Eyes Wide Shut Personal Lesson in Ideological Bubbles

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

I grew up in a sheltered childhood. I was raised within a Southern Baptist evangelical environment, but it was a paradoxical mix of standard 1970s end-of-the-world messaging and 1980s Satanic Panic paranoia with a load of serious theology taught from the pulpit that other churches weren’t doing at the time. While the pastor of our church allowed for some of the “cultural impact” tours to come and do their thing (A Thief in the Night film series, Francis Schaffer, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, etc), he was convinced the future would be better served by youth and adults alike being taught mid-level theology every week—basic hermeneutics, exegesis, simple language translation, critical theory, apologetics, and rational analysis. He believed many churches pushed eisegesis (reading an interpretation into a text rather than pulling meaning from a text) to forward an agenda that was more political than part of the mission of God. He was right.

While other churches we visited over the years were preaching hellfire and brimstone over Dungeons & Dragons, rock music, and crazy ideas of the Great Beast taking over the world through credit cards, our church was teaching how to study scripture and live a spiritual life in the world and not of it—as scripture says—rather than just reacting to the cultural tides going on outside the church walls.

But even then, it wasn’t until I entered high school, redirected from an expulsion into a military-styled religious academy run by a fundamentalist Primitive Baptist sect, that I truly understood there were Christians who were radically different from us. Even the hellfire and brimstone Christians were weird but not really all that different (and in our family, Catholics were just “misguided” but not “bad” and Mormons weren’t Christians at all). I never realized there were “crazy ones” out there. I had no idea there were Christians so extreme they would see me, just some nondescript Christian teenager, as “the enemy” and I would have to hide among them to survive. Ironically, but maybe not surprisingly, my occult life would begin during this same time.

A Rude Awakening

In what feels like a burst bubble of forced ignorance, or maybe just an intentional retreat to avoid engaging with a community that has been inundated with shallowness since the early-to-mid 2000s, coming out of the shadows was an act of desire to converse and engage in Thelemic spaces only to find that occulture, including Thelema, is saturated with political extremism in grotesque ways. The radicalization of individualism remains as strong as ever—it’s a decent money maker, apparently—and deep education¹I happened across a local O.T.O. body last night which is offering classes on “exegesis of the Holy Books” and I already know they mean “gematria” and “qabalah” and not actual critical exegesis of a text. And people are still churning out missives with WordHippo and trying to emulate the overblown style of the early nineties all over again. I can’t say I blame them though. I remember pontificating, once upon a time, with a thesaurus and a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustrastuck up my ass too. beyond Victorian occultism and bastardized qabalah is lacking across the board in all spaces.

I want to be clear that I think there is much to learn from both small-c conservative and small-l liberal worldviews. I don’t think dismissing them out of hand is the way to go. Yet I also don’t think Thelema is either one of these as we understand them in our modern political world.

However, while I grew up in an extremely conservative environment, I was encouraged to expand my education organically. My dad permanently removed the television from our home sometime before I entered Kindergarten because it was the “devil’s box” according to Bill Gothard (yes, that Bill Gothard), and I still ended up fairly liberal as a teenager. That didn’t change as an adult. But I’ve never seen conservative values as the enemy. Religious mandates? Republican agendas? Yeah. Sure. Of course. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t see them as “off.” But conservative valuesthemselves. Not really. There was always something I felt necessary in a balance between conservative and liberal values that needed each other for a successful society. It was never an either/or but more of a both/and thing for me. It was like an orchard where you could pick from various trees. I didn’t like peaches or pears, but I loved apples and lemons. So I avoided peaches and pears and went for the apples and lemons. But it was no big deal if someone else liked peaches and pears.

I just cannot put my finger on precisely when there was a shift from liberal values that worked in a sort of equilibrated tension with conservative values to liberal pearl-clutching that aligned itself more with a sense of dark-progressive purity culture. And I talked a bit about this dark-sided part of progressivism before. Don’t misunderstand me: I am all for measured social progress. I think it’s necessary overall to move society into a future that benefits more people than fewer people and in better ways than continuing to harm people, places, and things—to put it all tritely.²And, quite frankly, as a Thelemite, I accept that aeonic theory includes a progression through history that shows progress of some kind. It may not always be comfortable or positive in my lifetime—because that’s not how evolution works on any scale—but it will be a net positive through the aeon itself by the next aeon arrives.

