{"id":2310,"date":"2026-04-14T19:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T02:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/?p=2310"},"modified":"2026-06-24T20:03:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T03:03:56","slug":"interview-with-the-cults-to-consciousness-podcast-about-my-experiences-inside-ordo-templi-orientis-o-t-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/interview-with-the-cults-to-consciousness-podcast-about-my-experiences-inside-ordo-templi-orientis-o-t-o\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with the Cults to Consciousness Podcast about my experiences inside Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I Spent 11 Years Rising Rank Inside a SECRET OCCULT Society (Why Whistleblower is Speaking Out)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/g-w8Kwhd0dQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Interview with the Cults to Consciousness Podcast about my experiences inside Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.)<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Intro<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s this doorway in front of you, and it&#8217;s charged with these symbols, and you&#8217;re going to cross through this thing, and you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s on the other side, but there&#8217;s other people there, and you&#8217;re going to be part of something now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the inside, it&#8217;s structured like a secret society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oaths, rituals, secret initiation rites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the main functions of those early initiations is to get you used to the idea of authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fact that it&#8217;s a hierarchical, top-down organization, and that you are subjected to military discipline from the minute that you come in the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Really needs to be driven home about OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not a few bad apples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It really is an organism, but all it produces is corruption and abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All men in OTO have access to women, and they use that access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They were waking up in the shower with him, accepting a drink from him, and then not remembering anything else that happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was kind of a similar MO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He is still in the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When that information was passed along to leadership, they did nothing with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>be alone in a room with somebody who&#8217;s sixth degree, not because they&#8217;re going to do something to you, but like, what would you do if they did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You have literally no recourse at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I served as a local body master.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I stood at the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was the point of contact saying, come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My conscience wouldn&#8217;t allow me to just walk away from that and be like, oops, I guess I was wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was like an immediate inside coordinated response of let&#8217;s destroy this person&#8217;s reputation immediately to just cut this off at the root so nobody listens to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mine&#8217;s the only voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What have I been doing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lay down my autonomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After that, it got very dark very quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Interview<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hey guys, my name is Shelise Ann Sola and this is Cults to Consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we discuss leaving high demand religions or organizations and find healing and independence through awareness and true individual sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re only listening on those podcast platforms and you&#8217;d prefer to see our faces, you can go to YouTube at Cults to Consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It truly is the best way to support the podcast if you watch on YouTube because you can interact with the post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It boosts it to more people so more can become aware of these culty things, these manipulation tactics and control tactics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today&#8217;s guest, he reached out to us through our jot form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a reminder that you can submit if you would like to come on the show and tell your story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can find that in our about section on YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there&#8217;s just a little link and you fill it out, send us a video and maybe we get back to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So today&#8217;s guest, we are talking about a group that we have never touched on before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact, even with my research, I was just finding out through speaking with our guest that all that information was wrong and it was all a moot point to even look into it because there is not much information because it is a secret society and a cult society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today&#8217;s guest was part of it for 11 years and rose to the ranks and we&#8217;re going to talk about why he eventually left and why he believes it fits the parameters of the cult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So thank you so much for joining us, James Luceno.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thanks for having me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I just realized I didn&#8217;t even say the name of the cult, which is Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO for short, which I&#8217;m sure we will use most of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for those who aren&#8217;t familiar, which is probably everybody and myself, can you give us a little bit of a rundown of the history, what it is essentially, and then we&#8217;ll get into why you decided to join.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, so Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, is anesoteric initiatory organization. It presents itself as a modern continuation of the Western occult tradition. The most famous person associated with OTO by far is Aleister Crowley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Aleister Crowley was a British occultist who lived in the first half of the 20th century. He didn&#8217;t found OTO, it was founded by German Freemasons who were interested in creating an esoteric Freemasonry society, but Crowley joined it in the early 20th century and eventually took it over and infused it with his mystical religious philosophy, which is called Thelema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thelema is a Greek word, it means will, and the sort of central tenant of Thelema is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, which is the idea that each person has a true will or a divinely appointed purpose in life that it&#8217;s for them to discover and to live out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>OTO has a public facing side to it, which is like a church, so it&#8217;s not completely secret, but on the inside, it&#8217;s structured like a secret society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So there are oaths, rituals, secret initiation rites, and a hierarchical ladder that you&#8217;re expected to climb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On paper, OTO is about things like individual liberty, sovereignty, brotherhood and sisterhood, self-discipline, spiritual enlightenment, all like really wholesome concepts that a lot of people are into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, really great sounding stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reality is very different. The reality is that above all else, OTO rewards loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It rewards silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It punishes critics, it tears down anybody who publicly speaks out about it, and it protects predators, especially when they&#8217;re well-connected and high-ranking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, and I know that was a big reason for why you eventually left, which we&#8217;ll get to, but I just have to say, I think it&#8217;s interesting that this group kind of bridges the gap, or maybe it&#8230; started the whole thing of branching off into Mormonism because Joseph Smith was a Freemason, which is kind of part of OTO, and also, interestingly enough, connects our interviews with our vampire guests, where they were deeply involved with Aleister Crowley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I&#8217;m like, oh my gosh, all these interesting ways that these groups are connected, but also totally different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, Aleister Crowley is just this towering figure in 20th century spirituality. He was the person who kind of took this kind of mysticism called ceremonial magic and like brought it into the mainstream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He was very, he had a big influence mostly on artists and musicians. So huge influence on Kenneth Anger, who was a filmmaker, big influence on Jimmy Page. He&#8217;s on the cover of Sergeant Pepper&#8217;s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album. Of course, there&#8217;s the Ozzy song, Mr. Crowley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So he&#8217;s just this towering figure who has like influenced so many different aspects of the like kind of modern like occultism and spiritual but not religious movement, but there&#8217;s this one particular organization that has his name attached to it because he was a member of it and it&#8217;s OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s really why OTO has any kind of notoriety at all is because Crowley was such a big figure in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right. And also, I don&#8217;t know how much they went into this when you were in OTO or if it was even a part of it, but it seems like he also had a reputation of just being extremely scandalous for what he was up to, because I think from my research, who knows if it&#8217;s right anymore, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>YouTube, you never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it was saying that maybe he was bisexual and so he was considered a sexual deviant and he was introducing sex magic into his rituals, which was everyone was just shocked in that day and age, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s that&#8217;s all correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He was bisexual at a time where it was illegal to to be so I believe Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality and Alan Turing in the same country that Crowley was from had to undergo chemical castration as a punishment in the 1950s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, there&#8217;s there&#8217;s an aspect to there&#8217;s an aspect of Crowley, Crowley&#8217;s notoriety, which is really just kind of rebelliousness for its time and not really serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so Crowley&#8217;s spirituality is very much associated with transgression of different kinds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And, you know, that has its power. Positive and negative sides to it, which we can discuss in the context of OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, so I assume we&#8217;re going to learn a lot more about OTO as a whole through your story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let&#8217;s get into how you were introduced into it and what made you think, oh, this looks really interesting and I want to learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, so I&#8217;ve been a lifelong seeker. As a child, I marveled at the fact that anything existed at all. And in my adolescence, I got really into psychology and existential philosophy. And I studied it in school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And later on, I got