Explanatory Note:
The research of Jerry Cornelius regarding any contact Charles
Manson may have had with the Solar (Riverside) Lodge of the OTO, as
published in Scribe (vol.1, no. 7, 1997), leads him to a wall of denial.
Cornelius, in a hotly-written rebuttal, disagrees with me and other
writers, particularly Ed Sanders and Peter Levenda, about the
relationsip: "The most common misconception about the Solar Lodge that
authors love to foster is the connection with Charlie Manson. Contrary
to what some would like readers to believe, this is a misconception. He
was not a member, nor is there any strong evidence that he ever visited
the group. The sole source of these stories is found in Ed Sanders' book
The Family published in 1971. Here Sanders wrote that at "least five
separate individuals have claimed that they were told by a member of
Brayton's rebel O.T.O. Lodge that Manson was involved with the Lodge."
These allegations have never been substantiated and appear to be only
second hand gossip told to a third party who then talked to Sanders,
hardly the type of evidence which would stand up in a Court of Law. The
only tenuous connection to the Manson murders is that the Solar Lodge
problems occurred two months before the Tate-LaBianco murders We
find authors like Alex Constantine ... along with Peter Levenda, the
author of The Unholy Alliance, promoting the same old tired
misconceptions, if not creating new outright lies."
Odd that Cornelius should attack Sanders, et al. As recounted below,
Sander's version of events originated with Grady McMurty, then the "Outer
Head" of the OTO: "When it became known that Manson had been a visitor to
Jean Brayton's O.T.O., McMurtry informed on Brayton to the FBI in order not
to get involved in the FBI's investigations. He also fed the journalist Ed
Sanders with material who as a return favour did not mention McMurtry in his
book 'The Family.'" If Sanders is breeding "lies," they began with McMurty
the FBI informant, himself.
The following account by P.R, Koenig clarifies the connection, and
substantiates some of the allegations that Cornelius dismisses as "lies"
and "myths." The OTO has long attempted to revise history to distance
itself from the Solar Lodge and Charles Manson, but the Order's own
research, including the following, agrees with the published accounts
denounced by Jerry Cornelius (though there is some small disagreement on
details found in my own reporting, as noted in the text):
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Charles Manson and the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.
P.R. Koenig
New O.T.O. groups in the US
Although Charles Manson never had been member of any of the many O.T.O.
groups, the tabloid press often warms up his short contact with Georgina
Brayton's "Solar Lodge of the O.T.O." of the 1960s. The "Caliphate" (the
new American O.T.O. founded in 1977) often calls this earlier O.T.O.
lodge 'irregular', but Phyllis Seckler, a protagonist of the "Caliphate"
(the wife of its founder Grady L. McMurtry) recently admitted it to be a
real O.T.O. lodge. To exaggerate, without Manson the "Caliphate" would
not exist at all. -- Let's unroll the history a bit.
During Crowley's lifetime there was only one active O.T.O.- lodge in the
US; the so-called second Agape lodge in California. Since he was never
satisfied with its members and activities (entry in Crowley's diary 9
March 1945: "I place the Californian Lodge under INTERDICT.") Crowley
gave to one member of the group which he called fans, above mentioned
McMurtry, a special instruction: in case of emergency to take care of
this lodge, submitted to the veto of his heir, the German Karl Germer.
But Germer never thought highly about McMurtry (calling him a "Minus"
and considering the US as a "spiritual desert") and closed the Agape
Lodge on September 7, 1953 in order to favour the Swiss H.J. Metzger as
heir. Around this time, McMurtry completely lost his interest in the
O.T.O. and that's maybe why others continued O.T.O. activities in the
US.
In the mid-1950s, two ex-members of this ex-Agape Lodge (dissolved in
1953), Ray and Mildred Burlingame, worked together with Georgina R.
(Jean) Brayton (born 29 December 1921) and her husband Richard
Montgomery Brayton (born 1911, university lecturer at the University of
California) on some of Crowley's O.T.O.-rituals. After Germer's death in
1962, the Brayton group started to call itself Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.
or Riverside Lodge of the O.T.O. and was something like a motherless
satellite of a dissolved lodge. Neither Burlingame nor the later
re-appearing McMurtry possessed the permission either to initiate or to
found a new lodge of the O.T.O. It is strictly and explicitly forbidden
to initiate or install lodges without permission by a superior,
according to the O.T.O. statutes.
Members of the Solar Lodge were accused of having ransacked the homes of
Sascha Germer, Israel Regardie and Mildred Burlingame in order to
collect O.T.O.
