Description

 This volume includes only eight essays from No.81 to No.88 in our private archive. They detail years of study by Frater AO583, including everything Aleister Crowley wrote on the Tarot paths underlying Minerval and First Degrees OTO, in addition to a wealth of other research.

Frater AO583 was an upper degree initiate of OTO and the personal A.’.A.’. student of Grady Louis McMurtry. These essays explain the symbolism and theories regarding Frater AO583’s Thoth cards from The Fool to The Chariot. When Grady died, copies of two specific cards painted by AO583 were found on Grady’s private altar. According to Aleister Crowley, these specific paths relate to the foundation stones of the Eight Limbs of Yoga.

By Crowley’s own admission, failure in any one of these limbs means complete inability to fulfill IXth Degree OTO and he notes– “The O.T.O. is a training of the Masonic type; there is no ‘astral’ work in it at all, nor any Yoga. There is a certain amount of Qabalah, and that of great doctrinal value. But the really vital matter is the gradual progress towards disclosure of the Secret of the Ninth Degree.” However, he’s quick to add – “To use that secret to advantage involves mastery both of Yoga and of Magick; but neither is taught in the Order.” (Magick Without Tears). These essays also show how these paths relate to the Minerval (Chokmah) and First Degree (Binah) OTO on the Tree of Life. These paths reveal the basics of Crowley’s sexual theories. This volume includes black and white reproductions of AO583’s oil paintings of his cards. Released 2016.(For further study, here are the original, color versions.) 

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“Cornelius, an OTO upper degree under the direct tutelage of Grady Louis McMurtry, explores the secrets of the first eight Paths on the Tree of Life through a number of Thelemic and allied sources. Many are those which McMurtry directed him to study regarding the paths, even as Cornelius’ cards portray the secrets McMurtry taught him. Cornelius routinely includes Liber AL vel Legis and many of the other Holy Books; Aleister Crowley’s commentaries to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Seven Portals, from The Voice of the Silence; The Vision and the Voice; The Book of Lies; Magick in Theory and Practice; OTO sex magickal papers, books, and commentaries by Crowley and others; Liber Arcanorum; The Two and Twenty Secret Instructions of the Master from Crowley’s The Heart of the Master; Liber Viarum Viae; The Wake World, A Tale for Babes and Sucklings; McMurtry’s The Angel and the Abyss, A Cycle of 22 Poems in Honor of Our Maid of the Star Drifts; My Lady of the Breeches, A History with a Vengeance; and The Book of Thoth. For an overview of these correlations, readers are advised to consult Grady’s “cheat sheets,” which are published in Essays 1. In the present volume Cornelius explains the first eight of these correlations in full. He also draws upon a number of other Thelemic, Christian, Judaic, Hermetic, and psychological sources in order to elucidate mysteries relating to OTO Minerval and I°. In illuminating the first eight paths through the lenses of these various sources, Cornelius brings the foundation stones of Crowley’s magickal system into clear view and develops insights to be found nowhere else.