into meditation and Buddhism and eventually became interested in ceremonial magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ceremonial magic is sort of like an offshoot. It&#8217;s not like witch. There&#8217;s like some overlap with witchcraft, but it&#8217;s not really like earth based. It&#8217;s more like angelic magic, I suppose is kind of is kind of how I describe it involves like, you you draw circles and draw pentagrams in the air and chant divine names and summon divine powers, things of that nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that kind of got me eventually into Aleister Crowley because he was this, like I said, this overwhelming figure, in ceremonial magic and occultism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s sort of like, if you start to go into that orbit, you&#8217;re eventually going to get attracted to Aleister Crowley, because he&#8217;s just, he&#8217;s the most, you know, important occultist of the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was in my early mid thirties, I had a mystical experience and I decided that my life needed to change. I had lived in New Jersey up until my, my entire life at that point. And I had this experience that told me that I had to move across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I packed what I could in my car and I drove cross country and I just moved to, I moved to the West Coast, sight unseen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I just felt this sense of like destiny about it, like something was waiting for me there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And not long after I moved out here, I decided to look online and see if OTO was in my city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had moved to Seattle. I had read about and read about OTO back when I was in New Jersey. And so, but I only really kind of looked into it once I moved here because I was like, I don&#8217;t know anybody. Like, what am I going to do with my time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And sure enough, there was like an OTO local body, like about a five minute drive from where I lived. And they were having a ritual that weekend called the Gnostic Mass, which is like the main public ritual that they do in OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I kind of worked up my courage and I was like, okay, let&#8217;s go see what the Aleister Crowley people are like. And they were really nice and really like low key and their hospitality was good. And I felt welcome and comfortable. And I found myself drawn into like fun and interesting conversations with people. I was meeting other people who were also spiritual seekers and also interested in magic and, you know, mythology and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The way I would describe like getting involved in OTO is that it&#8217;s like a highly immersive environment because I don&#8217;t know how familiar you are with like Western esotericism, but it&#8217;s very symbol rich. You&#8217;ve got like tarot cards, the astrological signs, alchemy, like all the weird alchemical signs, like the ritual, the main ritual of OTO, the Gnostic Mass is like this beautiful, intense pageant where like people are dressed up in these like Egyptian costumes kind of, and one of them has got like a lance and there&#8217;s a grail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s got like the grail mythology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s just so, it&#8217;s so rich and it just, it stimulates your imagination because there&#8217;s so many different ways to interpret it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For me, it was kind of like I had gone on this, this journey. I was having like the journey of my life. It brought me from like the East Coast to the West Coast. And I landed here in this container that was just so like engrossing and so dazzling. And I liked the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And eventually, after a few months of doing it, I worked up the courage and I asked for sponsors to initiate. That kind of set me off on the journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would say that over the course of a few years, there was like a shift that happened where I stopped being a consumer of OTO and became one of its builders locally. But I would say that first, the preface to the story was the sense of landing somewhere that was just so immersive and so stimulating to the imagination. Just being up all night and laughing with people and making jokes and sharing hospitality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was just so cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I know a lot of people who join OTO have a similar experience to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was the community aspect of shared or similar interests that attracted you to this group. And obviously, too, and people tend to forget this, cult doesn&#8217;t generally scream, we&#8217;re a cult. You know, like it feels very warm and welcoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes there&#8217;s love bombing involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not that that was your case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It seemed like people were genuinely kind, but it does happen frequently where you get the biggest, best experience right when you first walk in and everyone&#8217;s so happy to see you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then things can often change as time goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for you, jumping into this community where there&#8217;s this magic and this symbolism everywhere. And I even watched a video that I think it was from OTO themselves who put it out. So I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fake, this one. But the way that they dress, it feels almost medieval in a sense, right? Do you feel like that&#8217;s a good description with like the cloaks and the sashes and the hoods and stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, it&#8217;s not medieval.It&#8217;s a particular kind of costuming. It sort of depends exactly what you looked at. If you were looking at the Gnostic mass, people dress in these like cloaks that might, I guess they might seem medieval because like the priest wears a crown and like the priestess wears like a dress and a girdle. So I guess that, and there&#8217;s like a lance and a grail. So yeah, I guess that part is medieval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would say that the other rituals, the vibe is more like ceremonial magic meets Freemasonry. So it&#8217;s got more of like a late 19th century, early 20th century vibe to it. Um, but yeah, medieval, certainly for the, for the Gnostic mass, I could see that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it does seem if you&#8217;re interested in those types of things, really fun and alluring and exciting and different. And if you have a group of people that also are really into it, I could see how it would be fun place to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what is it or what was your perception of it initially when you realized you wanted to be initiated? Were you aware of what you were signing up for or was there a certain thing that made you go, okay, if I was initiated, things would be better because?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, and this is really important because no, nobody knows what they&#8217;re signing up for in OTO. Let&#8217;s be clear about that. It&#8217;s a secret society. It&#8217;s a secret society. And on top of that, the way that it&#8217;s structured is especially opaque that I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s when you&#8217;re when you&#8217;re coming into OTO, the way that it looks on the ground is very similar to what I what I described. You&#8217;re kind of thrown into this immersive, symbolically rich environment and for, for me, it was also really important that I was meeting people that I thought were intelligent and able to converse with me and interested in the same things I was interested in and shared the same sense of humor with me. Like I had been in Seattle for like six months and I, and like, I hadn&#8217;t laughed with anybody, you know, until like one particular night, like hanging out with people. And I realized like, wow, this is like this whole, whole side of things that I had been missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re forming these social connections and it&#8217;s happening in this container where everything feels so symbolically laden and charged. It&#8217;s really hard for it not to feel like a myth or like a story that&#8217;s kind of carrying you forward. Almost everybody I know who has joined OTO has gone through a honeymoon period like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think for some people, it lasts a year or so, sometimes more, sometimes less. For me, it lasted less than a year, I would say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The decision to initiate really came down to me feeling as though I could fit into this group, feeling like I had a sense of, that I could have a sense of belonging here, that I had something to contribute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had a background in theater, and I had been missing that for, as part of my life. And I saw this as, as an outlet for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m very intellectual and Thelema is kind of like a heady sort of intellectual religion for some people. So that kind of drew me in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I think there&#8217;s like even a deeper layer to it because there&#8217;s like when you take initiation, you&#8217;re becoming part of something that is very unique and very special. This goes for any initiation because it&#8217;s done in secret. It&#8217;s done away from the prying eyes of the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And because everybody else in that room has gone through the same experience, like you&#8217;re becoming part of like an invisible brotherhood or sisterhood of people who have had this unique experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You know, for a lot of people in modern system, like we don&#8217;t do initiations really anymore. Like you have like your bar mitzvah or whatever your confirmation and like that&#8217;s it. Then you go off and you have a marriage and then you die. It&#8217;s like we don&#8217;t really mark the passages of life anymore. And so there&#8217;s something really novel about like there&#8217;s this doorway in front of you and it&#8217;s charged with these symbols and you&#8217;re going to cross through this thing. And on the other side is you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s on the other side, but there&#8217;s other people there and you&#8217;re gonna be part of something now. And it just kind of gets this momentum to it that&#8217;s very, it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s very alluring when you do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The shine comes off of it pretty quickly after a while, but at least at first, that&#8217;s like, that&#8217;s the interface that you see going in and that&#8217;s what attracts people and that&#8217;s what attracted me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Did you know what the initiation would be before you did it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, I did not. I was familiar in general with like esoteric occult initiations. Like I was familiar with the Golden Dawn, which was a group that Crowley had been part of. Like I surmised that they would blindfold you, right? And that you&#8217;d have to say some words. And like, that&#8217;s kind of, that was about it. Like I otherwise was walking blind into a ritual written by Aleister Crowley, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this actual ritual, was there anything that was scary about it to you or was it all exciting? Did it feel a little off, red flaggy, or you were like, yeah, let&#8217;s do this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, I was, I was mostly into it. It was kind of like, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s weird. If you&#8217;ve never gone through one before, it can be, it can be kind of weird. There was nothing about it that gave, that gave up any red flags. To be honest with you, I went through a bunch of them and there was never actually anything in any of them that to me seemed dangerous or particularly edgy at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In retrospect, when I thought about the things that I was swearing to, I kind of realized that in retrospect, I was being sort of subliminally trained for obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So