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Renuncio

Crowley's three Orders – EGC, OTO and A∴A∴ – all initiate. Like the Christian-Catholic Church of Rome, EGC (Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica) has a sacramental system, and OTO and A∴A∴ have their own peculiar initiatory paths. When approaching Thelema and Magick, the noob often wonders where to begin. People are generally advised to do whatever they want, but aside from such a redundant sentiment there is a more specific recommendation from the person who designed all these systems with a pattern and synergy in mind, Aleister Crowley. Quoting from a lecture given at Sekhet Maat Lodge in Portland, Oregon in 2010 by T Omphalos entitled, A Sword in my Hand:1

[Crowley] keeps on being fairly critical of what he comes to know as “occultists." He declares to W.T. Smith: “We do not want any more drifting occultists. By that he means people who came to Crowley to mine his knowledge of occultism but had little interest or use for Thelema. So he writes to W.B. Crow, “Your riposte about The Equinox and Book of Thoth does not touch me, because these are technical works for the learned. What I put out as doctrine is a simple slogan." 

And with this we see how Crowley at the end of his life - this was written in 1945, that is after he wrote Magick Without Tears - that Crowley envisions a kind of community where people basically start out as adherents, like he would write to Germer, that the basic public association with people would be the Gnostic Mass. That would be our first introduction to the Law of Thelema. And then we would probably be baptized and confirmed, and learn about Thelema. And then those who are called to the law as a way of life would then join the OTO to learn Thelema as a way of life, for those who are suited to that. And those who are called for attainment in a strict sense, in an A∴A∴ sense, can join A∴A∴. There's more than enough room for all of us. 

Crowley saw Thelema as a sweeping cultural movement, informed by A∴A∴, coordinated by OTO, and promoted by EGC via the Gnostic Mass, a rallying ritual that would call together sympathetic souls in a resounding affirmation of life and celebration of the gradual transmutation both within and without. Individuals would be drawn into orbit by the Gnostic Mass and be ceremonially received into our community with Baptism (and Confirmation). If they then sought a more active role in the movement, they might initiate into OTO, going through the first of three series of degrees, the Man of Earth triad, which Crowley designed to make one suitable for further initiation, either into the government of the Order, which begins (and, he writes, for most people ends) at the V°, and/or into A∴A∴. Crowley believed the Man of Earth series would serve as “a boot camp for A∴A∴," and as the Man of Earth initiate ends in the III°, Death, and its appendices, Perfection and Annihilation (IV° and P.I.), so does the Path of A∴A∴ begin in Death, the degree of Neophyte. 

I strongly recommend this path to people approaching Thelema. It is a structured initiatory progression that begins with a community of spirit - Ecclesia - informed by a life-affirming understanding of our heliocentric nature - Gnostica - that does not define itself on vulgar prejudicial categories of race or politik - Catholica. This is the basic need of those who approach us. Upon this real need for community and religion might be built an ideological promulgatory arm – OTO. And having achieved this basic initiatory magico-ethical experience, one is better informed and equipped to engage the august aspiration of A∴A∴, should that be their Will. This path is pyramidal in culmination, beginning with the basic but always mindful of the summit - the product resembling the peak.

There is another ceremony that I wish to address in this essay more directly, one that is often deliberately ignored despite Crowley's insistence that it precede any sort of affiliation, which I like to refer to as Renunciation. 

The more that Crowley accepted his role as prophet of Thelema and less as some unparalleled expert on all things occult, the more he became frustrated with those whose only interest in his organizations was the latter. Dilettantes abound, and they tend to toy with old sweetnesses in harboring sentimentality for the foregone religious traditions, the “Slave Religions" of the “Old Aeon." The plague of puerile pretenders persists to this day – many come to OTO and initiate, sometimes well into our degree structure, only to part ways because of some ethical conflict or mopish prejudice. Crowley was especially irked by his once-chosen protégé, Charles Stansfeld Jones or Frater Achad, who went mad in his attempt to cross the Abyss and then converted to Catholicism. Crowley describes the failing of this ultimate initiation as falling into the Abyss and states that in the attempt to divest oneself of everything, the one sentiment which is kept hidden is the anchor that sinks one into the abyss forever, the weight in one's heart that tips the scales of Ma'at. For C.S. Jones, Christianity was that cinderblock. Ten years previous to Jones' abandonment of Thelema and reversion to Christianity, Crowley had written to him: 

I am inclined to propose that you should prepare a formula, to be presented at your lectures, by which any person can publicly renounce the errors of Christianity and so on, and accept the Law. Such a person should at that time burn a copy of his old ‘sacred book’, Bible, Mrs. Eddy, or what not, and be marked by you with The Mark of The Beast, to wit, the Acid on the Pulse of the Left Wrist. 

AC to CS Jones, April 1, 1919 

There is no record that Jones ever put this into practice. Fifteen years following Jones' failure, Crowley wrote his ultimate successor, Karl Johannes Germer and, undoubtedly reflecting on Jones, Crowley's suggestion has become a very edict and a condition for Germer's succession. Crowley writes: 

I shall appoint you my successor as O.H.O. but on special terms. It is quite clear to me that a complete change in the structure of the Order, and in its methods, is necessary. The Secret is the basis, and you must select the proper people. You can take outsiders; but everyone who has anything to do with us at all must make a formal renunciation of ideas denounced in AL 49-56. Cap III. Then comes the New Social Order, on the lines laid down in the books LII, CI, CLXI and CXCIV (See Equinox III.1. pp 195-246) and same in Eqx III.2.—this volume is not under my hand at the moment. The broad base of public association is the Gnostic Mass. 

AC to Karl Germer, March 14, 1942 

In US Grand Lodge's semi-regular publication, Agape, Vol. 9 Num 3/4, the Grand Master Sabazius interprets the latter letter as stating that Crowley would allow Germer to communicate “the Secret" to non-initiates of OTO, so long as they made “a formal renunciation of [slave religion]." I beg to differ, arguing that Crowley, in this paragraph, jumps from point to point in each sentence, and that taking outsiders referred not to wanton communication of the Secret of the IX°, but rather to the general engagement of the public. 

T Polyphilus, a Chicago-based Bishop of EGC, says that laity of EGC and initiates of OTO are mistaken in thinking that the rituals of either suffice in severing ties from old religion. Crowley's edict recalls other traditions which expected likewise of their aspirants. In the Catholic baptism, which most baptids would not recall as they were doused in Papist bilge as infants, one precedes a Confessio with a Renuncio. The Priest asks, “Do you renounce Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?" To each query, the hapless idiot replies, “I do." 

Thelemic Renunciation recalls this – the renouncing of empty promises made by deceivers and hucksters – and also the Catholic sacrament of Confession. But in this Thelemic version of Confession, one does not whisper guilt in pained pitiful pants to some private priest. Rather, one declares to the Ecclesia one approaches that they reject the phony grace and transcendental suicide of old religions, and that they have naught to confess but, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." 

Despite this beautiful occasion and warm welcoming, most OTO communities today do not practice Renunciation, much less require it for membership. In fact, unbelievably, many modern members of OTO disdain the formality, calling it prejudicial to those hyphenated Thelemites who somehow reconcile faith in the Abrahamic slave-God and his insidious pundits with the Law of Thelema, which Crowley read as asserting that “There is no god but man." Crowley elsewhere marks that the Theist is necessarily a slave in having asserted God as being external. This displaced locus of volition is the beginning and the end of freedom. Faith in salvation through vicarious atonement or the sickly virtues and scornful morals of Christianity is the asshole of human consciousness from which only shit might emerge. 

Crowley's hate for Christendom is apparent to any literate student of Thelema, but one piece of ritual comes to mind. In Liber 70, The Cross of a Frog, Crowley writes: 

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 

Lo, Jesus of Nazareth, how thou art taken in my snare. All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name - with all other free souls in Christendom - I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed to me they pay not - in thy name. Now, at last, I have thee; the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom. Thine hour is come; as I blot thee out from this earth, so surely shall the eclipse pass; and the Light, Life, Love and Liberty be once more the Law of Earth. Give thou place to me, O, Jesus; thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus is arisen by the Magick of the Master the Beast that is Man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six. 

Love is the law, love under will. 

Current OTO culture and practice does not encourage sponsorship requirements at all. Frequently people cite Crowley in Liber 52, “Every man and woman that is of full age, free, and of good report, has an indefeasible right to the III°." They therefore believe that the sole responsibility of a sponsor is to make sure that the candidate is old enough, not incarcerated and not on “bad report." I argue instead that the line refers to the III°, Death, and “every man and woman" refers to the I°, the Man and Brother or Woman and Sister, the Birth degree, all this recalling a dated OTO practice of one's sponsorship for the I° being sponsorship into I° and through to the III°. 

All this discussion of rights, privilege and what one deserves aside, it is important to recall that current OTO policy does not require Renunciation for any other sort of membership, and it is not likely to in the near future. However, it is fine for an initiate to require it of an applicant who requests their sponsorship. I hope that understanding the importance of this formal requirement will become the norm over time, to where policy would be redundant, and OTO would not take seriously those who do not take Thelema seriously.2

For those who want to begin practicing this, there are some who have already written rituals to satisfy Crowley's outline, including T Polyphilus, IAO 131, and myself:

Renunciation Ritual

To be celebrated prior to any occasion of a public Gnostic Mass in whatever antechamber the People await admittance into the Temple. 

Those wishing to Renounce would have ideally provided whatever abrogate tome with which some shill first defined them (the bible etc), this for burning. There should be a place prepared for pyre. 

A Deacon, thus adorned, announces, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. The People reply, Love is the law, love under will. 

The Deacon should then proceed with a reading, either of Liber AL, Ch. III: 49-56, or of Liber Tzaddi, or of One Star in Sight. 

The Deacon then asks, Who wishes to Renounce may now step forward, each in turn, that they might publicly impugn the superstitious religions, disavow old sweetnesses and rebuke the patronizing laws of the slave gods.

One by one, the Deacon asks the following series of questions: 

Are you prepared to alienate yourself from the herd, declare yourself a Sovereign Star and receive the Mark of the Beast? 

(They reply I am, obviously) 

Do you renounce Christianity, the cowardly doctrine of vicarious atonement, and the sickness of pity?

(I renounce it!) 

Do you renounce Hinduism and Buddhism and their doctrine of transcendentalism, their denial of the flesh for pursuit of eternal rest and inconsequentiality? 

(I renounce it!) 

Do you renounce Confucianism and Judaism, with their overbearing paternalism and sinister servility?

(I renounce it!) 

Stand in the Sign of Apophis and Typhon and say with me: Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! Done 

Say with me: There is no grace, there is no guilt, this is the law: Do what thou wilt. Done 

Now spit on the book you brought to sacrifice and say, "Bahlasti!"3 

Done 

Now set it on fire and say, "Ompehda!"4

Done 

Now offer your left wrist and receive the Mark of the Beast. By this we shall know that thou art free. Done 

All are brought to this point, individually. 

This being done, the Deacon lifts up The Book of the Law and declares, There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. 

He then admits the People for Mass. 

Some Reflections, 2023

Crowley’s call for this ritual began making the rounds about 15 years ago. Several other OTO members in good standing also wrote rituals that followed Crowley’s instructions. They were all fairly minimalist, some more exuberant than others, and some were performed as novelty rituals at OTO bodies. As I recall the one element they definitely didn’t like was the book burning, which I agree is cringe, but their objection was it reminded them of the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You’d think the left wing OTO would rally behind a ritual like this since the anti-colonialism movement considers Christianity the driving factor of oppressive liberal global capitalism, aka Globalism. But even more frightening to them is the specter of fascism, showing once more that the leadership is just feckless liberals with no faith in Thelema as a unique response to the very real social problems of the New Aeon.

When Sabazius X° issued his above referenced phony explanation that it would only apply to someone in the highest grades of OTO - as if we’re to believe that he and his have done it - the issue was settled (administratively quashed) until people discovered that I’d been doing it at Subtlety or Force Encampment, where I was Master, and also in Beijing. I hadn’t done it since my return to Baton Rouge from China, but a wee man named Rodney Orpheus decided to make a stink about it in an unhinged tirade against "serious Thelemites,” namely me, which he was later compelled to take off OTO-ie.org despite being the OHO’s attaché for the OTO in Ireland. He complained that we serious ones strive for a more diligent practice of Thelema and that we are deferential to the Prophet despite difficulty in appealing to his writings to answer some important questions. He’s knocking on an open door! I pursued Thelema because of the writings of Aleister Crowley and certainly not those of the powerfully boring personalities like Duquette, Shoemaker, Rodney or any other contemporary apologist, and I care not a lick as to whether or not they’ve brushed paper with ink. Rodney later rage quit OTO despite being a IX° as he could not stand to be in the same club as people who did not share his hysterical views. I suspect he was only invited to the IX° to begin with because they wanted his pot of gold.

Incidentally, a week after his screed I was at Scarlet Woman Lodge in Austin for their grueling TOTOCON (Texas OTO Convention) where a Brother GP, a scholar and professor of esoteric religious studies, did a presentation on this ritual. It distinguished itself from the other talks primarily because the subject was discernable. He reviewed much of the above and then concluded by saying that it was ambiguous as to whether Crowley wanted Renunciation to be done, which is a disingenuous position at best. Therefore he concocted a masterplan; to wit, he would do the ritual and then analyze the results, which sounds like something a scientist would do! Ingenious! Therewith he, like many a Thelemite that practices ceremonial magick, went into his dark room, closed the door behind him, took a minute to catch his breath as he had a flashback of being locked in the janitor’s closet in high school. He lit a candle and vibrated his renunciation proclamation into the sheetrock. He half opened one corner of one eye and looked around to make sure the devil hadn’t snuck up behind him while he was openly courting eternal hellfire. He checked his brow for sweat, but there was only glitter from the night before. He heard an echo in his skull, “There is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. This confession has meant nothing.”

GP said that at least for him the ritual was bunk because he didn’t feel anything. GP’s conclusion is a normal one, as many people weigh their options in life in terms of pain and pleasure, like a rodent questioning the safety of a conspicuous piece of cheese. I told him, “you missed the point. The ritual isn’t for you. It’s to reassure the community that you seek to join that you are sincere in your intentions and aspirations.” GP stormed off, never to be seen or heard from again.

In May of 2015 I received this email from the Grand Souse General, Scott Coffin, of the OTO Braintrust:

93,
By order of the O.H.O., you are to immediately cease using the ceremony you refer to as the "renuncio," or any similar ceremony, in any O.T.O. or E.G.C. context, and discontinue using any O.T.O. or E.G.C. resources or communications to perform, implement, or promote this or similar ceremonies.
Please note that this is the second time you have been forbidden from using this ceremony in an O.T.O./E.G.C. context.  You were so directed by FSR NN in Beijing.  Your current promotion of this ceremony in an O.T.O./E.G.C. context at Pelican Camp constitutes a violation of that directive.
In addition, you are directed, by order of the O.H.O., to immediately remove all discussion of and references to this ceremony or similar ceremonies that occur on the Pelican Camp website.
Please respond to acknowledge receipt of this message.
93, 93/93
S

As always with these people, they were wrong about me having been told to not implement it, they were ridiculous to imply that an FSR in the eastern hemisphere had jurisdiction within US Grand Lodge, and they were wrong in thinking that I had offered it in Baton Rouge. My punishment was that I was told that my version could not be performed anywhere, nor could I perform anyone’s version in any OTO setting. The only real difference between my version and the handful of other versions was that all theirs were written by dutiful liberals. Sabazius made a point to say in email that Bishop Dionysus’ version was fine to do at a local body with the one condition that the person doing it isn’t me, implying either that I was being targeted or a Bishop’s version of a non-EGC ritual is halal whereas mine is not - mixed signals. My EGC supervisor, Dionysus, then updated his version to include a disclaimer so people wouldn’t be confused by him writing originally that “The present ceremony is a remedial sacrament … It might be appended to a lecture, a ritual presentation, or another event at which the Law of Thelema has been espoused or expounded.”

The degree to which the modern OTO tells people what not to do infinitely more than what they tell people to do is so baffling that the only sane read, albeit the darkest one, is that they’re committed to retarding the central mission of OTO, the promulgation of Thelema. The Chilling Effect is felt by everyone, and so no boldness or innovation takes place and nobody is willing to actually invest real money or assets into the timid shell of Crowley’s vision. But their insistence on permissive access to OTO has led to the organization being overrun by those with no investment of will into the Order, and without Will there is no Love. The most modest expectations of Aleister Crowley for admission was around $1000 in today’s money to access the first series of initiations, the Renunciation of traditions we decry as “superstition, tyranny and oppression,” and to accept that Aleister Crowley was the scribe but not the author of The Book of the Law and that its praeterhuman origin is of such import that one would not make any changes thereunto. Not much to ask! But for the free wheelin computer fatbodies and the maroon lipstick wine aunts of the OTO the only kind of person they’re willing to filter out are those sonofabitch “serious” Thelemites.

All that being said I do believe that the Formula for Renouncing Slave Religion follows the sacramental model of a source tradition, being our version of Confession or Renunciation of Satan, and should be incorporated as the First Sacrament, however executed. Frankly, Crowley calls for it and discusses it more than he does Baptism, for which he only left some numbered notes, some of which are illegible and were never even revisited. By contrast there’s decades between his first and second demand that Renunciation be implemented and the wording was very clear and consistent, possibly showing he’d been working the ritual in the meantime. The only criticism I have of the ritual is that the predominant herd morality of today is derived from secular humanism, and while it is a product of protestant Christianity it no longer defers to some volume of sacred law as much as it does to the State Department by way of the ochlocracy of social media.

If OTO doesn’t have standards for itself then it cannot expect its garden to bear fruit, or even to be recognizable as a garden. They preach an “indefeasible right” to initiation, sometimes weeping over the idea of USGL even charging fees5. The fees they do charge are 1/10th of what Crowley expected, though Crowley expected members to be among the influent and affluent, targeting people with socio-political purchase so as to actually affect the course of history rather than merely grouse about it. He clearly wanted applicants to be Thelemites, thence demanding they renounce slave religion and that they recognize The Book of the Law as being a received text. For advancement into the next triad Crowley demanded certain virtues such as harmony and athleticism, but today’s Lover’s Triad is populated by people who are harmonious in the 共产党 sense of the term and who are athletic in the sense that they learned some katas despite being morbidly obese. And then for entry into the highest grades Crowley marks in “Concerning the Law of Thelema” that "Tolerance also is taught in the higher grades; so that no man can be even an Inspector of the Order unless he be equally well disposed to all classes of opinion." But we see Sabazius appoint the most slobberingly sycophantic of people to the role of Revolutionary to say nothing of the other few score of uninspired USGL officers, and we see all of these people resort to pedantry and slander when confronted to any class of opinion that deviates from the one they’ve eagerly uploaded from NPR, irrespective of Thelema.

Crowley’s liberal idea of “Tolerance” explicitly refers to a good disposition towards a diversity of opinion, but the leftist voices in Thelema prefer to see it in terms more familiar to them, that of the communist Karl Popper and his le redditeur Paradox of Tolerance. IAO131 paraphrased, “a tolerant society will eventually be subverted by its intolerant/hateful elements if they are not kept in check,” and noted that Crowley stated the basic premise decades before, that “We are infinitely tolerant, save of intolerance.”6 However, in the same breath Crowley stated, “We are to do what we will, and leave others to do what they will,” implying that the borders between people and peoples are to be respected, and that we should expect others to respect the conditions for membership in OTO.

IAO131 explained that “for a tolerant society to propagate, one must be intolerant of intolerance,” which is to say that a generous society that respects freedom is vulnerable to illiberal elements usurping its means of authority and instituting intolerant mechanisms. Popper may be getting his ideas from Carl Schmitt, who was a generation before him, and who warned against liberalism altogether on this point, alleging that liberal democracy has failed to fulfill the bargain of the Enlightenment, which was that representative government would be more judicious and temperate than the authoritarian aristocracies that hitherto defined the entire course of human history. Either Popper did not agree with Schmitt’s indictment of western liberalism or he saw Schmitt’s warning as an opportunity for his own brand of progressive idealism to take root. Popper’s “Open Society and its Enemies” was credited by George Soros as the inspiration for his “Open Society Foundations,” which champions itself as a human rights group that facilitates mass migration into the wealthier democratic countries. They believe a hodgepodge democracy is less likely to produce an authoritarian and more likely to usher in a socialist utopia, but critics state that this is merely a subversion of nation states that will make them impotent, uninspired, and beholden to the interests of multinationals owned by oligarchs, aka Globalists, who view mankind as a labor force and the ultimate goods to be wealth and stability rather than traditional concerns (family, religion) or some higher aesthetic. This reduction of the individual to a unit of labor is hardly the New Aeon that Crowley had in mind.

There is a sort of globalist plot of Aleister Crowley, that of his OTO. Mentioned earlier, the “socialist smash” that he warned about was to be resisted by any means by the OTO, and the purpose of the OTO was to protect the aristocrats of the world. Crowley was a royalist and believed the failings of the aristocracies was due to them no longer fulfilling their royal obligation as representatives of the higher. In this sense he’s more on the side of Evola, who believed the natural hierarchy was for the Brahmin/priestly Caste to answer to the Arya/warrior-king Cast, than he is on the side of Guenon or Dugin. Where Liberalism promised that disputes between governments could be resolved through some Masonic IGO, Crowley’s resolution from The Book of the Law was brother against brother without the lodge, but Pax Templi within.

Beware lest any force another, King against King! Love one another with burning hearts; on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride, in the day of your wrath.

220.2.24

OTO does have a type of international judicial council, the Areopagus, which is composed of members of the VIII°, “a Philosophical Body,” those “higher members” Crowley spoke of in Concerning the Law of Thelema who must be disposed to all classes of opinion. They address “cases of difficulty involve deep philosophical principles; and the Areopagus of the Eighth Degree is charged with the duty of resolving them in accordance with the great principles of the Order.” (Liber 194) The Areopagus is the “Hill of Mars” spoken of in his fantastic “Empty Headed Athenians” with reference to the Athenian court’s latter years, those of St. Paul, who addressed its purported intellectuals and accused them of idolatry:

As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship — and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

They’d become “Empty Headed” sophists whose reliance on rhetoric and reason resulted in a self-important narcissism that prevented them from being judicious. Paul counselled them to turn their attention upwards and reflect on higher principles, such as Crowley demanded, lest they become entangled in their own rhetorical snares. This trap of reason is denounced in The Book of the Law in step with Nietzsche’s criticism of reason over instinct, but in the world of so-called liberal intellectuals like Karl Popper the ochlocracy of the mind, ie hive-mind, is the highest good.

I charge that OTO’s leaders are themselves individually lost in the funhouse mirror-maze of western rationalism and this reflects in their wanton illiberal imprudence. Crowley marked in his Supreme Ritual that he had blasphemed against Horus by reducing him to a simpler formula. He echoes this in Liber CCC with reference to Jason:

Let us only remember not to repeat the error of Jason, and defy Ares, who is Horus in his warrior mood, that guardeth it, lest He strike us also with madness. Nay! but to the glory of Ra-Hoor-Khuit and the establishment of His perfect kingdom let all be done!

Were the OTO more concerned with “the means to be taken to extend the Dominion of the Law of Thelema throughout the whole world” then it would be set aright. But instead their stock is random and know not for what captain and what war they fight, and “mutual madness strikes the warriors witless, and fierce wrath invades their hearts of fury, and with arms engaged, They fell upon each other silently, And slew, and slew.” (Liber CCC)

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I would like to thank Dr. Hereward Tilton of the University of Amsterdam for his excellent research on the subject of Michael Maier's relation to the Phoenix itself. His patient advice directed me to several avenues which gave a new and different life to this essay. Thanks also to Br. S. L. G. of Alombrados in New Orleans for his help with the Latin and also Dr. Nutzkiewicz of the University of New Mexico for help with Midrashim and Hebrew. - Crow, 2008

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Introduction

Yea, O my master, thou art the beloved of the Beloved One; the Bennu Bird is set up in Philae not in vain. 

Liber 65, IV:22

Of the many mysteries of antiquity that survived into the modern age, precious few have gained a great deal of popularity. These few are often composite with modern religion and interpreted in light of that paradigm. One such memory is the bird called the phoenix, which is as commonly known now as when it was said to have lived. However, very little of this remarkable bird’s background is popularly preserved.

The modern image is that of some flaming bird that returns to life and is sometimes capable of resurrecting deceased heroes in popular role-playing games. The dominant motif is the power of re-birth, itself being capable of rising from its own ashes thereby surviving the most annihilating of ends, immolation, reduction to nothing but dust and ash. This power makes the phoenix as a symbol of triumph, overcoming the inevitable, and victory over the impossible. What is forgotten is the divine beauty of this bird and the complex method by which it accomplishes the miracle of resurrection.

The first half of this essay will take its data primarily from sources dating from classical Greece, Ancient Egypt and Arabia, and poetic adaptations of the Phoenix in, broadly considered, late-Renaissance literature in the Rosicrucian genres of Hermeticism and Alchemy. The second half will attempt to weave all of this into Crowley’s usage and references to make the lessons tangible and practical to the initiate magician.

The Myth of the Fire Bird

For the sake of crowning the symbol itself with a divine name I will refer to the subject of this essay as “the Phoenix,” preserving its Grecian title and the better known. Several appearances of the Phoenix will be treated more fully later, but for the present a migratory history can be built through the etymology of its various names.

Phoenix is a Greek word with a few translations. Its root could be traced to the literal Greek phoinos, which means blood red or reddish-purple. The late Egyptian color scheme of the Phoenix follows suit. Curiously, Phoenix was also the Greek word for the Egyptian date palm. The connection between the Phoenix and the palm tree is treated more fully below. “Phoinos” is likely Semetic or even Mycenean in origin.

The bird and the palm tree’s sharing of a common name is not peculiar to the Greek. It is also the case in Egyptian, Hebrew, and Persian tongues. The double-meaning of Phoenix for the bird and the date palm may have arisen from the Ancient Egyptian. The Egyptian Bennu bird is the mythological origin of the Grecian phoenix. The word Bennu comes from weben, “to rise brilliantly,” or, “to shine.” Bennu was used to refer to both the Phoenix and the date palm. The date palm was given this resurrection role due to its hermaphroditic reproduction (self-fertilization), potentially leading the ancient man to believe it possessed the power of spontaneous generation, as did the Bennu Bird. Bennu is related to the Egyptian bnbn, “to copulate,” and referred to the mythical stone or mound of Heliopolis upon which the world was created. This connection is treated more fully below.

The Persian Huma shares many traits with the Egyptian Bennu and Greek Phoenix. Huma derives from the Persian word of power hum, the equivalent of the Sanskrit Om, and shares meaning with the Sufi word of power hu, and also the Arabic name for God, hua (Khan, 2005). The Sufi word of power Haqq, “truth,” is a composite of Hu, “God,” and Ek, “one.” Al-Haqq is also one of the 99 names of Allah in the Quran. The Prophet Zoroaster is said to be born of a Huma Tree, another connection between the palm and fire bird (Tame, 1984), though it is not a palm. The Huma bird’s role was one of granting luck, and should the Huma bird alight on a man’s head then that man was destined to become King. (Tame, 1984) Interestingly, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and statues, Pharaohs and Harpocrates were often depicted as having a Hawk protecting their head as if it were a part of the nemyss.

The Huma is mentioned by some sources to be involved in the rituals of the Tower of Silence, an antique Middle Eastern method of disposing of corpses. The connection could be through the ever-burning flame of the Zoroastrians kept within the Tower, the role of Birds in devouring the corpses contained therein, or the role of the Sun’s flames in the purification of the corpses. (Godrej and Mistree, 2002).

Some other fire birds are noteworthy. However, their relation to the western Phoenix is questionable.

The жар-пти́ца, Zhar Ptitsa, or “fire bird,” appears often in Russian folk-lore as a kind of trickster who initiates a quest for some young hero by dropping a feather. (Spirin, 2002) Once the hero collects the feather he begins a hunt for the Zhar Ptitsa, the trapping of which would grant some boon. Other than it being depicted as a peacock, very reminiscent of Late Greek and early Phoenician fire-birds, and having a flaming plumage, it does not bear the same power of resurrection as its cousins. However, the power of a phoenix feather is a recurrent motif in hermetic alchemy, appearing both in the works of Christian Rosencreutz and Michael Maier.

In the Far Eastern Orient similar fire-birds are of note; however, they share traits with the Phoenix only superficially. China’s 凤凰 Fenghuang dates to pre-historic times, but was more of a chimera.

Both etymologically and descriptively it is safe to assume that the western Phoenix derives largely from a Hellenic combination of the Egyptian Bennu and, to a lesser degree, the Arabian Huma.

The Phoenix of Ancient and Classical Greece

The Phoenix of Europe derives largely from the Hellenic Phoenix. This Phoenix’s myth seems to be in no way novel and merely a Grecian interpretation of the Heliopolitan myth. The Phoenix’s appearance in Greek literature is important to consider since this would have been the primary reference point for the revival of interest in the Phoenix in Europe. Greek authors were the first to deep dive into the allegorical nature of the Phoenix as an Aeonic device and metaphor for the soul.

The earliest reference to the Phoenix is the Precepts of Chiron where Hesiod ( who lived circa 700bc but the work is perhaps pseudepigraphic) simply discussed its longevity, saying, “A chattering crow lives out nine generations of aged men, but a stag's life is four time a crow's, and a raven's life makes three stags old, while the phoenix outlives nine ravens, but we, the rich-haired Nymphs, daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder, outlive ten phoenixes.” (Parada, 1997)

Of ancient Greek authors, the more informative description appeared three Centuries later in Herodotus’ Histories, and deserves to be quoted at length:

There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix, which I did not myself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to the Egyptians very rarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred years. They say that he comes regularly when his father dies; and if he be like the painting, he is of this size and nature, that is to say, some of his feathers are of gold color and others red, and in outline and size he is as nearly as possible like an eagle. This bird, they say (but I cannot believe the story), contrives as follows.
Setting forth from Arabia he conveys his father, they say, to the temple of the Sun plastered up in myrrh, and buries him in the temple of the Sun. He conveys him thus. He forms first an egg of myrrh as large as he is able to carry, and then he makes trial of carrying it, and when he has made trial sufficiently, then he hollows out the egg and places his father within it and plasters over with other myrrh that part of the egg where he hollowed it out to put his father in, and when his father is laid in it, it proves (they say) to be of the same weight as it was; and after he has plastered it up, he conveys the whole to Egypt to the temple of the Sun. Thus they say that this bird does. 

(124, Herodotus, 2003)

Herodotus’ account suggests that the Grecian phoenix was derived solely from Egypt. Tacitus' description in his Annals contains no other information than what Herodotus offers and it carries the same sound of reservation towards second hand information.

The information Greek authors most frequently referenced came from the priests of an Egyptian city called Heliopolis. This was a popular spot for philosopher pilgrims, including Plato, Solon, Hipparchus, and Pythagoras. This was due to its proximity to the Great Pyramids and other monoliths and also the Temple of Heliopolis. This temple is particularly important, for it was there that the Phoenix would undergo the necessary preparation for resurrection upon the “altar of the Sun.”

The resurrection of the Phoenix was also believed by Greeks to correlate with the transition of Aeons. This connection was explained by Manly P. Hall (2003, p. 231) and Aleister Crowley who, positing a 600ish year lifespan, saw three Phoenix-lives marking the three decans of whatever zodiac sign governed an Aeon. Crowley saw the Moses/Dionysus to Christ to Mohammad to Jacques de Molay or Martin Luther to himself as being marked by the Phoenix’s lifespan.

The Bennu Bird

O Atum-Khoprer, you became high on the height, you rose up as a bnbn-stone in the Mansion of the Bennu in On.

Pyramid Texts, utt 600, § 1652

The Bennu’s hieroglyphic depiction shows a pre-historic Heron which populated the Egyptian Nile and Arabian Peninsula, Ardea bennuides. Its exact date of extinction is unknown; however, it did interact with men in a religious capacity before it went the way of the rest of the pre-historic megafauna. This is known by the recent (2006) discovery of Ardea Bennuides skeletons in the tombs of Umm al-Nar in modern UAE (UAE Interact, 2006). These tombs dated between 2700bc and 2000bc, which roughly corresponds to the period of time of the Old Egyptian Kingdom. While not their area of expertise, the German archaeologists who discovered these skeleton remains are confident in its connection to the Bennu bird. (Bestiarium, 2007) Further, this position in Arabia in proximity to Egypt and Philae corresponds to ancient authors description of the Bennu's migration from Arabia to Egypt. Arabia was the Bennu's home but Egypt was its holy land. None but the Ancient Egyptians argued for the Bennu's literal existence. The Greeks and onward all argued an allegorical interpretation and that the notion of its literal existence was preposterous.

Its plumage, depicted in hieroglyphs, varied between blue, purple, gold, and red with white. As a testament to its size there is an ancient temple for the rites of Isis and Osiris on the small island of Philae in Upper Egypt, and in this complex is a massive cage-like structure said to have housed the Bennu bird. (341, Massey, 1998) This cage is a monumental structure, and the Bennu would’ve been twice the size of an ostrich to be contained within Philae’s pillars, which matches the exhumed mummies in the UAE.

The Bennu bird is given a different life span by each source. These dates seem like typical antiquated exaggerations of life span, but as scholars of esotericism note, there is often mystical import behind the age of a period or person. Herodotus believed the lifespan to be around 500 years and Tacitus posited between 500, 1400, and 6100 years. The complex lifespan based on animal generations given in the Precepts of Chiron suggests around 1000 years. (Parada, 1997) Later authors were fond of Herodotus’ estimate and often agreed with around 600 years.

All authors agree that the pilgrimage site for the Bennu’s sacrifice is Heliopolis, the “city of the sun.” Heliopolis is a fascinating city in Egyptian history. It was called, “city of the pillars,” and the Hebrew title was On, spelled אֵן or אֵון, which recalls the Greek word for being (ὤν/On, as in Ontology), Hebrew word for Nothing (אֵין/Ain, as in Ain Soph) and Arabic word for the sun (عين/Oin). Many Greeks traveled to Heliopolis for education and initiation. Among other things, Heliopolis taught the mysteries of geometry and mathematics, which to both Pythagoras and Plato was the study of a noumenal and immutable world. These myths of Heliopolis explain the Bennu’s reason for trusting its life with these priests above all others.

The Bennu’s connection to Heliopolis’ study and application of this science of being may come from its use of music. The Bennu has the gift of song which the Pythagoreans, who derive their lineage from Heliopolis, greatly emphasized. Music was a way of “tuning” the mind to the world of numbers, harmony, and beauty. Likewise this was an educational exercise encouraged in Plato’s Republic. This is a possible reason Apollo or Helios visited the Phoenix (either at dawn or noon) to listen to its brilliant song while drinking from the well at which the Phoenix enjoyed its siesta of noon. The music trait was lost in later European adaptations.

Heliopolis’ central deity was Atum, the “self-created,” who willed himself into existence and then created the entire Heliopolitan ennead with a fascinating spell. Accounts vary and co-mingle with those of Ptah, the Memphis corollary of Atum, and Amoun, his Theban counterpart. He either spat, ejaculated via masturbation, or spake the other Gods into existence. The Egyptians, noting the curative effects of saliva, saw spitting as a means of blessing or bestowing health. This is the most common method of creation credited to Atum. However, he and Ptah were also believed to produce the Gods from semen, and the hand eventually came to replace the traditional hieroglyph for Atum. This symbolic connection of seed and hand is preserved in the Hebrew letter י/Yod which means hand but resembles a seed or small flame. Lastly, speaking Gods into existence is the method of Ptah, but the Egyptians used one word for speech and ejaculate, ḥkꜣ/Heka, which also means magick.

