Guest Article by Nonagonal Press: Why It Was The Right Time to Release Charnel House

Charnel House is an incredibly special text written by Christos Beest, first published by Stephen Cox’s publishing house Coxland Press in the 1990s. What makes it so unique — and quite frankly pivotal — is that it is required for deciphering the highly esoteric elements of the ONA, such as the secret combinative ritual of the Ceremony of Recalling and the Natural Nine Angles Rite as briefly referenced by Christos Beest in the MS “Words of Vermiel”

After reading for a short time, those that have studied or practised Thelema and other Golden Dawn adjacent currents will begin to pick up on Beest’s clever use of gematria to hide secrets in conjunction with metaphors.

The amusing thing about the existence of Charnel House is that it directly contradicts the ONA’s [apparent] later disavowal of Thelema and Crowley. Was this a deliberate play by the old guard to make it harder for adherents to discover their secrets as a form of higher initiation, or was it simply the case that someone who wasn’t old guard decided it was too hard and attempted to scrub it from ONA history? Because it is hard, it is very hard.

From our studies we have deduced that in order to comprehend it you need to have: (1) studied Thelema and Golden Dawn theory; (2) studied certain theories of the Illuminates of Thanteros; (3) studied early ONA manuscripts such as Noviciate Studies (1974), which detail the need for studying Crowley, Thelema and Golden Dawn before begining with ONA techings (qv. Noviciate Studies); (4) located Christos Beest’s “Kamea” cipher in a text produced by Ordo Templi Orientis, thereby finding an evidential link.

This brings us to why we dedided to publicly release Charnel House again. Last year, we entered it into private circulation among Nonagonal Press associates and intended to keep it private. What changed is that we realised that by keeping a Rosetta Stone such as Charnel House hidden, others could change the ONA to obfuscate or attempt to eradicate certain parts of it to its detriment.

Making the ONA tradition more “extreme”, more “evil” has turned it into a fetishist club, and not a particularly tasteful one. For all that Chloe did wrong, the one thing that she did right was retain the Double Pelican in the spiritual successor of the ONA — that the Seven Oxonians refer to as “ONA 2.0” (O9A/Omega Nine Alpha) —  despite her critics calling her “soft” for doing so.

Thus, with the public release of Charnel House we hope the ONA can posthumously find its way back into the ranks of the esteemed mystery schools that have captivated the studious and astute for the past 2,000 years.

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