Broken Swords & Fallow Fields Will Thelemites Ever Tire of Being Terrible?

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

For as long as I can remember, Thelemites have had one of the worst reputations in all of occulture even before occulturewas coined in the 1990s as a term that is still as vague today as it was back then. There was an idealistic thought running through my head, once upon a time, that occulture would be this “thing” where occultists of all flavors—pick your term, I’m not going to be more specific than that but I mean it to be all-inclusive for the moment—but, to continue … where occultists of all flavors would be able to come out of the woodwork and create a more harmonious existence not just with the world-at-large but also with each other.

Sure.

I was young and naive. Very young. Very naive.

Everywhere I go on social media or even to public events, I hear the same thing: “Oh, you’re with that group.” And I know they mean O.T.O. without truly realizing not all Thelemites belong to that singular group. But being a Thelemite has for so long been synonymous with being a member of O.T.O.—and all the baggage that goes with it.

Then there is the sheer audacity of arrogance that occulture has endured from Thelemites over the decades.

And it doesn’t matter if we try to play the #NotAllThelemites game. It’s enough of them that we all get swept into the mix. Even if you get lucky for a moment to be that “oh, but not you” with someone, eventually you’ll piss them off in a heated moment and you’ll get the “all those Thelemites!” blunt end of the generalization again.

But how about the way we treat each other?

When I read these blogs and watch these YouTube gurus spit out their vitriol¹And when I use the term “vitriol,” I don’t mean some level (even heated) of honest critique of an idea or criticism of an ideology. I mean, the level of hatred and mockery some of these people unleash on others because they lack the ability to do much else. It’s all they have. at other people, doesn’t it get old? Doesn’t it get tiring to be that invested in someone else’s business? I sometimes scroll past this one individual who has risen lately as the O.T.O. darling—replacing the last puppet who flamed out after setting progress within Thelema back decades through memefication—and I’ll stop just to see what their latest grievance is against some nameless person in the community. And then I think: I’ve got better things to do than this. Damn social media!

These are people who think “strike hard & low” [AL 2.60a] involves unmollified cruelty. These are people who think they have it all so figured out that the phrase “erotic liberation” even sounds like a reasonable approach to Thelema rather than as the spiritual bypassing²Tina Fossella, “Human Nature, Buddha Nature: An interview with John Welwood.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Spring 2011. https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/

Welwood talks about “when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, it becomes compartmentalized in a separate zone of our life, and remains unintegrated with our overall functioning.” Much of grifting culture is about utilizing ‘magick’ while avoiding the integration of life-itself throughout the functional domains. it is—and the sycophants without a shred of common sense nod their heads in unison (and will, until the next breathing puppet comes along to replace this one). These are people who think they have a shoulder goblin speaking to them, offering them advice, moving their lives in some specific direction. They are speaking from the position of the previous aeon, just as Crowley said they would; and that’s fine since it “remains valid for those who have not yet assimilated the point of view of the Law of Thelema.”³Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA (Weiser Books, 1997), 159.

Honestly, I think the majority of Thelemites are in hiding. Not out of fear, but because other Thelemites have made them feel ashamed of being merely human and living human lives. I think the zeitgeist of Thelema has been so overcome with the radicalization of individualism since the 1970s that a large portion of Thelemites actually believes they are supposed to be alone in the world, that they are on some solitary path to transgressive deification, that they are searching for a still, small voice⁴I cannot say for certain if the late J. Daniel Gunther started this ridiculous doctrine in Thelema; but in both his initial books, Initiation in the Aeon of the Child and The Angel & The Abyss, he uses this metaphor out of 1 Kings 19 entirely without any comprehension of its original meaning or context to suggest the Holy Guardian Angel is some kind of “still, small voice” inside us like the “voice of God” that we just need to be quiet (or “learn Silence”) to hear. It’s a load of Southern Bapto-Theosophical trash. Frankly, unless you are Deaf—or have been through the experience itself—you have no physical conception of what this Silence means. It is not the quieting of the mind. It is not just the lack of external sound (which most hearing people can’t comprehend since that’s not something that happens for them in the normal course of life—ever—even with so-called “noise-canceling headphones”). It is a physical state. from some lonely place inside that’s going to speak them for the rest of their life and that’s all they need.

But then some horrible, no-good, grifting Thelemites step in to tell them they should pay $400 to “discover their True Will,” that Thelema is about waving wands in the air like they just don’t care, that Thelema will turn them into an “Übermensch-King,” that Thelema doesn’t matter but “Magick” is all they need to stay warm at night, that eyeliner is an excellent substitute for experience, that they are unsophisticated morons trying to use occult studies to replace the cultural capital their working-class upbringing denied them.