A strange motif in Egyptian mythology is self-fertilization. Atum, the primordial God of Heliopolis, impregnated himself with the next two Heliopolitan Gods. The lone date palm, a common sight of the Sahara, is a hermaphroditic plant, meaning that it is capable of self-fertilization. Since only one Bennu exists at a time it reproduced similarly. [see also my essay on Chaos]

The Benben (trans: to copulate) stone upon which Atum stood at the moment of creation has been interpreted as both “a stone” and “a mound.” The stone is described as that stone which surmounts the central pillar in Heliopolis or as the mound upon which everything was made and Heliopolis rests. Heliopolis was the home of Imhotep, the reputed inventor of stone-carving and creator of the step pyramid, pillar, and obelisk. This central pillar in Heliopolis is claimed to be an Obelisk of Imhotep’s design, being a pillar surmounted by a pyramidal black stone, identical to that stone which was held in reverence by the followers of Cybele in Rome, a frenzy cult imported from Anatolia. The Bennu bird’s altar for its incineration is believed to be an altar in the center of Heliopolis upon the Benben stone. This brings two important allusions. Atum standing on the Benben to create the ennead seems synchronous with the Bennu’s resurrection upon that very same stone. The alternative interpretation of Atum standing upon the “mound” bears no particular relevance to the Bennu outside of another text which places the Bennu on that mound, mentioned below. However, the idea that Atum spat/ejaculated/ uttered some creative formula to birth the Gods is also connected to the Huma bird of Persia whose name derives from Hu, the creative word of the Zoroastrians. Another more physical connection between the Bennu, Benben, and the palm is seen in the shape of the palm itself. The palm is a straight-standing pillar, similar to an obelisk, atop of which is a flourish of ray-like fronds very similar in appearance to an radiant sun. Were the Bennu to immolate itself atop a pillar it might appear very similar to a date palm.

Atum pre-dated existence, but stories differ as to how he arrived at the Benben. The Egyptologist Lasko relates, “Atum Kheper, you have come to be high on the hill, you have arisen on the Benben stone in the mansion of the Benben in Heliopolis,” (92, Baines, Silverman, and Lasko, 1991) where Atum-Kheper is Atum-Khephra, a composite of Atum and Khephra, the latter being the dung-beetle headed god that presides over the sun’s passage through the dead of night. Alternatively, he flew to the Benben as a great bird. Papyri from the twenty first Dynasty indicates that Atum himself may have been born from the cry or song of the Bennu bird, 

"...that breath of life which emerged from the throat of the Bennu bird, the son of Re in whom Atum appeared in the primeval nought, infinity, darkness and nowhere."

An interesting relationship here begins between Atum, the father, Pharaoh, his spiritual son and viceregent upon the earth, and the Phoenix as a sort of Holy Spirit.

Descriptions of this bird vary between that of the Bennu and Ba. The Ba was depicted as the soul of certain Gods and also deified men. Upon the death of Osiris the Ba leapt from his Heart. Also, the Ba of Atum is said to leap from body to body as it wishes. Ba is strongly identified with the soul, more specifically the magical image or Ruach. Considering the Ba as Atum’s soul, it lands upon the obelisk, or Phallus, and through an act of masturbation it creates the Ennead, all of which symbolize some material feature of both Egypt and the human body. Thus, the creation myth of Atum could be a depiction of a soul self-creating itself into corporeal form on the altar of the sun in Heliopolis, the obelisk, or phallus. The interchangeability of Ba and Bennu as Atum’s soul shines light on this sexual metaphor of re-generation.

A final look at various hieroglyphs that depict Bennu will help understand his connection to the esoteric side of Heliopolis. In Gardenier (G)-32 we see the Bennu standing on one leg in the style of the Ibis. Recall the hieroglyphic translation above that told of Atum’s birth from Bennu’s cry. This may imply that Bennu came before Atum. We find also in various Memphis and late-Kingdom Heliopolitan deviations from the original story that Thoth, the Ibis-headed God, was a pre-existent deity with Atum or Ptah. Thoth, as the Ibis, stood upon one leg. Conversely, in the Theban creation myth it was Amoun who spoke the Ba into existence. The plumage jutting from the back of his head recalls his relation to the Heron.

In G-53 we see the Bennu depicted as having the head of a human. The Ba, again, was the part of the Soul which survived death and would take a trip to a desired location, be it joining the Ka in the Sun in the afterlife (by way of the Obelisk) or, in the case of a King or Priest, the Ba would re-enter the world through another body. At the time of death the Ba would rocket from the heart of the deceased man.  The stone in front of G-53 is argued to be the actual Benben stone. (Philae.nu, 2008)

The Bennu’s life is another story. At noon it was said to perch and sing at a cool well. The location of this well differed between the Arabian Peninsula and the temple at Philae. Again, isolation with a well, or source of water, is also a characteristic of a palm tree. Palms, whose roots reach down into the earth, are capable of finding underground sources of water and are therefore indicators of a high water table, a suitable location for a well. Apollo, at either the dawn or noon-tide of his daily journey, would stop at and refresh himself at the well while listening to the Bennu sing. Perhaps his songs bestowed powers to others to cross through the night of death. Apollo’s next destination was Siwa Oasis to the west of Heliopolis in time for dusk. Siwa is the location of Sibyll in Maier’s work, discussed below.

The Bennu’s connection to the Ba of Osiris is seen in this excerpt from the Ani Papyrus:

“I am the great Benu-bird which is in Heliopolis, the supervisor of what exists. Who is he? He is Osiris. As for what exists, that means his injury. Otherwise said: That means his corpse. Otherwise said: It means eternity and everlasting. As for eternity, it means daytime; as for everlasting, it means night.”

Dr. Ogden Goelet, Jr. commented,

“The accompanying caption identifies this bird as benu “the heron,” a Heliopolitan deity associated with the beginnings of creation as a manifestation of Atum, or Re as a creator deity. The Benu is often described as the ‘Egyptian Phoenix,’ an error which may derive from Herodotus, who has transmitted a faulty description of a legend he claimed to have heard from priests of Heliopolis. In the Egyptian legends, however, the Benu is not reborn from his ashes after a fiery death; rather, the Benu made his appearance on the primordial mound when the land emerged from the water, bringing the light with him, a concept fundamental to Heliopolitan religion. As an example of how puzzling the glosses in the accompanying text can be, the Benu is said to be Osiris in one explanation and Osiris’s corpse in the other, two associations the Benu does not seem to have outside this chapter.”

Dr. Goelet’s assumption of the Phoenix's religious role is a little short sighted. Because the Bennu resurrection myth does not appear in Hieroglyphs at hand it does not mean that the myth or ceremony did not occur there. It’s easy to disregard a literal take, but the initiatory or alchemical allegory may have been preserved by the priests and communicated to visitors. This is to say, the Phoenix eucharist may have been given to pilgrims, something like the “salt” or “ash” of the bird being wrapped in dough mingled with resinous gums. The ritual use of the Bennu’s remains may explain why its mummies are exceedingly rare. If such a record did exist in Egypt in writing it would have been subject to early Christian censorship.

In the fifth century Hieroglyphica Horapollinis, Horapollo lists denotations and connotations of various ancient hieroglyphs, two of which allude to the Bennu. Ch. XXXIV uses a Bennu bird to depict the “soul continuing a long time here.” Ch. XXXV uses a Bennu to depict a man returning home from his travels, this being a sign of prestige and accomplishment. Conversely, an Onocephalus (ass-head) is used to depict a man who has not left his country. This recalls the second century “Alexamenos Graffiti,” which presumably mocked Christians by depicting “Alexamenos worshipping his god,” where Jesus is shown as having the head of a donkey.

As a final note, there is an interesting identification between Horus and Bennu. Nephthys’ relation to the Bennu is similar to her relationship with the infant Horus. She is the protector and nurse of Horus and simultaneously a keeper of the Bennu bird. The connection between Horus the Hawk and the Bennu is seen visually in upper Egyptian temples such as Edfu and Philae where hieroglyphic depictions of the Bennu are composites between the large and lurking crane and the facial features of a hawk. It is possible that Nephthys embodies the role of the Priest preparing the Bennu for resurrection.

The Miracles of Heliopolis

Much of Heliopolis’ fame is due to the mysterious miracles and magick said to take place there. Many of these were later incorporated into Hebraic or Christian mythos. For instance, depictions in middle to mid-lower Egypt of Baptism are common, usually Horus and/or Thoth pouring Ankhs over someone. Heliopolis was a primary place for this ceremony taking place in the waters of the Nile. This would have been convenient at Heliopolis since many believe the Temple itself was located on an island-hill in the middle of the Nile though the settlement was located nearby to the east in modern day Cairo. A similar arrangement is found with Philae, where the temple and priest residence is located on the island. This is no longer true due to it having been moved for the construction of the Aswan Dam. Another miracle of Heliopolis, which gave it the title “place of multiplying bread,” was when Horus supplied an enormous crowd of people with loaves of bread from only a small supply. During the time of Christ one Roman remarked that Christ’s miracles are nothing impressive and if one truly wants to see magic they ought to visit Egypt.

One ceremony occurred in Heliopolis that is paramount in importance in this essay, and that is the ceremony by which the Bennu is reborn. How this occurs varies between storytellers. The Bennu’s gender is hermaphroditic since it reproduces asexually, like the date palm. However, Herodotus refers to it as its own father. At some point, the Bennu bird reaching the end of its life will do a combination of several actions. Several variations are below recounted that are particular to the Egyptian myth (as delivered by the Greeks).

In the first myth, the Bennu bird gives birth to a nestling Bennu and then immolates itself, hopefully with the nestling at safe distance. The nestling then brings the prepared ashes of its father to Heliopolis where the Priests prepare this into a type of Eucharist and the nestling, upon eating the Eucharist, becomes fledged and inherits the fiery and immortal properties of its parent, reborn a new Bennu.

A second and more popular story is the Bennu bird springing forth from the ashes of its parent. As to whether this takes place in Arabia or Heliopolis is the source of variance. If the immolation did not occur at Heliopolis, the nestling wraps the ashes and delivers them there.

Another variation is who does the preparing. Some account that the nestling itself prepares the Eucharist. Alternatively, this is done by the priests. The subject of preparation is the final one. Several resinous woods and gums are prepared into which the ashes are rolled, forming a ball. These reagents differ between some combination of cacia, myrrh, cinnamon, frankincense, palm leaves, or palm ashes. Palm is almost always present in the story. This is sensible since palm oil is highly flammable and has been used for millennium as both a fuel and a drink. This flammable quality of the palm was relegated to the only palm in the region, the date palm, and this fuel use may be the reason that the Arabic word for the dates (دقلة نور/deglet nour) translates to “dates of light.” The wrapping of the essence inside a ball of something material again recalls Khephra. The dung beetle lays its eggs inside excrement and then rolls that ball some distance to find a water source, in which it lobs the ball. The wetness softens the ball and the dung beetle offspring emerge. Many temple complexes in Egypt include a pool which would be guarded by a statue of Khephra, including Ankh-f-n-Khonsu’s temple at Thebes.

The baby Bennu is not born as a nestling. It is initially a worm or insect. Accounts vary as to whether some process brings it to the next stage or it occurs naturally, but one day later it becomes a nestling. Then, at the height of the second day it is fed the Eucharist of its parent and resumes the office of the Bennu on the third day.

As a side note, this exact incense was used in early Judaism. In Exodus 30 the Altar of Incense is described similarly. It is, in a sense, an obelisk cut off near the base and is the exact size of Crowley’s “double-cube” used in the Gnostic Mass as the Altar of Incense. Of the oil to be prepared and also the incense to be burned thereupon, it is to be of frankincense, myrrh, and calamus (palm leaves),1 respectively life, death and resurrection. In 777 Crowley gives calamus to the Hebrew letter ב/beth, writing “The Palm is Mercurial, as being hermaphroditic.” This altar of incense burns before the veil which is near the Tabernacle and Ark of the Covenant. Naturally, burning a combination of thick resins such as this would leave a pillar of smoke burning before the Ark. The pillar of smoke before the Ark is said to be the force of Shekinah, a type of force or essence of a spiritual community in Judaism.

In Exodus this ritual was performed in the Tent of the Tabernacle. However, when the Jews colonized Salem and constructed the Temple of Solomon the King the ritual was performed therein. Another connection exists in Masonic lore with Solomon’s Temple and the Heliopolis Temple. They were both known for their pillars and both measured 120-cubits across. (Skinner, 1875) Heliopolis’ central pillar, the altar of the Bennu’s sacrifice, was located in the center of the complex. Solomon’s Temple’s Altar of Incense takes the same location. The Egyptian middle-pillar was surmounted by the Benben stone. Late Qabalists name the middle pillar, which is fixed between Jachin and Boaz, Ben (beth-nun), the Son.

The Abrahamic Phoenix 

Flamma Dei viuax succenso in pectore veram,
Non adimit vitam, quae renouata viget.2

The Phoenix made some biblical cameos which carried its name into the west via Christianity and Judaism. It was an uncommon subject in Midrashim, but in Christianity it was frequently found in early art. The reason is obvious; the death-rebirth power recalls Christ’s resurrection. The Phoenix complimented another Christian allegory, that of the Pelican. The Phoenix represented Christ’s divine nature (eternity and illumination) and the Pelican his human (charity, sacrifice).

This appearance of the Phoenix in the Book of Job deserves greater attention. As mentioned above, its quality of endurance was considered analogous to Job’s patience and fortitude in dealing with his merciless God. In Job 29:18 we read:

King James Version

Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand.

American Version 1899

And I said: I shall die in my nest, and as a palm tree shall multiply my days.

Complete Jewish Bible

I said, ‘I will die with my nest, and I will live as long as a phoenix.’

The translation of חוֹל/Chul (Cheth-Vav-Lamed) can be “sand,” “palm,” or “Phoenix.”

The midrash Berashit Rabbah discusses the Phoenix’s place in the Garden of Eden. Eve fed the rest of the animals the forbidden fruit, resulting in their exile, yet the Phoenix was the only animal that did not partake, thereby securing its purity and immortality. The Babylonian Talmud relates how Noah’s son Shem tells of his father’s encounter with the Phoenix in the depths of Noah’s ark. (Saggo, 2005)

As for the phoenix, my father discovered it lying in the hold of the ark. ‘Dost thou require no food?’ he asked it. ‘I saw that thou wast busy,’ it replied, ‘so I said to myself, I will give thee no trouble.’ Noah replied, ‘May it be God's will that thou shouldst not perish.” (Sanhedrin, 108b)

The Aggadah, a Midrash intimately describing the Seven Days of creation, discusses the Phoenix as one of God’s odd creatures created on the sixth day. Slight deviations from the regular myth are obvious:

Among the birds the phoenix is the most wonderful. When Eve gave all the animals some of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the phoenix was the only bird that refused to eat thereof, and he was rewarded with eternal life. When he has lived a thousand years, his body shrinks, and the feathers drop from it, until he is as small as an egg. This is the nucleus of the new bird.

The phoenix is also called "the guardian of the terrestrial sphere." He runs with the sun on his circuit, and he spreads out his wings and catches up the fiery rays of the sun. If he were not there to intercept them, neither man nor any other animate being would keep alive. On his right wing the following words are inscribed in huge letters, about four thousand stadia high: "Neither the earth produces me, nor the heavens, but only the wings of fire." His food consists of the manna of heaven and the dew of the earth. His excrement is a worm, whose excrement in turn is the cinnamon used by kings and princes. Enoch, who saw the phoenix birds when he was translated, describes them as flying creatures, wonderful and strange in appearance, with the feet and tails of lions, and the heads of crocodiles; their appearance is of a purple color like the rainbow; their size nine hundred measures. Their wings are like those of angels, each having twelve, and they attend the chariot of the sun and go with him, bringing heat and dew as they are ordered by God. In the morning when the sun starts on his daily course, the phoenixes and the chalkidri sing, and every bird flaps its wings, rejoicing the Giver of light, and they sing a song at the command of the Lord.

(Ginzberg, 1909) 

The cognate symbol of the Bennu as the Ba and Dove as the Holy Spirit is unmistakable. They were both portrayed as a flame in their greatest antiquity. The Shekinah, in a way the Jewish Holy Spirit, would descend as a tongue of flame on the heads of the faithful during Passover. Similarly, the Shekinah was conjured before the Ark of the Covenant by means of the same resins and incenses used to preserve the power of the Bennu. The Ba itself was depicted more as a ray of sunlight rather than a flame, but the Ba as the Phoenix and Bennu and their connection to fire still provides a strong connection with the dove as the Holy Spirit. The dove was also present on the ark and was one of Noah’s two birds that he released to find dry land. It returned with an olive branch, but the raven did not return.

A further connection with the ceremonial invocation of Shekinah or Spiritus Sancti and the Phoenix is the respective celebration of Passover or the Last Supper which roughly fall at the same time. The Last Supper became celebrated regularly in the form of the Agape Feast, the revelry of which was said to invoke the Holy Spirit as a comfort for the darkness of Christ’s death and promise of his resurrection. The sex-magical character of the Agape feast hearkens back to the Old Testament where Abraham was said to be in the presence of the Shekinah during sex, resulting in the prophetic birth of Isaac. Just as the Bennu would consume a Eucharist to renew its life the early Christians would consume Christ’s flesh and blood in the Agape feast to remind themselves of Christ and his covenant, the promise of everlasting life.

Christ had an interesting ancient connection to phoinos’ alternative translation, the palm. Recall that the Phoenix would use palm fronds or oil in its immolation and that palm fronds would be used to embalm its ashes for the Communion to follow. Palm fronds were used in ancient times during various ceremonies of the Levant and Near East. They were used to mark the doorways of tombs of holy men, prophets, and saints, Mohammad had built his home from palms, they were waved during celebrations and festivals, Romans granted palm fronds to victorious soldiers, and palms were used to cover the grounds of armies returning home victoriously. Using palms to cover someone’s path also welcomed Dionysus in a city just as they did Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.

Two Roman Catholic ceremonies mark the use of palms and their relation to Christ. Palm Sunday marks the Sunday before his Crucifixion and his return to Jerusalem amongst exclamations of the savior having come to free the Daughter of Israel, a title of Shekinah. Palms thrown before his path recognizes Christ as a redeemer, savior, conqueror, and Saint. Another Catholic holiday using palms marks the beginning of the season of Lent. This is Ash Wednesday, during which time Christians take the ash of palm fronds (traditionally being the palms of the previous year’s Palm Sunday) and receive the Mark on their forehead. While marking the Christian the priest cheers them up, saying, “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Ash Wednesday initiates 40 days of repentance, sacrifice, and asceticism. These 40 days are related to Christ’s time in the desert during which he underwent the same meditation.

The Phoenix’s primary color being red, indicating fire and blood (phoinos), this is also the liturgical color used for the Feast Days of Palm Sunday, Pentecost, Good Friday (when Christ died), and the death-days and martyrdom days of Popes, Cardinals, and Saints.

Other connections between the Phoenix and early Christian symbolism are likely. Many authors speak of its use in Christian symbolism, but few provide physical references. One catacomb called St. Miltiades dating to the 2nd Century has “an impressive carving: a phoenix with rays and an aureole surrounding its head.” (Christian, 2004)

It seems as if the Phoenix took an extended leave from the west after this late Roman period. But when Europe reawakened to its Hellenic heritage through the reintroduction of classical literature during the Renaissance the Phoenix made a strong come back. The Phoenix was preserved on heraldry and art, but the primary renewed interest probably came from Renaissance revival of Hellas and the Renaissance church's appeal to Midrashim and qabalah for elaboration on the Old Testament. Both of these currents fed into what became Rosicrucian circles and contributed to the genre of hermeticism.

The Hermetic Phoenix

Early Rosicrucians are responsible for the revival of interest in the truly esoteric and an attempt to subvert religion by reviving the study of the first principles of the ancient mystery schools. The Renaissance was a time of earnest exploration of the mysteries, with what little they had available, and western spirituality ended up caught in between subjectivism and humanism. However, some believed that the objective integrity of the mysteries could be preserved through initiation and allegories. This paradigm was called Hermeticism and its proponents the Rosicrucians.

There are two Rosicrucians particularly worth noting for their contribution to the Phoenix myth. These are Christian Rosenkreuz (whose existence and authorship are irrelevant for present purposes) and Michael Maier. Their canonization is evidence of their importance in a later development of the Phoenix myth, and a return to its ritual import, in the context of Magick.

Bear in mind while reading the following alchemical dissections that, following an early Hermetic maxim, anything which displays a certain power is believed to be capable of bestowing that power by virtue of its components’ consumption or ritual use. For instance, bread’s ability to “rise” is conferrable by “risen” bread’s consumption. Also, red wine's quality is related to its exposure to the sun, making good red wine capable of transferring that to its drinker. Similarly, the Phoenix’s feathers or ashes were believed to possess this quality, and their ritual use in ceremonies such as Rosencreutz’s Chemische Hochzeit intended to emulate its power. Whether the technical details provided by alchemists allude to a secret recipe for a decoction isn’t really the concern of this essay as much as is the symbolic and magical interpretation.

Rosenkreuz is the apocryphal founder of the Fama Fraternitatis, the Rosicrucians. Several works ascribed to him are considered the founding documents. One of these, published in 1616, was the Chymische Hochzeit, or Chemical Marriage. A fast-paced and dense work of layered symbolism would be difficult to summarize here, but several editions of this work are available for a free reading online. It tells a story of an old and wise man, stern in his faith and enlightened through his love of God, and his seven adventurous days leading up to a Royal Wedding.

Nothing about this week is normal and many feats are required of Rosenkreuz to test his spiritual mettle. During Day 3, when Rosenkreuz was set at liberty to tour the Castle, he came upon many treasures whose experience he described as communicating more than all the books in any library. He says, “there in the same place stands also the glorious phoenix (about which, two years ago, I published a particular small discourse),” but he is not so kind as to name this small discourse. Whether this is the Phoenix itself or an image is not said, but 2 days later, during Day 5, he mentions a Sepulcher again, saying “Herewith my companions were deceived, for they imagined nothing other but that the dead corpses were there. Upon the top of all there was a great flag, having a phoenix painted on it, perhaps the more to delude us. Here I had great occasion to thank God that I had seen more than the rest.” Rosenkreuz is the hero of this tale in managing to accomplish the resurrection of the King and Queen at the end of Day 6. Day 6 involves an alchemical transformation of a little bird which Rosenkreuz presided over. Perhaps something was revealed to him at one of these Sepulchers that gave him the insight to perform this operation correctly.

Day 6 contained an adventure through a tower. On the third floor Rosenkreuz and his companions opened a globe and therein found an egg which was ushered off by the Virgin. On the fourth floor they found the egg again and it had completely matured by some process of which Rosenkreuz was unaware. The egg hatched and a healthy, bloody, and undeveloped nestling emerged. After being fed blood of the beheaded King and Queen it fully fledged with black feathers. A second bloody meal caused it to molt and grow snow-white feathers, and lastly a third feeding caused his feathers to gain some multi-colored luster. On the fifth floor a heated bath of water and white powder was prepared for the bird. Its feathers were boiled off, but the bird was unharmed by the heat. It was set at liberty, and the feathers had turned the water into a type of blue paste which the naked bird was then painted with, all save its head. On the sixth floor an altar was prepared upon which was a serpent. The bird pecked at the serpent, killing him, and was then fed a draught of its displeasing blood. The bird then willingly gave its head to be removed, and after the head was cut off (from which no blood poured) the breast was opened and a blood flow as gorgeous as rubies spurted from its corpse. Its corpse was burnt and the ashes thereof were taken to the seventh floor where they were prepared into dough and baked. From the oven emerged two lifeless homunculi that, when fed the blood of the deceased bird, grew to full size. A short while later the decapitated King and Queen had reincarnated in the animated flesh made by the components of the little bird’s sacrifices.

Several aspects of this transformation recall the myth of the Bennu. A bird’s ashes are prepared into a Eucharist to a powerless image of itself and thereby it is reborn. The Phoenix, through its ashes, seems to work in concert with a Pelican nature, through the blood of its breast. Adam McLean (1979) provides a description of the alchemical bird’s transformation which seems to soundly follow the description provided in Day 6. He describes a “sequence, one which occurs in various sources: Black Crow - White Swan - Peacock - Pelican - Phoenix - as these correspond to a developing inner experience which involves a progressively deepening encounter with the inner spiritual dimension of our being.” In short it is a process of purification through sacrifice resulting in a perfect and immortal quality, the Phoenix. This Phoenix would Hermetically possess this process of resurrection and its ashes would be capable of bestowing this power, thence the resurrection of the King and Queen. Their blood was consumed by the “bloody and shapeless” bird and ultimately the bird’s blood and ashes were combined into a body and blood of the resurrected King and Queen. 

It is unfortunate that Rosenkreuz does not cite where he previously discoursed on the Phoenix. The Chemical Marriage, Fama Fraternitatis, and Confessio are the only works ascribed to him; however, another Rosicrucian writing around the same time did wax on the Phoenix much more.

Michal Maier was a German intellectual and physician whose cosmopolitan education contributed much to Rosicrucian literature. In 1617 Maier published an alchemical emblem book titled Atalanta Fugiens which depicted etches of various alchemical processes and a commentary in lucid prose. A few of these mention the Phoenix and are great descriptions of its alchemical role.

Emblem-33, “The Hermaphrodite, lying like a dead man in darkness, wants Fire,” depicts a hermaphrodite with two heads lying on a funerary pyre. The full moon illumes the spiritual darkness of the hermaphrodite’s death as Maier describes nature’s desire of external heat to ignite the internal flame. The Phoenix is used as a metaphor. Recall that the Phoenix itself is neither male nor female, and because its offspring is born of itself then it can be considered Hermaphroditic.

“One only Phoenix there is, which is restored by Fire, renewed by Flames and revived out of Ashes; and this, being known only to the Philosophers, is burnt and restored to life, whatever others fabulously may report of a certain Bird that never yet was seen or had any Being. Likewise, the Hermaphrodite of which the Philosophers speak is of a mixed Nature, Male and Female, one of which passes into the other by the Operation of Heat. For from a female it becomes a male, which ought not to seem strange in the Work of the Philosophers.”

(Maier, 1617)

The allusion of the female becoming male in the Philosopher’s Work is a plausible reference to the Great Work, the transmutation of metals or the infusion of the feminine soul with masculine spirit. The depiction of the soul as a hermaphrodite is not uncommon and implies the soul itself contains the seed of its own manifestation and rebirth. German Qabalism and mysticism were strongly influenced by selective interpretations of common Qabalism. The Hebrew word for Soul is feminine, as was the Hebrew word for Shekinah, a type of Sophia Perennis or Minerva Mundi. The various messianic figures such as Logos, Christ, Lucifer, etc., were traditionally portrayed as masculine. These two genders in conjunction were seen as being hermaphroditic, and their union initiated transformation of the soul’s nature from feminine to masculine.

By the increase of heat the genital parts are thrust out of the Body: for seeing a Woman is much colder than a male, and has those parts hidden within which a man has outwardly… After the same manner it is with the Philosophers, for by the increase of heat their woman becomes a man; that is, their Hermaphrodite loses the female sex and becomes a man stout and grave, having nothing in him of Effeminate Softness and Levity.

Alchemy's allegorical nature makes it frequently difficult to discuss, dissect, and digest. Key words and themes are noteworthy. In this excerpt, the theme of “coming out” and “hardening” is critical. As we will see later, the application of heat (via flame or Sulfur) hardens Mercury (making it “fixed”) and is a reference to making something substantial rather than incorporeal. Other period descriptions of the hermaphrodite even say it is three genders, referring to salt, sulfur, and mercury. Gender here simply means type or qualia.

As a final point it is noteworthy that the Emblems in Atalanta Fugiens describe a very long transformation and the summation of this part is, 

“For Heat sequesters and separates the superfluityes of Moisture and will Establish the Idea of the Philosophickal Subject, which is the Tincture.”

Ah the tincture! Often described as a variety of colors and consistencies, blue or red or white, or as a paste, powder, or fluid, a tincture represents some material which can initiate some sort of chemical change, often to metals, at least allegorically. However, the tincture also has to be derived from the components. The little bird of Rosenkreuz underwent a terrible series of ordeals where its components were divided and coagulated into a final product. Its plumage, blood, and ash were all recombined after being separated and purified in order to make the vital medicine. The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians mentions the Hermaphroditism of the Phoenix in an alchemical context as being a combination and careful balance of various alchemical polarities. Quoting, 

“The same Salt-Mother of the elements is the nitrous, aluminous and spiritual gumosic water, earth or crystal, which has Nature in its womb, a Son of the Sun, and a Daughter of the Moon. It is a Hermaphrodite, born out of the wind, a phoenix living in fire, a pelican, reviving his dear young ones with its blood; the young Icarus, drowned in the water, whose nurse is the earth, whose Mother is the wind, whose Father is the fire, the water her caretaker and drink, one stone and no stone, one water and no water, nevertheless a stone of living power and a water of living might; a sulphur, a mercury, a salt, hidden deep in nature, and which no fool has ever known nor seen.”

(Rosicrucian, 1785)

Maier mentions the Phoenix again in passing in his description of Emblem-43, titled “Give ear to the Vulture’s words, which are in no wise false.” The Vulture is not the sole subject of this Emblem, but instead Maier discusses the “philosophic bird.” He describes certain birds as being able to speak so as to pronounce their nature and that which they govern. Also, certain birds possess the power to self-fertilize. The vulture’s impregnation by wind in Egyptian mythology comes to mind.

“He conceives from himself (for so Rosarius towards the End. ) And he is the Dragon who marries himself and impregnates himself and brings forth in his own Season. And Rosarius to Sarratanta, " And that is the Serpent, Luxuriant in itself, impregnating itself, and bringing forth in one day. " It lives and endures a very long time, and multiplies itself. For what Virgil writes concerning the Phoenix agrees likewise to this, for it is the same Bird… It is very difficult to climb the nest of this Bird. It fights with the Mercurial Serpent, and overcomes it, that is Sol. With Luna it is conceived by the wind and carried in its belly, and born in the Air.”

This is the second place in the referenced Rosicrucian literature where the phoenix is juxtaposed to the serpent. The Phoenix is given a quality of Sulphur and the snake that of Mercury. As the snake possesses some immortal quality, Rosenkreuz’s little bird drinking the blood of the snake before its death seems to be a preparation of sulphur by fixed mercury to preserve its life through death.

Before going on to Allegoria Bella it is worth discussing the Phoenix’s fire as an alchemical agent. In Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, at the end of Book I, three fires are mentioned in presiding over the uniting of moist and dry. The first fire is the outer fire, “which the Artist or watchman maketh, which the Wise Men call ignem frontem, upon which Regimen dependeth the safety or the ruin of the entire Work.” The second fire is born of the Phoenix, 

“…the nest wherein the Phoenix of the Philosophers hath its abode, and hatcheth itself therein ad regenerationem. This is nothing else than the Vas Philosophorum [the way of the philosophers]. The Wise Men call it ignem corticum [fire of the mind], for it is written that the Phoenix bird collected all fragrant wood whereon it cremateth itself. If this were not so, the Phoenix would freeze to death and it could not attain to its Perfection. Sulphura Sulphuribus continentur [sulfur contains sulfur]. For the nest should protect, assist, cherish and keep the brood of the bird unto the final end.”

But, there is a final and third fire which exists hidden and secret with Mercury.

In the essence of the Mercurii is a sulphur which finally conquereth the coldness and the moisture in the Mercurio. This is nothing else than a small fire hidden in the Mercurio, which is aroused in our Mineris, and in the fulness of time it absorbeth the coldness and moisture in the Mercurio or removeth them, and that is also said about the fire.

Thus the combination of the Phoenix’s sulphur and Serpent’s mercury results in perfected sulphur. (Rosicrucian, 1785) In Crowley’s Atu XIII, Death, we see a process of transformation from cold mercurial fish to serpent and then to the vaporous eagle, but the eagle foreshadows the phoenix which is being prepared in the cauldron of Atu XIV, Art. The three trumps that precede Art are XI Lust, XII The Hanged Man, and XIII Death; respectively, sulfur, salt and mercury. Art is followed by XV, The Devil, ie Baphomet who is in the mystic aviary is indicated by the Double Headed Black Eagle.

Allegoria Bella

Published in 1617 by Maier, Allegoria Bella is an alchemical classic that describes the author in an existential funk much like that of Goethe’s Dr. Faustus, who also had troubles with his conscience over safe and effective potions. Dissatisfied with the burden of mundane life, Maier decides upon a quest, 

for I had heard that there was a bird called Phoenix, the only one of its kind in the whole world, whose feathers and flesh constitute the great and glorious medicine for all passion, pain, and sorrow; which also Helena, after her return from Troy, had presented in the form of a draught3 to Telemachus, who thereupon had forgotten all his sorrows and troubles. This bird I could not indeed hope to obtain entire, but I was seized with an irresistible longing to become possessed of at least one of its smallest feathers.

His inspirational quest to find a cure for melancholy would take him across the world. And as an allegorical piece, each element in the story represents some type of alchemical change.

For Maier, adventure accomplished the same transformation as the alchemical process. Maier “regarded his earthly existence as a spiritual journey... and a reflected image of the alchemical process itself.” (Tilton, 2003)

“The plan of my journey was determined by the relative quality of the elements which the different parts of the world represent, i.e., Europe stands for earth, America for water, Asia for air, and Africa for fire; and earth cannot become air except through the medium of water; nor can water become fire except through the medium of air. I determined, then, to go first to Europe, which represents the grossest, and last to Africa, which represents the most subtle element. But my reasons will be set forth more clearly as I come to speak of the different parts of the world.” -(Maier, 1617)

Europe is considered earth due to earth possessing a large proportion of the other elements, the result of which contains some method for the production of Heroes and Kings. He calls Europe a Virgin Lion, “Virgin because of her beauty and spotless purity; a Lion because she has conquered others, but has never herself been conquered.” Maier expected to find the Phoenix in Europe since Europe represents the sun upon the earth, but instead he was met with mockery by Europeans. He rebutted, saying that casual searching would never yield this greatest of treasures and that he must seek the Phoenix as the King his Queen or Princess her Prince. Europe seems to be here characterized as the alchemical Green Lion, the spontaneous generation born from sulphur and stone, the first sulphur and first matter. This sulphur, Maier’s ambition born of melancholy, must be purified by the prepared solvent.

America is the next destination, to which he sailed on a ship with an Eagle as its prow. In Emblem-46 of Atalanta Fugiens Maier describes the eagle as being sacred to John and the two eagles which circumnavigate the globe (east and west) to Sulfur and Mercury. Maier’s hope to find the exotic Phoenix among the other exotic birds of America led to disappointment. Instead he found “a stupid kind of people” and became engaged in the proper breeding of mules. [Here I’d like to point out that by America he seems to mean Brazil.] There was also much discussion of some water in America being capable of making Gold malleable, and also the transformation and separation of other elements, and the extraction of the “red Tincture” from quicksilver (mercury). Maier compares the soil of America to that of Peru, “Now all these are different kinds of mineral earth: the black earth, if mixed with water or wine, makes an excellent ink, the red soil is said to be the ore of quicksilver, and the Indians paint themselves with it.” Maier brought back with him a piece of black wood. This black wood may represent a fixed or solid form of sulphur, resulting from Europe’s Green Lion and Virgin Earth being transformed by American’s watery solvent.

Asia, or specifically Asia Minor, yielded an encounter with Jason (of the Argonautica) who instructed him as to the acquisition of the Golden Fleece. Inspired by this, Maier prays to Christ for assistance in his quest. He then finds himself in a city where many people are ranting about returning to paradise, so he follows his nose and discovers a pearl which he believes to be an important component of this Medicine he seeks. After discovering a statue of Mercury, he decides to continue his trek to Africa.

In Africa, by which he means Egypt, he sought the Sibyll, a prophetess, who answered his question as to the Phoenix’s location with the following,

"The object of your search is a great and glorious one; doubt is the first stage of knowledge, and you have also come to the right place and the right person. For the country in which you now find yourself is Araby the Blest, and nowhere else has the Phoenix ever been found; moreover, I am the only person who could possibly give you any definite information about it. I will teach you, and this land will exhibit to you, the glad sight of which I speak. Therefore, listen to my words Arabs the Blest and Egypt have from of old rejoiced in the sole possession of the Phoenix, whose neck is of a golden hue, while the rest of its body is purple, and its head is crowned with a beautiful crest. It is sacred to the Sun, lives 660 years, and when the last hour of its life approaches, it builds a nest of cassia and frankincense, fills it with fragrant spices, kindles it by flapping its wings towards the Sun, and is burnt to ashes with it. From these ashes there is generated a worm, and out of the worm a young bird which takes the nest, with the remains of its parent, and carries it to Heliopolis (or Thebes), the sacred city of the Sun in Egypt. Now, this whole tale which you find in the books of the Ancients is addressed to the mind rather than to the ear; it is a mystical narrative, and like the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, should be mystically (not historically) understood. An ancient Egyptian writer tells us that the Phoenix rejoices in the Sun, and that this predilection is its chief reason for coming to Egypt. He also relates that his countrymen were in the habit of embalming the Phoenix if it died before its time. If you therefore regard this tale as an allegory, you will not be far wrong; and you know that the flesh and feathers of this bird were of old used in Heliopolis as a remedy for anger and grief…Nevertheless, the most important part of the enterprise must be performed by the toil of your own hands. I cannot describe to you in exact and unmistakable terms the place where the Phoenix lives, yet I will endeavor to make it as plain to you as I may. Egypt, you know, owes all her fertility to the Nile, whose sources are unknown and undiscoverable; but the mouths by which it is discharged into the sea, are sufficiently patent to all. The fourth Son of the Nile is Mercury, and to him his father has given authority to shew you this bird, and its Medicine. This Mercury you may expect to find somewhere near the seven mouths of the Nile; for he has no fixed habitation, but is to be found now in one of these mouths, and now in another."

