All of my recent writings on Thelemic/OTO theology as they relate to EGC gender policy can now be found grouped under the gender series tag.
Last month I wrote a series of posts on my private Facebook exploring Thelemic and OTO theology as it bears upon the Gnostic Mass and current EGC policy regarding gender. As these posts largely represented a process of research/discovery for me rather than finished products, I initially chose not to share them on my Lapis Mercurii blog. However, in retrospect, I think the process I went through—from questioning to considered opinion—might be valuable for other researchers and individuals questioning EGC policy.
tl;dr – The theology underlying OTO mystery—solar-phallicism—to my mind does not support transgender clergy or queer mass. In other words, EGC policy is already a lot more liberal than it ought to be if we were adhering to Crowley’s original intention. That being said, the theology itself is problematic and kind of gross, and current EGC policy at least represents a move in a direction where OTO can remain relevant. The main problem with the policy is that the church now occupies a middle position—a kind of no man’s land—where they must inevitably draw fire from every side. We’ve already deviated from the Blue Equinox model of OTO in countless ways. There seems to me to be very little gained by holding the line on this particular issue. If enby people want to serve as both Priest and Priestess, church authorities should just let them.
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.
[Correction (3/1/2021): I unintentionally misrepresented Effertz’s opinion above. We have since spoken, and he does not agree with the position I stated above.]
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.
A little while back, I wrote an article on why I thought it was important to understand Thelemic theology. (You can read it on page 10.) It was a response to an EGC Bishop who claimed that theology should “be rightly spurned and discarded by individual Thelemites, and more importantly by our Church” and that all theological matters should remain “unsettled and diverse”.
Recently I was researching the magical and theological doctrines of our church as they apply to the question of queer Gnostic Mass. Imagine my surprise when I found an article by the very same EGC Bishop, written 7 years ago, claiming that queer mass would not fulfill the “doctrinal purpose” of the Gnostic Mass.
Funny how “settled” and “undiverse” theology suddenly becomes when certain issues are raised.
So let me double down on the claim I made in my Agape article: Thelemites really do need to acquaint themselves with the theology of their church, especially if they’re ordained clergy.
One of the first times I attended Gnostic Mass, a well-intentioned person at my lodge asked me if I had any questions about the ritual.
I really didn’t. Not because I understood everything about the ritual, but because I didn’t understand the ritual well enough to even know what kind of question to ask.
One of the reasons you want to develop competence in Thelemic theology is not just so you can ANSWER questions put to you by new people, but even more importantly, so you know which questions to ASK when individuals—especially those in positions of authority—put forward their own interpretations of magical and doctrinal issues behind the Mass.
I know that for the last three generations (at least) people have been told that the intellect is bad, that it’s the opposite of spirituality, that peace and group coherence are upset when people start forming and expressing opinions on things like this. I understand that it really does seem like having less clarity around theological issues gives individuals the most freedom possible to just enjoy the ritual on their own terms.
I get all of that. I understand why it appears that way.
But that’s only one side of things.
The other side is that if you do not sharpen your own mind and acquire clarity, then you are in a position where you are going to have to trust individuals in positions of authority. And you better hope not only that they’re competent but that they also have totally unimpeachable character, not in the slightest way blemished by prejudice or selfishness (in other words superhuman), because that’s what you’re relying on now for the proper functioning of your church.
You need to start questioning the idea you’ve been fed—not just in EGC but in the culture at large—that nebulosity around key issues somehow magically creates harmony. One persons feelings pitted against another person’s feelings does not create harmony. It creates what we see today in OTO.
I understand that some people are very, very scared of conflict. I don’t like conflict either. For instance, I know that every single time I write a post like this—no matter how civil and rational I am—I’m upsetting someone, either angering them or making them scared. I also know that people screencap them and might try to find ways of using them against me. They can take out their annoyance or aggression on me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
But you need to learn to tolerate the fear of conflict and the fear of being wrong. Because the opposite of persuasion is not individual freedom, it’s either coercion or self-imposed isolation.
When I first read that Polyphilus article in Agape, I laughed when I got to the part where he said such issues ought to be “reserved [and] quarantined” among IX°s. I didn’t even really address it in my rebuttal. It didn’t seem serious.
But then I encountered the identical claim in the article he wrote 7 years ago about queer mass. My jaw dropped. Why didn’t I think he really believed it when he said it? My own naivety, I guess.
Thelema is a spirituality that celebrates shameless strength. Strength isn’t just physical strength, it’s also mental strength and the strength of character you build up by having principled, even heated disagreements with others. And yet I find a lot of excuses bandied about for not developing mental strength—intellectual competence—with regard to even the basics.
Brushing off every disagreement as “drama,” dismissing every claim because issues are “above my pay grade,” or “it’s all relative anyway, just do your will,” is not strength. That’s weakness.
