“Anyone who is forced from his own course, either through not understanding himself, or through external opposition, comes into conflict with the order of the Universe, and suffers accordingly… A man may think it is his duty to act in a certain way, through having made a fancy picture of himself, instead of investigating his actual nature.”

This is one reason Crowley refers over and over to sexuality as analogous to, and a main expression of, your True Will. You do not get to choose your sexuality (despite it being called “sexual preference”). You do not choose to be heterosexual or homosexual or whatever-sexual. You might try very hard to deny this — for example being gay but still having a wife and children — but it does not make you something other than you are. Your sexuality is not something you pick according to your fancy. It is something you must “find”, meaning it is pre-existing of your decisions about it, and “do”, meaning enact in accordance with your nature rather than your “fancy picture” of yourself. Just as one example from Crowley’s writings:

“Every one should discover, by experience of every kind, the extent and intention of his own sexual Universe. He must be taught that all roads are equally royal, and that the only question for him is “Which road is mine?” All details are equally likely to be of the essence of his personal plan, all equally 'right' in themselves, his own choice of the one as correct as, and independent of, his neighbour's preference for the other. He must not be ashamed or afraid of being homosexual if he happens to be so at heart; he must not attempt to violate his own true nature because public opinion, or mediaeval morality, or religious prejudice would wish he were otherwise.”

The True Will is exactly like this but pertains to your entire being rather than just your sexuality. It is your “appointed course” and your “nature.” So when people ask for your opinion on something or which choice you would like to make, I’d hesitate slightly in saying “that’s not my will,” and reflect as to whether you’re merely using metaphysical language to make your choices seem incontestable.

Remember, the path of the Great Work involves killing your mundane desires and sacrificing your supposed “self” into the Cup of Impersonal Infinity. What arises from and moves out of that annihilation is a more true eidolon of your Will precisely because you’ve lost attachment to everything you considered your personal identity and preferences.

Have a great Friday 🌞

“Is there not one appointed as a warden?”

He asks if the Angel will accompany him and guard him as he plunges consciously into the Abyss. The Angel surprisingly answers negatively, recalling the statement of Christ on the cross:

“Eloi eloi lama sabachtani. [My God, my God, why have you forsaken me]”

Even his inmost and holiest self could not protect him from the abominations that lie in the Abyss.

The union with one’s Angel brings one to the Abyss. Just as Angel is completed by the Heh final of the maiden-soul… so does ADNI (65) unite with the Heh final (5), who has become a harlot open to all and rejecting none, to make 70, Ayin or Pan, the Secret Savior, as one expires fully in His NOX.

Even in this, one’s work is not finished as the blood drained into to Cup of Babalon awakens the Supernal Phallic force of the All-Father who ravishes one’s pure soul, instilling it with the eternal Eld. One’s star is then cast down from the Abyss back into the world, as another Master is given the task to cultivate a new garden of disciples, that might themselves be led into the infinite bed of Chaos.

What I am for is a Thelema seen as an all-encompassing paradigm based in its first principles as articulated by the Holy Books and by To Mega Therion 666, the Prophet. I have every intention of removing my personal idiosyncracies from the presentation as that is precisely what continues to dilute the presentation of Thelema. I joke about “thelemic fundamentalism” (which triggers boomers), but I am for a vibrant current that must develop from the source itself rather than constantly trying to excise it. If this speaks to you, then please keep coming back.

What I am against is the handwaving of Thelema and/or Crowley with a bunch of cliches “because its my will to think this”. I am against the idea because Crowley contradicted himself at times there somehow is not a coherent relatively consistent system underlying his thought from early life to end of life. I am against cliches that seek to reduce Thelema to a simple slogan, to something you might get in an Adidas ad of “be yourself” and nothing else. I am against turning Thelema into spooky self-help or occult therapy, which it most certainly is not, and has turned modern “thelema” into a validation of people’s most base nature and exacerbates narcissism. I am against removing Crowley from Thelema (especially while hypocritically continuing to ride his coattails). I am against people who are so morally weak they cannot stand someone speaking strongly on Thelema, even if its on their own page. All of these things are enemies to a true and healthy 93 Current.