Frankly, I think this is what has cost liberalism, in general, much of its legitimacy in the last few decades more than anything, this purity alignment, this pearl-clutching, this refusal to collaborate, this need to “be right” rather than be good, this need to have an enemy. I’m not suggesting “the other side,” those conservatives, have done any better. Nor am I suggesting that we all sit around in a circle, holding hands, and singing kumbaya with a radical conservatism that is rising to stamp out opposition, literally, in proposing to segregate all life into cages. But I’m focused more recently on this rise of progressive purity that is sinking liberal values that I think are important to social progress in conjunction withconservative stability—because I think this sense of ideological purity is also infecting our Thelemic spaces in a strange paradoxical manner.³The idea that Thelema can mean “only what my organization says it means” is ideological purity. However, the idea that Thelema can mean “anything anyone wants it to mean and no one can say otherwise” is also ideological purity.

Occult Extremism

But I think what concerns me the most is the radical Right extremist positions I keep being fed on social media now that I’ve found myself outside my bubble. Yet again, here I am thinking these would be one or two random idiots on the fringes—like Augustus Sol Invictus (Austin Gillespie) and that ilk—but it’s pervasive. Some extremist Left views concern me too, but much less than the Right positions.

I am alarmed by the amount of extremism—specifically far-right, authoritarian, fascist-level, extremism—that is prevalent in occulture (and even more specifically within Thelema) today. Someone close to me suggested earlier this is merely a return to a cycle in which Evola and traditionalism and the like were being recalled into current fashion. I guess I’m going to have to pull out Evola in the new year and refresh my memory. I don’t have a lot on my shelf, just a couple of books, as Evola was never all that compelling to me. Read like a dime store version of Guénon with delusions of Himmler or maybe Goebbels. It never much interested me, but I guess I need to educate myself better on his work. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it at all. But I’ll read anything, quite frankly, to educate myself—or, in this case, re-educate myself.

There is this strange idea still running around modern Thelemic spaces that Thelema can “mean anything someone wants it to mean.” That’s crap. Thelema can mean many things, of course. It’s absurd to suggest otherwise. But there are plenty of things it cannot mean. I’ve written about this before, but Thelema is opposed to anything remotely fascist. It’s incompatible with such an ideology. And I don’t care that Crowley wanted to put the Book of the Law in the hands of Hitler. Bad ideas do not make for good justification no matter what jackboot stupidity about Elite Thelema™ Frater Schadenfreude has tried to push over onto gullible Thelemites for the last twenty-plus years.

Rise of the Mythic

Within a week of Trump’s re-election, the Right is already creating strange leaps of narrative that compare Trump to a sun king, to mythic levels of a messianic archetype, and huge leaps of logic in his return to restore the United States (and, indeed, the whole world) to some kind of radical right ideal of patriarchal rule over women, minorities, and anything not Christian. It’s sick. I’ve been appalled. They were doing it before, certainly, but it’s taken hold even more now to the point that “neutral analysis” is starting to make these connections as well. There is an eye-opening, if not a wild roller coaster of a read, about the Mithraic connections with the Proud Boys and Trump that had me almost spellbound.

Then I sit back and look at some of my writing from the late 1990s and find I was advocating that Thelemites understand and build around the mythic narratives of Thelema-itself—even if we had to create new myths or work to transcend and include⁴An integral principle that I use and will continue to use regularly around this Substack, but directly connected to AL 2.5: “Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright.” old myths. Relying on the personality of Crowley wasn’t going to be enough, I said at the time. People weren’t interested. People told me that living the mythic was living a lie. Even today, the so-called “academics” in occulture have more eyeliner than experience, and the formal education of most (not all, mind you!) YouTube gurus reaches about as far as who they’re sleeping with.

The one thing the Red Hats have going for them that Thelemites—via their online influencers (and I mean every one of them without exception) and in-person communities (probably most, if not all but I hesitate to say “all” here)—have missed is the former have coalesced around their narratives, their myths, their symbols. Not even O.T.O. and similar organizations have instilled a sense of binding together of Thelemites. The “initiatory narratives” aren’t even enough for the members of those organizations alone, much less the larger Body of Nuit. Thelemites are still fueled more by suspicion of each other than through a sense of fellowship with each other that would open our doors on the association as mere Thelemites. At this point, Red Hats would open their doors at the sight of a (literal) red hat with the words “Make America Great Again” on someone’s head.

