"There is division hither homeward..." 
                 - LIBER AL VEL LEGIS, Chapter III, Verse 2 

"...the difficulty which you expect will surely materialize.  Let there be among you a man of understanding.  When the grain ripened, he came quickly with his sickle in his hand and reaped it.  Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear." 
                 - The (Gnostic) Gospel of Thomas 

"Pestilence only kills the body, but these impostors poison the soul." 
                 - The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel 
                   by Francois Rabelais 

"While it is a skill to speak, it is also a skill to be silent." 
                 - The Sentences of Sextus 

Let us briefly review both Sr. Motta and parts of his pseudo-Equinox, Volume V, Numbers 3 and 4, in this place. 

In No. 3 on page 339 Motta writes:  "The tendency of the Ego is always to interpret any phenomenon that represents the influence of another Ego as hostile.  This is the attitude of the savage - and there are very few truly civilized men and women in the world!" 

By Motta's own standards he then is an uncivilized savage. 

In the uneditorial like "editorial" at the beginning of No. 4, Motta libelously slanders the following:  Kenneth Anger, Janice Ayers (the Grant version of the O.T.O.), Michael Bertiaux, Christopher Gait (McMurtry's version of the O.T.O.), James Daniel Gunther, "once a legitimate O.T.O. representative (i.e. of Motta's pseudo-o.t.o.); demoted for planning to murder his hierarchic superior; withdrew voluntarily from the A.·.A.·. and was expelled from the O.T.O." (Neither of which, in truth, either Motta or Gunther, had contact with.), Lee Heflin, William E. Heidrick, "...possibly a dupe of Grady McMurtry" (This shows how ill-informed Motta is as Heidrick's association with McMurtry has always been very obviously  "Possibly"?  There's never been cause to doubt it!), Joseph Lisiewski, Gary Allen Martin, a.k.a. G.M.Kelly (We have already had our chuckle over this one in a previous number of TNN.), Phyllis McMurtry/Wade/Seckler, Grady McMurtry, James Lee Musick, Robert North, Michael Redelsheimer, "once a Probationer (of Motta's pseudo-order), was cut contact with for failing to keep his Oath." (Wonder if the "Oath" was a personal allegiance to Motta?  Most probably, although perhaps thinly disguised.), Israel Regardie, Beverly Senseman, Robert Shell, Joseph Shockley, William Siebert, Helen Parsons Smith (McMurtry's gang), James Wasserman, "at a time was a Probationer under Marcelo Motta; received a full power of attorney from Motta to handle the legitimate transfer of O.T.O. property to qualified hands; disobeyed all his instructions and delivered the property into the hands of thieves.  Was transferred to another Instructor and subsequently was cut contact with for breaking his Oath.  Has been instrumental in the piracy of O.T.O. copyrights and (reportedly) in the publication of the worst possible kind of pseudo-Thelemic material."  (The absolute worst possible kind of pseudo-thelemic material that I have ever seen was Motta's THE COMMENTARIES OF AL, which Wasserman, then an employee of Samuel Weiser, certainly was responsible for!  So there may be a grain of truth here.  Often Motta is incorrect in his statements regarding these individuals, sometimes he is correct, but his methods and reasons for attacking any of these people are hardly honourable or gentlemanly--let alone Thelemic!) [1997 E.V. NOTE:  Wasserman joined McMurtry's Caliphate pseudo-o.t.o.], William W. Webb, William Breeze, "an ex-Probationer who failed to keep his Oath and perform his Task and was cut contact with as a result.  Now pirating O.T.O. material with Peter Macfarlane" [1997 E.V. NOTE:  Breeze went from an association with the Kenneth Grant pseudo-o.t.o., to Motta's idiotic S.O.T.O., and finally on to McMurtry's Caliphate pseudo-o.t.o. which he became the "Caliph" of, Hymenaeus Beta, after Grady was out of the way.], Brian Edwin Ferguson, "by his own request, became a Probationer under Marcelo Motta; by his own request, received a Patent of O.T.O. Director in Canada.  