Ultimately in the O.T.O’s sexual magick everything came down to semen — more recently likened to a computer hard-disk pre-formatted to be loaded with software and used at will. Crowley: “The industrial use of Semen will revolutionize human society”; journal 8th August 1923.

His instructional text ‘Amrita’, dated 23rd January 1933, defines the use of semen as counteracting “Asthma, Bronchitis, Neurasthenia, Obesity, Stricture, Some cardiac distress, Greying hair, Loss of interest in sex,” reprinted in ‘O.T.O. Rituals and Sexmagick’ (Anthony Naylor, ed.) London 1999, p. 412.

To avoid charges of quackery, the current American O.T.O. or ‘Caliphate’ denies the medicinal use of this ‘Elixir of Life’, and claims that it “does not practice medicine” (as noted in ‘Thelema Lodge Newsletter’, Berkeley, September 1993).

For sacramental purposes, this O.T.O. uses hosts made with honey, meal, and wine-lees called ‘Cakes of Light’ (which may however contain small quantities of blood or semen: “ashes from burned cakes of light prepared according to AL III;23[–25] would be acceptable as an additional ingredient”). —

According to Crowley these Cakes should include menstrual fluids, but “In my Mass the Host is of excrement”; diary 5th July 1920 — magically speaking, blood and excrement attracting spirits, sperm keeping them alive. He also noted in his diary on May 30, 1923 that “The Dalai Lama is right to have the faithful eat his excrement.”

1963–1967 the Swiss O.T.O. used a total of 3,000 Hosts obtained by the Thelemites from a genuine Catholic convent. The incense-grains had been opportunely supplied by the Chief Sacristan of St. Gallen Cathedral. And the wine for the Mass came directly from the Bishop.

There are many other elements of O.T.O. doctrines that can prove inimical to its public relations image: the requirement for the crucifixion of a frog in one O.T.O. initiation ritual, advice given to members that they can consider those without the pale of the Order as inferior beings, and blatantly anti-democratic elements in the various O.T.O. constitutions, antisemitic statements and texts that could be said to interfere with religious freedoms, just to mention a few. Theodor Reuss went further: within the O.T.O. community the use of money was to be forbidden. Every member over 18 was obliged to labour daily; those refusing to work were to be punished by forced labour. In Reuss’s O.T.O. utopia, each child was brought up by the community, where doctor-priests under parental supervision would teach children from the earliest age on that the sex organs were holy (maybe Crowley’s idea that all children from infancy should be accustomed to witnessing every type of sexual act came from this.) Those who were not found capable of producing healthy children by a ‘medical board’ were not allowed to breed, while those who produced children despite this decree would be punished by forced labour. These extreme ideas have not survived in modern versions of the O.T.O., if indeed they were ever espoused beyond Reuss’s essay.

While the O.T.O.’s initiatory system is a sort of bureaucratic club game, it has a religiously associated section under its obedience: The Gnostic Catholic Church. It intends “to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar-phallic religion”; letter from Crowley to W.B. Crow (1895–1976), dated 11.11.44.

In 1906, Chevalier Le Clément de St.-Marcq had published a booklet about the Sacred Spermatophay, called ‘L'Eucharistie’. It described what Reuss called the ultimate secret of the religious aspect of the O.T.O.: the more sperm you eat, the more the manifestation of the Christ takes place within you: no women are necessary for that. The consumption of sexual secretions borders on anthropophagia, the assimilation of selected individuals who possess awe-inspiring powers, in order to neutralise or even to use them. The Gnostic aim is to release the human from his stifling entanglement with the physical universe, and to help the pure Spirit in its return to its Divine potential. One common characteristic of all the Spermo-Gnostics in the context of most of the many O.T.O.-versions is a reduction of the sexuality unto the male physiology. Orgasm for pure reasons of lust is avoided, unless ejaculation is refrained from, or the intention is directed to drift away from the immanent orgasm and concentrate itself upon wishes that under the circumstances appear worldly in the extreme. Sperm remains the point of focus. In the enthusiastic high of the genetic and gnostic superiority of the male, femaleness vegetates in a bizarre no-mansland of androgynous necessity and almost reprehensible superfluousness. The female Logos remains mute.

