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OAM TRADITION AND LINEAGE
I’ll write very briefly about the OAM to answer the recent question asked of me and give the background of the OAM and its lineage as best as I can in that tradition.
In answer to some of the questions raised recently I thought I’d better try and answer while I’ve got a chance here.
The first question as to would the Ordo Anno Mundi also refer to the Y tylweth teg as being Pre-Gardnerian Witchcraft? There’s no connection to any of the Welsh traditions and the OAM as far as Tony Steele has ever mentioned to me and as to being pre-Gardnerian is hard to answer, as lineage gets lost in story telling and conjecture in most traditions, including Gardner’s own tradition and claimed heritage.
The next question as to the Ordo Anno Mundi and The Coven of Cythrawl being Wiccan or Traditional because i have seen people refer to it with both descriptions? When I say Traditional i mean as far as Having an unbroken lineage and abiding by the old ways As a Pagan not neo-pagan. I was also wondering if someone could explain how Tony Steele came about as an initiated Witch and where the Oera Linda Book comes from, etc. Also, I was wondering why the God is described the same in the bible. I appreciate the attention and effort put forth to answer this Question.
Actually, the Coven of Cythrawl has always been more Wiccan. As I was firstly initiated by a Wiccan Coven many moons ago, and although I have practiced what can be classed as Traditional from many sources including some practitioners who claim a long heritage, our own training in the Coven of Cythrawl is actually more Wiccan drawing on a variety of sources, but the rituals are all Wiccan. The Temple of Cythrawl was strictly formed for the practitioners of the OAM in my area and is completely separate from the Coven of Cythrawl, as the two systems are so very completely different.
Don’t forget that the Coven of Cythrawl was also formed as a Research Group for all manner of practitioners to come and research all manner of occult practices and religions from around the world. That is the beauty of sharing knowledge and not being stingy with it. We can all learn and learn together and find what actually works for us.
Certainly not every practice works the same for each and every individual and is why we are called individuals. There’s nothing to say we can’t practice what works for us and be more eclectic in our training and workings. However, the OAM is very strict and has a system that is not so flexible, but is only one of the forms of training that I personally found interesting and extremely powerful in its working. Perhaps that’s just me though and it is certainly not an easy practice.
Tony Steele inherited the OAM’s own heritage from a couple of sources and would not be classed as Wiccan in any way. The claims of its history going back to ancient times is only conjecture and based more on the magical texts of the "Oera Linda Book", which has sections that are reputed to date back more than four thousand years, but of course there is so much controversy as to this fact and that it really only was written in the last few centuries is more than likely the case. However, it has practices that are not found in any other form of Witchcraft and rituals so far to date.
The backbone of being more a Northern tradition mixed with other components to bring into line with a more modern flavour came from Tony’s own training and interpretations. The Ordo Anno Mundi was introduced to me as a member of one of the oldest formed Traditional Witchcraft practices, offering full training in the Ophidian (Serpent-venerating) Traditional Craft, and has been mixed from various sources, including that of the water witches and other forms of practices that were put together to form a complete practice.
The actual OAM TRADITION AND LINEAGE as best as I can describe is in the main site. The site on our pages was written by Tony originally and when he asked me to add it to my pages I kept it as he wrote it. The historical side was only changed a little to include how I came into it to help assist Tony, as it was growing so fast with so many members that it all became too much for Tony to run by himself and as I was a mere member myself and had trained in the OAM for many years (to help me understand one of many different practices in my own personal plight to understand world traditions in occult practices).
There has of course been much talk about recognized craft lineages etc, which really are rigorously defended by individual groups around the world, especially in the England. But we can never really tell what came from ancient times and what didn’t, similar to the claimed history of the Druids, which is now of course accepted as being more Neo-Pagan, as no history besides the Roman essays ever survived history and that the Roman scribes, including Caesar, and were definitely biased and they were not of course initiated into any tradition such as the oral one of the Druids .
Anyway, in answering that the OAM still remains one of the oldest “founded” (note that word founded) traditional craft, with an unbroken line, is actually based on a mix of what was handed down to be eventually blended into the OAM itself.
Every ancient culture recognized a primordial Serpent-deity associated with wisdom and power, dwelling in the watery Abyss deep below the Earth's surface. Even the Bible makes comparison to Wr’alda the Serpent Deity of the OAM and Leviathan from Christian interpretation with its usual way of demonizing everything not of their making, similar to the Horned God
In more recent centuries this ancient belief of a primordial Serpent-deity was kept alive by Traveling Folk, (not just gypsies either), especially those who lived and worked on the sea, on rivers, and (later) on canals. Knowledge of the World Serpent also persisted in remote country districts all over Europe.