Whatever your opinion or “feeling” on the issue of queer mass or any issue, stop hiding in nebulosity and vagueness. Stand up, put your hands up, sharpen your damn mind. Learn to ask the right questions. Toughen up.
Here’s one sociological/psychological observation about the controversy in my church over gender and clergy.
Eight years ago, Michael Effertz sat down and made a thorough, what I would describe as almost preternaturally patient argument for queer mass (i.e., no gender restrictions on who can serve in what role).
He makes the argument several different ways: dialectically by showing how arguments against queer mass contradict (what was then) current EGC policy, spiritually and religiously using the writings of Crowley as evidence, and using evidence from gender theory.
One of the really interesting things he does in that book is he tends to “steel man” his opponent’s arguments. He attempts to give his opponent’s arguments the strongest form he can think of, and he attempts to think through what their objections would be and responds to them.
He printed this book at his own cost and sent copies to all lodges in USGL as well as the three governing officers of USGL.
And it was met mostly with crickets.
The only borderline official response it got was a review written by an EGC Bishop, Tau Polyphilus. Polyphilus did not address many of the arguments in Effertz’s book, certainly not the strongest ones, and where he did attempt to address them, he committed straw man fallacies.
Straw man is a fallacy of relevance. It’s when you do not respond to your opponent’s actual argument but rather a weaker reconstruction of it. In other words, as charitable as Effertz was, that’s how uncharitable Polyphilus’s counterarguments were.
Nonetheless, Effertz responded, again, this time with a short pamphlet in which he took everything Polyphilus said completely seriously and responded to everything even resembling an argument in it.
Again, crickets.
I’m pointing this out because I was reading a thread on a friend’s wall today, and I saw someone suggesting to a person who was upset with the current policy that they suggest a new policy to EGC authorities (in lieu of being angry about it, I guess).
But this has been done already, and it was done in the most thorough, most polite way imaginable. And it was met with (on the best interpretation) sloppiness and indifference.
Now here’s the thing.
No one is under any sort of absolute obligation to be polite with anyone. If you want to get right up in someone’s face and tell them they’re a homophobic ass-kisser, that’s your right. Not sure what it accomplishes, but that’s your right as far as I’m concerned.
And no one is under any obligation to consider a polite, well-reasoned argument.
I mentioned Effertz’s book to someone recently (who hadn’t read it), and their response was that Effertz is an asshole.
Sadly this is the level of discourse in OTO I’ve become used to.
It comes from the overculture, for sure. It’s also exemplified by some leaders in the group. But I’ve learned at this point that if I expect rational discourse, I’m going to be disappointed. There’s either no will for it or no ability to engage in it.
In the past year, at least, the only serious discussions I’ve had about anything of interest regarding Thelema or OTO mysteries has been either with former members or with individuals who have one foot out the door. (And I must confess, I am in the latter category now.)
But here’s the other side of it.
If people ask you for something politely, if they protest in the most civil way imaginable, and your response is indifference (or worse), they’re eventually going to go into a fucking rage.
It’s hard for me to take moral opprobrium seriously—moreso if you were one of the people doing the brushing off in the first place. The closer you were to the issue, the more I tend to view the pearl-clutching as being in bad faith. Although I also understand if there are people who just aren’t aware of all the history around all this—I wasn’t until recently—and who, because of that, are having trouble understanding why people are so upset.
So my suggestion is that, if you don’t want people becoming impolite, if you want there to be a custom of rational discourse in your community where people give and accept reasons for things, then start by giving and accepting reasons for things.
Or better yet, start by listening carefully.
The opposite of rational discussion isn’t personal freedom (as so many Thelemites seem to think). Reasoning exists at one end of a continuum, the opposite end of which is violence. (To my best understanding, the Book of the Law confirms this idea, it doesn’t deny it.)
So if you have a serious problem with discourtesy—if that’s something you value in good faith rather than as a cudgel to use against someone when it’s convenient—then when someone is courteous and rational with you, be courteous and rational back.
And if they’re not courteous and rational with you, still be courteous and rational back. Listen carefully. The higher up you are in any hierarchy, in my opinion the more you ought to do this, only because of the negative psychological impact and loss of prestige for your organization that comes from being a powerful person who also acts aggrieved.
Name one person who enjoys seeing a winner cry. Are we hard-wired against that?
You only have control over your own actions, but those actions end up influencing the culture around you. Straw man and ad hominem are not just mere logical fallacies. Those fallacies also send out a signal about how willing you are to listen to people and carefully consider their ideas.
Crowley’s reduction of the religious instinct to the sex drive was part of a broader countercultural movement in the early 20th century inspired by Nietzsche and earlier phallicists like Richard Payne Knight. Thelema is not the only or even the more famous representative of this movement. That place of pride probably goes to Carl Jung.
