Comments by Bryony Murds who edited above text
JH's comment "...consisting of the sum total of your observations, which nobody will accept as a workable definition" has some relevance. You frequently make reference to such 'keywords' (by which I assume you mean 'definitions') and yet they can be hard to pin down, either because they are defined in another piece of yours, or else you are assuming the reader has prior knowledge of them. I'm not suggesting that you start each essay with a dictionary definition like some lumpen-Rotarian giving a lunchtime talk — but I think it might be helpful if you provided a list of these definitions as a separate item on the website, or else descended to the expedient of a 'F[requently] A[sked] Q[uestions]' section like everybody else (I know an FAQ sounds horrible, but grit your teeth, dear chap!) Although you reject the 1970's fashion for accusations of fascism (with some justice — it became a kind of intellectual totalitarianism in itself) JH's point about the 'F-scale' is a valid one, at least in helping in providing a clear definition of totalitarian tendencies in the OTO. I suspect the 'F-scale' has now been superseded; I know that Amnesty International has devised a checklist for detecting totalitarian tendencies, and there is also a list for evaluating cults that I saw used very effectively on an anti-Scientology website. I think both of these would be useful in helping to tighten up your admittedly 'loose' initial thoughts.
I have altered your original comment about the TS teaching anti-Semitism, as (to the best of my knowledge) there is no evidence that they were any more or less anti-Semitic than anyone else at the time. The 'Root Race' business — which wasn't really HPB's idea, but a later accretion from the Leadbeater/Besant era — was certainly _implicitly_ racist, and was abused and distorted later in things like the Thule Gesellschaft &c., but it was a reflection of attitudes _then_, and should not really be adduced as evidence, except as a _precursor_ to current — and different — OTO bigotries.
Then there is the point about Thelemites as 'subjects', and non-Thelemites as 'objects'. Although I'm sure that JH's comments about ontological fields are right, you both seem to have missed out on an obvious source for such ideas in Nietzsche (even though JH later uses the word 'Übermensch'). I'm sure this could be developed in terms of comparisons with later misunderstandings and distortions of Nietzsche into mean-spirited stuff like Thatcherism or Reaganomics. It leads me to speculate why so many OTOites are ageing hippies (e.g. McMurtry, Breeze, Heidrick) who, having found peace and love a defective philosophy, did a _volte-face_ at some stage in the 1970's, and evolved into snaggle-toothed proponents of social Darwinism? They do seem to bear a generic resemblance to people like Abby Hoffman, don't they? How many of them voted Reagan into power? How many of them have read — not Darwin or Nietzsche, as they probably haven't got the brains for that — but things like Ayn Rand's crypto-fascist drivel? Perhaps this spirit also accounts for the increased interest in sado-masochism generally, and all these blood-and-sperm-soaked rituals among the Thelemites specifically? JH casts doubt on "Heidrick's treife kabalah". This is a trifle unjust, as any Qabalah to do with occultism is _ipso facto_ going to be 'treyf' (literally 'impure' or non-Kosher) to a presumably Jewish ex-yeshiva-bucher like JH. In GD terms, Heidrick did do some original and accurate work years ago, as in his 'Magical Correspondences'. It needs to be emphasised that there are two broad schools in Qabalah: historical Jewish mysticism as expounded by Gershom Scholem, and the Golden-Dawn inspired occult one as found in Dion Fortune - and almost never shall the twain meet, it appears.
The historical Jewish variety is very definitely a tradition, and has changed very little since the mid-19th century (hardly surprising, considering the havoc wrought on Judaism in Europe by pogroms and the Diaspora); presumably it was a version of this which JH found in his yeshiva when he was studying Torah — the Qabalah of 'gematria', 'temurah' and 'notariqon' used to interpret the odder bits of Hebrew in the Torah in some Jewish seminaries — which is what yeshivas are. On this side of the Qabalistic divide you _could_ include such aberrations as 'Ze'ev ben Shimon Halevi' (aka Warren Kenton, previously famous for his books on amateur dramatics) and his dreary plagiarised Gurdjieff masquerading as 'the way of kabbalah'; or the modish Hollywood cult of watered-down Baal Shem Tov that has attracted such great thinkers as Madonna, Jerry Hall and Roseanne - because they both nominally originate from Jews — but they are firmly in the occult camp, from what I can see.
