When I was talking yesterday about the importance of understanding Thelemic theology, I did not mention the specific theological doctrines I thought were important. When I wrote my response to Polyphilus’s Agape article, I underlined the importance of understanding 0=2 and Kabbalah. Those are important theological doctrines for understanding Crowley’s spirituality, but those are not the most important doctrines for understanding the Gnostic Mass. In my opinion the most important doctrine for understanding the Gnostic Mass—at least as far as the issues of sex and gender go—is solar-phallicism.
Two really good books I’ve read on solar-phallicism are The Theosophical Enlightenment by Joscelyn Godwin and a book I’m reading right now called The Aryan Christ by Richard Noll. The second book is actually about Carl Jung, but the doctrine Jung held to is close to Crowley’s. This isn’t because “Jung was a Thelemite,” as several people have mistakenly claimed to me. It’s because solar-phallicism was a major spiritual fad in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. There were just a lot of people—especially countercultural figures—who believed in solar-phallicism and saw it as a doctrine of liberation from the strictures of Christianity.
Solar-phallicism is basically the idea that the original religion was a form of sun-worship. Giordano Bruno had claimed that the Corpus Hermeticum represented the teachings of an original magical Egyptian sun religion that predated Judaism. Sir William Drummond extended and developed this argument in the 18th century, arguing that Jesus was just the Sun in the zodiac of 12 apostles. There was a late-19th century version of this idea, which heavily influenced Carl Jung, which said that the original Aryan religion was a form of sun-worship, and the Aryan people actually carried a phylogenic memory of this in their blood. According to this theory, the Jews had been “civilized” for longer than the Aryans and no longer carried this memory.
Biological reductionism was integral to this theory, with different races or “types” carrying different spiritual memories in their “blood” or other bodily fluids. The Sun was not just an astronomical or “macrocosmic” body. There was also an “interior” Sun or a “midnight Sun” or a “microcosmic Sun” which we carry within ourselves in the form of a drive to procreate.
Richard Payne Knight was the most famous “phallicist” of the 18th century. He claimed all religion was at its root worship of the “generative power”. Following Freud’s terminology, Jung simply referred to this as “libido” and claimed all true spirituality was to be found in it. What he eventually cleaned up, urbanized, and called “individuation” was originally a process of inward journey in which the buried sexual impulses are released from the constraints of Christian morality through an abandonment to sexual, pagan, biological forces within, leading one to deification. Jung recommended to all of his male patients that they engage in polygamy. He believed spiritual growth was impossible without releasing the libido from the constraints of Christian sexual morality.
Awhile back, an EGC bishop defended clergy gender requirements by claiming that the gender identities of the ritualists serve as symbols of macrocosmic and microcosmic polarities. I believe what he had in mind was either identical with or very close to the doctrine I just outlined. By macrocosmic polarity, he in all likelihood meant the Supernal Father and the Supernal Mother whose unity gives rise to the Sun. By microcosmic polarity, I think he intended the joining of phallus and kteis which gives rise to the Child.
Interestingly, this same bishop gives a talk on sex magick in which he claims that women have phalluses. He does not think the phallus is the male sexual organ, in other words. I’ve heard other Thelemites make a similar claim. They talk about the phallus, not as the male sexual organ, but rather as a kind of masculine magical energy that both men and women have.
Jung may have held to a version of solar-phallicism that is similar to that. For instance while he thought the libido was biological in nature, he did not think it was the sex instinct pure and simple. However, I do not believe Crowley himself held to that more generalized view. I think that by “phallus” Crowley absolutely meant cock.
Part of the problem with trying to “liberalize” Crowley by abstracting his thought away from particular biological doctrines he held to is that he was so specific. When he says, “Semen is God,” he is not leaving anything up to the imagination. He’s quite explicit about biology—especially sexual biology—and how for him it determines spirituality. Liber Aleph is full of such elaborations on sexually-determined spiritual differences.
I’ve heard the argument before that women, too, have sexual fluids. For example, perhaps what Crowley says about male ejaculate could be extended to female ejaculate.
