I’ve seen a lot of consideration given to exactly what is happening in part 8 of the Gnostic Mass (The Mystic Marriage and Consummation of the Elements).
- Are the Priest and Priestess mutually annihilated in the eucharist?
- Who or what are the congregants communing with? The Priestess? Ra-Hoor-Khuit? Baphomet? Should they be “allowed” to make eye contact with the Priestess?
- To what extent should the congregants emulate the actions of the Priest? Should they make the crosses/say the words? Should they ascend the steps and kneel? Should they start back in the tomb, anoint themselves with water and smoke, make circumambulations (yes, I’ve heard of this happening, too)?
- What should the congregants be focused on as they’re taking communion? Their HGA? Their personal wish? Etc.
It’s not that I don’t think this section of the ritual is worthy of consideration. It is. But at the same time, I think there’s a bias toward the mystical and magical that underlies the tendency to focus so much attention on this portion of the ritual to the exclusion of other parts.
I’ve tried to bring more attention to the earlier part of the ritual, particularly the Ceremony of the Introit. (For example see chapter 10 of my book.) While there is a mystical and magical dimension to the CotI, to fully understand its significance requires an account of the identity of the Priest and the Priestess. In particular, rather than focusing as the latter portion of the ritual does on the annihilation of the Priest’s identity, the CotI is instead about the kind of person the Priest must become in order to carry out the latter half of the ritual. It’s dramatizing the qualities of character a human being must develop in order to function as Priest.
Mystical interpretations are consonant with contemporary Thelema, because they’re focused exclusively on purely inward experiences. It’s difficult to judge something which is purely experiential and incommunicable. If somebody says, “When I go up to take communion, I have a direct fusion with the spirit of the Pillsbury Dough-boy,” there’s not a lot to say in response to that other than “You do you.” Everyone is on an equal footing, because everyone is in their own private universe.
Contemporary Thelema is comfortable with magical interpretations as well, though for a different reason: they reduce the spiritual to the procedural. Anyone can do magick; it’s just a question of learning and applying the most effective technique. What counts as “effective” is subjective and often mystified. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone claim that you need a certain development of character in order to do magick, as opposed to a development of a certain level of skill or craft.
But the liturgy in the CotI is explicit: the Priest upon emerging from the tomb is not yet worthy to administer the virtues to the brethren. Two things are left unstated, but I think they’re strongly implied:
- When he emerges from the tomb, his status is that of a Man of Earth, a “man among men” as he says. Crowley elsewhere describes the Man of Earth as the religious “adherent,” which implies the status of the congregants is the same as the status of the Priest at that point. (See New Comment on AL I.40 and Appendix 21 to the Commentaries.)
- The actions of the Priestess make the Priest worthy of carrying out his religious vocation. She bestows upon him consciousness of purpose, singularity of purpose, and energy to achieve his goal, those three qualities bestowed by what Crowley refers to as the “sacrament of penance”. (See Magick, part 2, chapter 4.) And by virtue of those qualities, he is united with IAO and becomes an Adept. The raising of the lance represents his “occult puberty”. Occult puberty or Knowledge and Conversation relies upon skill acquisition and entails a perspectival shift—it has magical and mystical dimensions—but the very term “puberty” implies states of growth. In any case, the liturgy of the Gnostic Mass heavily implies that the raising the lance is the outer symbol of the Priest having become “worthy” to administer the “virtue of the rod”. Playing upon the etymology of “virtue,” Crowley would say he is “worthy of manhood”. (See chapter 10 of my book and also my article in volume 3 of Ora et Labora for more.)
This interpretation doesn’t sit very well with other assumptions of contemporary Thelema. It implies not only that you have to develop certain skills in order to commune with the highest powers. It implies you have to become a certain type of person in order to do it. The Holy Books fill in the qualities that person should have: fearlessness, pitilessness, strength, vitality, worldly success, and appreciation of all things beyond good and evil.
Focusing instead on what the congregants ought to do from a technical perspective to have an experience closest to the Priest in part 8 of the ritual goes around this whole question of character development. It relies on a set of “Protestant” assumptions about the in-principle equality between the Priest and the congregants. But the liturgy contradicts that idea. There’s a difference between the Priest and the congregants; one is “worthier” of the role than the others. That much is explicit. But the fact that it’s a difference of virtue implies that it’s a difference of character rather than a difference of (magical) skill or (mystical or philosophical) perspective.
To put it another way, part 8 of the ritual represents a sacrifice of one’s life and joy, one’s body and blood, for the sake of everlasting life. The implication might be that not all sacrifices are equal. Unless you have outwardly become the image of the Sun (by embodying specifically Thelemic character traits), your experience of life and joy is not deep enough to serve as a sacrifice worthy of the power worshipped in the Gnostic Mass. (See AL II.18-21)
The idea that the Priest is different from the congregants is incontrovertible. The question is: what precisely makes him different? The intense focus on precisely what the congregants have to do at the end of the ritual to “have an experience” that is somehow “equivalent” to the Priest’s contains implicit within it an unstated assumption: that difference can be overcome by doing something rather than becoming someone. When we make a b-line for magical or mystical interpretations of Thelema, we jump over the ethical questions.
Ignoring ethical development in the context of spiritual practice (mystical or magical in orientation) leads to what’s called spiritual bypassing: seeking wonderful experiences in order to avoid cultivating the skills and the virtues needed to take a responsible relationship to the world.
But a religious rite serves a different purpose than a solitary spiritual practice. It’s supposed to form a religious community united around a common ethos. We adhere to these values and not those values, not just because they are more efficacious (they might be), but because they are both the cause and the effect of what we collectively recognize as the highest power. In the Gnostic Mass, that highest power is arguably the process of natural and sexual selection itself, which is revealed by the Sun and concealed by the Phallus. Light, life, love, and liberty are its emanations. (See chapter 9 of my book for more.)
But a religious rite without an ethos isn’t coherent as a religious rite. It’s just an occasion for people to have a private experience. Even in those Protestant rites that come closest to this—for example Pentecostal celebration—people are still hopping and flopping around and speaking in tongues. There is still outward confirmation of the inward experience and a communal dimension to it.
To make a ceremony like the Gnostic Mass an occasion just to have a private experience doesn’t generate Protestant Thelema. It generates what Tau Omphalos calls “cargo cult Thelema”: a religious rite (the runway) that doesn’t generate a religious community around it (i.e., no planes ever take off or land).
(None of which is to say that E.G.C. is not constructed around an ethos. I think it is. I just wonder if that ethos is different enough from the overculture to satisfy what Stark and Iannacone call medium strictness. If not, then that might explain the slow growth of Thelema relative to other new religious movements such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
So there’s more at stake here than simply spelling out how a Thelemite ought to act, or who has the correct or incorrect interpretation of the ritual. If you exclude character development from consideration in a religious rite and opt instead to focus exclusively on personal experience or orthopraxy, it begins to render the rite itself unintelligible. A rite like that is not capable of sustaining a community, because the religious experience is about more than skill acquisition or private mystical experience. It also has to include a typical developmental trajectory.