Some thirty-five years ago, before the public rise of the Caliphate O.T.O. in California, a djinni was let out of a bottle in Great Britain. It's a cryptic djinni, an incomplete djinni, a sometimes inaccurate djinni, one that has caused no end of arguments, deceptions, debates, and misinformed fools. Such are the natures of djinni, as any careful reading of the Tale of a Thousand Nights and a Night will inform.
In 1972, certain manuscripts were borrowed from private collections and copies of others alledgedly stolen from the Warburg collection were provided to Mr. Francis X. King, a researcher of no small fame in his native Great Britain, who had, among other things previously published a collection of the "Flying Rolls" of the Golden Dawn under the title of "Astral Projection, Ritual Magic, and Alchemy" and the decidedly more racy "Sexuality, Magic and Perversion." Mr. King's motives were supposedly genuine; he was reportedly trying to provide to modern students of the occult such rare and secret documents as he was able before they were lost, stolen, or locked away in private collections and rarely if ever to see the public light of day again. The end result, "The Secret Rituals Of The O.T.O." was published in a single edition by Samuel Weiser Books reportedly with a press run of 5,000 copies.
As I said, his motives were genuine: Mr. King used the best sources he had available to him, he used the best of his considerable skills and specialized knowledge of the subject to try and decrypt the odd abbreviations these manuscripts were plagued with, the hand-written notes on some of the scripts he was presented, and he presents the documents in question to the best of his not inconsiderable abilities. But his understanding of the subject in question was not perfect, and his sources were not always complete, reliable, or of the final draft for the ritual in question. So the book in question is not only incomplete, it is rife with mistakes.
Over the years, this book has been sought out by many would-be students of Aleister Crowley, who, for whatever reasons, try to discern the "secrets" of the Ordo Templi Orientis without submitting themselves to its initiatory mysteries. Perhaps it is the case as W.C. Fields noted in his biography, that a "stolen pie always tastes sweeter," and part of the glamour is that of the forbidden fruit. Whatever. This book is a tiresome read. It's like reading a straight script of a play or musical show-- the would-be student will find it's scripts inadequate and woefully short of stage-directions, songs, or dance-steps, the very sort of performance instructions that would give it life.
Any actor will tell you: Reading the script of "Hamlet" is hardly a substitute for seeing the play, let alone for actually acting the role in front of an audience. So too it is for "The Secret Rituals Of The O.T.O." It's no substitute, and will not communicate the secrets of the O.T.O. to the uninitiated, as if that was *ever* Mr. King's intention in the first place.
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