Introduction to Thelema - pt 2

vel Novum Aeon

[Originally presented as the third of three lectures given at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge in 2020. Here’s Pt. 1.]

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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.