It’s been a couple weeks now since I published, “What is Consensus Thelema?” and I thought I’d share some of the reactions I got to it.
Author: Entelecheia
Transcending Self-Authorization
Could we have avoided the excesses of Consensus Thelema if Crowley had not framed the religious experience in terms of Self?
Looking beyond Consensus Thelema
A brief sketch of how I think Consensus Thelema should be reformed.
The Limits of Self-Transcendence
One of the limiting aspects of Thelema is Crowley’s insistence upon self-transcendence at the expense of the transcendence of being or the superior transcendence of God.
From Thelema to Consensus Thelema
It’s one thing to decide you don’t want to establish a state religion. All considerations of Thelemic or any religious orthodoxy aside, that’s a lesson humanity has learned from the experience of history. But it’s quite another thing to replace your religion’s defining beliefs with an empty space or a question mark.
What is Enchanted Centrism?
Besides “Consensus Thelema,” my other neologism is “Enchanted Centrism,” which I also sometimes call “Magical Centrism” or “Magical Secularism”. That’s when people take contemporary secular liberal values and either assert them as though they have some kind of religious validity, or they reinterpret religious experience in secular, individualistic terms. An example of the former is…
Thelema and Secularism
The idea that truth—spiritual or otherwise—reduces to personal truth isn’t “Thelemic” per se. It’s just secularism. That’s one of the defining stroke of the secularist worldview.
Picking up the Burden
This is what we mean in saying that the Trance of Sorrow is the motive of the Great Work. —Little Essays Toward Truth, “Man” Christianity started as an apocalyptic political movement. In all likelihood, Jesus of Nazareth thought he would march down to Jerusalem with his followers, and presumably after some kind of conflict be…
Dignity and Divinity
One of the recurring motifs of Gnosticism and Hermetism is the idea that the soul is God or a divine spark which has accidentally fallen into and become ensnared in matter. This means incarnation is a tragedy or mistake in which we lose our divinity which must be rectified through gnosis and return to the…
Magic and Macrocosm
One of the distinguishing features of ancient magic is the view of the universe as a living whole in its own right: what is called a “cosmos” or a “macrocosm”. Things are not just mechanically related to one another but tend toward higher purposes, the highest of those purposes being the metabolism of the whole….