Until this point, I had assumed the organization’s unhealthy dynamics persisted despite its leadership.
After hearing these accounts, I began to suspect they persisted because of its leadership.
I Didn’t Join a High-Control Group
For 11 years, I devoted a substantial part of my life to Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.).
I took my first initiation in July 2014. Over the course of the next 11 years, I rose to the rank of 5th degree. Along the way, I was ordained as a Deacon and a Priest in Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, O.T.O.’s church. And I was chartered as an initiator, which authorized me to initiate members up through the 3rd degree.
During that time I also served as a leader. II became one of the more visible public writers on O.T.O. and Thelema. Throughout those years, I wasn’t merely participating in O.T.O.; I was trying to improve it. I devoted countless hours to making it a safer, fairer, and more spiritually serious organization. And eventually I became Master of Horizon Lodge, the local branch of O.T.O. in Seattle.
If you had asked me in 2024 whether O.T.O. was a high-control group, I might have laughed.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware of O.T.O.’s problems. I had been since around 2017 — and had even considered leaving because of them. But for most of my time in O.T.O., I believed the organization’s problems were failures of leadership — and I thought they could be solved by better leadership.
But something began to change for me during my final year in the organization.
The First Cracks Appear
It’s impossible to be a member of Ordo Templi Orientis without noticing its problems. The organization is rife with drama. Cliquishness, backbiting, and gossip are all common. Its procedures are often frustratingly slow and opaque.
But over time, certain patterns appeared often enough that I no longer regarded them as isolated incidents.
I witnessed numerous instances of leadership controlling information and dissent:
- Members monitoring and reporting on one another.
- Members questioned or criticized for publicly supporting critics.
- Members pressured to distance themselves from former members.
- Members whispered about or threatened for disagreeing with leadership.
I also witnessed repeated instances of double standards and lack of accountability:
- Advancement determined by whisper campaigns rather than clear standards.
- Well-connected members repeatedly protected despite credible allegations of harassment, manipulation, domestic violence, or sexual misconduct.
- Unsafe individuals placed in positions responsible for the safety of others.
What disturbed me most was not simply that these dynamics existed. Every organization has shortcomings. It was that they were repeatedly normalized, minimized, or spiritually reframed, making meaningful correction extraordinarily difficult.
Even so, I regarded these as failures of leadership rather than evidence that the organization itself was fundamentally unhealthy. I still believed O.T.O. could be reformed.
Becoming Master Changed Everything
In April 2023, the Electoral College of United States Grand Lodge appointed me Master of Horizon Lodge in Seattle.
For years I had believed that O.T.O.’s problems were not fundamentally problems with the organization itself. I believed they were failures of leadership: unclear standards, poor communication, inconsistent accountability, and a lack of transparency.
Becoming Master gave me an opportunity to test that belief.
My leadership was organized around the values of:
- Mutual respect
- Transparency
- Clearly defined roles
- Consistent standards
- Alignment with Grand Lodge policies
- Serious engagement with Thelema
In short, I wanted to know what would happen if an O.T.O. local body consistently practiced the values the organization publicly claimed to endorse.
By most observable measures, the experiment appeared successful.
- Attendance increased until public events were filled to capacity.
- Junior members stepped into officer roles, bringing fresh energy and perspectives.
- We were initiating more new members than we had at any time in the previous 8 years.
- Morale was high, and drama was low.
- Member retention was strong.
But there was one result I hadn’t expected. I gradually realized that I possessed the formal authority of Master, but not the practical authority to govern according to the standards I had been entrusted to uphold. In particular, I observed the following patterns:
- Authority became personal. Legitimate governance was conflated with “relationship issues” when it came to well-connected individuals.
- Senior members intervened informally. Rather than overtly overruling me, upper degrees engaged in persistent informal pressure or passive-aggressive resistance.
- Standards became inconsistent. Personal loyalty often outweighed objective standards.
- Trust deteriorated. By spring 2025, I increasingly suspected that conversations and private matters were being relayed upward without my knowledge. This was later confirmed.
- Successful leadership lacked institutional support. The lodge was doing well by observable measures, but the greatest obstacles came from recurring conflicts with influential members over boundaries, discipline, and authority.
When I accepted the position, I believed the office of Master carried both responsibility and the authority necessary to fulfill it. But by the spring of 2025, I had come to a different conclusion.
The office carried responsibility, but the real authority resided elsewhere. Eventually, I came to believe that the organization’s informal power structure made that responsibility impossible to carry out with integrity.
