This past weekend Richard and I headed up to central New Hampshire – Lake Winnepesaukee specifically – to attend Liber Oz Fest, an event put on by the good folks at the Knights Templar Oasis, an OTO group in Massachusetts, with help from the folks at Mithras Oasis in Connecticut. Liber Oz Fest was meant to be an exploration of the concepts that Aleister Crowley put forth as one of the central documents of Thelema. You can read the whole thing here, but it boils down to the idea of individual freedom.
The whole thing was held at Star and Snake, a truly incredble retreat owned and run by my friend and brother Natan, a tattoo artist from Salem, MA. The entire space is designed to promote introspection and self-awareness, and it shows. Everywhere you look, there’s something you didn’t notice before. Everything is perfectly curated and placed with intention. It’s cliche, especially given that this was a weekend gathering of ceremonial magicians, to call it “magical”, but really, I can’t think of any better word to describe it. I have rarely felt more at peace in a space than I did there.
There were some really fantastic talks given on the themes of Liber Oz and how to apply them to your daily life (my personal favorite was Art and Magick, naturally), but what really made it such a special experience was how everything just…flowed. The entire weekend was extremely casual, but never felt like anything was being treated with any less deference than it should be. Â
I think the low-key atmosphere was what made the biggest impression on me about the event, and I think it’s something they should definitely aim to maintain if they continue to hold this event.  There were closet to 50 people in that house at points, but you’d never guess it, because it’s so huge and there were so many things going on, both officially and not, and everyone just kind of lounged around and engaged with whatever caught their attention and spirit most at the time.  Not since my time in college at Hampshire have I been around such a large group of people who were so comfortably just doing what they wanted/felt like doing and were so completely un-self-conscious about it. At any given time, you might find people listening to a talk, or exploring the grounds, or napping, or playing musical instruments, or meditating, or chatting together, or reading. At one point I spent almost an hour just sitting on the couch with Lon Milo DuQuette, chatting about his life experiences as well as my own – not something I’d ever expect to be able to do.
Since the event ended, I’ve spoken with several others who were in attendance, and the general sentiment seems to be that it will likely go down as a significant weekend in the history of the OTO. It was quite a “meeting of minds”, punctuated by, as Richard Kaczynski, one of the speakers put it, “beauty & strength, leaping laughter & delicious languor, force & fire”. The space at Star and Snake is something truly special, and I can’t thank Natan enough for having worked so hard to create it. The result of such a space is an infectious energy of growth and exploration and introspection that I think had a major effect on all of those who were part of the weekend there.
I look forward to the next iteration of this past weekend’s retreat with great anticipation, and I’m still feeling the after-effects of this one. I had no idea what to expect of this weekend, but any expectations I had were far exceeded, and I feel that it was an incredibly positive experience for me that I’ll be ruminating on for quite some time.
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