Again, Crowley is too specific for that interpretation. In case you were in any doubt about what he meant, he identifies the spermatazoon IN PARTICULAR, not just the fluid medium it is transported in, as being magically significant. It is the “Lion-Serpent” or the “Yod” which is so important in the VIAOV formula, which so accurately describes the magick of the mass’s eucharist.
This is also the problem with saying, “But in tantra, there are many fluids that are magical, not just male sexual fluid.” Yes, but OTO solar-phallicism is not tantra. That’s not what Crowley himself believed, it has a completely different historical origin, and it’s not relevant to Thelema or the Mass.
This is ultimately why I do not think you should critique current EGC policy regarding gender and clergy from the perspective of Crowley’s spiritual doctrine, at least not if you want to liberalize it in the direction of allowing gender fluidity. The spirituality informing OTO and the Mass in particular is reductionistic in a way which is gender-essentialist to the extreme. To the best of my understanding of OTO spirituality, the current policy is already way, way more liberal than I think Crowley himself would have allowed for just on the basis of the sexual magick doctrines themselves.
Effertz argues in Priest-ess that IX° sex magick can be homosexual and XI° sex magick can be heterosexual, so if the mass is based on those sex magical formulae, that allows for queer mass. The only problem with this argument is that in every queer example of IX° and XI° magick we have from Crowley’s diaries, there was still always cum involved. That implies that cum is the determing factor. I brought this up to Effertz, and he agreed. Cum is a limiting factor. As far as I can tell, the reason it’s a limiting factor is because cum itself is God in Crowley’s view.
Ironically, I think the current policy—as well as the justification that bishop attempted to give—represents a well-intentioned attempt to accommodate transgender people. If there appear to be reprehensible beliefs preventing that policy from becoming even more accommodating, I believe those reprehensible beliefs do not stem solely from those currently setting EGC policy. The ugly parts actually come from the solar-phallicist theology informing OTO spirituality.
I’ve heard the claim made many times now that “Crowley was a product of his time” or “Crowley was radical for his time, but now we have to update that idea for the 21st century.”
This is not a great argument for one very simple reason. Solar-phallicism was not a stage or a step on a path from patriarchy to the present day. It was more like a weird tangent in European spirituality based on a fantasy of the past and fantasies about biology. It was part of a branch of thought which terminated, not in the present day, but in the Nazi death camps. It’s not to say that Crowleyism is Nazism, only that that set of ideas was a fad that went out of style a long time ago, and for good reasons. In other words, I don’t think there is an “updating” of that doctrine.
But here’s the other side of it. OTO is already not run the way Crowley himself intended. From the very beginning of its reestablishment, we have departed from the Blue Equinox model in probably a hundred ways. This is why I continue to say—as Effertz effectively argued in Priest-ess—that some of the best arguments we have for queer mass are already embodied in current EGC policy and in clarifications of the spirituality put forward by Sabazius.
They’re not going to roll that policy back. They’re not going to disallow transgender clergy to do mass. They’re not going to start requiring that women and men both have to be fertile to do mass. They’re not going to start demanding that men and women have to be conventionally attractive to do mass—which is a requirement Crowley himself definitely, verifiably wanted in place.
I would just keep drawing attention to the contradiction. There are a hundred different ways that what we’re doing now deviates from Crowley’s original vision. Why are we going to draw a line in the sand over this one particular thing, especially when it is so out of step with all our intuitions about fairness? As long as you continue to occupy a self-contradictory position based on arbitrary views about gender, you’re going to incite critique. You can’t go backward, so the only way to go is forward. IMHO that’s the way to argue for it.
But if you want to understand why the current policy is the way it is, it’s clearly because of solar-phallicism and the biological reductionist views Crowley picked up from Nietzsche and Reuss and Richard Payne Knight and other figures. That’s why Crowley thought it was cum all the way down. I think church officials are trying to maintain some link with that doctrine, even if it’s just symbolic, while also trying to acknowledge that the world has moved on. At least that’s the most generous reconstruction I can offer for what they’re trying to do.