Persistently disobeyed his Instructor and stole O.T.O. property.  Has been expelled from the O.T.O. and barred from contact with the A.·.A.·." (Possibly his contact is barred, but Motta could have nothing to do with that, actually no one but the individual himself could bar himself from contact with the A.·.A.·..  And notice how many of Motta's short-lived students "break their Oaths" and "disobey" Motta.  Kind of tells you a lot about Motta, doesn't it?), Peter Macfarlane, Carroll R. Runyon Jr., Russell Sampsell, Ken Ward, Kenneth Grant, Eric Hill, "was a Probationer for a short time; cut contact with for not keeping his Oath and Task.", Francis King, Stephen Skinner, John Symonds, Bernard Freon, "was a Probationer of Marcelo Motta for one month; wanted permission to 'start the O.T.O.' in France; tried to change the rules therefor, claiming that the French secret police considered the O.T.O. a 'neo-Nazi' organization.  Cut contact with for lying", Joseph Metzger, Oskar Schlag (one of this man's "crimes" is that he is "Jewish"--Motta has often shown that, among many other groups of people, he hates the Roman Catholic Church, which, in his opinion, is surely plotting against him, the Gay community, and of course, the Jews.  Motta is not a very tolerant man.  And as Aleister Crowley writes on page 668 of the Hill & Wang edition of THE CONFESSIONS, "Intolerance is evidence of impotence."  And considering one of Motta's personal problems that might not be too far off in even a literal sense!), Nevio Viola, Oseas Saturnino de Almeida, "once chartered by Marcelo Motta, showed symptoms of mental confusion.  Confronted, tried to appropriate the Order.  Was sued and lost in the first instance.  Appealed against the sentence, and lost again.  Old-æon mason with Roman Catholic and Zionist connections.  Expelled from the O.T.O.", (i.e. Motta's pseudo-o.t.o.  Ever stop to think about something?  If all of these people turned traitor, tried to murder Motta and robbed him after he accepted them into his "order", giving them power in that "order", Motta's judgment must be positively awful!  His ability to perceive truth, to judge character, to reason out possibilities, perform the arts of divination, et al, must be worse than nil.  And yet he parades about as if he were a Master!  By his own admitted poor judgment he could not even make the grade, as it were, of Probationer!), Euclydes de Almeida, "once a Neophyte under Marcelo Motta.  Charged with registering the O.T.O. in Brasil, tried to register it under his own name.  Expelled from the O.T.O., got in touch with Kenneth Grant and tried to set himself up as representing the same.  A court order was issued; did not try to appeal.  Cut contact with in the A.·.A.·.", Duval Ernani de Paula, Raul dos Santos Seixas, "Brasilian pop singer and composer.  Was for a time a Probationer under Marcelo Motta.  Tried to use Crowley for personal success, aping the Beatles.  By his own request, wrote several songs with Motta as his lyricist.  Tried to rob the lyricist and bowdlerized several of his lyrics, bowing to official government censorship.  Cut contact with", Irineu F. da Silva, "reached Zelator under Marcelo Motta; tried to misappropriate Motta's translation of Liber AL in Portuguese and misrepresent himself as author thereof.  Publicly unmasked as an imposter and thief.  Cut contact with in the A.·.A.·.; never represented the O.T.O.", Adam J. Pellen, Charles Olbach, Hill & Wang, Bantam Books, Professional and Technical Programs, Inc., Xeno Press, Mystic Arts Society, Gordon Press, Level Press, Llewellyn Publications, Sangreal Foundation, Thelema Publications, U.S. Games, Inc., Samuel Weiser, Inc., Next Step Publications, 93 Publishing, Askin Publishers, Booklegger Albion, Jonathan Cape, The C. W. Daniel Company Ltd, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, The New Equinox, Morton Press, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd...etc., etc., etc.!  The list does not end here.  Amazing, is it not?  That one man could hate so much, so many.  The envy and jelousy Motta feels must be overwhelming.  What an uncivilized savage he is! 

