Thelema

Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, is three short chapters spoken in turn by three figures: Nuit, infinite space and the totality of possibility; Hadit, the infinitely small point of consciousness at the centre of each individual; and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, a form of Horus presiding over the present age. Crowley held that the text opened the Aeon of Horus, the crowned and conquering child, succeeding an Aeon of Osiris organised around a dying and rising god and, before that, an Aeon of Isis. The furniture is deliberately Egyptian; the content is not Egyptology, and Crowley did not claim it was.

The maxim everyone knows, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", is almost always quoted without its companion, "Love is the law, love under will", and without the qualification Crowley spent decades supplying. True Will is not preference and not appetite. It is the specific function a person exists to perform, which he compared to the orbit of a star, and discovering it is described as difficult, lengthy, and largely a matter of stripping away everything that is not it. Once found it is not optional. Deviation from one's True Will is the only real error in the system, and indulgence that obstructs it fails by the same standard as any conventional sin. Crowley also held that True Wills cannot genuinely collide, each being proper to its own orbit, which is his answer to the obvious objection that the maxim licenses harm.

The formula is not original to him. Rabelais put "Fay ce que vouldras" over the gate of the Abbey of Theleme in the sixteenth century, and the Hellfire Club took it up in the eighteenth. Crowley knew this and treated the earlier uses as anticipations rather than as sources.

In practice the goal of individual work is Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, a phrase taken from an older grimoire and understood as contact with one's own higher nature, from which the True Will becomes legible. Beyond that stands the crossing of the Abyss and the dissolution of the ego as a separate thing. The system is graded, demanding, and framed as an experimental discipline rather than a matter of belief; Crowley's standing instruction was to test the claims and keep a record.

Thelema has no single church. Two bodies carry most of the tradition, and they do different work.

A.'.A.'., founded in 1907, teaches individuals. There are no congregational meetings. A member knows only the person who admitted them and those they admit in turn, and progress runs up a ladder of grades borrowed in structure from the Golden Dawn and mapped onto the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, from Probationer through the Adept grades to those above the Abyss. Each grade carries a syllabus and a requirement to keep a magical record.

Ordo Templi Orientis is a collective initiatory order with lodges, dues, degrees and officers. It is older than Thelema and Masonic in shape, and Crowley reworked its degrees around the Book of the Law and around a sexual teaching held as its central secret. Its public ceremony is the Gnostic Mass, Liber XV, a eucharistic rite with priest, priestess, deacon and two children, in which the consecrated elements are consumed by the communicant rather than reserved to a clergy, and which functions as the movement's most visible congregational service.

Crowley spelled the discipline magick with a terminal k, partly to separate it from stage conjuring, and defined it as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will, a definition broad enough to cover any deliberate act. Practice includes Liber Resh, four brief solar adorations at dawn, noon, sunset and midnight; banishing rituals inherited from the Golden Dawn; a calendar of holy days built around the equinox in March and the three days of the writing of the Book in April; and heavy use of qabalistic number, with 93, the value of both Thelema and Agape, will and love, serving as a greeting.

Crowley's writings remain the working corpus: Magick in Theory and Practice, the Book of Thoth with its tarot, the Holy Books of Thelema, and the Confessions. Smaller independent Thelemic groups exist alongside the two orders, and disputes over lineage, authority and copyright have been a recurring feature since his death.

Almost everything written about Crowley has to contend with the fact that he was an unreliable narrator about himself, and deliberately so. He courted the tabloid press, accepted the label of the wickedest man in the world with evident satisfaction, and wrote an autobiography he subtitled an autohagiography. He also exaggerated, invented and suppressed. The result is that the most detailed source for his life is the one least safe to use, and biographers still disagree about episodes for which he is the only witness.

The reputation was built from real material and inflated packaging in roughly equal measure. He was a serious mountaineer, involved in early attempts on K2 and Kangchenjunga. He was a heroin addict, the drug having first been prescribed for asthma. His sexual life was openly bisexual and promiscuous at a time when that alone was ruinous. He was a competent poet and an intermittently brilliant prose stylist. And people close to him suffered badly, including partners who died or broke down. The death of Raoul Loveday at Cefalu in 1923 was consistent with an enteric infection from local water, but the press treatment that followed, driven by Loveday's widow, produced the version that stuck.

Two claims are worth separating from the rest because they are commonly repeated and thinly supported. That he was a British intelligence agent rests mainly on his own account of his German-language propaganda work in New York during the First World War, and historians differ on how much of it was sanctioned by anyone. That he performed human sacrifice derives from a passage in Magick in Theory and Practice which his own later notes make clear was a coded reference to semen.

He also mattered, which is the part most easily lost. Rock music, science fiction, modern Wicca and the working vocabulary of contemporary occultism all carry his fingerprints, and the figure on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve is the same man the popular press had spent decades treating as a monster. Assessing Thelema through Crowley's personality is unavoidable, but it tends to substitute for assessing what he actually wrote.