Remember: No one is stopping you from being inspired by Thelema or Thelema adjacent with a bunch of hyphenated identities (Thelemic-Voudon-Buddhist blah blah blah). No one is knocking down your door because you misunderstand Thelema. This is a moral panic by morally weak people. However people do deserve to have Thelema presented publicly in a holistic and honest way so they can truly decide if it calls to them rather than being misinformed by a diluted cherry picked version of consensus “thelema.” By the way, when you come on my page (or on your little groups) and whinge & cry about how Thelema is whatever you want and big bad IAO131 cant tell you what it is, I know you feel like a big boy, but you look like a petulant child. Thelema is the law of the strong and maybe it’s not for you!

Have a great day 🌞

0 - Nuit and Hadit (0 to the 0 degree, Nothing unextended in any categories). The ultimate reality and the ground of all things.

1 - The unity of the Star, which is 1-in-3 and 3-in-1: The dual Child of Heru-Ra-Ha, the All-Father (Chaos), and the Mother of all (Babalon). The pure soul and the divine Will. The unity of the Supernal triad is insisted upon.

2 - The duality of manifestation. The Self vs the Not-Self, Microcosm and Macrocosm, the Angel and the natural soul.

“‘Six and fifty. Divide, add, multiply and understand.’ 6 / 50 gives 0.12, a perfect glyph-statement of the metaphysics of the Book.” (Equinox of the Gods)

Of course Thelema implies freedom FROM external constraints such as imposition of artificial restrictions to your ability to move, to love, to create, etc. But all of this is actually less important than and totally subordinate to your freedom TO do your Will. As Crowley says: “Liberty is the power to direct your course according to your Will.” Or even more importantly, Aiwass says:

“Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”

You have no right at all except TO do your Will. The freedom from constraints is explicitly subordinate to this more important, teleological concept of your Will: “Any thing soever that binds the will, hinders it, or diverts it, is Sin.” When Liber AL says “Do that and no other shall say nay,” it isn’t giving you the right to demand external validation, acceptance, or tolerance of your every passing whim. Rather, it is a structural fact or consequence of the preceding line of only having the right to do your Will: there is a perfect order on Earth (like the stars in Heaven), when individuals do their true Wills. Crowley is pretty clear about this: “it seems to imply a theory that if every man and every woman did his and her will — the true will — there would be no clashing,” because “each star moves in an appointed path without interference.”

Modern “Thelema” has built its entire vocabulary around “freedom from,” and you can always tell by certain phrases being dropped —“its my truth,” “whatever works for you,” “as long as it doesn’t harm anyone why should anyone care” “well its my will to do [thing that suspiciously sounds like a preference/choice]”… The entire culture has formed around this idea of validating and protecting your preferences from any external claims or demands. The end result is that Consensus Thelema is just people who basically want divine approval for their Wants, a kind of spiritual license and get-out-of-anything card. It’s no wonder we see plenty of thelemites basically reducing Thelema to not feeling guilty while having a good time. If we were to take freedom as freedom TO do your Will (and nothing else), there would be a much different picture: it demands discipline of your base desires and thoughts, sacrifice of your old ways, struggle, and the Path of Attainment. No wonder Crowley tells us:

“You have never yet known Liberty. When the temptations are overcome, the voice of Reason silenced, then will your soul bound forward unhampered upon its chosen course … Until you have reached this point, you are not wholly free. You must kill out desire, and kill out fear. The end of all is the power to live according to your own nature.”

You must kill out desire, not divinize it and use Thelema as a rhetorical bludgeon to force others into never challenging your indulgence. “Live according to your preferences” is the lazy, consumer capitalistic inversion of Thelema.

