To: alt.magick.chaos
From: bheidrick@aol.com (B Heidrick)
Subject: OTO and Politics
Date: 31 Oct 1994 10:25:02 GMT
Quoting: >Brian Rea (mrdude@indy.net) writes:

93

>(unreported? wow...)

Right, blamed P.O. fundies for destroying the mail.  That has happened in
Manchester England, even down to stuffing half burned OTO outbound
correspondence back into a home mail slot after it was mailed at the
postoffice.  However, records weren't kept properly and no effort was made
to restore the data after this problem was reported.  It took me half a
year in addition to run down most of the records via witnesses of the
initiations all over the Mid-West for the Minn. case.  Still not sure I
got them all, but looks 95% sure.  Got over half of the dues back too, but
that isn't as important as recording the degrees and such.

>as I was a second degree at the time.

I pay less attention to gossip than to maintaining the mailing list. 
Sorry to cut you short on your degree at the time, but I have enough now
to know you are you --- you caught the city and the degree trick,
something somebody pretending to be you would likely not have done.

>I built furniture for the TOT

Questions.  How much of the disturbance was OTO and how much TOT?  How
much both having problems with each other?  Was it a general melee or were
two or three different groups hard-timing and one-uping each other?  I'm
not trying to fix blame, but trying to see if we have seeds of other
problems visible here.  OTO and TOT had an unnecessary tension a few
months ago.  If we can see how these things happen without the awareness
of the hierarchy, we may be able to anticipate and prevent such problems a
little better.

   OTO frequently sees difficulties of the sort you have mentioned when a
group grows too fast in a new area.  After a year or sometimes two,
cliques form and interests become intrenched.  New or other groups with
different allegiances may start to overlap and frictions develop.  In such
circumstances, different orders tend to blame each other --- even though
the problems may be unrelated to the different orders in themselves.

>As for 'running off with *his* wife' as you put it, she was
>her own person, and chose to come with me freely....

Right, but that didn't make Rusty happy.  You see, being right isn't all
of it.  People will have their predictable reactions to chaos at times
like this.  Magick partly consists of being able to stand back a bit and
see the microcosm in a pattern.  If you can learn that, you won't be so
easily trapped in pain when your local pattern starts heaving.  Rusty
simply got his wheels straightened out and located wife number (was it 4
or 5 by then?).  You, on the other hand, have allowed yourself to dwell on
things best healed and forgotten.  These named demons and flashy symbols
have their social and human fields of action.  The Magician needs to take
the vision down to the abyss of manifestation if Magick is to be any good
while you are incarnated.

>I'd love to hear what versions of any other stories anyone
>else has about this! It's fun to be 'infamous' hehehe (just kidding)

I'm the one, remember, that Motta started calling Gothic names like "Gray
Eminence" after the 1985 e.v. trial.  Poor fellow didn't live long enough,
but he started concocting sinister theories about me that could have been
quite entertaining if his ticker didn't give out.  That whole OTO v. SOTO
thing was another example of chaos run amuck --- Motta could have gotten
most of what he wanted earlier, before we found out that he hadn't even
been a member of O.T.O.  As it was, he too looked only at the whole
pattern, rather than the part he fastened on, to see what advantages could
be obtained.

93 93/93
Bill Heidrick