Maevius Lynn blows the whistle on OTO

Occult influencer Maevius Lynn has ditched her plans to become a priestess, saying local OTO politics turned spiritual work into a nasty little power game.

The occultist and YouTuber said the Order’s old rumour mill about women being pushed into the priestess role is not what hit her. “I have been blocked. My progress, I have been bullied. I have been shamed. I have not had the opportunity to be a priestess at all in my tradition, at all.”

Lynn claims she was frozen out of opportunities and shut out of the admin who keeps people moving, with deadlines and paperwork somehow never reaching her. She says the sniping escalated into a smear campaign led by someone in a position of authority.

Lynn said: “It got to a point where it wasn't just like little jabs at me in person and little henpecking going on. It got to the point where someone was making up lies about me to try to ruin my reputation behind my back. And what a stupid way to spend your time, really. What a childish, pathetic thing to do. You know, you could be out there in the world doing literally anything else, having literally any other conversation, and you choose to talk about someone else.”

She says the gossip carried on even after she stepped back, including claims aired at a social event in front of a non-member guest.

“This person in a leadership role was still gossiping about me to new people, and there was a social event where someone brought their fiancée someone i don't even know who's not even an OTO member and they were just going for it they were going at trying to ruin my reputation, accusing me of things that are not true,” Lynn said.

Lynn said they “tried to make me look horrible, mentally unstable and a bigot” and she insists she had “receipts” to show it was fiction. She reported the behaviour to senior figures, then got what she describes as silence and fog.

She adds a darker warning about her local scene, describing a “red flag” pattern where someone with power pursued newcomers in an “adult” way, then love-bombed and burned through them. Lin says some of the worst incidents are not hers to detail, but she reported what she knew because she did not want other people harmed.

Lynn said: “I had stepped away, and then the final nail in the coffin was this whole shebang because I realised that the way politics are locally, I'm not going to be getting ritual experience. I'm not going to be getting experience doing the Gnostic Mass. And it's just an incredibly toxic, hostile environment for me. It's absolutely horrible. It negatively affects my mood. It negatively affects my mental health.”

OTO has had this sort of row hanging around it before, with long-running online complaints about clique politics, gatekeeping, and leaders acting like they own the place. Lin’s point is that the structure makes it far too easy for a local boss to turn a lodge into a personal fiefdom.

It also shows that these problems are never properly handled by senior OTO members who seem to isolate the victims and leave the people being complained about in place.

“The way things are handled in OTO is you don't really hear about what decisions are made or how things are done. So, I don't know if anything's done. I don't even know what's going on. No one's told me, and no one will tell me. That's the point,” Lynn said.

She posted a video outlining the complaints, but it was removed from YouTube after just 24 hours. It is unclear why this was the case, but there have been other instances of whistleblowers being told to keep silent for the “good of the Thelemic movement.”

Still, it keeps the autocratic sex pests safe. It is also helps organisers of expensive courses who feel they can declare occult orders are "unsafe" while events they hold at fascist theme parks are perfectly safe. The fact that said organisers might have had a brush with OTO for failing to recognise their greatness might have something to do with it.