Actual Thelema as espoused by Crowley demands you live according to your True Will, which is not possible until you are capable of controlling yourself. It demands you walk the difficult Path of the Great Work, and strive toward union with your Angel, and eventually plunging your ego into the Abyss toward its annihilation. Only then are you truly free.

One of the most repeated things you would hear from Thelemites — and these were often V°+, representing “experienced” or “seasoned”

Thelema — is that no one could explain or tell you what Thelema is. There was a distinct, underlying moral panic that one might be seen as being dogmatic, which is consensus thelema’s greatest mortal sin. If you took the initiations, they would tell you there is no official interpretation, you have to come to your own understanding. The oaths themselves are up to you to interpret — it was more important to say the same words than share the same meaning, which is quite literally missing the spirit for the letter. It is moral weakness dressed up in thelemic drag, as if it is more profound to not saying anything concrete and put everything back on the student. Looking back it makes me wonder how much of it was folks covering up the fact they didnt really know much at all about Thelema or their own initiations.

The other thing you’d often find is people treating Crowley, on whose coattails they were riding — the person who made it all possible — with glibness and even outright disdain. It was fashionable to make fun of him and repeatedly remind people (incorrectly) that he was full of contradictions, “just a man of a time”, and a person whose portrait hung on the wall but who everyone made a display of disrespecting. You were called a Crowleyite pejoratively as if respecting the Prophet of your own system made you equivalent to a dogmatic bible thumper.

This is a common theme that many people who supposedly represent Thelema actually dont like it very much and seem to even be embarrassed by it. There was a VII° I recall who publicly said they do not like The Book of the Law and yet was a bishop in the system, representing and enforcing its ideology, supposedly. Perhaps she just liked the wine and the false aura of respectability of having a large number after her name. There was even a well-know IX° who literally wrote a whole essay crapping on people who take Thelema seriously, as if being a “serious Thelemite” was worthy of scorn. Thelema to these people is quite literally doing and believing whatever you want, and eschewing the actual system in favor of cherrypicking random quotes that seem to back their inability to cope with the obvious fact Thelema is a coherent, teachable system that might contain some uncomfortable truths. In a system that teaches nothing, no one learns anything. What they learn are the things that are totally unchallenging and uncontroversial, which end up being memorizing qabalistic correspondences and mispronouncing Hebrew at the walls. No wonder there are a million classes on the LBRP — anyone can transfer procedural knowledge safely without looking too dogmatic.

And people often talk about spreading / promulgating Thelema. But to what end? Just so we can all end up in this Rorscach inkblot of a system, projecting our own personal idiosyncrasies onto a much greater man’s system? Does this really attract many people’s interest to have people tell you they can’t explain anything coherent about Thelema, they dont respect its Prophet, and you get to decide what Thelema is? Does a hall of mirrors really feel so profound to people?

What we need are people who unflinchingly assert Thelema as the system it was meant to be, as passed down by Crowley, and measured against that. We can still contemplate different approaches to the difficult or obscure parts, but it will require not handwaving away everything that its “not your will” to consider. If you just want ikigai with pentagrams, spooky self-help, and a spiritual cover for your profoundly narcissistic endeavors, I think why even bother pretending its Thelema?

People want a Thelema that doesn’t just say the same basic mystic platitudes as a generic new age spiritual teacher (“its all one! Theyre all the same symbol!”) or the same general moral platitudes as an Adidas ad (“you’re awesome, you do you!”). What people crave is something substantial, a real tradition with an actual center, instead of the hollowed out, flattened, hall of mirrors Thelema has become as a spiritual way to deflect criticism and accountability (“well thats just my will!”) Anyone who isn’t a trembling escapist from life can identify when someone is promoting this kind of slop. We want an encounter with something real, something to be challenged and grow by, not a reflection of the most narcissistic aspects of ourselves.