I would like to get to the second section of The Sword, but there is one more thing I would like to bring up in this review.  In No. 3 of his pseudo-Equinox, at or at about the end of the book, there is something entitled "DIRECTIVE No 1/TO ALL O.T.O. AND A.·.A.·. PERSONNEL" and after the usual Thelemic salutation the first sentence reads:  "Any persons who sign an O.T.O. Letter Patent are henceforth to provide the following:" and to join Motta's pseudo-o.t.o. one must provide him with "One fingerprint, the right thumb...People who lack the right hand will provide a print of the left thumb; who lack both hands, a footprint...", and that seems paranoid and funny enough, but the first prerequisite for joining Motta's little organization (which reportedly has only five members at the present time) is that the candidate must provide Motta with "Two photographs, one facing the camera, the other in profile, for each copy of the Letter Patent signed", which seems logical enough so far, but he goes on with, "the photographs preferably in color, whole body, and nude..."  Nude?!  What the devil for?  The answer seems pretty obvious to me, and hardly either necessary or esoteric.  I tend to think that he simply wants to lust over the women's photos, in which case he should not, to use a phrase not altogether incorrectly, mix the planes and instead just run out and buy a few magazines (I like Playboy myself), and in the case of nude photographs from men I suspect that he merely wishes to compare himself with them--you know, shape and primarily size--and I do not mean of the nose!  This is a particular problem with Motta, the size of his penis being a great concern of his. 

Motta's books are indeed well printed, but they are not worth much.  And their "author" seems to be worth even less. 

Grady, Frater Hymenaeus Alpha 777, makes a very big deal about the fact that Crowley gave him his magical motto.  In the now defunct O.T.O. Newsletter, Volume I, Number 3, dated December 1977 E.V., he writes:  "Crowley had asked Grady several questions and elevated him to the IXth (degree; this is doubtful and questionable -ED), but Grady had no motto.  Thinking that a knowledge of gematria beyond his own would be requisite, Grady applied to Crowley for help...A.C. asked: 'What is your Will?' Grady answered:  '...to unite that which is above with that which is below.' / Some time later, Brother Grady received from Crowley the letter that is reproduced on these pages.  In it the motto was set out and briefly explained..."  That motto was written on the back of the envelope:  YMENAIOC A 777.  Now Grady is very proud of the fact that A.C. gave him his motto, but should he be?  We all know what a terrific leg-puller the Master Therion was, and many of his jokes were private ones that most people today still take seriously.  Furthermore, since Grady undoubtedly brought up the subject of gematria, and since A.C. had, off and on, been trying to produce a reference work on the Greek Qabalah dealing with gematria, it might not be improper to take this science and art into consideration.  So let us try to look at this momentus, this historic event, from a different angle, a different point of view than Grady's, that that is, perhaps, truer to the facts. 

Grady lacked the imagination and insight to pick his own motto.  This must have displeased Therion, who, out of necessity, really only seemed to be using this young Grady as a source of income for the sake of publishing funds, a gofer and a messenger boy.  (It seemed only fair since individuals like Grady were trying to use Crowley.  And remember:  "the slaves shall serve", CCXX II.58--which does not necessarily mean that these slaves shall serve Thelemites, but that they shall be serving slaves to their chosen masters, ego in many cases, drugs in the case of an addict, and so forth, and such people who make of themselves slaves can be useful if you remember what it is that masters them.  However, if so employed, it should be in such a way that they too have the chance to benefit from the experience.  In Grady's case he was a slave to ego and his own stupidity and he not only profited from Crowley's employment of him, but it backfired somewhat--or did A.C., the Ipsissimus, plan even this for specific reasons?--giving Grady some APPARENT but ILLUSORY authority for his present schemes.)  Then when young Grady told A.C. that he wished to unite that which is above with that which is below, the Master might have thought "Foolish lad!  How can one unite that which is not divided?" 