The Oera Linda Book was; the story goes, compiled over many centuries by the Frisians, a nation who in historical times lived around the southern coast of the North Sea, but of course there is no hard fact as to this as the family who safeguarded the book were called into question over the centuries.
The Frisians believed that their ancestors had constructed the stone circles and megalithic monuments that are found all over Europe. They also claimed to be descended from the inhabitants of the lost island (I’m guessing here they probably mean Atlantis, or Atland, as they called it).
Of course an ancient Megalithic Culture existed across the whole of western and northern Europe, and was the earliest known civilisation on Earth. The Greek philosopher Plato, (and the Oera Linda Book for that matter), both tell us that this vast area was divided into ten autonomous kingdoms, or kin-groups, spread out over large tracts of the continent.
The remains of the Megalithic Culture can be seen to this day in the form of cromlechs, dolmens, barrows, and stone circles such as Stonehenge. The earliest of these crypts, or temples, have been dated to around 4,800 BC, so this gives us a reasonable starting point for the long and convoluted history of the Ophidian Craft - though some would say that it is as old as the human race itself.
Today, one of the forms of the Ophidian Craft, as it might be termed, is preserved and passed on by the Ordo Anno Mundi (OAM), which has branches all around the world. Based originally in Staffordshire, England, the OAM, as a new formation by Tony Steele was officially started on 18th March 1985 and forms its initiatory lineage on the Frisian-descended Canal Folk of the English Midlands, mixed with other traditional practices.
According to Tony Steele, the founder of the OAM and inheritor of the linage(s) as handed to him, the concept of "lineage" is still important in Occultism, and basically mean the ability to trace one’s initiatory line back, without a break, to a point in the past.
How far back that past goes is of course the age of that particular lineage. I couldn’t testify of any lineage as coming from megalithic times as that would be insane. History does not go in a linear form when we speak of cultures and/or religions as there is so much of a mixing and merging over time.
Tony Steele states emphatically that there are many groups and individuals around today who have no such lineage, and therefore tend to play down its importance. He goes on to say that many are often devoid of genuine magical knowledge (though a few of them may have stumbled on some aspect of it by accident).
But even more important than a physical Initiation, the lineage concept implies that Occult knowledge has been passed down in the form of training.
He goes on to say that there are far too many people around today who DO indeed possess an Initiatory lineage, but have neglected to do any of the work involved.
The OAM was founded as an official NEW formation, as I mentioned, on 18th March 1985 and actually has a dual Initiatory lineage, (besides personal initiory lineages from other groups),which forms the backbone of the OAM and prepares students who maintain the training to the higher Degrees within the OAM, which have a lot more powerful techniques and practices.
But let’s break this down a little to see the main two lines. In chronological order the first of these major lineages is derived from Alison Bayliss and the second from Bob Clay-Egerton, both extremely well known in the occult circles
Firstly, I’ll describe the the Bayliss Lineage....
Alison Bayliss was a member of the Theosophical Society (B’ham Annie Besant Lodge) and the Co-Masons (Lodge Loyalty No. 713) - the Co-Masons are a branch of Freemasonry that allows women to join as well as men. (You might remember that Gardner was initiated by similar traditional groups that belonged to more than one branch of occultism and there are people today, such as Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone, that think Gardner was initiated into that at first).
Anyway, Alison Bayliss was also a member of a small group within the Co-Masons who were heavily into the lore of Atlantis, and who called themselves the Societas Mundus Sapientia (which means "Society of Worldly Wisdom"). This had originally been set up in about 1902 by Annie Besant, who in that year went to France and received Initiation into the Co-Masons with the intention of setting up a branch of the order in England.
Annie Besant had been head of the Esoteric (i.e. ritual magic) Section of the Theosophical Society since 1891 and this latter organisation, as is well known, has a great deal to say about Atlantis. Here are excerpts from a speech Mrs Besant gave at a Co-Masonic meeting in London on 30th October 1919:
"In the earlier days knowledge was kept back from the world and given only to the ‘Secret Societies’…Therefore some of this hidden knowledge will not be given out till the Social Conscience of the world advances…If we do not improve the Social Conscience, our race is in danger of the same fate as that which overtook Atlantis."
Clearly, Annie Besant saw the Societas Mundus Sapientia as an inner core of enlightened souls whose task it was to raise the "Social Conscience" of the rest of the human race.
Mrs. Besant herself was involved in many ‘esoteric and traditional magickal groups’. She also became overall president of the Theosophical Society in 1910 and increasingly involved herself in Indian mysticism, as she spent many of her later years in India.
Leadership of the Societas Mundus Sapientia in England devolved on Georgina Bewick, who took it over on the death of Annie Besant in 1933.
Georgina Bewick had joined the Co-Masons (Lodge Cymru No. 710, Cardiff) in 1924 at the age of fifty-five, and at the same time became part of the Societas Mundus Sapientia.
