16 / Fire and Ice
(1923). (Indeed, there seems to have been a good deal of occult involvement among the German filmmakers of the pre-1933 era; some of the mysteries of this milieu have yet to be unraveled.) Finally, there was Eugen Grosche, who was initiated by Tränker and given the lodge name Gergor A. Gregorius. It was Gregorius who was the actual founder of the Pansophical Lodge and who was its general secretary. Gregorius ran an occult bookshop in Berlin at the time. In the summer of 1925, the most important event leading to the emergence of the FS took place. Without apparently knowing very much about his teachings, Master Recnartus invited Aleister Crowley to his house in Weida in Thuringia, Germany. The purpose of this meeting was to confer the leadership of the groups controlled by Tränker onto Crowley. Or so it seemed. After Theodor Reuss died in 1923, the international leadership of the O.T.O. passed to Crowley in England. Crowley had been an initiate of the Golden Dawn from 1898 to 1900. In April 1904, while in Cairo, Egypt, Crowley received a book—called the Liber AL vel Legis—which was transmitted to him by a praeterhuman entity calling itself Aiwass. This text is known more simply as the Book of the Law. With the reception of this book Crowley began to function as a Magus, and proclaimed a new Aeon with a new (Thelema: True Will). The Law of TheWord: lema was summed up in the motto: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," to which the obligatory response became: "Love is the law, love under will." All this constituted the Law of Thelema,