Maier then took to searching the mouth of each of these rivers, which he believed to relate to the seven planets. He found Mercury in none of them, but upon retracing his steps he found Mercury. Dr. Tilton (2003) posits the Tanitic mouth was Mercury's home, being the fifth mouth which was Mercury's position in relation to the Saturn in Maier's cosmology. This was the mouth where the locals actively denied Mercury's presence rather than feign ignorance - a blind. Mercury directed him to the Phoenix’s location, but the Phoenix was temporarily absent. Suddenly, Maier left to his homeland with the knowledge he had obtained. His alternative was to tack on a mere three weeks to his quest which up to now had already exceeded a year. Why did Maier not wait?

Dr. Tilton posits the answer can be found in the author referenced by the Sibyl, “Horus Apollo”, or more commonly known now as Horapollo. His Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, written in the fifth century, attempts to explain certain motifs in Egyptian hieroglyphs without much concern with literary accuracy. When he says the Phoenix is used to indicate “a traveller who returns from a long journey to his native land” (Horapollo, 1598) we can assume that Maier, in his return, actually did find that Phoenix in a more subtle way. One reading is that Maier's “return” to Egypt was the very discovery of that Phoenix where he is “mystically served with funerary rites.” Alternatively his achievement was the return to his own home, Germany, as if he discovered the Phoenix as himself as he was back in a familiar place but with a renewed vitality, like the Phoenix awakening within a new fledgling.

This theme of returning home is also foreshadowed in Maier’s opening, quoted above, where he refers to whatever medicine Helen gave Telemachus. This is a reference to The Odyssey,4 where Odysseus and his Argonauts (many of whom are canonized by Crowley for the Gnostic Mass) merely want to return home. In Greek this is νόστος/nostos, whither nostalgia, and the length of Odysseus’ longing is the strength of his glory when he arrives. In alchemy the idea is that materials are encountered in impure forms and need to be refined in order to be worked. Their gradual purification is their return to some pure state, their noumenal home, but it requires ardor, grace, and skill. Just the same the mystical adventure has been described as a return home, be it to the womb of supernal Babalon as a Babe of the Abyss or a redemptive repairing to the Garden of Eden.

Further on the Alchemy of the Phoenix

Alchemical literature between the 15th and 17th century was at its aleatory height, such as described by Crowley in his 1925 essay “The Method of Thelema.” The Phoenix was frequently evoked, sometimes to anoint research with Christian overtones but to many it was the central element of alchemy. Maier was one such alchemist to explore this mystery and he scorned contemporaries for their naïve understanding. Maier argued that the discovery of the origin of the phoenix was crucial for unlocking its secret. The tree is a surprising source of origin for the Phoenix. Maier describes one type of duck borne from a tree on the Orcanian Isles. This tree produces a fruit which then falls into the water. From this fruit a duck is born. Maier compares this duck to the Phoenix, saying,

But, that our tree–born bird appear not to our reader unique and sole among the vast host of winged beings, let us place him in the company of the Phœnix, that bird of fire, veritable nestling of the Sun, Vulcan's nursling — to whose birth hasten all gods and goddesses thronging the chapels of Egypt, that they might shower it with gifts upon its birth day.

-Maier, Tractatus de Volucri Arborea

This description continued into a chemical one. Maier proclaims the Phoenix's residence in Arabia was due to the riches of their temples which contained many rare metals. The description is here cited, but bear in mind Maier's obsession with the sun as the true god and the Phoenix as a representation of that sun. 

“Indeed, Nature first engendered In Araby a pupa, the seed from which the full–blown bird arises. For should one dispute to know which came first, the egg or chicken, let it then be answered that the first bird was created by God from nothing, with no pre–existent seed, and came from no egg[...] The celestial Sun produces the larva by a putrefaction in its own substance which is procured by Mercury. Thence, Mercury, Vulcan, and Apollo, who is the Sun, engender that Orion from the stagnation of urine or, rather, semen, enwrapping it in an cow–hide[...] The larva is thus first born in Araby from the viscous matter of Mercury by the operation of the Sun's heat, and in the same place, by the ministrations of Vulcan, artist of Egypt, it is transmuted into the Phœnix itself... The Tincture is Phoenician or Tyrean in colour and stems from a subject which is burnt and reduced to ashes, which ashes are consecrate to the Sun and both celestial and terrestrial, because of the solar child hid within them, and which resume life or, rather, their multiplication, in the manner of a propagation. They are thus never extinguished but, like fire, augment unto infinity by means of their self–nourishment.”

In Commentaire sur le Tresor des tresors de Christophle de Gamon (1610) the Phoenix is posited as being a symbol of the purified sulfur. Henri de Linthaut says,

“Wishing to veil this Treasure of Treasures, and its augmentation, the Poets invented the Phœnix which, dying, produces always of itself another of its species, ever taking birth, dying and being reborn within the fire. Such that by this fable, they wished us to understand how the real Phœnix, this divine Elixir, is born of fire, that is to say of Sulphur: and is transformed into ashes in the fire, when the work once again resolves into Black Sulphur: and revives in the fire on becoming the Red Sulphur or Red Elixir. Thus it is always one and the same bird, sacrifices itself to the rays of the Sun, which, in our fermentation, means that it is withdrawn by the Gold, or Sun of metals. It is also, say our Poets, this Phœnix that asserts itself as animal, for it vivifies all things, and also vegetable, in that it believes in quantity and virtue; and mineral with regard to the material from which it is born. This also is the bird who once born, cries that the artist shall never leave him, and he never quit the artist; thus is its pyre built, that it may burn itself, be reborn and multiply unto infinity.”

The Phoenix has been identified with both the white tincture and red tincture, the purification of mercury and sulfur respectively. This alchemical process was also described as an interaction between other mystic aviary. The Crow-to-Phoenix description given above is one example, but its focus on the exoteric symbols and meaning reduces the importance of the subtle process described by earlier authors. Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement in 1620 composed a poem describing the Phoenix:

In the same forest, my eye was carried
to a nest wherein lay Hermes' two birds.  
One was attempting to take flight,
while the other prevented his escape;
Thus the one holds back the other, and never leaves it.
Above this nest I saw upon a branch,  
Two birds locked in combat, destroying each other.
One the colour of blood, the other was white,
And, dying, both assumed a happier form.
I saw them transform into snow white doves,
And then, together, become one, single Phoenix,
Who, like unto the Sun, on brilliant wings,
Leaping aloft from that Park, betook himself unto the Empyrean heights.

This metaphor was taken by P. J. Farbre (in Panchymicum, 1646) as a typical illustration of the interaction of the red and white eagles. These two eagles recall Maier's eagles of the East and West. Their mutual murder results in the consumption of one another's blood and from this intermingling is borne two doves. These doves unify, and thence is born the Phoenix. Farbre goes on to compare the Phoenix to a silk worm whose metamorphoses in its cocoon gives birth to a new creature. “The virtue of this seed can never be destroyed in any manner[...] and cannot be annihilated in anyway. Were it otherwise, and if nothing of ourselves subsisted, there would be no hope that we might, one day, raise ourselves from our own ashes, for resurrection is not a creation but the renewal of the body from one that existed before.”

Farbre further gives the ashes to a salt, saying,

Indeed, the fire consumes all that is thick and foul, and nothing is left but the ashes containing a fixed and pure salt within which the various colours dwell. These are communicated to the reincarnating bird without effort, for this salt in the ashes of the Phoenix, in consequence of its immolation, is its true seed, whence, as from an egg, a new Phoenix is born. And also that extremely long. […]

The Phoenix... is the salt of the Wise, and, thus, their Mercury; it is Bazil Valentine's salt of glory, the albrot salt of Artephius, Trevisan's double Mercury, which is the philosophic embryo, and the bird born of Hermogenes; it is dry water, fiery water, and the universal Menstruum, or Spirit of the Universe... it is itself the sugar of the Moonwort, the spirit and soul of the Sun, the bain-marie, where King and Queen must bathe.

[...] it contains within it the unnatural fire, the moist fire, the secret fire, occult and invisible.

Some posit the Phoenix itself is the Elixer, others that its role is the multiplication of the Elixer (of life). Giovanni Bracesco posits that “our Jupiter” is derived from the Phoenix's ashes which, when mixed with the Elixer, multiplies it.

Paracelsus posits this multiplication, and the role of the Phoenix, in relation to the Iliastric soul to the Cagastric body, saying,

.The Iliastric soul, on the other hand, is so made that neither heat nor cold may harm it, but that heat is its life and nourishment, its air and pleasure, its joy and delectation. In other words, the salamandrine Phœnix lives in the fire and is the Iliastric soul in man. This being so, the soul also growing in the body of man, and rooting itself in the heart, but, like a tree and its branches, separating its branches into the blood and veins where dwell the spirit of fire and fire itself, there is the soul upright upon its throne and its dwelling in the blood and the veins. So much for the Phœnix.

-Paracelsus, Liber Azoth (1591)

The identification of the Phoenix with the Iliastric soul is an important recollection of the Bennu as it relates to the Ba. The Ba's reentry into the body carried the soul of a past life into a future life. The strength of that Ba, and also of that Iliastric soul, determined how well it survived the intermediary period before reincarnation. The Elixer of Life or Phoenix Tincture as the strengthening of this Iliastric soul, and so to Crowley's use of the Phoenix in magick.

The Phoenix of Aleister Crowley

Neglect not the daily Miracle of the Mass, either by the Rite of the Gnostic Catholic Church, or that of the Phoenix. Neglect not the Performance of the Mass of the Holy Ghost, as Nature herself prompteth thee.

-Aleister Crowley: Liber Aleph, De Cultu

Crowley mentions the Phoenix several times in more esoteric works, particularly The Book of Lies, Liber 333. Crowley’s understanding of the Phoenix is derived from both the historical context, in the case of the Bennu bird, and his studies of alchemy. Rosenkreuz and Maier were both canonized by Crowley in his Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, suggesting they were influences in the symbolism of the Gnostic Mass, mysteries of OTO, and also Crowley’s magical and alchemical philosophy. Crowley declared each of these men in Liber 52 as having constituted originating assemblies of the OTO.

In The Book of Lies there are several chapters that deal with the phoenix, each of which are one page of cryptic prose followed by one page of comment. Most obviously there is The Mass of the Phoenix, chapter 44, but also chapter 62, Twig?, chapter 11, The Glow-Worm, and chapter 16, The Stag-Beetle.

With The Mass of the Phoenix, as with all chapters in The Book of Lies, its number, 44, reflects its subject. This number is “the special number of Horus; it is the Hebrew [word for] blood, and the multiplication of the 4 by the 11, the number of Magick, explains 4 in its finest sense. But see in particular the accounts in Equinox I:7 of the circumstances of the Equinox of the Gods.” The Hebrew word for Blood is דם/dem and its enumeration 44. Daleth is the Empress, Venus, who plays a subtle role in the Chemical Marriage, and mem is the Hanged Man, appropriate to water and resurrection. And in contrast to the Emperor’s Ram, the Empress sits with a Pelican that feeds her nestlings.  Her shield contains the same double headed bird as the Emperor; however, the Empress’ bird is white.  Duquette comments that these two-headed eagles represent the white tincture and red tincture respectively.  Their two-headedness represents androgeneity, therefore the balance of the forces within the tincture. Daleth’s position on the Tree of Life is the gate, or door-way, so in conjunction with mem and dem it may be suggestive of blood flow or menstrual blood, an interpretation of Maier’s Emblem-33 (by virtue of the full moon). As noted earlier, Job 29:18’s choll enumerates to 44 as well. Choll is the Hebrew word for both “sand” and “Phoenix”. Lastly, the Greek word Φοίνικος/Phoinikos is the color “sun-red” and several of the above alchemists posited the Phoenix produced the “red tincture.”

During the Mass of the Phoenix, the Magician cuts their breast to draw blood to soak a cake. The significance of blood to the Phoenix myth and Mass is obvious by virtue of the Phoenix’s compliment in the Christian context, the Pelican, and by blood’s association with sacrifice. Crowley explains, “The word ‘Phoenix’ may be taken as including the idea of ‘Pelican’, the bird, which is fabled to feed its young from the blood of its own breast. Yet the two ideas, though cognate, are not identical, and ‘Phoenix’ is the more accurate symbol.” The natural question is: accurate in reference to what? Their role in alchemy is largely complimentary; the Phoenix is Christ’s divine nature, the Pelican his human. The Phoenix performs the process of spiritual perfection and rejuvenation, the Pelican performs a sacrifice by which its offspring are fed. The paternal Phoenix lives on, father to son. The maternal Pelican lives on in its offspring. In cases such as the bird transmutation (above) and Rosenkreuz’s phoenix-pelican sacrifice to revive the King and Queen it is obvious how the two were seen to work in conjunction, the blood and the ash having distinct purposes. The overlapping roles of the mystic aviary is a confusing theme with Crowley.

The phoenix-pelican connection is not the only link between the phoenix and blood. In the Golden Dawn’s Adeptus Minor initiation the 2nd Adept carries the Phoenix Wand. It is also the 2nd Adept that dips the dagger in a cup of wine and draws crosses over the head, feet, hands and heart of the aspirant, simulating Christ’s wounds. The heart is the last place symbolically cut, in silence. The Phoenix Wand is designed to resemble the Uas (wꜣs, Ouas) Scepter, though many argue its head is actually that of the Set animal. It’s perhaps best known by Thelemites as being carried by Horus, such as on the Stele of Revealing, but is also often carried by other gods directly associated with the Horus saga, including Set, Isis, Thoth and Anubis. In Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, the 5, 6 and 7 of Wands all depict the Phoenix Wand (with its two GD companions, the Lotus Wand and Orb Wand) and AC refers to it as such. In The Book of Thoth while commenting on the Magus card he writes that Thoth is sometimes depicted carrying a Phoenix Wand, “symbolising resurrection through the generative process. In his left hand is the Ankh, which represents a sandal-strap; that is to say, the means of progress through the worlds, which is the distinguishing mark of godhead.” And again in Across the Gulf Crowley writes, “By the bed stood the Priest of Horus with his heavy staff, the Phoenix for its head, the prong for its foot. Watchful he stood lest Sebek should rise from the abyss.”

In The Mass of the Phoenix blood is behaving in the magical capacity as the vital essence. It is acting in a magical capacity in its conjunction with the Host (the bread) which is feminine. The introduction of the vital essence into a physical medium for its transmutation and transmission is similar to the Bennu’s ashes being preserved in a host of resinous woods and gums. This recalls the blood (of the bird) being used to feed the host (baked from the ashes of the bird) in Chemical Marriage, the result being a living (yet soulless, and so unconscious) and royal host.

The blood in the Mass of the Phoenix is drawn from the Magician’s breast by a burin. This blood is the will or energy of a Magician. The burin, a weapon used for carving (talismans), is the magical weapon of Aries along with “the horns” and “energy.” Aries, in Hebrew, is הלט, Heleth, 44. The Horns adorned Exodus’ Altar of Incense. Aries, in the Tarot, is the Emperor, Sulphur. Again, Sulphur enters the picture as that which is being transmuted. He marks on this inner alchemy, “Use all thine energy to rule thy thought: burn up thy thought as the Phoenix.” While the Emperor, Atu IV, shows a red eagle, sulfur, the he blood itself is dem, that being daleth (the Empress, Salt) and Mem (the Hanged Man, Mercury).

The blood can also be Shamayim, which is Azoth. Herr von Welling gives an interesting interpretation of this mysterious substance,

"The universe is surrounded by the sphere of the stars. Beyond that sphere is the sphere of Schamayim, which is the Divine fiery water, the first outflow of the Word of God, the flaming river pouring from the presence of the Eternal. Schamayim, the fiery androgynous water, divides. The fire becomes the solar fire and the water becomes the lunar water. Schamayim is the universal mercury--sometimes called Azoth--the measureless spirit of life. The spiritual fiery original water--Schamayim--comes through Eden (in Hebrew, vapor) and pours itself into four main rivers [the elements]. This is the river of living water--Azoth [the fiery mercurial essence] that flows out from the throne of God and the Lamb.”

As the magick of the Phoenix’s sacrifice allowed its essence to survive its body’s death, so does the Mass of the Phoenix for the Magician. Crowley’s recommendation of this rite to be daily employed by “the Magician” may be a general anecdote for those practicing magick, but it may directly refer to the II° of OTO, the degree appropriate to Life, where the initiate is called “Magician,” properly preparing himself for the III°, Death, the dark night of the soul, Maier’s Emblem-33. This is the reason the Mass of the Phoenix is to be performed at dusk. Crowley comments in Chapter 62:

The first cake, burnt, illustrates the profit drawn from the scheme of incarnation.
The second, mixt with his life's blood and eaten, illustrates the use of the lower life to feed the higher life.
He then takes the Oath and becomes free-unconditioned-the Absolute.
Burning up in the Flame of his Prayer, and born again - the Phoenix!

The dual action of the Phoenix-Pelican is apparent. One cake is burnt, the other bloodied. “The profit drawn from the scheme of incarnation” recalls Crowley’s description of the III°5 and refers to the ashes, ie the essence. The other cake presumably has ashes of previous cakes in it per the recipe for cakes, and so the “lower life” is the blood feeding “the higher life,” which is the ashes. This alchemical action of Revivification is where the essence or ash of something is restored to life via a medium that resembles that from which it was derived. Maier gives an experiment where the ashes of a rose were exposed to a low heat and at some point the image of the rose was visible within the glassware on the surface of the ashes. Just the same, the purified elements within a Cake of Light, and also the blood that’s been made sacred through prayer, reintroduce to the body of the Magician something healthier than thou. The reconstitution of the essence or spirit within a new medium recalls the myth of the Bennu.

In Allegoria Bella we see Maier undergoing a type of elemental initiation in his quest for the Phoenix. In The Mass of the Phoenix various weapons are used to stimulate the senses. In Chapter 62 Crowley explains, “The Phoenix has a Bell for Sound; Fire for Sight; a Knife for Touch; two cakes, one for taste, the other for smell.” If this ritual’s purpose is to fortify the astral body, here are the weapons by which one may consecrate the senses. In The Serpent Power (Avalon, 1974) the chakras are viewed as sensory organs attuned to the tattwas (subtle elements). Each chakra corresponds to a gross sensory modality and it is necessary for the yogi to purify each gross sensory modality6 into its tanmatra or subtle form. This is done through pranayama techniques and meditations. In accomplishing this, the yogi dedicates each sensory modality to subtle rather than gross perception and gradually attunes his body of light to the astral plane. The Body of Light (Ba or Ruach), if properly prepared, will survive the Body’s death.

The title of Chapter 62 is Twig?. A brief allusion is made in the comment to the twigs a Phoenix gathers for its pyre. However, gematria tells a different story, showing twig as 28. 28 is the mystic number of 7 (Σ:1-7) and also the sum of four 7’s. This gives it a strong relation to Netzach, Venus, who lived in the deepest part of the castle in Chemical Marriage and thereby alchemically represented the most esoteric yet fundamental part of the process being performed. Netzach (the seventh sephira) is typified as a burning desire to reach God-head, the path connecting it with God-head (Tiphareth) is the path of Death and the liberation of spirit from matter. Netzach is Hebrew for “victory,” the traditional meaning of the palm frond. Netzach’s connection to love (as Venus) and its element being Fire offers a symbolic allegory of the Phoenix utilizing Netzach’s power to liberate itself by Death’s burning Fire of Love.7 This also recalls I Corinthians 15:54-55:

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

Some dispute exists as to which Eucharist the Mass of the Phoenix uses in terms of of how many components it contains. For this, the following citations pull from Magick in Theory and Practice. Crowley’s description of the Eucharist of one component as being “secret in every respect” seems at odds with the “simple and exoteric form” of Mass of the Phoenix’s Eucharist. The Eucharist of Two Elements, blood and the host, seems to be here used. Again, Chapter 20, 

The Eucharist of two elements has its matter of the passives. The wafer (pantacle) is of corn, typical of earth; the wine (cup) represents water. (There are certain other attributions. The Wafer is the Sun, for instance: and the wine is appropriate to Bacchus). The wafer may, however, be more complex, the "Cake of Light" described in Liber Legis. This is used in the exoteric Mass of the Phoenix mixed with the blood of the Magus. 

Alchemists deliberately set up blinds in their writings so as to conceal the Truth. Keeping in mind Crowley’s labeling the Eucharist in the Mass as “simple and exoteric,” read his description of the Eucharist of One Element:

“The highest form of the Eucharist is that in which the Element consecrated is One. It is one substance and not two, not living and not dead, neither liquid nor solid, neither hot nor cold, neither male nor female. This sacrament is secret in every respect. For those who may be worthy, although not officially recognized as such, this Eucharist has been described in detail and without concealment, "somewhere" in the published writings of the MASTER THERION. But He has told no one where. It is reserved for the highest initiates, and is synonymous with the Accomplished Work on the material plane. It is the Medicine of Metals, the Stone of the Wise, the Potable Gold, the Elixir of Life that is consumed therein. The altar is the bosom of Isis, the eternal mother; the chalice is in effect the Cup of our Lady Babalon Herself; the Wand is that which Was and Is and Is To Come.”

The description of the One Eucharist is similar to Maier’s discussion of the universal medicine and the power the Phoenix holds. The first two sentences in the above description strongly recall the hermaphroditic quality of the Phoenix. The imagery is resonant with that of the Chemical Marriage. The bird was sacrificed on an altar on the seventh floor of the tower by the Virgin. Its blood was caught into a golden cup and appeared as a fountain of rubies. The bird was then reduced to ashes by fire, the element of the wand.

The Eucharist of seven elements and one element are not the same Eucharist but are “mystically identical.” The One Element is expressible in many ways and the Eucharist of seven elements is an alchemical way of capturing or producing that one element. Liber Ararita would perhaps serve as an adequate meditation on this mystery, particularly the final chapter which deals with the Fire Qadosh burning through 7 aspects of creation. Alchemists described this Qadosh as an invisible centre of the triangle of the three principles of salt-sulphur-mercury, the Centrum in Trigono Centri. The Phoenix being depicted as various combinations of these elements, its incineration could be seen as the immortal flame of Qadosh. Qadosh is the Hebrew for “Sacred” and equates to “Tabernacle” and “Holy.” A slight corruption, Qadish, is a funerary prayer promising the departed that God will resurrect them and “reestablish his Temple within.”

Sexual fluids might carry a meaning with the Phoenix myth. In alchemy the application of heat, red, will reduce something to ash, white. Various tinctures are produces, including both the white tincture and the red tincture, mercury and sulphur respectively. The Phoenix as an combination of these two elements is hermaphroditic, having the power of both sexes and all alchemical polarities that follow suit. In sexual alchemy the red lion and white eagle represent these polarities. Crowley saw them as an expression of the sexual fluids. Their interchange represented a kind of fertilization, as depicted on the Art card where the tinctures co-mingle under the supervision of the Hermaphrodite. The result is VITRIOL, a Latin acronym describing the method of finding the “Hidden Stone.” This recalls the Benben stone or mound upon which the universe and its Gods were created. This also refers to the Stone of the Wise, which is the secret medicine advertised by OTO and sought by Michael Maier. The Stone of the Wise was a product of perfected and balanced salt (the ashes), sulfur (the flame) and mercury (the hermaphroditic palm).

There’s another connection that lets us explore the sexual alchemy, which is through mechanics. The palm-phoenix connection was actually the initial impetus for this essay after discovering that Crowley insisted in multiple drafts that a palm tree could be used as a substitute for a candle in the OTO’s Ceremony of Minerval, which takes place during the Witching Hours. Without giving away any more, obviously a palm tree wouldn’t be as functional as a candle for emitting light, even if it were the referenced deglet nour (dates of light). Either Crowley was casual with the timing of the ceremony or he was insisting upon this symbol being preserved. I believe the phoenix/palm recalls the fire of agni atop the pillar, just like a candle, burning down the spine from Ajna to Muladhara, Spirit to Matter as in the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram or as the “hollow tube to bring down Fire from Heaven” in L. 333 Ch. 15, mentioned shortly. The Ajna and Muladhara are the two chakras of the Grade of Minerval. These recall the two weapons of Tahuti (when he’s not holding the Phoenix Wand), he would hold a chisel in one hand and a tablet in the other, ie a wand and disk, lightening and the earth. The Minerval is Earth8 (90.3 or 220.1.40), figuratively “Mineral” with the solar V in the midst, but the other half of the equation, the agni/fire/spirit component, is the Initiator, whose offerings have already been mentioned in this essay.

More on the Mystic Aviary

While several chapters in The Book of Lies allude to mystic aviary, outside of Chapters 44 and 62 only one other references the Phoenix directly. Chapter 33, Baphomet, describes a black two-headed eagle. An allusion is here made to the Phoenix, “This Eagle is burnt up in the Great Fire; yet not a feather is scorched.” It is identified as a black triangle. (p. 519, Regardie 1989) In Golden Dawn teachings, “The black triangle will represent Saturn” (506, Regardie, 1989) This is a Masonic symbol, “a bird, which is master of the four elements, and therefore of the name Tetragrammaton.”9 (Crowley, 1980) Continuing with the comment, Crowley says, 

The Eagle may be identified, though not too closely, with the Hawk previously spoken of. It is perhaps the Sun, the exoteric object of worship of all sensible cults; it is not to be confused with other objects of the mystic aviary, such as the swan, phoenix, pelican, dove and so on. 

(Crowley, 1980)

The Eagle and Hawk are here called exoteric while the swan, phoenix, pelican, and dove are not. The above mentioned bird-transformation alchemical analogy lists the swan, pelican, and phoenix, mentioned by Crowley, and the dove has elsewhere been identified with the Phoenix. To distinguish I would say that within the trinity the Phoenix is the father (and son) while the dove is purely the Holy Spirit.

Crowley used “Phoenix” as a penname in one place, The Scientific Solution to the Problem of Government, where he writes as Comte de Fénix. An editor’s note in Revival of Magick to this essay marks that it was Crowley’s “secret name as head of O.T.O.” But he signs OTO documents as Baphomet, whether as X° or XI°, which is cognate with the dicephalic black eagle. In “Gathering Into Their Fold,” published in Success is your Proof (2015, Sekmet Books), current Rex Supremus of Grand Lodge d’Italia Father Φάνης/Phanes X° marks that it was 1925 when he adopted Phoenix as OHO, “the year that he signed the last Holy Book, called The Comment, as Ankh-f-n-Khonsu” and used “the cartouche of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu as the OHO seal” on the Preliminary Pledge Form for admission to OTO, aka the Minerval Application. To my knowledge the 1925 reference is from a letter from C. S. Jones to W. T. Smith printed in The Unknown God, which reads:

Our Holy Father Peregrinus-Merlin, O.H.O.—on whom be Peace—passed to the Greate East some time ago, and the title of the successor to this High Office is Phoenix. The Phoenix has been duly acclaimed as O.H.O. by the reigning Grand Masters here and in Europe, and he has himself accepted this Exalted Station.

Jones writes later that Smith should be able to easily guess the identity of the listed persons. He mentions a couple other people and gives them bird names, including naming Jones as Tantalus Leucocephalus, “the Pelican-Ibis, a kind of wood-ibis rather interesting as a new alchemical bird.” The conference of birds Crowley had assembled might be the one listed in a work published in 1925, Heart of the Master, discussed below.

Phanes X° argues the presence of the cartouche and the adoption of the “secret name” Phoenix indicates governance of A∴A∴ over OTO by the Imperator of A∴A∴, a reflection of the Magus, in this case Crowley who was Imperator. Perhaps then the Outer (exoteric) Head of the Order, OHO, is known as Baphomet, while the Inner (sacred and secret) Head of the Order is known as Phoenix. In Crowley’s case, these two were one. As previously mentioned, in Chapter 33 of Liber 333, Baphomet, “a black two-headed eagle” is evoked as an exoteric equivalent. Crowley comments that “[i]t is perhaps the Sun, the exoteric object of worship of all sensible cults; it is not to be confused with other objects of the mystic aviary, [such as the phoenix].” Lastly, Crowley also notes on this chapter that Jacques de Molay (canonized in the Latin as Iacobus Burgundis Molensis) was savvy to this, and “His initials I.B.M. are the initials of the Three Pillars of the Temple, and add to 52, 13×4, BN, the Son.” Ben means "son” in Hebrew, but it is also the benben stone, the third and central pillar at Heliopolis.

Another mention of the Phoenix in Crowley’s works is in The Heart of the Master where nine birds come and pronounce magical formulae in order to hail the Law of Thelema. “The Voice of the Phoenix” cries “AL: not to be burned, not to be quenched, the Soul of the Master bathes in the Fire of Nature, and is refreshed.” AL became the eventual liber title of The Book of the Law as Crowley believed it was the “secret key” of the book. The comment that “the Soul of the Master bathes in the Fire of Nature” is not reflected in AL, but it does recall the alchemical INRI formula, which Mackey gives as Igne Natura Renovatur Integra, by fire is nature’s integrity refreshed, and also Igne Nitrum Roris Invenitur, by fire is the ash/salt of dew discovered. Nitrum derives from the Egyptian nṯrj, an adjective form of nṯr, as in Nuteru, God(s).

INRI is not one of the voices of the birds, but INRI’s equivalent, IAO, is given to “The Voice of the Pelican,” writing, “all that liveth is blood of the Heart of the Master: all stars are at Feast on that Pasture, abiding in Light.” INRI is also frequently depicted with the Pelican in Masonic emblems. In 333.33 Crowley writes, “This Masonic symbol is, however, identified by Frater P. with a bird, which is master of the four elements, and therefore of the name Tetragrammaton,” but he doesn’t say which bird. Perhaps he considers the esoteric “swan, phoenix, pelican, dove” as mapping onto IHVH. A further connection between the Phoenix and the Eagle is the first part of the description of the the Voice of the Phoenix, “not to be burned, not to be quenched,” a paraphrase of 333.33 discussing the eagle, “This Eagle is burnt up in the Great Fire; yet not a feather is scorched. This Eagle is swallowed up in the Great Sea; yet not a feather is wetted.” Crowley’s note that this bird is “master of the four elements, and therefore of the name Tetragrammaton,” may be another play on words. Tetragrammaton means “four lettered word” and usually refers to IHVH, but it may be INRI as the four elements in Hebrew: Iaminim, water; Nour, fire; Ruach, air; and Iebschah, earth. In De Natura Rerum Paracelsus states that the four elements are a product of the, three, Salt, Sulfur and Mercury, but they are ultimately derivative of the one and can be reverse engineered into the one. The Analysis of the Keyword, whereby IAO is gotten from INRI, may reflect this shift from the four elements to the three, where IAO is salt (Isis’ tears), sulfur (Apophis’ fire) and mercury (Osiris, the psychopomp). Perhaps this confusion between the black eagle, the pelican and the phoenix is also reflected in these elements.

This contrast between the self-restoring Phoenix, ever individual and eternal, a straight line of continuity, and the nurturing Pelican who survives in future generations is reflected in the paternal and maternal work in the higher degrees of OTO, discussed in part in my essay on Chaos, but also the symbiotic works of A∴A∴ and OTO respectively. Perhaps this duplexity is what the AL of the Phoenix refers to, the spiralic swastika of the Aleph, the Ox that Jason used to plow, where the goad he used was the lamed, L.

Initiation and Immolation

Burning in Thelema is more of a sacrifice than a sacrilege. Cakes of Light are burned into ash and then reintroduced into the batter of the next batch, by one common interpretation. Doing this to the host in a Catholic Mass would be unthinkable and was guarded against rigorously, such as is described in the text 16th century papal edict De Defectibus, which Crowley referred to. However, his Comment in The Book of the Law demands biblioclasty, which many have interpreted as immolation. Also, Crowley’s notes for a Renunciation of Slave Religion ritual calls for immolation of the text of the creed you are renouncing, but this could be viewed as a sacrilege or a sublimation. In the mysticism of A∴A∴ the reduction of the aspirant to ashes (with the demand that not one drop of blood remain) is part of the initiation into the grade of Master of the Temple. It is described in Liber 156 and reference to Hermes, or Mercury, is made, “Nor shall the aeon itself avail thee in this; for from the dust shall a white ash be prepared by Hermes the Invisible.” Similarly in Crowley’s “self initiation into the Grade of Neophyte,” reference is made to the building of the Pyramid, where fire is an “informing” sacrament and Tahuti is one of the invocations. In Chapter 15 of The Book of Lies10, titled The Gun Barrel, Crowley writes:

Mighty and erect is this Will of mine, this Pyramid of fire whose summit is lost in Heaven. Upon it have I burned the corpse of my desires.
Mighty and erect is this Φαλλοσ of my Will. The seed thereof is That which I have borne within me from Eternity; and it is lost within the Body of Our Lady of the Stars.
I am not I; I am but an hollow tube to bring down Fire from Heaven.
Mighty and marvellous is this Weakness, this Heaven which draweth me into Her Womb, this Dome which hideth, which absorbeth, Me.
This is The Night wherein I am lost, the Love through which I am no longer I.

The connection with the Phoenix burning and love was repeated by Crowley. Telling a love story in The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon (Eq. I:6) he wrote, “there, among the vines, they lernt how — once in a century — the phoenix Passion may rise from the fire of Vice, and how in the beak of the phoenix proved by the fire is the ring of Love.” It’s with the fire of love that Simon Iff banishes the malignant spirit in the garden in Moonchild. It’s with the weapon of the wand, that of fire, that the invoking-earth pentagram is drawn in the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, when the proper weapon would be the disk. This describes the descent of spirit as fire into earth. In his Notes on the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram he marks, “Those who regard this ritual as a mere device to invoke or banish spirits, are unworthy to possess it. Properly understood, it is the Medicine of Metals and the Stone of the Wise.” In these notes Crowley gives the “LRP” a similar purpose as the Mass of the Phoenix in that it fortifies the Body of Light. In Ch. XX of Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley notes that the Mass of the Phoenix eucharist is actually that of five elements, albeit “in a slightly different form.” Pyramidos seems to be the eucharist of four elements, unless you add the oil.

Crowley marked that the Mass of the Phoenix utilizes the “blood of the Magus,” which is more than a reference to the operator/magician. The Magus is embodied by Thoth, whom the Golden Dawn likened to the Phoenix. In Crowley’s vision of Thoth in the 6th Aethyr, MAZ, he sees an urn.

But the Urn is the wonderful thing in all this; it is made of fixed Mercury; and within it are the ashes of the Book Tarot, which hath been utterly consumed.

And this is that mystery which is spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles; that Jupiter and Mercury (Kether and Chokmah) visited (that is, inspired), Ephesus, the City of Diana, Binah — was not Diana a black stone? – and they burnt their books of magick. […]

Now it seems that the centre of infinite space is that Urn, and Hadit is the fire that hath burnt up the book Tarot. For in the book Tarot was preserved all of the wisdom (for the Tarot was called the Book of Thoth), of the Aeon that is passed. […]

And a voice proceedeth from the Urn: From the ashes of the Tarot who shall make the phoenix-wand?

For Crowley, Tarot/TARO was likened unto the law/TORA, and also karma, the wheel/ROTA, and lastly to speak or orate, ORAT. But these are all burned up and the phoenix, or he who bears the phoenix wand, comes from the ashes. The Mass of the Phoenix was originally intended to be a group ceremony where at the end the operator would prophecy to those present. By contrast, in the Golden Dawn’s Adeptus Minor and Adeptus Major initiations, the phoenix wand is carried by the Second Adept, wearing red, whose place is in Geburah, and this is a reflection of Chokmah and the Office of Imperator, the commander, as opposed to Praemonstrator, the instructor.