No surprise then that the fundamentals of Thelema — their first principles— are what will direct us anew. No amount of political name calling as a Nazi, a communist, or a capitalist will be able to disturb a single atom of a first principles approach because it is finally one that does not rely on the passing political and moral fads of our day. It cannot be shouted down or cancelled. It relies on the revelation of The Beast 666 and his commentary thereon. No amount of intellectual equivocation can define it away because its based on the actual source texts, rather than a constant flight from them, “going beyond” them (inevitably into one’s own idiosyncratic grift). Out with the AI slop, in with a truly human, truly real Thelema. If we call this fundamentalism, so be it!

Have a great day 🌞

The most common method we see is people (mis)using Jung to describe everything as an archetype within their own psyche. Although — to be fair — it is often not even really the ideology of Jung himself but usually his diluted Neojungian followers like Erdinger or others. Even Thelemites who clearly are earnest repeatedly employ this heresy.

What I find most interesting is that every reinterpretation of Thelema in light of another ideology like Neojungianism always makes it easier, less challenging, less transgressive, less controversial, and more palatable to the masses. If one finds oneself insisting on using Jung to understand Thelema, perhaps consider why one feels the need to twist it into something its not to be acceptable. Perhaps consider you are not really into Thelema, and you really just want a spooky self-help.

The metastasizing of therapy culture in Thelema has inverted its values, where everything is about protecting and validating your ego and its vain desires instead of plunging it into the Abyss toward its annihilation. You are much more likely to hear “you are perfect as you are and no one can challenge you” than to hear you are “a perishable parasite, bred of the earth's crust, crawling irritably upon it for a span, and at last returning to the dirt whence he sprang.” The former demands absolutely nothing of you; the latter requires you to transmute the First Matter of your uninitiated self through the difficult discipline of the Great Work. Ultimately, the goal of Thelema is not a grand, therapized, faultless self, it is a black hole of nothingness wherein the Eld of the All-father may awaken the infinite in the hollow container of your soul.

Will = what a Star necessarily is, given its position in the totality, its actual nature beneath the projections of culture and ego.

Want = what the ego currently prefers, which shifts by the hour and is frequently the very thing obstructing Will. To dress up preference in the language of Will is to borrow the word's authority without doing the work the word actually requires, i.e. the Great Work of finding out what one's course actually is rather than what one would rather or hope it be.

The reason the heresy persists despite being obvious is that it's useful. "Not my Will" ends the argument in a way "I don't want to" can’t. The first sounds like indisputable metaphysical fact, the second sounds like what it is: reluctance, resistance, the ego asserting itself against something it finds difficult or unpleasant. Interestingly, nobody invokes True Will to excuse themselves from something they wanted to do anyway. The invocation only appears at the exact point of something being difficult or challenged… it is almost always ego defending its comfort, using the vocabulary of the True Will to avoid the ordeal proper to a Star. Discipline that is inconvenient, obligation that is unwelcome, confrontation that is unpleasant… it is no wonder these get relabeled as violations of Will rather than what they usually are, which is Will asserting itself against a self that would rather not.

This is one of the main aspects of modern Consensus Thelema: using the drag of Thelemic vocabulary to avoid anything difficult, any challenge, by using the thought-terminating cliche of “It is my Will.” Just be honest with yourself that it is your preference! No need to divinize your wants or use metaphysical language to shut down challenging of your desires.

The hexagram consists of the interlocking red descending triangle and blue ascending triangle, representing the union of divine and human, active and passive, father and mother, microcosm and macrocosm. At each quarter, the Adept makes the Holy Hexagram and proclaims in turn:

• Father and Mother are One God

• Mother and Son are One God

• Son and Daughter are One God

• Daughter and Father are One God

Moving through the quarters in this way affirms that every polarity, such as male and female, parent and child, or active and passive, ultimately resolves into unity expressed as Ararita. This reflects the perpetual formula of the Tetragrammaton: Yod and Heh unite to form Vav and Heh, Vav and Heh reunite becoming Yod and Heh... continually generating new expressions of unity through the interplay of opposites.