In the O.T.O.’s Gnostic Mass a host called Cake of Light contains the Logos. Ingredients are sperm, blood and vaginal secrets. This cake of light is made outside the ritual of the Gnostic Mass. It is given its character in the making. It is consecrated, but not transsubstantiated. The deity in the cake of light is the “Childe,” properly an aspect of Horus (or a sort of homunculus) and not of either Osiris or the cognate Christ. Transmutation is change of form, in the instance of the pertinent passage in Crowley’s Mass, by chemical processes of digestion. Transsubstantiation, on the other hand, is change of essential quality without change of form. Transmutation is a physiological process. Transsubstantiation is a non-physical process. Thus, a cake of light is transmuted in the preparation, to afford a character appropriate to the “miracle of the Mass”: it’s a sexmagical medium of the participant’s Will (the ritual itself can be interpreted as a mirror of the perpetual creation of the Universe). Similar passages can be found in a ritual of the O.T.O.: “and, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass. […] This is the Blood and the Body of the Logos.” Consumation of the host is necessary, body contact. Some say, it is not the host that is changed but the consumer of the host. Throught contact with saliva, chewing, stomach acid. This is the transformation, the unification of the host with the consumer. The thelemic host changes the consumer – contrary to the Roman Catholic host. A Roman Catholic host is said to be transsubstantiated during the RC Mass, a change of its invisible essence (for the entering of the real-presence of the Christ) without a change in the appearance and chemical qualities of the thing. If a thing such as that was both transmutated and transsubstantiated to the body and blood, it would become actual bleeding meat from the transmutation. —

The technical term for the bishopric in the context of the O.T.O. Phenomenon is Wandering Bishop or Episcopi Vagantes. This status is not defined by character qualities, not by education or theological position. These bishops are not elected by a canonical church, are not proposed as an ordain by a suffragan and not bound to a historical episcopal see or consecrated by an official bishop according to the canonical procedure. A real bishop is not a successor of a sole apostle because only the synod/college of bishops in toto is heir to the college of the apostles. Therefore: no Wandering Bishop has a real apostolic succession. There is no Holy Ghost in Wandering-Bishop-consecrations. The instrumentum consecrationis is of no apostolic value. Nevertheless, Wandering Bishops are collectors of papers and diplomas. In this context, Reuss tried to make Crowley’s ‘Gnostic Mass’ the “official religion for Freemasons” in 1920. But nowhere in the constitution of the O.T.O. was the office of O.H.O. connected with leadership of any church. In his introduction to the ‘Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae’, (Zuerich 1955) on page 4 H.J. Metzger claimed the “Antiochite-Jacobinic Succession, Syro-Malabarite Line of Mar Athanasius.” Today, some new O.T.O.-groups (e.g. the ‘Caliphate’) try to copy this scheme.

The Typhonian Order (sometimes called Typhonian O.T.O.) is concerned with effective transmissions and communications from 'outerspace' for the purpose of opening Gateways.
The Typhonian 'deities' denote specific operations of psycho-physical alchemy which involve essences or elixirs secreted (thrown out and/or considered unclean) by the human organism. Its formula is that of the XI° involving kalas that are entirely absent from the masculine organism.
There is no comparison to other O.T.O. versions, essentially because there are no group rituals or ceremonies of initiation at any stage of the degree structure. The basis of initiation is the assimilation of direct magical and mystical working. It follows that all initiation is in effect self-initiation. There is a small amount of set gradework in the Typhonian Order. However, the emphasis is on the initiate charting his or her own course. There is of course the experience of others to draw upon.

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