For whatever reason, we have influencers who keep telling Thelemites that tribalism is bad, that groups are bad (while recruiting people to their groups—go figure!), that community is a weakness, that individualism is salvation from “the herd,” that the goal of Thelema is to rise from unworthy to the Übermensch through suffering (or through an imaginary “ladder to God” via a hierarchy of degrees of adepthood). Yet these people have co-opted the myths from the Conservative Right to bolster their narratives while the rest of us flounder around cosplaying Victorian occultism with a side of 21st-century secular humanism. Not that I have a problem with secular humanism, per se, but isolated from and without an equilibrium of the interior nature of both the individual and the community it is little more than crude materialism.

In the past, when I, and my closest circle of planning partners, have attempted to put something different together, built around the ideals of a reading of the Book of the Law that focused on business, hospitality, mission (in the sense of purpose, not proselytizing), growth, community, and what some might call a person-oriented model rather than a performative-oriented model (like O.T.O. and other fraternal models are today), we failed because we were told it wasn’t O.T.O.-enough or it wasn’t “Blue Equinox”-enough or wasn’t “magick”-al enough. The idea of individuals—because it was always oriented around the individual first as the genetic structure of a community—coming together to support each other rather than “paying dues and doing ritual” seemed absurd to others.⁵Fraternal models are always Catholic/Orthodox (performative) in nature. I have always felt that the Friends (Quakers), Unitarian-Universalist, and similar models had a far better approach to community that honored the individual andcommunity in tandem than O.T.O. ever did or does now. I realize that many handwave off such things as “too Protestant” because of the immediate association with American evangelicalism, but aside from the lack of formal ‘ritualism’ in Protestantism—which I believe can be overcome—I think there is a blindness to waving off a semi-Protestant approach to Thelema. This isn’t condoning any of the aforementioned religious denominations or anything else. I’m strictly talking about their approach to religious community construction. Though I admit the Quaker programmed vs unprogrammed worship approach does appeal to me, quite frankly, and was the basis of my exploration of one theoretical model of Thelemic expression.

I think we need to learn from recent events. We need to learn from every success and every failure we can study, whether we like the subject matter or not. I am a proponent of not reinventing the wheel. I am for repurposing anything that works, including that which may have been originally for different designs in mind. Even the Book of the Law says, “Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright” [AL 2.5].

This is not a call to conservatism or liberalism—radical or otherwise. Both are leading this country and this world down dangerous paths, separating Brethren (regardless of ideology) from each other. Yes, I concede, there are some within our midst that hold to incompatible ideologies and their cognitive dissonance is palpable. We’ll have to work on that. But let’s take one step at a time here. The neo-Nieztchean knuckledraggers will see themselves to the door eventually—and they will go extinct as they always do throughout history. They lack the self-awareness to understand basic human psychology. They lack even the education to take their own advice and lift themselves by those imaginary bootstraps they claim everyone else should be using.

I don’t know what the world will look like over the next decade. Right now doesn’t look like two decades ago. Or even a decade ago. Things are rapidly changing.

But I do think it’s time to take a serious interest in our survival. I think it’s time to start talking about what binds us together and makes us stronger as individuals, as a community (and as communities), and as a culture.

I refuse to close my eyes ever again. I refuse to stare off into space either. I fell asleep at the post. I let myself be pushed into a corner by loud bullies who had nothing more than shallow memes and even shallower thoughts. I watched as my heroes and my mentors faded into their own corners, throwing up their hands in disgust at the toybox soldiers who threw themselves into senseless fights for nothing more than the social currency of clicks and congratulations from an echo chamber that spun its wheels going nowhere.

We’ve lost a generation to extremism (and laziness), some who think Thelema validates this bullshit, and others who are too spineless to know how to use Thelema to combat it.

It’s time to tap into the mythic and create living systems that will survive into the future. It’s time to stop living with our eyes wide shut.

Love is the law, love under will.