On the occult side, Qabalah has blossomed in all sorts of un-Jewish ways, with much more emphasis on the Tree of Life, and still more on the Tree's paths, than is found in the Jewish tradition. Scholarship (of a sort) and accuracy are occasionally to be found, but mostly the occult Qabalah is — to be charitable — a creative, poetic exercise, where æsthetics matter as much as scholarship. Otherwise, why is there such emphasis on correspondances in occult Qabalah, where the Tree is populated with rainbows of colour, all manner of myths, deities, angels, spirits, and devils, perfumes, plants, minerals, astrology, and a welter of symbols — except as an essentially artistic form?
Enough of this excursus; JH mentions Dr. Rudd and faulty Hebrew, which is quite true — he was an 18th-century vicar who tried to transliterate the names of the spirits in the 'Goetia' grimoire into Hebrew, and made a complete hash of it, as the 'Goetia' is not of Hebrew origin. But even Mathers (in his MS. of the 'Goetia' which Crowley pinched and published) as a _fons et origo_ of occult Qabalah, said that Rudd was wrong; and Heidrick didn't use Rudd. As for 'Ayin' not sounding like 'O' — well, how 'Ayin' sounds (it's often called 'rough breath' and is classified as a 'vowel carrier' in Hebrew grammars) depends on which vowel-sign you put with it, or what other letters precede or follow, as is the case with any Hebrew written out in full. And of course, while written Hebrew is consistant, the same cannot be said of spoken Hebrew — even within the Sefardi and Ashkenazi dialects there are variations. The interpretations of 'ON' do not originate with either Thelema or the OTO, but come from Freemasonry, where the name of Solomon is expounded as SOL-OM-ON (SOL Latin for 'Sun', OM the Sanskrit 'Aum', and ON various obscure Near Eastern stuff). Therefore the 'Caliphate' are no better or worse than United Grand Lodge in perpetuating an 18th-century ætiological myth.
JH then proceeds to the 'Caliphate's' _ad hominem_ attempts at character-assassination; part of the problem is that they probably ARE as stupid as he seems to think. Intelligence has never been a real advantage in rising to the top of a cultic dung-heap, so the Kremlin-mouthpiece style of their public insults comes as no surprise, if one assumes that their spokesmen have an apparatchik's mentality. To look at this from another viewpoint, one should remember that bullies are usually compensating for being dimwitted - and what else is the 'Caliphate' doing both internally and externally, but trying to bully people?
Another reason they tend to offend us as Europeans could simply be the cultural differences; the UK and US are said to be 'divided by a common language', and I suspect the UK and Helvetia have far more in common with each other than they do with the USA — in terms of population-density and length of history if nothing else. The USA had as many German-speakers as English-speakers around the time of the War of Independence, and this Germanic quality still shows in some parts of the American character. It used to be said of Germans before WWI that they were 'either at your feet or at your throat'; an unfair generalisation about a whole nation, but one which certainly has some applicability to the 'Caliphate' — or Heidrick (how many other 'Caliphate' members are of German descent, I wonder?) JH's anecdote about "Thelemic scholarship" shows that the 'Caliphate' ignores both scientific methodology AND literary criticism.
Presumably by Thelemic scholarship the "high booboo" meant a kind of uncritical elaboration of symbolic connections in the Thelemic texts, which, while it might be æsthetically pleasing, is merely adding to an already overloaded body of supposed 'correspondences' which are largely self-referential and only internally consistent; rationally, this is as much use in the real world as Hubbard's Scientology texts, and is on the same exegetical level as the Jehovah's Witness interpretation of the Bible. Once again, they fear real creativity, because a proper analysis (scientific and literary) of Crowley and his writings would yield results that would upset their tightly-constrained _Weltanschauung_.
So of course they will try to stamp out any signs of empirical reasoning (I think empirical reasoning what what JH really meant); the 'Caliphate's' ideas are perforce fixed in stone because they are just as much a cult as the Branch Davidians, and reality must not interfere in their microcosm. If the 'Caliphate' ever do reject their Sisyphean ideology, and admit that Thelema is NOT a science, but a subjective religious philosophy with a limited application to essentially immature people, they might make themselves look a little less foolish. They refuse to admit that 'the man Crowley' did indeed have a very strong effect on 'Crowley the prophet', for if they applied even that tiny bit of common-sense, they would see that as a sociopathic and megalomaniac personality Crowley was bound to inflate his fundamentalist background and Reuss's obscure pseudo-Masonic sex club (to list just two factors) into apocalyptic prophecies of worldwide Thelemic social and sexual revolution. As one of Crowley's contemporaries said, 'thank Heavens he was never drawn to politics!'. But being part of an 'elect' who are in on the ground-floor of the revolution is always going to appeal more to the inadequates ripe for Thelema, than being an eccentric artistic fan-club...
