Ordo Templi Orientis

When forced under cross-examination to decode the document, Eccles admitted that he had ciphered his own name, his best friend, Jason Baldwin, his girlfriend, Dominique Teer, and his infant son, Seth, and the name of notorious occultist Alistair Crowley.

While imprisoned, Echols was confirmed to be an active, self-described Thelemite and a formal member of the OTO, an esoteric organization historically headed by Aleister Crowley.

Eccles was so deeply embedded in the organization that he established his own library within the Arkansas OTO chapter, donating his personal collection of occult books to the local branch from prison.

But hey...

He's not a magician.

Right.

the hidden church is not that hidden, you know, but kind of, this is the route I went, you know, so for a while I was associated with, uh, you know, the OTO and other things and, you know, and progress from there.

Um, being very quickly kind of disenchanted by the standard Western form of esotericism, this lodge-based esotericism where I felt, you know, one size fits all, the initiations are formalized and standardized to a very strict degree, you know, supposedly working for everyone themselves, you know, then you have the usual idea of ascent, you know, purifying, you know, things, you know, basically mind over matter, you know, true will, will to power, stuff like that, where basically the mental sphere and the abstract realm or the connection to the abstract realm was supposedly um then enabling you to um command the material world which always seen or conceived of as lower or as um you know not as pure and you know the and so forth so this was something that didn't sit well with me since i've had You know, so much life before where I witnessed beautiful traditions that didn't see it that way, that didn't have it that way, where the world was engaged as is.

You know, the world was confronted in the way you kind of, you know, experience it in everyday life.

So basically that idea was always something that I had very strongly pressing upon my inner world.

Um, and then, you know, moved from the usual esoteric circles that you can find in the West to, um, Michael Bertu and his work.

Um, and I became the head of Michael Bertu's groups as probably some will know, uh, the OTOA and the La Couleur Noire and, um, worked with them for quite a long time.

And I try to reform it to a degree where, because of course, very quickly, once you work this, you understand it's also basically an esoteric form of German idealism.

This was the summer of 93.

And so within a few months of finding Crowley, I was starting my initiatory journey in the broader tradition that is represented by the Temple of the Silver Star, which I run and also AA and the OTO.

So kind of all at once that same year, pretty quickly.

Oh, wow.

The Abbey of Philema did attract one prominent example from Hollywood would be my sort of grand teacher, Jane Wolfe, who was a silent film actress.

And then in 1920 went to Cefalu, Sicily, where the Abbey of Philema was and worked with Crowley there and then came back to Sicily.

Hollywood to to work with Agape Lodge of OTO uh down there with figures like Jack Parsons and and such um so is that there is sort of an axis between the Jane Wolfe connection at and then the Hollywood scene with the OTO's activity in the 40s and 50s mostly in um in Hollywood or in LA broadly.

Yeah.