In the Class A book Liber B vel Magi, the Magus reflects on the dilemma of how he might transcend when he is all those things that he would negate. It answers, “Let Him beware of abstinence from action. For the curse of His grade is that He must speak Truth, that the Falsehood thereof may enslave the souls of men. Let him then utter that without Fear, that the Law may be fulfilled.” The word (of the magus) must be matched by the deed (of the magus) and the watery Baptism of Binah is balanced by the fiery Baptism of Chokmah, a Baptism of Wisdom. The fire of love is the means of this, “And the Magus is Love, and bindeth together That and This in his conjuration.” Curiously, in The Book of the Law (3:40), it’s “Hadit burning in thy heart shall make swift and secure thy pen., but it’s also fire that burns up the Book of Thoth, ie the Law. In Crowley’s VI° of OTO, Hadit is equated with Chaos, and Liber B vel Magi ends with, “And in the word CHAOS let the Book be sealed; yea, let the Book be sealed.”11

Conclusion

Despite the historical variations of the Phoenix myth and its sacramental import, many specific ritual and alchemical themes managed to persist over thousands of years. To speak broadly, therein is a mystery of the reduction of something to its vital essence and transmission of that to future generations in order to preserve its divine legacy and power. For aspirants, this preservation of the illuminating essence is fundamental to the Great Work. For alchemists of Egypt and Europe alike, this was more than a symbolic tale, it was one that involved a specific ritual sacrament, that of a Eucharist composed of bread and blood or their equivalents. This is preserved in our celebration of the eucharist, be it in the Gnostic Mass, Mass of the Phoenix, or Pyramidos, as our Cake of Light preparation is highly derivative of that of the alchemy of the phoenix.

The Egyptian appreciation of the Phoenix didn’t include details of these eucharistic rituals, but fortunately for us the Greeks did. Their skepticism suggests an honest telling which is perhaps omitted from Egyptian writings because it was an initiated secret, but the Greeks are notorious bean-spillers. The preservation of ritual elements surrounding this action suggests it may have been continued in another adjacent tradition, the Abrahamic tradition, just as Genesis 14 records that Abram was initiated into the tradition of bread and wine by Melchizedek, who, like the Egyptians, was of a tradition rival to that of the Hebrews. Manly P. Hall suggests in Melchizedek and the Mysteries of Fire that the phoenix is symbolical of the supernal order of Melchizedek that operates something like Crowley’s Secret Chiefs. Hall writes,

The highest of all occult orders which exists only in the inner world may be called the ‘Order of Melchizedek,’ although among certain nations it has other names. This Order is composed entirely of the graduates of the other Mystery Schools who have actually reached the point where they can give birth to their present selves out of their own natures, like the mysterious phoenix bird which, breaking open at death, permits a new bird to fly forth.

For him, as for Abram, this fiery initiation was king-maker. Jesus Christ is referred to as a priest in the order of Melchizedek in Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, and Melchizedek is sometimes considered as a prefiguration of him or outright Christophany. Jesus was not a patrilineal descendant of Aaron and therefore not entitled to the priesthood according to the Laws of Moses. Circumventing this by appealing to an apocryphal root of authority is a common move, one employed by Crowley even.

It’s odd that of all the Old Testament patriarchs in Exodus it is the most mysterious one from which Jesus derives his authority. Inasmuch as Abraham tithed to Melchizedek there is a recognition of him as Abraham’s better-than. Melchizedek is referred to as a priest-king of the “Most High God,” אֵל-עֶלְיוֹן/El-Elion, which in Hebrew fashion invites room for a lot of speculation and calls into question the umbella term “God” as a helpful translation. Christian theology has traditionally glossed over the Gnostic understanding of Jesus as a connection to the one true god, which allows him to effect salvation without needing to defer to the convoluted legal traps laid by the demiurge. Similarly, the phoenix sloughs off or sublimates the mortal trappings in order to be renewed and preserve the spirit of which it is a mere vehicle. In this sense the Phoenix is both the Father and the Sun, its essence is the Holy Spirit. This was gone over in detail in the aforelinked essay on Chaos.

He is the thing that migrates between the ages and preserves the fire of gnosis. For Crowley, the flaming Tarot (TARO) was the end of the previous Aeon, but it was also the destruction of karma (ROTA). In the case of Jesus Christ, two birds were killed with one cross. Concerning Melchizedek, he was made a Saint by Crowley in his Gnostic Mass. Many authors both classic and modern equated Melchizedek’s Canaanite god with Amoun, Alalu, Baal, Elohim, and other Hypsistos gods pronounced at the end of the Bronze Age, along with Chaos. This father is preserved by Crowley as Chaos or Had.

In discussing the Secret Medicine of OTO, Crowley cautions against its use as a simple remedy to preserve the life of another or one’s self, saying that such a practical use is only justifiable in the most dire of circumstances. He continues that it is because the karmic ramifications would be severe, possibly a life for a life. Death for Thelemites is a curve or a shift, an initiation neither to be feared or mourned, and if the host of the fire of initiation kept well the flame within him then his life was a gift to the next generation. By contrast, in Golden Bough J. G. Frazer said that kings who lived into old age would weaken the transpersonal majesty within their withering person. To pursue the transhumanist calling of immortality of the flesh and personality comes at the expense of the actual animating forces. The Phoenix self-immolating to create new life is an image of the resolution of karma for and through the fire of the will.

As for the person so too for the world, the fiery wands are upraised with the revolution of the aeons with the hope for fresh fever from the sky. Thelema is an apocalyptic religion with a dim view of current circumstances. Crowley saw the disasters of the 20th century as indicators of just how intense the Aeonic shift would be, and he expected escalation. The Book of the Law reflects the words of John in Matthew 3:11, "I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.” There’s much spoken of in Liber AL about fire, war and blood, and the prophet wanted this literally to occur, but he was always quick to remind people that the transformation must begin within if it can be veritable without. Crowley concludes Liber CCC, a peculiar tract worthy of a Minerval’s attention, with a lengthy discussion of how to build a campfire. I end with it in full:

We have for the whole Beginning of Our Work, praise be eternally unto His Holy Name, the Fire of our Father the Sun. The inspiration is ours, and ours is the Law of Thelema that shall set the world ablaze. And We have many small dry sticks, that kindle quickly and burn through quickly, leaving the larger Wood unlit. And the great logs, the masses of humanity, are always with us. But our edged need is of those middle fagots that on the one hand are readily kindled by the small Wood, and on the other endure until the great logs blaze.

Works Cited, (Alphabetically)

Baines, J., Silverman, D., Lesko, L. (1991). Religion in Ancient Egypt. Cornell University Press.

Bestiarium. (2007). War Ardea bennuides der Totenvogel Benu?. Retrieved on January 16, 2008 from website: http://bestiarium.kryptozoologie.net/artikel/war-ardea-bennuides-der-totenvogel-benu/

Christian. (2004). The Area Called St. Miltiades. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.catacombe.roma.it/en/milziade.html

Crowley, A. (1980). The Book of Lies. Red Wheel.

Crowley, A. (2000). The Book of Thoth. York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books.

Ginzberg, L. (1909). Legends of the Jews. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/loj103.htm

Godrej, P. and Mistree, F. (2002). A Zoroastrian Tapestry, Art, Religion and Culture. Mapin Publishing Private, Ltd. p.762.

Guenon, R. (2004). Crisis of the Modern World. Sophia Perennis.

Hall, M. P. (2003). The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Tarcher.

Horapollo. (1598). Hieroglyphica Horapollinis. Trans: David Hoeschel. Augustae Vindelicorum.

Herodotus. (2003). The Histories. England: Penguin Group

Khan, H. (2005). Volume II: The Mysticism of Music, Sound, and Word. Retrieved: March 22, 2008 from website: http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/II/II_8.htm

Maier, M. (1617). Atalanta fugiens. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/atalanta.html

Massey, G. (1998). The Natural Genesis. Black Classic Press

McLean, A. (1979). The Birds in Alchemy. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/alcbirds.html

Osiris F. (2003). On the Mass of the Phoenix. Retrieved on March 23, 2008 from website: http://www.hermetic.com/osiris/analysismotp.htm

Parada, C. (1997). The Phoenix. Retrieved: March 22, 2008 from website: http://homepage. mac.com/cparada/GML/PhoenixTheBird.html

Philae. (2008). The Benu Bird of Iunu (Heliopolis): A Prototype Phoenix. Retrieved on January 18, 2008 from website: www.philae.nu/akhet/Benu.html

Regardie, I. (1989). The Golden Dawn: A Complete Course in Ceremonial Magic. Llewellyn Worldwide.

Rosicrucian. (1785). Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.crcsite.org/SecretSymb1.htm 

Saggo, G. (2005). Phoenix on the top of the palm tree: Multiple interpretations of Job 29:18. Retrieved on March 23, 2008 from website: http://www.studiolum.com/en/silva5.htm

Skinner, R. (1875). Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures. Cincinatti: Robert Clark and co.

Tame, D. (1984). The Secret Power of Music: The Transformation of Self and Society Through Musical Energy. Destiny Books

UAE Interact. (2006). UAE Interact. Retrieved on January 15, 2008 from website: http://www.uaeinteract.com/maps/et_24.asp

Bibliography, (Alphabetically)

Avalon, A. (1974). The Serpent Power. Dover Publications.

Crowley, C. (1986). 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley. York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books.

Harper, D. (2004). Online Etymological Dictionary. Retrieved: February 10, 2008 from website: http://etymonline.com/

Phoenix (Mythology). (2008). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved: March 9, 2008 from website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_%28mythology%29

Spirin, G. (2002). The Tale of the Firebird. Philomel.

Van Den Broek, R. (1972). The Myth of the Phoenix According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions. E. J. Brill: Leiden, Netherlands.

Recommended for Further Reading

Crowley, A. (2000). The Book of Thoth. York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books.

Ginzberg, L. (1909). Legends of the Jews. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/loj103.htm 

McLean, A. (1979). The Birds in Alchemy. Retrieved on March 24, 2008 from website: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/alcbirds.html

Saggo, G. (2005). Phoenix on the top of the palm tree: Multiple interpretations of Job 29:18. Retrieved on March 23, 2008 from website: http://www.studiolum.com/en/silva5.htm

Tilton, Hereward. (2003). Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the Works of Count Michael Maier. Walter de Gruyter.

Van Den Broek, R. (1972). The Myth of the Phoenix According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions. E. J. Brill: Leiden, Netherlands.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

The question of Chaos is seldom explored by Thelemites, but this god plays a large role in Thelema, Thelemic mysticism and Crowley’s effort to develop a complete and consistent pantheon along with a Thelemic cosmogony and existentialism. In this essay I intend to explore Chaos’ role with reference to classical sources and the Libri of Aleister Crowley, and also discuss how Chaos might fit into an overall schema. My goal is to make Chaos more conceptually tangible and do some justice to the forgotten father. I also intend to address exactly why Chaos is ignored, which is due partly to the difficulty in reconciling the classical understanding of him with Crowley’s incorporation of him in the Gnostic Mass.

Chaos is the first figure venerated in Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass, his OTO’s “central public and private ceremony” that, like the Roman Catholic Mass, contains a Creed wherein participants go through several articles in a sort of confession of faith, a creed or credo, meaning “I believe.” Chaos comes first, taking the position of the “One God, the Father Almighty” of the Apostle’s Creed, and is similar in being the creator, lofty and vast. Chaos is usually mentioned in concert with Babalon, she to whom much more attention has been paid, and where she is night and woman he is bright and man. The challenge comes in reconciling this understanding of Chaos with his roots in Ancient Greece and Crowley’s vision of him alike, where he is understood as the blackness that preceded creation.

The subject is further complicated as Chaos’ appearance in Crowleyana is mostly confined to the Gnostic Mass and material tyled to the highest grades of OTO, the former being an abstruction of the latter. OTO material connected to the Supreme Secret is dense and Crowley expected aspirants to discern its nature and application through their own ingenium. Further complicating things is OTO’s seeming rejection of the cornerstone of their mysticism, the secret itself, out of preference for affirming gender newspeak.

This essay will review some classical sources to determine possible roots of the Greek Chaos for the sake of comparative religion. Crowley uses obscure etymology as much as Qabalah to give students a hint about deeper meaning, but if any exists here it is something he would’ve intuited rather than read. Some attention will be paid to mystery school material as Chaos and his proxies had more of a role in Orphic traditions than in public discourse, but that material is obscure. The primary resource for this essay is Crowley himself as it’s his understanding that is most relevant without some vain deference to antique obscurities.

Χαος

Χαος has traditionally been translated to “gap” or “chasm” as a Greek word of Proto-Indo European origin, traced back to ǵʰeh₂-, which means gape. According to Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, a volume Crowley claimed he always had at his side, it refers to “an empty space” or “abyss,” and also “a confused mass.” This latter meaning comes from Ovid’s 5th century BC Metamorphoses, where Chaos is described as “a rude and undeveloped mass/ that nothing made except a ponderous weight/ and all discordant elements confused/ were there congested in a shapeless heap. However the first mention of Chaos is Hesiod’s 7th century BC Theogony, which reads (lines 116-125):

The First Gods
In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss,
But then Gaia, the Earth, came into being,
Her broad bosom the ever-firm foundation of all,
And Tartaros, dim in the underground depths,
And Eros, loveliest of all the Immortals, who
Makes their bodies (and men’s bodies) go limp,
Mastering their minds and subduing their wills.
From the Abyss were born Erebos and dark Night.
And Night, pregnant after sweet intercourse
With Erebos, gave birth to Aether and Day.

Chaos is here the parent of all, his name being gender neuter in the Greek, similar to the Elohim of Genesis which was incidentally written around the same time. He’s referred to as an “immortal” or “timeless” God, along with Nyx, Tartarus and Eros. Some interpret Hesiod as saying these four progenitors occurred simultaneously and the listed order is irrelevant. Later, the Orphics would take Chaos in a new direction, proposing that everything, including and most importantly Eros, were a product of his early act of creation. Perhaps Chaos was the originator and the other three were formed about him - Nature, Hell and Eros, where Eros is Reason, Love and Light.

Hesiod did not write Theogony in a vacuum. He was breaking the silence of what’s called the Greek Dark Ages, that being the relative absence of literature that existed between the fall of Mycenae with the Bronze Age Collapse (circa 1200bc) and the coming of historians and epics. Hesiod was a citizen of Cyme, in Asia Minor near modern day Izmir, which was something of a cross-roads between Phrygia and Greece and may be the origin of Greek letters. Scholars posit that in this eastern frontier of a resurging Greece the letter Χ, Chi, was more asperative than in the west, sounding more like the “k” in “making” than a hard “k” like in “Kraftwerk.” The previous 500 years had given this region of the Mediterranean a more Anatolian hue, but not much more, but more importantly the Indo-European religion of the Myceneans had mingled to some degree with it’s Anatolian neighbors.

Χαος’ linguistic roots may be lost to history. Classicists seem conflicted or dismissive about any reference this may make to adjacent traditions. Χαος may be an initiated name, revealed by Hesiod, of some nearby cult. The Mycenean religion is largely unknown as it was practiced in secrecy. Many of their gods are only known by epithets, their true name not being divulged publicly. Perhaps Χαος is one of these, a mystery-name for the Mycenean Hades or Zeus. Perhaps Χαος is an appropriation of some Phrygian, Semetic or Egyptian god, but a linguistic connection is not obvious. Elohim is an attractive consideration as a local mythological corollary, but the etymology is lacking. It may be that either, or both, were an epithet for a proto tradition, perhaps coming from Babylon or Egypt. Χαος could also be a corruption of Dyeus, discussed later, laundered through Anatolia. Or Χαος could be a simple term for some lofty take on the primordial state, perhaps just a slap of the nominative -ος suffix onto the Mycenean word Ka, which means “one” or “first.” Whatever the root, it’s unlikely that Hesiod invented it. Much of Theogony reads like Indo-European literature, specifically the Völuspá where the völva are the muses, Odin is Hesiod, and it opens with reference to Ginnunga, the gaping yawn, and follows with an account of different orders of creation. The Greeks and the Norse were Indo European and the persistence of oral traditions in the PIE diaspora makes it possible that Hesiod was telling an ancient tale of his IE forbearers. This opens an avenue of speculation where Chaos does not refer to a void but rather to a space where magick and gods dwell. Aristotle shared this understanding of Chaos as a place, saying Chaos simply referred to a space where things exist.

Hesiod was also writing during the golden age of pre-Socratic philosophy, alongside Homer. Χαος is not mentioned in Homer, nor in other contemporaries of Hesiod. However Χαος is often discussed alongside Apeiron, without-bounds, an infinite one whose nature was discussed by numerous parties. Thales proposed that the nature of the Apeiron was that of water. Heraclitus proposed fire as the nature of the eternal one. The Pythagoreans believed there was an Apeiron but its limitlessness was delimited by the intersection of other forces, such as the elements. In this sense Χαος as “gap” may mean that originally forces were apart from one another, and then they intersected and produced the Cosmos in an incidental harmony. Xenophanes understood the connection with Chaos and Apeiron, writing, “The upper limit of earth borders on air. The lower limit reaches down to the unlimited [Apeiron].” Apeiron was also responsible for creation through division, similar to Ymir in Völuspá and also the Akaphelon in the Bornless One invocation, who is identified with Bes and Apophis.

In a work that was only translated two years after Crowley’s first vision of Chaos, Nietzsche’s “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” Nietzsche does a sort of diagnosis of the pre-Socratics by considering their personalities in light of their understanding of this question. Nietzsche’s position seemed to be that each of these several philosophers reflected their own personhood, beliefs and predilections into the undefined idea of Chaos.

Later classical authors, including those connected to the Orphic/Eleusinian mysteries, took liberties with Chaos. Aristophanes’ 4th century BC play The Birds, reads:

At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebus, and deep Tartarus. Earth, the air and heaven had no existence. Firstly, black-winged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in deep Tartarus with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.

The break of the primordial darkness formed two different darknesses, the darkness of the sky above and the darkness of the deep below. These wed and Eros was born, light, and winged like his grandfather Chaos. They then somehow coupled within Tartarus and our illuminated race came into being. Chaos coupling with Eros is often used as an explanation that Chaos is female. The Eleusinian reading of Chaos vis a vis Aleister Crowley will be gone into later.

Hesiod mostly concerns himself with another narrative trajectory though. Chaos gets one line, but the majority of Theogony involves the origin of the other Gods, and then the creation of the Titans, the war between the Titans and the Gods, and several tales of the son usurping the father.

Crowley’s Orphic Gnosticism

The first mention of Chaos in Crowleyana is in Crowley’s vision of the 4th Aethyr, PAZ, had on the morning of December 16th, 1909, in Biskra, Algeria.

So I am torn asunder, nerve from nerve and vein from vein, and more intimately — cell from cell, molecule from molecule, and atom from atom, and at the same time all crushed together. (Write down that the tearing asunder is a crushing together.) All the double phenomena are only two ways of looking at a single phenomenon; and the single phenomenon is Peace. There is no sense in my words or in my thoughts. “Faces half- formed arose.” This is the meaning of that passage; they are attempts to interpret Chaos, but Chaos is Peace. Cosmos is the War of the Rose and the Cross. That was “a half-formed face” that I said then. All images are useless.

Blackness, blackness intolerable, before the beginning of the light. This is the first verse of Genesis. Holy art thou, Chaos, Chaos, Eternity, all contradictions in terms!

The 4th Aethyr is the 4th to last for the aethyrnaut Crowley, and he admits that the closer he gets to the end of the Aethyrs the more difficult it is to express the visions in intelligible ways. Supernal things, he describes, are mysteries, and the real mysteries are incommunicable, or as Chaos is described, “ineffable.” In this Aethyr we have some classical references such as Chaos being blackness, but also Chaos as being referenced in the first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Crowley’s nod to Genesis recalls an observation by classicists regarding Chaos being the creator in addition to him being likened unto Water, recalling Genesis 1:2, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Crowley’s vision of an ineffable blackness that is breaking apart (which is collapsing together), and this eternal state of peace is contrasted from the “War of the Rose and the Cross,” which is Cosmos. And these precipitate the formation of “the beginning of the light.” Genesis 1:3, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” In the New Testament, Cosmos is translated as “the world” but this is often interpreted as “the people.” In John 3:16 “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” But in John’s First Epistle 2:15 believers are warned to “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” In both verses Cosmos is used. For Crowley, Cosmos seems to be the hermetically ordered phenomenal world that seeks balance, but in this balance comes a stagnation and Chaos is the force that renews creation through destruction. This is depicted in the 4th Aethyr in the interaction between Chaos and Madimi:

He hath a thousand arms, and in each hand is a weapon of terrible strength. His face is more terrible than the storm, and from his eyes flash lightnings of intolerable brilliance. From his mouth run seas of blood. Upon his head is a crown of every deadly thing. Upon his forehead is the upright tau, and on either side of it are the signs of blasphemy. And about him clingeth a young girl, like unto the king's daughter that appeareth in the ninth Aethyr. But she is become rosy by reason of his force, and her purity hath tinged his black with blue.

They are clasped in a furious embrace, so that she is torn asunder by the terror of the god; yet so tightly clingeth she about him, that he is strangled. She hath forced back his head, and his throat is livid with the pressure of her fingers. Their joint cry is an intolerable anguish, yet it is the cry of their rapture, so that every pain, and every curse, and every bereavement, and every death of everything in the whole universe, is but one little gust of wind in that tempest-scream of ecstasy.

Aristophanes’ Eleusinian telling, that positions Chaos as Eros’ parent, may have been known to Crowley. In The Book of Lies, where he wrestles with many of the mysteries brought to him by the Aethyrs, Chaos appears again in Chapter 25, the Star Ruby, as the god-name projected into the east in this “new and more elaborate version of the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.” Juxtaposed in the west is Eros, while Babalon is in the north and juxtaposed to Psyche in the south. Here, Chaos is Father, Eros is Son, Babalon is Mother and Psyche is Daughter. Pan is then evoked in the center as the final fifth name.

He comments on Chaos and Babalon in the same volume in “The Glow Worm” Chapter 11 (the fourfold name χάος plus the sevenfold name Βαβαλών):

Below [Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit] is a seeming duality of Chaos and Babalon; these are called Father and Mother, but it is not so. They are called Brother and Sister, but it is not so. They are called Husband and Wife, but it is not so.

The reflection of All is Pan: the Night of Pan is the Annihilation of the All.

Cast down through The Abyss is the Light, the Rosy Cross, the rapture of Union that destroys, that is The Way. The Rosy Cross is the Ambassador of Pan.

Crowley alludes that the Glow Worm may have a subtler meaning, and it does. In the Greek, lampouris, λᾰμπῠρῐ́ς, means “lamp-bearer,” and it is a winged beetle rather than a worm. Eros was the light-bringer for Psyche, and Eros is the Rose and the Cross, the Angel. Eros is the ambassador for Pan, and Pan’s name is evoked in the Star Ruby. Pan, the Devil in the Tarot, is referred to as the “Lord of the Gates of Matter, Child of the Forces of Time” in Liber 78. This recalls PAZ, where Crowley records, “Oh, blue! blue! blue! whose reflection in the Abyss is called the Great One of the Night of Time; between ye vibrateth the Lord of the Forces of Matter.”

For the Eleusinian mysteries, the candidate was brought into the darkness in order to find the light. Chaos was not the primordial darkness of a dualistic cosmogony, he was the originator of these three: light, the light-bearer, and the illuminated mankind. Crowley notes on PAZ that “Chaos is the Great Father, in one particular aspect.”

Aristophanes’ Chaos was the all-father in two senses. His creative act began with the creation of the universe, but he followed up on this creation by coupling with Eros to create mankind from within Tartarus. This resembles a gnostic cosmogony where the original creator was lost for a space but then returned through Christ who, a psychopomp like Orpheus or Eros, would lead the souls from Tartarus into the day, a torch-bearer to lead the blind one from Plato’s infernal cave.

Crowley’s Gnostic Catholicism

Liber XV, The Gnostic Mass, is a celebration of the central secret of the OTO through dramatic ritual. The ritual is begun in the fashion of John with the introduction of the Logos, The Book of the Law, and is immediately followed by the recitation of The Creed. Credo means “I believe” and over the course of the first six articles those in attendance, led by the Deacon, state that they believe in this and that. The subject of faith in Thelema has been discussed already, and whether this Creed is a list of beliefs that Thelema is premised on or not is not gone into by Crowley. Looking at the Gnostic Mass as a magical ritual, Crowley notes that a ritual is preceded by an oath, which is a sort of statement of conditions and objectives, almost like how a scientific experiment would premise its structure on relevant and defined axioms.

The most striking thing about this Creed is that it opens like the Nicene creed and contains many similar articles. Our Creed is presented below in order while an English version of the Nicene creed is presented below in italics but out of order.

I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole vicegerent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes.
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.

And I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

And I believe in the communion of Saints.

And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass.

And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

And I confess my life one, individual, and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

AUMGN. AUMGN. AUMGN.
Amen

The Nicene Creed is structured primarily to remind the laity of the important narrative elements of the Gospels. The Creed of the Thelemites, to borrow W. T. Smith’s title for it, describes a sort of emanation or hierarchy that goes from god to man. There are some references to Mary in The Book of the Law that pair her with Babalon after a fashion, and the Pan/Eros/Baphomet connection to Christ was discussed above. But for the present we will focus on the first articles of both creeds.

God the Father is also referred to by Christians as “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The “heavenly” nature of the father is less premised in the bible than one might think. Beyond creating the sky and being a party to a number of weather emergencies, there’s practically no reference to the “sky daddy” such as atheists like to evoke as a strawman to accuse Christians of superstition. In fact the “sky father” of the Lord’s Prayer is only present in Matthew, he who “art in heaven.” But the Sky Father is well premised throughout the Yemnayan Diaspora and is referred to as Dyeus Pater, literally Sky Father.

While his existence is not directly attested by archaeological or written materials, Dyeus Pater is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed deity of the Indo-European pantheon, as identical formulas referring to him can be found among the subsequent Indo-European languages and myths of the Vedic Indo-Aryans, Latins, Greeks, Phrygians and so on. In the Greek Dyeus Pater becomes Zeus Pater, in the Latin this is Jove Pater, Jupiter. From Dyeus we get Deus, Dieu, Day, Theos, and so on. I would venture that Chaos is a further corruption of Dyeus except I lack evidence and the linguistic mutation would be highly unusual, but that did not stop Sabazius from making that connection in his book Mystery of Mysteries. I believe Crowley also saw this connection and assumed an etymology.

Dyeus Pater is understood more to be the sky itself in its vastness rather than the sun, which was actually seen to be feminine in nature by the Indo-Europeans, a characterization preserved in the Gayatri Mantra. Dyeus Pater is the daylight sky, and his consort is Dʰéǵʰōm, Degom, the earth-mother, described as the “black earth,” and “mother of all” and also the final resting place. Compare this to the Second Article of the Creed. Curiously, classical PIE languages as well as some of their modern descendants referred to “humans” as “Earthlings,” borrowing from Degom. Degomomn is “earthling.” By contrast her consort, Dyeus, had Deywos, literally “skyling,” which is a root word for celestial beings in the PIE-diaspora, including Devas and possibly the Greek Daemon, which Crowley considered a corollary to the Angel. This frames the paternal force as a celestial one and the maternal force as a terrestrial one, and the wedding of the earthling aspirant with the skyling angel is no less the coupling of Chaos and Babalon. This reading of the bright Sky-father as the father of angels parallels with the dark-winged Chaos as the father of the winged Eros, the light-bearing loverboy immortal who wedded the mortal and irresistible princess, Psyche, the soul, in Apuleius’ 2nd century novel The Golden Ass. Crowley regarded this book highly enough to include it in his A∴A∴ reading list, marking that its "valuable for those who have wit to understand it."

Setting aside classical sources and PAZ for the moment, the First Article of the Creed of the Thelemites illustrates clearly that Crowley understood χάος to be consonant with Zeus or Deus and implying sky, light, air and sun.

The Lord

A more careful reading of the First Article can shine some light on the nature of Chaos. Rather than being one long run-on sentence, the three semi-colons that break up the First Article suggest a four-fold nature to this deity to match his four-lettered name. Bullet-points are mine, but the semi-colons are original and show the partitioning:

·         I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD;

·         and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return;

·         and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth;

·         and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes.

The first two sections show an interplay that is evoked quite a bit in the Gnostic Mass, that of “the Lord” as opposed to “the Sun.” A hint towards this is in the Nicene Creed, “visible and invisible,” which Crowley omitted from his First Article but brought up later in the first two Collects, “The Sun” and “The Lord.” The Collects follow, mirror, and explicate The Creed.

I believe that the “secret and ineffable LORD” is the same that’s evoked early on in the Gnostic Mass, almost immediately following the recitation of The Creed. The Priestess drops the veil from the Priest’s tomb in the west and draws three crosses over him while saying “By the power of ✠ Iron, I say unto thee, Arise. In the name of our Lord the ✠ Sun, and of our Lord ✠ ..., that thou mayst administer the virtues to the Brethren.” The blank left by Crowley after the third cross is an obvious reference to something omitted. In a private document, Crowley wrote “I.X.” in this blank. Some have argued that it’s a reference to the IX° of OTO, wherein is the central secret. Some argue that it is the initials for Ιησους Χριστος, Jesus Christ, arguing that the dots following the two letters precludes it from being roman numerals. I believe it may refer to the initiator in the Eleusinian mysteries, the torch-bearer Ἴακχος, Iacchus, referred to plentifully in Liber VII Chapter 4. But in truth, the reference is to the same thing, the paternal trinity of Father (Iacchus), Son (Jesus Christ) and Holy Ghost (IX°). This trinity that describes the central secret of OTO is evoked later in the Gnostic Mass, “O Pater estin O Huios dia To Pneuma Hagion,” the father is the son via the Holy Ghost. In Orphic terms this is the transmission of the light from Chaos, the “the darkness that holds light in his hand,” to Eros, the light.

This trinity is further explored by Crowley in the rituals of the OTO, in the V° the formula of INRI, the “analysis of the keyword.” In the Golden Dawn this formula was an Athanasius Kirchner-esque revelation of the nature of the Holy One by using Qabalah to draw a line from INRI to IAO. INRI is translated as Virgo/Isis, Scorpio/Apophis, and then Sol/Osiris. For Crowley in OTO it is Virgo/Iacchus, Scorpio/Asi (who is Isis), and Sol/Orus where Ὧρος is Horus, or Father-Mother-Son. Horus is the son of Iacchus in consideration of Crowley’s lecture on the III°: "Aries, whose mysteries are those of Spring and called the Greater Mysteries, wherein the Slain God is celebrated by his name Iao, Jupiter, Jehovah, Iacchus, Zeus, Shu, Jesus, Osiris, etc.” Others say that Horus is the son of Set, the ass-headed god who was compared by the Greeks to Chaos.

The masculine trinity of the masculine Gnostic Mass of the masculine mystery of the OTO is referred to unerringly in Crowley’s Liber Agape. It is reserved for IX° Hermits in OTO. It also repeatedly refers to “Our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Baphomet writes:

Behold the Trinity Most Holy One and Indivisible, IAO. One is the Most Holy Trinity; and Three are its Persons or Masks. One is its Spirit, One its Individuality, its Permutation One, Ararita! It is the Seed that persisteth in all mutation, being Itself, immune and omniprehensive, IAO SAB AO.

Now the Father is One, erect, single, eternal.

And the Son is One, in the likeness of the Father, yet in this nature double, being God-Man. And herein is a Mystery; for being the Word he is the Spirit, going forth from the Father and creating the worlds.

And the Spirit is One, not begotten but proceeding, the seed of which Father and the Son are in very truth but vehicles and guardians. And the nature of the Spirit is Liberty, and as the wind, He goeth as it listeth Him to impregnate the worlds.

And as the Son is double, so is the Spirit double; for He is both male and female. […] He is the Mother. He is the Womb. He is the Sperm that fertilizes the Ovum; nay, but He is that fertilized and self-living thing which is neither sperm nor ovum, but their marriage, the Perfect Tincture, the Medicine of Metals, the Philosophical Stone, the Universal Medicine, the Elixer of Life. […]

From this duplicity of speech hath sprung infinite confusion in the vulgar mind. For they understand not that man is the guardian of the Life of God; woman but a temporary expedient; a shrine indeed for the God, but not the God. Thus do they blaspheme who worship the false Trinity of Father-Mother-Son: blind mouths that gape poison, let them perish in the Day of Be-with-Us.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit is the Unity in the Trinity; for the Father and the Son are indeed guardians of the Quintessence, heirs to the Quintessence, of the substance of the Quintessence, but they are not the Quintessence itself. And this is of the Godhead; but in Earth it is the Son that combineth Father and Spirit as it were Man and Woman, God and man.

Without going into too much numerology, there are some odd plays here. There is the one, the father. There’s also the two and three, the double-natured son who is both father and son. There’s the four and five, the spirit which is dual in nature. This is one way Crowley gets quintessence, implying five, the pentagram, from the trinity. Here is a good place to recall Pan, “the all,” who is the object of invocation within the father-mother-daughter-son pentagrams of the Star Ruby. Pan’s value is 131, 1-3-1, the father and the son, self-same 1’s, guarding the trinity of the Holy Spirit, and again the sum of these three numbers is five, the pentagram. Pan recalls Baphomet, the Third Article in our Creed. Cited above from The Book of Lies, Pan is the reflection of All, where All is Cosmos, a force of balance that exists in counter-balance to Chaos.

The spirit being spoken of by Crowley in both the OTO documents and in the Gnostic Mass is the property of men and their gods. Macrobius’ Saturnalia states that the essence of every god is solar, goddess lunar. Crowley reiterates this in the Fifth Collect, “The Saints,” which opens “Lord of Life and Joy, that art the might of man, that art the essence of every true god that is upon the surface of the Earth, continuing knowledge from generation unto generation, […] we worthily commemorate them worthy that did of old adore thee and manifest thy glory unto men.” There is occasional fuss that there are no women listed among the saints, but the reason why should now be obvious - the Gnostic Mass tells the story of how men accomplish the Great Work and the continuity of gnosis in both spirit and soul.

The interplay of the esoteric “Lord” with the exoteric “Sun” in the Gnostic Mass is suggested in the first article of the Creed to be two aspects of one thing. While it’s tempting to say that the fourfold First Article is four aspects of Chaos, the first part refers to this “Lord” as “secret and ineffable,” essentially both unknowable and unnamable. Perhaps this can map Qabalistically onto Kether, the Crown, such as a Lord would wear, a unified one that can’t be spoken of without being distinguished from. However, Crowley explained in The Book of Lies that “Chaos and Babalon are Chokmah and Binah [the second and third sephirah], but they are really one; the essential unity of the supernal Triad is here insisted upon.” The second Collect of the Gnostic Mass gives us insight:

Lord secret and most holy, source of light, source of life, source of love, source of liberty, be thou ever constant and mighty within us, force of energy, fire of motion; with diligence let us ever labour with thee, that we may remain in thine abundant joy.

The identity here is confirmed in being “Lord secret” and the four L’s of Light, Life, Love and Liberty form the swastika that Crowley mentions in 777 as appropriate to Kether, but also suggests that it is the posture of Atu I, The Magus, whose office is in Chokmah. From 777:

The Crown is the meaning of Kether. It refers to the Supreme Divinity which the magician assumes in his working. The Swastika symbolize whirling energy, the initiation of all magical force—the Rashith ha-Gilgalim. There is a great deal of varied symbolism in this instrument, notably sexual; it demands a great deal of study to appreciate fully the virtue of this weapon. The Lamp is not a weapon; it is a light shining from above which illuminates the whole work.

The first Collect is the complimentary “Sun,” which notably lacks a couple L’s:

Lord visible and sensible of whom this earth is but a frozen spark turning about thee with annual and diurnal motion, source of light, source of life, let thy perpetual radiance hearten us to continual labour and enjoyment; so that as we are constant partakers of thy bounty we may in our particular orbit give out light and life, sustenance and joy to them that revolve about us without diminution of substance or effulgence for ever.