in pretty much all of the initiations from the get-go, as soon as you go in, you are swearing obedience of one kind or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everybody in OTO is so like relaxed and chilled out about it and kind of like makes jokes about it that you could easily be led into thinking that it&#8217;s not serious. But it actually is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And as you go through it, especially as you get up to the middle tier of degrees in OTO, those aspects of obedience become more and more important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the ground level, if you&#8217;ve only been in it for like maybe four or five years, and you&#8217;re still in like, within like the first three or four initiations, you&#8217;re not really going to be exposed to this side of OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the overwhelming majority of people in OTO are lower degree. Most people don&#8217;t make it as far as I do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But, you know, for example, right from the get-go, you&#8217;re given this metaphor that being in OTO is like being a cell in a larger organism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Crowley uses this organismic metaphor a lot to describe the ideal society, which on the face of it sounds cool. It&#8217;s like holism. Holism is good. We like, you know, being part of something. Yeah, we all work together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if you really think it through and think through what the implications are, it&#8217;s basically saying that your individuality matters only insofar as you&#8217;re able to contribute to the metabolism of this greater thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that can be okay, however, only if the organism is really producing something good, and I would argue that OTO is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when I was looking into this, it seemed like the initial beginnings of OTO was not as culty as maybe it is now, or it had better intentions, and then it kind of slid into what it is now, and people would call it dysfunctional or cult-like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Would you have that same opinion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is a really good question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>OTO was always, Aleister Crowley himself had a very strong authoritarian streak to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His reputation is as a person who was kind of like a rebel, a transgressor, an individualist, and all of the messaging in Thelema really kind of echoes that. And so people don&#8217;t usually associate the name Aleister Crowley with authoritarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, As I learned more about him, my view of this changed quite a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Aleister Crowley founded a magical organization in the early 20th century called AA. And the premise behind AA is that there are these secret chiefs that are basically like guiding human spiritual evolution. And the way that they&#8217;re doing it is through like the events that we see around us, political conflicts, wars, things of that nature, the rise and fall of religions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so there&#8217;s this kind of like conspiracy theory already kind of going on like behind the scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the premise behind AA is that Aleister Crowley was in contact with these secret chiefs. So he didn&#8217;t just come up with AA, he didn&#8217;t just come up with Thelema, it was given to him by this being that called itself Aiwass. And Crowley had this unique connection with Aiwass. He said Aiwass was his holy guardian angel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So already there&#8217;s this idea in Thelema of like a very top-down structure because let&#8217;s say you have a, let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re a disciple of Aleister Crowley and you have a different interpretation of what, you know, Thelema or one of the holy books means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, Crowley could turn around and say, it&#8217;s not your Holy Guardian Angel giving you this religion, it&#8217;s mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in fact, Crowley did have these sorts of fights with his disciples over time. And he had, you know, some very large falling outs with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when he created OTO, he infused, like OTO was meant to be kind of like the way he pictured it was not just an occult fraternity, but something more like\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You have to imagine almost more like an ark, like Noah&#8217;s Ark, because Crowley was convinced that the world was going to end, especially in the wake of World War I. He thought he saw the writing on the wall and he&#8217;s like, we have to preserve the best of Western civilization in OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it was going to function something sort of like the Benedictine society during the Middle Ages, like kind of in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, it was going to be like the last bastion of civilization. And so there was this kind of like militant monk ethos that infuses a lot of the documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I would say that modern OTO is probably not as culty as what Crowley, I think, himself would have preferred, which is interesting. And I think most people in OTO probably aren&#8217;t aware of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, that is interesting that it&#8217;s&#8230; the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s funny &#8217;cause as you&#8217;re talking, I&#8217;m just drawing all these parallels to other groups, like Scientology even, climbing up the ladder, and you don&#8217;t really know all the information until you get to the top, or even Mormonism, where they think they&#8217;re going to church, but then when they go to the temple, it&#8217;s Masonic rituals, and they&#8217;re like, What did I sign up for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had no idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you were describing going through the door, I was just picturing, and I haven&#8217;t done it myself, but going through the veil into the celestial room, it&#8217;s all very connected in these eerie ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So can we talk a little bit about the actual religion? Because it seems like it&#8217;s more than a society, an occultist society, but an actual spiritual religion. And you&#8217;re calling it Thelema?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thelema, yeah, it&#8217;s the Greek word for will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay. So what does this religion entail?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, it&#8217;s interesting. Crowley synthesized a lot of Western and Eastern philosophy and mysticism and kind of created what he thought was like a religion for modern times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the origin of Thelema is with the reception of a book called <em>The Book of the Law<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So in 1904, when Aleister Crowley was on honeymoon with his his wife, Rose, they were in Egypt. She started receiving messages in kind of like a mediumistic fashion. And this culminated in Crowley supposedly receiving the three chapters of the book of the law over April 8th, 9th and 10th, 1904. And so he didn&#8217;t come up, he claims he didn&#8217;t come up with it. It was like, it was basically given to him, foisted on him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like Joseph Smith!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, no, and he was called the prophet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I can&#8217;t stop!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, I mean, it&#8217;s a totally apt comparison, and we can we can also talk about connections with Scientology, too, because Hubbard was connected with Jack Parsons, who was a member of OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, yeah, we&#8217;ll put a pin in that. That&#8217;s a fun story, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, so Crowley receives this book in 1904, and declares the birth of a new Aeon, the Aeon of Horus, or the Aeon of the Child. And all the old religions are going to be swept away, and the world is going to be purified in fire, and there&#8217;s going to be a new age, basically. And Crowley is the prophet of this new age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And according to Crowley, he looked at this book and he was like, screw this. This is too crazy. I&#8217;m not interested in this. And so he kind of put it aside for a while, and he eventually came back to it and started taking it more seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tenets of the religion are, on the surface, fairly straightforward, but there&#8217;s actually a lot of depth to it. The two main tenets are do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and love is the law, love under will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law means that each person has a divinely ordained purpose in life. Really, what they have is they have a god inside of themselves and they don&#8217;t know it. And it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s hidden in the unconscious, according to Crowley. And it kind of signals to you in various ways what you ought to be doing with your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the way to the goal of a Thelemite, which is a practitioner of Thelema, is to get into contact with that inner divinity and to strengthen that contact through magic and meditation and to basically like shine the light of this inner God out onto the world to become, to become like God incarnate, essentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So sort of imagine like, imagine like a cross between like polytheism and Christianity and like New Age thought, right? Everybody becomes Jesus Christ of their own, like God kind of is how it&#8217;s supposed to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sounds like Mormonism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s really interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So It does seem like he was just redefining or just defining in a different way intuition of just understanding yourself more deeply and really paying attention to your intuitive thoughts, but naming it with a deity. It&#8217;s really interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, it&#8217;s part of it is definitely intuition. It&#8217;s a it&#8217;s like a power that he called Neschamah, which is which is a Kabbalistic term. And there&#8217;s sort of like a blurring in Thelema between what we ordinarily conceive of as like intuition or the unconscious and kind of like a higher intuitive power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that was actually kind of common for like early, like 20th century, like Carl Jung kind of toyed with similar ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But yeah, the idea was that you couldn&#8217;t, you weren&#8217;t going to come into understanding of it by ordinary means. In fact, the rational mind tends to like block out what this will is. That&#8217;s an idea that&#8217;s very resonant with a lot of contemporary spiritual, but not religious thinking. But in the context of a religious organization, it&#8217;s also a directive to not to suspend your critical faculties, which is a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It seems to me that this is where it would be like, this is attainable, but you need us. Did it feel very much like you need us to help you get there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, actually, that&#8217;s not the way that they get you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s really interesting. Thelema is \u2026 Most people who practice Thelema are solo practitioners. If you go out on the internet and look up the Thelema subreddit or the Thelema Facebook community, the overwhelming majority of those people are solitary practitioners, and they believe that you don&#8217;t need any kind of church or any kind of organization to do any of this, which is actually very different, I think, from how Crowley himself looked at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crowley, I think, was more of the opinion that if you really want to have that deep enlightenment, you have to join one of his organizations, but that&#8217;s generally not the view today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, with within OTO, on the surface, it&#8217;s far more individualistic and far more liberal sounding. So nobody tells you what Thelema means. Nobody tells you what the Gnostic mass means. Nobody tells you what the initiations mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re kind of, it&#8217;s all left up to you to interpret, which on the surface feels very empowering, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because it seems like there&#8217;s, um, an allowance for a diversity of opinions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reality in OTO is quite different because if you criticize the theological views of somebody who&#8217;s high-ranking, you will be branded a troublemaker and that is in fact what happened to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, so to make sure I&#8217;m understanding, you can be Thelema and not be OTO, but if you&#8217;re OTO, you are practicing Thelema?