While biological reductionism was initially a tool of sexual liberation in the face of the accretions of Christian morality, the idea that God or spirit lives in “the blood” or other bodily fluids was also an essential component in the Aryan racialist revival of the late-19th and early 20th centuries that led to Nazism. The religious version of this idea lives on in Thelema, but for those who study gender, biological reductionism is better known in the form of gender essentialism, or the idea that there are certain universal, innate, biologically- or psychologically-based features of gender that are at the root of observed differences in the behavior of men and women.
The irony is that Christian churches are now in a much better theological position to support transgender clergy than EGC is, because their religious doctrine never included biological reductionism. Neither Christ nor any of the church fathers ever said, “Semen is God,” but Crowley did.
This is why I keep saying that the issue of transgender clergy in EGC is not “drama,” nor is it merely a social justice issue. It has to do with the core doctrine.
A voluptuous statement on what liberation looks like from a Thelemic perspective, as it relates to sexual freedom and a eucharistic rite:
The supreme and absolute injunction, the crux of your knightly oath, is that you lay your lance in rest to the glory of your Lady, the Queen of the Stars, Nuit.
Your knighthood depends upon your refusal to fight in any lesser cause. That is what distinguishes you from the brigand and the bully. You give your life on Her altar. You make yourself worthy of Her by your readiness to fight at any time, in any place, with any weapon, and at any odds.
For her, from Whom you come, of Whom you are, to Whom you go, your life is no more and no less than one continuous sacrament. You have no word but Her praise, no thought but love of Her. You have only one cry, of inarticulate ecstasy, the intense spasm, possession of Her, and Death, to Her.
You have no act but the priest’s gesture that makes your body Hers. The wafer is the disk of the Sun, the star in Her body. Your blood is split from your heart with every beat of your pulse into her cup. It is the wine of Her life crushed from the grapes of your sun-ripened vine. On this wine you are drunk. It washes your corpse that is as the fragment of the Host, broken by you, the Priest, into Her golden chalice. “You, Knight and Priest of the Order of the Temple, saying Her mass, become god in Her, by love and death. This act of love, though in its form it be with a horse like Caligula, with a mob like Messalina, with a giant like Heliogabalus, with a pollard like Nero, with a monster like Baudelaire, though with de Sade it gloat on blood, with Sacher-Masoch crave for whips and furs, with Yvette Guilbert crave the glove, or dote on babes like E.T. Reed of ‘Punch’; whether one love oneself, disdaining every other like Narcissus, offer oneself loveless to every love like Catherine, or find the body so vain as to enclose one’s lust in the soul and make one lifelong spinthria unassuaged in the imagination like Aubrey Beardsley, the means matter no whit.
Bach takes one way, Keats one, Goya one.
The end is everything: that by the act, whatever it is, one worships, loves, possesses, and becomes Nuit.
As far as I can tell, the issue of gender queer clergy is not “drama,” nor is it merely a social justice issue. It has to do with what the Gnostic Mass is fundamentally about and how it relates to core Thelemic spiritual principles. I would hope that anyone in OTO would be curious about that.
My position on the gender requirements for Gnostic Mass in EGC is that I don’t understand them. The only explanation that has ever been offered to me by someone who affected the policy (not talking about some random OTO member offering a rationalization) doesn’t make sense to me.
To the best of my knowledge, these policies do not reflect a correct understanding of Thelema, the mysteries of OTO, or Crowley’s views on sex. Obviously the magical/spiritual/metaphysical side of this is huge. But like so much else in Thelema and OTO mysteries, I’ve never seen anything like an even halfway-convincing argument from core principles to defend OTO USA’s position.
Draw what conclusions you will from that. Suffice to say, if someone at least felt as confused as I do about it, I would understand.
I also don’t understand the policy of relaxing these gender requirements for private masses. Private masses are still official masses. They are still supposed to be working the same magical formula (a formula, YHVH, which is ALSO applied in a IX degree sex magick operation). Any sexual metaphysics governing public masses ought to govern private masses as well; otherwise they don’t make a spicy meatball (or whatever word you feel like using for something that doesn’t magically have the same effect).
I’ve seen people draw some very unkind conclusions from this about the motivations of those who crafted this policy about the private masses. I haven’t drawn those conclusions. I genuinely do not have even the foggiest idea what motivates this policy. There’s at least been an explanation offered for the gender requirements in public mass, but I’ve never even seen an explanation of the private mass policy.
From what I’ve witnessed, the effect of relaxing the policy for private masses is actually worse than having one policy across both private and public masses. If that was done with the intention of appeasing some people (my shot in the dark attempt to understand why they did it), it had the opposite effect. It’s easy to see why. It looks like “separate but equal.”
In my opinion, it would probably be better in the long run to have one policy governing all masses and to be very up front about that and the reasoning for it. That will risk alienating some people at the outset—and maybe those in charge will be made to feel like fools by some people—but it will also prevent a lot of hurt down the line.