She succeeded Annie Besant as its leader in 1933 until her own death in 1958, a few weeks short of her ninetieth birthday. She was also Master of her Masonic Lodge in 1935. In 1939 she moved from Wales to Bedford, but continued to attend Welsh meetings on a regular basis. Here are excerpts from an essay she wrote called The Spirit of Masonry:
"When star crowned trees, and the glint of sunlight on the flowering waters subdue him like the thought of one much loved and long dead…. When he can look into the wayside puddle and see something beyond mud…. Such a man has found the only real secret of Masonry, and the one which it is trying to give to all the world."
It seems very unlikely that the present United Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons would agree with her entirely though!
When Georgina Bewick died in 1958 she was succeeded as leader of the Societas Mundus Sapientia by Sarah Richards, who had become a member in 1937 at the same time as joining Lodge Cymru No. 710. She was Master of this Lodge in 1946 and 1951. In 1970 she moved from Wales to Birmingham where she joined Lodge Loyalty No. 713 the following year.
From this point on the centre of activity of the Societas Mundus Sapientia shifted, with its leader, from Cardiff to Birmingham.
But what did this activity consist of? In its earlier years, under Annie Besant and Georgina Bewick, the Societas Mundus Sapientia would have held formal ritual meetings - probably outdoors and also in members’ homes.
These meetings consisted of the various magical and special yogic exercises that Annie Besant had learnt from her various teachers in her long Occult career. Gradually, however, active meetings became less frequent, and by the 1970s they simply consisted of a discussion in the kitchen of Lodge Loyalty No. 713, held once a month after Lodge meetings. Sarah Richards died in 1984, and was succeeded as leader by Alison Bayliss.
Tony first met Alison in 1981 when Tony, who was already an experienced and initiated Wiccan Craft man, joined the Theosophical Society, and their personal mutual interest in Atlantean lore soon drew him into lengthy conversations. She sponsored, and helped to conduct, Tony’s Initiation into the Co-Masons in 1983, and he also became part of the Societas Mundus Sapientia.
By this time Sarah Richards was a very ill old lady, and Alison was already the effective leader of the group. But also by this time the group was virtually moribund, and was lucky if it got half a dozen people at its monthly discussions in the Lodge kitchen.
Yet Tony was fascinated by the extremely specialized and secret magical and yogic lore that they discussed, and he decided to put myself through some of the exercises described - which proved very effective in all sorts of magickal workings and especially Otherworld workings.
It is actually from this source the OAM inherits the various specialized yogic postures such as the Crux, Isis, and Saxon, which are extremely taxing both physically and mentally. It also inherits the Kultus and its correct environment, the techniques of magical continence, plus the whole gamut of Atlantean lore and Star lore, including the Axis Mundi, and the use of the Oera Linda Book (which Alison held to be of the utmost significance).
Unfortunately, Alison Bayliss died suddenly on the last day of July 1984, a mere twenty-six days after her predecessor Sarah Richards. She had had no time to stamp her own personality on the Societas Mundus Sapientia, nor to rescue it from its moribund state (as Tony was sure she had hoped to do). Neither had she named a successor. The result of course was inevitable - the group started to fizzle out, while Tony worked frantically to maintain it all.
The next few months were fairly chaotic for Tony, but in March 1985 he decided to try and get things moving again. He made discrete enquiries at the Lodge to properly maintain the Order and move it once again into an active working and research state, but nobody was really interested.
He knew that the link with Co-Masonry had choked the life out of the real core of it all, especially the magickal working and the Frisian heritage that Alison had passed down in the Societas Mundus Sapientia. Actually, the Order should have thrown open its membership to all genuine seekers, not just their friends in the Co-Masons.
So, along with four other members, Tony Steele was granted full leadership and with that, founded a new group which was to be totally independent of the Co-Masons completely, and he called it the Ordo Anno Mundi (a term that stems from a secret Frisian magickal chant for Wra’da).
The former members of the old group handed over the reins of the old Order complete, whilst also passing over all of its huge archives, especially the Clay-Egerton Lineage's, which have a direct line to the OAM, besides the other traditional groups that had melded with the Societas Mundus Sapientia over the years and joined the OAM as the main Order from that date.
The OAM had already been in existence for seven years when it received another important element in its overall lineage.
In 1989 Tony joined a Witchcraft Coven run by a young woman named Wendy Sycamore in Erdington, Birmingham. Later, in 1992, Wendy was Initiated by Bob Clay-Egerton, a famous Occultist then living in Newcastle.
Wendy closed down her original Coven and formed instead a new group called ‘Veils of the Ancient Serpent’, for which Tony acted as High Priest.
