Karl Germer (1885–1962)

For the last six months I have been reading the thirty-five years of correspondence collected in Karl Germer: Selected Letters 1928-1962. Germer's own writing makes up barely half of the content, because it is paired with letters from his correspondents, chiefly Jane Wolfe and Phyllis Seckler. While the editors have selected these letters from a larger set available to them, it is implied that they are limited to the archives of the Temple of the Silver Star, which organization published the show more book. This group claims an authorization from Phyllis Seckler (Soror Meral), and the relevant archives for this book are evidently part of her legacy to the group. Seckler was also, as reflected in a letter reproduced here (369-70) in receipt of Jane Wolfe's papers. There are, in fact, considerably more letters to and from Wolfe than Seckler, with the emphasis switching from the older to the younger woman at almost exactly the 2/3 point of the book.

No information is given on whether the individual letters were typewritten or manuscript. There are a fair number of typographical errors, and a few of these are ambivalently suggestive of defective OCR, e.g. "sigh" for sign (247). None are flagged with sic to indicate that the errors were present in the pre-publication originals. The index of names and subjects is valuable, but a table of contents listing letters by date with author and addressee would have been a huge help to serious researchers.

Although the letters are supposed to have been set into sequence by date, some letters are undated, and there are in fact a few letters in 1952 and 1953 that are not in chronological order (273, 280). These are particularly focused on a mystical experience of Soror Meral that is interpreted as involving her Holy Guardian Angel. I have heard it alleged that this apparent mix-up was deliberate, in an effort to promote Seckler's bona fides as an adept of A.'.A.'., although it is not obvious to me how the letters in their distorted order provide any real confirmation for those seeking it.

Germer gives his own adept resume--at least in terms of dates of advancement--in an especially interesting 1952 letter to Jane Wolfe (258-9). In the larger corpus, he repeatedly highlights his own incapacities. While he was certainly a member of the Sovereign Sanctuary of O.T.O. and in possession of the Order's central secret, he was thoroughly ignorant of both E.G.C. and the preliminary degrees of the Order. The only such degree he had ever even attended was a Minerval ceremony that he characterized as "a farce" (246). Basic management of A.'.A.'. in the Outer was something that he needed to learn from Jane Wolfe. He was dependent on her even for the text of the Oath of a Probationer (256). He confesses, "I have never been any good at Astral work and don't really understand it" (281), as well as, "Banishing rituals: I have never used any in my life, in fact, would not know how to work them" (368).

Germer's real interests and expertise, as shown here, lie in the vertebral Holy Books of Thelema (i.e. CCXX, LXV, and VII), astrology, and a sort of mystical nosology concerning grades of attainment and fidelity to the Thelemic current. He is explicit about a distinction between the mortal Aleister Crowley and the Secret Chief "666, who liveth forever, and runs the affairs of humanity" (244). Even after the stressful episodes during which Germer tried to manage the California Thelemites from New York before Crowley's death, he showed a preoccupation with previous leaders of the North American O.T.O. such as Charles Stansfeld Jones and Wilfred T. Smith as "traitors," along with interlopers like Ron Hubbard and Oskar Schlag. By 1958, after his move to California, he was also vituperating against Louis Culling and Grady McMurtry (364-5), and in 1961 Seckler felt compelled to confess to him her notion that he had "a persecution complex" which would soon result in setting her on the enemies list of his "neurosis" (370).

There are a few pieces of information dropped regarding the German Thelemites with whom Germer had been in communication. As someone who had himself been imprisoned for almost nine months in concentration camps (19-20), he expressed a curious pity for Martha Kuentzel (Soror I.W.E.), who had given her allegiance to the Nazis (125-6). He went to pains to keep in communication with and cultivate her successor Friedrich Levke. Eventually, he criticized Levke for using C. G. Jung's ideas to interpret Crowley, rather than the other way around (201-2). (I concur with Germer in this regard, and regret to see that Levke was far from the last to take the wrong turn in question.)

The final seven pages of the body text reproduce a trio of letters between Germer and Marcelo Ramos Motta that shed a great deal of light on a relationship that has often been considered a basis of legitimating authority in A.'.A.'. From these missives, it seems very unlikely that Motta ever received any Inner Order instruction from Germer. A mere three months before Germer's death, Motta capitulated on his previous claims to be the head of a de novo Order of Thelema and submitted a pledge seeking admission to the grade of Zelator in A.'.A.'. (388).

Germer's letters sometimes make provocative allusions without supplying details, in ways that would likely have frustrated his addressees as much as they do today's readers. For example, he claims in passing that the "title of the book [Liber AL] is not complete, the full title is secret anyway" (222).

While Aleister Crowley claimed "an intimate knowledge of the Bible so deeply rooted that it seems hardly unfair to say that it formed the whole foundation of my mind," it is bracing to find his organizational heir flatly declaring "I have never read the bible" (317)--which is not to take any issue with Germer when he remarks, "Christianity is a ridiculously parochial religion, to-day suited to the minds of the lowest tribes" (382). He condemned the anti-scientific posture of Christianity, while at the same time insisting, "What we all have to realize deep in our heart is the fact that conscious life is just an appendix hanging down on this physical plane from a Universe which is so incredibly vaster, richer, and fuller" (291). show less