Quotes

The idea behind the OTTO is this. In our early days, when we first become acquainted with the occult, it is often an awe-inspiring thing. After reading “The Devil Rides Out” we see an advert for the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Exchange & Mart and send off in trepidation for a catalogue of amazing incenses and weird paraphernalia to read by torch-light beneath the bedclothes with chattering teeth – expecting hellfire to blast us at any moment. A few years later we have worked our way through W. E. Butler, Dion Fortune and plucked up courage to read Crowley and we are ready to argue the psychological validity of magical technique with anyone. What we have gained is wisdom and understanding. What we have lost is that old gut-wrenching excitement.

We know enough to steer clear of the ego-tripping looney with the piercing gaze and long black cloak. We see through his act and congratulate ourselves. But we overlook the fact that a good act can be a delight, a piece of street theatre, an art-form, an invocation in its own right.

The OTTO message is this: now we have grown up enough that we no longer are in awe of the charlatan, it means that we are now free to delight in the charlatan – to dig the charlatan. Now we are mature enough to realise there aren’t any ancient brotherhoods with secrets passed down from time immemorial, we are now free to dig those brotherhoods who put on a good act of being just that.

Now we know that all paraphernalia is just trappings with no value other than surface appearance, let us therefore maximise that residual value by making surface appearance utterly mind-blowing!

“Gods” are the forces of Nature; their “names” are the laws of Nature. Thus They are eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, and so on; and thus their “Wills” are immutable and absolute.

Every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated. Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honorable response is to fuck with it.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children stories. They were better than than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

We who proudly make ourself every graven image, Shall have great copulations And are allowed to love our Gods: For we know the sacred alignments Amen.

If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. The human soul, living forever within you. The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

But seeing them now–not safe at home, hanging loose off a line of recruits in front of the beer hall–their beauty was made evident. Gray uniforms, gray helmets, gray mud, gray skies, gray mist, and gray men, moved as ghosts down the road as gray rain filled shell craters with gray water. Compared to the French in their red pants and blue jackets, we were invisible. Even Tommy made sure to cover their khakis with mud as soon as possible, but we came off the assembly line perfectly cast for this new barbarism.

This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.