I think that JH fails to make a sufficient distinction between art and science, but if he wants to be a "scientific illuminist", then good luck to him; I hope he realises that he's attempting something that's left the greatest minds since Goethe stumped! For myself, I doubt if the division between the 'two cultures' of science and art can ever be bridged satisfactorily. This shouldn't stop us trying to bridge it, but ultimately I fear it is destined to remain one of the great enigmas in human nature and culture.
Again, where JH refers to Thelemic "manipulation" of "terms", there is a valid comparison to be made with George Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_; specifically 'Newspeak' and 'doublethink'. (I've actually slipped a reference in to that, as it fits so well). Orwell's Ingsoc Party was of course supposed to be a political party, but as a totalitarian oligarchy it certainly displays characteristics found in modern exponents of Thelema — the deliberate alteration of the meaning of words, before those words are used in a restricted vocabulary that maintains internal consistency, but limits external applications. When JH talks of "'radiant' language, which refers to other things on closer examination", it makes me wonder what proportion of Thelemites have had any sort of higher education, and if they _have_ had higher education, what proportion of them studied an arts subject, where the critical faculties are trained? Not many, I'll bet. People who think they are scientists, or using scientific reasoning always make better fanatics.
...Crowley is of some value to occultists, but he is like the proverbial curate's egg — good in parts, and needs to be treated selectively and critically — one should never accept him at face-value. Take his poetry as an example: apart from some clever pastiches of Browning and Swinburne, and a rare poem elsewhere that is reasonably good, the whole vast corpus of his verse, which he promoted as a deathless masterwork, is almost entirely worthless. Yet true (if unconscious) poetry may be found in his 'inspired ' writings; it may not be to everybody's taste, but it is there nonetheless — not that Crowley would have realised it, since for him poems _had_ to rhyme and/or scan — to that extent he was thoroughly Victorian. He never realised that he was much better at writing prose than poetry. In that connection, his analyses of Buddhism are not without literary and esoteric value, and the language and form of some of his rituals has its own appeal; he was a competent pornographer, for those who take such things seriously enough to treat it as literature. But accept Thelema as a guiding philosophy of life — except in the most theoretical and rarefied sense — and you will inevitably be taking on Crowley the man, who is inseparable from Crowley the prophet, writer, and magician — whatever Messrs. Breeze, Heidrick or Grant might think. And Crowley the man was really far more 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' than Byron ever was; to those who knew him in real life, he was someone who constantly cadged money, would try to seduce your wife or husband, rarely stayed in one place for more than a fortnight without starting a blazing row, was suspicious to the point of paranoia, was full of grandiloquent and impossible schemes, and was filthy in his personal habits — such as the famous incident where he shat in the corner of a friend's dining room, rather than ask where the lavatory was.
(There, is that enough to be going on with?)
This has set me to thinking why so many fringe (not just OTO) characters are so overwhelmingly obsessed with 'genuine' lines of succession — it can't just be to keep the Logos Spermatikos going, as there are so many other non-Gnostic groups with the same lust for 'authenticity' at any price, like the promoters of degree-mills, pseudo-aristocracies like the Carlists, or any one of the rogue schismatic offshoots of Mormonisn, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Worldwide Church of God (of 'Plain Truth/Echte Wahrheit' fame), Scientology, Theosophy, and so forth. I think that the likeliest explanation is probably the simplest one for this; it's a compensatory psychological prop for insecurity and a poor self-image. That surely accounts for part of the attraction of even 'regular' Masonry, with its long-winded titles and secrecy; bored businessmen get a kick out being called a Master, or the likes of a 'Prince of the Pregnant Puffin' in the higher degrees, I'm sure. And this sort of apostolic succession sometimes provides an excuse to dress up in fancy robes and play-act — again, an indication of a basic insecurity, as that could well be a comforting form of retrogression to childhood 'let's pretend' or 'dressing up' games. It's because they disguise this compensation and reversion by taking it so deadly seriously that it verges on a pathological or obsessive state. I'm not saying that it IS a pathological condition; as a benign form of exhibit ionism I think that most use this ability to pretend temporarily as a bit of fun, and admit it. I suspect more integrated people with such desires express it by becoming actors, or playing exotic games in the bedroom, rather than claiming copyright royalties that aren't theirs, eh?