Thelema

What it is

The religious and magical system founded on The Book of the Law — Liber AL vel Legis — received by Aleister Crowley in Cairo in April 1904.

Its central formulations:

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

Love is the law, love under will.

Every man and every woman is a star.

The first line is almost universally misread, and the misreading is worth correcting before anything else.

Will here translates the Greek thelema, and it does not mean desire, preference or impulse. It means the True Will — the individual's authentic purpose, the thing they are actually for, understood as their proper orbit within a larger order. "Every man and every woman is a star" is the image: each has a true path, and stars do not collide when each keeps to its own course.

On this reading the injunction is not permissive but severe. Discovering the True Will is the central task and is assumed to be difficult, and most of what a person wants at any moment is precisely not it — it is appetite, conditioning or the demands of what Thelema calls the ego. The work is the discovery, and then the doing regardless of preference.

Where it came from

In March and April 1904 Crowley was in Cairo with his wife Rose Edith Kelly. By his account Rose, who had no occult interests, began entering trance states and delivered instructions leading him to a stele in the Bulaq Museum. On three successive days, 8–10 April, he wrote at dictation for one hour each from a voice he identified as Aiwass, describing it as a praeterhuman intelligence.

The book announces a new age — the Aeon of Horus, the crowned and conquering child — succeeding the Aeon of Isis (matriarchal) and Osiris (the dying and resurrected god, i.e. Christianity). Its tone is imperious, aphoristic and in places brutal, and Crowley himself was ambivalent about it for years before committing.

He founded the A∴A∴ in 1907 as a teaching order, and later took over the Ordo Templi Orientis, reorganising it around Thelema. The Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù in Sicily (1920–1923) was an attempt at a community, and ended when Mussolini's government expelled him after the death of a young follower, Raoul Loveday, from an illness contracted there.

How it is practised

Through a demanding curriculum: daily ritual, meditation, record-keeping — Crowley insisted on a magical diary, and on treating results with the scepticism of a laboratory notebook — the study of Kabbalistic correspondences inherited from the Golden Dawn, and the graded work of the A∴A∴, whose central operation is Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel: contact with one's own higher nature, and the means by which the True Will is discovered.

The OTO's higher degrees involve sexual magic, which was the source of much of the scandal attached to the movement and of a good deal of its actual content.

Thelemites observe their own calendar, the feasts of the Book, and the Gnostic Mass, which is the most performed Thelemic ritual and is public.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the system is serious and internally coherent, and that Crowley's technical writing — particularly on the discipline of practice and the recording of results — is of real quality regardless of what one makes of the metaphysics.

We can say the "do as you like" reading is wrong and is held by almost everyone who has heard the phrase, including many who invoke it approvingly.

And we can say the structural risk is high, which the history bears out. A system organised around a received scripture, a founder who is also the prophet, graded initiation, an inner order, and an ethic that can be read as placing the adept's Will above ordinary obligation is close to the worst arrangement described under the guru problem. The Cefalù episode — a young man dead, a community in squalor, a founder who deflected responsibility — is what that looks like in practice.

Contemporary Thelemic bodies are generally more institutionally normal than their reputation, with published constitutions and elected officers. The risk is structural rather than inevitable.

We cannot say what happened in Cairo. Crowley's own position shifted over decades between treating Aiwass as an external intelligence and as an aspect of his own higher self, and he never settled it — which is, in fairness, a more honest place to leave it than most founders manage.

Further reading

• The Book of the Law (1904) — short, freely available, and unlike anything else.
• Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice — for the technical system.
• Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) — scholarly and unromantic.