Here there is no mention of “Love,” that being the property of The Lord, nor is there mention of “Liberty,” that being “the nature of the spirit.” The “Lord secret” is perhaps the “center and secret of the sun” referred to in the Anthem:

Thee I invoke, abiding one,
Thee, centre and secret of the Sun,
And that most holy mystery
Of which the vehicle am I.
Appear, most awful and most mild,
As it is lawful, in thy child!
For of the Father and the Son
The Holy Spirit is the norm;
Male-female, quintessential, one,
Man-being veiled in Woman-form.

Man is motion, woman is form. Man is spirit, woman is soul. This explains Crowley’s remark that “Woman has no soul.” She is soul in the understanding of soul as a layer upon spirit, the medium of manifestation and refraction of the one light.

Some alchemists such as the medieval Raymond Lully and Renaissance Michael Maier discussed the reciprocity of the vivifying power of the sun with the heart of man and described the secret center of the sun as being the heart of man and the center of the heart of man as carrying the sun’s fire. This recalls 220.2.6, “I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.” This is Hadit speaking, and in OTO’s V° Chaos is equated with Hadit and Apophis. There’s too much to go into for the former equivalent and the aspirant is encouraged to study constantly in The Book of the Law, but the ineffable nature of Chaos is understood through this equivalence. 220.2.4 “Yet she [Nu, my wife] shall be known & I never,” is explained in Crowley’s metaphysics as the perceiver and doer, Hadit, is the subject, while Nuit is the object. A subject cannot know or operate on itself, and he is “everywhere the centre,” 220.2.3.

Regarding the Apophis connection, Crowley notes in Liber Agape:

One is the Essence of God; and One is the Essence of Man.

Yet since God is only One because He is Three in One; so man is only One when he is Two-in-One.

As God’s Essence abideth in Himself, so also with the Essence of man.

Yet man not being himself wholly, but part of himself, this essence is not wholly in him.

It is found in perfection only without himself, and he can only attain it by virtue of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

[…]

The sacrament is administered under two kinds, Bread and Wine.

In his notes on Liber Samekh’s “Bornless One” invocation, where the Bornless One is invoked as being “Myself Made Perfect,” and also as Besz and Apophis, Crowley describes the nature and purpose of the Bread and Wine.

He hails Him as BESZ, the Matter that destroys and devours Godhead, for the purpose of the Incarnation of any God.

He hails Him as APOPHRASZ, the Motion that destroys and devours Godhead, for the purpose of the Incarnation of any God. The combined action of these two DEVILS is to allow the God upon whom they prey to enter into enjoyment of existence through the Sacrament of dividual "Life" (Bread - the flesh of BESZ) and "Love" (Wine - the blood or venom of APOPHRASZ).

The equating of the Angel to the Serpent is the dominant motif of Liber LXV. Here we see the destructive forces of Chaos vs Cosmos as the father which creates through disruption. His Eucharist breaks up stultified matter so that it might wed itself to the light. They are like catalysts that assist the aspirant to reach his activation point so that the chemical reaction takes place.

The Sun

The second part of the First Article reads “and in one star in the company of stars of whose fire we are created and to which we shall return” and is a clear reference to our star, the Sun. Heliocentrism and phallicism are well discussed elsewhere in Crowley’s writings and by other commenters, but his emphasis of that is more than a Neil Degrasse Tyson snub of ancient men believing the earth was the axis of the universe. Crowley here states that we are created of the sun’s fire and shall return to it. The idea of returning to the sun is an ancient one. We see reference to this in the Story of Sinuhe, the earliest mention of the Egyptian monad-god Aten, where the devotee reunites with the sun-disk Aten upon his death. Akhenaten believed the same, and in his Hymn addresses that all life is in and of him. I am unaware of earlier mentions of the soul ascending into the sun on death, but in step with this ancient world precursor to monotheism we have Abrahamic tales of something similar happening, both in Jesus’ Ascension and that of Mohammad, but perhaps also with Enoch or Isaac.

Dissolution is normally discussed in terms of breaking apart in water, but the etymology se luo means to break away. In The Book of the Law Cap 2 v 21 we read “Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live. Now let it be understood: If the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in pure ecstasy for ever.” and then in v 44, “Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.” While Nuit is “Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof” (AL 1:22) she “bends in ecstasy to kiss/ The secret ardours of Hadit,” (AL 1:14) who describes himself as the snake or serpent and says “I am uplifted in thine heart; and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon thy body.” With this in mind, the “dissolution” spoken of in The Book of the Law may refer to a reunification with the Lordly solar essence, a replenishment in the “force of energy; fire of motion” as the Phoenix who bathes mid-day in the wellspring in Philae.

Regarding this “return” to the sun’s fire of which we are created, consider the Third Article, that of Babalon, that refers to the “one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest.” The fiery paternal force returns to the sun while the earthly maternal force returns to the earth. Remember the reference to “thou, the true fire within the reed, brooding and breeding, source and seed.” A reed having fire in it recalls an important image of Crowley’s, mentioned in Chapter 15 of The Book of Lies, “I am not I; I am but an hollow tube to bring down Fire from Heaven.” Again, the father and the son are merely vehicles for the creative fire, the light, Gnosis.

Of the First Article’s fourfold nature we have The Lord, the mysterious initiator, and then The Sun, the source of light and life, and then a third aspect that seems to contradict that. It reads, “and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth.” That Chaos is the Viceregent of the Sun seems to imply that he can’t be the sun.

One reading may be that Crowley here made the connection of Chaos/Zeus/Dyeus here and considered the sky to be the viceregent of the sun. The sky itself had its own viceregents though. Dyeus’ consort, Degom, Earth, became the root-word for humans - Dgemon and Dgeyos literally meant “earthling.” Just the same, Dyeus is the root for Deywos, “skyling,” and is the root word for celestial beings in many traditions. But this part of the First Article refers to Chaos as such - can he be both Father (Chaos) and Son (Eros) in one? Crowley wrote in Liber Agape that “the Son is One, in the likeness of the Father, yet in this nature double, being God-Man. And herein is a Mystery; for being the Word he is the Spirit, going forth from the Father and creating the worlds.”

This final statement regarding the spirit explains the fourth and final part of the First Article, “and in one air the nourisher of all that breathe.” Breath is spiritus in Latin, as in the Holy Spirit, Pneuma Hagion in Greek referenced above as being the way by which the father and the son are one and for which they are but mere vehicles.

Crowley’s First Article of the Creed of the Thelemites subsumes the entire trinity confessed in the Nicene Creed - Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is singular in nature but a four-fold trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, and the fourth point is their ineffable unity, the Centrum in Trigono Centri, the black-robed officer in Crowley’s Rite of Jupiter who bears a Swastika and who emerges white and gold as Iacchus, the Holy Spirit, bearing a cup. This cup is referenced in Liber Tzaddi, “Only your mouths shall drink of a delicious wine - the wine of Iacchus; they shall reach ever to the heavenly kiss of the Beautiful God.”

Chaos is referenced as a progenitor and never as a Titan by the Greeks, but Crowley may have seen otherwise in the vision of PAZ. We read, “O thou Titan that hast climbed into the bed of Juno!” Juno’s consort was Jupiter, a corruption of Dyeus Pater. The titans were the offspring of Uranus and Gaea, Heaven and Earth. While Dyeus is the root word for Daemon, which Crowley considered equivalent to the tutelary spirit the Romans called the Genius, the Genius was only for men. Women instead had a Juno.

PAZ refers to Juno as the “Queen of Heaven is in travail of child, and his name shall be called Vir, and Vis, and Virus, and Virtus, and Viridis, in one name that is all these, and above all these. VVVVV is a somewhat mysterious character in Thelema, but he is spoken of in the Class A Holy Book Liber Porta Lucis, the Gate of Light:

I behold a small dark orb, wheeling in an abyss of infinite space. It is minute among a myriad vast ones, dark amid a myriad bright ones.

I who comprehend in myself all the vast and the minute, all the bright and the dark, have mitigated the brilliance of mine unutterable splendour, sending forth V.V.V.V.V. as a ray of my light, as a messenger unto that small dark orb.

Then V.V.V.V.V. taketh up the word, and sayeth:

Men and women of the Earth, to you am I come from the Ages beyond the Ages, from the Space beyond your vision; and I bring to you these words.

This injection of light into darkness recalls the Eleusinian myth of Chaos creating his counterpart Eros to illume the world. Earth is described as a “small dark orb,” and Aristophanes said that Chaos’ first daughter, Nyx, laid an egg in the darkness, Erebos, who is Chaos’ first son. Eros hatched from this egg after a while. Just the same the Yezidi’s Eros, Melek Taus (literally King of Heaven or Dyeus Pater), the Peacock Angel, birthed the universe from the Cosmic Egg.

De Natura Chaos

I began writing this with the hopes of finding some conceptual image to offer up to give Thelemites a more tangible sense of Chaos. I even vaingloriously thought that I would find a good etymological root to the name, proof positive that he’s either a corruption of Dyeus Pater or something other than a gap. I should have taken Crowley’s description of him as “supreme and ineffable” as a cautionary note.

Scrying the 4th Aethyr, Crowley marked, “Holy art thou, Chaos, Chaos, Eternity, all contradictions in terms!” It seems simple that the creator would have all things wrapped up within himself but would evade reduction to any one thing. This is a mystery spoken of in traditions Crowley saw as adjacent to Thelema. Crowley enjoyed the Al-Ikhlas Sutra, considering it a suitable mantra in Liber ABA, which goes, “Say: He, God, is One. He is the ultimate source. He does not beget and is not begotten, and nothing is like unto him.” Al-lah, which Crowley defined as “the nothing,” is a sort of “positive nothing,” a thing in itself that eludes definition but inspires all meaning and form. He is therefore known by his 99 epithets just as the ancient gods were referred to by honorifics and descriptors rather than their true name.

Chaos’ nature as the all father is elaborated by Crowley’s appreciation of the traditional trinity of Father-Son-Spirit. The father is one, alone, and ineffable, but we understand his nature through the works of his Son, who is inspired, a leader, and possesses magical gifts. The son redeems the world, which is woman, society, and soul. He also extends the continuity of the father into future generations through procreation and sacrifice. The Father is venerated as the source for the tradition and its vitality. This is similar to how Odin was worshipped by ancient northern people where kings would trace their paternal genealogy back 9 generations, but the 9th in the line of fathers would be Odin.

More on the nature of Chaos can be grasped by Crowley equating him to Hadit. Chaos then becomes a living figure from The Book of the Law. Chaos is understood as Hadit in OTO mysteries, and this works well with Crowley saying that “Babalon” is the “secret name” for Nuit mentioned in 220.1.22. Hadit is “the Magician” and “the Exorcist” and “the secret Serpent.” He is “alone” and unworshippable because he is “the worshipper.” The Scarlet Woman, understood by J. D. Gunther to refer to the Master of the Temple, will achieve thus according to 220.3.45: “Then will I lift her to pinnacles of power: then will I breed from her a child mightier than all the kings of the earth. I will fill her with joy: with my force shall she see & strike at the worship of Nu: she shall achieve Hadit.” Therefore the achievement of Hadit is accomplished by the achievement of Nuit in some sense, Hadit being himself the ultimate subject to Nuit’s object.

So is Chaos achieved through action and doing. One becomes Chaos by being a perfect medium for the will, a hollow tube that brings down fire from heaven. But as Crowley noted in OTO documents, this is more the work of the son. In John 14:6 before parting Jesus told the apostles to go forth, but reminded them “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Final Thoughts

Unlike aniconic Abrahamic traditions, Crowleyana of whatever class is replete with mentions of what other traditions usually call “gods.” Crowley sometimes refers to them as gods, but really it’s a term of convenience and veneration. Crowley notes in one of my favorite chapters of Magick Without Tears that undefinable terms really don’t assist in understanding things and are more likely to tempt you towards some vulgar and dated speculation. 220.1.21 reads, “With the God & the Adorer I am nothing: they do not see me. They are as upon the earth; I am Heaven, and there is no other God than me, and my lord Hadit.” Nuit and Hadit are gods perhaps in the sense that they are immutables from Aeon to Aeon, like Hesiod’s immortals such as Chaos.

220.3.22 reads, “let all be worshipped, for they shall cluster to exalt me.” This is in contrast to Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 10:21, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of [daemons]: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of [daemons].” But Chaos as Hadit recalls (220.2.8) “Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.” Hadit also marks in 220.2.23, “I am alone: there is no God where I am.” How are we then to honor the ineffable father? It is by following his commandments, the present one being “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The action of the aspirant who devotes all to Nuit and lives in the spirit of Ra Hoor Khuit is the veneration of Hadit and of Chaos. It is the out-going of glorious action that exhibits his nature, “so that as we are constant partakers of thy bounty we may in our particular orbit give out light and life, sustenance and joy to them that revolve about us without diminution of substance or effulgence for ever.”

But it is not only in personal action that the father is honored but also in procreative action. Having children was considered a crucial part of the life of a Thelemite, described in no uncertain terms by Crowley and discussed in my previous article An Order for Families and also in my article on Thelema vs transhumanism. Life is the Light, and the extension of that life into future generations is the most basic and necessary step to “transmit the Light of the Gnosis” and “continue knowledge from generation unto generation.” As shown in Crowley’s banned essay, “The Whole Duty of Woman,” Crowley also believed in a special something that was carried from fathers to sons, thanks in large part to mothers, that was crucial for the revolution of the Aeon.

The popular misandry of OTO has caused its leaders to reject this central mystery of life. Crowley does not say that woman is redundant any more than man, marking that “the seed of which Father and the Son are in very truth but vehicles and guardians.” Crowley could be interpreted as saying that sex is an expression of the genome and men and women contribute differently to the continuity of Gnosis, which is life. To be a materialist, perhaps he’s suggesting that the je ne sais quoi is contained within the Y-Haplogroup but its prismatic refraction is a product of the X-Haplogroup. But leadership in OTO denounces Crowley as a “vitalist” and, in redditor fashion, point to a wikipedia article as proof that it is dated, unscientific and debunked. They claim that in Crowley’s time people didn’t know that the ovum carried genetic information, as if parents and husbandmen had their eyes closed for the past tens of thousands of years. They deliberately ignore that the above referenced bi-sexual nature of Baphomet refers to the Holy Spirit and instead use Crowley’s remarks regarding this as a nod to gender trends. Ensorcelled by cultural nihilism, contemporary so-called Thelemites continue to deconstruct - an academic term that means to obfuscate and undermine - this magical interplay of the sexes, both in rejecting the central mystery of the OTO if they’ve happened to be informed of it and by attempting to destroy the “gender binary” and “gender essentialism” of the Gnostic Mass.

OTO rejects its own central mystery, that of the Holy Spirit, not only circuitously as explained elsewhere but overtly, and its leaders are therefore guilty to the deepest degree of what our own “Lord Jesus Christ” described as the Unpardonable Sin, not the denial of him the Son but of It the Holy Spirit. The peculiar thing is how reflexive their new progressive spinoff of Thelema is. They rush to affirm trends in sexology before it’s even demanded of them. Thelema has its own understanding of gender and sex as articulated primarily in OTO’s most secret instructions. They deploy this secrecy as protection for why they can’t discuss the preservation of the “gender binary” in the Gnostic Mass, though that hasn’t stopped them from letting penis-having humanoids from assuming the role of Priestess. But their oaths of secrecy do not explain why they would adopt a gender ideology that is irreconcilable with that of their teachings or would let students go uncorrected when they mis-interpret symbols.

Perhaps they exist in a disordered state, a confused mass, because they break bread and share wine to disrupt the gross nature but fail to invoke the light. The typical Last Man bonehead lacks all deference to the mysteries and anxiously grasps for anything as they slide down into the abyss called because. The fundamental difference between the aniconic humanitarian progressive and their pre-modern Christian antecedent is that the former lacks the humility of the latter. They recall Liber Librae, “Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool, than of him.” Thelemites would do well to stop spinning in circles calling themselves gods and instead to humble their ignorant and blind persons and invoke the light from beyond, the Father’s blessing, ineffable and omniprehensive.

Love is the law, love under will.

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The imminently interesting and informing Tom Rowsell of Survive the Jive, a video-essay channel that focuses on reconstructing the religion of Proto Indo-European civilization and how it survived in its diaspora, gave a talk on Transhumanism at the PAGAN FUTURES conference in London in the summer of 2022. His message as a whole was to be wary of the motives, goals and methods of the secular religion’s pursuit of hollow immortality. He asserts that in defiance of this movement there has been a rise in its polar opposite, religiously as well as politically, in the form of a revival of rigorous pursuit of ritual and lifestyle observation of the old ways, (Germanic) Paganism namely. But what I wish surprised me was this line around 5 minutes in:

The decentralized, protean and whimsically syncretic nature of new age neopaganisms makes defining their theological tenets a rather futile endeavour. However, Neoplatonists and reconstructionist forms of paganism like German religion absolutely do care about theology and cannot be represented like new age pagans as operating without religious authorities, theology or religious texts. Do what thou wilt shall not be the whole of the law, [sic] nor even part of it, as far as we’re concerned.

This cheap shot at Thelema and Aleister Crowley undermines his very point. Thelema has religious authorities, theology and religious texts, and while Thelema may be a new religion it is really only such in that it is an old word, Thelema, being defined in a new context, the New Aeon, by a new authority, Aleister Crowley, and if there’s any ambiguity about its theology, values or necessity it is not due to a lack of texts but perhaps because of an excess. Crowley left us with a few hundred pages of “Holy Books” considered to be of religious authority beyond himself and exponentially more volumes that elaborate and celebrate the message.

The blame for the decreasing popularity of Thelema and understanding of Aleister Crowley lies upon the shoulders of those who have purported to continue his work since his death. I’ve gone on in numerous places about how OTO has been compromised by American leftists who put conformity to secular messaging ahead of fraternity, theology and even their own oaths, and A∴A∴ has published very little over the previous half century to promulgate Thelema beyond the initiatory interests of its aspirants. But to delimit one’s understanding of a religion to the vanities of its vocal tourists is a disservice to its real spirit and yet explicated theology. Just as he feels the need to draw a distinction between earnest pagans such as himself and the new agers who put on puppet shows with his gods, so too must ardent Thelemites disavow e-girls and prog trogs that purport to speak for Aleister Crowley or who, much worse, attempt to deconstruct Thelema, which is a fancy way of saying destroy.

In the remainder of this piece I’d like to highlight a few areas where Thelema really distinguishes itself from the cult of secular nihilism that the west has been adhered to. My goal is not to sell Thelema to Mr. Rowsell or his fans, nor is it to pretend Thelema is subject to interpretation and could be looked at from the right or from the left equally. The two pedants pointing at a figure on the ground arguing whether it’s a 6 or a 9 need only consult the person who described it, and I believe the scribe Aleister Crowley had an instinct and ambition that jives with Mr. Rowsell’s railings against the death cult of modernity.

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Transhumanism as Transcendentalism

In step with Nietzsche, who Crowley considered to be a sort of proto prophet, Crowley rails against Christianity and other religions of the Old Aeon for being death obsessed. The virtue of suffering for its own sake was seen by Crowley as a sin against life, and the idea behind it was the escape from the present world with all its trials and troubles in pursuit of a Hinterwelt, Nietzsche’s term, that was divorced from reality. Crowley instead believed that incarnation was a joyful thing willingly entered into by a free soul wishing to pursue its karma and find mastery, victory and strength. Life in its most basic functions is likewise to be celebrated, and Crowley ridicules the childless as eunuchs and proclaims it to be the frontal duty of every woman to bear children. He goes so far as to declare abortion to be a cardinal sin and a transgression against life that would warrant the death penalty for the offending mother.

Transhumanism is the secular version of transcendental escapism, a pursuit of immortality by self important atheists swaddled to the point of suffocation by their obsession with interiority. There is conflation of Crowley with transhumanism by Alex Jones and others, but this comes from a misreading of the purpose of his rituals that are transmutative rather than transcendental. Discussion of him alongside Marina Abramovic, the spirit cooking lady, is undeserved. Crowley’s description of bloody sacrifices are sex-magical euphemisms where Crowley understood sexual fluids to have some eucharistic potency that could translate into a new incarnation or could vivify the vehicle of someone currently incarnated. In several places, including upper degree OTO rituals, Crowley warns against using the Elixer of Life unless absolutely necessary, for the artificial prolonging of someone’s incarnation comes at the risk of running from death and the transformation that it brings.

Transhumanism as Globalism

Along with the vainglorious transcendence of one’s own life comes the transformation of all life into one non distinct mass of people, if they could even be called that by that point. Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt” was not a call to abandon sex, culture, caste and country, or even race for that matter. Aleister Crowley was a proud Englishman and spoke at great length about the dignity and power of his people. If he railed against anything it was the globalist force of Christianity that had stultified the natural instinct.

Alexander Dugin once studied Crowley and considered Thelema an option for a religious movement in Russia, something Crowley himself wanted when he appealed to Stalin to have the Gnostic Mass implemented as a state religion. Dugin’s push for multi-polarity rather than globalist hegemony resonates strongly with Crowley’s unfortunately titled The Jewish Problem Re-stated, wherein Crowley considers different cultures to have their own karma and trajectory and it was incumbent upon persons within that tribe, the one referenced or any tribe, to resolve and advance the will of their own people. What would have recently been considered a progressive, pluralist and anti-colonial attitude is now considered unconscionable today among the liberal milieu, but for Crowley the karma that one invokes upon incarnation is not merely the condition of the body and brain but also the circumstances of the individual, the people, and the celestial bodies. The diversity of the human experiences was something to be enjoyed, not levelled. In step with Spengler in his Der Mensch und die Technik, Crowley viewed colonialism as a temporary convenience for the colonizer and colonized alike, but one that’s likely to have blowback for both.

Transhumanism as Abdication

The most obvious sign of transhumanism today is the individual’s rejection of their duty to their own particularity. The celebration of the life of the decadent no-account wastrel is the religion of the secularist. It is the modern equivalent of the ascetic who adopts practices to make themselves uncomfortable, except hairshirts have been replaced by ridiculous trappings, self-flagellation and scarification has been replaced by body mutilation and sexual chastity has been replaced by castration through chemicals or surgery. The most common flag thrown at Thelema is the belief that Do what thou wilt encourages all of this errantry, but the opposite is true.

Crowley’s use of the term freedom is very misleading. Whereas we think of freedom as possibilities or rights, The Book of the Law reads, “Let it be that state of manyhood bound and loathing. So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will.” 220.1.42. Crowley says it is the “strictest possible bond,” and it is a specific calling or task, a vocation, and most likely not one that is divorced from the needs of your family or society. Rather, it’s one of universal ordination, however particular or grandiose. In the good old days, there was no doubt that the blacksmith’s son’s will was to apprentice under his father and ply the trade dutifully and beautifully. But Thelema is an apocalyptic religion in the sense that it recognizes the current transition mankind is going through is much more existential, severe and bewildering than previous collapses. The necessity to go about discovering your will is in part due to it no longer being obvious, and this is because the individual has been divorced from their nature in this cold gray land of the modern world. For Crowley, everything needed to be reconstituted, not only the inner nobility of duty but also the noble social order of hierarchy crowned by benevolent aristocracy.

The New Aeon and the New Age Movement

It’s odd that mid-century discussions of the Age of Aquarius were characterized by hippie whimsey when Aquarius is ruled by Saturn. They danced for Aquarius but apparently just expected more Pisces. And on the other horizon lies Leo, the Beast, in all his haught and power. But Thelema fell victim to the progressive movement like everything else after having incubated in California for several decades, and all the details and teachings Crowley left behind were subject to scrutiny by people who just considered Thelema a redundancy that applied a religious veneer to lifestyle liberalism. But Thelema is not that - it is a religion of life with defined mythology (much of it Mr. Rowsell would like to know leans on the Western Mystery Tradition and Proto Indo-European mythology) and mysticism, and clear instructions on how the individual and their society can be symbiotically rectified in the face of these new neon dark ages that Crowley believed would define the first several hundred years of this New Aeon. It is a religion for the world that refracts in distinctive ways through societies where it lays root, but this root does not deracinate the other plants. Rather it grows in between like mycelia, facilitating growth, communication, hardiness, and transformation. Thelema is the answer to Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman as to how we might redeem ourselves from the sins of our ancestors who traded the perennial life in exchange for temporary comfort and pleasures, and now all that’s left of the fruit of their indiscretion is the bitter core.

For those who cared to read this far and chance to abide in this bliss or no:

Love is the law, love under will.

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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Liber OZ is a brief text dominated by one syllable words and punchy statements regarding the Rights of Man.  Of the handful of tracts Crowley designed specifically for the purpose of promulgation, it is arguably the most popular. This is largely due to it being read during an OTO initiation, and for OTO initiates if it isn’t read to them then there’s no guarantee they’ll ever come across it. In addition to the task given during that initiation, Crowley encouraged some of the earliest American brethren to go out and distribute this tract to the public. As with all things Crowley it is falling out of style, but Oz stands apart in Crowley’s corpus for how much it is deliberated over. I propose that Oz was written to bewilder and beguile and Crowley was employing a style of writing that was extremely common in the western hermetic tradition, one we can call Esotericism.

The late James Wasserman (1948-2020) explained in his book The Slaves Shall Serve, a title pinched from Oz, that Crowley was moved by American individualism and social contracts such as the Bill of Rights and its British antecedents. Crowley wrote a late-life letter to his follower Karl Germer circa 1945,

By the way, about attracting people to the O.T.O., I still think Liber Oz is the best bet. There is a vile threat to the “rugged American individualism” that actually created the U.S.A. by the bureaucratic crowd who want society to be a convict prison. “Safety first” — there is no “social insecurity,” no fear for the future, no anxiety about what to do next — in Sing Sing. All the totalitarian schemes add up to the same in the end. And the approach is so insidious, the arguments so subtle and irrefutable, the advantages so obvious — that the danger is very real, very imminent, very difficult to bring home to the average citizen, who sees only the immediate gain, and is hoodwinked as to the price that must be paid for it.

While Wasserman’s endearing book pinched its title from Liber Oz, Oz got it from The Book of the Law, the cornerstone of Thelemic literature. In this book there is no mention of individuality, freedom or liberty per se, but there is a mention of rights, or rather right, in Cap 1 v 42, “So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will.” Rights are a legal fiction written into western liberalism’s “social contract” (which incidentally none of us have ever signed) that suggest our governments couldn’t possible infringe upon us unless they really needed to. The parameters of rights were worked out by philosophers for hundreds of years, but especially after the Enlightenment where the west broke from its religious traditions. Continental philosophers such as the German Idealists were keen to defend the freedom and conscience, the will and love, of the individual in beautiful and intelligent volumes, but ultimately it’s all an apology for the intrusion of institutional norms. In The Book of the Law there is no mention of democratic representation or jurisprudence, yet there is much discussion of Will and Love. While the words “president” and “chairman” and "sacred halls of Congress” appear zero times, “King” appears seventeen times and “Lord” nine times. The tone of The Book of the Law is not progressive bureaucratic idealism, it is an old-world tone of power, conquest, and revenge.

In The Book of the Law is also mention of caste, or at least the terms “few” and “chosen” vs “the many.” Deleuze in his Nietzsche and Philosophy describes how German Idealists were fixated with finding categories for people. Apparently “all men are created equal” was not so self-evident to them. Often this sorting was to forgive creative types trespasses for which the common man might judge them. Nietzsche picked up on this and warned that the few must be protected from the many, but this wasn’t concern for the random individual that inspired the drafting of the Bill of Rights. Nietzsche’s concern was for a category of people who, through art, poetry and philosophy, were attempting to herd the rest of society along and cultivate the vine of consciousness into something more resilient in the face of nihilism.

Along with rights, “equality” was a necessary legal fiction for the dogma of humanitarianism. Perhaps the concept was merely a post-hoc apologia for the social contract, or perhaps it was created deliberately as a way of calming the mob, like a biblical prophet saying their miracles are due to the spirit of the lord rather than sorcery. Crowley addresses the masses in Magick Without Tears, Chapter 73, saying:

Well, what tortoise is that elephant based upon?  Why, still obviously, upon the universal sense of individual weakness.  We all want a big bruvver to tell of him! Hence the Gods and the Classes. It’s fear at the base of the whole pyramid of skulls.

How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

And so, whenever we find one Man who has no fear like Ibsen’s Doctor Stockmann or Mark Twain’s Colonol Grainger that strolled out on his balcony with his shotgun to face the mob that had come to lynch him, he can get away with it. “An Enemy of the People” wrote Ibsen, “Ye are against the people, O my chosen!” says The Book of the Law. (AL:II,:25)

Crowley ridiculed his colleague Theodor Reuss in a letter to another brother, Traenker, saying that Reuss had accused “The Book of the Law of communistic tendencies, of which no statement could be more absurd.” In his diaries, Crowley remarks on August 18th, 1943, in the midst of World War II, that “The system of The Book of the Law is aristocratic; I am an aristocrat. A better word for democracy is ochlocracy – the rule of the mob. It all depends whether you want quantity or quality. Are you going to produce sonnets or Sunday newspapers?” Crowley felt that the masses were a threat who required a government of masters, literally an aristocracy. His mandate to “war down the serf” in Antecedents of Thelema reminds one of D. H. Lawrence’s statement regarding the corrosive effect of Christianity in his Apocalypse:

The religion of the strong taught renunciation and love. And the religion of the weak taught Down with the strong and the powerful, and let the poor be glorified. Since there are always more weak people than strong in the world, the second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will triumph. If the weak are not ruled, they will rule, and there’s the end of it. And the rule of the weak is Down with the strong!

Nietzsche warns of this delicate struggle in several places in his Gay Science. He describes a benevolent symbiosis between the few and the many, but advises a special kind of prudence for the few. In §76, The Greatest Danger, he describes this interaction so presciently that it is here quoted in full:

If the majority of men had not always considered the discipline of their minds-their "rationality” - a matter of pride, an obligation, and a virtue, feeling insulted or embarrassed by all fantasies and debaucheries of thought because they saw themselves as friends of "healthy common sense," humanity would have perished long ago.

The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness - which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments. And man's greatest labor so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement regardless of whether these things are true or false.

This is the discipline of the mind that mankind has received; but the contrary impulses are still so powerful that at bottom we cannot speak of the future of mankind with much confidence. The image of things still shifts and shuffles continually, and perhaps even more so and faster from now on than ever before. Continually, precisely the most select spirits bristle at this universal binding force-the explorers of truth above all. Continually this faith, as everybody's faith, arouses nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo that is here demanded for all spiritual processes, this imitation of the tortoise. which is here recognized as the norm, would be quite enough to turn artists and thinkers into apostates: It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because madness has such a cheerful tempo.

Thus the virtuous intellects are needed-oh, let me use the most unambiguous word-what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance. It is a first-rate need that commands and demands this. We others are the exception and the danger and we need eternally to be defended. Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule.

Nietzsche encourages the exceptional people to encourage virtuous stupidity among the bulk of humanity not because it is good life advice for the individual but instead so that the empty ones won’t mistake themselves as unique and crucial components of society and go about pushing their errant hallucinations on others. The net effect of “the many” thinking they are individually exceptional is the “sudden eruption of madness” and social collapse. It is the “first-rate need” of the artist and philosopher to keep the many busy and motivated, neither telling them “don’t look down” nor “look down,” because if they did they’d see how incredibly thin the social fabric is.

In the backdrop of Thelema it is increasingly difficult to square the liberal Bill of Rights interpretation of Liber Oz. Most Thelemites today may scoff at that statement, but most Thelemites haven’t begun to interpret Thelema as a moral superior to the socially ubiquitous dogma of the Enlightenment. There is a way to square Liber Oz with the misanthropy and caste dynamics of The Book of the Law, and that is by reading it as a piece of esoteric literature.

In Gay Science, § 381, “On the question of being understandable” Nietzsche describes a method of strategic communication:

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author's intention, he did not want to be understood by just "anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against "the others." All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid "entrance,” understanding, as said above - while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

And in § 196, “Limits of our hearing:”

One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.

Nietzsche did not invent being cryptic, but he was perhaps the first modern to push this ethos. Doing so required a decisive break with the foundational beliefs of the Enlightenment, such as that individuals are discerning and good natured so therefore society will gravitate in a productive direction by empowering the individual no matter how stupid. Philosopher Leo Strauss made a career off discussing this interplay and also off pretending he was anti-Nietzsche despite being deeply indebted to him and would, appropriately, privately wax about him. Leo Strauss builds upon the concept of the esoteric in relation to rational discourse’s inability to inspire ethical thought. Robert Locke, in Leo Strauss, Conservative Mastermind remarks that 

The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one (“exoteric”) thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real (“esoteric”) meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends.

Strauss’ use of the term “esoteric” is an appropriate choice. In his Persecution and the Art of Writing he shows how this technique was used specifically by Qabalists to protect their tradition. [Crowley utilized one specific technique in writing Liber Aleph as a series of letters.] Suspiciously in his On Tyranny he says the technique is so designed to manipulate rulers so they can exercise control over the masses without being in the firing line. Laozi paints a similar picture in his 道德经 or Classic of Ethics, that the 圣人, variously translated as Saint or Sage, must keep the ruling class fascinated and inspirited so that they protect their caste from the indiscretions of the profane. Christ spoke in parables and they did not understand, and then he spoke plainly and they still did not understand (John 16). Socrates spoke of the importance of discretionary education of the masses and the protection of the role of the wise advisor of the aristocracy - oh but he said it openly!

Crowley instructed his followers to greet one another by saying, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” and commented that the perfection of the verse showed in how it would move some but make those of a servile temperament recoil at the thought of being responsible for their own life. J. Daniel Gunther comments that “Do what thou wilt” is less of a statement and more of a challenge, and I move that Liber Oz is a long-form version of that challenge. However, the purpose is not to cruelly convince the many that they are the few, but rather as a mode of recognition between those who have accepted the Law and those that are of a nature that can.

Crowley taught that personal empowerment, liberty, and being right with the world is a product of discovering and doing your will. The challenge of Liber Oz serves as a sorting mechanism, but not just one that puts off the servile. The text itself is didactic and describes methodically the nature of attainment in Crowley’s system. Crowley stated in a letter to Yorke that “The items don’t go easily on the Tree; but I’ve got them down to five sections: moral, bodily, mental, sexual freedom, and the safefuard tyrannicide.” I believe the esoteric didactic interpretation of Oz is that it is a challenge to discover and do your will, and this is broken up in sections that correspond to parts of the initiatory work.

Section 1, the “moral” section, initiates the division between the higher and lower by announcing that “Man has the right to live by his own law.” This law is either the Kantian Moral-Law of the slaves or the “law of the Strong,” depending on the reader’s proclivities. Schlegel initiates Romanticism in response to Kant’s existential dilemma in “Blutenstaub” in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798), Aphorism 3:

If one becomes infatuated with the absolute and simply can’t escape it, then the only way out is to contradict oneself continually and join opposite extremes together. The principle of contradiction is inevitably doomed, and the only remaining choice is either to assume an attitude of suffering or else ennoble necessity by acknowledging the possibility of free action.

For this person braving the romantic adventure of “free action,” the “work” mentioned becomes the Great Work. The play becomes the Play of the Magister. The rest might be realized in relation to VII:4.14-15, “Nor is there any rest, Sweet Heart, save in the cradle of royal Bacchus, the thigh of the most Holy One. There rest, under the canopy of night.”  And finally the “death” mentioned is the mystical death. Section 1 depicts the work of the Outer College.

Section 2, “bodily”, refers to the Eucharistic formula that prospers Knowledge and Conversation. “Eat” and “drink” refer to the bread and the blood, his daily sacrament. Man’s right to dwell is in relation to the prepared place of operation, such as described in grimoires such as Liber VIII or The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Man’s right to “move as he will upon the face of the earth” refers to the fifth Power of the Sphinx, Ire, “to go,” spirit, the seal of the attainment.

Moving on, we have what Crowley defined as the “mental” domain in Section 3, which deals with the fruits of the attainment. Thinking, speaking, and writing are products of the communion with the angel - Will, Word and Wand.

The other acts here listed include drawing, etching, painting, moulding, and building. These are all magical or talismanic acts.  In The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, the Exorcist, having attained Knowledge and Conversation with his Holy Guardian Angel, sets about to conjure Demons from the nether-reaches and extend the benediction he received from on-high down to them. “Building” refers to the inspired Adept working his will in the world through the creation of a temple. “Dress” refers to the adornments of one’s new rank.