When Thelemites get tired of worshiping Crowley, I think they’ll find Thelema has been sitting here all along with the clear answers even Crowley found daunting.⁵But only because he kept trying to pigeonhole his own meaning into it all from his own level of understanding—and he knew this too. He talks about this regularly through his writings and letters. It’s going to take individuals willing to study Thelema rather than Crowleyanity.⁶Though I know someone will try to say I’m suggesting we kick Crowley out of Thelema. Move on. That’s not what I’m saying at all. The Book of the Law doesn’t give us Crowley or magick or occultism⁷And it will probably burn someone’s ass raw when I finally come out and say Thelema just ain’t all that “occult” in the end—nor did Crowley (or the Book of the Law) think so either. as the assignment. It doesn’t say “to each man and woman that thou meetest, were it but to dine or to drink at them, it is a book on Abra-Melin to givesell.”

When Thelemites get tired of putting their faith in superstition, I think they’ll find the Way of Thelema—if I can call it that—is far simpler than shoulder goblins, faux-leather bookshelf warmers, a series of ideological battles, and a mess of ritual “Calls to the Gaia-Lilith-Kali Nexis of the Christo-Gnostic-Templars.”⁸It’s almost as if these people have never sat down and read the Book of the Law. There is a clear mandate about how/where to direct all rituals in the first place and the consequences of not doing so. Even Crowley himself was clear about the goal of all magick. We continue to lose the point of all this Work with phantasmal cosplaying. Not that those all can’t be fun (except the ideological battles, those are totally super-fun⁹I hope you read my incredible tone of sarcasm in that parenthetical. Please tell me you read the sarcasm. It was allsarcasm. I promise.), but they aren’t necessary. I do think having multiple expressions of Thelema is healthy,¹⁰I am also of the opinion that sectarianism is a good thing: the more the merrier. If the doctrinal scale system holds, it would only take a couple of decades for the first-order (of which there isn’t all that much) and second-order doctrines (which would be all sectarian anyway) to shake out—in my opinion. All else falls into third-order issues and we move on.

Phyllis Seckler (Soror Meral) wrote, “The O.T.O. is only one of the great orders of antiquity to accept the Law of Thelema. There will be others. There will even be new Thelemic orders which might be moved to apply those things written about the O.T.O. in The Blue Equinox to their own work. The A∴A∴ is more truly Crowley’s own order and does not suffer from the ills of sociability and politics as does the O.T.O.” [Phyllis Seckler, The Kabbalah, Magick, and Thelema. Selected Writings Volume II (Teitan Press, 2012), 51-52. (emphasis mine)] I think she’d probably change her mind about the last half of that final sentence if she were still alive today.

But I believe the crowding out of other organizations that are not “O.T.O.-enough” is a large part of the continuing failure of organized Thelema today. The expectations of Thelemic organizations, while originally just an “O.T.O. is the only thing around” in the pre-1990s era, turned into a rooted pathology born of the memefication of Thelema from the early-/mid-2000s. but the baseline for Thelema is quite simple and far away from these superstitious distractions keeping people preoccupied with anything other than what is important: the Law itself. Crowley understood this—and went on to ignore his own advice, of course—when he told C. S. Jones, “Our business is to establish the Law. Any distraction from that, mystic or otherwise, is a mistake.”¹¹Aleister Crowley, personal correspondence to C. S. Jones, February 1916 (emphasis mine).
And wildly enough, this is an injunction he repeats over and over again throughout his life.

When Thelemites get tired of being the tabloid fodder of occulture, they will find Thelema resides outside these restrictions they’ve put on Thelema. They will discover Thelema exists beyond Victorian occultism and not-so-secret societies. Despite one long-time critic’s assertions, Thelema is not class warfare because Crowley wanted to be an aristocrat. Thelema is class warfare because it is a revolution in “the whole nature of man.”¹²Crowley, Liber ABA, 429.

Rather than risk killing my original thought flow, I am going to leave this in a footnote here: I’ve only been on Substack for a month (and a couple of days) at this point. The amount of far-right, fascist, and fascist-adjacent saturation in occult spaces is mind-boggling to me so much so that I feel like a sheltered homeschooled child exposed to weed for the first time. It’s bonkers. Men, especially, are not all right. Just because we might agree that democracy, as a political ideology, has faults and that we can discuss better political structures does not mean that we consent either to totalitarianism or anarchy as a backup plan. Despite the noise to the contrary, patriarchy is not a default structure of society (neither is matriarchy, to what I am sure is the disappointment of every proponent of an “Aeon of Isis,” second-wave feminist, neopagan, mother goddess social theory). However, whatever one feels about solutions for the future, going backward is not a solution. We are children in the playground of the now, not demagogues trying to reclaim fantasies of ancient glories. The future is open to creation. This includes a revolution in the class structures themselves: in politics, in religion, in psychology, in social organizations, and more. Instead of being assholes, Thelemites need to be wall-breakers and bridge-builders across a spectrum of human endeavors. I’ve said this in the past: until you have served in a soup kitchen line, don’t tell me about Kings and beggars or the nature of Will in the real world. The Book of the Law doesn’t say “Some men and some women are stars.” It says “Every man and every woman is a star.”¹³For those who need to argue over every little nuance: this line offers us a spectrum by which we can include everyone no matter how they identify.