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s the idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In practice, OTO is not strict about it. They don&#8217;t make you, like, swear that you&#8217;re only a Thelemite. The reality is that people in OTO practice lots of different spiritual paths, but I think they primarily identify as Thelemites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay. Okay, got it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let&#8217;s talk about when you noticed things were a little bit off. You said the honeymoon phase lasted less than a year. So what are some the things that kind of wore off for you in the beginning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. In the beginning, it mostly just started as like drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like you start to notice that it&#8217;s sort of like a theater troupe where there&#8217;s just like, or maybe like a high school clique, I guess, where, you know, you just get people&#8217;s personalities are like unstable or overbearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there was no real sense of, okay, I&#8217;m having a problem with this person. Like the person who was my Minerval sponsor was a very like overbearing and kind controlling person and was harassing me with text messages. Like I had no idea what I was supposed to do about that. I had no idea what the, what the customs were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I brought it up to somebody who was higher degree, they brushed it off and said like, oh, it&#8217;s not a big deal. She probably just likes you or something like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So like right off the bat, there was this sense of people are just kind of wacky. They&#8217;ve got these strong personalities and it&#8217;s not clear like what you&#8217;re supposed to do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was sort of like the first stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think that what I was, what I was starting to see at that time, I didn&#8217;t have this word for it back then, but the word that I have for it now is enmeshment. It&#8217;s highly enmeshed dynamics in the sense that there&#8217;s no clear boundaries between people. If somebody gets upset, it becomes everybody else&#8217;s problem. And if you do something that upsets somebody else, there&#8217;s no clear sense of ownership over feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that in and of itself doesn&#8217;t make something a cult by any means. But it is fertile ground in which different types of control can start to be exerted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, definitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you feel like this was an all-encompassing part of your life? You talk about enmeshment. Does that mean&#8230; you were working with them and maybe you were living with some of the other members where you were really just totally enveloped in this group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s a really good question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So no, I was not living with anybody, although several of the members did actually cohabitate together, like even though they were in like, you know, their thirties or forties, which is a little, I didn&#8217;t think there was anything wrong with it, but in retrospect, it is kind of, it is kind of interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s enmeshed more in the sense that like \u2026 People, it becomes very tightly knit. Let&#8217;s put it that way. You spend a lot of time with people. You could have these like back-to-back events over weekends. Like, you know, we would be in there like Friday night for like a solstice ritual. And then Saturday we would be back to set up for like a second degree. And then the following week we&#8217;d be doing another batch of second degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then like a few weeks after that, it&#8217;s like we&#8217;re doing this other thing and it&#8217;s just like, you&#8217;re constantly in there, you&#8217;re seeing each other sometimes from, you know, early in the morning until late at night, or somebody has gotten into some financial trouble and they need to move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So everybody&#8217;s there to like, kind of, you know, help them load their truck. There&#8217;s this tightly knit quality to it, which is, again, there&#8217;s nothing bad about that in particular. But looking back on it now, I can see that that combined with like the spirituality and all of the kind of like the depth of that was going on, like I was being pulled further and further and further into something that was kind of, that was going to gradually, that was sort of gradually swallowing up and molding myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. So how long before you started moving up the ranks into leadership?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would say that, so there was moving up the ranks and then there was moving into leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So moving up the ranks happened pretty quickly. I took my Minerval in the summer of 2014. I took first degree that fall. I took second degree a year later. So that would have been fall of 2015. Third degree came like early 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Technically, you&#8217;re not a leader at that point. Leaders are technically more like, you know, like fifth degree, the lodge kind of entered into a crisis around the time that I was like a fourth degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I stepped into a leadership role at that point, I started taking a lot more ownership over things that were happening in the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I would, I would pinpoint like that as the point where I kind of switched over from being a consumer of OTO to somebody who was really taking ownership over the, over the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what qualifies one to move up to the next level?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it depends what degree you&#8217;re at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So basically, to move up through the degrees, you need to find two sponsors, you need to fill out an application, and you need to pay some money, an initiation fee. And the sponsors are basically people who are vouching for your character, saying that this person is a person of good reputation and honor. That is generally not difficult to do. There&#8217;s no like real clear cut and dry set standards on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And generally speaking, if you&#8217;re like well-liked in the local community, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s easy to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s true up all the way through the Man of Earth degrees. So zero, first, second, third, fourth, and PI or perfect initiate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you hit PI or perfect initiate, to go further than that, you have to, it&#8217;s called an invitational degree. So you don&#8217;t fill out an application, you don&#8217;t get two sponsors. Somebody who is upper degree has to basically say this person is ready to come up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And all of the degrees from there on out are invitational degrees of that type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you have to pay money each time you move up, or how do they make their money? Are you constantly donating? How does that work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, so there&#8217;s two kinds of financial contributions in OTO. There&#8217;s contributions to the local body. And those monies go usually if the local body has a 24\/7 space, like we had a space that was in a shopping center, basically, that we rented. Most of the money, the overwhelming amount of money goes toward just renting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then a portion of every time, you pay something called Grand Lodge dues every year, which is like a nominal amount. I think it starts out as like maybe $20. And I think by the time I quit, I was paying, I want to say like 200 bucks a year to Grand Lodge, 250 bucks, something like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not like Scientology where you&#8217;re coughing over like, you know, a quarter of a million dollars. They&#8217;re not laughing their way to the bank. That&#8217;s not the particular kind of exploitation that&#8217;s involved here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But yeah, that&#8217;s how they&#8217;re making their money largely from their members, from membership dues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That makes sense. So I know we were going to get into a little bit of the rituals themselves, just so people kind of had an idea of what you&#8217;re actually doing in this lodge. Now, this is completely up to you. Anything that you want to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One question I did have before we get into that is when I was doing some research on OTO, it seemed like a lot of it was Aleister Crowley. Crowley. Is it Crowley or Crowley?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crowley. Long \u201co\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Aleister Crowley, sex magic or stuff that would lean into that, which I wondered if that was the case for OTO because it seems like that could easily be exploited with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To put it mildly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>OTO, the main purpose of OTO when it was founded was really to serve as kind of a, like a repository and a kind of laboratory for using the ninth degree secret, which is like the central sex magic secret of OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And this was a secret that came from a previous 19th century group called the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, which was actually an American group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Aleister Crowley became very interested in the ninth degree secret because he was already doing sex magic of a particular kind in AA. And so he combined his own sex magic theory with the OTO secret, the first initiation rituals that you go through, the first six have nothing at all to do with sex magic whatsoever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And as I said, the overwhelming majority of OTO members are in those lower degrees. So they&#8217;ve never been exposed to any secret teachings on, you know, sex magic or anything like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The initiations that you initially go through serve a few functions, they&#8217;re meant to basically present Thelema to you in a kind of initiatory, like kind of quasi-Masonic context. They&#8217;re meant to help you understand the nature of your soul, is how Crowley described it. They&#8217;re meant to knit you into the fabric of the group, and so basically make sure that you are self-disciplined and continent and obedient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the main things, one of the main functions of those early initiations is to get you used to the idea of authority. The fact that it&#8217;s a hierarchical, top-down organization, and that you are subjected to military discipline from the minute that you come in the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you get through those higher levels, they&#8217;re introducing the sex magic, and you&#8217;re expected to go along with it and be enthusiastic about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, so after you finish the Man of Earth degrees, which are the first six ones, then you go into the lover degrees. Lover