The Star Sapphire is therefore a concise ritual expression of Thelema’s cosmology. From Nothing, unity divides into opposites. Through love under will, these opposites reunite, giving rise to the cosmos and returning at last to the ineffable Zero. The rite is not only symbolic but also performative. The magician becomes the center of this process, affirming their nature as the Unity of the Star who carries out the Great Work of perpetual creation and dissolution, None and Two.

When the Adept returns to the center, performs the Rosy Cross, and proclaims “Omnia in Duos: Duo in Unum: Unus in Nihil,” they enact the cycle of manifestation and return. The magician becomes the active point where Nothing becomes Two, Two becomes One, and One dissolves again into Nothing. The act of ritual transforms these principles from intellectual ideas into lived experience. Through repeated practice, the magician continually affirms and realizes their identity as the Star, the child of Nuit and Hadit, the god who performs the Great Work. In this way, the gods and formulas of Thelema are made real, not as distant entities but as powers expressed and embodied through the Adept’s own being

The basis of 012 is “0.12” as one of the Qabalistic operations commanded by Liber AL (“my word is six and fifty. Divide….”) 6/50 is 0.12, while 210 is the value of “NOX” which Crowley wrote in a note is the Word of Horus as LVX was of Asar. To elaborate what these terms refer to:

CREATION — 0→1→2 (manifestation, incarnation, emanation, the Lesser Mysteries of Sword and Disk)

0: Nuit (infinite extension, 0) + Hadit (point, the dot .) = Nothing, the absolute or ultimate ground. It is 0° (0 to the 0th degree) meaning it is not extended in any category, its proper symbol being silence or darkness. It contains all infinite worlds within itself, but as perfect symmetrical opposites, the source and result of X and -X (any possible complementary pairs).

1: The unity of the Star or monad — Kether, Heru-Ra-Ha or Horus. Every man and every woman is a star, which is to say: There are only Gods within the Infinite Space of 0. Each Star has its own Universe of 2:

2: Duality, subject/object division — the monad God or Star divides itself into its own Universe, which is manifestation below the Abyss. Duality is the condition for love, will, experience. All experiences within this world are Events, even Event is the union of Hadit (point-of-view) with Nuit (infinite possibilities). Each Event therefore contains Joy. Iin other words the metaphysical structure of all existence is love under will.

ATTAINMENT— 2→1→0 (the initiatory path of the Great Work, the Greater Mysteries of Lance and Grail)

2: The Court of the Profane — the world of duality, labor, and death…. one starts here and does the work of the Sphinx (discipline & balancing all opposites) to begin to climb the ladder.

1: Tiphareth — the unity of Bride & Bridegroom in Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA, where the Star consciously recognizes its True Will.

0: the Abyss crossed, ego annihilated, dissolution into Zero, the blood drained into the Cup of Babalon and the awakening of the Eld of the All-Father chaos who ravishes your pure soul under the Night of Pan.

This is not a one-time creation and reversal story but a perpetual loop, an infinite Game that recurs, in the infinite play of Nuit and Hadit in all phases. No phase is preferable here, neither 0, nor one, nor two, nor many, nor all. As it is written (and enacted) in the Star Sapphire:

“Omnia in Duos: Duo in Unum: Unus in Nihil: Haec nec Quatuor nec Omnia nec Duo nec Unus nec Nihil Sunt.”

[All in Two; Two in One; One in none; these are neither Four nor All nor Two nor One nor None.]

Then there is the “you” you take to be yourself — everything you think you are (and arent), everything you’ve experienced, all your relationships, all your history, all your hopes and dreams, all your successes and failures — which is the incarnated self, the mind & body. This is your Khu, the magical world self-woven by the Star to know Itself through its permutations.

