The OTO: The Occult Order Behind Aleister Crowley

Podcast: Cults and Secret Societies · Forbidden Knowledge Network

Opublikowano: 2026-09-18

Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, is often remembered through Aleister Crowley, but it began before him in the early twentieth-century world of European occult fraternities, irregular Freemasonry, Rosicrucian systems, and competing claims to secret initiation. Its formative figures were Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss. Crowley entered later, bringing Thelema, the religious and philosophical system based on The Book of the Law, and reshaped OTO’s rituals, doctrine, public worship, and institutional identity around it. This episode follows the evidence from Reuss-era charters and publications to Crowley’s 1912 British authority, his later account of being confronted over Chapter 69 of The Book...