degrees are five, six, and seven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I got up to fifth degree, which is kind of like right in the middle of the ladder, and Crowley called it the natural stopping place of most people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So in other words, from Crowley&#8217;s perspective, most people who join OTO should become fifth degrees eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s no sex magic in those degrees. In the fifth degree, it&#8217;s about social charity. So the idea is that it&#8217;s supposed to be like the foundation of&#8230; an ideal society that&#8217;s based upon the teachings of the book of the law and upon Thelema. So it&#8217;s about the sort of age-old Rosicrucian idea of a true brotherhood of man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reality is obviously quite different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After that, once you hit sixth degree and start going up, then the theory of sex magic is introduced to you. but in kind of like highly, highly symbolic form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you get to 8th degree, that&#8217;s where practical sex magic starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then in order to get to 9th degree, you have to be able to guess the 9th degree secret. And only people who have figured out the 9th degree secret on their own are then admitted into the 9th degree, at which point you&#8217;re given all of these papers and um, practical instructions on, on how to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that&#8217;s sort of like the general scheme of ninth degree is the highest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s the 10th degree. The 10th degree is the head is the grandmaster, a national grandmaster. So the person who runs OTO in the United States is a, is a 10th degree. It&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s an administrative degree, basically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s, um, an 11th degree, which was associated. It&#8217;s not technically like an administrative level in OTO. It&#8217;s more of like a spiritual practice of using anal sex for magical purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then there&#8217;s the 12th degree, who is the outer head of the order. That&#8217;s the person who runs the whole thing. That&#8217;s the person who holds Aleister Crowley&#8217;s office, basically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So at the top, it&#8217;s all about sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, the whole thing. To sum it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s always about sex, damn it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s early 20th century, so people were, back then people were, there was, you know, there was this growing sense, Carl Jung shared this opinion too, that like, if we, that we have a kind of memory inside of our blood, inside of our bodies of a kind of primordial religion. And so to get closer to your instincts and to get closer to God are like the same thing for a lot of people around this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And Aleister Crowley was a deep believer in this idea. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How were you exposed to the upper levels? &#8216;Cause you know about them, but you never actually joined them. Did you see it happening or did people tell you about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So there&#8217;s a lot of information available in books and online. Like any of your listeners, if they are, you know, industrious can go online and find the papers of various kinds. A lot of the upper degree stuff is highly, it&#8217;s written in a highly symbolic language. So like if you read 8th and 9th degree papers, it&#8217;s not like you&#8217;re reading like a manual for how to do sex magic. You&#8217;re reading these treatises on theology that are couched in like alchemical language. It invites a lot of contemplation, weirdly enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not just about&#8230;you know, do this thing with your penis, and then she does that, and then you do this thing. It&#8217;s not like a cookbook sort of thing, like a lot of people think. It&#8217;s actually a lot more mystical, which for a long time gave me the impression that there was something deep about it because it was so obscure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is that true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting. So, in retrospect, I don&#8217;t think it is that deep now, at the end of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it presents as deep to get you to suspend your disbelief in order to engage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t think that was Aleister Crowley&#8217;s intention. However, I think that that&#8217;s the function of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay. And I guess I want to say here too, that I&#8217;m not going to say that I don&#8217;t think sex is magical because I do think it is. I think beautiful things can come of it. It can be a very sacred act. So it&#8217;s not to like yuck somebody&#8217;s yum when it comes to sex magic, like do you boo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the reason we bring this up and the reason I wanted to talk about it is because I know it probably leads into some of the more nefarious things going on that did produce victims and did put itself in the category of cult when you have people exploiting others in this highly, highly, highly vulnerable space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Highly vulnerable, highly hierarchical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you&#8217;re mixing, you&#8217;re mixing mysticism and a suspension of rational thought with hierarchy with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And obedience and sexuality and transgression. It&#8217;s almost an equation. It&#8217;s like, that&#8217;s the left side of the equation. It&#8217;s like, equals something bad is going to happen from that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right. So let&#8217;s talk about how that actually happened or how you saw that unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. So I think the point that I \u2026 I started to realize that something was really wrong was probably in 2017. This was kind of the beginning of a story that unfolded over the better part of my entire time in OTO, believe it or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was a man in our local body in Seattle. He was high-ranking, a sixth degree, which is pretty high up. I&#8217;m just going to call him Adam just to give him a name. And he was the local body master at the time, actually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the spring of that year, he had a very public meltdown after his girlfriend broke up with him. He posted online threatening suicide. He posted pictures of his cut up arm on Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He sent pictures of his cut up arm to his girlfriend and maybe to her family, I think, I don&#8217;t remember exactly. He was, the response of national leadership to this was that \u2026&nbsp; He was asked to take down the picture of his cut-up arm, and he was temporarily removed from his position as local body master.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, he was reinstated in that position just a few days later while he was on 24\/7 side watch. So our community was sitting with him around the clock, and in some cases, people were having to climb in his window of his house to make sure he was still alive. or to keep him from sending harassing text messages to his ex-girlfriend. And at the same time, this person was put in charge of the safety of our community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shortly after that, he stepped down from that position. But the problems only got worse from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over the course of that year, I kept hearing about and receiving complaints from women saying that Adam was making them uncomfortable. He was putting pressure on them to come over to his house to keep him company, and that if they refused, or tried to get out of it, he would guilt trip them into not meeting his emotional needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I reported this to the local body master at the time, who was best friends with Adam, and he did nothing about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I started going to other upper degrees to try to get some help to see if something could be done about this. And I was told that OTO doesn&#8217;t really have mechanisms for dealing with this sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eventually, a complaint was filed and Adam was suspended. But he was able to appeal the decision and was actually reinstated by an international body where he had a lot of allies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While all of this is happening, fast forward to 2022, an upper degree member from outside of this area came in and did his own investigation. And over a period of about three or four months, he interviewed 20 people and he uncovered allegations of sexual assault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Women basically saying that they were waking up to Adam penetrating them or taking them like they were waking up in the shower with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That kind of stuff, like accepting a drink from him and then not remembering anything else that happened. There was kind of a similar MO that kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He is still in the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When that information was passed along to leadership, they did nothing with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They reinstated him, and as I was leaving, I don&#8217;t know if this is true, I heard this, but as I was leaving, I heard that Adam was attending events again in OTO, but that he had to have a chaperone with him, that he had an OTO-appointed chaperone who would follow him around at these events, I guess to make sure he didn&#8217;t spike drinks or spike too many drinks. I don&#8217;t really, I don&#8217;t know what the point of that was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And this is a man who is at the upper levels, upper degrees, where they are practicing sex magic. So he still has access to women in that way or in those spiritual sacred circles and sacred spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this guy was a sixth degree, which is high up. Once you&#8217;re at sixth degree, you are close to untouchable by that point. Um, it&#8217;s very hard to do something about a sixth degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They don&#8217;t actually practice the sex magic. That&#8217;s not like technically a sex magic degree. It&#8217;s considered a military body, weirdly enough. They&#8217;re supposed to have like a kind of military devotion to the head of OTO in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, he had access to all, all men in OTO have access to women. and they use that access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s very common in OTO for upper degree men in their, you know, 50s or 60s to be dating women that are like 30 years younger than them. And I&#8217;m not knocking age differences in relationships per se, you know, people should do what they&#8217;re going to do. But I, I don&#8217;t have any problem with it morally. I will only point out that it seems highly unlikely to me that a lot of these men would be like dating the women that they are if they didn&#8217;t have power in OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Exactly. It&#8217;s the power differential. It&#8217;s not necessarily the age thing that&#8217;s wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like you&#8217;re saying, it&#8217;s because they have more power over these women and these women feel like they are some sort of higher up and it&#8217;s probably an honor to date someone at that level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in OTO, if you are upper degree, if you are a sixth degree or above, you do have power. You don&#8217;t have power in the sense that you can say to somebody who is like a second degree, Hey, go fetch me an egg roll, or something like that. It&#8217;s not that kind of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They have power in the sense that they can get away with almost anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As long as they are loyal, as long as they never criticize leadership or speak out publicly about OTO, they can get away with pretty much anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you