My Decision to Resign
Having concluded that I could no longer fulfill the office with integrity, in May 2025 I decided to step down.
I returned to the Electoral College and explained that while I loved serving as Master of Horizon, my position had become untenable. I proposed what I believed was a responsible transition. I would serve out another 45 days. During that time, I would work with the Electoral College and the members of the local body to decide on a suitable successor.
The President of the Electoral College accepted my reasons for wanting to step down and my plan, and a few days later I announced it to the membership.
That plan lasted only a few hours.
When the upper degrees at Horizon heard I was planning on stepping down, they went directly to the National Grand Master in the United States, someone who goes by the name “Sabazius.” He in turn went to the President of the Electoral College and had her remove me immediately and replace me with one of the upper degrees who had been undermining my leadership.
The following day, my successor came to my home to collect paperwork. While there, he asked for my bank card and asked me to stay away from the lodge.
This episode did not convince me that O.T.O. was a high-control group; nor did it convince me to resign. However, it did undermine another assumption I had carried for years: that the organization’s formal procedures would be respected when they conflicted with informal power.
And it made me seriously question whether the organization was merely unhealthy, or whether something more fundamental was going on.
Discovering the BITE Model
Around this time, as I was looking for a vocabulary that might explain what I had been experiencing all these years, I encountered Steven Hassan’s BITE model of high-control groups.
BITE stands for four broad dimensions of control encountered in high-control groups: behavior, information, thought, and emotion.
- Behavior — regulating conduct and participation
- Information — controlling or monitoring information and dissent
- Thought — encouraging members to interpret reality through approved conceptual frameworks
- Emotion — using guilt, fear, shame, or spiritual inadequacy to maintain conformity
As I compared the model with my own experiences, I was surprised by how many recurring patterns it illuminated.
The strongest parallels I observed involved information control, social pressure surrounding criticism, informal expectations of loyalty, and recurring attempts to reinterpret dissent in psychological or spiritual terms rather than engaging it directly. Other aspects of the model fit less neatly. O.T.O. does not exercise the overt behavioral control characteristic of organizations such as Scientology. Nevertheless, the BITE model helped me organize years of observations into a more coherent picture.
Why I Still Wasn’t Convinced
For much of my time in O.T.O., I was obsessed with finding our “formula of success”: the leadership approach that would meaningfully challenge people, minimize discord and drama, and grow a large, diverse community committed to the principles of Thelema and O.T.O.
By the spring of 2025, I believed I had finally found it in the form of evenly applied ethical standards, alignment with national policies and procedures, and unwavering commitment to Thelema. This had nothing to do with me or my personality. Anyone could do it. The method — not the person — was what mattered. And I was actively training the people I hoped would carry on the experiment after me.
At the same time, I believed I had identified the principal obstacle to success: upper-degree members who seemed to believe in standards of integrity and safety only so long as they and their friends were exempt from them.
What I did not yet realize was that the same dynamics I had encountered locally extended to the highest levels of leadership. That only became apparent after I shared my findings with them.
Over the previous 12 months, I had documented numerous instances of organizational dysfunction and breakdown of standards. I collected all of it — the evidence of overreach, surveillance, inconsistent standards, backchanneling, and undermining — into a 70 page report which I submitted to the head of O.T.O. in the United States.
In the report, I argued passionately that the principles Grand Lodge said it stood for were being systematically undermined by the individuals whose job it was to uphold them. And I backed up my claims with 30 pages of emails, text messages, and meeting memos — much of the unprincipled behavior exemplified in the participants’ own words.
I didn’t think anyone was going to get punished. I expected months of feet-dragging, a symbolic gesture such as a policy clarification, or that someone might get pulled aside and talked to privately. This was the outcome I feared the most. It’s how I had seen the national organization deal with serious problems in the past — the kind of ambiguous response that had kept me in moral limbo for so many years.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, they wrote back to me in 9 days. They said they had talked to one person involved and had found no evidence of wrongdoing. They even carbon copied that individual on the email response they sent back to me.
I laughed out loud.
Until that moment, I had assumed that the people leading O.T.O. ultimately wanted the organization to embody the principles it publicly proclaimed. The report I submitted was my attempt to demonstrate that those principles already worked when they were consistently applied.
I felt like a child excitedly showing a discovery to adults.
“Look! We have the key! It’s been here the whole time!”
What their response made clear to me was that they saw exactly the same thing I did.
They just didn’t care.
