Shared temple rituals
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2020 7:07 am
I was listening to a podcast (Oh No Ross & Carrie) about the Ordo Templi Orientis, which is Alister Crowleys occult church. It is still an active community after 100 years and the podcasters joined in to see what it's all about. The OTO claim not to be Satanists, even though they do perform satanic rituals and seem to think very highly of the Dark Lord.
It was the nature of the rituals that caught my attention. Not just the ones that involve a nude priestess on the altar, mind you, but the ones that involve hand gestures and tokens. There are three of them, in the first you hold one hand up, palm forward while drawing the thumb of the other hand across your throat. I can't remember the second, but it was similarly familiar. The third was not.
Of course, like the LDS temple ordinances, these gestures come from Freemasonry, but I thought it was interesting that the two traditions share some sacred traditions despite their divergent intentions. The big difference here is that the OTO tradition did not get embarrassed by their rituals and abandoned them. Our tradition, which claims to have received them from God, just dropped them when people started to sit up and take notice of their weirdness.
It was the nature of the rituals that caught my attention. Not just the ones that involve a nude priestess on the altar, mind you, but the ones that involve hand gestures and tokens. There are three of them, in the first you hold one hand up, palm forward while drawing the thumb of the other hand across your throat. I can't remember the second, but it was similarly familiar. The third was not.
Of course, like the LDS temple ordinances, these gestures come from Freemasonry, but I thought it was interesting that the two traditions share some sacred traditions despite their divergent intentions. The big difference here is that the OTO tradition did not get embarrassed by their rituals and abandoned them. Our tradition, which claims to have received them from God, just dropped them when people started to sit up and take notice of their weirdness.