The current which has been sustaining the output on this blog, web site and other venues over the last sixteen months or so is exhausted, and as such a period of reduction in activity will now ensue. Updates to the blog and to the rest of this web site will likely continue, but they will be significantly less frequent for a period of time.

The last two or three years has seen something of a mini-resurgence in interest in Thelema. Amongst other manifestations, a number of books from the likes of Gerald Del Campo and Lon Milo Duquette have surfaced, blogs – particularly on LiveJournal – have sprouted up, John Crow produced his “Thelema Coast to Coast” podcast, and the centennial of the “reception” of The Book of the Law passed. A recurrent theme through almost all of this output is a woeful and apparently complete ignorance of the subject matter being discussed. The central concept of Thelema – will – has been completely ignored, presumably because the commentators have nothing to say on the matter. Instead, attention has been paid to vague ramblings about mysticism, laughable notions of “ceremonial magick”, ethical values, and the “strategic goals” of an obscure organisation grounded in Victorian freemasonry and resurrected by ineffectual hippies. Despite frequent exhortations, people have failed to take their own advice to “go back to the Crowley material” and hence have failed to realise what Thelema even is, let alone to develop an ability to say something sensible about it.

The motivation behind the output on this blog in particular was to remedy that. Through essays such as The Ethics of Thelema, The Khabs is in the Khu, True Will, Fundamentals of Thelemic Practice and A Thelemic Primer we have distilled from the writings of Aleister Crowley, and presented in plain language, the essentials of what Thelema actually is, what the “will” is and how it might be apprehended, the nature of the obstacles in its path, and the essence of attainment. Through a variety of other entries, we have illustrated these concepts from many different perspectives. Using the material available on this web site, any serious student should now be able to understand, in a relatively short amount of time, the theory and practice of Thelema and to devise a course of action to begin the task of approaching his will. We have given him the tools to finally throw off any and all of the unfortunate associations Thelema has acquired with romantic mysticism, dubious and juvenile “evocation of spirits”, religious and other supernatural beliefs, blatherings about the “transcendental”, misguided and obscurantist philosophy and occultism, leaving him free to discard all these distractions and to focus finally on the task at hand, that of apprehending and then following his will.

It is useless to continue to beat a dead horse. Therefore the time has come to allow this material to mature and disseminate – as has already begun – and to enter a period of relative silence. Silence is innocence, the absence of restriction. Effort provides the fuel for growth, but silence provides the space to grow into, exactly as a muscle must be rested in order to reap the benefits of exercise, exactly as the aspirant must open up and observe to give his newly acquired knowledge some context. People naturally reject overthrowing their sentimental pet beliefs at the behest of others, but with a little time they lead themselves to think that they are overthrowing them on their own account, once they no longer have anything to react against. The ideas have been embedded into people’s minds where they will grow regardless of the intentions of the thinker, under cover of darkness.

Normal activity will resume in the future, and the foundations presented here will be built upon further. There is no fixed timescale; it may be months or years. In the meantime, the time has come to return to the woods, the mountains, the rivers and the sky. Occasional updates will be made, but regular readers should take the opportunity to concentrate on the material presented to date, to study it, and to absorb it. The author will remain contactable via email.

Into my loneliness comes—
The sound of a flute in dim groves that haunt the uttermost hills.
Even from the brave river they reach to the edge of the wilderness.
And I behold Pan.
The snows are eternal above, above—
And their perfume smokes upward into the nostrils of the stars.
But what have I to do with these?
To me only the distant flute, the abiding vision of Pan.