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Am I turning magic into philosophy?

No, because magic has already been turned into philosophy (technically an ideology). That’s what Consensus Thelema is: the collapse of magic into a restrictive subset of permissible statements about reality and action.

In the realm of epistemology and metaphysics, you’re allowed to assert the axioms of pragmatism and relativism. What is real is “what works,” and each person has their own reality. Whether anyone actually believes this is doubtful, as even the most strident proponents of this dogma usually act contrariwise.

(The actual exemplars of this view were the architects of the Iraq War, and those like Putin who have followed them, not the soi dissant galaxy brains currently populating Twitter and internet forums.)

Even so, it’s the only position you’re permitted to state within the language game of Consensus Thelema. Any other position will be laughed out of the discussion or dismissed with the thought-terminating cliché that “there is no capital-t truth”.

And in the realm of ethics, you’re allowed to say it is up to each individual to assert, create, or decide for themselves what the good life is. In other words you are allowed to espouse classical liberalism. I have even seen someone suggest that it is incumbent upon any magical practitioner to reject the good/evil dichotomy, thereby rendering elicit any form of magic at any point in history that has failed to live up to the ethical standard of Consensus Thelema.

This is why I also refer to Consensus Thelema as magical centrism: it’s because it’s bourgeois ideology transformed from a contingent historical moment into a timeless religious doctrine. Ideally it should be philosophy—in the sense of reactivating our sense of wonder and initiating an active, deliberate quest for what is good and worthy of pursuit and care in life. Instead it’s been turned into rote recitation of epistemological and moral dogmas.

My work doesn’t attempt to transform magic into philosophy; it is a critique of an already existing but unacknowledged ideology. I critique Consensus Thelema by (1) comparing it with ideas in Crowley’s writings that contradict it, (2) comparing it with reality to show that its assertions about the human being are mythological and fantastic, and (3) retrieving pre-Thelemic notions of the human being, reality, and agency in order to create possibilities for thinking and practicing spirituality outside the confines of the demands of the present moment.

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