Khabs has a relation to its incarnations or Khu’s similar to how a user has a relationship to video game characters it plays. The Star-User creates various characters and interacts with a virtual world so it can have various experiences (whether good or bad, fun or boring, painful or joyful, etc). Inevitably that character must dissolve in death. The character does not persist beyond each game played, only the Star does. The only real difference is the Star cannot “play” at all except insofar as it enters a “character” (your mind and body). When we say something like “you are eternal” in Thelema, we aren’t talking about the character, but the User. Nothing you take to be yourself is eternal — it is precisely that which is given up in the Abyss and in death. It would be like a video game character claiming to be the User.

Crowley had one narrow exception to this (of which he expressed uncharacteristic skepticism and qualification), and it was only for Adepts. The default end of all characters is infinite dissolution into Nothing. Adepts have the possibility to cleave their mind to their Star so tightly that it possibly retains the ability to be incarnated into with memory of a past life. However, even though this memory may persist, it is still not the Star. No matter how good your save file is, your data is going to get lost eventually, and thats part of the game.

The essential goal of Thelema’s system of attainment is to regain the User-perspective. One can then play with infinite time, knowledge, and power the infinite games of life. Not to obtain anything, but for its own sake, for the sake of the infinite itself. Or as Crowley said:

“Work thou, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, in and for Eternity.”

“He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.”

One thing this verse makes me think of is how constantly Thelemites “explain” so much, always to explain away verses from what they mean. Every difficult passage in Liber AL and Thelema in general seems to always be given accompanied by an extra explanation, and guess what? That explanation pretty reliably always arrives at the conclusion the reader was already comfortable with! What are the odds?

“Compassion is the vice of kings” somehow means kings have compassion,rather than it being seen as a vice. “Stamp down the wretched and the weak” is actually only an inner exhortation about one’s own bad habits! “Ye are against the people” means don’t be a normie, but dont forget everyones a star! Its like every edge Liber AL had has to be softened in order to accommodate your pre-existing sensibilities. Yes, Liber AL is rhe law of the strong, but we wouldn’t want to say something immoral! Crowley said “The Truth is radiantly simple.” The constant pretending like Thelema is not what it says it is is radiantly stupid.

Explanation is the preferred weapon of avoidance because it wears the veneer of scholarship. The Clever Commentator who has resolved all verses has closed the account and can no longer be taught anything by the text since it now says back to him whatever he brought. The biggest problem with this is you will never learn anything and certainly never grow if you dont let things challenge you. If Thelema is just a fun Egyptian occult version of your pre-held beliefs, you are just divinizing your own laziness. A verse that offends you or otherwise challenges you is the one still still capable of doing work and leading to growth! Maybe sit with it, and 666’s explanation, without the immediate avoidant footnote and find out what it actually might be saying.

As Ra-hoor-khuit said: “they are the slaves of because: They are not of me”

My aim with these posts & upcoming book is to present Thelema faithfully from Crowley’s perspective, not IAO131’s or anyone else’s, which includes minimizing all foreign overlays that dilute the Law including but not limited to Jungian psychology, Egyptology, Golden Dawn ritualism, Eastern mysticism, therapy culture, left or right political positions. Much of what passes for Thelema today is a watered-down version only superficially resembling what Crowley taught, and one cannot honestly accept or reject a thing one has only learned in distorted form. Even some of my own past writings are not exempt from this critique.

What about the Comment forbidding study, you might ask? In his own orders he did the opposite of forbidding study: OTO Minervals receive a copy and are told to study it well… For A∴A∴ and OTO the Book is “the Word and the Letter of Truth, and the sole Rule of Life”… For his Order of Thelemites pledged members to study and expound the Law. He had disciples memorize portions of these Holy Books, as we know. So we have to look at the Comment’s real context, which is that Crowley wrote it in fury in the 1920s after Norman Mudd challenged his authority — its purpose was to establish his interpretation as the sole authorized orthodoxy (“One Textus Receptus… One High Court of Interpretation, each for himself”), guarding against “fraud and false ways of reading the Book.” Those who set up rival schools he branded “heresiarchs” to be shunned. He wanted the purity of Thelema to be retained — in contrast to how he saw the degradation of religions — and his idea was that his reading would be the one source of study (“with reference to his writings” from the Comment), then people can accept, reject, or otherwise do what they will with it.

