In her article, The Death of Post-Thelema, Georgina Rose mentions my article, What is Consensus Thelema?, as a “shift in discourse” that was a “blow to post-Thelema”.
His idea of Consensus Thelema was the idea that throughout the past few decades, Thelema has become so open-ended and abstract that the word Thelemite has ceased to have any meaning. In practice, this calls for a return to a first-principles based approach to Thelema. It rejects the definition of a Thelemite that I listed above, instead calling for a far more rigid and strict one. After this point, the theological overton window of Thelema shifted back, and moved further towards a more traditional approach.
While there is some truth to this, it does not quite capture what I was aiming at with the critique of Consensus Thelema.
Consensus Thelema operates on the assumption that Thelema can be reduced to a few simple propositions. These are some of the most common:
- “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” means that you ought to live your life in accordance with what your own conscience dictates. At the extreme end, this is taken to mean that what is true is what you yourself decide or “will” to be true.
- “Love is the law, love under will” means that the will ought to be “tempered by love”. If your will dictates you ought to be selfish, then love corrects it with consideration of others.
- “Every man and every woman is a star” means each person is divine, and so we owe one another respect. All people deserve the same rights, especially those enumerated in Liber Oz.
In sum, each person should be free to live as they please, as long as they don’t harm or interfere with others.
As for the other 217 verses in the Book of the Law, select from them “as you will”.
So while the Book of the Law says you should stamp down the wretched and the weak and not show compassion, if it’s not your “will” to act that way, you don’t have to. Or you can interpret those statements to mean whatever is right to you. Some Thelemites interpret “the vice of kings” to imply that compassion is something you do for leisure, like smoking a cigar or drinking a glass of wine. “Stamp down” can actually mean “raise up” or “give to charity,” since you determine for yourself what reality is.
There are certain spiritual practices Crowley talked about like magick or yoga, and there are spiritual attainments like Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, Crossing the Abyss, or Samadhi, but none of those are essential to Thelema or being a Thelemite. To be a Thelemite means to discover and to do your will, and that’s a completely subjective, personal, individualized process. No one else can tell you what your will is. That makes one’s spiritual beliefs, practices, and identity a purely personal set of decisions that does not have to cohere to societal expectation or even logic. If it’s your “will” to be a Shamanistic Christian Jewish Thelemite, you do you. Unless you’re hurting or interfering with someone else, who’s to say what’s right for you?
The observation I made about Consensus Thelema is that, while it appears open-ended, pluralistic, and supportive of diversity, in reality it is reductionistic and dogmatic. It’s reductionistic because it reduces the entirety of Crowley’s contribution to spirituality to three sentences from one book interpreted in very narrow terms. It’s dogmatic because attempts to question those assumptions are met with what Robert Jay Lifton termed thought-terminating clichés: “loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.”
So I wasn’t attempting to replace something “open-ended” with something “more rigid and strict”. I was instead attempting to show that something which presents itself as open-ended is in fact restrictive and defended against by its adherents with rhetorical strategies typical of closed, total systems of thought.
Nor do I think the solution to Consensus Thelema is to provide a more accurate definition of Thelema, as Georgina suggested. Definitions are useful when we’re attempting to learn how to use a word we’re unfamiliar with. But when we’re attempting to understand the thing itself as opposed to how to use the word, we don’t want a definition so much as a structural-functional account.
For example, if I tell you that a bird is “any of a class (Aves) of warm-blooded vertebrates distinguished by having the body more or less completely covered with feathers and the forelimbs modified as wings,” that gives you a sense of how the word is used in a sentence, but it doesn’t tell you much about birds themselves. It doesn’t tell you about their metabolisms or diets. It doesn’t tell you about how they fly. It doesn’t tell you how they keep warm or raise their young. It doesn’t tell you if they make good pets.
The definition of “bird” will provide you with a list of the features that belong to and hence define the term bird. A structural-functional account tells you how those features interact together and constitute an actual bird: an intelligible whole which interacts with an environment to manifest the reality of birdness itself.
Similarly, a definition of Thelema is never going to be satisfactory, not because people will disagree about it (who cares?), but because there’s no essence or truth to be experienced through it.
Consensus Thelema provides no structural-functionalist account of Thelema. It’s just a small set of ideas or features which derive, not so much from the Book of the Law, but rather from the overculture we happen to find ourselves in. Consensus Thelema offers no challenge to society, just as it offers no challenge to the individual.
Do whatever you can afford to do (monetarily, morally, pragmatically, etc.) shall be the whole of the Law.
And Georgina is right that, against this, I propose a first principles approach.
Generally speaking, thinking linearly from first principles is a more radical, more creative way of thinking than reasoning by analogy. Following the implications of an idea will lead to more novel results than constantly looking left and right to see what other people are doing.
It is also bound to produce startling, even disturbing results that conflict with received wisdom.
It is sometimes averred that people are going to disagree as to what counts as a first principle, to which I reply: That’s the point.
The purpose of going back to Crowley isn’t to generate a Thelema that everyone is going to agree with. Nor is it done out of some abstract longing for a “return to tradition,” whatever that is.
The purpose of a first principles approach is to generate new, more monstrous forms of Thelema with which to attack Consensus Thelema.
The standard isn’t what most accurately reflects exactly what Crowley thought about Thelema. That’s a moving, sometimes arbitrary target.
The questions is: What is most meaningful or deep in Thelema? What is most alive?
The romantic individualistic aspect of Thelema as often important to Crowley and still is for a lot of Thelemites. I think it’s boring and shallow, so I don’t emphasize it—and when I see it in Consensus Thelema, I call it out as shallow and stupid.
Instead I tend to emphasize a magical and mystical encounter with something dark and unknown which makes us dark and unknown to ourselves.
I speak about that to people, because that’s my experience of Thelema. That’s what I think is valuable in it. If I said that Consensus Thelema was on an equal footing with that, I would be lying.
If I were a Consensus Thelemite, I would be ethically bound to regard all versions of Thelema as equally valid. But I’m not, so I don’t.
So the purpose of the critique of Consensus Thelema is not to get a more accurate, more original definition of Thelema or anything else. The point is to show that Consensus Thelema is a shitty religion, and there are better places to put your energy.