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The Long Story
In Autumn 2000, members of Golden Apple Camp, a Seattle-area OTO body, asked Jon Sewell to direct and star in a production of Aleister Crowley's The Rite of Jupiter as part of their ongoing performance series of the Rites of Eleusis. As fate would have it, Jon attended a performance of the traveling Broadway show "Rent" the afternoon of the first production meeting for Jupiter. Feeling inspired by the wonderful musical, he decided to produce Jupiter as a rock opera.

Jon composed most of the music for Jupiter. Several members of the local OTO community who were musically gifted also happened to be interested in participating in the Jupiter production, among them J. Ulysses Ruiz, who played Typhon and composed the musical core for the pieces he would sing. Local eclectic musician Antony Passonno composed and recorded the musical expressions of the Sphynx, and digitally recorded the music for the performance. In this production, the long sections of poetry for Jupiter and Typhon were sung, while the 963 adoration, Hermanubis' poem, and the non-poetic dialog were spoken. The Rite of Jupiter was first performend in March 2001 at The Vogue nightclub in Seattle.

Due to continued interest, a second performance was staged at the Summerstar Pagan Gathering on July 20th of 2001. For this performance, H. Seth Herman joined the cast as Hermanubis and chose to sing a haunting rendition of the poem "Awake" that had been spoken in the first performance. Jon recorded and digitally mastered a soundtrack of this performance as well and composed several new instrumental sections of music for the performance.

Throughout the production of Jupiter, the question was always, "Can it be done?" After producing Jupiter, Jon was hooked and determined that he wanted to do all of the Rites as musicals. Jon selected The Rite of Luna as his next project because it was the first of the Rites that he had seen and because he wanted to play Pan. For The Rite of Luna the question was, "How well can it be done?"

One year after the final performance of Jupiter, while attending Summerstar 2002, Jon began composing music for The Rite of Luna with a copy of the script and his acoustic guitar. After nearly two years of work and collaboration with Melissa Holm, as flautist and the voice of Cancer, the Rite of Luna started to become a reality. The Rite of Luna was performed in the spring of 2005, with one show in Portland, OR and four shows in Seattle, WA.