The First Rites

Many moons ago back in the early eighties, my wife Meryl and I performed in the first American batch of the Rites of Eleusis, which were put where put on by Shandra. Meryl and I were at all the entire first batch of rituals. I myself played Sol and Meryl, Scorpio Apophis; Grady played Bez, and I must say that having Grady dance on my coffin was a singular experience. I remember at one point in the Sol ritual that heat in the room grew intense and it was as if a beam of molten gold light entered the room through the window. I was standing there in my white robe and everything was quiet and still and all I could do was bask in the golden light, and feel the power and glory and be grateful, as it was a kind of peace and repose in the center of the maelstrom.

We played other parts in the various Rites, and we were in all the Rites through Luna. I remember being Ganymede in the Rite of Jupiter. I remember being a Centuar and playing Mercury in the Rite of Mercury. (Or was it Virgo?) I remember a lot of odd occurances, like lightning happening outside the window the night before the Rite of Jupiter. A hawk circled the house all day during the Mercury Rite. A sword slid off the altar in the Rite of Mars. There were poltergiest knocks at one point in the Rite of Luna. A lot of other strange happenings seemed to be swirling in and around the whole event.

Meryl and I had been a priest and priestess team at the Grand Lodge for two years before, so even though we had no idea what we were in for, the energy was potent, and we just channeled it as it kept building and building. At one point -- I believe it was after the Rite of Sol -- in the middle of the night we performed the Gnostic Mass. Boy, that was bizarre. I can't for the life of me imagine why we did that extra added performance, except that I think it was Shandra's idea. After going through a whole day's ritual, it was like we were going into overdrive at some Olympic marathon. It got a bit weird, I must say.

To this day I still feel the magick energy from the Rites reverberating. It's like we are still performing them on some level. We always think about those days and compare events in our daily lives to the experiences we had while doing them. We still have powerful psychic experiences. Meryl had a recent experience where she felt that she was communicating with Shandra's spirit. I remember that I had a dream about Shandra where she appeared in a white robe. I found out a few days later that she had died at the same moment I woke from the dream. Last night, Meryl and I were talking about Crowley and whether he communicates with us, and a little while later Meryl saw an object of light, the colors purple and green, pink and blue, with a small rotating star in the middle of it. She was watching it float across the room as I walked in, and was looking at something I could not see and telling me about it. At other times we have both experienced balls of light. One time we both had the same dream at the same time: we both heard a voice saying, "It was carved out of the desert sand, do you understand?" And we both woke up saying "Yes!" This happened not too long after the Rites or maybe right around that time.

At any rate/rite, we left the Grand Lodge not too long after the Rites and have been on our own ever since. I am not going to go into the reasons for our departure from the Outer Order, only to say that there is the long story and the short story, and the long and the short of it is: things got a bit confused and weird, and personalities and politics are always in the mix. We are Thelemites, and having had almost twenty years retrospective, it's like we never left. I cannot explain that here, now, if there is any sense of historical continuity in O.T.O. then Meryl and I have our place in that history. Nothing can change that! 'World without end' and in the eternal return of things perhaps it's a very minor footnote indeed, but nevertheless, in the short history of O.T.O. since Crowley passed, I feel that those first Rites since Aleister himself performed them started a very important tradition in modern Thelema. I am proud to say we played our parts.

Please if you have any questions, ask away!

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