That's the question investigators have pondered for decades, and Craig Heimbichner furnishes fascinating answers as he probes deeply into the sooty arcana of the Ordo Templi Orientis — or "OTO" - the higher secret society to which elite Freemasons emigrate as part of a process of occult succession.
Blood on the Altar pursues the shape-shifting trail of this successor group — on the Left, as the pillar of a libertarian ethos, avant-garde drug culture, and radical hedonism; on the Right, as the pillar of aristocratic preference for authoritarian rule and classical culture.

Heimbichner has deconstructed not just a Janus-faced secret society but a method of operation so deceptive, the reader can hardly believe that such audacious and far-flung subterfuge and misdirection could possibly succeed for so long without exposure. But succeed it has, until now. The head-spinning trail of the OTO leads from the US government to the NASA rocket program, from the Hollywood film industry to Right-wing "patriot" groups, from the New Age craze for the Kabbalah, to an attempt to control the conservative enthusiasm for traditional liturgy.
The OTO has marched from triumph after triumph, as the spectre of its "Great Beast," British Intelligence officer Aleister Crowley, cast its Thelemic spell over a double-minded populace alternately seeking freedom-and-constraint, sex-and-repression, magick-and-Christendom, science-and-superstition. Blood on the Altar shows the OTO to be the signature secret society behind the most dazzling — and puzzling — charades of the modern Cryptocracy.

Softcover, 170 pages ($16.95)