternative was to go and submit to my friend's enemy. This was simply not a possibility. Shortly thereafter, I left a message to Heidrick on his CompuServe account announcing my resignation from the O.T.O. I continued my practices for about a year, although without the "hook" of the initiatory motivation, I was finding myself less and less enchanted by the Book of the Law, which had been given to me in my Minerval initiation. I would say now that I had been unconsciously suppressing my objections to it while I saw its study as a spiritual exercise leading towards some definite goal. With the goal gone, the objections began to surface. Another mental barrier crumbled -- the one that held me back from an obvious exercise -- going through Magick in Theory and Practice and systematically figuring out its clues to the secret IX and XI practices pertaining to the O.T.O.'s highest degrees. I started from my symbolic exegesis of the Gnostic Mass, recorded some time earlier in my journal, and supplemented it with the widely-published knowledge of the physical part of the formula. From there it was a few weeks to an understanding of every cryptic passage. About a year later, I wound up moving to San Francisco for reasons of career and culture, and the transition disrupted my regular practices in a way that I have not bothered to repair in the last five years. At the same time that my practices lapsed I saw myself becoming better company, more relaxed, more capable of tuning in to a social situation rather than controlling my space. I am not sure the practcies did me any good on any plane other than the mystical, and I think they did me inordinate harm on social and intellectual fronts, so I am reluctant to return to them. It is my hope that by balancing solo practice with group practice, I could offset the insular nature of the experience and ameilorate its various dangers. But so far, I have not encountered a group which does not want to lead me back into easy answers to insoluble questions as a condition of membership. For a while I hoped to spur change in the O.T.O. that would make it possible for me to return there, but I encountered only hostility, especially from my old comrade Josh Gordon, from Tony Iannotti, and from the mutable but usually contemptuous Mordecai Shapiro. After my freedom of thought agreement with the Order was proposed, accepted, and immediately violated by Tony Iannotti, I gave up on that route, as I had already given up on trying to convince Neo-Pagans to make space for psi-skeptics. A year after the debacle over the freedom agreement, I did something that people had suggested I do for years, attempt the formation of my own group. But I am not an organizer or a leader; I am a writer, and so far no one with organizational talents or inclinations has come forward to complement my own deficiencies in this regard. Having never been closely tied to such an organization before, having participated in some three or four group rituals in my entire career, I really have no idea of where to proceed. I am done with the endless charter-fiddling; I will make at most one more round of changes before declaring it complete. But before I do that, we will have to have some more concrete basis than a lump of electronic communication. Any ideas? Tim Maroney