The new group used in its workings the special Ophidian (Serpent-venerating) lore that Wendy and the OAM received from Bob Clay-Egerton. When this knowledge was firstly passed on to us, Tony was especially fascinated and excited to see many points of convergence with the Atlantean and Frisian lore he had known about for years. For example, the Leviathan of the Ophidians appeared to be none other than the World-Serpent (Wr-alda) described in the Oera Linda Book.
The Pleiades, (which by the way, was the name of my own first Wiccan Coven with a direct line to Gardner, where I was initiated into Wicca in a place called Shropshire, bordering onto Wales in 1967). Anyway, back to the Pleiades, which is terribly important in both systems, as is the number Seven by itself. (That is also why the Pleiades and Seven Sisters has seemed to follow me all my Craft life). I actually had come from a loose past in the Old Ways and story telling on the Isle of Man and just kept going and never once looked back).
A lot of the Yogic and Tantric lore from the Ophidian (Serpent-venerating) lore that Wendy had received from Bob Clay-Egerton was found to be very similar to what Tony already had and came as a bit of a shock. He came to the conclusion that the two systems, Ophidian and Atlantean, are most probably derived from a common source.
And that by combining the two, it would be possible to fill in a number of holes that had crept into the transmission. Incidentally, the main difference between the two traditions is that the Ophidian tends to use Hebrew in its terminology, whereas the Atlantean/Frisian uses Greek and other European languages. This difference is purely superficial though.
The ‘Veils of the Ancient Serpent’ eventually and sadly split up in 1993 when Wendy moved away from Birmingham. From the Ophidian teachings of Bob Clay-Egerton the OAM inherits the Hebrew-Edomite (Qabalistic) titles of the Ancient Powers, the Hells and their correspondences, the emphasis on thought-forms and their myriad capabilities, and various other trappings of ritual.
Bob Clay-Egerton died on 20th January 1998. In his long Occult career, spanning more than forty years, he had been initiated into a vast number of different groups and traditions, of which some were obviously transmitted and passed to the OAM directly.
One of the earliest of these was a Traditional Witchcraft Coven that operated in the Cheshire area when he was a teenager. At about this time he also became part of a magical order called the Wardensi Aldredsley, or Wardens of Alderley Edge.
He later took part in magical workings with Gerald Gardner, the founder of revised Wicca, and was a close friend of Alex Sanders, (who actually also taught me on one occasion in London many moons ago).
He apparently even knew Aleister Crowley, before the old boy croaked. Among the groups of which he was a direct part can be named the ‘Esoteric Order of the Serpent’, the ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, and the ‘Order of the Golden Dawn’. Bob Clay-Egerton was truly a polymath and was connected with just about everything going.
If even a small fragment of his vast knowledge has been inherited by us (in the OAM, as a direct line to his Orders and him), through his vast archives and writings, I feel that the OAM can be proud of this lineage alone....
In the 1990s Tony Steele added another missing fragment that came at a most opportune moment from the magical practices of the Water Witches, who, like Alison Bayliss, held the Oera Linda Book in great esteem. After hearing rumours for many years, Tony was finally able to also inherit and be initiated into the traditions of these hereditary water travelers of the canals.
Their beliefs and practices turned out to be very closely related, perhaps even ancestral, to the Atlantean and Ophidian lore Tony had already been taught and filled in many of the holes that had escaped over the millenia. He even then wrote a book called WATER WITCHES, (Capall Bann Publishing, 1998).
Well -that completes a bit of a lengthy discourse and I’ll wait until you digest it all. If you have any more questions, just drop me a line.
B*B
Azaz
If you are interested in finding out more about the OAM and its uniquely effective system of magical training, then please take the time to explore the rest of these pages :
Members (This page is for members only and is encrypted)
If you are interested in checking out the OAM Linage
One of the most important books in the Ordo Anno Mundi, is the "Oera Linda Book" and is an important magical text in the study of this form of Traditional Witchcraft.
If you wish to consider joining the Ordo Anno Mundi form of Traditional Witchcraft, you may go and learn more about it at the following link...
... or you may go straight to get an application form at the following page:
Updated 19th November 2003
You may also find lot's of interesting articles here at More Witch Stuff
I have also recently added some postings. These postings are derived from the Research Group's chat pages besides offering many various lessons and insights for newcomers to the Old Ways, besides deep enough to be thought provoking for experienced members. With over 95 people on line, there is a lot of interesting topics always coming up and not just about Wicca or Traditional Witchcraft.
Reading and Other References
Pennick, Nigel
Dragons of the West (Capall Bann, 1997)
Steele, Tony
Water Witches (Capall Bann, 1998)
Rites and Rituals of Traditional Witchcraft (Capall Bann, 2001)
Oera Linda Book
Complete text online: http://www.angelfire.com/realm/oam/oera.htm
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within Wicca Working Tools of Wicca
Elements of Witchcraft
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Script
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