Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
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.
The problem of course is that men are biologically programmed to prefer THEIR children from THEIR women. Look at abuse and CSA rates between fathers and step-fathers towards their children.