have that thumb ring, which is the symbol of the sixth degree, you could shoot the proverbial person in Fifth Avenue and get away with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it is real. It is real power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I tell people, when you go to these conferences and you&#8217;re around all these people, do not accept a drink. Do not be alone in a room with somebody who&#8217;s sixth degree. Not because they&#8217;re going to do something to you. But like, what would you do if they did? Like, you have literally no recourse at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s incredibly dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is. It&#8217;s incredibly dangerous. And people don&#8217;t realize how dangerous it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this is what opened your eyes, this instance of Adam, and you started to reassess your position in the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The way that, yes. The way that I started to reassess my position in the group, though, was that I became more committed to reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So here&#8217;s the thing. When you&#8217;re in OTO and all of these crazy things are happening, when you&#8217;ve got the sexual harassment going on or the stalking or the blowing up or somebody losing their cool or ranting or whatever it is, the way your mind naturally interprets it is that you think it&#8217;s a one-off thing. Like even if it happens a lot, you still have a tendency to think of it as like bad apples and you trust in the fundamental goodness of the organization in large part because you remember your honeymoon period and you remember how it felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so my first response to the whole ordeal with Adam wasn&#8217;t OTO has a rape culture problem. My response to it was, oh, we have a problem. We have a problem with a rapist. We have to get rid of this person, and I know how we can fix this situation, okay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What we have to do is we have to agree to these basic sets of rules, and we have to be serious about them, and we have to structure our community this way, and we have to do this kind of education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So my mind went into, like, I plugged in, I turned into like a little shape reformer and I plugged right into OTO and there&#8217;s a place for that person in OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the problem with that is, you know how I described a moment ago how OTO is like an organism and we&#8217;re all cells in it, right? The problem with that is OTO invites particular shapes to come in. One of them is reformer. If you don&#8217;t have to happen to fit one of those shapes, you don&#8217;t belong there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what I discovered over time, and it was a very slow process for me to wake up to this, is that you start to lose yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So much of your energy goes into how you&#8217;re going to function within this thing that you actually become fundamentally disconnected from your true will, weirdly enough, from that thing that Thelema says you&#8217;re supposed to be so, so dedicated to. And I&#8217;ve seen it time and again in so many different examples of it. People become, some people fit in by being fawning. Some people fit in by being helpers all the time, some by being the listeners, some by being the rebel or the problem child. Weirdly enough, there&#8217;s a place for that person in OTO as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For me, it was like waste management. It was like garbage disposal, basically, like, I&#8217;m going to fix this thing. We&#8217;re going to get in here. We&#8217;re going to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so that&#8217;s the path that I got on from, I want to say, 2018, well, up until about the time that I that I left in in 2025 when I would say that I reclaimed myself and that&#8217;s how I that&#8217;s how I got out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wow. So okay, this is a big deal for you coming out so shortly after too, to expose all this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But first, I know we were going to talk about when you actually said that you wanted to leave and how quickly they switched and turned on you. So let&#8217;s talk about that first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, it was there was a process to it. So where do I want to begin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because it&#8217;s so interesting because when I look back over it, I can see that I was going to, I could see now in retrospect that I was going to leave OTO, that the seeds for it were set like maybe three years prior. But we&#8217;ll just go from the point where I said that I was going to step down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So after I served as two years as local body master, which was basically, I was in charge of running the day-to-day operations of the local body here in Seattle. And in the second year that I was doing it, there were just mounting problems. I got along really well with all of the new people that were coming in. There was a lot of interest, a lot of new people. I was bringing new people up into officer roles. I had pretty good relationships with all of them. The work was fulfilling. It was exciting. It was fun. It was fresh. But the upper degrees had to basically undermine the work in one form or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And finally, an incident happened that just, you know, pushed me like one step too far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I wrestled with it over the course of several weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then I decided, I spoke to the president of the Electoral College, which is the Electoral College appointed me to this position. And so I set up a meeting with the president of the Electoral College, and I described to her everything that I had experienced over the course of the last year, the undermining, the back channeling, the overreach, the surveillance of my private life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And she was appalled and understood completely why I wanted to step down. So she and I made a plan that I was going to serve another 45 days in the role. And that we were in that time going to affect a smooth transition to somebody else. We didn&#8217;t know who it was going to be yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I said to her, okay, give me a couple days to talk to my junior officers. I felt like I owed them an explanation from my mouth, like why I was stepping down from the position. And I said, then we&#8217;ll move from there and we can start meeting with the upper degrees and we can figure out somebody who can take this over from me because this isn&#8217;t like, it&#8217;s not good for me and it doesn&#8217;t seem like it&#8217;s good for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it was done in a perfectly, you know, legitimate fashion. I met with my junior officers. They were really upset that I was stepping down, but they were also understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The following morning, I sent out an e-mail to the local body. I said, here&#8217;s the situation. I took over this role with a commitment to values of safety, transparency, and accountability. I don&#8217;t believe that I can do that anymore. I don&#8217;t think that those values are compatible with what I&#8217;m doing. I&#8217;m going to be stepping down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ve made a plan. I&#8217;m going to serve another 45 days and we&#8217;re going to transition out. So I was completely, you know, transparent about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within hours, nobody called me on the phone, but within hours, the upper degrees in this area went to Sabazius, who was the National Grand Master in the United States, and got him to remove me immediately that day and hand over the reins to my deputy who had served as local body master before me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was a surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The following day, that person that they handed the local body over to came over to my house. He called me up first. He didn&#8217;t just show up at my door. He showed up at my door ostensibly to pick up some paperwork from me. I gave him the paperwork at my door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At that point, he also asked me for my bank card as though I was going to take like our Chase debit card with like $2,000 on it. And I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t know what. He seized my bank card and he asked me not to come around the lodge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the community that I had spent 11 years building and protecting, I was now no longer welcome in. And I was treated like a threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After that, there was, it was pretty heavy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around that time, I filed a complaint. I filed a 100-page complaint with the National Grandmaster in which I described in detail various forms of institutional breakdown and dysfunction that I had witnessed over a period of about 12 months. There were 70 pages of documentation included with it, including text messages, emails, meeting memos, basically showing how all of these upper degrees had not only undermined my leadership over the course of a year, but had undermined the principles of OTO, the principles that OTO was supposed to stand for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it was all in their own words. Like 30 pages of it was my words, 70 pages of it was theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was like, it was overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While I was in the middle of putting that report together, they stripped me of my access to necessary files to complete the report. Thankfully, I had made backups, but they actually pulled my file access while I was in the middle of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They knew that I was preparing the report because I said I was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I turned in the report. They came back nine days later and said, actually, everybody&#8217;s doing a good job. We don&#8217;t see anything here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s like in the show Westworld, when they hand the photograph of like Times Square to the Android, and it&#8217;s like, doesn&#8217;t look like anything to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And they came back in nine days. Like, OTO doesn&#8217;t do anything in nine days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I saw the response, I literally laughed out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also, they carbon copied one of the people that I filed the complaint against when they wrote back to me, which I thought was a nice touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I literally laughed out loud when I saw this response from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took about 10 or 15 minutes and I wrote a resignation letter and I sent it, and that was the end of 11 years of dedicated service that afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wow. So do you think that OTO has a leadership problem, or do you think that the way it&#8217;s set up and the tenets that it follows, ultimately, it doesn&#8217;t matter who was leading, it would still end up being very much like a cult?