When Thelemites get tired of comparing themselves to every other religion on the planet, they might start developing their own¹⁴See footnote 10. with sincerity and conviction. I know, that last word is one of those triggers that gets the hackles up for many. I used it intentionally. Thelemites are known as fickle, uncommitted washouts. Even within the first-generation Thelemites, there was a trend of defections to Catholicism, Buddhism, or atheism that continues to this day. The plug-and-play method of Thelema has failed since O.T.O. took over in the 1960s and declared anything purporting to discuss Thelema other than from the “writings of Aleister Crowley”¹⁵David Scriven. “Beauty and Strength: Address Delivered by the National Grand Master General Sabazius X°.” In Beauty and Strength: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference, edited by Richard Kaczynski (BookSurge Publishing, 2009), 151–56.

t had implicitly been this way for some time, but Sabazius finally said the quiet part out loud in 2007, “Our religion is that of Thelema. Our Thelema is not some meaningless diversion like this so-called ‘Rabelaisian’ Thelema—Saint Rabelais never intended his satirical, fictional device to serve as a practical blueprint for a real human society. And it is not some revisionist imposture, such as that put forth by some of the proponents of the so-called ‘New Aeon English Qabalah.’ Our Thelema is that of the Book of the Law and the writings of Aleister Crowley—the Master Therion, the Prophet of the Aeon of Horus.” was to be stamped out, and so people went elsewhere to try and explain Thelema as the “Tao of the West” or “a better version of Scientology without the space aliens and LRH” or “Buddhism-lite” or “Gnosticism Redux!” That’s still failing us today.

It’s time to step up with Thelema rather than with Thelema+. Thelema stands just fine on its own without the need to +it like an Apple product. It needs voices who don’t sound like basement-dwelling, thesauri-drooling fruitcakes with qabalah-laced memes strapped to their chests ready to explode or who attempt to regale us with the wash-rinse-repeat cycles of biographies of Crowley’s life down to every shit he took on a rug. It needs voices willing to dig into the human condition and apply Thelema in a language we all can understand.¹⁶This doesn’t mean we can’t have “graduate-level” materials. It just means that we could do with a whole lot less overblown blathering from neo-Nietzschean knuckledraggers using WordHippo to write blog posts after a night of drinking alone.

And we need more humor. I can tell you that every Adept who crosses the Abyss comes back with a genuine “humor stick” from the City of the Pyramids™ so they can shake, rattle, and roll through deep topics with a sense of levity.

When Thelemites get tired of condemning each other, that’s when I think we’ll see real change. I honestly don’t care that someone came up with “erotic liberation.” It sounds like a political platform for sex workers. But I’d be all for it—if that was what it really was. I don’t care if someone else is still preaching their worn-out message of Elitist Thelema™. It was barely relevant after World War 2, entirely irrelevant two decades ago, and a mere idiocracy in 2024. But I’d be all for it if it mattered even the slightest to any world problem outside their own narrow personal worldview. But the core message of both these individuals is how they attack others and set themselves up as the authority on Thelema.¹⁷At some point, I’ll come back to two types of pedagogical traditions of the past that illustrate divergent approaches to teaching scripture. Thelema is a genetic inheritor to one of those strains—and you can always tell the caliber of a teacher by which method they use. That’s what they’re good at. If you don’t agree with them, you’re the enemy. We’ve seen what religions do when they treat others, including those within their own ranks, like the enemy. This behavior—and those like them who inflict this behavior on others—is what I think will have to end before Thelema starts to grow into its own fruitfully.¹⁸I’m also aware of the irony of calling out bad behavior while calling for an end to bad behavior can appear as, well, bad behavior itself. Sometimes, calling a spade a spade is necessary.

Life is already difficult enough without having Thelemites adding to the problems by just being assholes. Thelema is a religion of light, life, love, and liberty. We need to see more of that in our lives, in our online connections, and in our communities.

I hope more Thelemites will get tired of being terrible people. Our fields are fallow and dying from the lack of fruitful seeds being planted, yet still full of the broken swords of ideological battles fought over social currency and insignificant egos.

I believe Thelema can make the world less terrible.

It just requires Thelemites to be less terrible too.

Love is the law, love under will.