Crowley held and did things many find troubling, and his claim to be essentially the sole authority on Thelemic orthodoxy unsettles many who identify as Thelemites. But personal distaste is not an argument. Whether or not one likes it, this was demonstrably his position. An honest account of Thelema requires reporting what he thought and did without blending it with our preferences.

And Thelemites need to reconcile with the fact that if you accept Liber AL as divine revelation, it is AL itself that established Crowley as central authority. Crowley as central authority. This is not simply a Crowleyan self-assertion. He is the “chosen priest & apostle of infinite space,” repeatedly named “the prophet,” identified with Ankh-af-na-khonsu of the Stele of Revealing, and instructed to comment on the Book “by the wisdom of Ra-Hoor-Khu-it.” If we take the Book seriously as revelation, we must take seriously its claim that Crowley holds a central place in its understanding.

The Comment, his self-positioning as doctrinal authority, and the Book’s own designation of him as Prophet make Crowley absolutely central to Thelema, and his idiosyncratic meanings make grasping his perspective necessary to grasp the Law. This does not preclude personal interpretation — Thelema celebrates freedom, and there is no thought police — but the system was founded with coherent intent, and it is worth engaging on its own terms before accepting, rejecting, or modifying it.

“Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains.”

This is a claim about the structure of reality, not just an encouragement to cheer up. The New Aeon opens up with the assertion that the ground of being is joy, and that is not because Aiwass took too much cocaine. It is because the structure of existence is Love: every Event is a union of Hadit with Nuit — a perpetual marriage-feast — and every union brings joy. It is baked directly into the cake of everything.

I think in this regard it is instructive AL asks us to “remember” and not to pretend or contemplate, as it is something we already know somewhere beneath all our thoughts about life. In those rarified moments we recall our starry heritage, our true identity as a God rather than merely a mind and body that suffers for a bit then dies, we can penetrate to this joyful substratum of existence. In that moment we remember the ultimate reality of Stars in Infinite Space. And, at the end of the day, all the practices in the syllabus works toward apprehending this fundamental truth of existence directly rather than merely believing it or hoping for it to be true.

Whether its Buddhism, or generic new age-ism, or Secular Humanism, or left- or right-wing politics, or Voudon, or Zen, or Fascism, or Communism…. It is not Thelema. But it is a basic disingenuous move — sometimes unconsciously, I’ll admit! — that tries to trojan horse your own personal ideology into Thelema, a.k.a. your preferences or wants masquerading as the the ideology of Will.

And why do I say “heresy”? Well first of all Crowley called people “heresiarchs” who tried to set up some other brand of Thelema. Second of all, it is a forceful term that gets people to actually realize the gravity of what they’re doing. Third of all, it pisses off idiots who probably are too fragile to be Thelemites to begin with.

Is my intention “to create right-wing thelemites”? Obviously not, it’s to remind people Thelema is its own philosophy: a substantial, all-encompassing paradigm with its own central, generative principles. Every importation of another ideology dilutes and confuses what Thelema was passed down to us as by 666. In other words, I want people to finally encounter Thelema as Thelema, and not someone’s personal idiosyncratic politics and metaphysics dressed up as it. Is that such a crazy idea? Actually letting people hear about Thelema itself so they can truly judge if its for them rather than softening the edges and cherrypicking to pretend its something it’s not?

Boomers always have a kind of “Liberation Thelema”: "Do what thou wilt” means “do your own thing" which means sex/drugs/anti-authoritarianism in general. Particularly concerned about external restrictions in terms of sexual morality and therefore reads “freedom” as “freedom from constraint” and therefore as license. Their ideal is a naked person who doesnt care what society thinks of them.