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s structural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the people who are running it, especially the person in the United States, is I found out that he is very unstable and very cruel. I found that out after I quit and spoke out and saw what he did to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But even if he were to die today or just decide to step down today, the only people that would be there to take over are people that he has brought up. All the people below him, it&#8217;s invitational. It&#8217;s by invitation only. Like, you don&#8217;t get there if you&#8217;re a person who has courage. You don&#8217;t get there if you&#8217;re a person who asks sharp questions. You don&#8217;t get there if you&#8217;re a person who even rocks the boat or does anything that makes them uncomfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s set up in such a way that even if the top leadership all walked off today, the only people that are waiting in the wings have already been filtered essentially to be the same as, to have the same values as the leaders, to not be critical, not ask questions, not have courage, to constantly ask for permission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s a system at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think that&#8217;s the thing that really needs to be driven home about OTO. It&#8217;s not a few bad apples. It is it it really is an organism, as Aleister Crowley envisioned it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But all it produces is is corruption and abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like, that&#8217;s the main product of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what happened when you resigned? Did you hear anything from the members about what the upper leadership was saying about you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. So I heard quite a few things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Probably the most noteworthy is that after I left the National Grandmaster, the person who runs OTO in the United States, spent 40 minutes, I was told, of a national meeting ranting bitterly about me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He didn&#8217;t address any of the criticisms that I had made about OTO, or any of the problems that I had pointed out, or even so much as a single word about OTO that I had mentioned in my letter or in anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said that I was mentally ill,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was suffering spiritual psychosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My ego couldn&#8217;t handle OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was an envious person that multiple people said that I was a grifter who was using OTO to enrich himself, which is insane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you knew anything about like, I mean, it&#8217;s just, it&#8217;s so ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said he took, he took my, he took my online business. I have like an online coaching business. He put it up on the screen. And he mocked my business, which is not, it&#8217;s not an OTO thing. It&#8217;s just like my business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He&#8217;s like, look, how this person writes. Oh, he&#8217;s charging $300 for the, please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He took, he took screenshots that people had sent him of my Facebook events for non-OTO events and put them up on the screen and said, who writes like this? Somebody who I thought had been a friend of mine submitted a memo about me, about a private event that I, a party that I invited him to. And he submitted a memo on me, and that memo was put up on the screen. And the national grandmaster scornfully read it out loud and said, can you believe this? Look at this. Look what kind of person this is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And like people would try to interrupt and be like, Or to like, ask a question and he would be like, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And he would put more stuff up on the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it went on like this for 40 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And he mentioned the names of people, upper degree people who had been friends with me, saying that like, they said he&#8217;s changed, he&#8217;s lost his mind. He&#8217;s just in it for the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So like, it was like a coordinated, it was like an immediate inside coordinated response of let&#8217;s destroy this person&#8217;s reputation immediately to just cut this off at the root so nobody listens to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Was that the reason you decided to speak out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That wasn&#8217;t the reason, no. It was a motivator for sure. Because certainly once I heard that they were doing that, it made me realize just how dangerous this organization is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reasons that I spoke out were complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I had to sort of sum it up neatly, I spent 11 years serving this organization. I wasn&#8217;t just a consumer of it. I wasn&#8217;t just hanging out and like going to tarot classes, you know, or bringing a casserole to potluck. I was leading it. I was reforming it. I was speaking with victims. I was advocating for changing the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also had a public face I made YouTube videos about it. I wrote articles about it online, positive articles that made it appear deep and made it appear rational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I served as a local body master. I stood at the door. I was the point of contact saying, come in. This is safe. You can have a safe, challenging experience of Thelema here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I did that for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My conscience wouldn&#8217;t allow me to just walk away from that and be like, oops, I guess I was wrong. I couldn&#8217;t do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like, what was I going to like? I guess I was just going to like start making videos about, I don&#8217;t know, basket weaving or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You know, it&#8217;s like I had a public face and I felt like I owed it to my conscience and to everybody that I had spoken to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like people, people e-mail me now and say, \u201cI joined OTO in part because I read your book or because I heard your lecture. Like, I don&#8217;t understand what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I never try to get these people to leave OTO. But what I tell them is, no matter when it is, whether it&#8217;s a month from now or a year from now or 10 years from now, if you need me for anything, you reach out and let me know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because they read, they read my book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like, I don&#8217;t know, I can&#8217;t, like, I feel like I owe it to people to, to be there. I made it appear like something that I know now It wasn&#8217;t and can never be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s why I spoke out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what was it do you think about the group that kept you blinded to the truths while you were in it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s such a good question because it&#8217;s not just one thing, it&#8217;s several things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are external factors that have to do with the way the organization itself is set up. And then there are internal psychological factors where we blind ourselves, where we kind of set ourselves up to misinterpret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The external factors are that it&#8217;s a secret society. It&#8217;s opaque by design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So most people, for the majority of time that they&#8217;re in OTO, they see a particular face of it. They see their local body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the way OTO is organized, it&#8217;s organized in the local bodies. Like the national organization doesn&#8217;t have its own building that everybody like goes to. It&#8217;s not like it&#8217;s not like Mormonism this way. They don&#8217;t have a big palace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the way you&#8217;re going to encounter OTO is not as OTO per se. You&#8217;re going to encounter Horizon Lodge or Sekhet-Maat Lodge or one of these other local groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And from your from your perspective on the ground, what you see is, first you experience all the stuff through the honeymoon stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you&#8217;re seeing the symbolism and the potlucks and the people coming together and helping out and making friends. That&#8217;s what you see and that&#8217;s what you experience. And so that&#8217;s what you think it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then as time goes on, you start to see exceptions to that. And your mind registers it as that, as exceptions. Bad apple, one-off event, a blow-up, a problem person, but things will be better, they&#8217;ll get back to normal after this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that&#8217;s sort of the second stage that you go through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I started to see a different aspect of it once I started to see the disciplinary side as applied to Adam, the person Adam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then you start to see that there&#8217;s this like opaque, there&#8217;s this like separate opaque disciplinary process for upper degrees where they&#8217;re handled with kid gloves and it&#8217;s all done behind closed doors and you can&#8217;t get any information about anything. And then another side of OTO starts to open up for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s what I call the OTO Mushroom Culture: people are kept in the dark and they&#8217;re fed shit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you realize that that&#8217;s how the national organization relates to the people on the ground, that there&#8217;s this other level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And as you start to rise the ranks, and especially as you get to fifth degree, and especially as you become a local body master, you start to encounter that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because I&#8217;ve heard this from a lot of different local body masters. They come in with a commitment to good things like, hey, we&#8217;re going to have a safe space. This is going to be safe. We&#8217;re going to be respectful to one another here. And the upper degrees are like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. But the footnote, the sort of like subtext to it is, as long as it doesn&#8217;t apply to us. or our pets, our teachers&#8217; pets that we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so that&#8217;s where you start to see that kind of two-tier aspect of OTO, that there&#8217;s one set of rules that applies to people on the ground, and then there&#8217;s a whole separate set of rules that applies to people who are sixth degree and above, or the people that are their pets, as I refer to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s something that unfolds very gradually in a staged way over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it seems like you have a pretty good retrospect version of what you went through and how you&#8217;re able to reclassify it now as cult-like behavior, manipulation, coercion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I mean, you haven&#8217;t been out for very long. And I know through talking, it&#8217;s been a period of time that you&#8217;ve been slowly unraveling, but where have you landed now that you&#8217;re out and you&#8217;re looking back and you&#8217;re doing videos, you&#8217;re taking accountability for bringing people in and trying to share the real side, the raw side of OTO. Where have you landed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. So, I mean, this is really the culmination of a process that started like a few years ago of reclaiming myself and leaving OTO accelerated that process for me. That was really, that was really the turning point for me with, with OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t really a question of like, oh, I have finally seen something about OTO that has like shattered my illusions. It was more like I was put into a position where I could either be loyal to myself or I could abandon myself. And when I saw it in those stark terms, I went for myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s when OTO rejected me is the way that I look at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the hardest step was the first step. That was when I stepped down as local body master. That was the step of terror. And the only reason that I was able to take the step of terror is because I literally felt like I was going to die if I stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But then after that, every step just got easier and easier, and it kind of went faster and faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And like I said, you know, when I heard back on that complaint that I filed, I just kind of laughed and I was like, what are you going to do? Wrote my resignation letter. And for the first week that I was out of OTO, it was like an altered state of consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s the only way I know how to describe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was almost as if I took like a giant metal helmet up off my head like this, like a 50-pound helmet, and put it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I was like, whoa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I didn&#8217;t know what to do with myself because I had been putting 20 hours of free labor into this thing every week for years. And so I would just walk and walk and walk for hours every day and just kind of marvel at this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t altered consciousness. It was just normal consciousness. I didn&#8217;t know what it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was just like- It was unburdened consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was unburdened consciousness because for the first time in years, people weren&#8217;t spying on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They weren&#8217;t taking screenshots of, you know, my events and tattling on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They weren&#8217;t writing reports on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t looking over my shoulder or worrying that my tone was wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was nobody digging a hole behind me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nobody was abusing me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so it like that was a big adjustment that went on for like two weeks and.