It’s hard to understand what Thelemic magick is if you begin from the premise that it is a subset or sub-genre of ceremonial magick.
For one thing, it makes it hard to understand what the Thelemic part of Thelemic magick is supposed to be. Is it just ceremonial magick in the Golden Dawn style but with different godnames used? I was badly pronouncing Hebrew at the walls before; now I’m badly pronouncing Greek. What difference should that make?
That leads to the idea that doing Thelemic magick just means adding Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, etc., to the retinue of deities one practices with. It accommodates Thelemic magick to contemporary paganism.
Is Thelemic magick just ceremonial magick or Egyptian-flavored paganism but somehow … willing it more? Like I was a practicing occultist before, but somehow I wasn’t choosing to do it or wasn’t enthusiastic enough about it?
Or is it doing magick or devotion, but while doing these practices, I add the idea that I’m a god? I’m doing my LBRP as I was before, but in the middle of it I’m stopping to think, “I’m such a badass!”? Or when a spirit shows up during an evocation, I stop to remind it that I’m on an equal or greater footing than it?
Or maybe it’s practicing occultism but doing more drugs or sleeping with more people. Of course, when I say “doing more drugs,” I don’t mean meth or fentanyl; I mean “spiritual” drugs like pot or DMT. And when I say “sleeping with more people,” I mean doing it in a state where people still have access to reproductive health.
In other words, I mean ceremonial magick plus permissiveness with the safety net afforded by an affluent lifestyle and Democratic control at the state level—both of which are becoming rare in our failing democracy.
Or perhaps Thelemic magick is ceremonial magick, just with a particular aim such as Knowledge and Conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel. I think this is probably the best (mis)understanding of Thelemic magick, although it doesn’t help explain why Crowley also suggested so many non-magical practices to attain K&C, nor what the philosophy of true will is supposed to do to inform those practices.
Then you also have to make sense of Crowley’s strange definition of magick: the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. His definition of magick encompasses all effective human action. This leads to a total secularization of Thelema where it becomes self-help or life advice—and not terribly effective advice at that, unless you start adding Ikigai, Why Discovery, or psychotherapeutic concepts to it.
And then after giving such a definition of magick, why does Crowley then go on to explain principles of ritual, magical formulae, purification, consecration, i.e., all the normal dimensions of ceremonial magick?
Because of these inconsistencies and seeming lack of coherence, it took me many years to even begin to understand what Thelemic magick was supposed to be and how it was supposed to relate to ceremonial magick or other spiritual practices.
The breakthrough for me occurred when I read this:
The method of Magick: Love the mode in which Will operates. The method of Magick in this—and in all—Work is: “love under will.” The word love (Ἀγάπη in Greek) has the value of 93, like that of Θελημα, will. This implies that love and will are in truth one and the same, two phases of one theme. Love is thus shown as the means by which will may be brought to success.
Djeridensis Comment on AL I.55-56
What I realized is that, while Thelemic magick may involve agency and the choices we make—spiritual or secular—it has a more original sense than that. It has to do with the dynamic coupling between Nuit and Hadit which gives rise to our sense that we are selves with a world in the first place.
In other words, magick is not first and foremost a form of human choice or spiritual practice. It’s a process occurring in reality which gives rise to our sense of choice and our sense of self—in the same way the operation of the Ruach is dependent upon the functioning of the Neshamah.
And because magick as a dynamic process grounds our more basic sense of self and agency, our normal attempts at self-empowerment and conceptualization cannot adequately capture it.
Of course it can be theorized. That’s what Thelema is by my understanding. What I mean is that we can’t get to the bottom of the processes forming us in real time, at least not directly. We have to approach them indirectly and symbolically by means of spiritual practices.
Or to put it more accurately, spiritual practices represent this underlying process’s attempt to work with itself, to optimize itself away from perennial spiritual problems. It’s not doing it primarily at the level of beliefs but rather in a symbolic, embodied mode.
Thelemic magick is the magick of magick. It is the power of human flourishing taking interest in itself.
It is Ἀγάπη.