While Section 3 addresses coming into communication with one’s Will, Section 4 brings that great Thelemic Freedom of understanding one’s relation to the Great Work. This section was denoted by Crowley as “Freedom of Love,” not only to revel in the love and lust of one’s Angel but also to realize Love as Fraternity, Agape, Ecclesia, and Initiatory Continuity. As a Master, it becomes one’s responsibility to alight upon the world and disseminate one’s Word and Will for its particular end, but also to inspire and instruct others. The Master extends his benediction into Fraternity; be it the Brotherhood of Men or an Order or Institution. This puts the Magician in Section 4 in the position of a Master of the Temple, responsible for tending her Garden and also for extending her own roots in an Order by either corrupting an extant Order or forming her own under the auspices of the Aeon of the Child. J. Daniel Gunther teaches that “Scarlet Woman” refers to a Master of the Temple. She is “loud and adulterous,” and an adulterer is not just a cheater but also can refer to a home-wrecker, as in someone who inserts themselves into an extant relationship or tradition to infuse it with their love.

Section 5, the “safeguard against tyranny,” has some interesting implications. On the one hand, tyranny can be taken as illegitimacy of heirship. “[T]hose who would thwart these rights” is a reference to the modern rulership of the world who reign without crown or royal blood. Man not only has the right but also the responsibility to subvert those extant forms of government and oppressive Old Aeonic institutions. The Master of the Temple, being beyond life and death, has precedence over these, keeping with the Initiatory gradations between the sections. Plato and Aristotle concur that the Tyrant is one who rules without law. In our case, the tyrant is he who is not in step with the Law of Thelema. Nemo must weed her garden, but this also is compassion. The conclusive “slaves shall serve” reinforces this document’s social underpinnings as endorsing the reinstatement of Hierarchy and Thelemic Aristocracy.

This is all to say that Oz describes the process of initiation in the New Aeon and states that your rights, freedom and powers are pinned to this attainment. This recalls an opening citation of Liber Oz, “thou hast no right but to do thy will,” which is to say that your sole right is to discover and then do your will. In the absence of this wherewithal, all is guess-work and nothing should be assumed. Additionally the only person with “rights” would be the person who has attained, and therefore Oz establishes a hierarchy of “right” vs errant persons, making the former the exceptional caste, the “few” who must be considered and protected.

Much of Thelema may seem redundant when Thelema is divorced from its historical context as a reactionary religion purposed to avenge traditional power structures and restore the real hierarchy to society as to the individual aspirant. But in the free-for-all of the modern world there has to be a reckoning. What Nietzsche warned of, “the sudden eruption of madness,” is apparently upon us. This isn’t Junger’s anarch-ism, this is worse than the simple discordance of a violent society; it’s Clausewitz’s Absolute War, Crowley’s vision of the 19th Aethyr:

...this is not a battle between two forces, but a melee in which each warrior fights for himself against all the others. I cannot see one who has even one ally. At least the fortunate, who fall soonest, are those in the chariots. For as soon as they are engaged in fighting, their own charioteers stab them in the back.

Nietzsche explained how we got to this point. In §125 of The Gay Science, “The Madman,” who asks the crowd where he might find God, but answers himself, saying:

We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers... What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. 

Nietzsche’s remarks ring true, that the death of God is not to be taken tragically but rather heroically, as an opportunity to advance beyond the same, or at least as an ethical responsibility to assume his authority in maintaining the world. God was not killed intentionally. Nietzsche explains that he was needled to death with our “little knives,” that being our servile reliance on group-think that we call “rationalism.” The cost of this dependence on reason is the atrophy of our muscles for instinct and intuition. And now that god is dead, “There is no god but man,” Oz’s first line that isn’t a verse from The Book of the Law. I believe this is a nod to the Parable of the Madman, and Crowley is presenting the method of redemption following the death of the Christian God. He wrote, “Rights of Man is an historical document.”

Nietzsche warned that something much worse came after God’s death. He remarks in §108 that despite God’s death, “given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” The moral worldview of western civilization and much of the world was deeply infected with Christianity, but at least Christianity had its theology, mysteries and deference. The parody that replaced it, so-called Enlightenment humanitarianism, is pure mob mentality, incapable of self-awareness and its lack of mystery and deference makes it much more dangerous.

Much of Thelema and Crowleyana is off-putting to the public, and this includes Liber Oz. Rather than apologize for everything, the current Christian custom adopted by leadership in OTO and vulgar society alike, we should embrace how it distinguishes us or even alienates us from the folks of the old gray land. Liber Oz is not a Bill of Rights for hedonists and libertines, that being the common culture today. It is very much the opposite. Crowley wrote in Ch. 70 of Magick without Tears:

Shameful confession, one of my own Chelas (or so it is rather incredibly reported to me) said recently: “Self-discipline is a form of Restriction.”  (That, you remember, is “The word of Sin …”.)  Of all the utter rubbish!  (Anyhow, he was a “centre of pestilence” for discussing the Book at all.)  About 90 % of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline.   One is only allowed to do anything and everything so as to have more scope for exercising that virtue.

Concentrate on “…thou hast no right but to do thy will.”  The point is that any possible act is to be performed if it is a necessary factor in that Equation of your Will.  Any act that is not such a factor, however harmless, noble, virtuous or what not, is at the best a waste of energy.

Our mystery, the First Paradox of Philosophy, is that discipline is nowise the enemy of freedom. According to Crowley, one’s Freedom is proportional to one’s discipline in observing your own right: Do what thou wilt.

Love is the law, love under will.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I have endeavoured to tackle aspects of Thelema and the magico-mysticism of Aleister Crowley that are often misunderstood or underappreciated. This will be a continuation on the first talk, wherein Crowley’s mysticism was cast as more a humbling one’s self to a celestial order of beings. To recap, the law of Do What Thou Wilt necessitates discovering what one’s Will is, and this discovery is intertwined with the magical achievement of Knowledge and Conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel. While much ado is made about this attainment, which is one of two crucial grades in the 10-grade Qabalistic model of the system of A∴A∴, the interest in this system of attainment seems to have missed the mark. This is a difficult subject to discuss, but I believe the mysticism of Thelema is designed towards extraversion and action and the villain of the Old Aeon is the persisting obsessive interiority and self-importance embodied by new age mysticism and which is pervasive in contemporary culture.

It’s very easy to misunderstand Thelema because for most of the past century it has been seen as a niche within the broader “magical community,” one that borrows most of its mysticism, beliefs and values from mainstream liberal Christianity, the moral order of the post-Enlightenment world. This moral framework’s ubiquity in the west has been discussed previously as the actual villain of the Old Aeon, but needs to be revisited to understand the cultural backdrop of the predicament of perspective present in Thelema today.

At the conclusion of the 30 Years War in the mid 17th century, where modern Germany and surrounding states lost between a quarter to a half of their population, the intelligent, industrious and civilized people of Europe collectively decided to believe that warfare between small kingdoms over religious allegiances wasn’t going to work out well in the long term. It ended in the Treaty of Westphalia, whence the concept of the Westphalian nation-state, wherein a defined government would preside over a defined territory inclusive of defined people by defined laws. This began a gradual but real shift away from greater or lesser traditional territories run by ruling families, perhaps crowned with a King. King is a verbish form of Kin, which comes from the PIE Genh-, which means to produce - generate or beget. The King was your kinfolk, literally, which is inevitable when one family is having more babies than any one other family in your valley for a few hundred years. But gradually his power was checked by meta-institutions, first the Church of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, which were aristocratic bureaucracies and an early experiment with Federalism. After the 30 Years War, via the Enlightenment, increasingly secular bureaucratic institutions supplanted Kings who were getting in the way of business.

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. […]

“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto

After a while, any successful institution will exist primarily to perpetuate itself, and the purpose of its initial incorporation will become secondary if not forgotten altogether. This became true for nation-states, or rather the powerful bureaucratic entities that control them - the ghost that comes to indwell the political machine - and that profit from the encircled populace, and the prevailing philosophy of these places as established by their de facto moral authorities became less one of faith, family and future and more one of economic exploitation. Mitt Romney once had a moment of self-implicating candor and said, “Corporations are people, too.” But the same could be said of any arbitrary government, and you shouldn’t get your views or values from either. 

Peter Thiel wrote in the Straussian Moment that “From the Enlightenment on, political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature.” The so-called Enlightenment was anything but; it was the dimming of the room to hide the colors, it was the blasting HVAC to keep the inmates on ice, it was the noise to hide the signal, a contract signed in the blood of those not yet born. The Enlightenment was supposed to put aside divisive issues by blunting the authoritarian and evoking peace. It failed miserably and we continue to go through the motions where the ruling class pretends to care about the secular parody of Christianity and all its brag and fuss.

“Religious wars - The greatest progress of the masses up till now has been the religious war, for it proves that the mass has begun to treat concepts with respect. Religious wars start only when the finer quarrels among sects have refined common reason so that even the mob becomes subtle and takes trifles seriously, and actually considers it possible that the 'eternal salvation of the soul' might hinge on slight differences between concepts.”

Nietzsche, Gay Science §144

This indictment of the Enlightenment is ideologically unbearable for people who continue to believe in the liberal axioms it depends upon. This is not to say that previous civilizations and cultures did not honor things like property rights, freedom of movement or freedom of conscience, but rather that the logic for their existence shifted from one of natural rights to one of corporate practicality. But with the Enlightenment came the end of the cultural religious inquiry and the beginning of the shallow tyranny of institutions. The belief was that the strategic retreat from religious questions would result in peace, but with a few hundred years of retrospect we learn that this couldn’t have been further from the truth, and that they neither honor their liberal/libertarian traditions nor prevent war. 

This is not a political talk, but we have to consider how our view of the world may have been categorically corrupted by normalized institutions and their rhetoric. Nobody would doubt today that public conscience can be shifted pretty radically and pretty quickly by a few billion dollars in pharma advertising on major networks, or the sudden ubiquity of carefully curated content on social media. Five hundred years ago the shift was from religious necessities observed by large hierarchical tribes towards the abandonment of the social prerogative, putting the imperative in the hands of the person. Protestant Christianity, one product of this theological retreat, taught us about one’s personal relationship with Jesus, eventually one that needn’t be reflected in one’s actions at all but simply in a confession of faith or now, according to mainstream progressive Christianity, just being a good dude! But previously your salvation was tied to your constant observance of the institution’s rites and expectations in order to earn access to it, be it the Baptism of your child, blessing of your marital union, administering the Eucharist, or Last Rites.

This shift from institutional/cultural/familial observation to personal one is the primary culprit for creating a society of narcissistic interiority whereby transcendental escapism or holistic gratification is the goal. And so the primary goal is an Epicurean one. People work only as much as they need to to be able to have a nice weekend, purchase things that make them feel on par with their neighbors, and indulge in activities such as therapy, travel, debauch, or media consumption designed to entertain you to death. Ironically this anxious effort to feel good has resulted in widespread neuroses. But don’t worry your little head! There’s pills for that. We moved from burials, as your body was expected to rise from the grave with the second coming of Jesus Christ, to cremation, a fiery disposal. We live in a therapeutic society where the original sin is feeling disaffected and life revolves around finding out how to make the hungry ego feel sated.

St. Nietzsche in §125 of Gay Science, the Parable of the Madman, prophesied that “God is dead. We have killed him [… T]he holiest and mightiest thing that this world has ever possessed has bled to death under our little knives. Who will wipe this blood from our hands?” In Zarathustra he answers the question that what we must do is replace God by becoming God-like. But for Nietzsche the product, or maybe the action, of the murder of God - that is the Enlightenment - gave way to very corrosive beliefs. Nietzsche’s primary criticism of Christianity was that it obsessed over the otherworld rather than this one, and that this world, our world, paid the price for their rejection. If anything you can conceive of is divorced from the perfect and immutable divine, God, Heaven, whatever, then any conception, motivation or hope you can have in life is not only doomed, it’s sinful. Nietzsche called this the obsession with the True World, the “Hinterwelt,” where everything is removed, blissful, permanent, and good. Nietzsche said it was a cowardly surrendering of life and that it’s better to die on your feet with pride than on your knees surrendered to some ideal. But the purpose isn’t pride, the purpose is to take the big questions regarding humanity and the soul seriously, and how can you take something serious if you’re trying to escape, deny, or obfuscate it?

In step with this fetishism, Nietzsche predicted that Buddhism would become very popular in the west, and he was right. But Buddhism isn’t alone in transcendental mysticism. In fact very few religions are not solely concerned with either the afterlife or the transcendent state. The global religion today, secular humanism, also fits into this category by fetishizing a progressive utopia where everything will go smoothly forever (Fukiyama’s End of History liberal dream) if only these fifteen thousand policies are instituted globally and people are made to conform indefinitely. Further proof that it’s a religion is it has its own morals, things you can’t say and now things that you have to say, its own martyrs like George Floyd, and even its own churches, that being the Unitarian Church and NPR if you prefer gospel radio.

Thelema is at a curious intersection between traditional values and the twain traditions born of the Enlightenment. On the one hand Thelema observes an old-world realpolitik of conquest, fidelity and obedience, all of this abundantly evident in The Book of the Law. But on the other hand Thelema was born of a magico-mystical revival that picked up speed at the end of the 19th century, one that Crowley became a big part of. While the Enlightenment produced shallow transcendental parodies of traditional religions, it also accelerated the spread of secret societies and mystical groups, specifically Freemasonry which attempted to create a new series of rites or sacraments designed to imbue individuals with qualities and values so that they can create beautiful things within the world and ennoble human civilization. But even this gave way to the culture of interiority and transcendental mysticism, known as the movement from practical to theoretical masonry, and by the end of the 19th Century (AC born 1875) Freemasonry had numerous variations of beliefs and rituals that were increasingly abstract and mystically focused. 

For Crowley, Thelema had practical dimensions that synergized with the magical and mystical practices. This was primarily gone over in the first talk I did a few months ago, but the idea is that the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel was the goal, but for the purpose of discovering your Will. Crowley defined “black magick” as magick that is not purposed towards that marriage, and he understood yoga as primarily a mental discipline to make magick - the communion with spirits - more successful and intelligible. But the goal is action. He writes in Liber II, 

Note further that this will is not only to be pure, that is, single, as explained above, but also “unassuaged of purpose.” This strange phrase must give us pause. It may mean that any purpose in the will would damp it; clearly the “lust of result” is a thing from which it must be delivered.

But the phrase may also be interpreted as if it read “with purpose unassuaged” - i.e., with tireless energy. The conception is, therefore, of an eternal motion, infinite and unalterable. It is Nirvana, only dynamic instead of static--and this comes to the same thing in the end.

Elsewhere Crowley describes transcendent states such as Samadhi, which I think he’s referencing above, as being dynamic, not some conclusory state, and not some escape. He explains it’s a precondition for the achievement of the grade of Master of the Temple. It’s peace, and peace only exists within the heart of the seasoned warrior, one who fights without fighting, acts without acting, and wills without willing.

Crowley argued that the magical and initiatory path is an extraverted one. In Dangers of Mysticism, wherein Crowley challenges A. E. Waite’s idea that magick is ugly and mysticism is goodly, Crowley says the Magician’s formula is 1+(-1)=0, some sort of union, while the Mystic’s formula is 1-1=0. He writes of the insanity of spiritual pride:

“The Magician is not nearly so liable to fall into this fearful mire of pride as the mystic; he is occupied with things outside himself, and can correct his pride. Indeed, he is constantly being corrected by Nature. He, the Great One, cannot run a mile in four minutes! The mystic is solitary and shut up, lacks wholesome combat. … Corollary to this attitude is the lack of all human virtue. The greatest magician, when he acts in his human capacity, acts as a man should. In particular, he has learnt kindheartedness and sympathy. Unselfishness is very often his long suit. Just this the mystic lacks. … Hundreds of mystics shut themselves up completely and for ever. Not only is their wealth-producing capacity lost to society, but so is their love and good-will, and worst of all, so is their example and precept.” 

Crowley’s term “shut himself up” is an explicit reference to his vision of the 10th Aethyr of the Enochian System, the means by which he “crossed the abyss.” The monster of the abyss, the closest thing to a bad Devil in Thelema, is Choronzon, and the account of AC’s interaction with Choronzon is chilling. The Mighty Devil says, “I am the Master of Form, and from me all forms proceed. I am I. I have shut myself up from the spendthrifts, my gold is safe in my treasure-chamber, and I have made every living thing my concubine, and none shall touch them, save only I.” The implication couldn’t be more damning, that the transcendental mystic plays into the hands of the Black Brothers, those who have lost their soul by allowing mystical pride to trap them in obsessive thoughts, in interiority. Crowley comments on the assertion “I am the Master of Form” that “this (and many following assertions) must not be taken as true. Choronzon is in no sense the master of anything. It is the personification of a moral idea in a much more far-fetched way than that in which we say ‘Venus is the Lady of Love’. For one can imagine Venus as a living individual being, while Choronzon is essentially not any sort of person.” A humble servant once memed that “Having a personality is not a personality.” How many people do we know who are an emotional and intellectual dumpster-fire because they obsess over abstract, idealistic and moralistic concepts? How many of these people do we know are yoga instructors?

To assist people in the pursuit of Thelema, the discovery and the doing of the Will, Aleister Crowley presents a “shift in perspective” from the inward-facing transcendental mysticism of preceding traditions to an outward-facing mysticism fueled by magick, which is outward-reaching. Therefore the doing of the will, which Crowley considered to be magick itself (aside from a traditional understanding of magick), is a mysticism of action and adventure where the aspirant accelerates the maturation of their person by challenging their environment. This environment is not only the time and place setting of one’s life, but also the private factors such as one’s personality, mental acumen, and even family history and cultural narrative. Crowley writes in Liber Librae, “A man is what he maketh himself within the limits fixed by his inherited destiny; he is a part of mankind; his actions affect not only what he calleth himself, but also the whole universe.”

The extraversion of the path should not be considered in contrast to introversion, a looking within. Nor does it mean that you can’t be ponderous or public-averse, but it’s one thing to be a misanthrope and another to be crippled by social anxiety. A real introspection is impossible because the real actor is the deepest within. The subject and the object cannot be the same thing, except only in the deepest mystical sense. When you perceive something there is an immediate temptation to identify it with yourself, but in this identification should an understanding of separation and then their product, a question of relation. This can be applied to anything, including your body, your brain, even your purpose, and the net effect can be a total sense of alienation and dissociation. The pursuit of introversion is those with a weak locus-of-being getting hypnotized by things and mistaking them as being essential. It’s a fatal mistake, and an inevitable product of transcendental mysticism where the aspirant traps himself in his mind. The equaling of some concept with your self is submission to an external locus of identity, often an addictive or memetic one that was created by another person with the goal of ensorcelling the masses. This is not to deprecate “the masses” that need what Nietzsche called a “stolid metronome” to prevent them from going apeshit, the dark journey being too much for them to bear.

Let me give a more concrete example of how what Nietzsche called a “slight difference in concepts” bears out in practice. Aleister Crowley was trained in a school of yoga called Raja Yoga, mostly by himself after reading Swami Vivekananda’s book entitled the same. It is a very practical and sciency-sounding look at the Eight Limbs of Yoga, which well predate it. Raja Yoga means Royal Yoga, which Crowley saw as a nice compliment to the Ars Regia, Royal Art, ie Magick. These Eight Limbs are pursued sequentially, beginning with Asana where one sits still (modern yoga gyms have almost nothing to do with trad yoga) and suffers their body’s groans and moans until they stop and the Yogi, the yoke, comes to the realization that he is not the moans and groans of his body of flesh. The subject distinguishes itself from the object through meditation and transcends it through mastery. Next on to Pranayama, the dynamic energizing compliment to Asana, where the Yogi realizes that he is not his breath or his blood but is instead beyond and, through mastery, transcends them. Yama and Niyama, morals and ethics, also conquered. Dharana, Dyana, Pratyahara, various techniques of mental discipline, all mastered and sublimated into the Yogi’s arsenal of powers. Himself being thus armed and master of the first seven limbs he may brave the eight and final, Samadhi, the last leg of Slepnir. Samadhi, death, the -1 to the Yogi’s 1, the total dissociation, the transcendent mystical state. The Yogi thus mastering transcendence and absence of self achieves transcendence of self and simultaneously realizes he is not his absence of self also. What is he then? What has done the yoga? The Will has, and he has made himself into a vehicle for the Will, the creative force, the all-devourer, all-begetter. 

Optional aside

It’s interesting that the word Yoga comes from the PIE yewg, which means to link or join together, whence “yoke.” A yoke is something you use to bind together beasts of burden to double the work they can produce, such as an Ox. Ox is suggested in the Hebrew Alphabet by the letter Aleph, and the ox-goad (a poker you’d use to make the oxen move) is the letter Lamed. Aleph and Lamed is AL, God, and the special title or “key” to The Book of the Law, otherwise known as Liber AL. T Polyphilus asked an important question in his opening remarks at NOTOCON VII, asking are we the doer or the thing being done upon, are we the ox or the goad? Or maybe the yoke? Maybe we’re each of these in turn, the Ox, the Yoke, and then the Goad.

Anyway I brought up the Thelema-perspective pursuit of yoga to contrast it with the common one, which is the attempt to shut off the mind. The contrast in Dangers of Mysticism is an evident one, monks and hermits cloister themselves and attempt to do as little thinking as possible. They ignore the appetites of the flesh, ignore the whimsies born of boredom, and ignore whatever expectations or vocations might have been expected of them from the world, be it labor or family. Whatever intellectual product they gift to humanity is born of this denial of life. If they’re resolute then maybe they can avoid imperilment of the spirit by thoughts and fascinations, but more likely, especially today where information bombardment is overwhelming, they’ll be seduced by their mystical pride to stop any real inquiry and polish their possessed personhood with a religious veneer.

Crowley proposes that the concepts of “higher self” and “true self” are dangerous, even though you’ll encounter them in his earlier writing. One, they propose there’s an Echtwelt, a perfect goal, and Two they suppose that there’s a self that can be perfected. If the innermost is ineffable and indescribable, how can it be understood? To understand Thelemic mysticism you have to move beyond progressive/positivist ideas regarding attainment and be wary of catchphrases such as enlightenment, spiritual progress, development, transcending. The basic mystical supposition is that you are something that is growing in wisdom, power and credibility. But is it you that is growing? What is the internal locus of volition and identity? 

Crowley wrote about the concept of “self” as a misleading one. In Chapter 28 of Magick Without Tears, “Need to Define "God", "Self", etc,” he notes that it’s not a really helpful term in any sense, but in terms of the “within” he writes:

“We are whole-hearted extroverts; the penalty of restricting oneself is anything from neurosis to down right lunacy; in particular, melancholia.

“You ask whether these remarks do not conflict with my repeated definition of Initiation as the Way In.  Not at all; the Inmost is identical with the All.  As you travel inward, you become able to perceive all the layers which surround the “Self” from within, thus enlarging the scope of your vision of the Universe.  It is like moving from a skirmishing patrol to G.H.Q.; and the object of so doing is obviously to exercise constantly increasing control over the whole Army.  Every step in rank enables you both to see more and to do more; but one's attention is inevitably directed outward.”

But in his comments on The Book of the Law there is talk of a “Silent Self,” specifically referring to Hadit. While Nuit, the subject of Chapter I, is “Infinite space and the infinite stars thereof,” Hadit, the subject of Chapter II, is the “motion” to Nuit’s “matter,” it is That which occupies space, he is the “magician and the exorcist, the axle of the wheel,” and says “‘Come unto me’ is a foolish word: for it is I that go.” And then, II:8, “Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.” Crowley comments that “Harpocrates is also the Dwarf-Soul, the Secret Self of every man, the Serpent with the Lion’s Head. … It is bad Magick to admit that one is other than One’s inmost self. One should plunge passionately into every possible experience; by doing so one is purged of those personal prejudices which we took so stupidly for ourselves, though they prevented us from realizing our true Wills and from knowing our Names and Natures. The Aspirant must well understand that it is no paradox to say that the Annihilation of the Ego in the Abyss is the condition of emancipating the true Self, and exalting it to unimaginable heights.”

I believe that Crowley later distanced himself from this idea, and this is evident in several places in Magick Without Tears, or at least he did not want people to use vague terms that already have a lot of mystical fetishism attached to them. But an important takeaway here is that the self, the inmost being, is identified as a dynamic and metapersonal force, the complement of Nuit. Crowley explains of the verse “Yet she shall be known and I never” that Hadit is the knower, the witnesser, the worshipper, and as the inmost self anything else is an object of Hadit; therefore, anything conceivable is a medium for the manifestation of the will and not to be considered in even the same order of being as Hadit. The knowable self is not the personal self - there is no personal self - it is the “company of heaven” that is the body of our Lady of the Stars.

There is a darkness to this sort of Nietzschean mysticism, that the self is a deception. This contrasts the Christian view of the immortality and distinctiveness of the individual soul. The Thelemite, the Yogi, attempts to burn this self up in the fire of the will. “I am not I, I am but a hollow tube to bring down fire from heaven.” And to reach this new state of being, the thesis, I am myself, must be processed through the antithesis, I am not I. To be made a vessel of the will one must put their personhood through the ringer, which is to say that the aspirant disciplines the powers of their being in order to master their environment, which includes the conditions of their incarnation, which includes their body and brain. For Crowley this begins with the Angel and ends across the Abyss, whereby one becomes a dweller in Duant, the Star Abodes, wherever their body may be. And the methods he outlined were arduous and alienating, the ultimate achievement that would require years of devotion. But the purgative nightmare of the Dark Night of the Soul was not purposed to escape the world like the martyrs of the Old Aeon, but rather the painful experience of being re-born as a Babe of the Abyss. This is not the Hinterwelt of Nietzsche where one escapes, but a dynamic process continuing into the Aeons. The Master of the Temple swears to return swiftly into the mortal world upon the death of their body to continue the Great Work, the cultivation of the material to better manifest the motion of the Will, everlasting, world without end. 

Love is the law, love under will.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I’d like to begin with a history of Thelema and Aleister Crowley’s relationship with it to give the talk some context, then give a tour of Crowley’s mysticism that he inherited from his pre-Thelema traditions and wed with some world religions and his own visionary experiences, and conclude with a look at Crowley’s ideas of yoga and magick, how they intersect and how we can understand them as distinct practices that work together for the aspirant.

Thelema, which means Will in Greek, is the “word of the law” in The Book of the Law, a book written by Aleister Crowley in 1904 but not, according to his account, a product of his own intellect. Thelema is the “Will” in “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” a verse from this book, a verse that is usually coupled with another verse, “Love is the law, love under will.” These two verses address questions of ethics in the discussion of love, law, and will, and these concepts find their relevance in several historical narratives including that of continental or classical philosophy, Abrahamic religion, and a linear and pessimistic historiography of Proto Indo European civilization. 

Aleister Crowley believed the reception of this book from praeterhuman and transcorporeal entities was of Aeonic historical consequence, which is to say that it initiated a new era in the human experience that he called the New Aeon, that of the Child, referring to Horus, the Greek name for Ra Hoor Akhty, Horus of the Two Horizons. This was juxtaposed against the previous Aeon, that of Osiris the father, characterized by prescriptive societies and a redemptive myth of vicarious atonement for the sin of incarnation through suffering and faith in institutions. In ways Crowley believed his New Aeon would participate in trendy cultural movements such as scientific positivism, radical individualism and liberal legal developments, but in other ways the New Aeon would partake of values that preceded the Aeon of Osiris, going back to the Aeon of Isis, the mother, characterized by faith in nature’s abundance and cyclical existence of eternal return rather than linear history that anticipates an ultimate and inevitable catastrophe such as Apocalypse, Ragnarok or the Samson Option. 

Crowley was not originally moved to explicate Thelema to a broader audience. After the initial reception of The Book of the Law Crowley, pushing 30 and newly wed to an Irish lass, was still enjoying circumnavigating the globe and pissing away his inherited wealth. It was a few years later that he aggressively revisited the Qabalah-oriented model of the initiatory order he’d devoted himself to leading up to the reception of The Book of the Law, that of the Golden Dawn, and began receiving additional books, most of which are a tenth the size of The Book of the Law. To my knowledge the most recent publishing of this collection was entitled “The Holy Books of the A∴A∴,” excluding The Book of the Law, as the editor felt these later additions to Crowley’s corpus of received text were decidedly more focused on the initiatory system Crowley was working on rather than the Aeonic scope of The Book of the Law. Their manner of reception was also different, The Book of the Law being dictated by a spirit and the later books being received through some form of automatic writing. Initially all these texts, which he called Liber this and Liber that, were reserved for aspirants to the system of A∴A∴ as special material appropriate to certain initiations, suitable for meditation and required to be memorized for advancement. Later in Crowley’s life they were made available to the public, The Book of the Law itself being published and distributed not so much as mystical instruction but rather as a sacred text in the vein of Abrahamic prophetic literature that promulgates a new Law, one might say a new Covenant, designed by a body of transcended adepts to assist mankind into the next step of the evolution of human consciousness. Crowley consider himself in step with a line of Magi that begins with Laozi and others and includes Moses, Dionysus (or Jesus), and Mohammad, and then him.

To the modern student approaching Crowley’s work the regiment of study is not readily apparent. Crowley expected curious parties to approach his material through one of his initiatory orders where certain spheres of esoteric knowledge are gradually taught and where reading lists were made available. There were several attempts at introductory works, including his commentaries on The Book of the Law (later published as The Law is for All), which explains Thelemic morality for the layman, and also his Liber ABA, a massive tome currently published at twice its intended size due to the incredible amount of footnotes, endnotes and appendices provided. I maintain that despite its daunting size and scope that it is still the best cover-to-cover introduction to this material. But it is possible for the student to become lost in the weeds absent an instructor to help keep everything in perspective. 

It took Crowley a while to transition from a teacher of esoteric subjects and provider of initiations into his role as “World Teacher” or Prophet of the New Aeon. A catalyst for this was the incredible historical changes he witnessed in his life, coming of age at the end of the 19th century a wealthy Englishman during the height of the British Empire but then living through the Great War and the collapse of the western aristocracies. He was occasionally optimistic, early on as a young magician and then later in his life with the political innovations of Europe promising something newer and better. He attempted to insert himself into early 20th century revolutions. He proposed The Gnostic Mass could form the basis for the state religion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire. He thought his OTO could imitate Musolini’s Brown Shirts and protect the working class and the aristocrats alike from the socialist smash. He even believed he’d managed to get a copy of The Book of the Law to the leader of the Socialist German Worker’s Party in the 1930’s, whose name I won’t say but I think you know who I’m talking about. Crowley’s attraction to these movements was primarily as an opportunist targeting fledgling governments that were confrontational with Christianity and of a more masculine and intrepid nature than western liberal democracies which he saw as dainty, vulgar and petty. Ultimately his attempts to install himself as a Rasputin or Himmler were unsuccessful and the collapse all around Europe and around the globe was an ill omen for his New Aeon.

While we are tempted to be dismissive of Crowley and the importance of his message because of his failure during his life to become a conquering Mohammad or Joseph Smith, both of whom he admired, and also daunting is the very minimal traction Thelema has gained in the world since his death, I believe there is a greater lesson apparent: don’t get ahead of yourself. Crowley’s hopeful message during his life - that the Law of Thelema provided an expeditious method of attainment whereby one can live a joyous life as a conquering soul in the discovery and doing of their will - expected the Aeonic transition to be a productive one. But the initiation of the New Aeon resembles the initiation of the soul, and the first stage upon the path is a dark one. Aleister Crowley wrote near the end of his life that the New Aeon will begin with several hundred years of darkness, war and collapse, and the 20th century, the first century of the New Aeon, has exhibited this. 

It’s easy to forgive Crowley his optimism. He had a lot going for him around the reception of The Book of the Law. The Nietzschean tone of the book is anything but timid. He came from a romantic, Masonic and liberal tradition that had a lot of global achievements to boast. He thought he was catching the wave at exactly the right time, but it was a massive tidal wave and things don’t always go as planned. Discouraged but not dissuaded, his message instead was to hold on tight, work to spread the message, but also to be guarded against the indiscretions of the profane who have a habit of executing religious and political upstarts. His OTO, counter-revolutionary in its attempt to preserve the aristocracy but revolutionary in its aim to recruit them and transform society from above, would also be targeted by unstable, paranoid and illiberal governments. OTO members were targeted by the Nazis, including Karl Germer, Crowley’s successor in OTO and A∴A∴, who was originally imprisoned in Columbiahaus (the concentration camp, not the record store), more of a white collar prison for political enemies in Berlin, but was later moved to Esterwegen. Nazis became keen on Crowley when his student Kuntzel translated The Book of the Law (Das Buch des Gesetzes) and other materials into German and distributed them to her aristocratic friends - a major backfire and a big wake-up call for Crowley. 

As a curious aside, surely Germer was upset with Crowley for getting him incarcerated. The proof they used to incarcerate him was a letter they intercepted from Crowley to Germer where their activities are explicit. So between giving incriminating materials to Hitler and writing unencrypted letters involving illegal activities to Germer, Crowley did not do favors to his friend. The move to the harsher Esterwegen concentration camp came after Crowley and Sasha, Karl Germer’s wife, tried to pull strings to get him released. There may have been a strange moment on Germer’s arrival in Esterwegen where inmates were marked with a color-coded triangle to group them by reason of incarceration. Jews bore the yellow hexagram that said “Jude,” and you may be familiar with the pink triangle for gay men. Political prisoners, Germer’s classification, bore a down-pointing red triangle, which Crowley says was given to him in a vision as a symbol special to Horus and the New Aeon, the “descending tongue of grace,” which sits centered on the breast of the black Tau robe of the initiate, such as Germer wore. So, after the three mistakes of Crowley that landed Germer in a western front concentration camp, Germer was immediately adorned by the same red triangle of Horus by his captors that he’d received during initiation. Ever the stalwart German, Germer made use of his time in meditation and achieved Knowledge and Conversation while incarcerated.

"Civilization is crumbling under our eyes and I believe that the best chance of saving what little is worth saving, and rebuilding the Temple of the Holy Ghost on plans, and with material and workmanship, which shall be free from the errors of the former, lies with the O.T.O." —Aleister Crowley

All of this is to say that Aleister Crowley began as a wealthy young man interested in mystical attainment through magical means and esoteric instruction and early on into his life a number of experiences, including mystical experiences and the reception of a body of “sacred” literature, compelled him into shifting gears towards sharing a message of historical consequence with a much broader audience, that being the contents of The Book of the Law, more specifically the Law of Thelema, and it was his task to promulgate this new law to the world. Before he leaned into his role as world teacher he focused on an initiatory order that advanced the teachings of the Golden Dawn, from where he got so much of his early instruction, this new order being the A∴A∴. Later he assumed control of OTO. Initially he saw OTO as an esoteric initiatory order that could synergize with A∴A∴ to stimulate personal attainment, but later he looked at OTO as a revolutionary order that could promulgate Thelema and ally aristocrats to install his teachings legally and culturally. During his life neither A∴A∴ nor OTO boasted a large membership, neither did they ingratiate themselves with the ruling class to any consequential degree, but Crowley had many intelligent and accomplished artists, writers and even social movers as students and colleagues.

A∴A∴ and OTO both exist today, where A∴A∴ is still focused on individual instruction and initiation, publishing periodicals less so, and OTO, while it has thousands of members in many different countries, does very little to promote Thelema today aside from continuing to do the Gnostic Mass and initiations when they’re not too busy fretting over the flu. As someone who was a member of OTO for almost two decades it pains me to say that the only thing that’s worth it about them is that they do Crowley’s initiation rituals and celebrate the Gnostic Mass, even though the iteration someone today is likely to encounter is less than what Crowley would have wanted. However, today, there are many intelligent and motivated Thelemites around the world who will probably do much better promoting Thelema once the current OTO gerontocracy punches out.

A∴A∴ is different, and that brings up the next subject, Crowley’s mysticism. 

