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.

As I worked through the Man of Earth initiations I learned that the O.T.O. community functioned significantly differently than the Pagan community. In the Pagan world, when I held an event, I personally bore the liability for the event. I made the rules and enforced them and there was no structure to fall back on. Local and national groups spent a lot of time figuring out what the rules were – then deciding whether a given egregious act had violated them sufficiently to get the person kicked out of that group.

After bearing that weight alone for so long it was quite a relief to step into a structure with rules that I didn’t have to make or enforce. Each initiation strengthened my bonds with the people around me and with the order. Like all initiations they created a shared set of experiences, a vocabulary, and an energy.

The relationships built through the initiations are meant to be permanent. When I have a problem with someone I’m going to have to work it out because we’re both in it for the long haul. The order has mechanisms for working out those issues. There are the public mechanisms, how to make complaints and request mediation, but there are also rituals rooted in shared experience. That commitment to bring each other through initiation spills over into a committment to bring each other through life.

I spent two blissful years not being in charge of anything. It was great! Alex, Ted and I would go to an event. Most were held in Masonic halls which had big kitchens with commercial dishwashers. After running kitchens at Pagan festivals for several hundred people, dishes for thirty didn’t seem like much. The three of us would organize ourselves without words and process the dishes neatly. Unfortunately that brought us to the attention of the people who were scouring the ranks for volunteers and I got pulled into an office, and then took charge of a body. So I didn’t get to be one of the rank and file for very long. Even so it was a wonderful renewal for me.

I served four years as Master of Vortex Camp, then Oasis, and I currently hold a charter to initiate. My ties with the order are permanent. Wherever I go in the country and in the world I can connect with a community of people who share a vocabulary and a set of experiences. I know if I am in trouble they have my back, just as I stand ready to help my brothers and sisters in need.

At the end of a dozen years of devotion to community I wanted to take a break. I still had the get-out-of-jail-free card in my back pocket, my Minerval initiation in O.T.O.

I happened to attend a local event, Concentric Circles, where a man performed a Star Ruby in public. This guy had founded Horizon Oasis and served as its master for a decade. I asked him out for coffee to catch up on what I had missed in that decade. He spent several afternoons talking to me about the order. His patient care allowed me the time to understand how the order had evolved.

When I took my First Degree initiation I was hooked. This was a real initiation! It wasn’t done by halves, everyone was fully committed. I was knocked out that a group of strangers would go to such lengths to make the experience happen for me.

The Man of Earth initiations have a story arc. First Degree is birth, Second Degree is life, Third Degree is death. Entering into those initiations gave me the rare opportunity to live an entire magical life.

This new magical life gave me two gifts. It is public knowledge that the initiations involve chakra work. The energy that work triggered cleared out old issues, liberating me in a visceral way from the control of others. Each initiation highlighted long-standing problems in my life and gave me the tools to process them.

(A note on “Man of Earth”: this is Crowley’s term for the initiations, I analyzed the impact of the male-centered language in “Feminist Thelema”.)

Thelema is the law of freedom. The Man of Earth initiations granted me freedom in ways I could not have anticipated which put me unequivocally in charge of my life.

It was 13 years between my Minerval and First Degree.

Actually this was an experience passed on to me in one of those unexpectedly significant moments in life. I spent an afternoon hanging out on Telegraph Avenue while a friend read Tarot cards on the street. It was one of those hours-of-boredom gigs. Like waiting for a late bus, an hour on a city street with nothing to do that you will never get back from your life.

That afternoon of tedium turned into one of the more significant in my life. Sitting next to the Tarot reader on the sidewalk I jotted down the outline of Ecstatic Ritual. This would become my first published book.

That’s not all that happened to me that day. While I was working a passerby struck up a conversation with me. He said he had the longest running gap between Minerval and First, thirteen years. I believe now he passed that energy on to me!

I’d taken my Minerval when a savvy initiator who was both Pagan and O.T.O. took the time to explain to me how it worked. You just put in an application and pay your money, he said. This was wildly different from the traditional Witchcraft circles I was running in where you hung around and hoped to be asked to join a group.

Half a dozen of my friends took our Minervals and promptly formed up a study group called Qadesh Camp. This was not officially sanctioned by the order, it was an unofficial group. We met at the Dog House, a famous Seattle institution, where you could use the back room if everyone ordered a meal. Their place mats said “All roads lead to the Dog House” and had a map listing the types of people who ate there, including “lodges”. So we weren’t the only fraternal-type group meeting there. We’d talk about our studies. Alex would read a selection from the Holy Books of Thelema. It was sweet when it wasn’t snarky.

Eventually we all went our separate ways and became a footnote in the history of the O.T.O. in the Pacific Northwest. I spent the rest of the 80s organizing Pagan festivals and serving in national office for Covenant of the Goddess. Then I spent the 90s teaching beginner Pagans.

I always knew I had that Minerval though. It felt like having a get-out-of-jail-free card in my back pocket. I didn’t understand how true that turned out to be! Thelema is truly the law of freedom. It took my First Degree initiation to teach me that.