After ten years with the order I re-connected with the national Pagan community through the experience of writing Feminist Thelema. Once I started going to Pantheacon I continued to attend, then was asked to speak at Theurgicon, and now at Paganicon.

I feel at the moment that I stand equally in both worlds, the Pagan and the fraternal. This gives me the metaframe to see both with the perspective of both an insider and a partial outsider.

I know O.T.O. people who attend Pagan events, and O.T.O. people who don’t. The Order is its own world and pockets of community can trend toward the insular. Those who do attend Pagan events have insight into how to talk about what we do to people who aren’t yet involved in the Order.

I served as Master of Vortex for four years, taking the body from camp to oasis. The group was specifically founded to form a bridge into O.T.O. from the Pagan world. Every Master of the body has actually been a Pagan organizer as well as an O.T.O. initiate. It was a good place for me to land, and that’s probably why it still feels like my O.T.O. home.

Both communities are necessary to me. In the Pagan world I create my own rituals, I make my own rules, I connect with people who revere the old gods. In the O.T.O. world I participate in a structured organization, I have long conversations with intellectual esotericists, I connect with a fraternal energy that is one of the foundations of Western magic. I don’t think I could choose between them, and fortunately, I don’t have to.