Now Grady thought Hymenaeus such a wonderful motto because in mythology Hymenaeus is the God of marriage, the personification of the wedding feast, and after all Grady wished to unite that which is above...et cetera.  Aside from the fact that Our Father Aleister Crowley could be very crude sometimes and may have been thinking that the word Hymen is derived from Hymenaeus and that he may have thus been thinking of Grady as a protector of virginity (not necessarily a compliment coming from a Thelemite!) or simply a "stupid cunt", as the phrase goes, it should be taken into account that A.C. was a terrific biblical scholar and that Hymenaeus is also a character to be found twice in the New Testament, a traitor to his "faith".  In 1 Tm. 1.20 Hymenaeus is called a man who had "not listened to (his) conscience, and (had) made a ruin of (his) faith", while in 2 Tm. 2.17 he is referred to as a man whose teaching "will be like an open sore that eats away the flesh".  To me it sounds as if the Master, nay! the Ipsissimus that we commonly refer to as Aleister Crowley, master of the tarot, I Ching, geomancy and astrology, accurately saw into the future to know just what Grady would mean to Thelema, and as the biblical Hymenaeus became a traitor to and perverter of his "faith", so too would his follower, the man who would assume this name, abuse and pervert Thelema for his own selfish ends.  Perhaps A.C. did indeed foresee this, but if so why not stop it, nip it in the bud?  Why would he actually play up to Grady's ego and help it to happen?  Hard it is to fathom the mind of a Master let alone an Ipsissimus, but probably he found that some things just had to be and that the perverters of Thelema are needed to force the true Warriors of Thelema to step forward and proceed to properly establish the true Thelemic teachings in the world.  There must, in any Great Work, be a stage of putrefication--and that certainly seems to apply to what has been going on lately, thanks to men like McMurtry, as well as Motta, Grant and Bertiaux! 

Now why did A.C. add the Alpha to Hymenaios?  One would think only to make the 776 come to 777, but that is rather crude for an Ipsissimus, which A.C. was at the time Grady knew him oh so very little and briefly.  Perhaps A.C. did wish to saddle Grady with the number 777, but it should also be remembered that Alpha (A) is equated with the Hebrew Aleph, and that both letters are attributed to Atu 0, The Fool--and it is more than likely that A.C. did not have the Pure Fool in mind, but rather his common counterpart. 

And what of 777? 

777, the numeration of Ymenaios A (see Key for English letters employed to represent Greek characters), is, interestingly enough, also the numeration of e Kaliphes, "the Caliph", the virtually meaningless title that A.C. gave the young Grady to flatter his ego and which the old Grady wears today as a badge of honour--probably unaware to this day that Crowley was laughing at what he was then and would become in the future.  777 is also the numeration of the following:  o bradys, "the slow", and indeed it did take Grady many years to finally start up with his pseudo-o.t.o.; o ialemistria, "the wailing woman", possibly referring to Grady as a whiner; "diamachomai, "to fight with, struggle against; to fight one with another...", aside from the fact that he, Grady, was a soldier at the time he briefly knew A.C., this may refer to what is going on today as well as the idea that Grady is at least one of the sources for the "division" that is "hither homeward".  These Greek words, by the way, are to be found in Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, the same reference book A.C. primarily relied upon for his own work with the gematria of the Greek Qabalah. 

Last but not least, Crowley, in his Commentaries to THE BOOK OF THE LAW, provides us with another word which comes to the numeration of 777.  A.C., as he did with Hymenaeus, employs the old style of Sigma which looks like a capital or uppercase C in English when he writes this word and he takes the Sigma and Tau (st) as one letter, not two, that is to say as Stau, which is numerically equal to Digamma, 6, and that word which has the numeration of 777 is CTAYPOC, stauros--that word meaning "cross", the symbol of suffering, the symbol of Christianity (not necessarily the same as the teachings of the Initiate and Master Jesus).  When A.C. gave this foolish young man the number of 777, the number of the cross, was he referring to Grady's uncorrectable "Christian" leanings?  Personally, I think so.  And I suppose that Grady was the cross that Crowley had to bear at the time, and the cross all sincere Thelemites must bear, at least for a little longer. 

And Grady McMurtry is proud of his motto given him by Our Father Aleister Crowley, Trickster Supreme.  Why this may be the very best leg-pulling A.C. ever pulled off!  All these years and Grady still has not realized that in all probability he was the butt of a practical joke, that the Master Therion had very little, if any, respect for him.  Of course Grady will deny all of this to his dying days, but look at the assembled facts and consider well the personality of Aleister Crowley.  Does it not seem likely?  Perhaps more than likely... 

"In my hand is thy Sword of Revenge; let it strike at Thy Bidding!  By the Sword I invoke Thee!" 
     - THE EQUINOX OF THE GODS, page 83, by Aleister Crowley 

"The sword is made sharp in our hands, but the point He shall guide" 
     - Jephthah by Aleister Crowley 

(TNN.IV.3.6-10, JULY 1985 E.V.)