Sorry this has turned into a busy week for me, and I have had trouble catching up.
Commenting on various conversational loose ends and odds and etcs.
Re: guru re: "slippery slope" argument for human sacrifice and/or animal sacrifices as gateway drug:
(Slippery slopes often invoke indirectly a form of moral absolutism or at least an hierarchical series of real world consequences, many of these invalid in many circumstances, but I am going to ignore meta-ethics for the time being in order to preserve conciseness unless we feel it necessary to press the point)
The quote function is quite annoying to attempt on my mobile, so I will be doing my best to discuss most of this from memory, apologies for omissions or imprecision.
I'm not certain I can assume any particular practitioners of ritual animal sacrifice would automatically assume human death as being the next logical step. It seems rarely entertained as a notion except with regard to minority religions, but this is an assumption. I could point out that very similar arguments could be made with regard to Jesus, whose last recorded public act as a free human is participating in, officiating even an animal sacrifice. It is very rare for someone (modern/western) to assume that his followers immediately jumped to human murder, despite the implied cannibalism in their rituals coupled with their stated belief that consumption of the godking's flesh granted literal immortality.
The gateway nature of the assumption is silly on its face, at least as applied universally to all of a certain "type" of group. (I.e. Groups that you aren't a member of)
As I mentioned earlier, animals are slaughtered in horrible industrialized fashion every second of every day and blithely consumed by moderns, divorced from the reality of violence inherent in a predatory diet. The vast majority of people who kill these animals for the majority of us, including those who do so for their own pleasure (sport) don't go on to hunt and kill humans.
There is also no universal rule that implies that the slope could be travelled in the other direction. I.e. That love of animals can foster love of humans or that disregard for human life is necessarily related to disregard for animal life in any statistically relevant much less predictive fashion. That is, Gandhi and Einstein were vegetarians and anti-hunting, but so were Hitler and Himmler, for ostensibly the same reasons. (Hitler was said to avoid even filmed depictions of violence to animals, Himmler attempted to outlaw hunting in its entirety)
(Although the OTO was purged by the Nazis, it wasn't for animal or human sacrifice)
W.r.t. The "secrets" of the OTO: I don't think that they have any secrets about ritual crimes, and I think that is a silly baiting of a question. For the record, they appear to be almost impoverished. Which implies that if there was ever any serious interest in them by powerful agencies, it has lapsed, probably very long ago.
But to return to the slope, I could widely agree with your statement that I have never seen
a single shred of evidence or a convincing argument as to why someone like Crowley, or occult fraternities in general, would propagate ideas that form a solid rationale for ritual crimes but only ever be exploring these ideas in a purely intellectual capacity, never dreaming of putting them into practice in anything but the most sublime (sublimated) of metaphorical ways
Or at least the majority of its first half.
Of course, I am not completely sure that I have ever seriously spent time looking for evidence that something DIDN'T happen. The very idea is a stranger to my sensibilities. That isn't at all how investigation of anything usually happens. Its witchunters' logic applied to history, representing much sloppiness in rationale. Given the broadness of that statement, so vast as to include large swaths of humanity, including many diverse groups whose memberships number into the millions and of whom I am one, I find it intellectually offensive. If you'd just said the same about jews instead of wizards, you'd have been banned and the post would have been deleted before I had a chance to take offense.
That said, and not necessarily in best good faith, I will nonetheless give an answer to your preposterously silly and bigoted assertion:
Its considered somewhat established fact in Thelemic and post-Thelemic circles that the OTO and its headmaster were maybe kind of sex-obsessed. Perhaps a reaction to the suppression and sublimated sexual violence of their era. The point being that ritual sacrifice is not the only aspect of western hermeticism that they considered coded sex. In fact, if you read the book you've quoted, the utterly obviousness of Crowley's semi-freudian, nearly constant euphemistic approach to all the menagerie of mysticism as he knew it would be entirely unavoidable. Cups and Lances and all that, through and through. I don't see you making an argument that the OTO was seriously engaged in Alchemy, although its symbolism occupied quite a few more pages than sacrifice did in the same volume. Do you believe that Crowley believed he could turn lead into gold, or even that he actually could?
...the exact same sets of sexual coding was applied to this set of symbols as to almost every category of esoteric theory, and it would be unfair to assume everything is meant literally in one chapter but not the previous or subsequent chapters of the same book.
...
For someone who seems worried about "presumptiveness" you seem unworried about using words like "proven" and "know" quite freely. Often in the midst of vague and sweeping allegations.