Aleister Crowley was in his early 20’s when he began to encounter esoteric religious literature that spoke of orders of people, and orders of beings, that are vested with the responsibility of all creation. It wasn’t even the 20th century when Crowley, who had for years been compelled to be intimately familiar with the bible (and forty years later he told his son to make sure he was very familiar with the same), set off to discover the source for these secret utterances and calls to action. AC’s search led him to the Golden Dawn, a collection of sincere occultists in late 19th century England who were practicing a brand of magick that was a combination of gradual initiations along the Qabalistic Tree of Life, regular ritual practices that borrowed heavily from Qabalistic symbolism and who were expected to learn a great deal about Qabalah, esoteric correspondences, numerology and Renaissance occult symbolism derived from alchemy and mythology. In this humbler time they would not have considered it an insult that so much of their teachings were derivative of adjacent and recent mystical schools, including offshoots of Freemasonry. But they did have a secret source of instructional material called the Cipher Manuscripts, watermarked 1808, by which they claim to have gotten in touch with one Anna Sprengel, a German Rosicrucian, who chartered their new enterprise.

What the Golden Dawn claimed followed suit with Madame Blavatsky, and echoed the mythology espoused in Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, which Crowley considered the book that got him started on this path. They espoused there is a congregation of transcendent masters who have managed to preserve their wherewithal and power beyond the flesh and who continue to affect the course of mankind from their higher vantage by, primarily, offering instruction to individual aspirants still laboring in the flesh upon the earth. This body of the highest initiates have variously been referred to as Boddhisatvas, Mahatmas, Saints, or Secret Masters or, eventually for Crowley, Secret Chiefs. The people running the Golden Dawn stated they were in touch with this body of the high initiates and it was from them that the genius of their ceremonies derived. For them, and for Crowley, the authority of the visible head of an order was premised on their connection to the invisible head of this august body, the Great White Brotherhood. 

Among the literature of the Golden Dawn was a translation of great importance called The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, wherein is advertised a months-long ritual vigil whereby one attains Knowledge and Conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel. There are similar rituals in the PGM and the prayer for the genius was a normal religious affair in at least the classical world of the Mediterranean. Abramelin’s method was not the first revival of this ancient ceremony. The earliest manuscripts pseudoepigraphically given to Abraham of Worms are dated 1608, and he lived circa 1400. Brian Johnson’s book Necromancy in the Medici Library discusses the flurry of similar manuscripts being proliferated in the 15th century during northern Italy’s magical revival, called the Renaissance. Johnson translates a spell that is extremely similar to Abramelin’s. It is ascribed to Michael Scot, a Scotsman who lived and studied in Italy circa 1300. These earlier versions describe the spirit being sought as a sort of tutelary wraith, a dead person who is capable of communicating all knowledge to the magician. This ritual, the attainment of the angel, would be the principle reason that Crowley had a falling-out with the G∴D∴.

Crowley left to Loch Ness to prosecute this attainment but returned to London at the request of his mentor and friend, Mathers, the head of the G∴D∴, who had moved to France and then experienced friction with the London chapter. Much of this was due to his affection for Crowley and wanting to advance him into the adept grades of the Rosy Cross, but the London chapter refused to welcome him into their interior order, because unimpressive people feel better about themselves when nobody noteworthy is around. As the G∴D∴ crumbled Crowley began globe trotting, believing the G∴D∴ was corrupt in that it did not require the attainment described in Abramelin’s book as a condition of real membership in the interior order. Crowley understood that inasmuch as their legitimacy as conservators of the mysteries was derived from their connection to the ascended masters that an adept must be someone who has achieved some actual connection to them, an intermediary, an Angel. Therefore those people who described themselves as adepts were not so because their only distinction from those below them, in the “Outer College,” was that they had completed the course material and kept a low enough profile to not arouse the jealousy or irritation of their fellow pretenders. Crowley therefore believed the hierarchy within the GD was not based on attainment but was artificial and its members were therefore frauds. He parted ways with the G∴D∴.

“But all exterior societies subsist only by virtue of this interior one. As soon as external societies wish to transform a temple of wisdom into a political edifice, the interior society retires and leaves only the letter without the spirit. It is thus that secret external societies of wisdom were nothing but hieroglyphic screens, the truth remaining inviolable in the Sanctuary so that she might never be profaned.”

Liber XXXIII, An Account of A∴A∴ [Crowley’s Cloud Upon the Sanctuary]

A few years later he designed the A∴A∴ and with some of the more impressive G∴D∴ people created a new order, one that subsumed the work of the G∴D∴ and pinned real attainment, real initiation, to the experience of the Angel and then the experience of the Abyss, or rather the crossing of it, where the aspirant might find rest in the cradle of royal Bacchus, might find sanctuary beyond the Nile, the Nothing, within the City of the Pyramids, the twilight of the Duat, the home of the gods, the campground of the Secret Chiefs. This attainment of Crossing the Abyss was something the G∴D∴ believed was not within the realm of possibility of a living person. It became a focal concern of Crowley and theme in his Holy Books, a way of not only being connected to the Great White Brotherhood but to be received into their number, to commune with them regularly. Crowley began his operation to become an adept, defined as being in communion with your Angel, circa 1900 while still in the Golden Dawn and considered the ritual complete within the next several years with the reception of The Book of the Law. AC later considering the speaker, Aiwass, to be his angel, and this attainment was also cemented when he was kicked by a donkey in China. Shortly after the donkey incident he was in Japan and had a vision of being received into the Great White Brotherhood and within a few years he found himself in Algeria, in the Sahara, experimenting with a late Renaissance magical system popularly called Enochian (related to the Angels of Enoch) where he parted the veils of even loftier domains and was initiated into the Great White Brotherhood as a Master of the Temple, tantamount to a Boddhisatva who takes upon the sorrow of the world by vowing to return until no unilluminated soul remains.

In the remainder of this talk, advancing a more functional understanding of the difference between yoga and magick within the mysticism of Thelema. 

The Qabalistic mapping of the progress of an initiate upon the Tree of Life finds its explicit origins in Freemasonry but dates much further back, at least a couple thousand years where we find descriptions of the Sephirah and paths in works like the Sefer Yetzirah. Inasmuch as much of what’s now considered Qabalistic mysticism was appropriation of Gnostic concepts and these Neoplatonic ideas go even further back then the understanding of the Tree of Life as a model of emanation of the divine that conceals a method of return is a staple in European mysticism. We see ten sephirah and twenty two paths, and as each of them has a peculiar power, appropriate allegory or category of symbolism, and a relative importance then each of them implies some necessary stopping point or grade. In the system of the G∴D∴, and of the A∴A∴, there are ten such grades, explicitly corresponding to the Sephirah. In the system of OTO there are ten numbered grades and an additional 12 in-between grades (if you include EGC sacraments), totaling 22, the number of the paths. However, for Crowley there were only two initiations of significance. Perhaps it’s better to call them states or orders of being, destinations, or attainments. Again, this is the Angel and the Abyss, Life and Death, Light and Night or Lux and Nox in the Latin. The Book of Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage wherein is described the method of K&C with HGA comes from a tradition of esoteric Qabalistic literature where the Hebrew term Devekut was often used to describe this attainment, that meaning “clinging,” as if you’re connected to some new plateau or hierarchy. Crowley referred to Abramelin as the source for his terminology and understanding of the method, and he went on to write a few more. The second step, the crossing of the Abyss, is first explicitly engaged within Thelemic mysticism as an achievable initiation while living. Crowley believed that such an attainment was not new, just that access to it had become readier in this New Aeon. Similarly Crowley found many parallels of the “Holy Guardian Angel” in previous traditions, the worship of the Augoeides or personal Daimon being a popular observation in the classical Mediterranean world. Christ was seen as a universal and preferable alternative to this pagan medium, so much so that the worship of the genius annually on one’s birthday became a forbidden practice in Christian Rome. That’s right, it was a capital crime to celebrate your birthday.

What is very peculiar about these two initiations, in contrast to basically every other initiation or “grade,” is that it implies communion with a new order of beings. Abramelin’s term was “knowledge and conversation,” in the original German this “knowledge” was Kennen, to know something experientially rather than semantically. Kennen shares a PIE root with kindred, Gnosis and also with Knowledge, and Gnosis is translated in the New Testament usually to mean knowledge in a deeper sense of Christ. As mentioned previously, with Jesus Christ as the substitute for the HGA for early Roman Christians, Gnosis of Christ and Knowledge of the HGA are very akin. So where Knowledge means to experience or become aware of the religious significance of, Conversation means to talk to. But actually, con is with and versus means to turn. Versus’ PIE root is Wer, which variously means to lift, turn, cover or watch out for. From this we get the word weird, which is English for Wyrd, the Proto-germanic term for fate, and one’s fate may take many turns. So, to converse means to turn towards someone, to engage them, to give them attention, and possibly to turn to go their way, that path. And, it also means to talk to. So in one sense K&C means to discover and redirect, but it also means to conversate, and Abramelin and Crowley believed that more literal understanding to be the case.

The Law of Thelema is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The “Will” in question does not, according to Crowley, refer to some spontaneous interest or want. Rather, it referred to a sort of vocational calling for the individual that might manifest differently depending on one’s lot in life, nature, or especially their progress on the path. It may be more nebulous or more specific. But, Crowley believed that this imperative solved all questions of ethics, that it was a watch-word of freedom for all and that the discovery of your own individual will was crucial so that you could begin executing such in the world expediently. He also believed that the doing of the will would right your work and invite illumination and harmony in the world. 

Crowley originally identified this angel as a psychological phenomenon, attempting to be a sort of Buddhistic skeptic or neo-yogi rationalist like Vivekananda, whom he respected. He would variously call the Angel the higher self, true self, or the genius in the sense of your crispness of intuition. However later in his life he backed away from this pointedly, in Magick Without Tears Cap 43:

I have tended rather to elaborate this theme, because of the one personally important question which arises in more recent letters; for I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order.  He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood.  He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term “Higher Self” implies “a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion.”

It it were not so, there would be no point in The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.

Apart from any theoretical speculation, my Sammasiti [mindfulness] and analytical work has never led to so much as a hint of the existence of the Guardian Angel. He is not to be found by any exploration of oneself. It is true that the process of analysis leads finally to the realization of oneself as no more than a point of view indistinguishable in itself from any other point of view; but the Holy Guardian Angel is in precisely the same position.  However close may be the identities in millions of ways, no complete identification is ever obtainable.

But do remember this, above all else; they are objective, not subjective, or I should not waste good Magick on them.

This is relevant because Crowley is suggesting a real, rather than interpretive, Euhemerization (divine figures arising from mortals) as a possible origin of these angels. He proposes elsewhere that of his Saints list in the Gnostic Catholic Mass that some more ancient saints such as Krishna, Thoth or Dionysus might have once been men who collected some other tales about them and only their divine natures and powers are remembered today. So while he concedes that many spirits may be “incomplete microcosms” in that they are partial in being emmentations of the natural world, be it elemental, planetary, zodiacal or otherwise, he proposes that we humans inspirited by light have used the power of spirit to order the elements into a more or less functional quintessence whereby the powers of nature can be mastered and the conquering spirit thereby exalted into higher planes of being and achieve some sort of post-corporeal existence. 

So what does this “conversation” include? From Liber II AC writes:

The obvious practical task of the magician is then to discover what his will really is, so that he may do it in this manner, and he can best accomplish this by the practices of Liber Thisarb (see Equinox I(7), p. 105) or such others as may from one time to another be appointed.

The conversation with your angel is the beginning of a personal initiatory engagement with the angel. Your angel becomes your guide directly and leads you to a greater discovery of your will. Your angel informs you of the natures and powers of your own being, your spiritual lineage, and of magical formula appropriate to your own person. For Crowley, the discovery of your Will begins with the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. Therefore, the initiation into the adept grades is being informed of the unique essentiality you bring to the table of the world today. This is to say, the first real initiation for Crowley, that of the Angel, is you learning from a new order of beings that were once in your mortal predicament what you need to do to resolve your karma in order to continue in your aspiration and, perhaps more importantly, right the world. And as the crossing of the Abyss is likewise entering into Duat and engaging the next order of beings, the ascended masters, those who navigate and steer the ship of mankind, one is again entering into a new place of instruction on how to help in this endeavor. Therefore, the two real initiations in Thelema, the Angel and the Abyss, are about entry into a new order of being wherein you are given instructions on how personally and then strategically you might improve the human condition by manifesting illumination in word and deed by collaborating with this immortal brotherhood.

Now on to magick and yoga.

Crowley liked sciency sounding definitions of terms. This was because he had an optimistic view of science’s ability to resolve spiritual questions, which was a very contentious subject in his time and other mystics, such as the traditionalist school, looked at scientism as a profaning position that would ultimately reduce spiritual questions to quantifiable conjecture that appealed to the lower rationalistic instincts. Rene Guenon’s Reign of Quantity is a fantastic book and I believe he is ultimately right in that almost all modern occultists are rationalists and amateur psychologists. Crowley was more given to that earlier in life when he was reducing the HGA and the goetic demons to psychological or neurological features. But, even after he aggressively denounced that reductionism, he still liked the positivist idea of “Scientific Illuminism,” and he often gave important terms very broad definitions. For instance, perhaps most famously, he defined Magick as the “Science and Art of causing change in conformity with the will.” Rather than appealing to the magician and giving an example of how one would apply occult sciences and magical instincts to affect the course of human history through sorcery, in accordance with the Will, Crowley instead invokes the example of a man who wishes to write a letter. He uses his disk, the paper, his wand, the pen, to etch a talisman, the contents of his letter, and then he conjures a mercurial spirit, the postman, to deliver his will, which is his word, his magick, to say the Governor’s office to convince that loser to stop making children wear masks.

Crowley didn’t use the terms “high” or “white” magick, those being modern inventions of post-Crowley grifters. But he did use the term “black” magick, perhaps only to respond to allegations, but gave it a sciency definition or at least one that was in step with his definition of magick. Black magick is the pursuit of anything that is not in accord with your Will. They are vanities and the obsession over them is the obsession over things that are only tangentially a part of your personhood and are more likely just phantasms that you were mesmerized into confusing your self with by enterprising hucksters such as politicians or marketing mercenaries. At this point the internet and social media can be accurately described as a gateway to another dimension populated by nothing but spurious and toxic beings good at nothing but preying upon the vanities and insecurities of neglected children and weak-willed adults. Crowley continued that black magick, being the doing of something not in accord with your will, puts the incommunicado majority in a tough spot, but he said the best thing for those to do who do not know their will is to work hard to discover their will and some magick, in a classical or practical sense, might be appropriate to that, such as invoking Jupiter (whether a planetary spirit or a rural property mortgage broker) to secure a quiet place where one might complete the Abramelin Operation. 

Magick, for Crowley, is tied to the doing of the will. Crowley said in Antecedents of Thelema that Thelemite and Magician are practically synonyms. The will, for Crowley, is of cosmic ordination and significance, and the only ethical thing one can do is to discover and do one’s own will. The Will is discovered with the assistance of the angel, and the angels and greater orders of being are responsible for moving mankind along in an ennobling direction. Therefore magick, for Crowley, is at least the communication with higher orders of beings to learn what to do. Most, if not all, of Crowley’s described magical ceremonies are designed to prepare for this, stimulate this, and make firm this attainment.

Yoga, for Crowley, is essentially considered supportive of magick. Though Crowley says several times in his life that he was more of a yoga guy than a magick guy, and The Book of the Law was conceived during one such period, his most mature thoughts on the subject, later in his life, are recorded in what’s now a short publication called Eight Lectures on Yoga, originally a lecture, and also in Magick Without Tears. He consistently refers to magick as a mechanism of getting in contact with higher planes, an extraversion to yoga’s introversion, and in those higher planes one extends one’s power and mastery, learning and growing with the soul-stuff in those places and interacting with the spirits. He says in one place that while Magick is the art of communicating with spirits Yoga is the practice to get better at understanding what they’re saying. Yoga offers things like concentration, focus, which is a crucial skill to anyone who has attempted subtle body work or projecting one’s astral body into new planes. This also helps with equivalent skills such as spirit sight and spirit hearing, which is interacting with spirits during conjurations, scrying or seeing, where being able to hold on to the state of consciousness appropriate to the communication is something you need to passively do while you’re also attempting an inquiry, request or sacrifice. Yoga also helps you fixate on certain principalities, keep your cool, and abstract your mind to be able to receive novel impressions. Crowley marks that much of the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple is yogic in nature, and he’s referring to how the attainment of the 8th of 8 limbs of yoga, Samadhi, death, was necessary for him to snap his mind into the world beyond the Abyss. But, it was through invocations that Crowley initiated contact with those Secret Chiefs, in Cairo, then Shanghai, then Japan, and then in Algeria. Just the same, one spends a lot of time preparing for K&C with HGA, and then comes the prayerful and lengthy invocation, and then one spends a lot of time affirming that connection.

In the last part of this lecture I’d like to propose a terminological distinction derived from Thelema regarding magick and yoga. I hope my point has been made thus far that magick is principally attempting to communicate with spirits in higher orders of being to be graced with instructions designed to assist you in discovering and doing your Will and to further the Great Work. Yoga is therefore an umbrella term for practices designed to facilitate this communion. Yoga means Union, according to Crowley, but its etymology comes from the PIE yeug, to join, where we get the term yoke, as in to fashion together beasts of burden to pull a plough or chariot. Yokes were symbols of toil and discipline, and yoga is breaking yourself with practices to be able to focus, empty or abstract the mind. We must therefore ask how much of what is popularly described as being “magick” is either magick or yoga. 

Take for instance the practices of the Golden Dawn that lead up to the adept grades where, at least in Crowley’s system of A∴A∴, Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel is implied. Again referring to the 10-step Tree of Life diagram of initiation, the four lowest Sephirah, whose grades constitute the “Outer College,” are all preparatory and have specific tasks involving practice, memorization and knowledge. You begin with simple rituals and rising on the planes. Then you advance to the first two limbs of yoga, which is learning how to sit still and breathe regularly. Then you advance to some additional practices but otherwise a ton of memorization of Qabalah, which is an interpretive mechanism for making subtle communications and organizing thoughts and memories. Then you advance to more specific invocations outlined in very rudimentary texts. Unlike in the Golden Dawn, some of these A∴A∴ expectations in the Outer College are subtlety invocatory. However, the majority of this work is about discipline, concentration, focus, clarity, abstraction and subtleties, and achieving clarity. All of it is therefore preparatory for the first and real invocation, that of the Angel. Therefore I maintain that all of these practices are essentially yoga and not magick. For instance, the Ritual of the Pentagram is a staple of the magician’s daily diet of exercises as specified in De Cultu in Liber Aleph, and its basic form is purely an exercise in imprinting Qabalistic signifiers into the mind and subtle body of the magician via meditative focus on symbols. This is yoga. However Crowley did slightly modify the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and installed in it something that is perhaps more meditative, as he suggests in his Notes. He later modified the ritual several times, ending with Liber V vel Reguli, which is explicitly magick in the sense that it is inviting communion with the governing forces of the Aeon.

This procedure is nothing new. All religions, antique and modern, focus heavily on purification so that the singular object might be received and maintained more perfectly. This is usually some combination of ritual baths, Struggle Sessions to atone for transgressions and confession of devotion to the ineffable, called faith. Older religions would require feats to validate your place within the tribe, which is inextricable from the religion, like puberty rituals where you go out and kill an animal on your own or sew your own tapestry or join a Mannerbund or something. By the Early Modern Period this had become something of a science for Christendom. There was a very mechanical process for invigilating right behavior and evidencing your fidelity to Christ’s Kingdom. But because of some combination of the stodginess of this, institutional failures of the Church of Rome and violent incursion of Islam into Catholic lands, some peoples, movements and even Kingdoms began to part ways and develop new aesthetics and ascetic procedures. One such example is the Alumbrados of post-Reconquista Iberia, which is the earliest explicit “Illuminati” group, who attempted to develop a devotional methodology to personally communicate with Christ. This later turned into allegations of Satanism and of Priests hanging themselves on a Cross while nuns copulated with them to “release souls from purgatory.” But the question was a good one: how do you make yourself worthy of God’s attention, maintain that state of grace, and at the same time not become the victim of an imposter spirit? Ignatius of Loyola followed on the Alombrados’ heels with his Spiritual Exercises in the mid 16th century, and a century later yet another Iberian, our St. Miguel Molinos, offered his wildly popular Spiritual Guide that Disentangles the Soul. But even before Ignatius there were many Italians and Bavarians forming spiritual orders devoted to exploring the mysteries of Qabalah, Qabalah-inspired meditations that are very in step with some of the latter limbs of Yoga such as Dharana and Dhyana, and that were even using devotional practices and models derived from antiquity. It is from this Renaissance that Thelema derives much of its mystical vocabulary and interests, and while “magick” has been the blanket term for much of this “yoga” is a more accurate one. But, Magick has been the purpose for at least the past 600 years in that the primary concern of these Renaissance magicians was to enter into conversation with higher orders of beings, be they angels, saints, or even Christ himself. 

It should come at no surprise that many contemporary occultists focus on more mechanical rituals such as those the Golden Dawn advertised. In my definition they are yoga rituals and not magick rituals, but as yoga rituals they are only subservient to the person attempting to discipline their vessel into being able to accomplish the real invocation. But for most occultists the yoga is enough. Remember that Crowley defined yoga as the introversion, the looking inwards, the sammasati or mindfulness, the shaping of a person into something smart and athletic. However, it ends there. I believe the propensity to focus on these technical accomplishments is because of the therapeutic society that we live in today where attainment is a psychological and Epicurian effort. It’s premised on the idea that you are born flawed but can be happy if you’re only a better version of yourself, and in this labyrinth of self importance that people slave away, yoked to the herd morality from which they derive their idea of betterment. But there is no magick therein, because the Great Work, the advancement of mankind to the Next Step, is accomplished through clinging to the higher, communicating with the eternal and denying that our own conceit and content is the end all be all of attainment. 

“Nor is there any rest, Sweet Heart. Save in the cradle of Royal Bacchus, the thigh of the most holy one.” - Liber VII vel Lapis Lazuli, Cap 4, v. 14

This has been a heavier lecture and I haven’t been able to describe everything in exactly the way that I wanted to. This is because Thelema really turns traditional mysticism on its head, especially Christian mysticism and its increasingly common parodies such as the new age movement. Terms like free will, self, enlightenment, transcendence and so on really have no place in Thelema. We are not transcendental idealists attempting to escape the world by inverting into nothingness or escaping into a state of blissful inconsequentiality like Nirvana or Heaven. We are warrior monks attempting to execute our will and establish the dominion of the Law of Thelema upon the earth so that the wedding of flesh and spirit might be consummated in every action and the genius of mankind, which is the Will to Power, which is the Will, might express itself freely. 

Love is the law, love under will.

[part 2 of this talk is scheduled for the 12/12]

Thelema as an umbrella culture is staked on the importance placed on the individual Will, but this is not our distinguishing trait as there are no few religious and philosophical traditions both past and present that expound on this. Our uniqueness lies in an understanding of how this Will comes to be known and done, and our answer is the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.

K&C, if you’ll pardon the abbreviation, is also not peculiar to our tradition. On one hand you have an understanding of the angel as the inner genius that, expressed, inspirits one’s life with a richness of understanding and meaning that guides the individual towards their idiosyncratic talent the universe requires of them. Emerson praised this sort of Gnosis half a century before Crowley, such as in his essay Self-Reliance, and he was among many others from the western Christian tradition. On the other hand there’s the understanding of the angel as a discarnate entity who, having achieved some mastery while living, survives death to mentor men. Again, there were many who spoke to this Gnosis coming from eastern and western traditions, Crowley providing a list of cross-cultural corollaries in The Temple of Solomon the King. He did assert in the end of his life that the angel is its own being, not some higher self or personal qualia. 

Crowley found uniqueness in his appreciating how this sort of ethical mysticism can resolve issues of both philosophy and religion. He believed that the individual’s relationship with their genius might vary where some require a more methodical approach to achieving this Gnosis, ie Magick, while others might have a lucid and natural communion. After Nietzsche and Emerson, Crowley called these latter people artists. However achieved, Crowley believed it was imperative for each individual and so for all people to discover and do their Will, to initiate this communion with Genius, which is Gnosis. His understanding of both individual liberty and cultural progress was rooted in this goal. For Crowley, this is good. So, what is evil?

Crowley wrote in Liber Librae, “Nevertheless have the greatest self-respect, and to that end sin not against thyself. The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.” The language here deviates from a common understanding of Thelema as it speaks of sin and pardon in a religion where, “There is no grace, there is no guilt. This is the Law: Do what thou wilt!” But the logic is sound as the denial of truth and knowledge, both of which can be understood as an experience of Gnosis, is a denial of one’s very capacity, a sin that is not a slight to some deity but instead as a grave offense to the one true god, one’s self, specifically one’s capacity to commune with the divine. 

Liber Librae is Crowley’s adaptation of the Fourth Knowledge Lecture of the Golden Dawn, given to the Practicus, specifically “ON THE GENERAL GUIDANCE AND PURIFICATION OF THE SOUL,” and preserves the tone and nod given to the Sermon on the Mount. For instance, from the GD version, “When men shall revile thee and speak against thee falsely, hath not the Master said “Blessed art thou.” This is a reference to the last of the Blessings of KJV Matthew 5:11, “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” The Master speaking is Jesus Christ. Crowley preserved this honorific in his Liber Librae. The Sermon on the Mount is the first of the Five Discourses of Matthew. The third discourse also bears some relevance, or rather what immediately precedes it. In the beginning of Matthew 12 Jesus apologized for his followers harvesting grain on the Sabbath. The Pharisees challenged him to heal on the Sabbath, and he did so, but then Jesus fled to avoid arrest. The pharisees mocked Christ, calling him “ἀκάθαρτον,” Akatharton, which means mixed, of mixed spirit. In Matthew, Jesus says, "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” When Jesus was being called an “evil spirit” by the Pharisees, he informed them that it was one thing to blaspheme him, but it was unpardonable to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. That sin was final. The third discourse comes in the next chapter, 13, in the form of numerous parables, most of which are seed related. 

What is here important is the parallel between Liber Librae and the Sermon on the Mount and the equating of the “Eternal Sin” of Matthew 12:31-32, “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” In Liber Librae, “Nevertheless have the greatest self-respect, and to that end sin not against thyself. The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.” This “sin” is the denial of the Holy Spirit, the possibility of communion with genius, which is gnosis, which is “truth.” The “knowledge” feared is the gnosis of spiritual vision. The “prejudices” are those personal vanities that scatter the will. 

The author of the GD lecture understood the metaphor of gnosis vs thoughts in Matthew. The “scattering” of Matthew 12:30 is echoed in the GD lecture, “To obtain magical Power, learn to control thought. Admit only true ideas which are in harmony with the end desired, and not every stray and contradictory idea that presents itself.” 

Crowley elaborates in The Heart of the Master, “Also, to deny the Law of Thelema is a restriction in oneself, affirming conflict in the Universe as necessary. It is a blasphemy against the Self, assuming that its Will is not a necessary (and therefore a noble) part of the Whole. In a word he who accepts not the Law of Thelema is divided against himself: that is, he is insane, and the upshot shall be the ruin of the Unity of his Godhead.”

When the Jesuits went to China, hundreds of years ago, and they set out to translate the Bible into classical Chinese, they were at pains to find a word that paralleled the Holy Spirit in its mystical magnitude (without conjuring the image of a friendly Chinese ghost). To appreciate the mystical vernacular of the Chinese language the Jesuits studied Daoism and found a very common spirit, they translated “Holy Spirit” as “Dao” in Chinese, understanding that this Way, the Way, was their Way, Truth and Life. I would add that this Holy Spirit, this Dao, is the Will. The spirit must be holy, not mixed. Gathered, not scattered. One thing, not two, not divided against itself. 

The Will, a product of Gnosis, K&C, is crucial to liberation. To deny (the necessity and therefore nobility of) the Will, or to deny (the possibility and presence of) K&C, is the irredeemable restriction, sin. To we who are Thelemic Gnostics, there is no refuge for Agnostics, those who assert the impossibility of Gnosis, or Knowing. This is not to tease those who have casually identified as “agnostics” in their life when it would have been more accurate for them to say that they are lazy or uninformed, the Lumpenphilosoph. The offender here is more the Atheist, scorned in Mackey’s Masonic Encyclopedia as “One who does not believe in the existence of God. Such a state of mind can only arise from the ignorance of stupidity or a corruption of principle, since the whole universe is filled with the moral and physical proofs of a Creator.” The knee-jerk of the new atheist would mock this “creationism” because the handicap of his imagination reduces his capacity to understand the thesis at about the level of a toddler watching Fantasia and wondering if Mickey was the creator. Rather, abstractly, the creative force that we accept as being responsible for the universe is Chaos, whose ebbs and flows through the nothingness of space evidence the maxim “As Above, So Below,” or As Big, So Small, for the macrocosm and microcosm follow self-same patterns and the hermeticist recognizes within his person the very same formulae that echo through eternity. Mackey also references the Book of Constitutions of 1723, “A Mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious libertine.” 

Anyone who denies the Holy Spirit is not a Christian. 

Anyone who says they do not believe in the Holy Guardian Angel is not a Thelemite.

Crowley also comments on the atheist in his essay Gematria as printed in “777 and other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley,” that:

Atheists are of three kinds, 

1. The mere stupid man. (Often he is very clever, as Bolingbroke, Bradlaugh and Foote were clever.) He has found out one of the minor arcana, and hugs it and despises those who see more than himself, or who regard things from a different standpoint. Hence he is usually a bigot, intolerant even of tolerance. 

2. The despairing wretch, who, having sought God everywhere, and failed to hind Him, thinks everyone else is as blind as he is, and that if he has failed — he, the seeker after truth! — it is because there is no goal. In his cry there is pain, as with the stupid kind of atheist there is smugness and self-satisfaction. Both are diseased Egos. 

3. The philosophical adept, who, knowing God, says “There is No God,” meaning “God is Zero,” as qabalistically He is. he holds atheism as a philosophical speculation as good as any other, and perhaps less likely to mislead mankind and do other practical damage than any other. Him you may know by his equanimity, enthusiasm, and devotion. I again refer to Liber 418 for an explanation of this mystery. The nine religions are crowned by the ring of adepts whose password is “There is No God,” so inflected that even the Magister when received among them had not wisdom to interpret it.”

But another dilemma of dogma arises for those of us who believe in the promise of “certainty, not faith.” How can someone who lacks gnosis be expected to believe in it? The answer is given by Crowley in his Preliminary Remarks, the introduction to Part 1, Mysticism, of Book 4, Liber ABA. Crowley bemoans the bankruptcy of vainglorious religious inquiry, commenting, “No religion has failed hitherto by not promising enough; the present breaking up of all religions is due to the fact that people have asked to see the securities.”  He proposes instead to not start from theory but instead from observation, by turning to the written accounts to look for themes and commonalities. This is the method of Scientific Illuminism, a hermetic science and anthropic one, similar to what Emerson called the Joyful Science and Nietzsche called “The Gay Science” or “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,” where fröhliche means Gay or Joyful. Frolick comes from fröhliche, a sort of defiant enthusiasm, a gaiety where spirit and creativity might make manifest. Wissenschaft is science. Crowley writes:

But what of the origin of religions? How is it that unproved assertion has so frequently compelled the assent of all classes of mankind? Is not this a miracle?

There is, however, one form of miracle which certainly happens, the influence of the genius. There is no known analogy in Nature. One cannot even think of a "super-dog" transforming the world of dogs, whereas in the history of mankind this happens with regularity and frequency. Now here are three "super-men," all at loggerheads. What is there in common between Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed? Is there any one point upon which all three are in accord?

No point of doctrine, no point of ethics, no theory of a "hereafter" do they share, and yet in the history of their lives we find one identity amid many diversities.

Crowley goes on to illustrate how they, along with numerous others, share some core aspects of their lives and so in their teachings. 

Elaborate lives of each have been written by devotees, and there is one thing common to all three -- an omission. We hear nothing of Christ between the ages of twelve and thirty. Mohammed disappeared into a cave. Buddha left his palace, and went for a long while into the desert.

Each of them, perfectly silent up to the time of the disappearance, came back and immediately began to preach a new law.

Making every possible deduction for fable and myth, we get this one coincidence. A nobody goes away, and comes back a somebody. This is not to be explained in any of the ordinary ways.

What was the nature of their power? What happened to them in their absence?

History will not help us to solve the problem, for history is silent.

We have only the accounts given by the men themselves.

It would be very remarkable should we find that these accounts agree.

Of the great teachers we have mentioned Christ is silent; the other four tell us something; some more, some less.

Buddha goes into details too elaborate to enter upon in this place; but the gist of it is that in one way or another he got hold of the secret force of the World and mastered it.

Of St. Paul's experiences, we have nothing but a casual allusion to his having been "caught up into Heaven, and seen and heard things of which it was not lawful to speak."

Mohammed speaks crudely of his having been "visited by the Angel Gabriel," who communicated things from "God."

Moses says that he "beheld God."

Diverse as these statements are at first sight, all agree in announcing an experience of the class which fifty years ago would have been called supernatural, to-day may be called spiritual, and fifty years hence will have a proper name based on an understanding of the phenomenon which occurred.

The methods advised by all these people have a startling resemblance to one another. They recommend "virtue" (of various kinds), solitude, absence of excitement, moderation in diet, and finally a practice which some call prayer and some call meditation. (The former four may turn out on examination to be merely conditions favourable to the last.)

We do not believe in any supernatural explanations, but insist that this source may be reached by the following out of definite rules, the degree of success depending upon the capacity of the seeker, and not upon the favour of any Divine Being. We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurrence in the brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object. We propose to discuss this phenomenon, analyse its nature, determine accurately the physical, mental and moral conditions which are favourable to it, to ascertain its cause, and thus to produce it in ourselves, so that we may adequately study its effects. 

So there is an understanding that these great masters of times past have a common narrative - prince to pauper to prophet - and that the real redemption came from a common experience - Gnosis. They describe having witnessed God, Theophany, and it’s important to remember that Gnosis is knowledge gotten through experience or vision. These prophets experienced certainty and preached faith, but not a sating faith. The faith they preached was one of observation of practices that might lead to a similar experience. So too is Gnosis translated in KJV 1 Timothy 6:20-21 as science, “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.” In terms of Scientific Illuminism, Postulants were enjoined to repeat the experiments of prophets to see if similar results are achieved. This was not just to discover if the original scientist was or was not a fraud but also because the end was seen as desirable, both for its ability to satisfy the religious instinct and also because of the sort of man it produced, a Holy Man, a man of virtue whose illuminating experience turned them into a lighthouse for those lost at sea, a catalyst for the ennoblement of civilization. This was another common thread among holy men not here mentioned by Crowley, that their Gnosis transformed their worlds. In Liber 33, Crowley’s version of “Cloud Upon the Sanctuary,” he writes:

But as men multiplied, the frailty of man necessitated an exterior society which veiled the interior one, and concealed the spirit and the truth in the letter, because many people were not capable of comprehending great interior truth.

But all exterior societies subsist only by virtue of this interior one. As soon as external societies wish to transform a temple of wisdom into a political edifice, the interior society retires and leaves only the letter without the spirit. It is thus that secret external societies of wisdom were nothing but hieroglyphic screens, the truth remaining inviolable in the Sanctuary so that she might never be profaned.

Liber 33 speaks mostly in terms of initiatory societies, but to Karl Eckartshausen’s romantic idea of human evolution this was meant in larger terms of the development of civilization. This would agree with Eliade and St. Constant’s ideas of all societies beginning as initiatory ones and the deterioration of this spiritual understanding of civilization has led to a great entropy in the ennoblement of humanity.

There is another cause for faith for those who have yet to achieve K&C, which is the fruits of those who have. Just like shielding your eyes from the Light of the sun so that you can bear witness to its effect upon the earth, Life, you don’t have to see the sun to know that there’s a cause for all the abundance upon the planet. When we witness innovation, creativity, ardour, excellence and virtue, we witness the expression of genius. When we seek beauty we find truth, and the truth that we find is a resonance between our heart and the heart of the creator of that beauty. The Master Mansur al Hallaj wrote, “I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart. I asked, ‘who are you?’ He replied, ‘you.’” 