I spent about 10 minutes writing a resignation letter. And I sent it.
And I was done.
But that wasn’t the end.
It was the beginning.
The Final Piece Fell Into Place
In late May 2025, I took my ebook about O.T.O. off my online store, and I made two public announcements about my resignation: a blog post and a video.
I did this because I had spent years encouraging people to join O.T.O. I believed I owed those people an honest account of why I was leaving.
None of my public announcements named names or delved into particulars. They described the patterns I had witnessed over a decade of dedicated membership and leadership, and why I thought they were harmful.
The public response was at first overwhelmingly positive. Former members wrote to say “me too.” Non-members found what I had to say cogent and compelling. Even several current members reached out to express sorrow at my departure, with a few openly wondering why the organization has repelled so many thoughtful people over the years.
But inside the organization, something else was happening.
A few weeks after my resignation, members independently contacted me describing meetings they had attended with national leadership. Someone present at a meeting with the National Grand Master, Sabazius, described it to me as ostensibly an opportunity for members to raise concerns with him. Instead, before discussion could begin, Sabazius went into a lengthy presentation focused on me — my website, business, Facebook posts, lectures, motivations, and psychological state.
According to this account, relatively little attention was given to the substance of my criticisms. Instead, the emphasis was on constructing a narrative about why I supposedly should not be taken seriously.
Perhaps the most striking claim I heard is that Sabazius allegedly maintained folders containing screenshots, comments, and discussions about various situations and individuals — not just my own activity but reactions from other members across Facebook and elsewhere.
Alarmingly, his files also included information about my private, non-OTO activities, including screenshots of private events, and even a memo submitted by a friend who I had invited to a private ritual.
Another recurring theme was the apparent tracking of where people “stood” regarding me.
Rather than disagreement being treated as a normal feature of organizational life, this account suggested that members’ attitudes toward critics themselves became information of interest. Since then, other members have reached out to say they have been pulled aside should they express anything that looks like agreement with me.
From what I heard, leadership — including individuals I had worked closely and well with up until very recently — repeatedly framed my resignation in terms such as:
- Spiritual psychosis
- Theatricality
- Ego
- Personality changes
- Inability to handle OTO
- Envy
Since then I have been accused more times than I can count by O.T.O. members and supporters of instability, mental illness, personal obsession, or midlife crisis.
Until this point, I had assumed the organization’s unhealthy dynamics persisted despite its leadership.
After hearing these accounts, I began to suspect they persisted because of its leadership.
For years, I was puzzled by why there was so much tolerance for unstable, vindictive, mean behavior in O.T.O.; why surveillance seemed normalized; and why upper leadership seemed reluctant to act in instances of clear violation of the organization’s standards.
I gradually came to the conclusion that this behavior was not merely being tolerated. It appeared to be broadly consistent with the incentives created by the organization’s leadership.
In an organization like O.T.O. where so much advancement depends upon decisions made behind closed doors by individuals who are ultimately accountable to no one but themselves, the person who intuits what the leader wants is going to have an advantage over the person who doesn’t.
Sabazius doesn’t need to tell members to screenshot one another’s social media posts. All he has to do is display the contents of his Google Drive on a national call.
He doesn’t have to tell members to attack critics. The fact that the screenshots are sorted into supporters and critics does the work for him.
He doesn’t have to tell people to spy on one another’s private events. He just has to put a memo about such an event on the screen while speaking scornfully about the event’s host.
Looking back, I realized this was the missing piece that explained nearly everything I had struggled to understand over the previous eight years. The organization’s most powerful mechanisms of control were rarely explicit. They emerged from a culture in which members learned to anticipate the preferences of those above them, long before anyone had to issue a direct command.
Looking Beyond the BITE Model
The BITE model helped me recognize many of the patterns I had witnessed in O.T.O. It gave me a useful vocabulary for describing forms of behavioral, informational, cognitive, and emotional control that I had previously struggled to articulate.
But over time I also came to believe that the BITE model explained only part of what I had experienced.
It described how many of these patterns operated. It did not fully explain why they proved so persistent, or why intelligent, thoughtful people — including myself — could participate in them for years while sincerely believing they were pursuing greater freedom.
To answer those questions, I found myself looking beyond organizational dynamics and toward O.T.O.’s philosophy, initiatory system, and conception of freedom itself.
That investigation ultimately changed my understanding of Thelema every bit as much as it changed my understanding of O.T.O.
See Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.): An Analysis of a High-Control Group for more.