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then there was the period where I made videos about OTO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I was waking up every day to being attacked by people, basically waking up every single day, being called a piece of shit for like 12 weeks straight, like pretty much every single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I&#8217;m glad for it because one, the information is out there and now nobody can do anything about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And number two, every attack that I received just proved to me and to everybody else that this is a cult. Because normal people don&#8217;t act that way when somebody says something critical about their club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so, but eventually I kind of got to the point where I was like, okay, I&#8217;ve said enough about OTO. It&#8217;s time to move into the next phase of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And where I am now is that I&#8217;ve kind of rediscovered that childlike sense of mystery and wonder that I mentioned. back at the beginning of our conversation and marveling at existence and, you know, having like interesting memories about childhood as well, like staring up at the sky and experiencing wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But like, I&#8217;m mixing it now, not with like esoteric mysticism, but with like philosophy. And I&#8217;m coming up with tools, like philosophically informed tools to help people basically keep their sense of self together in like unstable or chaotic situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like I realized that like for me to have made it all the way through OTO as long as I did, and even before that to like previous things in my life going far back, like, I&#8217;m pretty resilient. Like I haven&#8217;t been jaded by all of this at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s like, there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s like, I realized it&#8217;s not just luck, there&#8217;s a certain set of skills in it. Like I was I went through a lot of pain, but I was awake through so much of it. And I allowed it to land. I allowed it to transform me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My goal now is to put that into words for people and to help them get some of that strength for themselves so that wherever they are, maybe not necessarily in a cult, maybe in a bad relationship or a bad family structure, or maybe they&#8217;re just standing face to face with the crazy world that we&#8217;re in now and want to be able to put their feet down somewhere. Like, I want to help people do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, and it&#8217;s a hard thing to do when you&#8217;re trying to figure out not only who you are, but trying to deconstruct the previous notions, previous indoctrination from whatever it was you were a part of. It&#8217;s really hard to distinguish yourself from these programmed ideas and to unweave all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Enmeshment, I think you said earlier is such a great word of how do I take apart all of these fibers and figure out what is me and what is what they wanted me to be, or whoever it is, the cult of relationship, as you said, there&#8217;s so many different scenarios there, and really stand in your own power to find that individual sovereignty without these other influences. And so that is a really good tool be able to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, it&#8217;s, it was really my commitment to that, which I think made me see what OTO was and make me see, like, why I had to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because I&#8217;ve always been very committed to understanding myself and understanding the world. But in my own case, that transformation started when I was inside of OTO. And it really started with breaking that sense of enmeshment, and really, like really getting in touch with my own boundaries. My own capacity to say no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And beneath all of that, like a much deeper longing, a longing for something bigger than, you know, a high school clique with an authoritarian organization sitting on top of it, basically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. Yeah. And seeing it for what it is too. And now understanding more clearly how these fun, cool communities or groups can actually be more devious and nefarious at the top once you get involved. And also knowing that it&#8217;s okay to get involved in fun, cool, interesting groups, people who have like-minded ideas, as long as you&#8217;re aware of the signs that may pop up, and if they do pop up, you can choose to leave or choose what to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So&#8230;It&#8217;s tricky because I never want to be like, don&#8217;t ever go look for community. Don&#8217;t ever find a cool club because&#8211; Stay inside. Yeah, it&#8217;s hard, right? Because things can get culty so fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so that&#8217;s part of what we try to do here is just to help people see the red flags from other people&#8217;s perspectives so that if something does pop up and they have that weird feeling in their stomach, they can go, hold on, this kind of sounds like that love bombing that they talk about at C2C or something that feels off, they can wreck recognize it instead of ignoring it and just be more aware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I feel like awareness truly is the key to keeping yourself centered and focused and not getting swayed in either direction or not being controlled because of course, we&#8217;re always going to be swayed by what&#8217;s around us, but not being controlled to the point of losing your sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this has been such a great conversation, James. Thanks for coming on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I need your Linda, listen moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Linda, listen, I know that it seems scary to leave the high control environment that you&#8217;re in now. You have no idea what is on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is there anything even there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m gonna tell you what&#8217;s there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re waiting for yourself on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Be courageous, have heart, take the leap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re waiting for yourself there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, I love that. What is on the other side of the cult?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, let&#8217;s tell everybody how they can find you and support you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I have a YouTube channel called The Turning of the Sky. You can find me there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can find all of my videos about OTO there and my new videos that I am making about resilience and modern life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I also have a Patreon called The Turning of the Sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And yeah, you can find me in those places. Those are the places that I am the most often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perfect. Any social media handles like Instagram or TikTok?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, I&#8217;m on, yeah, I&#8217;m on X as LapisMercurii, L-A-P-I-S-M-E-R-C-U-R-I-I, and I&#8217;m on Facebook as Turning Sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thanks so much, James. Any other final thoughts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>JAMES<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SHELISE<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, absolutely. It&#8217;s been interesting learning about these new groups and finding other ways that people have figured out to control the masses and end up just having sex and control and power is just like never ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yes, I&#8217;m always happy to receive submissions from new groups from people who are trying to get the word out about something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It seems like you are a whistleblower, maybe one of the only ones with this group, and so I&#8217;m happy that you reached out to us so that that we can help people become more aware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if they are in this group and it doesn&#8217;t feel culty, at least keep your eyes open in case you notice the turning point of when it does become culty for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So thank you guys so much for watching. Leave those words of encouragement down below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or if you have any experiences with anything similar, any other groups that you think that we should cover, please let us know in the comments, especially if you have a specific person you would like to recommend. We love your suggestions. And that&#8217;s the best way to support the show, interacting with the post in any way, shape or form. It&#8217;s It&#8217;s truly the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you want to support further monetarily, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash cults to consciousness. And we have some merch at cults to consciousness.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have a short clips channel if you&#8217;re interested in 8 to 10 minute clips of our previous guests. And then you can decide if you want to dive further into their story. You can check that out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everything will be in the description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you like this video, I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m going to link. We&#8217;ll let Jonathan figure it out. Do more down here below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And until next time, follow your highest excitement, be conscious, and be well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interview with the Cults to Consciousness Podcast about my experiences inside Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) Transcript Intro JAMES There&#8217;s this doorway in front of you, and it&#8217;s charged with these symbols, and you&#8217;re going to cross through this thing, and you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s on the other side, but there&#8217;s other people there, and you&#8217;re&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,506,505,515,516,67,66,488,487,2],"class_list":["post-2310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aleister-crowley","tag-cult-recovery","tag-cults","tag-cults-to-consciousness","tag-interview","tag-ordo-templi-orientis","tag-oto","tag-oto-high-control-group-2","tag-oto-high-control-group","tag-thelema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2310"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2314,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions\/2314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}