Gen X seems to routinely overemphasize technique without ontology: you’ll always hear people from this generation speaking of magick as pragmatic “tech”, often via or adjacent to chaos magick. You will often hear Thelema can be reduced to “Do what thou wilt” and the entire complex scaffolding of thelemic metaphysics of the Star, incarnation, etc is often absent or seen as baggage. Their ideal is like a detached technician with no beliefs.

Millennials engage in a therapized and politicized Thelema: True Will becomes “authenticity”, lots of purity tests (and likely to call Crowley a racist, sexist bigot), which involves a deep moral inversion, basically re-moralizing exactly what the New Aeon abolished. They are more likely to be preaching something that can be found in a random therapeutic self-help book but dressed up with thelemic figures — what I call “ikigai with pentagrams.” Their ideal is like a morally pure, trauma-informed, self-actualized person who has processed their triggers and values inclusivity over everything else.

Gen Z I see as hyper-focused on either Thelema-as-Aesthetic and/or manifestation-Thelema: Crowley as vibe/sigils as decor, the image is the thing itself. As well as "manifest what you want" which is collapsing Will into desire and treating the universe like a vending machine you have the occult codes for. Their ideal is the “main character” who is aesthetically perfect and can aurafarm.

Gen alpha is too young to tell but I think we can see it will probably be an AI-mediated Thelema, where people read the original texts even less, things are reduced to bite-sized, gamified tidbits because of our attention economy being so strained. Horus only knows what their ideal will look like.

So…. Which heresy do you follow?

The problem is not the goal of promoting Thelema for all or combating oppression. There are admirable ends. The problem is the method, which is Heresy in the strict sense: judging the Law by an external standard rather than deriving conclusions from it.

Not one concept in these modules follows from the ontology of Nuit, Hadit, and the Star. The conclusions arrive pre-fixed by contemporary progressive morality &sociology, and Class A texts are conscripted retroactively as Thelemic decoration to preheld beliefs. One module even asks participants how to answer someone “who takes issue with the binary language of our core material.” I encourage you to read that again…The imported framework is sitting in judgment over Class A scripture, the core revelatory material that makes Thelema what it is. That is the exact inversion of the textual hierarchy on which the whole system rests.

The proof-texting of the modules obviously falsifies the sources. One module directs reflection to Liber Tzaddi verses 22 and 40-44, the joy and equilibrium passages, while omitting verse 25 of the same Class A text: “The weak, the timid, the imperfect, the cowardly, the poor, the tearful — these are mine enemies, and I am come to destroy them.” A curriculum built on imported concepts like marginalization and generational trauma cannot cite Tzaddi honestly, because Tzaddi is a summons out of victim-consciousness. And the program’s structure is recognizably Osirian: privilege as inherited sin, bias-examination as a new form of confession, allyship and self-auditing as penance, with absolution of course never arriving in a perpetual self-flagellation. Remember that “It is a lie, this folly against self” and also that “The word of Sin is Restriction,” which Crowley comments in Liber Aleph as “the Doubt of his own Godhead.” Training initiates to audit themselves for unconscious guilt is the systematic cultivation of that doubt.

But before anyone on the right starts celebrating: the reactionary reading of Thelema is the identical error with reversed polarity, a mirror image of Heresy. The tendency exemplified by figures like James Wasserman, filtering the Law through Fox News libertarianism, militia-adjacent siege narratives, and Second Amendment maximalism, commits the exact same methodological sin. A preheld ideology is retroactively justified with cherrypicked lines. “Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights” gets conscripted for Ruby Ridge fantasies the same way Liber Tzaddi gets conscripted for antiracism workshops. Both camps arrive with pre-held political commitments and then, looking backwards, mine the corpus for ratification while ignoring or dismissing obvious contradictions. Both mistake their ego-identifications, their Wants, for Will. One whose Thelema is indistinguishable from his cable news diet, whichever channel, has derived nothing from first principles and is only engaging in self-deception.

The answer to either heresy is not the other heresy. It is orthodoxy.