The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites

Starr, Martin P.

ISBN 10: 093342907X / ISBN 13: 9780933429079

Published by Teitan Pr, 2003

About this Item

Bolingbrook, IL: Teitan Press, 2003. 1st edition. Sm 4to. xii,416pp. Illus. Very Good book. (occultism, Ordo Templi Orientis, Wilfred Talbot Smith, biography) Inquire if you need further information. Seller Inventory # CA08AA-00405

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the ...

Publisher: Teitan Pr

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

The first documentary study of Aleister Crowley's contemporary followers in North America, told through the life of their de facto leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith (1885-1957). Smith, the unacknowledged offspring of a prominent English family, emigrated to Canada where he met Charles Stansfeld Jones and through him, the works of Aleister Crowley. Although Crowley and Smith met only once, their twenty year correspondence proved to be a major link to the few and the faithful attracted to Crowley's work in the United States and Canada.

Smith's spiritual life centered first on the initiatic structure of the Order of the A.'..A.'., complemented by the emerging fraternal and social schemes of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). Smith followed Jones into a few long-forgotten movements like the Universal Brotherhood and the Psychomagian Society, but he declined membership in C.F. Russell's Choronzon Club.

To promulgate the Crowleyan teachings, in 1934 Smith incorporated his own "Church of Thelema"--known to Los Angeles newspaper readers as the "Purple Cult." The following year he initiated OTO activity in Los Angeles which attracted its own cast of occult characters. Smith's life reached a strange conclusion when Crowley, taking a page from Louis Bromfield's novel, THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS ANNIE SPRAGG, which explored "the twin mysteries of love and religion and the confusion that lies between" and combining it with a reading of Smith's natal chart, sent him off on a retreat to determine which God he was incarnating. It was a journey from which Frater 132 never returned...

THE UNKNOWN GOD is a fascinating and complex human story, intimately interwoven with the lives of most of Crowley's disciples in the United States including C.F. Russell Jane Wolfe, Max R. Schneider, Jack Parsons, Louis T. Culling, Frederic Mellinger and Grady L. McMurtry as well as occult teachers like H. Spencer Lewis (AMORC) Paul Foster Case (BOTA), and Wayne Walker (OM), Hollywood actors such as John Carradine and even the founder of the Mattachine Society, Harry Hay.

From the Author:

THE UNKNOWN GOD required a long time to come to birth; I hope you enjoy the results. To quote Frater 132: "To the Rest who waited not knowing for what they waited. These all I must not fail."