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Review: The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz, by Satyr. Kaos-Babalon Press, 2002. Online PDF file (and free of charge) search for Joel Biroco as the website keeps moving

This review is a sister piece to a review of Joel Biroco's monumental Kaos 14 magazine online, The Black Lodge' is offered as a supplement to that main document, but can be read separate from it as a standalone piece.

Since there are numerous living and real individuals and magical groups named in the article we should assume that legal or similar clearance has been obtained to represent them as such, as from the manner in which they are described it seems very likely that THEY will know who the author is. Or else, given the pejorative content of this piece in many places, Satyr just doesn't give a f*ck Either, both, neither- it's not important.

Ok; the story. It's California, late 1980s. The Caliphate OTO. Get the picture? Satyr details his initiation into the order, the personalities involved, and describes the rituals convincingly. It does not seem that this part, at least, is fiction. It then starts to become worrying: I've never been in the OTO, but I would start to get worried about an order who expect you to reproduce your scrying results absolutely verbatim to what should have been experienced according to some book- I think it was Jan Fries who said something like if you get visions exactly like Castaneda (or anybody else in print or otherwise well-known) you're probably fooling yourself and you should dare to be original.

It begins. Satyr and his wife were split up to be individually tutored' (ahem) in the Order. As you will have perhaps realised, as Old Crowley would have put it "it was the usual confidence trick" to separate a man from his girl, and most likely his money as well. There are overall some pretty stupid uses of magic by the group evoking a demon to ask who will win the baseball World Series, for example. Especially silly as having summoned the thing they didn't afterwards take the opportunity to win some money by actually placing a bet. Other magickal matters are dealt with here, in great frankness, the painful personal dissolution that is the path of the initiate, for examplethat area is gripping. If you've been there it's screamingly familiar, if you've not been there you wonder why the heck anyone would choose to go through such a process: "Of all that I lost in those days, losing my hero was the most bitter loss of all." It's the only way as Satyr says elsewhere "as many of

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