There is a natural faith that comes through a deeper sense, a hermetic experience of the resonance of hearts that inspires faith that there is something within and beyond the gross impression of nature and humanity. The Master of the Temple experiences the Trance of Wonder, from the final phrase of the Oath of a Master of the Temple. "I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul." Crowley writes in Little Essays Toward Truth, Wonder:

It is necessary to add but one brief word to this elementary essay: this Trance is of its nature not only passive and intuitive. Its occurrence floods the mind with Creative Energy; it fills the Adept with Power, and excites in him the Will to work. It exalts him to the Atziluthic World in his Essence, and in his manifestation to the Briatic. In a very special sense, therefore, it may be said that the Postulant is most intimately united with the Supreme Lord God Most High, the True and Living Creator of all Things, whensoever he attains to enter this most Majestic Pylon of the Trance of Wonder.

With all this let not the aspirant fear faith, for there is a natural faith in the integrity of those who came before, and also an understanding that civilization, when strong, has a quality that evidences ennoblement as well as nurtures it. Blasphemy in Thelema is to deny excellence, the Troglodyte is blind to this beauty and resents those who preach its immanence and the path of communion, to deny the great Anthropic truth, that there is no god but man, he who is to be overcome.

Love is the law, love under will.

Eucharistic magick is a staple of the Magician's regular practice. In De Cultu from Liber Aleph, Crowley instructs, "Neglect not the daily Miracle of the Mass, either by the Rite of the Gnostic Catholic Church, or that of the Phoenix." In the Sixth Article of the Creed of the Thelemites, we recite, "And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass." In Liber ABA Crowley devotes some chapters to the Eucharist and the Bloody Sacrifice. Crowley wrote that 

    A Eucharist of some sort should most assuredly be consummated daily by every magician, and he should regard it as the main sustenance of his magical life. It is of more importance than any other magical ceremony, because it is a complete circle. The whole of the force expended is completely re-absorbed; yet the virtue is that vast gain represented by the abyss between Man and God. 

    The magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal frame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name. 

    This is the most important of all magical secrets that ever were or are or can be. To a Magician thus renewed the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel becomes an inevitable task; every force of his nature, unhindered, tends to that aim and goal of whose nature neither man nor god may speak, for that it is infinitely beyond speech or thought or ecstasy or silence. Samadhi and Nibbana are but its shadows cast upon the universe. 

All this is mentioned to illustrate the importance that Crowley placed upon this regular ritual. This ritual action is one of the more obvious borrows of Crowley from earlier traditions, taken and advanced in his way and with roots that go into pre-history. In antecedent traditions ritual sacrifices were similarly emphasized. Both the Pentateuch and the Gospels place bloody sacrifice and breaking bread in central roles for popular celebration. Just the same, The Book of the Law has somewhere between 7 and 11 verses devoted to this ritual. This stands out in The Book of the Law as being the most detailed and tangible exhortation. Coupled with Crowley's emphasis it is surprising that Eucharistic magick is not a more common practice in Thelemic culture than other ritual actions such as the Pentagram Ritual, Liber Resh, Raja Yoga, or whatever it is that OTO does. It is also surprising that the recipe is approached relatively casually despite it being the main course of OTO activity where, by contrast, all other minutiae of the Gnostic Mass is deliberated over endlessly.

In this essay I want to go into the recipe a little more aggressively with some inevitable interpretation of the verses in question. It is my goal to present a recipe that is more textual and tastier, albeit slightly more involved. I understand that the production of cakes can be quite simple, but I hope the reader will entertain this more detailed version if only because the simpler recipes deviate in pretty significant ways from the recipe in Liber AL, which I will explain.

I  want to enjoin my fellow Thelemites to be more observant of De Cultu and present how this might be done without the difficulty that a Gnostic Mass can be (when aiming for daily communication!) or the timing inconvenience of the Mass of the Phoenix. 

Cakes of Light have been colloquially called "death cookies," in jest, but a cake is not a cookie. Cookies are pretty easy to make – mix up flour, sugar, egg, butter and water, then bake. Notice though that nowhere in Liber AL are any of those ingredients mentioned! Liber AL Cap III V. 23 reads, 

For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.

We'll go into these one by one. A big difference between my recipe and others' is the attention paid to the reagents. Most importantly I emphasize the observation of Liber AL's verbiage with reference to historical recipes and implications. I also encourage the use of rawer ingredients, not out of some deference to orthorexic magicians but rather because the level of purification and filtration of modern foodstuffs has the negative effect of removing natural yeasts from them. Additionally, many store-bought products identify as something that they are not. A driving theory of this more elaborate recipe is that the yeast that causes the Cake to rise, a crucial symbolical action, comes from the components. 

Meal is any grain that has been milled.  Oftentimes in English literature you will have reference to corn. The Golden Bough uses this term consistently, but bear in mind that corn (as depicted here) is a new world grain and Europeans say "corn" to refer to any whole grain. Take for instance the very relevant early British rhyme, John Barleycorn: There was three kings into the east,/ Three kings both great and high,/ And they hae/ sworn a solemn oath/ John Barleycorn should die./ There was three men come out o' the west their fortunes for to try,/ And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die,/ They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in, throwed clods upon his head,/ Til these three men were satisfied John Barleycorn was dead. The story of the runaway gingerbread homunculus is also a curious example of creating living beings from grain. Crowley wrote "... not only do I hold the cult of John Barleycorn to be the only true religion, but have established his worship anew; in the last three years branches of my organisation have sprung up all over the world to celebrate the ancient rite."

A mill is a big grinding stone that crushes up grain mechanically, making simple and quick what would otherwise be a huge pain. It was a revolutionary industrial invention in the ancient world and whole cities sprung up around simple mills that were powered by streams, donkeys or Conan. It crushed the grain to a certain fineness, but not necessarily that of flour. Flour is a powder, meal is grainy. If you buy packaged meal you'll find it is very grainy. Some stores have finer grain grain; I purchase "stoneground wheat" from local stores, but Cream of Wheat or farina could be considered equivalents. Again, the reason I do this is because the verse says "meal," not flour, and I hope that a rawer reagent might still have residual yeast in it. In the New Commentaries to The Book of the Law Crowley writes that Meal is "ordinary wheaten flour," but again for purposes of having rawer yeastier reagents of greater historical approximation (even to Crowley's time) we're going to avoid bleached or “enhanced” pulverized powder. Yeast is often seen on foodstuffs as a simple white powder, the same white powder you see on grapes you buy. Unless they're chemically washing or bleaching the stuff, which I doubt, then that yeast is still there and still alive. I utilize wheat because of its flavor and historical accessibility to the Mediterranean region. Other grains used by ancient man were spelt and barley. I have mixed these grains before, but always keeping my meal mix at least 3/4 wheat. 

Honey is bee vomit, nature’s finest excrement. Honey is very good for you, not only as a treatment for allergies but also because of its antibacterial quality. In the good old days it was a go-to for covering wounds. It also lasts forever without refrigeration - perfectly preserved honey has been found in Egyptian tombs. Very raw honey can also have yeast that would have been carried into the admixture by bees, but you're going to have to go local to get honey that raw. Honey has to be a little filtered unless you like eating bug legs, but the honey you get at any grocery store is extremely processed. Further, it is usually pasteurized, which means boiled, which would also kill any yeasts and de-nature components whose properties we want to carry into our cakes. If nothing else be warned that most mass market honey is not honey at all but is actually honey-flavored Chinese sugar goo. I know those little plastic bears are cute, but do not trust their dead eyes. Check with your local hippies or utilize google to find a honey supplier near you. Shop around because some of those yippies think its worth its weight in gold!

Thick leavings of red wine is where it gets a lot more involved and where the most inappropriate shortcuts are most popular. "Leavings" is an archaic term found in The Book of the Law. Crowley commented that "the 'beeswing' of port should be good." Beeswing comes from "bee's wing" and is a residue that you might find in the bottom of a bottle of port, a red dessert wine. The issue is that beeswing is seldom thick - being crystallized - and increasingly rare in this mechanically filtered world we live in. I have purchased an embarrassing amount of bottles of wine in my life and only found residual goo or beeswing in a few. To compensate for the scarcity of this essential component there are two popular alternatives, both inventive and both wrong.

One technique is to dump into a saucepan a bottle of red wine or port and boil it on very low heat for a long ass time. This will boil out the ethanol and reduce the liquid into a goop that is thick, of red wine, and left behind, which really sounds like what the verse calls for except that it denatures the product and kills the yeast. Another increasingly common course is to simply use Cream of Tartar. Cream of Tartar is a hundreds of years old product of alchemical distillation that you find in the works of Paracelsus, Basil Valentine and others. It is the purified powder that you get from lees, which means lies as in the sediment that lies at the bottom of a bottle. Because it's processed from something yeasty Cream of Tartar has an effect on dough that makes it lighter. If you mix it with baking soda: baking powder! But there are a few problems with Cream of Tartar. First, it's not "thick." Second, it's not "leavings" as I'm about to define that term. Third and perhaps most importantly, it's not even "of red wine!” ALL commercial Cream of Tartar is made from white grapes, not red, and the grapes that are used for making Cream of Tartar are not even used to make wine, they are cultivated specifically for the production of Cream of Tartar. I was shocked when I read this in an industry article and I wrote several manufacturers and they confirmed it. Despite the red grapes depicted on the little label, it just ain’t so.

I propose that "leavings" means leavening lees. In the practice of viticulture, the art of producing wine, one first jumps up and down in a big tub of grapes. Then, you let it sit there for a minute and the yeast will go crazy and the whole mixture will start to bubble. The first filtration takes place which removes what's called the "must." Must includes leaves, sticks, and grape skin. Subsequent filtrations remove any other residue and once it is done the wine is barreled or bottled and left to age. Fermentation, which is what we call when yeast eats sugars and excretes ethanol, has to be done before bottling as the container expands with the farts and the heat of the reactions taking place inside. In modern winemaking the filtration removes all residue before bottling, which is why lees are now so rare. If you find lees in a bottle the wine is called sur lie, on lees, and the lees are dead yeast. Dead yeast does not leaven, which means to lift up as in levee, levity or levitate. Yeast is what causes sugars to turn into alcohol and also what causes bread to rise (because of the trapped gas). We need those lees to leaven in order to be leavings. To acquire leavings you therefore need to get what is taken out of the last filtration (after the must has been filtered out). So unless you're cozy with a viticulturalist, here's what you do.

Watch this video! And/or follow these simple instructions. Get a thing of Welch's grape juice without any additives. Drink a cup of it for space for foam for burping. Then add two teaspoons of regular old yeast, though your local liquor store should have wine yeast available which will get your product to higher concentrations of ethanol. Very little yeast is necessary to ferment the wine, but adding more yeast can get you more leavings. Give it a shake and then let it be. Within an hour you'll see it frothing. Within two or three hours you'll need to start burping the container as it'll expand pretty rapidly. You want to keep it sealed to prevent alien microbes from floating in and contaminating the concoction, but you'll want to leave a little crack in it overnight and it'll aspirate on its own.

In a few weeks it'll be well fermented and there'll be a good amount of leavings on the bottom, meaning yeast that has exhausted the sugar, sunk to the bottom but is still mostly alive. Bottle the wine and leave a swish in the jug and slosh it around to absorb that yeast. You should be able to get about one ounce of thick liquid leavings. Alternatively just cut the jug open and spoon out the goop. And don't ditch the wine! If you don't or won't or can't drink it then your leavings are technically not "of wine."

Oil of Abramelin can be complex to make yourself. I purchase Abramelin Oil locally but it is available online. Crowley's from the commentary to Liber AL:

• 8 parts cinnamon essential oil 

• 4 parts myrrh essential oil 

• 2 parts galangal essential oil 

• 7 parts olive oil 

And mix! Be careful in procuring these component reagents as much of the cinnamon and galangal oil on the market are usually just cheaper substitutes. The final product could be quite expensive depending on the level of quality you desire. This will easily be the most expensive ingredient, but it is used very sparingly so an investment will last for some time. Remember that Magick is the Royal Art, so don't skimp or you're liable to be purchasing and producing trash. 

And olive oil is a pretty easy get, but remember that the goal is to get rawer and yeastier products and olives, like grapes, can have a residual yeast on them. Don't get "extra virgin olive oil" just because it sounds sexier. Like mass market honey it's filtered to death and most products available are fakes as a big expose in 2014 showed. CBS did a special on how to identify the real stuff. Regular olive oil is great, it's distinctly cloudier.

Rich fresh blood is the last ingredient and there's some ambiguity with how it becomes present in the final product. What it is comes up in the next verse: The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what. So there are options! 

Blood is the sixth component and clergy often call it "Ingredient X." Liber AL is ambiguous as to whether the final product contains fresh blood or blood that has been mixed with batter and reduced to ash. OTO's policy for cakes is that they either have "livestock blood obtained legally from a butcher shop or a farm" or "Ash from Cakes of Light made according to any reasonable interpretation of [Liber AL Cap III v 23] or [Liber AL Cap III v 25]," so OTO adopts both interpretations of the method of introduction. Obviously there are more sourcing options for X going directly into the batter, but not for OTO events unless they’re made ash first. OTO’s reasoning here, like usual, is legal, since the reduction of bloodied cakes to ash denatures the X to where courts do not regard it as being what it may be. But, it is ambiguous in Liber AL if the ash is gotten from burned bloodied cakes or from burned bloodied batter. So simply take a cake, get your blood on it, burn it on a coal or an electric burner, grind it with a mortar and pestle and add the ash to batter. Don't fret about the coal's Potassium Nitrate (saltpeter), which has the stigma of suppressing sexual appetite. That was bad information from the early 20th century and it's not added to corn flakes anymore, nor is it given to soldiers to make them less rapey. I utilize a coal to burn up a small cake that I've bloodied (and that I use for incense), then I grind it up and add that ash to a new batter that I prepare. Bringing ash from the last cake of one batch into the next batch establishes an alchemical continuity. Continuity of reagents is a traditional consideration, such as with using starter yeast from previous doughs and vintages, and also with the Holy Oil described in Exodus which contains a drop from a previous batch, transferring the essence into the new medium.

The burning of the host would be sacrilege to a Christian, the sort of black magick that they were warned of in De Defectibus, but it has its roots in the classical worship of the Daemon in the manner of Socrates where one would burn honey cakes as an offering to their Daemon on their birthday. This is the reason birthdays were outlawed as a pagan practice under the reign of Constantine, a capital crime that was prosecuted for a thousand years. This was likely in deference to 1 Corinthians 10:21 and the understanding of Christ as the liaison for man with god rather than his personal spirit. This tradition is carried in Thelema explicitly in the above referenced Mass of the Phoenix, Chapter 44 of The Book of Lies, where the magician burns one cake and bleeds on and consumes the other. The former is explained in Chapter 62 of the same book as the one that “illustrates the profit drawn from the scheme of incarnation” and the latter “illustrates the use of the lower life to feed the higher life.” The Mass of the Phoenix is therefore a good ritual to implement if you’re down to two cakes and you want to enjoy a sacrament and end up with a burnt host for your next batch. However, if cakes you consume have ash from a previous batch in them then you’d need to first be gifted ashes from another’s batch in order to begin your own continuity of reagents.

For further reading I strongly recommend Sister Kimbell's essay on beeswing, though obviously I very much disagree with her recommendations for substituting leavings her research is great. T Polyphilus' Discourse on the Miracle of the Mass is great for information and reflection, as is, of course, Crowley's chapters in Liber ABA, Of the Eucharist and of the Art of Alchemy and Of the Bloody Sacrifice: and Matters Cognate. 

Love is the law, love under will.

In Thelema the vast majority of us are converts, coming from old-time traditions or an irreligious upbringing, this in stark contrast to mainstream religions Occidental and Oriental where most of their adherents are born into an ideological framework composed of morals and metaphysics that most of us would consider morose and mundane. We were born into that framework as well, and while we have embraced the Law of Light we still bear the scars of the scourging of our indentured servitude to the slave gods. To what degree can we spare our children the servile madness of time past? Can we raise a generation free in mind, body and spirit from the heavy darkness of the world? Crowley seemed to think so, and he thought that OTO might be the vehicle for that change.

In several places Crowley talks about the importance of promulgating to the masses, such as in his campfire metaphor in Liber CCC, but in the OTO-focused book Liber CI Crowley seems more interested in a special kind of growth in our community by adopting and educating children. This practice was not uncommon in other contemporary traditions such as Islam where special schools would be set up to care for the orphaned children of conquered peoples. Rather than eating the children they would be sent to special schools and raised in the light of Islam to grow into capable diplomats or assassins, as needed.

In Liber CI Crowley writes in Of the Duties of the Brethren, Fifth House (that of Leo) this: 

13. Every Brother shall seek constantly to give pleasure to all Brethren with whom he is acquainted, whether by entertainment or conversation, or in any other manner that may suggest itself. It will frequently and naturally arise that love itself springs up between members of the Order, for that they have so many and sacred interests in common. Such love is peculiarly holy, and is to be encouraged.

14. All children of Brethren are to be considered as children of the whole Order, and to be protected and aided in every way by its members severally, as by its organization collectively. No distinction is to be made with regard to the conditions surrounding the birth of any child.

15. There is an especially sacred duty, which every Brother should fulfil, with regard to all children, those born without the Order included. This duty is to instruct them in the Law of Thelema, to teach them independence and freedom of thought and character, and to warn them that servility and cowardice are the most deadly diseases of the human soul.

Crowley not only recommends that we reproduce with one another but anticipates children being born of these common interests. He also says that children are to be a priority, each equally, and that the general membership should take pains to rear and revere them. He goes so far to say that children born without the order should be extended the same charity, that they should be taught pride and strength in accordance with the Law of Thelema. 

Later, in the Tenth house (that of Capricorn) Crowley marks that “Colleges of the Order will presently be established where the children of its members may be trained in all trades, businesses, and professions, and there they may study the liberal arts and humane letters, as well as our holy and arcane science. Brethren are expected to do all in their power to make possible the establishment of such Universities.” Later, in Privileges’ Fifth house, Crowley continues, “Children of all Brethren are entitled to the care of the Order, and arrangements will be made to educate them in certain of the Profess-Houses of the Order. Children of Brethren who are left orphans will be officially adopted by the Master of his Lodge, or if the latter decline, by the Supreme Holy King himself, and treated in all ways as if they were his own.”

Children come from mothers, and Crowley wanted every consideration to be made for women. He writes in Duties’ Tenth house:

 37. All pregnant women are especially sacred to members of the Order, and no effort should be spared to bring them to acceptance of the Law of Freedom, so that the unborn may benefit by that impression. They should be induced to become members of the Order, so that the child may be born under its ægis.

 38. If the mother that is to be have asserted her will to be so in contempt and defiance of the Tabus of the slave-gods, she is to be regarded as especially suitable to our Order, and the Master of the Lodge in her district shall offer to become, as it were, godfather to the child, who shall be trained specially, if the mother so wishes, as a servant of the Order, in one of its Profess-Houses.

 39. Special Profess-Houses for the care of women of the Order, or those whose husbands or lovers are members of the Order, will be instituted, so that the frontal duty of womankind may be carried out in all comfort and honour.

And continuing in Privileges’ Tenth house: 

Women of the Order who are about to become mothers receive all care, attention, and honour from all Brethren.

It’s fascinating that so significant a portion of this brief document be focused on the encouragement to create, welcome, educate and defend children and to venerate and support women who give birth. Crowley wanted children to be born and raised free and glorious, as is our father the sun. Crowley set up the OTO to further this with obligations all the way up to the Supreme and Holy King. From appeal to Liber CI, there is no arguing this, though one is left to argue the selfish position that Crowley’s dated position on family is a thing of the past and that now’s the time that we grab a glass of wine and walk hand and hand into oblivion.

We need to consider a very prominent reason why Crowley was concerned about single mothers and the welfare of children and if a central purpose of OTO was to provide for this - he hated abortion. He writes in Chapter 50 of Confessions,

I consider criminal abortion in any circumstances soever as one of the foulest kinds of murder. Apart from anything else, it nearly always ruins the health of the woman, when it fails to kill her.

The vigour of my views on this point strengthens my general attitude on the question of sexual freedom. I believe that very few women, left to themselves, would be so vile as to commit this sin against the Holy Ghost; to thwart the deepest instincts of nature at the risk of health and Life, to say nothing of imprisonment. Yet criminal abortion is one of the commonest of crimes and one most generally condoned by what I must paradoxically call secret public opinion. And the reason is that our social system makes it shameful and punishable by poverty for a woman to do what evolution has spent ages in constructing her to do, save under conditions with which the vast majority of women cannot possibly comply. The remedy lies entirely with public opinion. Let motherhood be recognized as honourable in itself, and even the pressure of poverty would not prevent any but a few degenerate women, with perverse appetites for pleasure, from fulfilling their function. In the case of such it would indeed be better that they and their children perish.

Given his sympathetic position here and everything described about the role of OTO above, I argue that OTO was designed to facilitate charitable work for single mothers and their children so that those who somehow evaded or avoided a nuclear family can find an accepting and hospitable social organ wherein they can be cared for if not celebrated for carrying out the “frontal duty of womankind.” This is perhaps the most important charitable work OTO describes, and perhaps also the only charity OTO demands of its members for those without its pale. So much of OTO social machinations are internal favoritism so that we can synergize one another and become a social bloc of consequence. But the one place where Crowley says that consideration needs to be made for the plebium is for the little children. He writes in an essay “The Whole Duty of Woman”

Motherhood is holy.

Fatherhood is holy.

The act of creation is a sacrament.

Let these things be no more the matter of lewd jest and shocked prudery.

Let love be a religion, with every man a king and priest, and every woman a crowned priestess, unto God.

Let not this purity be soiled with fees to clergymen, and consideration of property, and succession, and social status; these are fetish-sacrifices to the wooden gods of property.

Let the Beauty of Strength match the Strength of Beauty for the prize of Birth!

Let Love rule in Holiness and Solemnity, and Purity find its consecration in the Climax of Life.

For your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost.

But this isn’t all he said in this wartime propaganda piece he wrote. In this piece of nationalist propaganda he claimed he circulated, but purportedly only published once (Magical Link Vol IX Num 3) and with a hefty apologia to emotionally prepare the modern progressive reader, Crowley says that it’s incumbent on the man to have as many children as he can and for the woman likewise, and if she needs marriage then make marriage a simple and easy thing, but it’s better to have bastards than none, saying “And let every woman capable of bearing a child consider herself shamed unless she bears one in her womb or at her breast!” Crowley wrote this during WWI, anticipating, correctly, another greater calamity to follow in short notice. The story is that of the Egyptian Min (incorrectly transliterated as Khem in our Gnostic Mass) who had a vision of Amoun where he was instructed to impregnate all the woman of Egypt for Pharaoh’s armies would suffer a massive loss, Crowley was worried that the deaths to come would far exceed the births, and that a new stock of “healthy, lusty, sturdy little devils” are needed. “But this is the essence of the need: to make motherhood on any terms honorable and prostitution and sterility disgraceful.” He goes on to describe how these bastards would be adopted as soldiers of the state, their paternity recognized by god, and cared for by the king if need be. Thence his edict above that Masters of local bodies should adopt orphaned children. Crowley obviously saw a forthcoming need for a new sort of tribe, that the nuclear family got in the way of procreation, and he anticipated a lot of violence for which fresh young soldiers would be needed. 

And to pair this with a citation from Chapter 72 of Confessions, “Civilization is crumbling under our eyes, and I believe that the best chance of saving what little is worth saving, and rebuilding the Temple of the Holy Ghost on plans, and with material and workmanship, which shall be free from the errors of the former, lies with the O.T.O.” 

To tie in Crowley’s concern over social collapse, children and OTO I refer to a clip from a talk given by T Omphalos, an EGC Bishop from Norway, given in 2007 in Portland of all places:

I have written a little bit about how Crowley wanted to use the OTO as a war engine in order to promulgate the law of Thelema. I have a bit of an amusing quote here concerning what he wanted to use his soldiers for, if you want to call them that. He writes to Mudd concerning this: “Their advantage comes in their insurance against revolution. They can be organized for defense or enabled to flee for refuge, according to circumstances. We might, for instance, have one town with ten thousand members who would form a force ready and organized to assist the authorities in maintaining order. In another town, we might only have three, and they would be warned and brought into safety when the smash came.” The smash he’s talking about is the revolution from the socialists, which Crowley was fairly concerned with. What he describes here is what the blackshirts of Italy were doing. He admired them until he was kicked out of Italy.

Crowley’s belief in the importance of propagation did not begin and end with OTO. In his Dangers of Mysticism, “affectionately inscribed to Arthur Edward Waite,” Crowley draws a hard line between the mystic, who attempts to reduce himself into nothing, and the Magician who attains through his engagement of the world. In step with Nietzsche whose criticism of Christianity was that it forfeits this world out of obsession over the transcendent Echtwelt, be it heaven or progressive utopia or static Nirvana, Crowley states that the mystic shuts himself up, becomes uncharitable, narcissistic, even losing their “love and good will.” He goes on that the Magician does not forsake the lower or even have it sublimated into the higher, writing that “the Hindus honour no man who becomes ‘Sannyasi’ (nearly our ‘hermit’) until he has faithfully fulfilled all his duties as a man and a citizen. Celibacy is immoral, and the celibate shirks one of the greatest difficulties of the Path.”

It is a tragedy today that OTO has openly abandoned its mission to be a refuge for pregnant women or single mothers, rejecting the veneration of motherhood as woman’s holy “frontal duty.” Instead, OTO jockeys for abortionists, even raising money for the secular slaughterhouse, supporting what Crowley decried as the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” that being the “Unpardonable Sin,” when OTO was supposed to be its temple. This is in step with its rejection of a central mystery of the spirit and the trinity, that described in Liber C vel Agape vel Azoth, that “man is the guardian of the Life of God” and evoked in Liber XV as “ο Πατέρ εστιν ο Ηγιος δια το Πνεύμα άγιον,” the Father is the Son through the Holy Spirit. Instead, positivist progressives have denounced this mystery as being a product of Crowley’s Edwardian misogyny and ignorance that the ovum also contributes genetic information. OTO’s prog-trog leaders believe that neither parents nor husbandmen have noticed that mothers contribute to the genome of their offspring prior to 1963. But OTO’s dereliction of its duty is no reason for Thelemites to ignore these important mysteries, edicts and concerns of Crowley going forward.

We have to plan and practice with Aeonic goals, not just immediate ones. Do we live and work because we think the world will be saved in a few lucky decades? No, because we see all around us what Crowley prophesied, that these are the dark ages of the New Aeon and we must thrive and survive if we are to be the light at the end of the tunnel. We will not live long enough to enjoy the shade of this sacred oak that we have planted. We may not live to see the day where the vintage comes into its fullness. For the present, ours are the pains of the labor of love, the grueling work of breaking up the soil, smashing the stones, setting the fence and shooting the varmints. But if we work hard now and plan for the future then the third century of Thelema might look very different than this one and we might be recalled as the pioneers who dared to settle this new land where our sons and daughters might build a lasting civilization for the Crowned and Conquering Child. This is our duty. 

Love is the law, love under will.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

The Diagnosis

Thelema is a reactionary religion evidenced in the apocalyptic tone of its central text, The Book of the Law, which resembles select writing of preceding traditions but often employs a corrective tone when confronting central moral or ontological dogmas of the past. The Book of the Law was composed in 1904 amidst the fin de siècle, but for Crowley the ending cycle was not the turn of the century, it was the procession of the zodiac, and new forces were in charge for the next couple thousand years. The immutables for the present are Leo in the east and Aquarius in the West, at dawn at the Vernal Equinox for the next 2000 years. These are the Beast and Babalon, the initiated and the initiator, replacing Virgo (the ascetic) and Pisces (the fish, Christ) of the previous Aeon. The aggressive and reactionary tone in Liber Legis is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the object of the ire of the book that announces a new King of Kings, Horus, who wanted it to be “understood that [he] is a god of war and of vengeance.” Unfortunately, the messaging from Crowley coupled with the liberal interpretation of “Do what thou wilt” has allowed many contemporary Thelemites latitude in determining what it is about the “Old Aeon” that is to be opposed. Popularly this manifests as misandry such as contempt for patriarchy or any institution or person that teaches stricture, whether it be chastity or cleaning one’s bedroom. 

The political tumult that existed during Crowley’s adult life, that being the first half of the previous century, made it difficult for Crowley to determine what humanity would look like in this Aeon of the Child he initiated at the behest of the Secret Chiefs who dwell in eternity and attempt to herd mankind in a positive direction. A young liberal Crowley was more in step with contemporary views of Thelema. He pushed against Christianity and stodgy Victorian mores and endorsed a sort of personal cultivation through transgressive social and sexual behavior. But an older Crowley who confessed to profligacy and having been errant in his fidelity to “Thelemic morality” was concerned about “the smash” of socialism and the toppling of aristocracies around the globe by the profane. Crowley saw institutions such as OTO as a possible vehicle for social change by initiating persons of intelligence, influence and affluence into Thelema. His Daoist character Guo Li Ya swam to the shores of Japan from China and informed the Daimo that their “aristocracy is not an aristocracy because it is not an aristocracy,” aristo meaning “master” and implying that in order for an aristocracy to not be a tyranny that it must tap into the higher life. Crowley saw OTO as a sort of illuminati organization that would create a secret network of powerful persons who could guide mankind through the global chaos he saw escalating, and he reached out to upstarts of all political stripes in an attempt to rope them into his master plan, including his own countrymen who were championing liberal democracy and also proponents of fascism such as Mussolini and Hitler and of communism such as Stalin. But his efforts were in vain and by the end of his life he had alienated anyone that might have afforded him some political traction. 

Crowley’s political shift is one that many share today. He began as a liberal positivist, a progressive that believed shifting times promised a steady upward trajectory for humanity. Then he became a conservative, concerned about the possible fallout of ideologies wise in their own conceit. He ended up a sort of pessimist, prophesying a centuries-long dark ages and saying that OTO may be the ark that preserves the continuity of gnosis for future generations, a keeper of the Holy Ghost. This disaffection with liberal democratic globalist capitalism, communism and fascism alike puts Crowley’s politics more in step with a school contemporary with him, Traditionalism, whose most consequential proponent today, Alexander Dugin, seeks to pave the way for the “Fourth Political Theory,” one that he believes will manifest from peoples’ deference to their unique cultural and spiritual narratives rather than a mishmash of policies concocted by sheltered idealists. Crowley likewise understood how politics and religion are inseparable, and to derive one's values from politics is simply to adopt the fruits of the informing religion or ideology. Instead, one appeals ceremonially to a personal spirit guide that might afford some mystical achievement but would at least lead one to discovering their Will, their purpose among us. This is in contrast to the crowdsourcing of values or identity such as is common in our culture of vulgar scientism and conformity. For Crowley, personal values were a product of personal illumination to be earned by a humble yet frank aspirant able to put aside their sentimental affection for a sick world. His disenchantment with political apparati came from his humbling himself to this process, putting the ? before the !, and accepting that the world was changing so rapidly that pretensions to know what was going to come out the other side would make for a great miss.

Aleister Crowley absolutely should be considered alongside the traditionalist school in terms of his politics for his primary concern was to save the traditional hierarchy and therefore preserve peace by whatever means necessary. While Guenon and Evola certainly have much more in common with one another than with him, the fundamental concern is the same. The outright rejection of traditionalist thought by OTO and many contemporary Thelemites and occultists is not because they flirted with fascism, it is because they rejected the false song of liberal democracy on the grounds that it appealed to the indiscretion of the profane to determine the shape of a new world. This faith in the positivist religion of liberal democracy has dominated by default for the over half a century and the entirety of the west has been aggressively indoctrinated into its basic beliefs, such as the appeal to reason rather than instinct, the appeal to bureaucrats rather than aristocrats, and the humiliating dogma of equality and resent. These tenets are those of Christianity and the Old Aeon with the difference that the mystery is ignored, rejected, or believed to be something discernable by experts. This Christianity, neutered through the Enlightenment era bargain that war can be avoided if important questions are ignored, is the shadow of the god that Nietzsche reported murdered, is none of Thelema, and Thelema is in great jeopardy so long as its purported adherents mistake its abrogate antecedent for it. It is urgently necessary for Thelemites to take a step back and humble themselves to the fog of war of the dawn of the New Aeon and accept that in the midst of the apocalypse it is foolish to appeal to old sweetnesses for insight. 

The Situation

Many have hoped for some time that the tide might turn and the curators of Thelema and the legacy of Aleister Crowley, the OTO, might relent in their invigilation of secular mores within Our Holy Order, but years have passed, and things have only become more incendiary and intolerant. What was once a fairly liberal organization where Thelema was revered and earnestly examined has become yet another woke social club that enforces newspeak and gatekeeps against anyone that doesn’t obey the cultural trends broadcast by the Globalist American Empire and its vassal states, dwindling though they may be. This deference of the OTO to the stampede is a very sad turn for the New Aeon, as we read in Liber 33 that “all exterior societies subsist only by virtue of this interior one. As soon as external societies wish to transform a temple of wisdom into a political edifice, the interior society retires and leaves only the letter without the spirit.” We can only hope that there are torchbearers within the Order at the top, or in other castles, their light shining so bright that it is not perceived as light.

Despite this dimming of authority, the OTO still keeps some of the treasures that Aleister Crowley left behind. By my estimation, Aleister Crowley ran Orders that contain several dozen initiations within them, but perhaps only 10 of these were written by the prophet, and the majority of these are the grades of the Man of Earth series in OTO. Crowley was originally compelled by his Masonic brothers to cease in using the Blue Lodge degrees of Freemasonry to onboard people into higher grades of OTO, so he transformed the I-III of Masonry into the 0-IV1/2 of OTO, six grades, and he wanted them to be a sort of boot camp for the work of A∴A∴ that built up to the work of the Neophyte. He later stated that he would have rewritten them to be more promulgatory in nature, didactic ceremonies that teach the ethics espoused by The Book of the Law, but he did not, and they should still be viewed as having that original intention. So, OTO still offers initiation into the introductory degrees of Aleister Crowley. It’s hard to leave that on the table. 

Crowley wanted OTO to promulgate Thelema, but his tract on promulgation, Liber CCC, was more than an edict to spread leaflets, there is a magical instruction on how to extend Thelema into the world, and this instruction implies that being initiated closes the circuit. The preservation of these rites is crucial to preserving the religious integrity of Thelema, and this is accomplished by undergoing them, however annoying it may be to ingratiate oneself with OTO. The participation in the organization may be necessary to get the required blessing of its members to receive initiation, but beyond that OTO is unlikely to slough off the ideological infestation and achieve relevance. 

It is practically unnecessary for a Thelemite or OTO member to operate under the direction of OTO middle management. However, for OTO initiates operating a “local body” the opinions and impromptu rules may come fast and hard. For the past two years most local bodies were not allowed to operate at all due to the positivist fetish for safety and deferring to experts and bureaucrats. There was no debate, no update, no reasoning about the Covid Policy, there was just an expectation to conform or else, USGL going so far as to push or require dubious experimental therapies masked as vaccination in order to participate or be initiated, things that they’d only recently considered to be inalienable rights. The echo chamber of USGL exists on all levels, dissent is rewarded with slander and cessation of promotion into higher grades, and there is absolutely no telling what wild thing the western regime concocts next that they will enforce. However, they did not stoop to policing individual behavior, and for the past two years Thelema Club was able to operate unobstructed while OTO hid behind a mask. This is only one example of the lack of vision exhibited by the current OTO brain trust, and the fallout of this is beginning to become obvious. But allowing small committees staffed by failed or untested leaders to determine what you can and can’t do or say is no way to break through. The earnest promulgator is much better off operating under their own header or within their own organization, and initiations or celebrations of the Gnostic Mass are something that could be conducted by chartered or ordained people rather than having to coordinate everything through bureaucrats with veto power.

A Solution and a vision towards the future

Thelema Club is barely an organizational model. It is more a statement of intent to promulgate Thelema, earnestly, each in their own way, and to break bread with other Thelemites to affirm the bond that exists between us though we may not be aware of it. It is also a call to run parallel with OTO and not be antagonistic towards it. This model of organizing, where individuals divest from the membership but take advantage of the magick, may eventually turn OTO into less of a social club and more of a resource where people can access the initiations of Aleister Crowley. It may be time for OTO to move beyond the brick and mortar and more into the secret chambers of our houses, not only to diffuse the ideological intrusion that is inescapable with central planners on a power trip, but this movement to house churches may also be necessary just as it was 2000 years ago, to protect our mysteries from the indiscretions of the profane and the violence of the New Aeon we can expect to continue. 

Love is the law, love under will.