Thelema

Overview

Thelema is a religious and philosophical system founded by the English writer and occultist Aleister Crowley after a sequence of events in Cairo in April 1904 that produced the text Crowley regarded as the foundational scripture of a new religious era: Liber AL vel Legis, “the Book of the Law.”

The central maxim of the system, drawn from that text, is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” complemented by “Love is the law, love under will.” Thelema is the doctrinal framework of the modern Ordo Templi Orientis and the A∶A∶, but it is not identical with either organisation; significant Thelemic practice exists outside any institutional body.

Origins & history

While in Cairo with his wife Rose in April 1904, Crowley reported receiving the three chapters of The Book of the Law over three successive days from a discarnate intelligence named Aiwass, dictating in English. Crowley described himself as the scribe of the text rather than its author. He spent the next two decades reluctantly working out the implications of what the book demanded of him.

Crowley elaborated the system through his journal The Equinox (1909–1919, with later supplements), the Liber Aleph letters to his magical son Charles Stansfeld Jones, and the practical magical papers of the A∶A∶ (the order he founded with George Cecil Jones in 1907). After his admission to and reorganisation of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Thelema became the explicit religious framework of that order as well.

Beliefs & practices

The Thelemic cosmos is structured by three principal deities drawn from the Egyptian pantheon as reframed in The Book of the Law: Nuit (the infinite goddess of space, of whom every star is a particular condensation), Hadit (the infinitesimal point of consciousness within each being), and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (the active, manifesting deity of the present aeon). The current age is the Aeon of Horus, succeeding the Aeons of Isis and Osiris.

The doctrine of the True Will holds that each individual has a unique trajectory or vocation — the True Will — the discovery and execution of which is the sole legitimate aim of life. The maxim “Do what thou wilt” is consistently interpreted by Crowley not as licence but as the discipline of locating and following that specific vocation.

Practical Thelemic work draws on the Hermetic and Qabalistic curriculum Crowley inherited from the Golden Dawn, restated in Thelemic terms in his Magick in Theory and Practice and the practical libers of the A∶A∶.

Symbols

The principal symbols are the unicursal hexagram (a hexagram drawn in a single continuous line, with a five-petalled flower at its centre), the Stele of Revealing (the funerary stele Crowley encountered in the Boulaq Museum in Cairo and which figures in the events of 1904), and the numerological signature 93 (the value of both thelema, “will,” and agape, “love,” in Greek isopsephy), used as a greeting.

Notable figures

• Aleister Crowley 1875–1947
  Founder; principal exponent

  English author, mountaineer, occultist, and self-described prophet of the new aeon. The bulk of the published Thelemic corpus — doctrinal, ritual, philosophical, and poetic — is his work.

• Rose Edith Crowley (Kelly) 1874–1932
  Participant in the Cairo events of 1904

  Crowley’s first wife. Her trance communications during their stay in Cairo in March and April 1904 were the proximate occasion of the reception of The Book of the Law; the founding texts of Thelema treat her presence as essential to the events.

• Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad) 1886–1950
  Magical son of Crowley; producer of key Qabalistic work

  English-Canadian Thelemite and Qabalist whom Crowley acknowledged as the “magical son” predicted in The Book of the Law. His Q.B.L., or The Bride’s Reception (1923) is a major Qabalistic work in the Thelemic line.

Controversies

The historicity of Crowley’s reception of The Book of the Law is, by its nature, not externally verifiable. Crowley himself oscillated between framing the event as the dictation of a real discrete intelligence and as a phenomenon of his own deeper consciousness; the modern Thelemic communities differ on which framing they accept.

The British press persistently attacked Crowley personally throughout his life, often inaccurately. Some criticisms were grounded: the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù was closed and Crowley expelled from Italy by the Mussolini government in 1923 following the death of one of his followers, Raoul Loveday, from contaminated water and the resulting press coverage of practices at the Abbey.

The relationship between Thelema as an open religious system and the institutional bodies (O.T.O., A∶A∶) that claim particular authority within it remains a source of internal disagreement.